“No, of course you’re not, dear. You’re just high-strung, like I was when I was your age. I want you to keep yourself calm. Our guests are nearly ready to leave.”
“Do you know anything about Rob Morrison’s murder?” I asked him.
“Not a damned thing,” Cotter said, his voice savage. “But no big loss. The bastard’s dead. No one wants the prick now.”
Savich said in that deep, calm voice of his, “I’m tired of your foul mouth, Cotter. You’re an undisciplined boy in a man’s body. You’re offending me.”
Cotter just stared at Savich for a long moment, then he took a step back.
“I can say whatever I want to, you fuckhead.”
“That’s quite enough,” Elaine Tarcher said, rising gracefully to her feet to face the man who was her son, and who was also certifiable. “You’re not off in the woods with them somewhere, Cotter, you’re here in the living room of my house.”
To my wonder and relief, Cotter said in a calm, controlled voice, “I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t want to make a mess in the living room. You have so many nice things in here.” He’d made the right choice.
“Yes, dear. It’s kind of you to remember. Go find your father now.”
Cotter walked out through the elegant arch of the living room doorway. He turned and said, “Rob Morrison was a fool. He only wanted you for two and a half weeks, Mother. Was he blind? You’re so beautiful the bastard should have been crawling to you. Rob was fucked up, crazy.” Then he was gone.
“I apologize,” Elaine said with a charming smile to all of us. “Cotter gets overstimulated sometimes. My mother was exactly the same way. I believe it’s drinking too much coffee. He doesn’t mean any harm. Now, are you all ready to leave? It’s time, you know. I do have a lot to accomplish this afternoon.”
Sherlock shuddered. Laura said, “Mrs. Tarcher, your son is very seriously disturbed. He’s a sociopath. He needs professional help before he hurts someone or himself. Surely you see that?”
“She’s right,” Savich said. “He’s dangerous, ma’am, and one of these days he won’t back down.”
“I’ll deal with it if and when that day comes,” she said. “He doesn’t need a shrink. That’s absurd. Actually, I believe he got himself involved with that terrible drug of Paul’s. As soon as some time passes, I’m sure he will be all right again.
“I’d like you all to leave now. I’ve been very cooperative, but enough is enough. Why are you staring at me, Agent Savich?”
“You said your son was taking Paul’s drug,” Savich said, his hand still on Sherlock’s shoulder.
“Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m not sure what it was, but he’s seemed more aggressive, not always in control of himself.”
“What we gave Cotter, my dear, was a simple tranquilizer that Paul recommended, nothing more.” Alyssum Tarcher had entered the room speaking these words. He stood tall and imposing in tailored Italian slacks and a white shirt open at his throat. How much had he heard his wife spill?
He continued, “Well, if it isn’t more federal agents, in my living room, threatening my wife and bullying my son. Poor Cotter is in a state. Now, I’ve had it with all of you. If you don’t have a warrant, I want you out of here.”
“Sir,” I said to Alyssum Tarcher, “we came to ask you about Jilly. She’s still missing. I’m very worried about her. Have you seen her? Do you know where she is?”
“We haven’t seen Jilly since before her accident,” he said.
“Do you think Jilly was taking Paul’s drug?” Savich asked. “Do you think she was taking too much of it? That it made her mentally unstable and that’s why she drove off the cliff?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You are upsetting my wife.”
Laura was hurting, I could tell, but she was controlling it well. She said, “Did you know that John Molinas was murdered in Costa Rica at a drug compound run by Del Cabrizo?”
“It was on the national news,” Alyssum said slowly, one eye on his wife. She was sitting very still, her eyes on her ballet slippers. “Neither Elaine nor I have seen John in a very long time. We were saddened to hear of his death.”
“Unfortunately, your niece is missing,” Sherlock said.
“My brother loved his daughter very much,” Elaine said, rising slowly to stand by her husband. “He wasn’t a bad man.”
“I want you to leave now,” Alyssum Tarcher said. “I am innocent of any drug-trafficking charges, these horrible murders that you and your sister, Mr. MacDougal, seem to have brought to us. There is nothing for you here. I don’t plan to fall apart and confess because there is nothing to confess. Get out now.”
We were nearly to the front door when he said from behind us, “I’ll be sending you a bill for the repairs I had to have done on Seagull Cottage. You left it in a mess.”
He had wonderful gall.
“That was a good touch,” Savich said as we left. “That man’s something.”
