Wicked Lies (54 page)

“Then he was there! I stepped around the corner and caught him looking at the window. I gasped and he saw me and just leaped.” She outwardly trembled. “I saw the knife in his hand and tried to run away, but he caught up with me and whirled me around. He hissed at me! Called me names and I was kicking at him when he swung the knife down. Then . . . then Isadora came running.”

“I’d been looking out the window,” Isadora said. “Pulling the curtains shut when I saw him. It was dark. I didn’t know what was happening, but I grabbed the first thing I could find, which was the cast-iron skillet, and ran outside. I screamed and hit him over the head with it, and his knees buckled for a second. . . .”

Laura watched as Isadora swallowed hard, her lips moving silently as she relived the horror. “Then,” she said, her voice softer, “he turned and I saw his eyes. There was light. . . . The moon? I don’t know, but they were
glowing
! Ice blue. Horrible! He sprang at me, swinging his knife. I put my arms in front of my face and was screaming and running backward when Catherine came with the gun.”

“Gun? You shot at him?” Laura asked, reaching for a fresh roll of gauze.

Catherine shook her head. “I couldn’t. It was too dark. I was afraid I’d hit Ravinia or Cassandra. . . . I shot into the air and he bolted. Disappeared into the night.”

“And you didn’t call the police? When you knew they were looking for him?” Laura accused as she began to cover Ravinia’s wound with a fresh bandage.

Catherine’s jaw was set, her eyes narrowing, as in the distance the sound of sirens split the air.

“Looks like I didn’t need to, now, did I? You took care of it.”

Before Laura could respond, her cell rang. She saw on her caller ID that Harrison was finally calling her, and she felt instant, gratifying relief. “Hold this,” she said to Ravinia, placing the fingers of her unharmed hand over the sterile gauze patch. “Hold it tight.” Then, “Hey,” she answered.

Harrison was terse.

“Sorry about running out on you. There’s been trouble down at Zellman’s house. Turnbull was here.”

Laura glanced in surprise at her sisters, all of whom were staring at her and eavesdropping on her conversation. “Then he’s been busy, because he came to Siren Song last night. Wounded a couple of my sisters. I called nine-one-one when I heard about it, and I think the cops are just showing up.”

“Don’t go anywhere. I’m on my way!”

Harrison snapped his phone shut and headed for his car. Stone was standing near one of the police cruisers, cell phone pressed to his ear, his eyebrows drawn together in a hard scowl, while Detective Dunbar was still dealing with Dr. Zellman, trying to reason with the man as they all stood in the rain. While the detectives and deputies of the department were wearing caps emblazoned with the sheriff’s department logo, Zellman and Harrison were bareheaded.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Dunbar asked the psychiatrist, who, after watching his wife’s body bag being placed in the back of the medical examiner’s van, had somehow pulled himself together.

“I need to go in and change.” He tugged at the bandage at his throat.

“Sorry, not until the investigators for the crime lab are finished.”

“I need to go in—”

“It’s a crime scene now.”

“But—”

“Is there anyone we can call to be with you?”

“No,” he said, his tone rasping with the effort. “I need to get to Ocean Park, to see my son! Brandt, he was injured and . . . I’m leaving!”

“I don’t think you should be driving alone.”

Zellman pulled himself together and breathed down his nose in that superior way of his. “I said, I’m fine. I’m a doctor. I should know.”

Without another word, he turned on his heel and strode to his car. Seconds later he was wheeling out of the drive. Dunbar caught Harrison watching and just shook her head.

Harrison turned to witness Zellman’s Lexus streak through the trees and rain. What kind of a man acted like that just after learning his wife was murdered and his son brutally attacked and fighting for his life? Something was definitely off with the good doctor.

But then Zellman always had been a prick.

A tech came through the front, carrying a plastic bag of bloody bedsheets.

“From the kid’s room?” Dunbar asked.

“Yeah. Someone left him for dead.”

She took one look at the blood-soaked sheets, then turned quickly and doubled over to vomit in a stand of rhododendrons just shedding their blooms.

“You okay?” Harrison asked.

“Yeah.” She wiped at the back of her mouth with her hand. “Nothing to do with this.”

