Wicked Lies (31 page)

“Anyone who knows something about Madeline Turnbull’s death. I’m a reporter.”

“Mad Maddie’s dead?” He sounded surprised and upset. “Nobody tells me anything!”

“You knew her?” Harrison proceeded to wheel the chair down the hallway from the direction Herm Smythe had appeared. He probably had five to ten minutes before the forces of Morrow and/or Anderssen descended on him.

“Sure did. I knew all the women like her.”

Wondering what that meant, Harrison was nevertheless beginning to think he might have happened upon a gold mine of information. “Which women, Herm?”

“Catherine. Mary. Maddie. I wrote their history, you know,” he added proudly.

“The women of Siren Song?” Harrison asked in surprise.

“The Colony,” he said, nodding his head with satisfaction. “That’s what they’re called.”

“
You
wrote their history?”

“Don’t sound so surprised, mister. Wrote it down in a book,” he said proudly. Then, “Where the hell is that thing? Parnell had it last.”

“Parnell?”

“Dr. Parnell Loman. I didn’t give it to him. He took it. But he’s dead now . . . a long time. Killed himself off the jetty. Wait. Whoa, Nellie. Here’s my room.” He pointed to the door with his name on it.

Harrison processed the information Herm had given him as he turned the chair and wheeled the older man inside. The room was furnished with two orange molded-plastic chairs and little else besides Herm’s bed. Herm eased himself from the wheelchair into one of the chairs and waved Harrison to the other one.

Harrison perched himself on its edge, glancing toward the open door.

“Close it,” Herm ordered. “Don’t need ’em all listening in.”

He rose to shut the door, then reseated himself. “There’s a Dr. Loman at Ocean Park Hospital,” Harrison said. “An osteopath . . .”

“That’s Dolph.” Herm spat the words. “Parnell’s brother. A pompous ass, if there ever was one!”

Harrison silently agreed on that point. “This Parnell did not write the book, but it was in his possession.”

“That’s right.”

“You wrote the book of the Colony’s history. The book that’s at the Deception Bay Historical Society?”

“Yes, I . . .” Herm considered a moment, concentrating hard. He pressed a finger to his lips, then shook his head in frustration. “Dinah told me something about it. . . . I don’t remember. . . . Damn, it’s hell getting old!”

“Dinah?” Harrison prompted.

“My daughter.” His gray eyes held a secret. “She might be a sister to one of ’em, you know? A half sister, anyway.”

“To the women of the Colony?” Harrison felt a little like he was swimming upstream. Every time he made progress, he seemed to slip backward.

“I had my times with Mary.” Herm twinkled at Harrison. “I was quite a swordsman in my day, you know.”

Another time Harrison would have encouraged Herm Smythe’s amusing dialogue, but it just felt like the conversation was seesawing from one side to another without direction on a topic Harrison really wanted to hear. “What did Dinah tell you about the book?”

“Parnell took it,” he said. “He wasn’t supposed to, but he took it.”

Harrison inwardly sighed. “The book at the historical society.”

“Yes, the book I wrote. It’s a history of the Colony. Did I mention that?”

“You said Dinah told you something about the book,” Harrison reminded.

He nodded. “Dinah’s my daughter.”

“Yes.”

“It’s all about their history, you know. The Colony. How they came to be what they are. You say the book’s at the historical society now?”

“A friend told me that,” Harrison agreed. “She thought a doctor wrote it.”

He vehemently shook his head. “What friend?”

“Her name’s Laura,” Harrison said, wondering if he’d tapped the older man out of information.

“Who’s Laura? You mean Lorelei?”

Harrison couldn’t quite contain his surprise. He hoped it wasn’t as obvious to Herm as he sidestepped, “My friend’s a nurse at Ocean Park Hospital.”

“With that bastard, Dolph.” He nodded sagely. “He was always jealous of me. Mary liked me, and Parnell, but she couldn’t stomach Dolph.” He cackled out a laugh. “Yeah, I wrote the book, but it doesn’t really have the good stuff. Mary was a loose woman, you know. Free love. It was the seventies and eighties. We were all into it. But Catherine put the kibosh on everything. She never, ever liked me. Doesn’t matter, ’cause Mary and I had our times, you know.” He skewered a look at Harrison with his gray eyes under salt and pepper brows. “That DNA stuff that’s all over television? Sometimes I think I should go back there and test some of those girls, find out if one of ’em’s mine, you know. Can you do that for me?”