I turned to look back at the house. I saw Cotter staring at us through one of the upstairs windows. When he saw me looking up at him, the curtain fell back over the window. I knew exactly what the drug had done to him. But he’d probably loved it. Had his father taken the drug as well? His mother? I didn’t think so. As for Cal, I’d probably never be certain one way or the other.
I felt empty. Coming here had been a waste of time. Jilly was gone and I had no idea now where to look.
“Let’s spend the night in Salem at my condo,” Laura said. “I want to see Grubster and Nolan. When I called the super from San José, he said they were eating well, but not happy that I was gone. It was very nice of Maggie to take them back home.”
“Will they sleep with us?”
“It’s a queen-size bed,” Laura said. “There’ll be room enough for all of us. Oh, yes, I’ve got a nice guest room for Sherlock and Savich.”
I called Maggie Sheffield and told her where we’d be if anything happened to turn up, which I strongly doubted. So did she, but she was nice enough not to say so.
I fell asleep in Laura’s very comfortable bed, at arm’s length from Laura because Grubster had decided to purr the night away snuggled against her side.
I dreamed I saw headlights, bright and sharp, piercing through a dense fog that seemed to cover everything in a thick veil of white.
Odd, but I could clearly see the road ahead. It was coming at me quickly, too quickly. I wanted to yell and smash down on the brakes, but I couldn’t. If there were brakes, I didn’t know where to find them. I wanted to get away from that highway that was moving so quickly, but I was helpless. I was trapped.
I couldn’t draw a breath I was so afraid. Suddenly, I heard a soft keening sound from beside me. It was a woman moaning as if she hadn’t anything left, as if there was nothing more for her and she knew it and accepted it.
I wanted us both to stop, but the road kept coming up through those bright headlights, faster and faster. I tried to tell her I was here with her, that I would help if I could. But she couldn’t hear me.
I heard her speaking now, quietly. She was praying. I was nearly part of her in those moments when she prayed for forgiveness.
I knew I was dreaming despite what I thought, what I felt. I wanted to wake up but I couldn’t.
The road disappeared. I was thrown forward hard, but then everything seemed to fade away. We were flying out into the fog, sailing high, then dropping toward the water.
I was aware of immense pain slamming through me, a tremendous pressure against my chest that didn’t really hurt but was just there. Then it too was gone. There was just an eerie sense of calm, of finality. So easy, I thought, it was so very easy. I smiled at the gentleness of it, smiled even as everything simply went black, and I felt nothing at all.
The next morning the four of us stood together on the cliff, looking out over the water. It didn’t take long. A man in scuba gear split the surface of the water and yelled, “She’s down here!”
I’d known Jilly would be. In my dream
I was down there with her.
Another man came up beside him. He called out, “There are two cars down there, next to each other. There’s a white Porsche that looks like it’s been there awhile and the one she’s in looks like a rental car.”
EPILOGUE
Washington, D.C.
Three Months Later
S quawk.”
“Keep your feathers on, Nolan.” I dumped a pile of sunflower seeds in my palm and reached inside his cage.
“Squawk.”
“Here you go.”
Grubster rubbed against my bare leg. “Yep, you’re next, fella.”
You’d look at Grubster and believe he’d eat anything that didn’t move out of his path he was so big, but it wasn’t true. Grubster ate only gourmet cat food. That had started the day we’d all moved into a new town house in Georgetown.
“He thinks he’s upscale now,” Laura had said. “It’s his statement of self-worth.”
I put a slice of bread into the toaster and got out the can opener. I forked out an entire can of salmon and rice into Grubster’s big white bowl, with a smiling cat face on the bottom, petted his back, rubbed his ears, and listened to him purr as he chowed down.
“Squawk.”
I waved a hot slice of toast until it cooled and broke off small pieces for Nolan.
“Everyone happy now?”
There was blessed silence.
It was Saturday morning, already warm and promising to be hot by noon, and Laura was still asleep. I was about to go back to bed to kiss her awake when the doorbell rang.
“Just a minute,” I called out and went into the bedroom to pull on a pair of jeans.
“A registered letter. Are you Mr. MacDougal?”
I nodded. “Who is it from?”
“It’s from Oregon, that’s all I know.”
I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. It was a short note from a lawyer in Salem, Oregon, telling me only that my sister wished this to be mailed to me exactly three months after her death had been confirmed.
My hand shook as I smoothed out the pages.
