The Next Victim (42 page)

He said, "Sounds like this girl, Crystal Adams, might be the key."

"Yeah. We'll talk to the Tucson PD beat cops and ask around. Trouble is, sounds like she doesn't want to be found. And now that Kali has scared her off, she'll be doubly skittish." Michelle checked her watch. "You want to grab a bite to eat before calling it quits?"

"Sorry, I've got some fences to mend at home. Assuming they let me anywhere near the ranch."

"I have a spare bedroom," Michelle offered. "You know, if you need a place to stay for a few days."

"Thanks, but I'll manage." He pulled into the station lot. "You were married once, right?" Erling didn't really know much about Michelle's personal life. Wasn't interested, either. But she was the only woman besides Deena he knew well, and he respected her.

"If you can call it that."

"Who left, you or him?"

"Physically, I kicked him out. Emotionally, he was never there. But you're really asking about you and Deena, right? Your situation is different. The two of you have been married a long time. You have a daughter." She hesitated. "And a son who died. I'm not saying what you did doesn't matter, because it does, or that Deena will forgive you for it. Just that your situation is different. There are bonds that are not easily broken."

"I seem to be making a mess of my entire life," Erling said, with a sigh. "Now I'm on the outs with Mindy, as well."

Michelle made a face. "That I can't help you with at all. I know nothing about kids."

"Except that you were one yourself, a lot more recently than I was."

"And I was a holy terror. I know I gave my parents a shitload of grief. But I also loved them, though I didn't realize it at the time. Mindy will be pissed at you, but I bet she'll get over it eventually. You overreacted because you care about her."

He nodded. Too bad he couldn't defend as easily what he'd done to Deena.

"By the way," Michelle said, "I was going over the list of people who called in after we announced finding Hayley's body--back when she was still unidentified. Sloane Winslow was one of them."

"Why didn't she come forward with the girl's identity, I wonder?"

"We didn't have the sketch yet," Michelle reminded him. "And from the notes, it looks like she was thinking the body might be someone else."

"Crystal?" Erling remembered Sloane's phone call to his own machine. Had she tried to reach him for more information?

"That's what I was thinking," Michelle said. "The sooner we find this girl, the better."

Erling was expecting the firing squad at home. What he got instead was isolation.

Mindy acted as though he didn't exist. She ignored anything he said, walked right past him, and talked to her mother as if he weren't standing right there. She refused to eat dinner with them. Instead, she made a tuna sandwich and ate it in her room.

Deena lambasted him for overacting and making a scene by having the cops pull Mindy over, then fell into a hostile silence. She recognized his presence at the dinner table only long enough to ask him to pass the salad. The fact that she'd even served dinner should have made him hopeful, but her indifference cut through him like a knife. He was incapable of feeling anything but pain and yearning and deep regret.

"Let me do the dishes," he said when they'd finished their silent meal.

"Why, so you can tell yourself you're trying, you're being a good guy and I'm such a bitch to be mad?" Deena pushed back her chair and started to clear the dishes.

"No, of course not."

"So you can tell yourself you've been an attentive husband and I'm ungrateful?"

He followed her into the kitchen. "Deena, that's not the way it is. Believe me. I know I made a mistake--"

"
Mistake
?" She turned to face him. Cheating on your wife is not a mistake--it's a conscious betrayal."

"Maybe mistake was the wrong word. What I meant is, I know what I did was wrong. And I'm terribly, terribly sorry. It's just that I don't know what else to do at this point."

"Maybe there's nothing you
can
do."

Her words caused Erling's blood to run cold. "Are you saying you can't forgive me?"

Deena turned back to the sink. "This isn't something I can just tell myself to get over, you know."

"I understand that." Although part of him, he realized, did want her to simply get over it. It wasn't like he'd run off with Sloane, or even seriously contemplated it. And it was over now anyway. Had been over even before Sloane was killed. Whatever happened to "Let bygones be bygones"?

Erling tentatively touched Deena's shoulder. She brushed him away. "Fine, do the dishes. I'm going to take a bath." She left the room.

