Blind Pursuit (21 page)

38

Annie was rearranging her display of gift baskets, not out of necessity but simply to take her mind off Erin, when the shop door jingled open at two-fifteen.

She turned, and a sudden smile dimpled her cheeks. “Jeez, Harold, look at you. You’re a mess.”

Gund paused in the doorway, gazing down at himself. His pants, badly rumpled, were soiled from knees to cuffs with blotches of tan desert dust.

He blinked as if embarrassed. “Yes ... well ... there was some damage to the chassis. I had to crawl under the van to check it out.”

“We’d better get you cleaned up or you’ll scare away the clientele.”

Briskly she rummaged in a drawer behind the counter until she found a large brush useful for cleaning clothes and smocks dirtied by potting soil.

“So what was the estimate?” she asked as she stepped to the middle of the room.

“Twelve hundred dollars.”

She let out a low whistle. “That’s a bundle.”

“My insurance will pay for it.”

She stooped and began brushing his pants with quick, vigorous strokes. “Was it the other driver’s fault?”

“Yeah. He cut me off.”

His answer was clipped, his posture stiff. Apparently he found her close contact uncomfortable. Funny for a man in his forties to be so shy.

Well, this would take only a minute. To distract him, she said, “If the other guy’s to blame, he should pay.”

“He hasn’t got any insurance.”

“Not even liability? Isn’t that illegal in Arizona?”

“He’s from out of state. A snowbird.”

Annie frowned. Snowbirds were part-year residents, fleeing harsh northern winters. If this negligent motorist could afford to maintain two homes, he ought to be able to reimburse Harold out of pocket.

She was about to say as much when she noticed the belt.

A western-style belt, black leather with a snakeskin overlay and a brass buckle. Harold wore it often, nearly every day, but she’d never gotten a close look at it before.

The overlay was studded with small turquoise beads.

One of the beads was missing.

Her hand opened reflexively, and she dropped the brush.

“Oops. Clumsy me.” The words were spoken by someone far away, someone who would remain composed in any crisis, someone like her sister. “Think I’m done, anyhow.”

Gund took a quick step back, as if anxious to distance himself from her.

She replaced the brush in the drawer. Her mind was frozen. When she opened her mouth, she had no idea what she was about to say.

“Gotta use the powder room for a sec. Hold down the fort, will you?”

He nodded. His face seemed slightly flushed, and his eyes wouldn’t meet hers.

Did he realize she’d been staring at the belt? No, that wasn’t it. He was ... aroused. Bending near his waist, stroking his trousers, inadvertently she had turned him on.

The thought left her feeling unclean. In the small bathroom at the rear of the shop, she washed her hands unnecessarily.

Then she unclasped her purse and removed the creased square of tissue. Nesting within its folds was the turquoise from Erin’s apartment.

She held up the stone to the light. It might very well match those on Gund’s belt.

Eyes shut, she pictured Gund in Erin’s bathroom, leaning against the counter, reaching for the top shelf of the medicine cabinet, where the Tegretol was kept. His waist rubbing against the countertop’s Formica edge, the loose turquoise bead coming free and dropping, unnoticed, to the floor ...

“No,” she whispered. “It can’t be him. Just can’t be.”

But what if it was?

She sat on the closed lid of the commode, staring blankly at the stone in her hand, which gazed back like an unwinking eye. She asked herself how much she really knew about Harold Gund.

She’d hired him six months ago, when he responded to a help-wanted sign in the shop window. She almost hadn’t taken him on; a flower shop seemed a peculiar place for a large, burly man, and a dead-end job at little better than minimum wage was hardly ideal for someone his age.

But Harold had explained his circumstances, quietly and sincerely. For twenty years he had worked as a custodian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Last September his wife had died; she remembered him fumbling in his wallet for her photo and showing it to her. Miriam had been her name.

They’d had no children. All they’d shared was each other. Now she was gone, and as autumn yielded to winter, Harold had found that he couldn’t face another season of bleakness and cold.

He’d applied for a custodial position at the University of Arizona, then had come southwest with an assurance that the job was his. Through a bureaucratic bungle someone else had been hired before he’d arrived. Now he was stuck in an unfamiliar city with no employment.

The story was almost too affecting to be true. But she hadn’t doubted him. He seemed incapable of duplicity, with his round, smooth face, his sad blue eyes, his large belly overspilling his belt. Though he was years older than she, he conveyed a pleasantly boyish quality, and an instant sense of familiarity, as if he were an amalgam of two old-time movie actors she liked—the face of Ernest Borgnine and the voice of Aldo Ray.

