The One That Got Away (19 page)

That wasn’t a problem. A closer scrutiny of the house wasn’t vital. He just needed to get a firm grasp of Muñoz’s movements, look for an opening, and swoop in when he was at his most vulnerable. Right now, he had a starting point—Muñoz’s home. Everything would develop from this place and point him forward.

A white Dodge Challenger roared past them and pulled into the driveway. A short, squat man in his late thirties climbed from the car. It was Muñoz. Beck recognized him from his picture in the news reports.

An ugly growl leaked from the seat next to Beck. He turned to Brando. The dog had been so cool and calm at the center, but here, face to face with his tormentor, he was a tense knot of anger. Beck smiled.

“Don’t fret, my friend. You’ll get your revenge. We just have to bide our time.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Zoë and Greening stayed the rest of the night in Mammoth Lakes. Greening already had a motel room there, so she’d followed him from Bishop. When they’d arrived, she’d checked into a room of her own and had been asleep within minutes of stretching out on the bed. Greening woke her with a phone call at 9:00. She was up and out of the room in thirty minutes and found Greening waiting by her car. He was wearing a suit again. She guessed he was on the clock.

“You’re riding with me today. You can leave your car here. I cleared it with the motel.”

Zoë tossed her overnight bag in the trunk of the rental.

“You hungry?”

She nodded.

“Great. I found a good place yesterday.”

They drove to a diner, where they got a booth with a view of Mammoth Mountain and ordered breakfasts. Zoë got the feeling that Greening had been working for a couple of hours before he roused her. He would have no doubt been reporting on last night’s festivities.

“So you came out here to check up on me?” she asked.

“I’m looking into your case. It can help us with ours and, hopefully, vice versa.”

“When did you come out here?”

“Yesterday.”

“Have you learned anything?”

“Not much. I’m hoping for better luck today.”

The waitress dropped by to refill their coffee cups before moving on to the next table.

“Why is it so important for you to come out here and torture yourself?”

She shrugged. “Because I have to remember what happened to me. That night is a blank. Everyone else can probably tell you more about it than I can, and that pisses me off. I’ve been meaning to come out and retrace my steps. I tried once before, but didn’t have the courage to go through with it. I felt that if I came back and faced it all, I’d be facing what I did—or what I didn’t do.”

“Which was?”

“I ran when I should have stayed.”

“You’d be dead if you had. You know that.”

“It’s not like my life has been all sunshine since. Dying in order to save Holli would have been the better option.”

“Bullshit.” Greening’s remark came out with sharp edges and no sympathy. “Don’t tell me Holli got the better deal. If she were here, she’d make you eat those words. If Laurie Hernandez is any reference, your friend died an ugly death that no one would wish on another person. You lived. Accept it. And love life because of it.”

It was oh-so-simple to people like him who didn’t understand what she had gone through. Their problem was they didn’t comprehend shame’s indelible mark and how deep it went. And why would they, unless they’d committed a reprehensible act? Even Jarocki didn’t really get it. He’d lived a charmed life. All he knew about shame was what he’d learned in books or from the people he’d studied. Greening and Jarocki and everyone else saw it the same way—like it was a surface issue.
Oh, look—you have some shame on you. Don’t worry, it’ll come off with a little soap and water
. Shame was one of those things that had to be excised like a cancer, but it was a hard thing to remove when it was wrapped around your heart.

“Did you come out here hoping to run into him again?”

“No. I’m not on a suicide mission. I’m trying to help. Help Holli, Laurie Hernandez, and any other victims.”

“And yourself?”

“Yes, and myself. I’ve hidden from that son of a bitch for too long. I was trying to repeat the trip from Vegas to home, to see if it could provide any clues.”

“Like the Smokehouse.”

“Yes. I don’t remember the place at all, but they remembered me.”

Greening shook his head. “And you apprehended Craig Cook, an innocent man. Do you see how dangerous that was? How that situation could have turned nasty on you?”

