Hunted (Reeve Leclaire 2) Page 21

  “Really? That’s interesting.”

  Reeve has an image of the blond assistant walking in lockstep with Dr. Moody, tipping her face toward his. “They were awfully friendly.”

  “Friendly as in having an affair?”

  “Maybe. So she would have had contact with Flint through Dr. Moody. . . .” Reeve’s mind is spinning.

  “But why would any sane person ever want to put Daryl Wayne Flint back on the street?”

  Reeve suddenly pictures Flint’s mother entering the courtroom with the young blonde, both with eyes shining, wearing smiles as if relishing a shared joke.

  “Oh, crap,” she says, grabbing JD’s arm. “I think she and Flint’s mother were friends.”

  FIFTY

  Cybil Abbott puts her blond hair in a ponytail, slips on her jacket, grabs her keys, and heads out to her car. This is the first time in months that she has made this drive, and it will surely be the last. It’s time for a purge.

  They used to call the secluded cottage in Gig Harbor their love nest, which now strikes her as worse than corny. It’s pathetic.

  Now her car is loaded with boxes, garbage bags, and cleaning supplies. She certainly can’t afford to keep the place on her own, and there’s no way she’s going to forfeit the cleaning deposit, so she’ll work nonstop, without indulging in sloppy sentiment, until the rental is spotless. And of course she plans to strip the place of anything of value.

  Turning up the radio, she sings all the way there.

  It doesn’t take long.

  She parks in front, grabs some trash bags, and climbs the steps, pausing to enjoy the view. Then she steels herself and fits the key into the lock. The door swings open, she steps inside and feels . . . nothing.

  It’s an empty one-bedroom shack. That’s all it is to her now.

  She exhales a note of triumph, turns on the heat, and heads toward the small kitchen. Glancing around, she decides to start with the booze and the stemware, so goes back to the car to fetch boxes and bubble wrap.

  After carefully packing the wine, champagne, and martini glasses, she goes through the dishes, wrapping the best pieces and tossing the rest in the trash. Pots and pans, cooking utensils, and canned goods get similar treatment.

  One drawer yields an envelope filled with cash. Nice. For six years, Terry had given her cash for rent and incidentals. Well, he’s still paying. So there!

  Once all the drawers and cupboards are empty and the boxes have been loaded into her car, she sets to work scrubbing every surface. The stove, the microwave . . . Then she opens the fridge.

  Shit. Why didn’t she start here?

  All the condiments and frozen goods get tossed. The vegetable tray, luckily, is empty, except for some crusty brown matter. The bottled waters and sodas she decides to keep. And, hey, what have we here?

  Champagne!

  Cybil lifts out the bottle of liquid gold. Dom Pérignon. The good stuff.

  Terry had brought a box of Godiva chocolates and two bottles of champagne for Valentine’s Day. They’d drunk only one. She’d forgotten all about it.

  Surveying her progress in the kitchen, she decides to reward her hard work. Why not?

  The cork gives way with a satisfying pop! A champagne flute would be nice, but they’re already packed. She takes a deep swig from the bottle.

  So good. It makes other champagnes, even pricey ones, taste like cheap stuff. She enjoys another few swallows, but that’s enough. She still has work to do, so she’ll save it for later. The champagne goes back in the fridge.

  She heads toward the bedroom, where she’s hit with an unexpected pang of emotion. The king-sized bed is an affront. How many hours has she wasted in this bed?

  “Six years,” she says aloud. “Six stupid years of swallowing his lies.”

  She attacks the bed, stripping off the sheets and stuffing them into a laundry bag.

  The sex, unfortunately, had been fantastic. The best of her life. She’d even let herself believe they were making love! The lying weasel had convinced her they had something special, something much more than just a torrid affair. He’d promised they would stay together. He’d promised a ring. He’d even hinted at an extravagant wedding in Tahiti.

  Divorce his wife and marry his assistant? What a cliché! She’d been an idiot to fall for such a transparent load of crap.

