Where Evil Waits (28 page)

S
ETH
G
UILFORD COULDN’T REMEMBER
ever
wanting
to go to his church youth group before. It met for Sunday evening dinners when he always had homework he’d been putting off all weekend, was led by two college students who thought they were cool but weren’t, and they usually did something lame like plan for car washes and spaghetti dinners or watch movies that were supposed to challenge their faith in God. Seth didn’t like planning things, didn’t like spaghetti, and had already lost his faith in God.

But tonight, he wanted to go. His dad had died on Thursday at the ball game and his best friend and proxy-aunt had blown up in a boat explosion the next night. His mom did nothing but cry all the time and try to hide it from him, and there were relatives all over the house for the funeral, who kept patting him on the back and stupidly asking if he was okay.

Aidan—the one person who would have understood what Seth was going through—was gone.

Seth felt lost.

Guess that’s what his mom had been trying to tell him all along by making him go to church and join the youth
group. Maybe this was the kind of time when it wasn’t all that lame. When your life was falling apart.

His mom didn’t quiz him about it when he said he wanted to go; she just nodded and dropped him off. And to Seth’s surprise, the uncool leaders of the group led everybody in a pretty cool memorial service for Seth’s dad and Aidan, where everyone got to talk about why God let shit like this happen, and where they were allowed to be pissed off, and where no one even suggested they were supposed to accept these things as “God’s will.” He hadn’t expected to, but after an hour or so, when the pizzas came, he actually felt a little better.

He was just going to the bathroom when his cell phone vibrated. His mom, probably, worried about him. He pulled the phone from his pocket and looked, and his breath caught in his chest.

His heartbeat tripled.
Aidan? Oh, God. It can’t be, he’s gone. Can it? Wait
. Seth’s brain scrambled to that first day after the explosion—it was all a blur—when police were frantically dragging the lake and looking for signs of them. For a while, they’d hoped that—

He stopped himself. Get a grip. It couldn’t be Aidan.

But what if it was? What if, somehow, he was alive?

Seth opened the text message, his heart in his throat.

Agent Hogan was the official face of the investigation and the Bureau’s way of showing the media they had
brought in their top minds, so he went to talk to the husband of the missing Laura. Kara called the nursing home and made arrangements for her and Luke to meet with the girl who’d called in.

Sarah Fogt was a nineteen-or twenty-year-old nurse’s aide with spikes of purple in bleached-white hair and a stud in her eyebrow. An older woman ushered her into the office, then crossed her arms, glaring at Kara.

“There was no reason for Sarah to notify authorities,” the older woman said, pursing her lips. Kara read her tag: M
S.
H
ENDERSON,
RN, LNFA. An administrator. “Mr. Rodin’s condition was not a secret.”

“We want to see him,” Kara said.

“Well, I’m afraid that’s not possible right now. His son took him out for the day.”

Kara’s belly flopped.

“He just wheeled a man out the front doors?” Luke asked.

“It’s not a prison, Agent Mann. Family members are encouraged to take patients out.”

Dear God, Kara thought. Sasha Rodin had taken his father away. “Sarah, you said Mr. Rodin has marks on his neck that look like barbed wire.”

The girl nodded. “It’s creepy. And they
are
from barbed wire.”

“Mr. Rodin was involved in an accident before he came here,” Ms. Henderson said.

“How long before?” Kara asked.

Henderson pinched her lips. “There are confidentiality issues to consider, Ms. Chandler.”

Kara glanced at Luke and he nodded:
Take it away, Counselor.
Kara closed in. “Ms. Henderson, it looks to me as if the staff of Mountain View failed to report suspected
abuse and endangerment of a patient in its care. Do you know what the penalty is for that?”

“Now, wait a minute—”

Kara produced the sketch of Sasha Rodin, held it up in front of both women. “Is this the man who signed Mr. Rodin out for the day?”

Ms. Henderson looked away. Sarah seemed to shiver.

“It could be,” Sarah said. “But those eyes aren’t quite right.”

“What was he wearing?” Kara asked.

“Jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. I’ve never seen him in anything else, no matter how hot it is.”

“And you believe he may have harmed Mr. Rodin.”

Sarah opened her mouth but Henderson cut her off. “If anyone at this nursing home believed that, we would have reported it. I told you: We’ve never had any reason to believe that Mr. Rodin was in danger from his son.”

Sarah looked at her hands, wringing them. Luke leaned in, his voice a rumble. “You don’t have to be afraid, Sarah. If anyone’s job is on the line here, it’s not going to be yours.” He said it with a perfectly timed glance to Henderson.