My dearest Ford:
I wonder if you will be with me tonight. If so, you will know what it is I have done. I am so sorry to cause you this pain, but I will be grateful if you are there with me.
How can I begin? At the beginning, I suppose. Paul and I had such great hopes for my brainchild. I managed to bond a neurotransmitter involved with memory to an opiate, and was surprised when the compound proved stable. We thought we would accomplish so much with it when it seemed not to be toxic and had such profound effects in our laboratory. We thought we’d found a key to how memory works, and maybe sexual drive too. But no matter what we tried, we couldn’t control it or predict its effects well enough, and the bastards at VioTech pulled the plug on us.
Actually, Ford, they pulled the plug because both Paul and I had tried the drug ourselves, and they found out about it. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. It was so wonderful at first. The sex was simply incredible. By the time we left VioTech, I was badly hooked. Paul was always afraid of it, even though he loved what it did to his sex drive, and so he kept his doses in check, and it saved him.
But we had to be able to make more of it by then, and I wanted to keep trying to alter the drug, or control it better. We approached Cotter Tarcher in Edgerton. Paul knew the vicious little bully well enough to think he’d be interested. After Cotter tried the drug, he was willing to help talk his parents into supporting us. Cotter thought he would get rich beyond his dreams. We didn’t know his uncle, John Molinas, was a drug distributor, and that Cotter would tell him about us. Nor did we know that he’d bring that big drug lord in on it—Del Cabrizo.
We didn’t make any progress, and I got worse. The drug just took over. It still has control. I’m not proud of what I’ve done in the last six months, Ford, the men I’ve been with, including Del Cabrizo. When Del Cabrizo had Molinas tell us Laura was DEA, it turned me completely psychotic. She was inside my head, tormenting me, and I couldn’t stand it. I tried to kill myself so that I would be killing her too.
And then you arrived. You were such a comfort to me. I left the hospital because Cotter called to warn me that Del Cabrizo knew that you’d found Laura, and he was threatening to kill both of you. I don’t know how he found out, but he did. I was so afraid for you. There was nothing else I could do, so I left the hospital and went into hiding. I stayed with Rob Morrison for a little while, another man I’m not proud to say was my lover. Because Rob crossed them by hiding me for just that first night, they killed him.
Del Cabrizo needed me to make progress on the drug, you see, and it became a sort of standoff. I told them I’d keep working on the drug if they didn’t kill you. But I couldn’t stop them from taking you. They promised not to kill you if I helped them clear out all the evidence and move the operation to a cabin outside Spokane. They wanted me to get back to work once we moved everything to Spokane out of sight.
They also killed Charlie Duck, an old man who just dug and dug once he suspected what was going on. I told Molinas I was afraid of what he’d found out and that he’d talk. With those words, I signed his death warrant. Del Cabrizo sent some goons to his house to search for anything he’d written down about what he’d found out. Paul told me that they’d forced a lot of the drug down him, then killed him when he tried to break away.
I’m so sorry about what they did to you, Ford. Please forgive me. I heard about your escape. Good for you. My brother the cop, you were always my hero.
I’ve been responsible for so much death and pain. It’s all my fault.
As you know, I got away from them. But they’ve still got Paul. I know you can track him down if you want to, but they will kill him in a heartbeat if you do. They will probably kill him anyway when they realize he can’t help them. He just doesn’t know enough. Please, don’t you be the one to go after him.
I wanted you to know what happened so you could put me away, maybe tuck me in the back of your mind as at least a bittersweet memory. No matter what I was, what I became, I loved you, Ford.
By the way, you should get together with Laura. She’s perfect for you.
Good-bye, my dearest. Jilly
I slowly folded the pages and eased them back into the envelope. I lit a fire in the fireplace. When it was going strong, I gently placed the envelope on top of the flames.
I sat on my haunches and watched as it burned. I didn’t move until it was completely gone.
“Mac? It’s got to be ninety degrees in here. You lit a fire?”
I rose slowly and walked to my wife. I hugged her tightly against me. “Would you believe that I found an old photo of me hugging a girlfriend and I burned it before you saw it and got jealous?”
“Squawk.”
“Nolan believes me.”
“Sure, Mac,” she said. I knew she didn’t understand, but she was willing to accept that I didn’t want to explain.
I hugged her for a very long time.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Catherine Coulter, The Edge
(Series: FBI Thriller # 4)
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