Forests of the Night (12 page)

She poured them both two inches of Patrón tequila in old-fashioned glasses and handed him his. He took a sip, then stared into the glass for a moment and threw back the rest of it. After a gasp, he raked his hands through his hair and began.

“Spent an hour on LexisNexis, researching the newspaper accounts of the bombings.” Parker swiveled in his chair and lifted a sheaf of printouts. “I remembered them vaguely, but I was hazy on the details. Same wire stories over and over, not much independent reporting. And a lot of contradictions. Vague stuff about security videos, but no detail. Bottom line, no one seems to know about his motivation. No notes left behind, no phone calls taking credit. All five banks were in North Carolina. Of course, the stuff we could use wouldn't make the paper.

“Question number one is, how'd they arrive on Jacob Panther as their prime guy? And question two is, why does someone blow up banks? If it's not to steal the cash, which it isn't, then it must be to make some political point. If it's that, why hide it? Abortion clinics, gay nightclubs—there's a clear motive, no notes required. We'd be dealing with some kind of fanatic. But banks?”

Back on the couch, Charlotte nursed her tequila, savoring the glow that
was working down her throat and spreading golden warmth through her chest.

“Maybe there's some private crusade going on between Jacob and the bankers,” she said.

“That occurred to me. But there's no evidence of that in the public record. The fact is, we could speculate forever. We need some hard facts.”

“We?”

He waved his hand as if clearing smoke.

“Okay, okay. I'm not expecting you to get involved. I understand your position. This is my son. My fight. You've got ethical conflicts with what I'm doing. I respect that.”

“What you need at this point, Parker, is a look at Panther's dossier.”

“Not much chance of that.”

She sat back on the couch and crossed her legs.

“I'm working on getting the boy's file.”

Parker straightened, and she watched his face grow bright.

“You are? How?”

She explained about Charlie Mears and his recruitment attempt.

“Harold Benson? You spoke with the goddamn director of the FBI?”

“That's the deal I offered. I get the file, I give them a pound of my highly intuitive flesh.”

Parker shook his head and smiled.

“Jesus, I knew you were good at reading people. But that's a little scary. I'm living with a human polygraph.”

“That's right. So don't even try your bullshit with me anymore.”

His smiled softened, and she saw his eyes dodge to the side and close briefly as if shunting away an uncomfortable thought. Perhaps a pang of worry about how many more of his dark secrets she might uncover.

He got up slowly and came toward her across the room, and she rose from the couch. As he opened his arms, she felt a confession rising from her gut. Go ahead and tell him about the gadget in her backpack, join forces with this good, sweet man she loved, become a double agent, screw the feds.

And maybe she would have done it exactly that way if they'd kissed, and
if that kiss had ripened as it had so often before into a communion of identities, a warm blurring of the distance between them.

But at that moment the phone rang, and Parker halted, lowered his arms, shrugged an apology, then headed back to his desk and picked it up and looked at the caller ID and said, “It's Mother.”

Charlotte forced down a long breath and sat back on the couch.

Parker told Diana hello, then was silent and went strangely stiff.

“When did this happen?”

Charlotte stood up. With both hands she made a questioning gesture, and Parker waved at the hallway phone.

She was there in seconds. Diana paused midsentence.

“Is that you, Charlotte?”

“What happened?”

Parker said, “Gracey ran away.”

“When?”

“I'm not sure exactly. Fifteen, twenty minutes ago maybe.” For once Diana's voice had lost its imperious edge. “She took the Jaguar.”

“Did you see her leave?”

Diana said that no, no she hadn't. She'd been cooking dinner, lost track of time, and went out on the patio to see how Gracey was doing. That's when she found the note.

“Oh, Christ.”

“What'd it say, Mother?”

“I'll read it to you if you want.”

“Just tell us,” Charlotte said. “We need to get moving.”

“It was a couple of sentences, that's all. Very garbled. It didn't make any sense. She was still quite upset, sobbing and cursing. I've never heard her talk like that before. The foul language.”

“Diana, please.”

“She said something about bruises.”

Charlotte came down the hallway with the portable phone and sat on the couch again. The blood was draining from her limbs.

“Bruises?” Parker looked at Charlotte for help.

“I'll explain later,” she said through the phone. “And what else, Diana?”

“Something about her brother. She was going to live with her brother. In a cave like a bear.”

“Oh, Christ Almighty.”

“What's she talking about, Parker? What brother?”

Charlotte dropped the phone and trotted to the kitchen and dug out her cell and called Gables emergency. Mary Troutman two nights in a row.

She gave her the story, describing Diana's car.

“It's Gracey?”

“Right—sixteen years old, shoulder-length blond hair, five-five, a hundred and ten pounds. Blue jeans and a yellow top. Probably headed north on I-95. I'll call you back in a minute with the tag number. Pass it to the Highway Patrol. Tell them it's about the Jacob Panther case. That should get them humping.”