Sarah swallowed. “I’ve just never trusted him. Whenever he came, his father’s vital signs skyrocketed and he tried to speak. And the marks on his neck… It just seemed—” She shivered. “I asked about them. I heard the story. It didn’t seem right. And then, this morning, when I saw the news…” She took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t have waited. I should have called the police right away or stopped his son from taking him.”

Luke crossed to Ms. Henderson. “I want all the records you have on Mr. Rodin, including his son’s address and phone number, any insurance, records of his checks—everything.” She didn’t answer and he narrowed his eyes.
“Are you going to make me get a subpoena? Because I can do that, but it will put me in an even worse mood than I’m in now and that’s not a pretty sight.”

“It’s not that,” she snapped.

“Then what is it?”

“We don’t have any records of insurance or financial statements. And the contact information—” She stopped and closed her eyes, and Kara recognized it: a guilty mind, trapped.

“You don’t have that, either,” Kara said.

“I did. But it’s bogus. I tried to call him at the number he provided a couple of months ago when his father had a reaction to some medication. It wasn’t a working number and the address he gave… I mapquested it. It doesn’t exist.”

“And you never confronted him about it?” Kara asked.

“It didn’t seem necessary to pull Mr. Rodin from care just because—”

“Bullshit.” Luke glared at her. “Who’s paying his tab?”

“That’s confiden—”

Luke bore down on her. “The man you’ve been in cahoots with is a cold-blooded killer. He took his father out of here today and we have every reason to believe he’s planning to kill him. Now tell me the fucking truth: Where did the money come from?”

“Cash,” she said, breaking. “Mr. Rodin’s son paid cash. For a full year, he paid up front. The year just ended and he came to me with one more month’s payment. A week ago.”

Kara blinked.
One month.
She looked at Luke, who looked ready to blow.

“Did that include a little something for you?” he asked, and Henderson’s face turned beet red.

Dear God. Sasha Rodin had cash, more than they’d
even imagined. Enough to leave no trail of anything. No wonder they couldn’t find a record of him in Atlanta.

“We need to have a look around his room now,” Kara said. “Do you have any problem with that, Ms. Henderson?”

She closed her eyes on something that might have been a prayer.

“Of course not.”

Inside Room 144, the odor of stale human touched Luke’s nostrils. He shut the door behind them and the second it clicked, Kara turned to him.

“Sasha’s going to kill him,” she said, looking at the empty bed. “He’s got everyone he needs for the party except me, and Hogan said he probably hated his father. His father was there, Luke, at the party. He’s going to kill him.”

Nausea balled in Luke’s gut. If the layer of air freshener were stripped away, the room would smell almost like a Colombian prison cell.

“Get that light,” he said, suddenly claustrophobic. He hit the switch for the overhead fluorescents and Kara turned on a table lamp. The sickness eased a fraction.

They began looking around the room. It was sterile and small, with a couple of dusty knickknacks on the window ledge and a clock on the wall so the patient could watch his life tick away. A luxury Luke hadn’t known during his time in a cell.

He pulled the blanket from the bed—no one had been in here since Mr. Rodin left this morning—and shook it out. Nothing. A stack of old magazines sat on the nightstand and he looked at them. They were in Russian, some sort of mathematics journals. They were from the 1990s.

Luke picked one up, remembering that Sasha’s father
had a doctorate in math. He thumbed through it—puzzles and formulas and math problems, to the extent Luke could tell. His Russian was lacking.

He stopped, looking at the inside front cover.
STEFAN
was penciled in, in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting. He picked up another—same thing. They had all belonged to Stefan.

He reached across the bed and handed one to Kara. “Does that look like a child’s hand to you?” he asked, showing her one of the puzzles.

“Maybe,” she said. She looked at another. “Yes.”

Huh. He had to wonder why a man whose mind was gone kept math puzzles at his bedside that had been done by his dead son. Kara kept moving, opening and closing the nightstand drawers. She started pawing at pillows, frowned, and stopped cold.

“What is it?” Luke asked.

Kara pulled out an envelope. Her name was on the front.

“Oh, God,” she said, dropping it on the bed. She backed up as if it were a bug and Luke’s heart slowed. He picked up the envelope and opened it, touching it as little as possible.

On the outside of the card was one word:
DARE.
Inside, in cursive letters, it said,
It’s a party!
And the details were hand-printed in the proper spaces:

T
HEY CALLED
M
IKE, WHO
met them in the parking lot of a Waffle House.

“It’s six o’clock,” Mike said when Luke approached his car.

Luke frowned. “What do you mea—” Then he remembered: Collado. Jesus. It was lift-off.

He pulled out his phone just as it vibrated in his hand. A text from Knutson.
We’re moving.

