The Girls He Adored (16 page)

Irene sighed and slid deeper into the bath until the hot water reached her chin. Perhaps she could still help that little boy to exorcise the animal under his skin, she thought—that is, if the great state of California didn't murder him first.

After listening to the Lyssy tape in the bath, Irene had promised herself she'd take the rest of the evening off. To fail would be an admission that she was slipping back into her workaholic mode— Barbara Klopfman would give her holy hell.

But if television was a vast wasteland, then Wednesday night was surely its Death Valley, so Irene took her laptop to bed with her and reviewed her notes on her last sessions with Donald Barber and Lily DeVries, the two patients she'd be seeing the next day.

Around eleven-thirty Irene went downstairs to raid the refrigerator. She made herself a cup of Sleepytime tea, cut a slice of carrot cake as thick as her thumb, and ate in front of the TV, switching back and forth between
Letterman, Leno,
and
Politically Incorrect.

Around the time Irene came to the admittedly paranoid conclusion that all three networks had synchronized their commercial breaks, she thought she heard someone moving up the walkway that led around the side of the house—someone with leather-soled shoes.

Speaking of paranoid . . . She quickly muted the TV. There was no doubt about it—she could hear footsteps out back now, behind the office. Had she listened to the news that evening, she would have been even more alarmed; as it was, her heart began to pound and her throat tightened. Irene had only been in physical danger a few times in her life, and never since moving to Pacific Grove seven years earlier. The phone—where had she left the cordless phone?

In the office. But if someone was breaking in, he'd be coming through the back door, the office door. What now?

Suddenly the front doorbell began to ring out the first thirteen notes of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.”

Over hill, over dale
. . . . The tune was the legacy of the house's previous owner, a retired infantry officer from Fort Ord. Irene hated it, but Frank had liked it, and after he died she couldn't bring herself to have it taken out. Irene hurried to the front door and, peering through the peephole, saw a man in a sheriff's uniform shifting nervously on her doorstep.

“Are you all right, Dr. Cogan?”

“I'm fine. What's—”

“Could you open the door for us, please?”

Irene pulled her bathrobe tighter around her silk nightie, unlocked the door, and opened it.

“Would you step out onto the porch, please?”

“I'd rather—what are you doing?” For he'd grabbed her roughly by the elbow and yanked her out of the way while two men from the sheriff's TAC squad in bulky Kevlar vests and helmets with tinted visors charged past her into the house, guns drawn.

The deputy hustled Irene down the porch steps and onto the lawn. She heard shouting, pounding footsteps, doors crashing open, police radios squawking, tires squealing, car doors slamming, sirens in the distance, then the percussive whompwhompwhomp of a helicopter. A moment later, a blinding light in the sky directly overhead turned night into blazing white day.

“Will someone
please
tell me what's going on?” she shouted to the cop, who ignored her. When she began to struggle, trying to break his hold, he twisted her arm behind her back and forced her to kneel. Her nightgown and bathrobe were rucked up behind her, and the grass was damp beneath her bare knees.

Emotions flooded her—rage, helplessness, shame. She lowered her head and found herself looking down at a pair of pointy-toed black cowboy boots polished to such a gloss that she could see the reflection of the searchlights dancing on them like miniature white suns.

“Thanks, Jerry, I'll take it from here.” Irene caught a whiff of cologne as the owner of the boots, an older Latino man in a white cowboy hat, helped her to feet.

“I demand to know what's going on here.” Irene flexed her shoulder, tugged at her nightgown, adjusted her bathrobe.

“I'm Sheriff Bustamante.”

“I know who you are—I voted for you last election.”

“ 'Preciate it. Where's my prisoner?”

Though still half in shock, Irene was somehow not surprised. “In your jail, so far as I know. I haven't seen him since this afternoon. Now can you tell me why you're breaking into my house?”

Bustamante handed her a sheet of paper. “Here's the search warrant. He escaped from custody late this afternoon.”

“Well, he's not here. Why have I been frightened half to death, manhandled, humiliated, and dragged out of my house in my bathrobe?”

“Because we had reason to believe he might be heading here.”

“What possible reason—”

“During his escape the prisoner attacked an FBI agent working undercover in his cell.”

“Pender!” exclaimed Irene. “I spoke to him on the telephone this afternoon.”

“Before he lost consciousness, Agent Pender wrote the words
Cogan
and
accomplice
on the cell floor with his own blood.” Bustamante didn't mention that there was a question mark after the second word, or that due to the misspellings it had taken the crime scene investigators several hours to figure out what the nowcomatose Pender had been trying to tell them. “Why would he go and write something like that?”

“I have no idea.” Feeling weak at the knees, Irene tried to visualizethe scene.
Accomplice
was a long word—there must have been a lot of blood.

