Delusion Road (8 page)

Griff’s fingers flew over his keyboard. Months ago, he’d hacked her computer and downloaded software that alerted him whenever someone accessed her Facebook page or messaged her through any of her social networks, but no alert had been triggered beyond the ones he routinely investigated. Nothing was foolproof, though, which is why he was manually accessing her other media, but half an hour later, he slumped back in his chair, frustrated once again. His efforts had turned up nothing he hadn’t seen before, no contact from people he hadn’t already checked out. The only difference was that Soccerguy89, whom Talia had friended weeks ago, was suddenly more than just a friend.

Seeing how the target had covered his tracks so thoroughly, Griff figured the man knew how to stay under the radar, which was why he’d switched his focus to the older son. He was sure
the kid would fuck up, thinking that after all those months had passed it was finally safe to reach out to her. So when Soccerguy89 first popped up on Talia’s page, Griff’s instincts had jangled like crazy—the target’s son had
lived
for soccer.

But Soccerguy89 was just a seventeen-year-old named Nick Longley whose dad, a major at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, had mustered out of the service and taken a civilian job at O’Hare Airport, resulting in the family’s move to Chicago. And from what Griff had learned while accessing the boy’s Ohio school records, an okay guy. Certainly nothing like those losers Sonia Martinez was forever hooking up with.

And now Talia and Nick Longley were a couple.

Griff felt a twinge of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Disappointment? That made no sense. The girl was nothing to him. She could date whoever she wanted, right?

But that twinge was there just the same. Gnawing at him.

Griff studied the photo that Talia had posted with her status update. In it, she and this Nick guy were standing in front of the Chicago Culture Center. He had his arm around her waist, and she was gazing up at him instead of at the camera. She looked happy.

There had been a long period when that hadn’t been the case. Griff wasn’t completely insensitive—he knew it must have been hard on her after her boyfriend disappeared. And before that, there were the two days it took the medical examiner to confirm that what little remained of the body found in the rubble was female. At least then Talia knew he was still alive. But all those unanswered questions must have weighed on her.

Much to Griff’s dismay, arson was suspected and later confirmed, but that was only because the husband had disappeared,
a fact that raised a huge flag for investigators. They’d initially found no trace of an incendiary device, but when they combed through the debris a second time, one eager forensic specialist discovered minute evidence of the mechanism’s signature. And once that detail was released, there was no end of speculation in the media about what had happened. At first, reporters focused on the possibility of insurance fraud, only to discover later that there was no policy on the wife. No policy on any of them, in fact, since their insurance had lapsed a year earlier. Then there was the suspicion the wife had been having an affair and the husband killed her after finding out, but no neighbours or co-workers could corroborate that theory. There were other stories, too, but of all those generated by the explosion and subsequent disappearance of the husband and two boys, Griff had most enjoyed the terrorist angle: the family had lost everything in a foreclosure and the husband had been planning to blow up the bank that had taken his house, but the device he’d built had detonated accidentally. And since there was no evidence to suggest otherwise—the guy’s money problems were, after all, well documented—that one had been bandied about by the media for days until another news cycle had kicked in. Things might have gone differently if the target had had relatives around to defend him and demand answers, but there was no one.

What had pleased Griff about all those stories was that nothing tied the explosion to anyone else, which was probably another reason why he was still among the living. The target had, after all, worked for Battaglia, so there was no direct connection between him and that pasty-faced fuck Morozov. But despite the satisfaction Griff took from how things had turned out, he
could appreciate how hard all of those stories must have been on the girl. Which only increased the respect he’d felt for her as she’d continued to wait month after month for news of her boyfriend. There was no denying how attractive she was, and there was probably no end of guys waiting to take his place.

Griff studied that photo once more, looked at the expression on Talia’s face, looked at the way this Nick person had wrapped his arm around her, and he felt that twinge again.

