Chapter 34

CHAPTER 34

I sink back into a deep hole of sleep, and when I come to I’m not sure where I am, the storm still raging, rain beating the roof like sticks. I feel for Benton, his side of the bed empty and cold. Then I remember him waking me up with the news about Carrie. Cool air whispers across my skin as the wind whistles and roars.

The deluge lashes and drums, thunder cracking while my eyes adjust to the dark. I listen to the familiar electrical hum of the antique ceiling fan that came from a bank once robbed by Bonnie and Clyde. That’s the story told by the owner of the Louisiana junk store. I check my phone, and Benton texted hours ago that he was safely in Washington, D.C.

All okay, he wrote then, confirming that Carrie Grethen isn’t a factor.

He’s telling me not to worry. She’s in Poland or she was. Where she can’t be right now is here, and I wander into the bathroom, washing my face and brushing my teeth. As I ponder what to wear today, I’m torn by indecision. The Brileys are behind bars and Carrie’s being hunted down in Eastern Europe.

I should feel a sense of relief and resolution, but I don’t. There are too many unanswered questions. I’m stealthy as I follow the hallway in the glow of the patinaed copper sconces Benton and I came across in New England. All is quiet inside the guestroom where Marino and Dorothy are staying.

I don’t hear any signs of Shannon stirring as I head downstairs. I’m making a cup of coffee in the kitchen when my smart ring alerts me that Lucy has sent a message.

Can you feed Merlin? she’s texted. Sorry. Didn’t know I’d get stuck here all night.

Not seeing him so far, I answer.

Hopefully in my place.

Her cat wears a collar embedded with a sensor that opens the small electronic flaps she installed in doors at our house and the guest cottage. If Merlin can’t come and go at whim and on demand he wails like a banshee. He tears things up.

I don’t want Mom going into the cottage, Lucy continues to explain. I’m running a special operation with the software and she needs to stay out.

Will head over there now to feed Merlin, I write back. Where are you?

Lucy answers that she’s with Benton, and I imagine them in a situation room surrounded by data walls. They’re tracking Carrie Grethen. Maybe she’ll be caught, and what a gift that would be, taking her out even better. Turning off the alarm, I put on a slicker, opening the kitchen door to the amplified sound of the heavy rain splashing.

The sky is solid gray, the rising sun a vague whitish smear on the soggy horizon, big cold drops of water pattering the top of my hood. Beyond the kitchen door the courtyard is flooded. The heavy branches of the magnolia rock in the wind, the big white blossoms manhandled by the storm.

The wet brick walkway glowers in the glow of carriage lamps as I carry leftovers from last night, the plastic containers cold from the refrigerator. I walk quickly, surveying deflowered tree peonies and dogwoods, pastel petals scattered everywhere like little bits of trash. Centuries-old evergreens and hardwood trees thrash and bend, leaves and pine needles scattered.

I think about what Shannon said, and she’s right about the universe seeming agitated. It’s as if the weather is alarmed, warning me to be careful.

It’s not over, amore. I hear Sal’s voice in my head.

Getting out my keys, I climb the front steps of the quaint white brick guest cottage, a cat flap in the lower part of the door I unlock. I flip on the lights inside, taking off my slicker so it doesn’t drip everywhere, hanging it on the coat rack. The wide board pumpkin pine flooring, the exposed brick walls are the same as the house, and I call out to Lucy’s cat.

“Merlin? Hello? Time for breakfast!”

Beyond the front door is the small kitchen, and I place the containers of food inside the refrigerator while calling out to Lucy’s capricious and elusive pet rescued from a parking lot. It’s unusual that he’s not slinking in to greet me. Lucy jokes about him being a watch cat, and to some extent he is. When he’s here and the front door opens, he flies in to see who it is.

“Merlin?” I drop my keys on the kitchen counter. “Please don’t tell me you’re outside somewhere!”

“He’s in here with me,” a familiar voice answers from the sitting room, and my heart slams against my chest.

No. Please God, no.

“Sitting right here next to me purring,” the voice adds, and I didn’t bring my gun.

“We’re looking each other in the eye, friends now. Aren’t we, Merlin…?”

Frantically opening drawers, I find the Sig Sauer pistol Lucy usually keeps in here. Holding it in both hands, the barrel pointed up, I quietly leave the kitchen. The next room is the living area where tables are arranged with laptops, arrays of video screens and spectrum analyzers with blinking lights.

“Hello, Kay, it’s been a while,” the voice says, and it’s not Janet talking through Lucy’s computer.

I walk to the desk, and Merlin is sitting on top of it staring at the curved computer monitor.

“What do you want?” I ask Carrie Grethen.

“I see you’re armed and dangerous, but it’s not like you can shoot me.” Her scarred face smiles at me remotely, her hair dyed the same color as Lucy’s and cut similarly.