A few seconds later she was back on the phone with Diana and Parker. But the line was silent.

“What's going on?” Charlotte said into the mouthpiece.

Across the room, with the phone pressed to his ear, Parker said, “She heard something outside, glass breaking or something. She's spooked. Don't be hard on her, Charlotte. Gracey'll be fine. She's only been gone a few minutes. She's probably already turned around and heading home.”

On Diana's end of the line there was a heavy thump, then a squeal.

“Mother?” Parker took a clumsy step toward Charlotte.

The line was still open, but there was no sound.

“Diana?”

Diana's phone tumbled from its perch and clattered against the tile.

“Mother, are you all right?”

A moment later a rustling wind blew across the mouthpiece, then Diana spoke.

“A hatchet.” Her voice was light and drifty, almost bemused, as if she were giddy with champagne. “My neck.”

“Are you injured? Diana, are you cut?”

“Oh, Lordy. Oh, Lordy, Lordy.”

“Lie down,” Charlotte said. “Lie down, don't move. Stay perfectly still, take deep breaths. Cover yourself if you can.”

Parker dropped his phone on the carpet and sprinted toward the front
door. Diana's house was eight blocks away. Not more than five minutes.

Charlotte spoke Diana's name, and the woman responded with a wet, rattling cough.

“Stay calm, Diana,” Charlotte said. “You're going to be all right. Just be still, try to relax. Parker's on the way.”

She could hear Diana straining for breath, a low, gasping wheeze. Then two words spoken in the hoarse voice of someone strangling on smoke.

“Beloved woman.”

“What?”

Diana sputtered and heaved and was silent.

“Diana? Mother, hang on. Parker's on the way. Hang on, Mother.”

Charlotte listened as the tread of heavy footsteps echoed across the floor of Diana's house. Growing louder as they approached. She heard the rough scrabble of someone lifting the phone from the floor.

Then a man was breathing faintly in her ear. Charlotte concentrated on the rhythm and texture of his breath, struggling to form a picture of his face, but nothing came. After a moment's pause the man inhaled deeply, then blew out the long sigh of someone with a great deal of work left to do.

 

While the Metro crime-scene techs worked the scene, Charlotte stood on the flagstone patio staring into the lit swimming pool. Diana's body lay in the kitchen and would remain covered until the ME arrived. The killer had left behind his weapon. A primitive ax whose head was a dark, triangular stone with a blade sharpened to a brittle edge. The ax head was lashed to the wooden handle by a complicated weave of strands that looked like animal hide.

One blow was all it had taken. A deep gash at the base of her neck near her collarbone.

A single pane of glass was broken in the French door leading from the kitchen to the pool area.

Charlotte's instant theory: The intruder saw Diana on the phone and was impatient to do his job, so he broke the glass to draw her outside. When she stepped onto the patio, he chopped her from behind.

Why that side of her body, that angle, that shape of wound? The crime-scene gurus would work up a theory. Use their software to make a cartoon out of it, position the victim and the culprit, analyze the geometry, determine height and strength of her killer. Right or left hand. Read some secret message in the Rorschach of the blood spatter.

After Diana was dealt the fatal blow, she'd managed to stumble the five steps back to the kitchen, grab the phone, and speak her final words.

Her killer followed her inside, watched her fall, then picked up the phone, listened for a second, and put it back. Arrogant son of a bitch. Cool and smug. No hurry, no worry. Didn't try to prevent Diana from talking to whoever was on the line. Which meant he was either a stranger or masked.

Maybe he even wanted Diana to pass on some detail about the killing. A teaser for the cops. Which made him more than arrogant, made him a truly pathological fuck. Bragging, chest-thumping while a woman died at his feet.

There wouldn't be fingerprints. Wouldn't be any fibers or DNA, footprints, no fairy dust of any kind. This guy was clean. If he wasn't a seasoned professional, at least he'd seen enough cop shows to wear his booties and latex gloves. Fucking cop shows.

Sheffield took her statement, what she'd heard over the phone, Diana's words, the sound of the killer's footsteps. Nothing helpful, she knew that, nothing to nail the son of a bitch. She started to describe the sound of the guy's breath, but even in her jangled state she knew that was ridiculous, so she gave Frank her theory about the killer—his egotism, arrogance—and Frank scribbled something on his pad. She could see he wasn't totally buying it, but was treating her like every other grief-stricken relative of a homicide victim—numb, out of it, unreliable.

Charlotte brought up Gracey, and Sheffield assured her they were doing what they could: be on the lookout for the bulletins, state troopers making it a top priority. Which she also knew full well was the reassuring bullshit next of kin always got, but she was too goddamn weary and desolate to call him on it. And anyway, Sheffield assured her that the biggest percentage of runaways turned around and headed back home within twenty-four hours.

