Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (9 page)

Before Amanda can be pressed further, the cook-housekeeper interrupts to ask if coffee will be served in the dining room or the library. Then Ben and Mike want to know how much longer they’ll be under house arrest, and Emily darts reproving glances when Laurel turns down the offer of a full breakfast from one of the kitchen helpers.

Nate and Colin break out of their huddle with Bemus and Tom Jensen at the other end of the room. Laurel moves in their direction, zeroing in on Colin, intending to thank him for helping her get through the night and allowing her to sleep in this morning. But before she can murmur even an affectionate greeting, the chime announces Grillo’s arrival.

If Detective Grillo is affected by the artwork in the library, he doesn’t show it in any conventional way. And he refuses an offer of coffee and a chair at the table where she, Nate, Amanda, and Colin are now seated on pins and needles. Instead, Grillo holds forth on foot and from a defining distance, plunging in—much as Emily did earlier—without preamble.

“The task force has recovered the Sebastian murder weapon,” he says to a chorus of released breath. “A Bowie-style knife with a nine-inch blade was found on the unimproved slope behind the Chandler property. Evidence in the same area indicates the perpetrator may have fled the scene on a bicycle and taken a hard spill causing him to drop the knife.”

“The . . . knife,” Laurel says. “Fingerprints?”

“Yes ma’am. Prints from the knife match latents lifted at the scene from a doorframe in the garage and from the driver’s side of the vehicle you were in.”

“How about the nursing home, any matches there?” Laurel says.

“We’re still workin’ on that, ma’am, and it’s gonna be a while. Lifting partials and the sheer process of elimination could take as much as a week. Individualization always takes time and so does matching up with prints on file.”

“Very well. Please go on and please don’t call me ma’am.”

Grillo resumes, mixing terse with tedious and repeating much that’s already known. Laurel is about to call him on this when he departs from the tired script.

“We’re in contact with the Bureau,” he says and waits for a reaction he doesn’t get. “The FBI,” he says as though they might think he meant the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. “Special Agent Byron Bell is heading up a team that’ll coordinate with L.A., New York, Northern Michigan, and London, if it comes to that.”

“London? London, England?” Colin says.

“Yeah. The writer guy I was put in touch with . . .” Grillo fumbles a small notebook from a side pocket. “Brownell Yates,” he reads from the notebook. “Yates is convinced there’s some kinda tie-in with the drug death of your buddy, Rayce Vaughn. The Bureau don’t even wanna hear about it. Neither does the local task force, for the most part, so we’ll just have to see what develops there.”

“Brownell Yates,” Colin says. Why’s that bloody name familiar? Do I know him?” He targets first Laurel, then Nate before Amanda answers.

“He wrote that insightful magazine piece about you after the Concert for Rayce,” she says. “And before that, he approached Nate with data supporting Nate’s and my belief in the existence of a disgruntled avenger of Aurora’s honor.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” Grillo says to Amanda. “These beliefs of yours—something’s missing in that write-up—in all them color-coded charts and graphs and timelines you furnished. I’m doin’ you a favor to point this out now because you can bet your sweet bippy the Feds’ll jump on it.”

“I’m not getting you.” Amanda bristles at the perceived criticism.

“I know what he’s getting at,” Nate says. “In all your meticulous documentation he’s unable to find the one single incident that put me over the edge—made me into the paranoid, nursemaid I became after Colin’s accident. And, oddly enough, if the detective hadn’t broached the subject today, I would have. Because of the blood connection.”

Amanda, who was bristling a minute ago, is now close to cringing. Nate looks as pained as he was when his injuries were fresh. Colin displays mild annoyance, and Grillo appears ready to wait as long as it takes.

“Very well,” Laurel says into the void, “I’ll bite. What’s the blood connection?”

Nate repositions himself in his chair, fusses with the sling supporting his left arm, clears his throat.” I started to make the connection when I saw what had happened to David,” he says. “When I saw the incredible amount of blood that was spilled and compared it with the lesser amount I saw on Aurora’s mutilated body. A trickle by comparison.”

