She shuddered. “Not really. But given all the things that have happened lately, yes. No stone unturned, et cetera, et cetera. My gallery is closed on Sundays and Mondays anyway and my back room will be a crime scene for a couple of days. So, yes, I’m free to accompany you on a little trip down memory lane.”
He smiled.
“What?”
“You’ve got plenty of what Anson calls grit. You know that?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve suffered from anxiety attacks off and on for most of my adult life.”
“That’s got nothing to do with grit.”
“What’s your definition of grit?”
“Murder goes down in your back room, followed by an anxiety attack that ranked at nine point nine on the scale of one to ten, and yet you’re up for taking a trip to the place where your nightmares got started. That, my friend, is grit.”
She grimaced. “Not like there’s much of an alternative. I need to know if Quinton Zane is still out there. I need to know what really happened to Hannah Brewster.”
“So do I.”
She saw the shadows in his eyes and knew that when he dreamed about the past, he, too, heard the echoes of the other children screaming and felt the heat of the flames. They had both lost their mothers to the fires of hell, but Virginia had been one of the lucky ones. Her grandmother had come to claim her. No one had stepped forward to claim Cabot.
Driven by an impulse she did not stop to analyze, she leaned forward and brushed her lips gently across his.
A great stillness came over him.
“Please don’t do that again,” he said.
Shocked, she sat back quickly. In that next instant a furious tide of embarrassment swept through her.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “That was a mistake. I apologize for putting you in a difficult position. Please, just forget that happened. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my room now.”
He got to his feet, moving in the smooth, fluid manner that somehow managed to cross the invisible line from the merely well coordinated to the intensely sensual, and stood in her path. He closed his hands around her shoulders.
“What I’m trying to say is, please don’t do that again unless you mean it,” he said. “I don’t need to be comforted. I don’t need your gratitude.”
His voice was husky, as if he was exerting a fierce control over some dangerous emotion. His eyes were stark with desire. She could feel the need radiating from his hands on her shoulders. But there was also a lot of raw willpower, a lot of control.
She raised a hand and touched the side of his face with her fingertips.
“I don’t generally kiss people unless I do mean it,” she said.
“Did you kiss me because you felt sorry for me? For what happened in the past?”
She hesitated, telling herself he deserved honesty. “Well, maybe it started out that way. I was remembering you as a fatherless boy who had just lost his mother and how no one from your family came to claim you.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought was going on. For the record, I do not want you to kiss me for that reason. I don’t want any pity kisses.”
“Okay.” Feeling more certain of herself now, she flattened her palms against his chest. “But just to be clear, you don’t object to me kissing you for other reasons?”
“Depends.”
“I want to kiss you because I would like to find out what it’s like. Is that a good enough reason?”
He gave that half a second’s thought and then used his grip on her shoulders to pull her hard against his chest.
“That’s the only reason you can come up with?” he asked.
“No.” She gripped fistfuls of his T-shirt. “Here’s the bottom line: I know some of your secrets, Cabot Sutter. And you know some of mine. A long time ago you and I spent some time in hell together. We were both wounded while we were there but we both survived. I’d say that’s reason enough for a kiss.”
“That works,” he said. “For now.”
He tightened his grip, pulled her even closer and covered her mouth with his own, all in one swift, relentless, irresistible motion.
The kiss went hot and deep, overwhelming her, swamping her senses. She was not sure what she had been expecting, but this shattering, disorienting sensation was not it. She clung to him, holding on for dear life.
She had learned long ago not to get her expectations raised too high at the start of a relationship. She made it a rule to go in clear-eyed, anticipating very little in the way of actual fireworks and, sure enough, she had never been surprised. A little mild heat and a fleeting sense of intimacy were as good as it got for her.
“Home by midnight” was her rule.
Lately she had been forced to shelve even those limited expectations because the anxiety attacks had started to become more frequent, striking with unnerving unpredictability. The turning point had occurred one memorable night a few months ago.
Brad Garfield was a very nice man but she knew he had probably been traumatized for life when an anxiety attack exploded through her just as things reached the intimate stage.
In the wake of the disaster, she had sworn off dating, at least until what she thought of as the Storm Season had passed.
Tonight was not the time to rethink her decision, she thought. The last thing she wanted to do was wreck the fragile bond she was developing with Cabot.
Kissing him had probably been a mistake.
But it was Cabot who ended things. He eased them both out of the kiss before it could drag them under.
“We should probably stop here,” he said, his voice more than a little rough around the edges.
He was right, although his reasons for calling a halt were probably quite different from her own. “Never sleep with a client” was one of his rules.