When Charlotte ran out of words and began to stare off at the sky, Frank gave her a buck-up pat on the back and went to speak with Parker. Diana's spacious, well-appointed house was full of people, one last party.
Gables cops, Metro, South Miami, an FBI squad. More than a dozen cars outside—red lights, blue lights pulsing in the high limbs of the oaks. The entire gang working with a hushed professionalism. No crime-scene humor tonight, showing some respect for a fellow officer. Or, if they were joking, at least they were concealing it pretty well.

Charlotte stared into the pool and watched the automatic cleaner move aimlessly around the bottom, sucking up leaves and debris. With her mind perfectly blank, she stood watching the mindless robot do its work while the cops combed Diana Monroe's home for fairy dust they wouldn't find.

It was noon the following day, Wednesday—roughly sixteen hours since Gracey had fled and Diana was murdered, and when Charlotte and Parker were leaving the house for Diana's hastily arranged memorial service—that Charlotte found the manila folder cocked against the front door.

She waited till they were rolling before opening it. After a minute of riffling through the pages, she could see the feds had upheld their end. It was unedited, with no blackouts, a document running to eighty-three pages, including black-and-white stills from some of the bank security cameras, and eyewitness testimony. Even with a cursory look she could see the narratives were composed by no-nonsense agents who'd taken their time and written in complete sentences. Not the sketchy, dashed-off police report lingo she was used to seeing and guilty of writing herself more than once.

“The file,” she said, in answer to Parker's questioning look. “Panther's.”

They were both dressed in black, riding in the Toyota rental. A single morning to throw together Diana's service, phone all her friends, write the obituary. Aching every second for any word on Gracey. But nothing came.

The affair was at the Granada Country Club. Manhattans and vodka gimlets, finger sandwiches. How Diana would want it, Parker said. No
church affiliation. No other surviving kin to invite. Just her golf friends and her bridge cronies. A few toasts and everybody could trot off to the front nine.

For the last sixteen hours every throb of blood through Charlotte's brain had spoken Gracey's name. A fog had settled over her, a twitching impatience to kick it into gear, be doing something, anything, to find her runaway girl. But what was there? Drive aimlessly up I-95, searching for a silver Jaguar? Go rummaging through every goddamn cave in the Carolina wilderness?

That's what Mildred Pierce would have done. Let go of everything, rush off in a blind, flailing, self-destructive panic, crazed to rescue her Veda. But Charlotte wasn't Mildred. The last fifteen years of police work had made her averse to impulse.

In his dull-eyed state, Parker continually repeated Sheffield's bullshit about twenty-four hours, eighty percent of all runaways turned around and came home. Like some statistical mantra could soothe their anguish.

All through the night he had sobbed beside her in their bed. For hours at a time Charlotte held him tightly as the rhythmic waves of grief crashed over him. But she had shed no tears. From the very moment she'd seen Diana's body, her emotions had shut down. A professional detachment had kicked in, that central dogma of good police work—stay cool. But this time, distancing herself from the events didn't quite work. She was feeling dizzy and dislocated, as if floating several feet above her body's current position.

As Parker was pulling into a space in the country-club lot, Charlotte's phone vibrated and she plucked it out of her purse.

In a sober voice Sheffield said, “They found the car. Your mother-in-law's Jaguar. Northern outskirts of Jacksonville. Parking lot of a Holiday Inn along I-95 near the airport. No sign of struggle. Just sitting there.”

“When?”

“Sunup this morning. It might've gone unnoticed for a while except a delivery truck bumped the back fender and the driver filed a report. Took a few hours, but eventually the crack law enforcement types up there ran the plates and we got the call.”

“Jacksonville.” She said it half to Parker, half to herself, trying to unravel it. Then to Parker, “They found the car, nothing else.”

“Oh, there
was
something else,” Sheffield said. “Activity on her credit card.”

Charlotte said, “Tell me, Frank.”

“Just got off the phone with MasterCard security. A fill-up at an Exxon station in Vero. Breakfast at a Cracker Barrel near Daytona.”

“Ate at Cracker Barrel,” Charlotte said to Parker.

“She loves that stupid place,” he said.

“That sound like her?” Sheffield asked.

Charlotte said yes, it did.

“Is it normal these days,” Frank said, “a sixteen-year-old girl has her own credit card?”

“Normal, Frank? What's that?”

“You sure she didn't witness the murder? That she was gone already?”

“That's what Diana told us. She could've been gone for as much as half an hour before it happened.”

He thought about it for a second, then said, “Daughter of a cop. Knows there'd be an APB, so she ditches the car. Or maybe Panther gave her instructions to do that.”

“We don't know her note's true, Frank. We don't know Panther is involved in this in any way. The girl's delusional. She could scribble down one thing in a note, do something totally different. Meeting her brother in a cave, that could be a complete fantasy.”