Grillo holds up a silencing hand. “Wait a minute. Lemme make sure I’m following,” he says. “By Aurora, you refer to the first Mrs. Elliot.”

“Right,” Nate says.

“And you’re referring to the condition of the body when—according to documentation supplied by you—you were first on the scene of the ’eighty-four road accident that claimed her life.”

“Yes. That’s the incident you’re looking for. The incident I’ve spoken of only once since.”

“I’m all ears,” Grillo says.

“The decapitation . . . I believe everyone here knows that Aurora Elliot was decapitated.” Nate bounces questioning glances off each of his listeners; each nods in turn.

“You’ve been led to believe the decapitation was caused by the accident, but that’s not true. It didn’t happen that way.” Nate pauses, takes several shallow breaths. “When I first got to the crash site, Aurora was whole. She was dead, but she was in one piece.”

Another pause follows; more breaths are taken before Detective Grillo speaks for the group: “Meaning her head was still attached.”

“Yes,” Nate answers. “But when I returned to the accident scene with help, her head was gone. Cleanly, almost bloodlessly removed. The help—a former army medic and volunteer fireman who had seen his share of gore—jumped to the obvious conclusion that she was decapitated by the accident and treated the situation as routine.

“I was too shocked to argue. My shock was such that I went along with the obvious and even began to doubt my earlier perception. I began to question if her head ever
was
there. At one point I decided I’d hallucinated, that I only imagined seeing her head because I couldn’t deal with seeing the . . . with seeing where it should have been.

“But there were always annoying details that came back to haunt me. Too many details to have been imagined. Such as remembering that when I first reached the wreckage, her head was bent backward at an unsurvivable angle. An angle that exposed marks on her neck that looked like bruises, but were, in all probability, needle tracks. That had to explain why there were no signs of struggle. No signs that she resisted a violent death, almost as though she was already dead when the truck crashed. Or stoned beyond fear of death.”

“The blood connection,” Grillo prompts.

“Blood.” Nate fusses again with the sling supporting his disabled arm. “There wasn’t a lot of blood on Aurora when I viewed her in a whole state, and not much more when I viewed her in an altered state. A remarkable lack of blood if—”

“Got it,” Grillo says. “You saw the amplitude of blood that drained out of Sebastian yesterday while he was still . . . uh, vital, measured that against the minimal amount shed after Aurora Elliot was tampered with, and decided you could finally believe your own eyes.”

“That’s correct. And yesterday I had the opportunity to question a doctor in a nonspecific way about the pooling of blood in a corpse—how fast blood pressure collapses at death, to what extent spurt and flow rate diminish, things like that—and his answers convinced me that Aurora Elliot had been dead for a while when her head was removed.”

“I’m gettin’ the distinct feeling this isn’t the only thing you’re newly convinced of,” the detective says.

“It isn’t. Not by a long shot. At this juncture it’s not preposterous to believe Hoople Jakeway visited the crash site and cut off Aurora’s head while I went for help. We now know Jakeway had serious designs on Aurora. Unhealthy designs, I want to say, so it’s not a stretch to believe he was stalking her before Mr. Elliot apprehended her at a Northern Michigan fuel stop and that Jakeway was at the wheel of the vehicle tailing me just prior to the accident—a vehicle matching the description of the one he was driving when he first invaded Old Quarry Court.

“And it’s certainly no stretch to believe Jakeway knew his way around the rugged terrain where the wreckage came to ground. This was his home turf, after all. Less than a half mile from where he grew up, according to one of my sources,” Nate adds.

“Okay, sayin’ that’s all true—and I’m not sayin’ it ain’t—I’m still left wonderin’ what Jakeway wanted with her head. But
most
of all I’m wonderin’ why he didn’t finish off Elliot, here, when he had the chance. Isn’t the whole premise based on this guy being out to eliminate anyone he saw as screwing with the object of his affection? If that’s really the case, why’d he spare Elliot?” Grillo probes.

“Mr. Elliot looked pretty bad at the time. Jakeway probably thought he was already dead,” Nate replies.

