Disturbance (30 page)

T
en. Nine. Eight …”

Parrish was standing outside the bathroom door, counting down the time I had left in the two minutes of privacy allotted to me—one hundred and twenty seconds of a small degree of freedom.

I had awoken as the SUV stopped before a freestanding cinder-block building with a corrugated tin roof. Parrish pressed a remote, and a metal door rolled up. We drove into the building, he pressed the remote again and shut off the engine.

The men got out of the car but left the doors open. Donovan walked straight back to the bathroom, not doing anything to help me but not asking anyone’s permission to move around as he pleased. Marking his territory first?

The others followed suit. Next, Parrish ordered Donovan to bring me to the bathroom. He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, which is far from the case. Although running has kept me lean, I’m five seven in my bare feet. He set me on my feet and pulled out a knife.

“What are you doing?” Parrish asked angrily.

“I’m not going to carry her. There’s more tape. I’ve only got one back.”

Not
that
heavy
, I thought.

“She’s not that heavy,” Parrish said, instantly proving he could still unsettle me with no more than a few words.

“You’re in no shape to carry her, and neither is Kai,” Donovan said. He bent and sliced through the tape that bound my ankles. He straightened. “I’m probably going to end up carrying everything anyway, so I’m not going to risk injury now.”

Parrish watched him move the knife toward my hands. “You are not going to free her hands!”

Donovan looked at me. There was something so powerful, so compelling in his gaze—for the first time, I felt frightened by him. I found myself struggling to name that something even as I felt it hit me like a blow.

It was not as if he cast a spell. I would have laughed at an attempt to cast a spell.

He did not hypnotize me. Hypnotism seemed a very weak thing next to this.

It was akin to command but not that, even though it demanded obedience and promised consequences for disobedience. It was sharp and cold and said, in no uncertain terms, that any ideas I cherished about myself mattered not a whit to him, that in this particular moment, all that was true was what he was about to say to me, and whether I liked it or not was utterly immaterial. Giving him my undivided attention seemed all that allowed me to breathe.

My mouth went dry.

I felt sure he knew that, knew my heart rate had quickened, knew I had broken out in a cold sweat. Felt sure that no condition or emotion of mine was unknown to him.

When he spoke, he did not raise his voice. He said, calmly and matter-of-factly, “If you use your hands to attack any of us or try to escape, I’ll cut them off. Then I’ll bandage your wrists so that you will live long enough to experience things that will
make you think losing your hands wasn’t so bad—compared to what followed.” He paused. “So, Irene, are you going to leave here with your hands attached to your wrists?”

I could not breathe, let alone speak. I nodded.

I felt faint as I watched the blade move toward my hands, arcing precisely and quickly to slice the tape between my wrists. I did not move.

He sheathed the knife and took me gently by the arm. He began to guide me toward the back of the building. I went as easily as if he had me on a leash. We passed Parrish, who seemed stunned, as did Kai. I couldn’t blame them.

When we were out of earshot of either of them, Donovan said softly, “Are you okay?”

Startled, I looked back up at him. The icy look was gone. The man who had intervened at the café, the man who had tapped out a little reassuring message to me was back. But who the hell was he?

“You did well,” he added. “Keep acting afraid of me.”

That wasn’t going to be a problem.

Parrish seemed to snap out of whatever daze he was in and told me I had exactly two minutes to use the bathroom before he would come in and force me out of it. Not surprisingly, to someone who was thinking
At least I still have my hands
, that threat wasn’t as powerful as he might have hoped it would be.

Even with the time limit, I had a chance to wash my face and hands and spend glorious seconds without Parrish or his spawn sharing the same four walls. Maybe not enough time to completely center myself but enough to get rid of the worst of my shakiness.

I made a quick search of my pockets, in case I didn’t get a chance to look through them again. Energy bars, the winter gloves that had been in the duffel.
Cheer up! You’re not a human bomb!

There was no mirror on the bathroom wall, for which I felt grateful. If you had asked me just weeks before if I would have thought of a small bathroom in an industrial building in the Mojave as my idea of a slice of heaven …

Well, it’s not the past, it’s now. Take what you have.
I knew I also had to stop thinking about all the horrific things Parrish might do in the future, had to stop wishing that what had happened hadn’t. It happened. I slowed my breathing, calmly opened the bathroom door, and walked out when Parrish was still on “five.” That was clearly a letdown for him, which made it easier for me to keep my head up.

There was no kitchen per
se, but near the back wall was a long folding table surrounded by metal folding chairs and a metal counter that held a small refrigerator. Ian told me to sit at the table and opened the refrigerator, which was stocked with water bottles and ham and cheese sandwiches. I ate and drank what was given to me without protest. No one addressed any remarks to me or discussed any plans, which aided my efforts to calm down.

The meal was mostly silent. Kai had stretched his legs out on the one empty chair at the table, until Donovan raised an eyebrow at him. He then put both feet on the floor.

Parrish kept looking at Donovan in a considering way, as if gauging whether he was an asset or a threat.

Kai also appeared interested in Donovan, although the interest seemed different, almost wistful. Was he longing for a big brother?

What, I wondered, had Kai’s childhood been like? For all I knew, he had met some of his half siblings before now. I doubted it, though. He struck me as a loner, but I might have been mistaking his aloofness toward me for a general policy. I
thought of my conversations with his neighbors and decided that the bonhomie edition of Kai Loudon did not exist. He had been persuasive with his mother’s health care providers but did not seem to have any close friends or go out of his way to seek the society of others. Violet’s paralysis made the perfect shield.