  Feeling overheated, she stomps back to the kitchen, yanks open the refrigerator door, grabs the bottle of champagne, and lifts it to her lips. Two gulps, and she decides to carry the bottle with her back to the bedroom.

  The dresser drawers get emptied into a large plastic trash bag. The few items in the closet get stripped from their hangers and added. She takes another drink, looks around, snatches up a few bottles of perfume, and tosses them in for good measure. The bag is heavy, but she wrestles it out to the car, thinking she’ll sort through it later.

  She returns to the bedroom and dusts every surface. Satisfied, she carries the bottle of champagne into the bathroom. The medicine cabinet is crammed so full, it’s too much to bother sorting. Instead, she takes the empty trash can from beneath the sink and sweeps the contents from the shelves, sending them clattering.

  A spritz of cleanser, a little elbow grease, and in minutes all the surfaces are sparkling. She rewards herself with another swig of champagne. Towels get added to the laundry bag, and then she lugs the trash can and the bag of laundry out to the car.

  She’s getting tipsy. So what? After she’s done here, she’ll drive carefully down the hill into town and use Terry’s money to buy herself a nice steak dinner, followed by an espresso or two.

  She stomps up the steps to the porch and glances again at the view, now softened by dusk. A bubble of nostalgia rises in her chest as she recalls a romantic picnic down by the creek, but she quickly clamps down on this emotion.

  Six years she wasted in this place. No more!

  The living room requires little work. She finishes dusting, vacuums the whole place, then walks through the cottage, giving it a final once-over. The vases, a framed picture, and a few throw pillows get added to the load in her car, but all the furniture belongs to the landlord.

  Finished, she sprawls on the sofa to catch her breath, keeping the bottle of champagne close at hand.

  She turns on the television and is flipping through channels when she glimpses a grainy image of Daryl Wayne Flint. She hears, “. . . the fugitive who escaped from medium-security lockup in the state’s largest mental institution.”

  The still image of Flint is replaced by boldfaced numbers, and the newscaster declares, “There’s been a substantial increase in what was already a hefty reward for information leading to his arrest. The number to call is on your screen. The reward has been raised from fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  Cybil sits forward. “Well now, that’s more like it.”

  She’s raising the bottle of Dom to her lips, about to take another swig, when she’s hit by a powerful notion.

  Is it possible?

  She gets to her feet. With a glance at the clock, she pours the rest of the champagne down the sink and grabs her keys. She’ll have to skip the steak dinner. She’ll grab some coffee in town and head to Tacoma. She’ll have plenty of time during the drive to figure out how to get what she wants from Flint’s mother.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Tacoma, Washington

  The lead on the Ford Bronco has brought Case Agent Pete Blankenship to Tacoma, a town thirty-five miles south of Seattle. He feels certain that they’re closing in on their fugitive, thanks to the headlight fragments left at Triangle Park. Because what are the odds that Flint’s buddy—who just happens to be a fellow sex offender—has the same type of vehicle that was used in yesterday’s kidnap attempt?

  Sven Larsson and Daryl Wayne Flint were art therapy pals at the psychiatric hospital. And records show that Larsson owns a 1996 Ford Bronco. Larsson is still in medium-security lockup, but he left his vehicle with his girlfriend, a rugged blonde na
med Arlene Johansson, who also owns a Harley, a van, and a furniture-repair business. Records show that she visits her boyfriend with religious devotion.

  It gets better. Her visiting hours coincide with Flint’s mother’s. And she lives not far from a wig shop where, if the owner is correct, Daryl Wayne Flint recently purchased three wigs. The connections are too thick to ignore.

  But unfortunately, Arlene Johansson is proving uncooperative. After following her home from work, Blankenship stopped her outside her house. He identified himself and asked to take a look around.

  “Hell, no,” Johansson replied, shutting the door in his face.

  The warrant has taken longer than he’d hoped, but now Blankenship is primed to make an arrest. He approaches the house armed and outfitted in protective gear. Six other armed agents are in position, ready to take down their fugitive by force.

  Blankenship pounds on the door. “Arlene Johansson! FBI! Open the door.”