“Yes,” she said, going for a bracing tone. “We’re involved in a very serious situation. We don’t want to make things more complicated than they already are.”
He appeared to give that some thought.
“You think going to bed together would complicate the situation?” he asked.
“Well, yes. Don’t you?”
“No.”
She glared at him. “Then why did you stop?”
“Because I could tell you were having second thoughts.”
“I see.” She drew a breath. “That was very . . . intuitive of you.”
“That’s me, Mr. Intuitive. Mind telling me why you were having those second thoughts?”
She spread her hands. “For all the obvious reasons, starting with we hardly know each other.”
“Seems to me we know a whole lot about each other. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re scared to go to bed with me, aren’t you?”
Now she was getting angry. She made to step around him, heading for her bedroom.
“I’m not afraid,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m a serial dater, remember? But I do learn from experience. And for the past year, all of my experience has been bad. The last time I got to the hot-and-sweaty stage with a man, I had a full-blown panic attack. Poor Brad thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I had to talk him out of calling nine-one-one at the same time I was trying to find my meds in my purse.”
“Virginia, wait—”
She reached the bedroom, moved through the opening and turned to face him. “The word humiliation does not even begin to describe what I experienced that night. It happened months ago and I still can’t get that scene out of my head. So, yes, I’m having second thoughts about trying to have sex with you.”
She closed the door with rather more force than was necessary and stood for a moment, seething.
When she had her emotions back under control, she opened the door again. Cabot was standing right where she had left him.
“I apologize for that incr
edibly ridiculous display of high drama,” she said.
“No problem.”
“I deal with a lot of dramatic artistic types but I’m not usually into the theatrics myself.”
Cabot propped one shoulder against the wall and folded his arms. “Like I said, not a problem.”
“Yes, it is a problem, but it’s my problem, not yours, so, again, my apologies.”
“No prob—”
“Don’t say it.”
She closed the door again, this time with exquisite control. She crossed to the window and stood looking out at the city lights for a long time.
CHAPTER 20
“Last night after you went back to bed, I did some research on Night Watch, the tech company where Sandra Porter worked,” Cabot said.
He was behind the wheel of his gunmetal-gray SUV. Virginia was in the passenger seat. They were forty minutes into the roughly one-hour drive to Wallerton and the site of Quinton Zane’s first compound. He had exited Interstate 5 a while back and now they were on a two-lane road and deep into rural country. Tiny towns, farms and small ranches dotted the landscape.
Thus far conversation in the front seat of the SUV had been polite but stilted. He figured he now knew the precise meaning of the phrase walking on eggshells.
He knew he couldn’t blame all of the brittle tension in the front seat on the searing late-night kiss. It was the sight of the holstered gun he had picked up at his place on the way out of town that had made Virginia’s eyes narrow.
“We may be dealing with a killer,” he had said.
“I know,” she said.
That was pretty much all she had said for the past several miles.
Virginia took her attention off the road long enough to give him a quick, curious glance. “You mentioned that Night Watch was a tech company.”
“It is in the sense that it’s selling products online and has no brick-and-mortar presence, but as far as I can tell, it’s just a straight retail operation.”
“What do they market?”
“According to the website, they offer a variety of personalized sleeping aids. Herbal products, guided meditations that are supposed to help insomniacs get to sleep, one-on-one online sleep therapy sessions, special music designed to help you sleep—that kind of thing.”
Virginia thought about that. “Zane’s cult sold a program that he claimed would allow people to control their dreams and channel the latent powers of the mind.”
“Zane’s operation was your basic pyramid scheme. It had several tiers. Customers had to keep buying their way up to the next level. In addition, they only made progress if they brought in new customers.”
“It sounds somewhat similar to selling insomnia therapies.”
“Night Watch may be selling junk cures for insomnia, but from what I can tell, the business is not a pyramid scheme.”
“Well, it’s probably all bogus, but given the number of people with sleep disorders who are desperate for a good night’s rest, I’m guessing that business is brisk.”
“It was doing well enough to catch the attention of a venture capital firm a year ago,” Cabot said. “Night Watch burned through that first round of funding and is rumored to be getting ready to go out for another.”
“I assume you checked out the people who are running Night Watch?”
“I did. Like most start-ups, it’s still a small organization. The founder and CEO is Josh Preston, a former wunderkind tech whiz who made his first fortune before he was thirty. He designed a social media app that was hugely successful. Got bought out by one of the big companies. Looks like he kicked around for a while, enjoying his money, and then decided to reinvent himself with Night Watch.”
“He wants to see if he can catch lightning in a jar twice?”
“Probably. But here’s the bottom line: according to the business media, Preston is only in his midthirties and none of his employees are over thirty.”