His University of Wisconsin reference had checked out. And his van, although old, was serviceable; it would be useful when he made local deliveries. Annie, feeling a stab of sympathy, had taken a chance on him. After all, she’d reasoned, he couldn’t be worse than her previous assistant, a frizzy-haired nineteen-year-old named Beth whose chief talent had been devising excuses for showing up late and leaving early.

As it turned out, Harold had proved to be punctilious and diligent, the most reliable employee she could have asked for.

But although she’d worked at his side six days a week for half a year, she actually did not know him at all. He was like one of those good neighbors she occasionally read about, the person described by everyone as quiet and considerate and well mannered, until the day a cache of dismembered bodies was discovered in the crawl space under his house.

Bodies. She shivered.

Then she got hold of herself. As usual, she was becoming all emotional, letting her imagination run rampant, jumping to wild conclusions. She had nothing to go on except a turquoise bead, and such gems were commonplace in Arizona.

Besides, the whole idea was crazy. To suspect Harold—sweet Harold who made lovely bouquets of long-stem roses and worked overtime without pay and consoled her over Erin’s disappearance—to suspect
him
as a kidnapper, a psycho ...

Then she remembered how her porch light had been activated in the early hours of the night before last. The footsteps she’d heard, the chortling rumble of an engine.

Harold’s van sounded like that.

Had he deposited the letter? Had it been his footsteps on gravel, his van pulling away?

No way. Impossible.

Still, she had to be sure.

He had seemed nervous about taking a long lunch break today. And something about that accident just didn’t add up. And when she mentioned the dirt on his pants, he’d seemed flustered, hadn’t he? Almost ... guilty?

She wondered if he had really taken the van for an estimate, or if he had gone someplace else.

There ought to be a way to find out. Another minute of hectic, feverish thought guided her to a plan.

Before leaving the bathroom, she flushed the toilet and ran the faucet again, for realism.

In the front of the shop, Harold was on a stepladder, hanging a basket of green camellia on a ceiling hook to replace an identical item sold earlier today.

“Looks good,” Annie said, studying the plant from below. “Maybe spread the leaves a little more on this side.”

He did so.

“Perfect. Which auto-body shop gave you the estimate, by the way?”

“Metzger’s, at Grant and Campbell.” He glanced down at her, and she wondered if it was only her imagination that caught a glint of suspicion in his eyes. “Why?”

“Just curious. I know a good place if you need a second opinion.” A pause, then casually: “You know, I never did get lunch. Think I’ll run next door and grab a sandwich.”

Gund made some kind of acknowledgment, which she barely heard, and then she was out the door, breathing hard. The effort of maintaining a neutral facade had exhausted her.

On her way to the delicatessen, she circled around to the rear of Gund’s van and memorized the license number. The tires, she noticed, were streaked with desert dust.

At the back of the deli, there was a pay phone. A battered copy of the Yellow Pages was set on a shelf below. She looked up Metzger’s, dropped a quarter in the slot, and dialed.

As the phone rang on the other end of the line, she drew a deep, soothing breath and tried to calm her frantic heart.

“Metzger’s,” a female voice answered.

“Good afternoon.” She kept her tone cool and professional. “This is Barbara Allen, calling from Allstate Insurance. I’d like to confirm an estimate for one of our clients, Harold Gund, policy number seven-six-two-three-eight.” The five digits came out of nowhere; insurance people always gave the policy number, and she didn’t expect the receptionist to check. “The vehicle in question is a Chevrolet Astro van, license plate ...” She recited the memorized number.

“Hold, please.”

Silence. Annie clutched the hard plastic shell of the handset and tasted a sour flavor at the back of her mouth.

Click, and the receptionist was back. “Sorry, but we have no record of any estimate on that vehicle.”

Her heart slammed into overdrive. “It was my understanding”—she fought to betray no reaction other than mild consternation—“that our insured party, Mr. Gund, took his van to Metzger’s for inspection earlier this afternoon. He’s informed us that Metzger’s provided an estimate of twelve hundred dollars.”

“Well, we have no record of that.”

“I see. There must be some mix-up, then. Thank you.”

Even after she had replaced the handset on the plungers, Annie kept her hand on it, as if afraid to let go.

No record.

He hadn’t gone to Metzger’s.

Hadn’t gotten an estimate.

Then what
had
he been doing? And where?

Briefly she considered calling Walker. No, waste of time; she had nothing, really. Nothing specific, nothing tangible.

For the time being, she was on her own.