A ribbon of satisfaction curled in his belly. It was happening. A nationwide, coordinated effort that would shut down the entire Collado network and arrest the top two levels of the syndicate, all in less than ten minutes’ time.

It was impressive and it was his, but it didn’t matter anymore. He had other things to think about now.

Kara got out of the car and joined them—she’d been talking to Aidan—and Mike caught them up. “Bruce Finney confirmed that the watch you received back in the fall belonged to his wife, Laura. He reported her missing in September when she disappeared after an aerobics class. Carrollton police have found no sign of her.”

“God,” Kara said, and Luke felt the weight of yet
another person’s life press down. The party guests were all dead: Megan Kessler had been the last one. But Sasha’s father—God willing—could still be alive. They just had to keep him that way.

And, of course, Kara.

“Give me the card,” Mike said, and Kara pulled it from her bag. She’d wrapped it in a paper towel from Dmitri Rodin’s bathroom—not that fingerprints mattered. They knew who he was. As a former inmate of Federal prison, they had DNA aplenty to match to.

Mike looked at the card and cursed. “Eight fifty-two? What kind of party time is that?”

Luke had checked. “It’s sundown tonight.”

“Son of a bitch,” Mike said beneath his breath. Then he opened his briefcase on the trunk of his car and stuck the invitation inside, exchanging it for a larger envelope of photos. He started going through them, one by one. “We’ve been running the yellow zone. These are aerial images of sixteen properties zoned for livestock. They all have arenas, indoors or out. We’re using county deputies to drive around and check them; anything with stonedust footing will make our short list—”

“Wait,” Kara said, stopping his hand. “Go back.”

He slid the previous satellite image back on top. Kara touched her stomach.

“Oh, my God. That’s Montgomery Manor.”

“What?” Mike said.

“My home, where I grew up. This is Montgomery Manor.”

Luke looked: The image showed a sprawling L-shaped complex of buildings in an open field. A completely open field—unnaturally empty. No trees, no bushes, no buildings, no crops.

“I’m telling you,” she said, her voice still shaking but getting some of its strength back, “that’s exactly the layout, the size. This building is the arena, and here’s the lobby and the stall aisle. There are bathrooms under this roof and the tack room here, and all along this wall of the arena is a viewing balcony so people can watch the riders. And here,” she said, pointing at a very small square roof, “Dear God, that’s a wishing well.” She looked up. “It’s exactly like home.”

“Where is this place?” Luke asked, and Mike held up the photo. In digital, hard-to-read letters, the address was printed in the bottom right corner:
3270 St Rt 143, Hayden, GA.

“Hayden,” Mike said. “How far away is that?”

“From here, about an hour and a half,” Kara said.

Luke looked at her, seeing the wheels begin to spin in her mind. Sasha had put
TBA
for the location of the party, undoubtedly wanting to withhold that information until he was ready for her. But now, they knew in advance. Nearly three hours before he expected her, they knew where he would be at nine o’clock. Or eight fifty-two, rather.

Sick bastard.

Luke looked at Kara, saw her processing the information. The sun beat down on the parking lot, lifting tiny beads of perspiration beneath her throat, where her pulse throbbed like a piston. “No way am I letting you go up there, Kara. No way.”

She looked at him, her eyes seeming to clear as she came to grips with what she’d just seen. “He knows that,” she said, frowning. “After all he’s done to make sure I know what he wants to do to me, there’s no way he believes he can send me an invitation and I’ll actually show up. And even if I did think that, he’d have to know I’d bring a slew of FBI agents with me.”

“It’s the dare,” Hogan said. “You accepted it once before. He may be so far gone that he thinks you’ll do it again.”

“I don’t buy it,” Kara said, and something deep in Luke’s chest moved. She was right. It wouldn’t be as simple as Kara showing up to the party.

“If he doesn’t think you’ll accept a simple invitation, then he must have another way of getting you to cooperate. At least he thinks he does.”

Aidan.
The thought hit all of them at the same time. But she’d just hung up with him, not five minutes ago. He was fine.

“Mike,” Luke said anyway, “move Aidan. Change safe houses, add guards.”

Mike nodded and Kara shuddered. “They won’t let Sasha get to him,” Luke said. “I promise.”

He could see that she was trying to believe him. “Then what do you think he’d use to get me to come?” she asked. “Why would I go to him?”

Her phone rang—the iPhone. Luke’s heart jammed.

Kara dug out the phone and looked at it, holding it out among the three of them with shaking fingers. It was an unknown number. But not a text, and not a picture. Just a regular phone call.

She cleared her throat and touched it to life. “Hello?” she said.

“Aunt Kara?” A boy’s voice, cracking. “It’s me, Seth. Please do what he says, Aunt Kara. He’s going to kill me.”