Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) (10 page)

CHRIS MADE HERSELF
a Jack and Coke and sat on the couch, phone in hand, to call her friends and fill them in on what was going on. Odds were the FBI soon would be talking to them as well, asking about Chris’s character, so she wanted to prepare them. Raquel didn’t answer when Chris tried to call, so she rang Tavey, who tended to go to bed early and wake up with the chickens . . . literally.

She didn’t answer, as expected, but within a couple minutes of hanging up, Tavey called Chris back, her voice crisp and efficient, as if she hadn’t been woken up at eleven o’clock at night. “Chris, what’s wrong?”

“Sorry to wake you,” Chris muttered. Tavey always seemed to know when something was wrong, even though it wouldn’t have been hard to guess this time, just like Raquel knew when someone lied, and Chris, well, she didn’t think she had any special talents, unless it was being able to put her leg behind her head.

“That’s all right. I get woken up all the time.”

Chris knew. Her search-and-rescue dogs were called out for a variety of reasons: missing hikers, possible drownings, escaped prisoners, and the list went on. Since Tavey liked to handle the dogs herself, she often received calls in the middle of the night.

“The Feds were just here.” Chris pulled her knee to her chest and balanced her Jack and Coke on it. “They think I’ve been helping that serial killer Raquel told us about . . . the Boyfriend.”

Chris could see Tavey, sitting up in her bed in one of those long nightgowns, long brown hair braided.

“I know you’re not kidding, because you wouldn’t wake me up to joke about that, so what do you need? Want me to call my lawyer? How do they think you’ve been helping him?”

Chris shrugged, although she knew Tavey couldn’t see her. “Apparently the killer hacked my computer and the accounts I use to create identities. He’s been using them to kill people.”

“So what they’re thinking is not a mistake.”

Chris swirled her Jack and Coke around and took a sip, crunching on a piece of ice. “Nope.”

“But they don’t think—” A series of long howls and a few barks interrupted Tavey’s response. “Boomer, Jack, Lizzie, quiet,” Tavey ordered, her voice muffled as she turned away from the phone. Her three personal pets—beagles—slept on the end of her bed. If you woke them up, they found something to howl about. They liked to howl. Chris sympathized—she felt like howling herself.

“Sorry.” Tavey came back on the line. “So they don’t think you’re deliberately helping this person.”

“They’re mostly convinced. Well, one of them is.”

“But right now you’re not being held or anything.”

“Nope. I’m alone in my apartment.” Chris heard the blatant plea in her voice and winced. Tavey lived at least thirty minutes outside of town.

“Why don’t you come here? I have plenty of room.”

Chris was in no state to drive, but she didn’t want to tell Tavey that. The phone beeped, saving her from a response. “Hang on, that’s Raquel.”

She switched over and greeted her friend.

“What’s up, girl?” Raquel said. “It’s late. I was about to go to bed.”

“I have to tell you something, but I have Tavey on the other line. Hang on.”

She pressed a button to switch back to Tavey’s call. “Tavey. That was Raquel. I’m just going to tell her what’s going on and go to bed. Don’t worry about me. One of the county sheriffs is supposed to be outside.”

Tavey’s silence spoke volumes. “Okay. Come see me at the store tomorrow. I should be in at ten.”

“You got it.” Chris crunched another ice cube.

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Chris hung up and switched back to Raquel. “Hey. Sorry.” She took another long sip of her Jack and Coke, emptying it, and straightening.

“No problem. What’s wrong?”

“Well, you know that case you told us about—the Boyfriend?”

“Yeah. I remember. You find him?”

Raquel gave Chris a fair measure of credit for her hunting skills. “No, I wasn’t looking for killers, but this one found me.”

“What?” Raquel’s voice, usually honey-soft, ironed out like her grandmother’s sheets. “You okay? You call the police?”

“They found me, too. Or the FBI did. They came by and wanted to talk to me right after I hung up with you earlier.” Chris proceeded to fill her in with the details, including how much Agent Helmer seemed to dislike her.

“I don’t know him.” Raquel sounded thoughtful. “But I’ll ask around tomorrow.”

Chris nodded. “That’d be good.” She hiccuped.

“Girl, are you drunk?”

“A little.” Chris nodded and heard Raquel snort.

“Shit, I would be, too.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Raquel would be cleaning her gun while making tea or something equally ladylike.

“You need me to come over there?” Raquel offered. She lived in town, in a small house that had been her grandmother’s.

Chris looked around at her apartment, at the old-fashioned lamps with tasseled shades, the reclaimed wood table that an artist friend of hers had made, the floral sofa, the random collections of glass bottles and jars on every available surface, and the framed prints of Picasso, Rothko, and other modern artists on the walls. She was an eclectic mess of styles, colors, and decades. Raquel tended to twitch when she visited Chris’s house. She liked all her surfaces free of clutter and her rooms color-coordinated, while Chris preferred her cheerful mess.

“No, I’m good.” And she was . . . now that she’d had a couple drinks. She’d be fine.

“Okay. Let me know what happens tomorrow and I’ll try to find out more about the case.”

Chris agreed and hung up, tossing her phone on the couch next to her.

Quiet descended on her apartment; the kind of quiet that made a girl want a cat or something. Maybe she’d get a bird, something colorful and loud that would curse at FBI agents.

She understood that she was avoiding going in her room, not wanting to touch the computers, not wanting to think about the killer who had used her to hunt, used her to kill. Knowing he was in there, probably lurking even now, made her feel violated and unclean.