She’s seated on a green leather couch inside a room with fine art on the walls. In the background are antiques, arrangements of fresh flowers, a window overlooking the skyline of an old city.

“Let me adjust this a bit.” Carrie moves her computer monitor, making sure I don’t miss the wicker gift basket, the bottle of red wine uncorked on the glass coffee table.

The focaccia bread I baked has been torn into pieces she’s dipping into a saucer of the olive oil I gave Sal for his birthday. For an instant, I can see Carrie’s left hand, mangled by the drone that flew into her years earlier. The propellers sliced open her face, and severed the tips from two of her fingers. She’s wearing Sal’s inexpensive beaded bracelets, the ones he always wore, my rage so intense I almost can’t bear it.

“The Tignanello has hints of violets and strawberries. It’s quite nice and travels well.” She takes another sip, savoring it like a sommelier.

Holding the glass of Tuscany red in her mangled fingers, she makes sure I never forget the damage I inflicted when she showed up on my property. This was before I moved back to Virginia and my sister inadvertently led the wolf to the door in Cambridge, Massachusetts. All I did then was finish what Carrie started. She makes her own choices. They always turn out catastrophically for someone.

“Not a bad year.” She sets down the wineglass with a sharp clink as I set down the Sig Sauer on top of the desk.

“What do you want, Carrie?”

“I have a few things to share with you, Kay.”

I pet Merlin’s head, and he’s purring. But it’s not his normal purring. It’s the sound he makes when threatened, a mixture of a purr and a growl with the hint of a yowl. As if he’s gargling unsettledness and about to bare his claws.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I tell him, and he twitches his tail, staring at Carrie’s face on the monitor. “What did you do with Janet?” I ask.

“Oh, she’s here somewhere.” Carrie’s gaze is like looking into chaos. “Janet, oh Janet? Where are you?” Carrie laughs. “Oh, there we go, come here, baby.” She switches to baby talk, smiling lovingly on a curved monitor big enough for gamers.

She holds out her damaged hand, and I again notice the bracelets. Around her neck is Sal’s fossilized shark’s tooth on a gold chain, my fury smoldering.

“Come, Choo Choo.” She pats the sofa, and the big spotted cat jumps up next to her.

The male cheetah I saw in the Oz theme park. Or I’m assuming it’s the same one, purring so loudly I can hear it, and no wonder Merlin is growling and ready to pounce.

“You remember Choo Choo from Somewhere Over the Rainbow, don’t you, Kay? That was him you heard moving around while you were borrowing the ladies’ room in the Witch’s Castle. Well, both of us were right above your head at one point,” Carrie says, rubbing his ears. “Until I zipped away into the fog.”

“Where did you steal him from?” I envision the location of every camera Lucy installed in here, enabling Janet the AI avatar to engage in a meaningful way.

“Not steal but liberate. He did surprisingly well on the plane. Put him in a dog carrier, which he didn’t love,” Carrie is saying. “I admit it’s helpful flying private.”

Standing by the desk petting Merlin, I can’t look into Carrie’s eyes on the monitor without being pulled in. And I won’t go where she is. I won’t let it happen and never have. I keep my attention on the cheetah sitting next to her like a porcelain statue.

“Lucy’s slipping up, hate to tell you,” Carrie goes on. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this tête-á-tête, Kay. So much for her failproof firewalls. Well, here I am. In fact, I’m in a lot of places, in case you’ve not figured that out yet. Your office, for example.”

I envision the exterminator on top of the ladder.

“And, oh dear, the problems your poor niece and her lovesick partner Tron are having with the cloud computer. ‘ Lucy in the sky with malware… ,’” Carrie sings.

Lucy’s not here right now because of the problem. Meaning, I showed up to feed her cat. Carrie goes on to boast about how clever she is compared to the rest of us. The problem is we let our emotions get in the way of the mission.

“And then one loses focus…,” she explains as I’m thinking how to send a message without Carrie seeing what I’m doing.

She’s in front of a video display somewhere, possibly some expensive house or apartment in Warsaw. She’s sending out electronic signals, and the longer I can keep her talking to me, the more likely it is that law enforcement will locate her.

“What do you want?” I sit down at Lucy’s desk, rolling the chair close.

There won’t be cameras on the floor beneath me, and using one hand I carefully slide my phone out of my slicker pocket. I type in the password, barely looking at what I’m doing while Carrie tells me how sorry she is about Sal Giordano.

“It doesn’t feel good when you lose someone important, someone who goes way back,” she’s saying with saccharine sympathy as if we’re close and share much in common.

“No, it doesn’t,” I reply with forced civility while typing, my phone out of sight in my lap.

“Feels even worse when someone takes them away. And you’ve done it more than once, Kay…”

She’s hacked in, I text Lucy.