“I don’t think so.” He wasn’t unkind. “When you were with Mary?” Harrison prodded. “What year was that?”

He shrugged, uncaring. “Ask Dinah.”

“Do you have a number for her?”

“Sure.” He waved a hand over to his bedside table. “Go over there.”

Harrison cruised around the bed and found a list of phone numbers written in large black lettering on a paper that was taped to the table. Dinah’s number was listed, along with several others that weren’t labeled. Harrison scratched them all into his small notebook, just in case they had a meaning that he couldn’t quite see yet.

There was a knock on Herm’s door, to which he called gaily, “Come on in!” as if he’d completely forgotten his earlier desire for privacy.

One of the staff members stuck her head inside, her eyes darting to Harrison. “Everything okay, Herm?”

“Oh, sure. This is my guest. . . .” He glanced toward Harrison with a faint frown.

“Harrison,” he said.

“He’s dating my daughter, Dinah.”

The woman stepped into the room, standing erect and giving Harrison a long, meaningful look. She was in her thirties, heavyset, with a cold manner that said nobody, but nobody, better mess with her. Her gaze never wavered as she said, “Oh, I don’t think so. He doesn’t look like Dinah’s type.”

“I was just leaving,” Harrison said, giving her his best smile. He shook Herm Smythe’s hand.

“You wanted to know about Mad Maddie,” Herm suddenly said. “She’s down the hall. The other side.”

At the mention of Madeline Turnbull’s name, the aide visibly stiffened.

Harrison didn’t remind Herm that Mad Maddie was gone. It probably wouldn’t stick in the older guy’s mind, anyway. “Thanks.”

The woman stepped back into the hallway and Harrison followed her out. Her name tag read
TONI
. Harrison nodded at her, but there was no way she was going to let him go without a postmortem.

“Keri said you were a reporter.”

“Keri works at the front desk,” Harrison guessed.

“Mr. Smythe isn’t a reliable source,” she said tightly. “As I’m sure you noticed, he has trouble with his short-term memory.”

“But his long term’s okay?”

“Whatever you’re working on, his word isn’t to be taken as fact. He wanders from the past to the present to places of his own fantasy. As for anything about Ms. Turnbull, you’d be better off speaking to the director.”

“Already had the pleasure,” Harrison said.

They reached the reception area together. Keri glanced over at him balefully, and he responded with a smile, as if they were old friends.

“Can we help you with anything else?” Toni demanded.

The buzzing of his cell phone prevented him from having to answer her. Shaking his head, he moved to the door, waiting for Keri to buzz him out. He clicked on to his cell. “Frost.”

“Well, well, well. We finally connect.” Pauline Kirby’s cool tones made Harrison almost smile. She might be an out-and-out bitch whose narcissism was legendary and whose interview technique was tactless, discomfiting, and altogether annoying, but there was something about her chasing him for a story that definitely warmed the cockles of his heart.

“Pauline,” he said, a world of meaning in his tone.

“Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I just want a quick few words on what you think of these entitled, pissant teenagers. Are they dangerous, or just poseurs?”

“Both.”

“Think their daddies’ll get ’em off?”

“Only property crimes, so far. What do you think?”

“The tone of your writing, Mr. Frost, suggests that you would like to see the little darlings have to pay for their mistakes with more than a slap to the wrist.”

“I think they should know there are consequences to every choice. Action and reaction. Yin and yang.”

“Are you saying they should go to jail?” Pauline asked.

“I’m saying that they need to get the big picture somehow,” Harrison responded.

“How do we get them to do that?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “What makes a good parent? What makes a responsible child? Who’s at fault? Why does this happen? What can we do to prevent our own children from taking the wrong fork in the road?”

“Do you have children, Mr. Frost?” She sounded truly curious, but Harrison knew better.

“No.”

“Plan to have them?”

He flashed on Laura, his feelings for her. His amorphous thoughts about a possible future together. “Not if they’re going to break into other people’s homes just because they can. I gotta go.”

“Just one more thing. I get the feeling that you’ve moved on.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Something in your tone. Your impatience, maybe.”

“Maybe I’m just impatient with you, Pauline.”