Remorse gnawed at him like some vicious animal chewing on his gut. He'd destroyed everything. Everything he'd held dear. How could he have been so stupid? So thoughtless? He promised himself that whatever it took, he was going to make it up to Deena. He was going to earn her forgiveness. And Mindy's, too.

When he'd loaded the dishwasher and wiped the counters, Erling faced the long night. A pariah in his own home.

He knocked on Mindy's door, then opened it without waiting for an invitation.

"I'm studying," she said. Though she lay on her bed with a magazine rather than school books.

"I want to tell you I'm sorry about what happened today. It wasn't my intention to embarrass you." Erling sat down beside her and she didn't protest. "I was so worried," he said.

"Tony will probably never speak to me again."

"If he's a decent person he'll understand."

"Yeah, sure. You are so clueless sometimes." Mindy's eyes were on the magazine, but Erling could tell she wasn't reading. "Is he in trouble?" she asked after a moment.

"No. At least not based on what we know now. His sister was murdered, and another girl he knew. But there's nothing that links him to those crimes."

"You sure came on charging like there was."

Erling leaned back against the headboard, exhausted. "I thought there might have been. He knew both victims, and then he gave you a book of love poems like he'd given them. If he was involved...and anything happened to you..." Erling's voice broke. He put his head in his hands.

What a mess he'd made of everything. Mindy. His marriage. His job. It all washed over him, sucking the air from his lungs. His shoulders convulsed. "I couldn't bear it if anything bad happened to you. I love you so much."

Erling felt the bed shift as Mindy swung her legs over the side. He thought she was leaving, flaunting her disdain for him. Instead, she scooted next to him and hugged him.

"I know you do, Daddy." She paused. "And I love you, too, even though I'm still mad at you."

Erling gave up trying to choke back the tears. He cradled his daughter in his arms and she let him hold her.

He felt his cell phone vibrate on his belt. He wanted to ignore it, but he knew it had to be work. "Sorry, honey," he said, reluctantly releasing his hold on her. "I need to take this call."

"It's okay, Dad." She actually patted him on the knee.

"Yeah," Erling said into the phone as he eased himself from the bed. He stopped at the door to Mindy's room and blew his daughter a kiss.

"I know you're off the case," Michelle said, "but I think you're going to be interested in this."

Kali was exhausted but she couldn't sleep, despite a couple of glasses of wine and a heavy dose of Motrin. Her body ached and her nerves were jumpy.

Finally, a little after midnight, she got out of bed, limped into the kitchen, and made herself a cup of lemon herb tea. She took it into John's study to check her e-mail. When she set the cup down on the desk, her elbow knocked over one of the boxes Sabrina had packed up to take home, spilling a loose collection of old family snapshots onto the floor.

Kali picked up the photos one by one. She worked slowly, taking time to savor each one before putting it back into the box. Her parents on their wedding day. John as a baby in their mother's lap. The three of them as kids in front of the Christmas tree. John had been about ten, squared shoulders and cocky grin even then. She was reminded once again of all they'd lost by years of estrangement.

There were photos taken at birthday parties and soccer games and summers spent on the beach down by the river. John's high school graduation photo, just like the one her parents had displayed in a frame on the mantel back in Silver Creek. A picture taken at John's college graduation. He was in his cap and gown standing beside their beaming dad. Another showed him with a younger, thinner Reed, also in cap and gown. With them was a girl a few years younger. She had Reed's pale coloring, broad-set eyes, and square jaw.

Even though it was one in the morning, Kali went into Sabrina's room and turned on the light.

"What's happening?" Sabrina shielded her eyes from the brightness with her hand. "Is something the matter?"

"I couldn't sleep."

"So you had to wake me up, too? It's the middle of the night, Kali."

"I know what time it is." Kali showed her the photo. "Who's this?"

Sabrina grumbled and reached for her glasses. "It's John." She gave Kali an accusatory look. "You had to wake me to ask that?"

"Who's with him?"

"The guy is Reed. The girl is Sloane."

