Where Evil Waits (10 page)

M
ORRIS
S
LEDGE WAITED.
Sat on the open gate of his pickup truck, spit tobacco juice at rocks in the dirt, and felt the sun beat down. He’d called the Panola County Sheriff’s office forty minutes ago. Wished the assholes would hurry, but knew they wouldn’t. They never took him serious. Didn’t believe him when teenagers had been hidin’ out smokin’ pot in his barn. Didn’t believe him when Newt Fulton set up a telescope on his porch and watched Morris’s house every hour of the day. Didn’t believe him when the aliens crunched paths in the cornfields like them crop circles he’d seen on TV. Fuck, they’d even brought charges against
him
for that one. Claimed he was disturbin’ the peace shootin’ at his own corn.

Here he was a good citizen who actually went to the local high school on Election Day and cast his vote for sheriff and all them county commissioners, and then when he called, they took their sweet old time coming out and hardly believed a word he said. They probably expected not to find anything this time, either.

Well, wouldn’t they be surprised?

Ten more minutes passed before Morris saw the
white Ford heading his way. He climbed off his truck and stepped out of the drive, moving to the center of the road to wave them down. Gus Flaherty was driving, and some young kid with a deputy’s star was in the passenger seat. Morris couldn’t remember the kid’s name; kin of the Cahill family, he thought.

“Morris,” Gus said, getting out of the car. He didn’t even bother putting on his flashers. “Dispatch says you found somethin’ in your corn. It better be interesting, you makin’ us come all this way out here.”

“It’s interesting,” Morris said, and started past his truck. He stopped and pointed at the chain that usually blocked off the drive. “I seen a bunch a vultures circlin’, figured I’d come out an’ have a look.”

Gus looked at the kid-deputy. “You called us out here to see some deer carcass or something?”

Morris spit out the chaw. “Somethin’,” he answered, and walked past the nose of his truck. He went about twenty more feet and the deputies followed, the cornstalks making a wall on either side of the drive. Then he stopped and waited for them to come up beside him.

Morris bent down to the edge of the blanket he’d thrown over the heap. He hadn’t liked the way the woman looked at him, her throat all marked up and her eyes ate out by bugs. He snatched off the blanket.

Both deputies staggered back.

“Holy Jesus,” Gus said, and threw up in the corn.

Aidan shored up his courage. The thought of talking to Luke Varón made him sick to his stomach. But he couldn’t let the bastard keep jerking his mom around.

And he couldn’t tell his mom the truth.

He came out of the bedroom and went straight to
Varón. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “Where do you get off telling my mom that Dad did cocaine? He didn’t. He
didn’t.
”

Varón set down the plate he held—a pile of bagels and bananas and big bunches of grapes. He pushed it across the granite island as if offering it. Aidan felt his mom come up behind him.

“No, he didn’t,” Varón said. “Your dad was the dealer, not the user.”

Aidan’s hands fisted.
No way. Oh, God.

The shame nearly smothered him.
I’ve taken care of it, Aidan,
Dad had said.
Just keep your mouth shut and forget it ever happened.

The memory nearly buckled Aidan’s knees.
Jeez, Dad, what did you do?

Aidan caught his mother’s piercing gaze, looking as if she was about to start cross-examining him, prying for the truth. Damn it, he had to be careful. He’d promised. It was the last conversation he’d had with his dad.

He’d promised.

“You’re lying,” he said to Varón. An easy target for his anger.

“I’m not, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, you and I are on the same team now. We all want to find your father’s killer.”

Aidan studied him, feeling as if he was being played, but not sure how. He didn’t like Varón. He wanted to tell him to fuck off, then he wanted to walk away without looking back. But Varón was like a car wreck on the highway. Aidan couldn’t seem to drag his eyes away. He remembered his mom’s case against him a few weeks ago. She’d talked about him as the worst type of criminal, the lowest thing society had to offer, and Aidan had conjured up
an image of someone stout and old, with a pock-marked face and thick nose that hissed when he breathed. Someone who couldn’t string two sentences together without sounding like a thug.

In reality, Varón was nothing like that. Last night, he’d looked like a man who made his living on Wall Street and had season tickets to the symphony, a guy who might try to buy drinks for his mom. Today, he looked like a star athlete on his day off. Another guy who might try to buy drinks for his mom.

Aidan glanced back at his mom. She was looking at Varón the way she might look at something she found crawling under the sink.

Okay. No worries there.

He said to Varón, “What are you planning to do with us?”

“A valid question,” Varón answered. “First, I was going to give you breakfast. Or, lunch, rather. Bagel?”

“Screw breakfast. Answer my question.”