“But it didn’t.”

“You saying that concerns me, because that situation did get nasty, and you don’t recognize that.”

Greening sounded like Jarocki.

“You like to make waves, Zoë.” He looked at his half-eaten meal and pushed it away. “Did you think Cook was the guy?”

“In that moment, I did. I saw him and I saw the possibility.”

“Our man is in the city. Not out here.”

“You don’t know that. He could be commuting. Double identities and all that.”

“Possible but unlikely. To have picked up Laurie Hernandez the way he did means he studied her. Trust me, he’s in the city. Even if he isn’t, you can’t be so reactionary. It’s going to get you hurt.”

A lull followed, where they didn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Look, I didn’t mean to get overbearing or anything,” Greening said. “Actually, you retracing your steps is a good thing. It’s something I was trying to do, but it’s a lot more helpful with you, so what I’d like to do is take you out to where the sheriffs found you and backtrack from there. Sound good?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

Greening paid the check, and they hit the road in his car. She noticed him giving her sideways glances.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Your face. That bruise. You didn’t pick that up last night, did you?”

She couldn’t have done a very good cover-up job. “I got that at work. I was disarming a thief, and he clipped me.”

“Disarming?”

She told him about the incident with the iPhone thief.

Greening shook his head. “How did you go from a PhD candidate to a mall cop?”

“After what happened, I couldn’t go back to school. I needed to do something different, but I didn’t have any other qualifications. Mall security was all I could get.”

He frowned. “I think you’re selling yourself short. You have a degree. I’m sure you could get something that pays better and is safer.”

Her degree in environmental sciences gave her options, but none she wanted. “I could get something else, but I like mall security.”

He smirked at her.

“Really, I do. I don’t want to do a normal job. What the Tally Man did to me changed me. I can’t do some nine-to-five gig. I have to do something that makes a difference, and I do that at the mall. I stop bag snatchers, pickpockets, shoplifters, and vandals. I help lost kids find their parents and pick people up when they fall down. I make the world a little better.”

His smirk changed into a genuine smile. “You sound like a cop.”

She said nothing.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No. Dr. Jarocki says I should consider becoming a cop.”

“Well, if you’re serious about making a difference and helping people, give it serious consideration. It’s a good career, far better than mall-security work.”

“Do you really want someone with my baggage being a cop?”

“If by
baggage
, you mean someone who can empathize with a victim and is willing to do right by them—then absolutely.”

Yeah, right
, she thought. She studied him, looking for a sign of sarcasm and saw none. His faith in her surprised her.

They were approaching the on-ramp for US 395, the highway she’d been found on. He pulled over before reaching it.

“OK, I’m going to take you out to the spot where you were found. I know things are sketchy on what you remember, so we’ll pace ourselves. If anything looks familiar or there’s anything you want to see again, you tell me. We can take this as fast or as slow as you need. OK?”

The thought of doing this made her break out in a cold sweat, but she nodded.

They joined the highway, driving way under the speed limit. He drove with his light bar flashing so as not to piss off the other road users.

He told her what he’d read in the police report. It was surreal to listen to him relay events that had happened to her, that she had no memories of. She wanted to have a spark of inspiration, but nothing came.

He asked her to go over events as she remembered them, and he quizzed her on every detail. She slipped from reality back to that night. She didn’t see the road. She saw herself, Holli, and the Tally Man. It was the same hazy and incomplete movie she’d played in her mind again and again. It was hard to watch, but for the first time, she wanted to see it all. Suddenly, he slowed the car.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re here.” He stopped the car. “This is exactly where the sheriffs found you.”

The revelation slammed into Zoë. Her reaction was immediate and ugly. She broke out in goose bumps, and the strength drained from her body. She struggled to unlatch the door and had to throw her weight behind it to fling it open.

