The Survivors Club (18 page)

“Maybe, maybe not. He could have paid someone to buy the mountain lion.”

“You really think that happened?”

“I do.”

“Why would anyone do
that
?”

“He wanted a mountain lion kill.”

“
Why?
”

Tess said, “He wanted it to look like Farley was killed by an animal. He had his reasons—it was a game.”

“A game.” He looked straight ahead.

She knew what he was thinking.

She’d tell him what she suspected. Might as well. He’d have something to yuk it up with, with his buddies. And so she ran it down for him, that DeKoven had likely killed an ex-cop named George Hanley, Peter Farley, and his own father, Quentin DeKoven. She told him about Hanley’s investigation.

“So this, uh,
Hanley,
wrote all this down? He called it an investigation? You said he was retired.”

“He was a homicide cop for twenty years.”

“He was how old?”

“Sixty-eight.”

“Uh-huh.” He did not look at her. “So you’re saying this was a game he played, finding people who survived accidents, then killing them?”

“That’s the theory we’re working under. He got the jump on Mr. Farley, maybe knocked him out in some way, and put him in with the lion.”

Zudowsky kept his eyes on the road. “The lion probably wouldn’t attack him even then, from what I’ve heard.”

“He would if he’d been starved.”

Silence. It hung there like the dust over the graded dirt road.

Finally Zudowsky said, “I just don’t see how your theory hangs together. I can’t see someone doing something like this. It’s much more likely that Farley was attacked by a mountain lion. It could happen, if Farley was bent over his bike. That’s what happened north of here. We’ve had two attacks of mountain bikers, and they’re both fairly recent.”

Tess said, “Did anyone do a tox on Peter Farley?”

“I don’t remember seeing anything about one. His cause of death was pretty obvious.”

“Also, I wonder if there were any marks on the body from the cage.”

“DNA wasn’t at front of mind when you’re dealing with an obvious mountain lion attack. Plus, there wasn’t enough of Farley to identify him except for his wallet, bike, and his vehicle parked at the entrance.”

Tess said, “I would like to find that cage.”

He said nothing.

Tess realized that his respect for her had run out, along with professional courtesy.

Just before they split up she said to Barry Zudowsky, “I’m going to ask you to do me one favor.”

To his credit, he didn’t roll his eyes. But he said nothing.

“I’d like to pair Ms. Nussman with a sketch artist. The person who bought the lion is key.”

Zudowsky said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

When he got back in his car and drove away, she thought she’d never hear from him again.

CHAPTER 31

It wasn’t until Jaimie was up drinking tomato juice (she swore by it for a hangover if there wasn’t any
menudo
around) and squinting at the car coming down the hill—Marisue Jennrette’s Armada—that she realized she hadn’t canceled lessons for today.

Shit.

Felt like a crushed box in the road. But she went out anyway, squinting against the harsh sunlight, and met Marisue and her daughter as they were getting out.

Shielding her eyes against the glare, her brain throbbing in her skull, Jaimie said, “I can’t teach today. I’m sorry.”

“What?” said Marisue. Like she’d been told the sky was falling. She always was a bitch.

“I’m sorry, but my brother died. I’m just getting ready to go to his funeral,” she lied.

“Michael?”

“No, Chad.”

“Chad? Why didn’t you call me? It’s fifteen miles to get here, and I’ve got a lot to do today. I’m working on the flower committee at the Chamber of Commerce!”

God, her head! Jaimie pressed a thumb into her left temple. “I’m sorry. But it’s just this once. My brother, you know? My brother is dead.”

“Fine.”

The woman said it the way Jaimie always said it, the way women said it to men. If that’s the way it’s going to be, fine. Just fine. And by the way, fuck you.

Well fuck you, too,
she thought.

After Marisue and her chunky untalented daughter drove off the property, Jaimie walked back toward the house.

Her dogs followed her up onto the steps. They milled around while she opened the door. They stood there, chastened, while she told them to stay outside.

She went to bed. She slept. When she woke up, it was early afternoon. She heard rocks pop off car tires—someone
else
coming. She hoped it wasn’t Michael. Or Brayden. She wasn’t up to that today. She just wanted everything about what happened in Laguna Beach to just fricking go away.

She got up, not bothering about her wrinkled clothes, her tank top and jeans. It was a truck like any other around here, a white Ford. But she didn’t know this particular one.

She opened the door and the dogs milled around.

The two little terriers, the black lab. The two mutts, one of them spotted. The coon hound.

The truck bumped along the road toward her.

Six dogs, not seven. Jaimie was missing the familiar blue-gray, white, and black—her prize.

Her consolation prize.

Adele was missing.