“In other words, there’s no one involved with the company who might be Quinton Zane,” Virginia said.
“No.”
“I suppose that would have been too easy.”
“Yes. That’s why we’re going back to the beginning again.”
Virginia gave him another searching look. “Because you’re sure there must be some connection between Hannah Brewster, Sandra Porter and the past.”
“I think so, yes.”
They stopped for coffee at a small restaurant in Wallerton and then Cabot drove the last few miles up into the heavily wooded foothills. The closer they got to the old house, the more tense Virginia became. She wasn’t the only one, he thought. He was on edge, too.
The last stretch of road was a strip of badly weathered pavement that was barely wide enough for the SUV.
The big house was a three-story stone-and-wood monstrosity that had been built back in the previous century. It sat at the end of a long, mostly-washed-out drive. It was a structure that, thanks to its location in a long valley, never saw much daylight even in high summer. Now, at the end of a Pacific Northwest winter, it existed in shades of twilight.
Virginia studied the house with a grim expression. “It looks like something out of a horror movie.”
“One with a bad ending,” Cabot said.
He drove between the twin stone pillars that marked the front of the drive. The remains of the old gate sagged on rusted-out hinges.
“I remember the gate was always locked and guarded,” Virginia said. “Zane told us it was for our own protection.”
“The first rule in establishing a cult is to isolate your followers,” Cabot said.
“He was a total sociopath.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Cabot brought the SUV to a halt in the clearing. He and Virginia sat silently for a moment, contemplating the ugly house.
“This is where it all started,” Cabot said. “Hard to believe so many people fell for his lies.”
“You’re hoping to find some clue to the identity of the new owner, aren’t you?”
“That would definitely be interesting.”
He grabbed his windbreaker and the holstered gun off the back seat, opened the door and got out.
Virginia collected her parka and joined him at the front of the big SUV.
“I don’t want to tell you your business,” she said, “but this is technically private property.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to break in. I just want to take a look around. But if someone does happen to show up, we are a couple of city people who got lost out here in the country. Our GPS isn’t working so we stopped to ask for directions.”
“Okay, I guess that sounds sort of reasonable. Do you do this kind of thing a lot?”
“No, but I’m still new at the private investigation business. Did it a lot in my last job, though.”
“That would be when you were a police chief?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you really get fired from that position?”
“Long story.”
“Which means you’re not going to tell me, right?”
“Maybe some other time.”
He walked across the weed-covered clearing to the front door of the old house. Virginia trailed after him.
He went up the steps and rapped several times on the front door. Not surprisingly, there was no response. The gleam of untarnished metal caught his eye. He looked down at the door handle.
“New lock,” he said.
“The new owner probably had new locks installed to discourage transients and squatters from moving in.”
“Either that or he’s planning on spending some time here.”
“I doubt he’s doing that yet,” Victoria said. “If this place has been standing empty for several years, it can’t possibly be fit for habitation. The new owner will have to do a lot of work. Pr
obably needs new wiring, for starters. The kitchen and bathrooms will have to be renovated.”
“Depends on what the new owner intends to do with the place,” Cabot said.
She watched him come down the front steps and go to the nearest window.
“You’re really suspicious about the new owner, aren’t you?” she said.
“It’s the timing that bothers me. Why, after years of sitting in foreclosure, did someone decide to buy it now?”
“We have to allow for the possibility that someone figured it was a steal and picked it up with the idea of remodeling it and selling it at a profit.” She looked past him toward the main house. “I hate this place.”
“I’m not real fond of it myself.”
“I wonder if the new owner knows that it once housed a murderous sociopath and his cult,” Virginia said.
“Good question,” Cabot said.
The windows were all shrouded by faded curtains. He could see very little of the interior.
“I’m going to take a look around back,” he said. “Why don’t you wait in the car? It will be warmer.”
“All right.”
She went back to the SUV, opened the passenger-side door and angled herself onto the seat. She left the door open and watched him with a brooding, anxious look.
It occurred to Cabot that it might have been a big mistake to bring her with him today. On the other hand, he doubted that he could have talked her into staying in Seattle. She was in this thing with him. They had only been in each other’s company for a very short time, but he already knew her well enough to know she was going to stick with him until it was finished.
He rounded the back of the house and went cautiously up the rotting steps of the rear porch. The sight of the outside door of the covered woodshed made his stomach knot. One of the duties that he and the other boys had been assigned was stacking logs and hauling them into the house through the door inside the shed that opened onto a mudroom.
He went down the length of the porch to the kitchen door. There were no curtains on the window. There was no indication that any remodeling had been started.