Taking her glass into the kitchen, she cleaned up her mess from her mac-n-cheese, realized she’d forgotten to eat, and poured herself a bowl of Lucky Charms. She ate it standing up by the window, looking out at the town circle, at the old-fashioned wrought-iron streetlamps that cast small circles of light on the sidewalks while cheerful gas lamp sconces burned at the entrance of each brick building. The Alcove was closed, but the local pub was still open, the Twin Oaks Tavern; its old-fashioned sign with the Shakespearean-looking writing was lit up by a spotlight, and the witchcraft shop had a glowing jack-o’-lantern—hopefully not lit with a candle—grinning in its display window.

The town hadn’t always been so gentrified. In the eighties, when the four of them, Chris, Tavey, Raquel, and Summer, had come to town for church on Sunday, there hadn’t been much going on. Well, Tavey had to come for church, the rest of them went with her because they didn’t want to be separated. Back then the only things to do in town were go to church or shop at the local grocery/hardware store in the circle. Many of the shops had been out of business, lonely-looking mannequins with out-of-date clothes in the windows, boards covering some. It wasn’t until Lake Arrowhead became a tourist destination and a small private college had been built nearby that the town began to change.

Tavey’s grandmother would give them some money from her coin purse and tell them to go get an ice cream from the hardware store—just a block up the street from the church—and they’d run, screaming and laughing while some people stared, and then they would dash to the graveyard and sit in the shade of the big oak tree and eat their ice cream and tell stories, safe from the prying eyes and ugly comments of the town.

They’d been the four oddballs, though some people shook their heads and wondered how someone like Tavey, with her family’s reputation in town, could be friends with such an unsavory crew. She’d been an outsider, too, though: richer than everyone else in town by far, a princess without parents—they’d died in a car accident when she was two.

Chris’s mother had gotten a job with the Collins family after she was fired for having an affair with her employer—good old Dad—and the two girls had met when Chris’s mother began bringing her to work. Back then, Chris’s father had yet to be arrested for embezzlement and fraud, so most people just pretended Chris was invisible. Raquel wasn’t so lucky. As the mixed-race daughter of Gloria Belle—one of the town’s most famous residents, a blues singer with an unfortunate cocaine habit and a taste for married white men—Raquel was openly cursed on occasion. Her grandmother, who handled the mending and tailoring for the Collins family, often brought her young granddaughter to the Collinses’ house.

Summer was the strangest case, and probably the least bothered by it. She been blind since birth and born a witch family member, so “different” was an apt descriptor when comparing her to the rest of the townspeople. She’d been charming, though, and as lovely as a daffodil, so people tended to treat her kindly when they encountered her.

Together they were the misfits, the special ones, and their differences only tightened their bond, until they’d lost Summer.

Once she was gone, the threads that bound Chris, Raquel, and Tavey were their shared sorrow and determination; the three of them made a vow that they would never stop looking for their lost friend, a vow that had turned into a mission to find the lost, no matter who they were.

Just as Chris was about to turn away from her window, she saw one of the county patrol vehicles pull into the circle and complete a slow lap, pausing in front of her building. She waved, but couldn’t see any movement inside the car.

Chris turned away from the window, poured her bowl of cereal in the sink, and marched into her bedroom. She took a seat at her station with grim determination, adjusting the mouse and the position of the keyboard back the way she wanted them. She didn’t like the idea that someone was spying on her, and that he used the characters she played in his sick crimes against his innocent victims.

“Okay, asshole, you want to play, we’ll play.”

14

THE TALL MIRROR
in his bedroom showed a man of medium height, medium build, with light brown, thinning hair, and a scar that ran down his chest. Joe didn’t really notice that, though; his body was simply a dummy, a display. He kept running his hands up and down his arms and then up to his neck, touching the strings he had looped and tied around his wrists, elbows, and neck. There were more strings tied above his knee, and at his ankles. He had collected them over the years from a variety of subjects. The most recent ones were from the girl with the rainbow hair, some from his latest contributor.

Behind him, the body of another man lay slumped against the tiles of a walk-in shower. Deep lacerations scored the man’s neck, elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles. The shower had washed away the blood, and the wounds gaped open obscenely. The woman was wearing an apron and cleaning the blood away, her face calm if not serene.

A dark thought gathered in a frown between his eyes. He should have waited, he supposed, at least more than a day before taking the strings from the man, but he hadn’t wanted to wait, not when he felt so close to . . . something—some epiphany that lay just out of reach.

He stopped petting himself and went back to his computers, ignoring the body for the moment. He would load it into his van in a few hours and dump it somewhere outside of town, just as he had the rainbow-haired girl, probably from one of the bridges into one of the rivers that ran from the mountains to Lake Arrowhead.

He was pleased to see that his Creator was at her desk, playing loud music, her pretty face set in a frown of concentration. Picking up a cupcake with chocolate frosting, he took a bite and chewed slowly while he watched her. He never grew tired of watching her, spying on her through her computer’s camera. She had an oval face with catlike eyes and high cheekbones; her eyes were gold, though they looked brown in the bluish light from the computers.

He’d found out quite a bit about his Creator once he’d hacked her machines, and even more when he’d done some research on her through the Internet. She was the daughter of a wealthy man in Rome. He’d bought a vacation home on several acres on Lake Arrowhead in the summer of 1977 and had an affair with the housekeeper. Their daughter, Christina Pascal, was born nine months later. Then, eight years after that, her father had been arrested for real estate fraud. He’d been selling investors on the idea of a golf course residential area on the outskirts of Fate, but he’d been taking their money and gambling it away instead. He was finished with his jail time and lived in Atlanta, but she didn’t speak to him.

Chris’s mother had found a position working as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family who owned a large ranch known for its kennels, where the patriarch of the family raised prizewinning bloodhounds and beagles—the Collins family. Christina had gone with her mother to the Collins residence, where it seems she first met one of her best friends, Tavey Collins.