The guy was just a guy, looking at various pieces of land around here. He asked her if she knew of any. “Just a couple of acres, kind of like a homestead,” he said. He had an open, friendly face. Straw cowboy hat. Jeans, denim shirt. Your average middle-aged guy who maybe grew up rural and now wanted a small place of his own in God’s country. She’d met a million like him. He was way too old for her. But she wasn’t thinking about sex right now. Just get rid of him. Adele was missing. She had to be around here somewhere. But she could be hurt. Not like her not to come when she was called.

Jaimie scanned the yard as he talked, bending her ear with useless babble. On and on and on, as if he enjoyed boring her to death. When all she wanted to do was find Adele. She tuned him out, her eyes searching the grassland, hoping to see some light blue and black
and white. Looking for Adele. Maybe she was in the barn. Maybe…

She wished the guy would just get in his fucking truck and go.

He didn’t seem to get the hint. She told him about a place up the road where she’d seen a F
OR
S
ALE
sign. Just
go
, already.

Finally he did. In the truck, he honked the horn once and gave her a salute.

Jaimie barely noticed. She was too busy looking for her dog.

Tess was now certain that the lion was purchased to kill Farley. The name on the credit card was made up, but DeKoven had been too cute about it. She looked up the word “Dom” in an online dictionary. “Dominus” meant “lord.” And Derring. She knew that “derring” was part of the term “derring-do.” Her mother had used that term all the time. It meant, basically, doing something that was daring. So it could be that Michael was saying he was superior to others—a lord—and he was, at least in terms of wealth and privilege. Michael was the scion of a wealthy and important family. And he would certainly think of himself as having plenty of “derring-do.”

Old-fashioned term for a young guy.

Derring-do—maybe it was an expression he learned from his mother or father. It took a whole hell of a lot of derring-do to go around the country killing people because you thought you could get away with it.

She wondered where the animal was now. If he had been in the cage with Farley, if he had been driven out of hunger to eat Farley, then there could be evidence somewhere.

The cage was the most likely piece of evidence left.

But how to find it? Michael DeKoven had money and means to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do.

He could have killed the mountain lion and buried him. He could have destroyed the lion cage. Break it up for kindling. Burn it. Melt down the bars. Leave it in a landfill, or push it down a mountain. Plenty of places to do that. There were infinite ways he could dispose of the evidence.

Trying to find the cage, trying to find the mountain lion—that would be like looking for the needle in the haystack. There was so much open county. Forest land. Canyons and washes out in the boonies. Junkyards. Trash heaps.

The lion was gone. The cage was gone. Tess knew it.

She was convinced now that DeKoven was killing people who had previously escaped death. People who should have died, but lived instead.

If it was a game, it was a rich kid’s game. Michael was in his midthirties, but Tess thought of him as a kid. Look at his toys. Look at that car, the Fisker Karma. Look at those expensive paintings. She thought of Jaimie as a kid, too. The two of them in it together?

That left the second-youngest, the girl. Brayden.

And Chad in Laguna.

Could all four of them be involved?

What were the odds of that?

Four siblings, in it together? She grouped them by age. Michael and Jaimie were closest, at thirty-five and thirty-four. Then came Chad at thirty-two—two years’ difference between Jaimie and Chad, and three years’ difference between Michael and Chad. From Chad to Brayden, the youngest, it was three years. Which made Brayden five years younger than Jaimie and six years younger than Michael.

Six years’ difference in age might make a difference. Michael might not have included Brayden in this.

Tess hadn’t met Brayden. She hadn’t met Chad, either.

She wondered which one of the family had tagged Alec Sheppard on top of the Hilton Atlanta.

CHAPTER 32

Tess collected her bag at the Tucson International Airport carousel and walked out to her car. She saw she had a message from Alec Sheppard. She punched in his number as she walked.

“Mr. Sheppard? I thought when people sat across from each other at a picnic table and listened to a band called the Blasphemers, we could at least call each other by our first names.”

“I’m ever the professional.”

“No doubt in my mind. I haven’t heard from anybody and wanted to know if there was a—what do you call it in cop lingo? Break in the case? Anything on Steve Barkman?”

“Nothing yet.” She wasn’t about to tell him about the micro disc. “I plan to talk to Detective Tedesco later today. Are you still in town?”

“As a matter of fact I am. I’m looking at houses.”

“Houses?”

“I’m thinking of relocating.”

“Relocating?”

“You know, as in moving here. To Tucson.”

“Why?”

“I like it here, and I don’t need to live in Houston…you have a problem with that? Me being in your jurisdiction?”

“Technically, you’d be in Cheryl Tedesco’s jurisdiction. So what kind of place are you looking for?”