Charlotte watched the parade of old folks entering the country club. Most wearing the bright, unnatural pinks and lime greens of the golf course. In solidarity with Diana. What she would've worn for their funerals.

“You check the Holiday Inn, surrounding motels?”

“No need for that,” he said. “Same credit card was used for cab fare from a location near that Holiday Inn to the Jacksonville Greyhound station.”

“And the bus ticket? There a record?”

“Apparently she used cash.”

“Thecabdriver?”

“One of our guys talked to him, yeah.”

“She was alone?”

“That was our first question, too. Yeah, she was by herself. So she's not being coerced. Officially, we can't treat this as a kidnapping. It's a runaway.
In fact, the cabbie said she seemed in good spirits. Talkative. Very upbeat. A smart girl, full of sass, that's how he put it.”

“What'd she talk about?”

She heard Frank paging through his notes.

“Movies, actors. That sort of thing. Small talk.”

“What about the bus station? Somebody had to notice her.”

“Mexican woman, one of the cleaning crew, notices a girl—seventeen, she thought, maybe eighteen—blond hair, pretty. Girl took a nap on a bench at the station around dawn this morning, then apparently hopped a bus sometime after that. Somewhere between dawn and right now.”

“How many buses we talking about? Morning departures.”

“Way too many to flag them all down, if that's what you mean. Locals, express. She could've already switched from one bus to another. They do a lot of business through there.”

“You bastard. This suits you just fine, doesn't it?”

“Why would you say a thing like that?”

“You're banking on Gracey leading you to your boy. Probably got agents at every bus stop along the way from Jacksonville to North Carolina. See if she gets off, then follow her.”

“If we find your girl, we return her immediately. The government doesn't use sixteen-year-olds as decoys. You think I'm that kind of asshole?”

“I hope not, Frank. I sure as hell hope not.”

Charlotte was trying to imagine Gracey's state of mind. Full of sass? Was that real or an act she was doing for the cabbie? At least her head was clear enough to navigate three hundred miles north along a busy interstate at night. She was a very smart girl, very competent in lots of ways despite having a serious mental illness. There was no way to know if the note was true and Gracey was headed to see Jacob Panther. No way Charlotte could read the girl's intentions at this distance. It was hard enough to do that when she was in the same room.

“I'll let that slide,” Frank said. “So tell me, Monroe, she have a driver's license? Maybe some kind of fake ID says she's eighteen?”

“She's got a learner's permit. No fake ID I know of.”

“But she looks eighteen?”

“Depends on who's looking. But yeah, she could pass. Why?”

“I was thinking she might appear young enough, it could register with somebody along the way. They'd think something wasn't right, make a call, stop her, and ask some questions.”

“She could pass,” Charlotte said. “The right makeup. Even without it.”

“She have access to a lot of cash? Savings? Or anything missing from your mother-in-law's?”

“Not that I know of. She might've saved a little from her allowance. But not more than a hundred or so. She's not a thrifty girl.”

“Well, that'sit then.”

“What about the ax? No prints were there?”

“They're looking at some fibers, hairs, But nothing yet.”

Parker was staring out the windshield, submerged in his dull trance.

Still staring forward, Parker said, “Ask Sheffield why the guy uses a blowgun one time, hatchet the next.”

She passed along the question, and Sheffield said, “Different locations. He has no choice in the airport—got to use something that gives him a chance to melt away. At your mother-in-law's he didn't care if things got messy.”

She relayed that to Parker, but he shook his head firmly.

“Different MO equals different killer.”

Already building his case.

“And for godsakes, Diana was his grandmother. Why would he attack her? Where's the motive?”

“Why would he blow up banks, Parker? Kill some guy at the airport?”

Parker shook his head firmly, having none of it.

Charlotte asked Frank if there was any more. There wasn't. He did a quick condolence on Diana.

“I got your package,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Which package was that?”

“Panther's files.”

“All I did,” Sheffield said, “I passed on the message to Mears, and stepped back out of range. For the record, this little deal's between you and the high-and-mighties, okay? If there's blowback, it's going to singe their butt hairs, not mine.”

“I appreciate it anyway, Frank.”

“Thing is, Officer Monroe, and let's underscore this in big red Magic Marker, okay? I'm keeping you in the loop because you're the anxious parent of a runaway kid. But if a parent was all you were, you know damn well I wouldn't be sharing as much detail. I think you understand what I'm saying.”

Charlotte choked back a flare of anger, then drew a measured breath.

“Thanks for keeping me informed, Frank. Anything else you get, day or night, I want to hear about it.”

“That goes double for you, Monroe. Double. And please tell me you got that gizmo on you?”

“I got it, Frank. Everywhere I go.”

“Press it, green light comes on, bingo, we're there. Don't even have to say a word.”

“Bye, Frank. Always a pleasure.”