Varón picked up a small tablet and a pen, pulled a stool up to the island. “Second, I want you to talk me through the murders. Everything you can think of, starting with your dad’s.”

Aidan frowned and looked at his mom. Her appearance took him by surprise. Jeez, she could almost be an older girl at his school, the way she was dressed. Except for the worry in her eyes. That still looked like Mom.

“Mom,” he said. “Don’t trust him. We need to get out of here.”

But she’d made up her mind—he could tell. She was going to talk to this man who’d kidnapped them, a man who knew too much about Aidan’s dad and yet who knew nothing. She was going to tell him everything she knew.

She came to the island. “Have something to eat, Aidan,” she said, then turned to Varón. “What do you want to know?”

Sasha shifted, circling his foot to keep his leg from falling asleep. The house had been quiet for the past couple hours, but now there was movement. A light here, a shadow there.

Kara.

My, my, he really
had
frightened her. So much that she’d faked her own death and taken refuge in this big, isolated house, tucked away in acres and acres of forest. Even with the beacon on Aidan’s cell phone showing him the way, it had been tough to find.

But he had.

Rich bitch. You think you can hide from me after all these years?

He’d left the Lexus off a beaten path a couple of miles down the mountain, hiked through the woods with the GPS, then scouted out a vantage point. Not too many choices. The forest was untamed and the thick summer foliage made it hard to see very far, but the flip side to that was that he could get pretty close without being seen himself. He had a couple of close-but-no-cigar calls in deciding on a good location, but eventually found a tree that worked. Sasha looped the strap of the rifle over his shoulder, hoisted himself up, and climbed high enough to see, positioning himself with his back against the tree trunk. With one leg hanging over the branch, he could cock his other knee and actually brace it against another branch. Not quite comfortable and he had to keep working the pins and needles from his leg. But steady enough for decent shooting.

He unwound the strap from his shoulder and sighted the big house through the trees. Just the way the folks at the gun club had taught him. Sasha had practiced. He’d gotten good. Good enough that with the right gun and the right scope, he’d offed Louie Guilford from six hundred yards out. Of course, that was with a perfectly clear sightline, not in a fucking forest where you could hardly see thirty yards for the trees. But he didn’t need to be a sharpshooter today. He didn’t want Kara dead yet. He only wanted to let her know that he was here. And still calling the shots, so to speak.

He smiled at that, rested the butt of the rifle against his thigh, and peered through the trees at the house. Patience, now. He was good at patience; the years in prison had made him an expert at that. Staying back, keeping under the radar. Waiting your turn so you don’t become someone’s prison pet.

It had worked for a while. Until someone caught a glimpse of him in the shower.

He gritted his teeth, the memories only making him more angry at Kara. Her fault, all of it. Rich, haughty bitch. She’d taken everything from him, and never even batted an eye.

Well, turnabout’s fair play. Kara Montgomery Chandler was about to learn that. She thought she’d gotten herself to safety, with her little boat ploy and this hidden house. But sooner or later, she and that brat kid would have to come out.

And when they did, Sasha would be waiting.

I
ALWAYS THOUGHT YOUR FATHER’S
accident was too coincidental to make sense,” Varón said. He aimed the conversation as much at Aidan as at Kara, as if trying to make Aidan feel included. He really was skilled at playing people, Kara noted. She’d be wise to remember that.

“Why?” Aidan asked.

“Because I knew there was a hit out on him, remember?”

Aidan sneered. His hands closed into fists.

“But this shit you told me about,” Varón said, “it’s different. This is personal. So, start by racking your brain. Is there anyone,
anyone,
who might have a grudge to pick with you?”

“Of course there is,” Kara said. “I make my living among people who hate me.”

“Then it will be a long list. But make it anyway. Chances are good he’ll be on it.”

“You keep saying ‘he,’ ” Aidan said. “Maybe it’s not even a man. Did you ever think about that?”

“We won’t rule it out,” Varón said, “but strangulation is hard; it takes muscle. Not to mention that Penny Wolff
told your mom her husband had struck a deal with a man. And,” he started to say something else but paused, looking at Kara. “The type of murder weapon used on Penny Wolff suggests a man.”

Kara frowned. Penny Wolff had been strangled. “Type?”

He hesitated and Kara had the feeling this was something he didn’t want to say. He blew out a breath. “She was strangled with barbed wire.”

“Barbed wire?” Aidan’s face went white. Kara felt as if a gale-force wind whipped over her.

“Does that have any significance to you?” Varón asked. “Can either of you come up with a reason someone might relate barbed wire to you?”