“When I was a college student, I thought it would be pretty cool to live in one of those neighborhoods with the old houses, like the ones in Encanto. So I’m standing in front of this pink adobe pueblo-style monstrosity and I was wondering if you’d give me advice, since you’re a local. Wait, let me send you a picture of it.”

Tess’s heart sped up. She cleared her throat. “That’s not necessary. I’m here in Tucson. I could meet you there.”

Tess drove north on Palo Verde and ended up twenty minutes later outside a very pink house surrounded by desert on a street in a neighborhood called Colonia Solana.

Alec Sheppard was waiting by his rental car.

He looked good.

He was a good-looking man.

She liked Alec Sheppard. In fact, she liked him a lot.

They toured that house and two others. One was in the foothills. The sun was starting to get low. “We could have dinner,” Alec said.

Tess opened her mouth to say she had to get back. Instead, she excused herself and went outside to call Bonny’s extension. It was late and he was already gone. She left a long message detailing what had transpired in California. She sent photos from her phone of the area where Peter Farley had been buried by the mountain pool. She sent photos of the animal sanctuary.

Then she went to dinner with Alec Sheppard. The food was good. The conversation, better. However much she liked him the first time they went out together, she liked him even more now.

She went up to his room for a nightcap.

Not advisable. She knew she was letting herself in for big trouble. He was too attractive, too decent, too nice, too smart, too good a man for it not to cause a major wrinkle in her life, but it was all operations go from the moment they stepped inside. She wanted him and he obviously wanted her. It started to get warm and then hot, and Tess realized she was equal parts attracted to Alec Sheppard and angry with Max.

It was hard to stop. Like a pilot trying to pull a plane out of a dive. He wasn’t just a good kisser, but a good toucher, a good hugger, a good feeler, and she was getting to the point—quickly—where she would not be able to stop.

She might be there now.

They were more urgent now, lips, mouths, tongues, hands, hips, molding each other into an approximation of the act but with clothing between them—it was impossible.

They tangled on the bed. She unbuttoned his shirt. She ran her fingers down his chest and then below that. He was doing plenty of research on his own. It seemed physically impossible to break away.

Too late…too late.

But there was Max.

Maybe she and Max were over, but she couldn’t do it this way.

She managed to pull away. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.

She said, “I’m in a relationship.”

Alec looked at her. His face was a mirror of hers. Not shock exactly. He wasn’t bereft, or brokenhearted, or disappointed. More like the rug had been pulled out from under him and he’d hit the ground flat on his chin.

She felt the same way.

He sat up, rubbed his neck. Looked away.

“I’m in a relationship,” Tess said. “It’s…problematic.” Then she added in a rush of words, “I can’t add to that, to our troubles. I have to…I have to think about it and I have to figure out if I want to stay with him.”

She was aware that she sounded like she was pleading.

He sat still beside her. He blew air out of his lips. Looked into the middle distance and then down at his hands.

A good-looking man.

A man she liked being around.

A man she could maybe, possibly, fall in love with.

But she wasn’t going to do it this way. “I’m sorry, Alec.”

“I know.”

She managed to pull herself together. Uncrimp and straighten her clothes. Tell her body to stop screaming at the top of its horny little lungs.

She heard herself say, “I want to keep in touch.”

Then she bolted out into the chilly spring night.

Wondering just how much more she could screw up her life.

As Tess headed for her car, her phone chimed. It was Barry Zudowsky.

“I got a sketch artist with Frieda Nussman today. I’m going to send you a photo of her sketch.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No. Let me send it to you.”

He disconnected. Tess knew he was done.

A few moments later she was staring into the face of the man who had purchased the mountain lion.

She’d seen the face before—twice. In the first picture she’d seen of him, he’d been thirteen years old, standing at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a water treatment plant. He’d lost the baby fat he’d had as a child but had retained the passivity in his expression. She recalled the more recent version of him from the family portrait in
Tucson Lifestyle
.

As a young man, his mane of blond hair was streaked with white from hours, days, months, and years of the surfing life in California. His face had become more angular and was deeply tanned. Chad DeKoven was a true boy of summer.

He was also a gamer like his brother, Michael, and his sister Jaimie.

He was part of it.

Tess looked for an address for DeKoven. He lived in Laguna Beach. She was able to access the DMV files, and this in turn yielded his phone number.

She sat in the car and considered how she would approach him. If he was a killer as she suspected, he would stonewall her. She knew she would only tip him off if she approached him head-on. She knew she’d need to do an end run around his defenses, run a game on him, but right now she couldn’t think of anything. So she decided to call and see if he was there. She used her home phone to punch in his number.

A canned message sounded. Chad DeKoven’s phone had been disconnected.

There was one person she hadn’t yet talked to, other than Chad—Brayden DeKoven McConnell.