Laurel hazards a sidelong glance at Colin, whose gaze remains fixed on Nate. From Colin’s strong profile she’s unable to tell how this bombshell has affected him; she’s unable to tell if his eyebrows are working in the super-anguished way the Denver neurologist likened to dueling caterpillars.

“Did you witness the beheading?”

Laurel hears Grillo ask Colin the inevitable as though from a great distance. She hears in the question the stressor the neurologist must have used without knowing its full implications.

Stressor. She gets stuck on the term she once vowed never to employ again—even in thought. Catastrophic event. Another term she could scrap, but nothing else describes what transpired just now. Or what transpired yesterday, for that matter.

What was it the neurologist said about the likelihood of Colin experiencing a flashback on the stressor? Didn’t he say that if Colin encountered a precise set of provocations or another monumental agent of stress, he might return to the event that sent him into oblivion? Has not that criteria just been met and then some? Is there not damn good reason to worry that Colin might slip away again?

Long after he should have responded in some way, Colin remains mute and motionless, the detective’s question left hanging in the air like a threatening cloud.

“I fail to see how that information will further the investigation into Mr. Sebastian’s death,” Laurel blurts, much as Nate did when making his shocking disclosure. She stands, advances on the detective, leaves nothing to chance as to where her annoyance is directed. “You already have my eyewitness account—my description of the perpetrator—and Mr. Isaacs has been more than cooperative in describing the incident that first provoked his suspicions. Unless you have something pertinent to add to your update, this session is over.”

Grillo looks affronted for a second or two, recovers with a shrug. “I guess they weren’t just whistlin’ Dixie when they said she used to be a prosecutor,” he mumbles as Nate escorts him from the room.

The detective was well briefed if he knew Laurel Chandler Elliot was once a prosecuting attorney. So why wasn’t he told that Colin Elliot has no legitimate memory of the bloody damn accident or the events surrounding it?

Colin ponders this in Nate’s gym an hour after Detective Grillo was shown the door and soon after the good news of Laurel’s pregnancy was revealed to Nate, Amanda, and Laurel’s brothers. But the good news wasn’t complete antidote to the can of worms served up at the briefing in the library. Not for him, anyway.

Slumped on a bench in the same area where he first came across concrete evidence of Nate’s dodgy practices, Colin also ponders how today’s new evidence impacts on the old, and the answer is, very little. Even if he’d known what Nate was dithering over for close to three years, he’d still be pissed and insulted about having been denied a star turn at the Icon ceremony. And he’d still be outraged that Nate had Laurel investigated against his stated wishes. But he doesn’t feel any specific animosity towards Nate at the moment; he doesn’t feel much of anything in that sector or he wouldn’t have agreed to stay here, safe haven or not.

Whilst changing into shorts chosen for wear on a Turkish sailing vessel, he examines his present feelings for Laurel. Yeh, he is a bit annoyed that she sprang to his defense when Grillo posed the question he couldn’t answer. But why should that bother him, actually? Has he already forgotten his delight when she spoke to the press on his behalf that day at The Plaza? Or all the times since when she’s made clear to all comers where her allegiance lies?

He tugs on a pair of trainers intended for shore excursions to the many ancient ruins along the Turquoise Coast and dismisses his annoyance as ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous. What kind of deficient lout could find fault with this fabulous woman who continues to thrill, surprise, and touch him in ways the most inflamed imagination could never envision?

The deal made before he left her in the kitchen just now requires her to eat a full balanced meal and him to complete a much-needed workout while they’re apart. Assuming she’s digging into some hearty fare about now, he’d better get his arse in gear.

He starts with the treadmill, as he did the only other time he used this gym. Inside of fifteen minutes he’s breaking sweat and feeling benefit to his legs. He’s also flashing back on Detective Grillo’s ill-advised question. He speeds up the treadmill as though to outdistance the intrusion; he’s running before the effort registers as more ridiculous than being annoyed with Laurel. He slows to a permissible pace and a whole litany of questions overtakes him. Some predate the accident; some are only minutes old; all are destined to forever remain questions as far as he’s concerned.