Greening missed the change in her and strode over to a spot off the edge of the asphalt. He consulted the contents of a file folder before gesturing to the ground with both hands. “You ran off the road here, with your car pointing in this direction,” he said, gesturing south.

She tottered over to Greening on unsteady legs. It was all too real for her, and her bravado shriveled. She had come here for the truth and to help catch a killer. Now she just wanted to run and hide.

Greening flipped open the file folder again. Reports were clipped to the right-hand side, while eight-by-ten photographs were pinned to the other. He tapped the one on the top of the pile. It showed her Beetle buried nose deep in the ditch, with a uniformed cop standing in the background, a look of disapproval on his face.

Memories of that night came back to her, but only in jump cuts: red-and-blue lights filling her vision, then a blinding light in her face. Silhouettes against the light. The creak of the car door opening. Someone saying, “Miss, miss, are you—? Christ, she’s naked.” Someone else saying, “This bitch is blitzed.” Her screaming and striking out at hands touching her. Men shouting, yelling at her to calm down. Her saying a single word—
Holli
—again and again. Then nothing.

“You OK?” Greening asked.

Zoë wiped a hand over her face. “Yes. Fine.”

The cop looked doubtful.

She took the folder from him, creasing the file back on itself to examine the photo. She oriented herself so that she stood in sync with the image.

“Remember anything?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

“The wreck shows that you were coming from the Mammoth Lakes direction and heading toward Bishop. That’s the reverse of your trip. You were doubling back on yourself. Can you explain?”

She shook her head again.

“Did you want to get back to Bishop for some reason?”

“I think I was just driving to get away. The destination wasn’t important. Sorry, I wish I knew.”

Greening sighed. “That’s OK. Let’s look at it this way. You were heading south. Does that trigger anything?”

“I was so doped up that, for all I know, I could have been driving around in circles before I wiped out here. All I remember was getting in the car, driving, and praying he didn’t follow me.”

He nodded. Zoë felt Greening willing her to remember. She’d done the same herself, but had long ago given up on having sheer will step up to the plate. The lost memories would either come back or remain erased for all time.

“I believe the place you were taken is somewhere off this stretch of road. Considering the condition you were in, fear and adrenaline would have overcome some of the effects of the Rohypnol, but not all of them. You wouldn’t have driven far before ending up in this ditch. I’m guessing ten miles at most in either direction. When you factor in the time you left Bishop, how long it would have taken him to drive you out here and get down to business—”

She winced at his use of the word
business
—a faceless euphemism for torture and murder.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s OK.”

“I just want to say that we’re close. Really close. Do you want to see if we can find this place together?” he asked with a smile.

“Yes, but the sheriffs did that. They checked out properties in the area and found nothing that matched.”

“You couldn’t tell them anything the last time. They based their search on where you ended up. They didn’t know where you’d come from and where you were going. They had nothing to focus on. We do now. Everything that happened to you, happened to you between Bishop and the road to Mammoth Lakes. So I’ll ask you again, do you want to see if we can find this place together?”

“I do.”

He turned back to his car.

She remained on the shoulder, staring down the barrel of the road disappearing to the south. It narrowed to a point in the distance, the mountains and hills on both sides moving to swallow it up. This would have been her view that night. She wanted it to be familiar, to spark a memory or shine a spotlight on a feature of a featureless road. The road remained just a road, but it didn’t change the fact that everything that had happened, had happened here.

“Zoë? You OK?”

She turned. “Yeah. I think we should go in this direction first.”

His expression turned hopeful. “South it is.”

They followed the road south, pulling off at every exit and exploring every side road until it dead-ended. They reached the end of the road—Bishop—without finding anything that matched her diluted memories.

Greening drove to the Smokehouse and stopped the car in their lot.

“I don’t think they’ll be too keen on having us for lunch.”

“Most definitely.” He was smiling, but his grin quickly fell away. “OK, I want to do things differently on the return sweep. I’m going to talk you through that night, and I want you to fill in the blanks.”