  She swings the door wide and stands with a hand on her hip. “I told you, he’s not here. Jesus, don’t you people listen?”

  He hands her the search warrant and tells her to step aside.

  “This is ridiculous. You think I’d have a murderer in my house? Christ, don’t track mud in here. Wipe your feet, would you, please?”

  She purses her lips and watches with a hostile attitude as the agents stream from room to room. When they find no one, she says, “See? I told you he wasn’t here. Now, would you please leave?”

  But they next approach a side door, and she blocks their way. “I don’t want you going in there. Stay out of my garage.”

  “Step aside,” Blankenship says, restraining himself from giving her a hard shove.

  “Jesus Christ, no one is in there,” she grumbles, moving aside.

  Anticipating an arrest, Blankenship nods at the team leader, who gets into position and bursts through the door. Three men rush into the garage as Arlene Johansson hollers, “Don’t touch anything! Don’t you dare touch anything!”

  The garage is crammed with furniture, including a bright pink dresser sitting atop a drop cloth with up-ended pink drawers arranged around it like sentinels. There’s a strong odor of paint.

  “Dammit, that’s still wet,” she snaps.

  A large dehumidifier chugs away in the corner as the men continue their search, pulling aside plastic sheeting, uncovering bed frames, tables, and other furniture along the walls.

  “Hey, I try to keep this place dust free, all right? Is that a crime?”

  Blankenship faces the woman. “You have a vehicle registered to Sven Larsson here. A 1996 Ford Bronco?”

  “Well, it’s not in the garage, obviously. It’s around back.”

  Three armed agents file out the back door and into the yard, where they find the vehicle up on blocks, rusty, and cannibalized for parts.

  Blankenship hustles his team out of there. They shed their Kevlar and compare theories on the way back to Seattle.

  His mood goes from bad to worse when he arrives back at the office and finds a bunch of nosy civilians waiting for him. Not only is Reeve LeClaire in some kind of snit, but Milo Bender and his son are now rallied behind her, tall and adamant, like a pair of damn Vikings. His first instinct is to have Nikki Keswick handle them, but she’s off somewhere, probably having dinner.

  With scarcely any time to collect his thoughts, he tells them to sit down and keep it brief.

  Reeve shares some crackpot idea about Dr. Moody’s former assistant being some kind of coconspirator.

  He grunts in response. “Cybil Abbott? We questioned her the day after Moody’s body was found. She’s clean.”

  Reeve narrows her eyes at him—as if he would lie about a thing like that— and launches into some theory about how Cybil Abbott is guilty of something just because she and Flint’s mother happened to have a conversation or two during her son’s trial.

  “Are you kidding me?” Blankenship says.

  “Come on,” Reeve says. “You must have found something linking her and Mrs. Pratt to the storage unit.” She barely takes a breath before she’s off on another wild-ass idea about a link between Flint’s mother and the storage unit, simply because it was on Church Street.

  Blankenship interrupts, saying, “Your supposition that Mrs. Pratt may or may not have mentioned a church wedding to her son is awfully thin proof of any involvement. Especially since it was a male that rented that place.”

  “But you can’t completely rule out his mother,” she insists. “She’s as slippery as he is.”

  He almost makes a crude remark, but stops himself. They don’t need to know about Mrs. Pratt’s handful of arrests for prostitution over the years. What bearing does it have on this case? So poor Daryl Wayne had a crappy childhood. Big whoop.

  “You should at least make her take a lie detector test,” Reeve is saying.

  Blankenship turns to Bender, looking for help. “We can’t force the woman to take a polygraph, you know that.”

  Bender at least shows some sense. “He’s right about that. There’s nothing to show that Mrs. Pratt had a role in her son’s escape. The forensic auditors went through all her receipts. She had no connection to the storage unit, and she never used credit cards near Olshaker except when she was there during scheduled visits.”