We know, she answers right away, and I realize this is what she wanted.

She’s set up an electronic trap that’s giving the Secret Service Carrie’s location even as she talking to me over the internet. It would seem Carrie hasn’t a clue what I’m doing. She’s none the wiser that Lucy has hacked into Carrie hacking into Janet.

Keep talking, Lucy then texts me.

“And when bad things are done, someone has to pay,” Carrie is saying.

“I feel you blame me for many things,” I reply. “Now’s your chance to explain your side of things.”

“From the beginning you involved yourself in matters that were none of your business. In fact, that seems to be your trademark, Kay. And look at the trouble it’s caused you and everyone.”

Her crazy eyes are steady on me, and I look between them, a trick I learned long ago in court. It appears I’m staring someone in the eye but I’m not.

“What do you want?” I again ask.

“It’s obvious you could use some help…”

Suddenly her face vanishes from the monitor as a video begins to play. Within seconds I recognize Luna Briley’s pink bedroom. She’s on top of the bed, eating from a small paper bag of candy-coated peanuts when her mother walks in.

“ What do you think you’re doing, you little shit? ” Piper Briley screams, and she sounds inebriated.

Snatching away the bag of candy, she shakes Luna by the shoulders. Piper is shrieking and throttling her. Then Ryder Briley appears in the doorway, shirtless and in boxer shorts, his face livid.

“ Let go! I told you not to leave marks on her, you fucking bitch! ” he snaps at his wife.

“ I told you she won’t listen! ” She turns around, glaring hatefully at him as I feel myself getting angrier.

“ And it’s your fault. You’re the fucking mother. Now do a better job or I’ll find someone who will! ”

“ You’ll find someone who will? ” she screams at him. “ I think you already did, you sorry motherfucker…! ”

Piper storms off, and is back seconds later, their child sitting up in bed, sobbing and cowering.

“ What are you doing…? ” Ryder bellows as Piper storms back into the bedroom, pointing the pistol at their daughter. “ WHAT ARE YOU DOING…? ”

“ Making sure I don’t leave any marks…! ”

BANG!

The video abruptly stops. Then Carrie is back on the monitor, her scarred face twisted by a mix of hatred and ecstasy.

“All those antique dolls on shelves in there?” she says, the cheetah rubbing against her. “They have hidden cameras looking out of their pretty little glass eyes. Piper and Ryder liked to keep a close watch on their prisoner daughter. They liked to witness the power they had over her. They got off on hearing her cry herself to sleep. After the bad thing happened, they deleted the video, of course. And I undeleted it, naturally. I’d been watching what was going on for a while, you see. It’s important to know who you’re working with, don’t you agree?”

“You gave Luna candy while you were at the house,” I reply.

“As I had before, would sneak her a little bag of it when her daddy and I discussed the various big ventures we’re involved in. I happen to like candy-coated peanuts myself, and I’d share them with her. There’s video of that too, if Lucy’s ever smart enough to find it.”

Carrie goes on to explain that Piper Briley was furious when she walked into the bedroom after lunch and found Luna eating candy. But that’s not what tipped the scale.

“It was finding out that her loving husband is fucking his jailbait helper Mira Tang. Well, he won’t be anymore, and you can thank me for that,” Carrie says with a contemptuous smile that’s crooked because of the damage I caused.

“I don’t intend to thank you for anything,” I tell her.

“You’re secretly just as pleased as I am. Let’s be honest, the Brileys are bottom-feeding scum.”

“You have no idea how I feel about anything. You just think you do.”

“Speaking of bottom feeders, reminds me of that poor pilot on the bottom of the bay. I can’t recall his name.” Carrie sighs. “Nobody special but there was no need to kill him. I wouldn’t have done that. But Ryder insisted on tit for tat with that overblown TV journalist.”

Carrie tells me I’ll find the same B-52 cocktail in the vitamin water that Mira Tang spiked. The vials of haloperidol, lorazepam, the liquid Benadryl are in a gym bag at her house under her bed.

“I assisted Ryder Briley with one last favor before he and his trashy wife rot in prison. And believe me, that’s the worst thing for them.” Carrie feeds the cheetah from a plate of ground steak tartare. “Terrible to imagine how they’ll be treated for the rest of their days, depending on how long they last. All because of me. Payback.”

“For what?”

“They didn’t do as instructed. And I know about being a helpless child when you’re trapped in a nightmarish home, completely controlled by fuckers.” She feeds Choo Choo another raw steak meatball.

“You didn’t deserve to be mistreated as a child, Carrie. But how tragic that you’ve turned into the same monster,” I reply as pounding sounds in the background…

Then wood splinters… Voices shout POLICJA! as the monitor blinks out. I look down at the phone in my lap, reading Lucy’s last text.

We got her, it says.