Was there ongoing contact with Parrish’s other children, if any? If any. How many half siblings were there? Were there daughters as well as sons?

I thought of Marilyn Foster and Cade Morrissey, and wondered how many women might have put their children by Parrish up for adoption, felt ashamed of the connection to him. Or believed it was in the children’s best interest to be hidden from their father or left unaware of their connection to him.

At the time of Parrish’s first arrest for murder, there had been shocked and disbelieving protests by people who had worked with him or lived near him, saying he was a quiet and charming man. Perhaps he had used some of that charm on women like Violet.

I wondered why he hadn’t been sued for child support. Perhaps he had been. It seemed more likely that he would have conned these women, given them phony information about himself, kept most of his encounters short and superficial. I thought of the things Marilyn’s friends had said about that evening in the park—perhaps he chose vulnerable women, domineered them during brief relationships, then made them so afraid of him it was unlikely they would protest or do anything to draw his attention back to them once he was gone.

My previous experience with Parrish had eventually led me to take up a grim study, an effort to understand more about serial killers. I did so in part, I suppose, to try to understand why he had chosen me to play a role in his plans but mostly to know my enemy. So the idea of family links between pathologically violent men was not difficult for me accept.

Over the past twenty years, neuroscientists, geneticists, and others had been discovering more about the biology of violent behavior. Imaging systems were being used to study the brains of violent individuals and had determined that, in at least some cases, there were physical differences in the way their brains worked. Magnetic resonance imaging studies of the brains of violent individuals taken while they were viewing images of violence indicated areas of their brains were active that were not active in nonviolent individuals viewing the same images. Discoveries had been made of genetic links to high-risk behaviors. In recent years, scientists had been studying the role of variants of the MAOA or “warrior gene” in antisocial and violent behavior, especially when severe childhood abuse was also a factor. Oddly, a variant of that gene might even be a predictor for credit card debt. I’d put that tidbit to use in a consumer economics story last year.

Other factors played their own roles in violent behavior, of course, and these studies did not imply that every child of someone who killed was destined to be a killer. There was a great deal of work yet to be done before the biology of violence could be thoroughly understood.

Kai’s neighbor had hinted that Kai’s stepfather abused him. I looked again at Donovan, wondering what his family history had been. I wasn’t sure what to believe of what he had told me at the Fireside.

So here I was at the family dinner table, such as it was. It occurred to me that Donovan’s display of dominance had not only allowed me to move around without my hands and ankles taped but had probably allowed me to use the restroom with the door closed. It might also be why I was eating at the table, treated not as an object but as an individual during that meal. Donovan was distracting the others from me though not overtly.

“What do you want to do about sleeping shifts?” he asked Parrish.

Parrish puffed up a little with this deference. He checked his watch. “It’s ten o’clock now. I want to be on the road again at two. Kai will stand guard.”

No one raised an objection. Donovan again took on the role of leading me, holding my upper arm and guiding me to an area where there were five cots. He took me to the one closest to the wall and told me to lie down, that Kai would not hesitate to shoot me if I moved from the cot. He then lay down on the cot next to mine, facing away from me.

Parrish laughed as he took the next one over and said, “Yes, Irene, you’ll soon be very busy, so rest up.”

Whether Donovan’s positioning was protective or possessive, I could not tell. I did not fall asleep as quickly as I had in the SUV. My last waking moments were spent wondering why there were five cots and five chairs at the table. I remembered that Violet had said Quinn Moore was one of the half siblings. I had no idea why he was missing, but I felt a flicker of hope. Maybe he was ratting out his “family.” Then again, maybe they had killed him. If nothing else, the extra chair and cot must mean they were shorthanded now. I was outnumbered only three to one instead of an obviously planned-for four to one.

I would have felt better with a different lineup on the opposing team.

I woke with something cold
and hard pressing painfully against my forehead and opened my eyes to see Kai Loudon staring down at me. He pushed a little harder, until I thought he might intend to kill me just by driving his gun barrel into my skull.

He smiled. “Wake up, you fucking bitch.”

R
achel had taught me a set of moves that I probably could have executed before he executed me. Even lying flat on my back, I could have disarmed him, especially since he apparently didn’t think I was much of a threat. He was right-handed—his wounded arm would make him even more vulnerable. I could make him feel intense pain and possibly disable him enough to keep him from coming after me if I made a run for it.

Which still left two other assholes to deal with. And the run-for-it idea had a major drawback—even if I somehow managed to get out of the building, there was nothing close by that would offer cover or a haven. Recapture seemed inevitable, and the follow-up might include removal of my hands, which would make everything else Rachel had taught me a little more difficult to do.

I decided to save my energy for a later fight, and in the meantime encourage his idea that I was incapable of self-defense. So far, all he had ordered me to do was wake up, and I had definitely obeyed.

I wondered, in those seconds
of looking into Kai’s eyes and seeing his desire to pull the trigger, if it might not be worth it to go ahead and resist while I could still breathe.

“Let’s go, Kai,” a voice said. To my surprise, it was Parrish’s.

Kai’s smile grew, and he eased up on the pressure, then stood.

“How’s the arm?” Donovan asked, and Kai finally looked away from me.

“Better. Still hurts, though.”

“I’m sure it does.”

“Kai,” Parrish said with impatience, “help me with the car. Donovan, tape her hands and feet again.”