  Blankenship pinches the bridge of his nose. His head is pounding and he’s got a ton of paperwork ahead of him. “If there’s nothing else, I’ve got work to do,” he says, and wastes no time shooing them out of his office.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Tacoma, Washington

  Flint’s mother knows who’s calling the instant the number lights up on her phone. She nearly says, “Hello, Cybil,” but catches herself, remembering that her phone is likely tapped.

  “Mrs. Pratt?” says Cybil’s familiar voice. “Your friend Zola asked me to call. She’s in the hospital and she’s asking if you can stop by.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  Mrs. Pratt bites back a nasty comment and plays along. “I’m sorry to hear that Zola is back in the hospital so soon,” she says, using their code. “It hasn’t been very long.”

  “Yeah, but she really needs your help.”

  Mrs. Pratt tells her she’s on her way and hangs up, irritated that Cybil has called. That blond bitch thinks she’s being clever. She imagines that she is going to casually buy a vial of pills while prying loose information about Daryl’s whereabouts. That hefty reward has stirred her juices, it’s clear as day.

  Mrs. Pratt reviews the phone call in her mind, worrying that it was a mistake to involve Cybil, which had been Daryl’s dumb idea.

  It all started with an idle exchange during visiting hours one day. “Who owns that gorgeous Audi in the parking lot?” she’d asked her son.

  When he said it was Dr. Moody’s, she remarked, “Well that’s some doozy of a scratch in the side. Who’d he piss off?”

  Daryl had apparently made a point of finding out during his next psychotherapy session, for an opportunity was born.

  A woman scorned, and all that.

  “Remember that hot blonde from the trial?” he asked. “You two were buddies, weren’t you?”

  “Hardly,” she said, though it was true that she’d cultivated a relationship with Cybil. “We shared a few drinks, but we didn’t stay in touch.”

  He gave her that lizard look of his, saying, “I need you to give her a call.”

  She hadn’t guessed what he was up to, but at Daryl’s insistence, she’d managed to rekindle her relationship with Cybil. She set it up innocently enough: Just a brief call to get reacquainted, a friendly chat, a lunch, and the offer of some illicit pharmaceuticals.

  “Still having trouble sleeping?” she’d asked, pretending sympathy. “I can help with that.”

  Of course, Mrs. Pratt made sure there was no link between the two women, other than a few calls like this one, placed from one of the few remaining pay phones at Tacoma General. That was clever, if she says so he
rself. A woman of her age would likely have friends calling from the medical center from time to time. It had been a safe place to meet, and the arrangement had served both their needs. Cybil’s various complaints got treated, and Mrs. Pratt pocketed some extra folding money. Simple.

  But not long after she’d reported that to Daryl, he surprised her with another strange request. Glancing around the visiting room, he’d leaned forward and whispered, “I need you to call Walter Wertz. Tell him we’re on for Plan B.”

  She lights a cigarette, thinking about the day she’d first laid eyes on Walter. He was a dangerous young man—all hard muscle, smelling of hormones and campfire.

  It was the same summer that hot-tempered husband of hers had broken Daryl’s arm. Don had decided there was need of another pair of hands up at the lake, and so he’d dragged her along, though she hated camping. “Nothing but dirt and fish guts,” she said. But he left her no choice.

  Walter showed up just after they’d pitched their tent. The three males had apparently made acquaintance the previous summer. But Walter calmly informed Daryl’s father that they’d strayed onto his land.

  “You’ll have to pack up and move back down the road to the public campground,” he said.

  Don took issue with that. He argued that they were in a national forest, that they had every right to camp wherever they liked.

  The two men were standing toe-to-toe, and it was clear they were about to fight. Then she came out of the tent and stepped between them, putting a hand on each chest.

  Pretty soon, Walter was showing up whenever Don took the Chevy for a run into town. Sometimes, she’d cook dinner for him—until Don found out and beat her with his belt, that mean son of a bitch.

  One night toward the end of summer, while Don was off buying liquor and cigarettes, she’d invited Walter to join her inside the tent. She was still pretty enough to attract a young buck. But if she was expecting to tame him, he certainly surprised her. He’d already worked out a whole scenario in his head.