Okay, then.

Erin had sent an SOS. A distress signal. A cry for help.

Annie would do her best to answer it.

Tonight.

39

Even after she awoke, Erin lay unmoving on the futon for long minutes, taking inventory of every separate pain.

The cramps in her abdomen and thighs had loosened their grip, to leave only a dull, throbbing ache. Rubbing at the rope for hours had taken its toll; her shoulders and arms were agonizingly stiff. When she turned her head, a hot needle lanced her neck.

The worst pain, however, was not internal but external—the searing sunburn on every inch of her exposed skin. Her gaze drifted to her right arm, lobster pink. It looked boiled.

The burn would torture her for days. Every scrape of her clothes against her skin would be a minor agony.

But at least, for the moment, she was alive.

Grunting, she propped herself on one elbow and threw back the cheap cotton blanket. A gleam of metal caught her eye.

For a disoriented moment she imagined she was wearing an anklet. A large, curiously bulky anklet glinting on her right leg.

Then her mind cleared, and she recognized what she was seeing. A loop of chain, wound tightly around her leg just above her boot, with a padlock’s hasp inserted through two heavy links.

The chain snaked across the concrete floor to the wall, where a second padlock secured it to the sillcock.

Slowly she bent forward, wincing at the residue of pain in her abdomen, and studied the chain. The links were rusty and soiled, as was the padlock. They had been used outdoors.

The gate. It had been chained and locked. Yes.

And the other padlock, the one fastening the chain to the spigot, most likely had come from the rear door, which she’d tried to open last night.

While she slept, her abductor must have removed the chain and both padlocks, then brought them in here and shackled her. Christ, shackled her to the wall—like a prisoner in a dungeon.

Well, what else was she? What had she ever been?

She struggled to her feet, gingerly testing her legs. Though her knees were stiff and her balance uncertain, she could walk.

She tried reaching the door, couldn’t. The chain, drawn taut to a length of six feet, stopped her when she was still more than a yard away.

He was taking no chances, quite obviously. He didn’t want her escaping again.

Little likelihood of that, anyway. He’d cleaned out the room, removing all possible lock-picking tools, leaving only a bare minimum of necessities. Besides the futon, all she had left were the two chairs, a roll of toilet paper, the milk jugs and coffee cans she used for bathroom purposes, and, in the cardboard box, a few items of food—none requiring the can opener, which was gone.

Painfully she shuffled over to the sillcock. Crouching down was an exercise in self-torture so intense it was almost pleasurable. She turned the handle and cupped her hands under the lukewarm stream from the spout, drinking until she was satisfied.

A memory of the awful thirst she had known in the arroyo returned to her. It was said to be impossible to remember physical sensations, but the sandpaper dryness of her mouth, the swollen thickness of her tongue, the ache of her gums—all of it was abruptly vivid in her mind, as shockingly real as direct experience.

Not again, she promised herself, straightening up with a renewed protest of sore muscles. She would not be staked out again—to endure the elements or to burn. If he tried to take her, she would fight. She would make him kill her here.

Would it come to that? She blinked at the question, then nodded slowly. Of course it would.

She had been granted only a reprieve, a stay of execution. He would never let her go. Never.

She had seen his face.

Only dimly, it was true—in weak light outside, and through a haze of visual distortion in this room. Nonetheless, she
had
seen it.

And the ranch, too.

The ranch.

There it was again, startling as a slap—the wordless certainty that she had visited this place before.

Baking in the sun, she’d had no strength to ponder the riddle. Now she did.

A horse ranch in the desert, near the interstate.

Barbed-wire fence, wood-frame house, barn and paddock. The buildings painted green, white, and orange.

Green, white, and orange ...

“Oh, my God,” Erin whispered, remembering.

Her knees unlocked. She would have crumpled to the floor if she hadn’t gripped the brick wall for support.

In her mind she saw it suddenly—the ranch,
this
ranch, spread out before her, not in starlight but in the crisp May sunshine of another year, the buildings dressed in faded colors, paint peeling in strips like sunburned skin.

And at the entrance, a padlocked gate that displayed a hanging sign.

The sign was gone now. She hadn’t seen it last night.

But on that spring day in 1985 she and Annie had paused before that sign, reading the inscription grooved deep in the rust-eaten iron.

A single word in block letters: CONNOR.

This was the old Connor ranch. Lincoln and Lydia’s homestead, where they had spent the twenty years of their marriage.

Erin knew it, knew it with certainty, even without the sign as proof. The distinctive color scheme was confirmation enough. Green, white, orange—the colors of the Irish flag.