G
uiding the SUV into the three-car garage attached to her family’s Georgian colonial, Willa replayed in her head the conversation with the new guy one more time:
About this morning, what I said when I introduced you, I wanted to
—It sounded like he’d been about to apologize, but then Britney had jumped in and the whole thing had gone to hell.
You need to grow up, Jaffrey
, he’d said. As if he
knew
her! But as much as that had stung, it was his parting remark—
I had you pegged from the moment we met. What you see is what you get, right?
—that had made her lose her temper.

Getting out, she crossed the other two garage bays. Her father’s was empty, but a new Cadillac ATS with dealer plates—
Jaffrey 2
—sat in the space nearest the entrance to the house. Willa sighed, hoping her mother’s mood had improved since that morning. Despite the size of their house—nearly six thousand square feet spread over two and a half storeys—Willa had easily heard her parents arguing again before she’d gone down to breakfast.

Willa passed through the mudroom into an enormous kitchen containing sleek modern cabinetry designed and installed by Ferrari, the same company that produced precision-built cars. One of the first of its kind in the province, the kitchen had
been featured in
Atlantic Home and Garden
the previous spring. Dropping her books on the large quartz-surfaced island, she opened the commercial-size refrigerator beside the equally large upright freezer and reached for a bottle of orange juice. For all the grocery shopping they did—which wasn’t much, since the staples in their house seemed to be juice, yogourt, and cottage cheese—a small bar fridge would have met their needs. But really, how would a bar fridge have looked in a Ferrari kitchen featured in
Atlantic Home and Garden
?

“You’re home.”

Willa turned to see her mother in the doorway, an empty crystal tumbler in her hand. During the past few weeks, Lenore Jaffrey had taken to delivering cryptic second-person proclamations—
You’re home, You’re early, You’re late
—in lieu of actual greetings whenever her daughter appeared, as if Willa needed play-by-play commentary to narrate her own movements.

“Mm,” said Willa, twisting the bottle’s cap.

“How was your first day?”

“Same as every other,” Willa replied, taking a couple of swallows. Her answer, of course, wasn’t entirely true, but she knew her mother wasn’t entirely interested. The empty glass told her the reason she’d come to the kitchen.

As if to confirm that deduction, Lenore moved to the refrigerator and placed her tumbler in the ice dispenser, which dropped three perfect half-moons into her glass, and then opened a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose. As her mother poured herself a generous amount of the expensive vodka, Willa couldn’t help seeing the changes in her looks. A stranger would no doubt see only a striking, slender woman who still looked
youthful despite having celebrated her forty-third birthday in January. Her shoulder-length blond hair was thick and shiny, and between the trips she made to a salon in Halifax, only a few roots ever showed traces of grey. And to anyone else, Lenore’s oval face probably still looked as fresh as ever, her smooth features seeming to mirror those of her daughter. But it was the way she now achieved this smoothness that Willa had noticed. Her mother had begun to apply more makeup than usual, to conceal the lines around her mouth and her eyes. Not that it was unusual for the face of a woman her age to begin showing the passage of time, but Willa didn’t think the lines were entirely due to aging. She’d first noticed them during the summer when tension between her parents had developed. And those lines hadn’t been helped by the glass that, lately, never seemed far from her mother’s hand.

Lenore raised the crystal tumbler and took a long swallow of the vodka, then turned to her daughter. “Did you have the new teacher today?”

Willa nodded.

“What’s he like?” asked her mother, bringing the tumbler to her lips again.

“I like him. Actually seems to enjoy his job.” But she didn’t want to think about school anymore. “How’d you spend
your
day?” she asked, although she was pretty sure she knew.

“With Rachel on the links.” Lenore and Celia’s mother had been friends for years, and the two had taken up golf after Rachel’s divorce.

“How’d you do?”

“Kyle says my backswing is improving,” her mother replied,
the edges of her words softer than usual. She drained the rest of the vodka.

“Who’s Kyle?”

Her mother blinked at her, which made Willa wonder if she was having trouble focusing. “I’ve mentioned him before, haven’t I?”

Willa shook her head. “No. You haven’t.”