“All clear inside, Sheriff,” one of the TAC squad ninjas called from the open front door.

“Thanks. Have your men stand down, I'll be with you in a minute.”

Bustamante turned back to Irene, looked her over, and made one of those snap judgments that lawmen live or die by every day. “I'm sorry for the inconvenience, Dr. Cogan. Perhaps there's been a misunderstanding. Just in case, though, what I'd like to do, with your permission, is arrange to have a call-trace unit put on your phone line, and leave a couple of my men behind to watch the house if he does decide to pay you a visit.”

“I don't know about tapping my phone—”

“I can also do that without your permission; it's just easier and more courteous this way.”

Irene's Irish was still up. “Oh, by all means, let's start being courteous now.”

“I have been courteous, Dr. Cogan. Do you see that man over there? The fellow in the jogging outfit, talking on a cell phone? He's from the U.S. Marshal's Service. If he'd been in charge of this operation, they'd have rammed down your front door instead of ringing the bell—I talked him out of it.”

Irene wanted to keep arguing but realized she was overcompensating, trying to regain a measure of control over the situation. She'd also begun trembling—and not just from the cold. “Thank you, Sheriff,” she said hurriedly. “Do whatever you need to do. May I go back inside now?”

“Yes, of course. I'll ask my men to be as unobtrusive as possible.”

“I'd appreciate that,” said Irene, with as much dignity as she could muster. But once inside the house, Irene not only locked the front and back doors, she also threw the deadbolts that hadn't been thrown since she and Frank first moved to the nearly crimefree Last Hometown, and double-checked the windows, even the ones on the second floor, to make sure they were locked.

Not that there was any reason to think Max would be coming after
her
. That was probably the last thing on his mind, Irene told herself as she climbed into bed and pulled the covers up over her head.

D
OORBELL CHIMES ECHOED
through the little ranch house in Prunedale. Sheriff's Deputy Terry Jervis, well sedated, murmured “Whazzit?” through her wired-up jaw.

“Ssh, it's all right. Go back to sleep. I'll see who it is.” Aletha Winkle pulled a corduroy bathrobe on over her T-shirt and padded sleepily down the hall to the front door. She made sure the chain was fastened, then opened the door a crack. A sheriff's deputy she'd never seen before was standing on the doorstep, his face shadowed by the visor of his cap. Harmless looking white guy in an ill-fitting uniform, as best she could tell.

“What is it?”

“Sorry to bother you—has anyone notified you yet?”

“About what?”

“Terry's last collar, that Doe. Didn't you see the news?”

“Tell you the truth, we were watching
The Simpsons.”

“He broke out of the old jail this afternoon. Sheriff thought there was an off chance he might be heading here. They didn't call you?”

“Nobody called.”

“Fucking typical. You haven't heard any suspicious noises, though? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“No, it's been quiet.”

“Probably a false alarm, then. Terry inside?”

“She's out like a light from the sleeping pills and painkillers.”

“That's good—they say rest is the best thing. How's she feeling?”

“Better every day.”

“Good to hear. Listen, when she wakes up, tell her Frank Twombley said hi, and he hopes she's feeling better.”

“I'll do that.”

The deputy started to leave, then turned back. “You know, as long as I'm out here I might as well take a look around back, just to be on the safe side. Any dogs?”

“No.”

“Good deal. I'll just take a quick look, make sure everything's, you know, copacetic, then I'll be out of your hair.”

“Better safe than sorry, I guess.”

Aletha watched through the crack in the door as the deputy disappeared around the corner of the house. A few seconds later she heard a tapping out back, hurried into the kitchen, peered through the curtained window of the back door. Deputy Twombley was squatting down, examining the edge of the screen door by the yellow light of the bug lamp.

“What is it?”

“There are some scratches on the corner of the screen here— looks like somebody tried to force an entry. Could you take a look for me, tell me whether they're fresh?”

Aletha opened the back door, stepped out onto the concrete walk. “Where?”

“Right down here, around the bottom hinge.” He stood up and stepped back to give her room. She stooped to take a closer look. The first blow of the riot stick caught her across the back of the neck and dropped her to her knees; the second, equally swift, equally savage, smashed into the back of her skull with enough force to cause a radiating fracture of the occipital bone, one of the strongest bones in the human body.

And in the brief instant between the blossoming of a thousand stars and the onrushing blackness, Aletha Winkle had time for one last thought:
I'm sorry, Terry.

“Mama, you are a
load!”

Max grunted as he dragged Aletha Winkle over the threshold into the kitchen. Though he appeared slender when clothed, he was in fact about as strong as a hundred-and-thirty-five-pound man could be without sacrificing speed and flexibility. But hauling two hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight—half dead, anyway—took every ounce of strength, sweat, and leverage he could muster; he was breathing hard by the time he was done.