After the deaths of her husband and son in 1968, Lydia Connor had relocated to a bungalow in town, where, later, she raised her orphaned nieces. She rarely spoke of the ranch, never took the girls to see it, but in her photo albums there were pictures of a house and barn, a paddock with a split-rail fence, horses grazing on a few bleached acres.

In the second semester of her freshman year at the University of Arizona, Erin signed up for a course on the history of Tucson. At the library, hunting through the archival files of local newspapers to research her term paper, she came across contemporaneous accounts of the Connor case. One of the stories gave the couple’s address.

The next weekend, impelled by curiosity, she and Annie visited the ranch. The map they used was disappointingly inaccurate, and it took them forty minutes of searching in Annie’s old rattletrap Dodge, with the vents blowing hot air and the brakes squealing ominously, before they finally pulled to a stop outside a spread that matched the faded photos. The location, Erin recalled with a low incline of her head, was a side road off Houghton, just north of Interstate 10.

The Connor ranch never had been a large-scale operation, even when Lincoln’s parents had run the place. By the time Lincoln himself took possession of the title, most of the acreage had been sold off; what little remained had been adequate only for the pasturage of a half dozen horses, mostly elderly animals maintained at the expense of good-hearted owners.

The developer who’d purchased the ranch and acres of adjacent land in 1968 had meant to convert the property into housing tracts, but his ambitious plans had fallen through. The Connor homestead and the land around it, remote and unwanted, had been forgotten. When Erin and Annie found the ranch in 1985, it lay in forlorn disrepair, unoccupied for seventeen years.

Well, it was occupied now. Her abductor had bought it. Bought it and taken down the sign.

But why? What would he want with it? What could this place possibly mean to him?

Nothing, obviously—unless he’d lived here himself.

But no one had lived here in years, in decades. No one had lived here since Lydia, Lincoln, and ...

“Oliver,” she breathed.

The thought was dazzling like a blow. She groped for the chair and sank into it.

The man holding her captive couldn’t be Oliver Ryan Connor.

Oliver was dead.

Wasn’t he?
Wasn’t he?

Eyes shut, lips pursed, Erin tried to recall what little she had ever known about Lydia’s son.

Most of what she’d heard had been local gossip, circulated in school. The murder-suicide had been a noteworthy local news item in 1968, and even in the mid-’70s, when Erin and Annie were growing up in Lydia’s house, it had not been forgotten. Other kids their age had heard the details from older siblings, and when they learned the two girls were living with Lydia Connor, they had talked.

From them, and later in more detail from the library’s newspaper archives, Erin had learned how Lincoln Connor had tracked down his son, shot him, and turned the gun on himself.

That was the official version, at least, the one accepted by everybody. But suppose it wasn’t the truth. Suppose Oliver hadn’t died in that clearing of Prescott National Forest, but somehow had duped the authorities into believing otherwise.

Suppose he’d changed his identity, relocated to the Great Lakes region, only to find that his first episode of homicidal violence wasn’t enough, that the same compulsion to kill would rise in him periodically, when his fingers would tingle and his ears would chime.

The aura phase. First stage of a seizure, perhaps an epileptic fugue state ...

“Of course,” Erin murmured.

He
was
Oliver. He must be.

Because she, too, was an epileptic. For both of them to suffer from variants of the same affliction could not be a coincidence.

Having studied epilepsy to better understand her own condition, she knew how rare it was. Less than one percent of the general population exhibited the syndrome. But among children of epileptics, the percentage ran as high as six percent. And when both parents had epilepsy, the percentage of affected children rose to twenty-five percent, clearly demonstrating the affliction’s hereditary component.

Among the Morgans, only Lydia had shown any epileptic tendencies—occasional petit-mal seizures with retrograde amnesia. Presumably either Rose Morgan or her husband, Joseph, Erin’s maternal grandparents, had carried a genetic predisposition toward seizures without exhibiting identifiable symptoms.

Both Lydia and Maureen must have inherited the trait, though Maureen never had shown any evidence of it. The syndrome had been passed on from Maureen to Erin, and from Lydia to Oliver.

“We’re family,” she whispered, blinking at the thought. “He and I—the same background. Same blood ...”

And if he had bought the ranch of his childhood, kidnapped his cousin—his foster sister, in fact—then he must want something from her, something more than therapy.

She couldn’t guess what it was. Perhaps he himself didn’t know.

But whatever it was he wanted, she would find out soon enough. When she did, she would understand him.

And then, almost certainly, she would die.