One of the officers overheard and grinned like a ghoul. “Sure, Dunbar. It couldn’t be blood and death and violence. Must be some other reason.”

Spitting into the ground, she stood up and regarded him coolly. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

The officer started to laugh uproariously, then cut himself off when he saw her expression. “You’re kidding.” Then, “Who knocked you up?”

Stone joined their group at that point, just in time to hear her say, “Don’t worry about it. It isn’t mine.”

He did a double take, and he and Harrison exchanged a mystified look. “Uh . . .” Stone had momentarily lost his train of thought, but then he shook himself out of it and said, “That was the boss. Seems our boy was busy last night. An attack was reported at Siren Song. Two of the women injured. A unit and ambulance have been dispatched.”

Harrison said, “I heard. I just called Laura. She’s there.”

Stone was already striding to his car. “I’m on my way.”

“I’ll wrap things up here and then head north,” Dunbar said.

Harrison didn’t wait. He was already jogging to his Impala. He figured the detectives would try to talk him out of driving to Siren Song, but they might as well save their collective breaths. He was going to see for himself that Laura was all right.

“Hey!” Stone yelled at him. “You might want this.” He was holding up the 9 mm. “You do have a license. I checked.”

“Told you.”

Stone handed him the gun, then slid behind the wheel. “It’s nothing personal, Frost,” he said. “It’s just I don’t trust reporters.”

CHAPTER 42

M
ike Ferguson found the old motel fascinating as hell. He’d hitchhiked to Deception Bay first with an elderly couple in a pickup that looked like it was from the sixties. They took him as far as the cut-off to Jewell and Mist at a crawl. Then two teenagers picked him up in a hot Toyota 4 Runner. They didn’t believe in going less than sixty-five, which was fine by Mike. He got to the turnoff to Seaside in that cool rig, then had to walk a couple of miles before the ride to Deception Bay with a guy who claimed to be a cook at some place called Davy Jones’s Locker. The driver of the Ford Focus had dropped him off in the middle of town, and Mike then worked his way to the old motel that Mad Maddie, Justice Turnbull’s mother, had once called home. Ignoring the chained fence with its faded
NO TRESPASSING
sign that creaked with the wind, he’d soldiered on through the rain to the front of the motel.

The place was a wreck, but Mike couldn’t help from poking through the old dilapidated cupboards and closets of the units. There really wasn’t a lot left. It looked like someone had camped here at some point and left an old rat-eaten sleeping bag in the living room of the manager’s unit, the best one of the whole sagging stream of cabins. Strung together with carports, each individual cabin was falling apart. The roofs had gaping holes in the shingles, and bricks had fallen off the chimneys. A couple of doors had been nailed shut, and there was plywood over most of the windows. The fence surrounding the place was like Old Man Ramsby with his mouth of gaps where teeth were supposed to be.

And it was loud here. Overlooking the ocean.

But there were a few things that he considered cool enough to shove into his backpack. An old license plate from the sixties, way older than Justice, he thought; and a small picture of Jesus charred into a piece of driftwood, which had once hung on the wall and had fallen from its nail and down through a hole in the floor; and a dog collar with a tag that read
SPORT
. He’d even found a tarot card and remembered that Mad Maddie had been a fortune-teller of sorts. So the death card was a real treasure.

But what was there of Justice Turnbull’s? What little bit of his boyhood had he left in this wreck of a building?

Mike thought Justice had lived a good part of his childhood years here, but he couldn’t find anything that proved it. He knew only that this place was where he’d tried to kill his mother and that other woman a few years back. But he found no evidence of the crime; it had been too long ago.

Sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor, he listened as the wind howled. Low tide was still a few hours away, so he’d hole up here for now. Maybe he’d find something really cool, something that might impress James . . . or even Kara Mathis, at the lighthouse. How badass would that be?

He found his phone and turned it on. Belinda had texted him, saying that James was looking for him. Yeah, well, he knew that much. James had left a ton of texts and voice mails. Mike thought about phoning him back, then decided he didn’t want to be called an idiot. Let him stew. Served the jerk right!

He’d be home tomorrow, anyway.

After visiting the lighthouse.