Kara couldn’t come up with a reason; she was too busy trying to keep the contents of her stomach where it belonged.
Barbed wire.
She closed her eyes and remembered the picture of Penny Wolff. The details hadn’t been clear on the phone image. But the scarf… “Dear God, the holes in the scarf—”

“Yes. And Knutson and I transferred the photo from your text message to a larger screen. There’s no doubt: It’s barbed wire.”

Kara got up and crossed her arms over her midriff, pacing. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Who could hate her enough to kill other people and try to make her feel responsible?
Look what you’ve done. TRUTH.
And who could be so angry that he would do his killing with barbed wire?

The answer came in a flood of horror: There were several. A defendant she’d put in jail over the course of her career. A family member of a defendant. She could even think of a lawyer or two she’d beaten who were marginally psychopathic.

“Kara,” Varón said, “is there anyone you’ve sent to Death Row who’s actually been put to death?”

“No. Not yet.”

“But you have put people on Death Row.”

“Two. Levar Townsend. He raped and killed two women in 2005. He’s been through several appeals, but hasn’t won any.”

Varón wrote down his name. “Keep going.”

“Wyland Sellars. He shot and killed his wife and her parents in a hostage standoff with his two kids, then killed a bailiff trying to break from court.”

“I remember that,” Aidan said. “That’s when Dad bought you a gun.”

“Yes. But Sellars has years of appeals ahead of him.” She thought of something. “Where’s my phone?”

Varón said, “I have it. I’d rather you not use it right now.”

“I need Internet.”

Varón strode to a desk and opened a briefcase. He came back with an iPad and Kara Googled a list of her cases over the years, picking out the ones that had the potential for a killing spree of vengeance. There were five. In addition to Townsend and Sellars, there was a cat burglar who’d nearly killed a woman who awakened during a break-in and who had been paroled after serving three years. A pair of brothers who’d owned a package store they set on fire for the insurance money, killing an employee. They were still in jail but there was a third brother who’d threatened to kill Kara in a rage, right in front of God and everybody. And there was a heroin addict who’d shot his dealer to get a hit when he didn’t have enough money to buy it. He, too, was still in jail, but Kara had always suspected that his father—an “elder” in
some fanatic religious organization—was crazy enough to try to kill her.

“His name is Elijah Grooms,” Kara told Varón. “He’s a crackpot and his son is in jail.”

“Okay,” Varón said, and added the name to his list. “Did any of these cases have any association with barbed wire? With cattle or farms or anything like that?”

Kara was clueless.

“You were raised on a horse farm, right?”

She shrugged. “That was ages ago. My mother died when I was six, and my father died four years ago. His will stipulated that Montgomery Manor be sold and it sold to a developer. It’s not a horse farm anymore. It’s the reason I still have some money after Andrew’s busi—” She stopped and Aidan rolled his eyes.

“Geesh, Mom, it’s not like I don’t know.”

Right. “After Andrew’s business went bankrupt. Most of my father’s estate was a lump-sum donation to an undisclosed recipient. A charity, I guess. But the rest came to me.”

“Dad wanted to start breeding horses here,” Aidan injected, “but Mom didn’t want to.”

Varón’s brow hiked up in question.

“I didn’t love that life,” she explained. “I mean, I liked the horses, but it was a life that was—cold. Maids and private chefs and stable hands. I didn’t want Aidan to grow up in that world.”

Varón tilted his head, then said, “Okay,” and moved on. They spent twenty more minutes talking through possibilities, Aidan standing soberly in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest. Eventually, they came around to the night Andrew had been killed.

“He’d been out,” Kara said, feeling the sting of both
anger and embarrassment. “He had a standing appointment on Thursday evenings. I don’t know with whom, but this night, he was apparently with that woman, Elisa Moran. I got a call that he’d been hit while crossing the street. Elisa Moran was taken to the hospital, but Andrew was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“And there was never a lead on the driver,” Varón said. It wasn’t a question. He knew the details. Kara supposed he was just trying to get them from her perspective.

“A few leads,” she said. “But two days later, John Wolff walked into a police station and turned himself in. He was charged with first degree homicide by vehicle and leaving the scene, but he cooperated fully and showed remorse and claimed he didn’t remember the accident—that he was shocked at the condition of his car. He probably would have received the minimum sentence of three years, with some time suspended, but then Elisa Moran died, too. He was killed two days after he was transferred to prison.”

“The question,” Varón said, “is what happened during those two days?”

“Which two days?” Aidan asked. “The ones after the accident or the ones after Wolff went to prison?”