"Reed and Sloane. Don't they look a bit like Crystal in that picture of John's?"

Sabrina looked at the photo again. "Yeah, sort of, since you mention it." She set her glasses back on the bedside table. "Can I go back to sleep now?"

Kali never did go back to sleep. But she waited until seven in the morning to call Doug Simon and ask him to look into the family histories of Ray and Martha Adams.

"Are you looking for something in particular?" he asked.

"See if either of them is related in some way to the Logan family."

"The murdered woman's family?"

"Right. Her brother, Reed, is still in Tucson running the family business started by their grandfather. As far as I know, Sloane was his only sibling, but they probably have cousins and other extended family."

"Sure, I can do that," Simon replied. "It shouldn't be too difficult."

Despite the lack of sleep, Kali was keyed up and antsy. She wanted desperately to find Crystal--although she had no idea how she'd convince the girl to talk to her when Crystal had already run from her once.

Sabrina focused less on the running and more on Crystal's plight.

"I feel so bad for that child," she told Kali. "We know what it's like to lose your mother when you're young. Dad may not have been the rock of Gibraltar, but he loved us. He did the best he could."

For years, Kali had assumed their mother's death had barely touched Sabrina. That she, Kali, had been the only one to suffer. But as she and Sabrina had gradually mended their differences, she'd learned that wasn't so. Each of them, and John, too, had borne the weight of grief. They'd simply grieved differently.

"She must feel so alone," Kali agreed.

"She
is
alone." Sabrina shook her head sadly. "It breaks my heart. Imagine living on the streets, reduced to begging. No youngster deserves that, no matter what she's done."

They had planned to devote the day to filling out the reams of paper sent by the bank and brokerage house John used. But like an elusive gnat near one's ear, thoughts of Crystal nagged them both. Finally, Sabrina went to ask Reed about cousins named Adams, and Kali went off in search of Crystal.

First stop was Sunshine House. No one had seen Crystal, of course. That would have been too easy.

She went back to the liquor store, where the clerk shook his head. "Some guy was by here earlier asking the same thing."

"A police detective?"

"Musta been."

She walked around the campus, drove by Hayley's old apartment, then finally gave up and went back to John's, feeling discouraged by her fruitless afternoon. Sabrina hadn't returned yet.

The phone started ringing the minute Kali stepped through the door. She picked up. "Hello."

Silence, though she could hear breathing on the other end. Then a girlish voice, high-pitched and thin. "This is Crystal. Are you the woman who wanted to talk to me yesterday?"

Kali's pulse quickened. "Where are you?"

"You still want to talk?"

"Tell me where you are. I'll come right away."

Crystal's voice quavered when she gave Kali the address. "It's off Gate's Pass Road."

"I'll leave the minute we hang up."

Kali scribbled a quick note to Sabrina and was on her way.

It wasn't until she was on the road that Kali wondered how Crystal had known how to reach her. Then she remembered she'd said she was John O'Brien's sister. John was listed in the phone book. It wouldn't have been difficult for Crystal to get the number, assuming she didn't already know it.

The directions took Kali south and west, out of town to an area where she'd never been before. It was more open and rural than the city proper, an uneven mix of newer homes and ramshackle structures on lots strewn with old appliances and cars on blocks. The farther she drove, the fewer and more widely spaced the houses.

What was Crystal doing way out here? Kali wondered. Was she staying with a friend? And how had she gotten here?

Or was Crystal not the innocent Kali and Sabrina imagined?

At the end of a rutted, single-lane road, Kali found the address she was looking for--a newly constructed house that looked to be not quite completed. The exterior siding hadn't been painted and blue tape still lined the glass panes of the windows. No vehicles were around, and no sign of work in progress. Kali guessed the owners had gotten this far and run out of money, or there'd been a construction dispute.

She started to knock on the front door, but it swung open with her first touch, and she stepped into the dim interior. Concrete subflooring and Sheetrocked walls. Loose nails and scraps of molding were strewn about, but no tools.

"Crystal?"