“No.” She sounded sure of herself, and he figured she’d already guessed what he was working on. “You’re on to the Justice Turnbull story, aren’t you? I mean, it’s practically in your backyard. Hope you don’t mind if I check in with you some more as we go along.”

Harrison couldn’t decide if he was outraged or amused. He settled on the latter. “It’s flattering that you need to follow after me to find your own news, Pauline.”

She laughed. “Are you still mad about that whole episode with your brother-in-law? C’mon, Frost. We’re all adults here.”

He could practically see her sharklike smile. “Are we?” he asked, then clicked off before he lost his sense of humor.

Lang wanted to clap his hands over his ears at the rhythmic moaning filling the offices. He felt like he couldn’t just leave, although O’Halloran had no such qualms, and was at his desk, finishing up some work he’d planned to put off till tomorrow. He might have stuck around the department, but he was definitely glad that both Johnson and Geena Cho had been the ones to separate James Cosmo Danielson’s significant other from her clinging children so that Savvy Dunbar could escort the hysterical woman to the morgue to identify the body. The woman’s ID had been positive—a loud keening wail before flinging herself atop the body, according to Savvy—and now she, who had said her name was Virgin, short for Virginia, according to her ID, was crying softly and rocking her children to and fro. The aforementioned sister had been called to come collect her, and the sister and her husband were on their way to the TCSD together as Virgin had the sister’s vehicle. The sister’s husband was going to drive the flowered van back home, but there was the impound to pay, and it was that injustice added to Cosmo’s death that had sent Virgin into her current chanting, rocking fugue.

Into this distracting noise, Lang’s cell phone rang. It was lying on his desk and he snatched it up. He recognized the number displayed on his LCD as Sam McNally’s, so he headed out of the squad room to the relative quiet of the sheriff’s office, closing the door behind him.

“Detective Stone.”

“Sam McNally,” he responded in a serious tone. “I understand you’ve been trying to get hold of me.”

“That’s right. About Justice Turnbull.”

“He escaped from that hospital, huh?”

“Friday night. We think he’s driven back here and is somewhere on the coast.”

A pause. A soft remark that sounded like “Shit.” Then McNally said, “You know he’s after those women at the lodge, Siren Song.”

“Yeah. And you were the lead investigator the last time he was after them,” Lang replied.

“I worked with your department. There’s a woman who lives in my county. Rebecca Sutcliff Walker. She was adopted out as a child, but she’s one of them. She was tops on his hit list last time but escaped. I’m going to put some protection around her. Otherwise, he’ll probably try to get to the ones at the lodge. He’s got a total obsession about them.”

“He wants to kill them all. . . .” Lang heard the questions in his words, even though he had meant to make a statement.

“He seems to try to pick off the ones outside the gates, but that doesn’t guarantee he won’t go after the ones inside. He’s really a whack job. I mean it, a bona fide psycho.”

“I got that,” Lang said with feeling.

“Any others on the outside that you know of?”

“I don’t think so,” Lang said slowly. “I could ask Catherine. She’s like the matriarch,” he said, for lack of a better term.

“You talk to her?” McNally was bowled over.

“Some. Our sheriff, O’Halloran, has known her for years, and my fiancée is a doctor at Halo Valley. She’s talked to Catherine a few times. Has even been inside the lodge,” Lang admitted.

“Really.” McNally sounded amazed. “That’s more than Rebecca ever managed.”

“What can you tell me about Justice? Something that might help find him now.”

“Nothing you probably don’t already know,” McNally said. “He squatted in the lighthouse. His mother owned that motel, which I understand has been boarded up ever since. She went to a nursing home, I believe, after he attacked her.”

“Seagull Pointe,” Lang clarified. “It hasn’t been publicized yet, but it looks like Justice got in and smothered her last night or early this morning.”

“What? For the love of God!” Then with more urgency, “You gotta keep those women safe, Stone. If you can reach this Catherine, do it. Hell, we don’t even know if they’re aware he’s out.”

“Yeah, well, they have interesting ways of getting information,” Lang said. “But I’ll try to breach the gates, make sure they’re all okay. We’ve been patrolling outside their lodge, and they have to know it, so they must know something’s up. Sam, can you update me a little bit on what happened last time? I’ve got the gist of it, but since you led the case . . . ?”