There was something about Zellman that really bothered Harrison. As he raced to Siren Song, he tried to figure out what it was. Something more than his super-inflated opinion of himself. There was something manipulative about the man. It was as if Zellman, in reveling in how brilliant he was, thought he could maneuver people to do his bidding. Except it had backfired with Justice Turnbull. Zellman had misread his own patient.

What had Zellman said when asked about the threats by Turnbull to the doctor? Something about patient/client privilege? But Zellman wasn’t always so eager to play by those rules. He’d let a lot of things slip in a previous interview with the man, even typed it out on his computer, as it was difficult for him to speak.

Harrison flipped his wipers to a higher speed and squinted as the rain picked up and the roof of the sky seemed to lower, the clouds thick and gray. One of the things Zellman had mentioned was that Turnbull believed he could smell the women of Siren Song when they were pregnant.

Crazy talk.

But then wasn’t telepathy between Laura and Justice Turnbull unbelievable?

And something else burned in his mind. Seeing Detective Dunbar throw up in the bushes at Zellman’s house had triggered thoughts of when he’d first met Laura and she’d lost the contents of her stomach.

Hadn’t Laura’s ex, that jerk Adderley, accused her of being pregnant? Wasn’t that what he’d said in the parking lot?

An uneasy feeling crept through his mind. She was tired. Pale. Dark circles under her eyes. And she’d been distant as well. He’d chalked it all up to the newness of their relationship and all the pressure she was under with Justice Turnbull on the loose. But maybe there was something more that was stealing her sleep and worrying her mind.

“Stop it,” he muttered, disgusted with himself. He braked for a corner, scaring up a crow picking at the carcass of something indistinguishable on the pavement. The crow, disturbed, flapped his wings and flew to the shoulder.

Harrison barely noticed. The tires of his Chevy sang over the wet pavement as he drove and his thoughts grew as dark as the heavens. Surely Laura wasn’t . . . She would tell him if she were . . . what? Carrying her ex-husband’s child?

“Don’t listen to that asshole Adderley,” he told himself, but his reporter’s gut instinct that something was very wrong in a relationship that had just barely begun wouldn’t leave him alone.

Coming up on the turnoff to Siren Song, he slowed to a crawl. The twin ruts of the lane were riddled with puddles, the grass mashed from the tires of several vehicles parked near the open gate. No chain nor taciturn woman in a dress right out of the eighteen hundreds was blocking his entrance.

Instead a row of police cars, lights flashing, and armed officers kept the onlookers and curious at bay. No amount of talking would get Harrison inside the walls of the estate, though he tried his damnedest. The police were conducting a thorough search of the grounds and the area outside the gates, trying to discover where Justice Turnbull had entered.

Even Stone, who’d arrived before him, wouldn’t come out and give Harrison the green light. But Laura, who had obviously been waiting for him, must have spied his Chevy, as she came hurrying from the house and along the path to the gate.

He hadn’t seen her since morning, and the sight of her chased away his doubts. She was shoving her arms through a lightweight jacket. She smiled and waved as her gaze met his, and he remembered kissing those lips and being so disturbed by her closeness the night before. There was just something so damned alluring and sexy about her, something that touched him in a spot he’d never really known existed.

Lorelei
, he thought.

“It’s all right,” she insisted, cocking her head at Harrison and speaking to the cop. “He’s with me.” She looked tired, the dark circles under her eyes still visible, as if she was battling insomnia or the flu. He’d thought he’d understood. Now he wasn’t so certain.

But he did know that Justice’s reign of terror was taking its toll on her. Now the madman had not only chased her down and nearly killed her, but he’d attacked her sisters. Here. At Siren Song. Where they were supposed to be safe. No doubt she would be all the more ready to “call” the psycho telepathically for a showdown.

A bad idea if the carnage at Dr. Zellman’s house was any indication of what the murderer was capable of.

It was obvious Justice Turnbull was escalating, going off the rails. Patricia Zellman was dead, Brandt Zellman clinging to life, and as he understood it, two of Laura’s sisters were seriously wounded, though from what he could determine, they hadn’t suffered life-threatening wounds.

All in all, a busy, bloody night for Turnbull.