“I know what his wife told me about the two days after the accident,” Kara said. “She said her husband was scared. Crazy scared and she didn’t know why. He wouldn’t talk to her. He’d left his car somewhere—he said it had broken down—but then it turned out to have been the car that hit Andrew and Elisa Moran.”

“Penny didn’t know about the hit-and-run?” Varón asked.

“Not until John left to go to the police station and confess. She knew he hadn’t done it. He never drank and
wasn’t out that night. She tried to convince him not to go but he told her he’d made a deal with the devil and had to pay, but that the money would be worth it.”

Aidan looked shocked. “Why would anyone agree to that?”

“The killer got to him,” Varón said, but Aidan frowned. He didn’t seem to be able to wrap his mind around what he was hearing. “Think about it,” Varón said. “The killer comes to you with a deal: Take the fall for an honest accident, which probably won’t carry much jail time. For your trouble, your wife and sick baby girl receive ten thousand dollars every month you’re in jail.”

“That’s bullshit,” Aidan said.

“I’m not finished. Then the killer says, ‘By the way, have you looked at the front end of your car this morning?’ And when you do, you find the victims’ blood all over it, dents and clothing fibers on the bumper. My guess is the killer had scouted John Wolff out and chose him because he was someone whose car he knew he could steal, who had an Achilles’ heel and who wouldn’t have an alibi—”

“God,” Kara said. It was starting to fall into place. “Penny Wolff said her husband worked a four a.m. to noon shift at a shipping depot. He was in bed every night by eight. That’s why she was sure he hadn’t gone down to Atlanta the night Andrew died.”

Varón nodded. “The killer probably had the whole story laid out. If Wolff turned himself in and confessed, he’d be out of jail before his daughter got out of grammar school and his wife would have all the money she needed to take care of her while he was gone. If he didn’t, he would still go to jail, but for a lot longer.”

Kara was dumbfounded. The entire course of events had unraveled in his mind. “How do you know all that?”

“Because that’s what I would’ve done,” he said.

A chill slithered down her spine. Kara closed her eyes. It made sense—the way Varón spelled it out. Penny Wolff had held her silence until Kara walked into her home almost a year later and unleashed her own set of threats. Then, within hours, she’d been killed.

And that was on Kara.
Look what you’ve done.

“You couldn’t have known,” Varón said, and the fact that he had read her mind unnerved her further. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

“Mom?” Aidan was at her side.

Dear God, she couldn’t fall apart. Not now.

Varón looked at her. “We need to talk about the deal I offered, Kara. I don’t need a kid getting in my way.”

“Deal? What deal?” Aidan asked.

Varón was calling up something on his cell phone. He found it and held out the phone to Aidan. “I want you out of the way, someplace safe. This is a picture of the place you’d go. It’s a nice place; you’ll like i—”

Aidan batted the cell phone from his hand. It clattered to the floor. “Fuck you.”

“Aidan,” Kara was mortified, but knew Aidan was just scared. “I said no to that deal,” she explained. “Do you think I would send you away on Varón’s word? He’s the devil’s spawn. I know that.”

“Right here,” Varón injected. “Listening.”

“Shut up,” she shot. “We have to work with him, Aidan. This is our chance to get out from under this killer’s nose. We are
dead,
so this killer can’t torment us anymore. That’s thanks to Varón’s help.”

“It has nothing to do with Varón wanting to
help
, Mom. It only has to do with what
he
gets out of it.”

Varón stepped around the island and came to Aidan,
looking down at him like a giant bird of prey. “You’re right, kid. I don’t much care what happens to the two of you. But you need to wake up and realize that I have sufficient motivation to babysit both of you until I get the answers I need. There’s eight and a half tons of cocaine riding on this.”

Ice water washed through Kara’s veins.

“And what about afterward?” Aidan asked.

“Afterward, I’ll send you on your merry ways.”

“I don’t believe you,” Aidan said. “We know too much. When you’re finished using us, what’s to keep you from killing us?”

“Nothing,” Varón acknowledged. “But you won’t be going back to life as the Chandlers, so I have faith you’ll get out of Dodge. It would certainly be the wisest course of action.” He turned a leering grin to Kara. “Unless, of course, your mother decides she wants to find a way to repay me for my efforts.”

Aidan sprang; Varón put him on the floor with one shove of his hand. Aidan clambered up and started for him again.

Kara grabbed him. “No,” she said, but could hardly see through the tears in her eyes. “I can’t watch anyone else die, Aidan. Especially not you.” She shook his shoulders.
“We have to do this.”

Aidan gaped at her. His eyes filled with despair and he jerked back from her hands. “I guess you two have it all figured out.” He shot a look at Varón, then a glare at his mother. “Let’s hope he’s as good as you think he is.”