“The new instructor. He’s been giving me lessons.” She looked at the empty glass in her hand, and Willa thought she could see the lines around her mother’s mouth deepen. “Giving
Rachel
and me lessons,” she added.

“Does this Kyle have a last name?”

“Of course he has, Willa. Don’t be silly.” Her mother refilled her glass, then turned and crossed the kitchen, opening the garden door and stepping out into the backyard. She would, Willa knew, lie on the lounger beside the pool until the shade from the trees stretched across the patio telling her it was time to prepare dinner, a process that usually involved either warming up something their housekeeper, Evelyn, had cooked earlier or ordering out. They’d had the Brookdale Heritage Inn’s dining room on speed dial for years.

Finishing her juice, Willa collected her books and headed upstairs to her room, where she hoped to finish her math homework before Wynn came over that evening. Setting her bag on the bed, she pulled out her math stuff, sprawled across the duvet, and immersed herself in a series of questions that she suspected Shedrand had created to encourage less capable students to drop out of the course. It was a strategy that, along with Deadhand, had earned the teacher the name If-You’re-Wrong-You’re-Gone Shedrand.

As she’d expected, it wasn’t long before her reams of copied notes were useless, and she reached for her laptop to get some online help. When her Facebook page automatically appeared, though, she thought about her mother’s odd response to her question about the golf pro, and she did a quick search for him. She was surprised by how young he was. And how good-looking. Although she wasn’t able to access much of his personal information, she learned he was single and “looking for someone special.” Judging from the photos the guy had posted of himself, two of them showing a bare chest that had been sculpted by something a lot heavier than golf clubs, she was fairly certain he connected with more than his share of special someones.
What you see is pretty much what you get.

Recalling that comment, she couldn’t help wondering what the new guy had to say about himself, and in seconds she was searching for “Keegan Fraser.” There were a lot of them—three looked to be senior citizens, several were men around her father’s age, but the majority were teenagers. None of them, however, was the Keegan Fraser who’d insulted her in English class and then again in the corridor after school:
One of these days, you’re gonna find out you’re not the centre of the universe.

Well, she thought as she directed her browser toward the calculus site she’d used last year, that makes
two
of us. You aren’t even on Facebook!

As she clicked through the introductory page of the math site, another thought tugged at her. Who the hell isn’t on Facebook?

G
riff toyed with the wording for nearly half an hour. All during that time, he couldn’t help thinking that Gil Atkins would get off on the idea of messaging girls on Facebook. Not that convicted killers on death row had the opportunity. And besides, Griff was nothing like Gil Atkins. He was no pervert. Griff—or, more accurately, Kayley Sheridan—was just sharing a concern about a friend, right? And hadn’t they all been friends for months now? That was, after all, the beauty of Facebook.

He read his message once more before finally clicking Send.

It took only moments for Sonia Martinez’s reply to appear on his screen:
what’ve u hrd
?

This, Griff knew, was the tough part. Like Talia, Sonia had met Soccerguy89 weeks ago, and Griff couldn’t risk saying something that Sonia would know wasn’t true. And having hacked into the guy’s computer, Griff had found nothing about the boy that was of use to him. He didn’t even surf porn, not the kind that would raise eyebrows, anyway. Good-looking, strong student, terrific athlete—your basic prom-king-in-the-making.

But chances were good that whatever Sonia knew about Nick Longley’s background were things she’d learned only from him. And people didn’t tell others everything. Griff’s own mother was
a good example of that—the bit about the abortion had been a jaw-dropper when she’d finally shared it.

Griff began to type, his thick, blunt fingers surprisingly nimble as they moved over the keyboard. Finishing, he smiled and clicked Send.

This time, Sonia’s reply was almost immediate:
WTF????????

“I
was thinking about you last night.”

Keegan turned and saw Russell Shaw five lockers down from his own, struggling to get a backpack off his shoulders, the words on his XXXL sweatshirt askew but still readable:
Fat people are hard to kidnap.
Keegan grinned. “Need some help there?” he asked.