Light Before Day (47 page)

And now Joseph Spinotta was dead.

"Terrance, listen to me!" I called out in a firm voice that got the man's attention.

The perimeter alarm on Rogers belt went silent for a few seconds. Then it started again. I ignored it.

"Who abducted the boys, Terrance?" I shouted over the beeping.

He looked from the speakerphone to me, torn, totally lost.

"Answer me and you'll find out who just broke through your fence!" I screamed.

"Reynaldo Reyez!" Terrance gasped.

"Have you ever laid eyes on Reynaldo Reyez?"

"No!" he gasped, leveling the gun on me. "Reynaldo still thinks Spinotta is in charge. We let him. Spinotta hired him."

"Did Joseph ever tell you how he met Reynaldo Reyez?" I asked.

Terrance just stared at me.

"Answer him!" Caroline shouted.

"No!" Terrance cried.

I heard Caroline mutter something in shock. She had already figured out where I was headed.

"A week ago," I said, struggling to control my voice, "Billy Hatfill called you and told you to kill a man named Corey Howard."

"Yes," Terrance said instantly. "He said Corey was trying to blackmail him."

"Did the name Corey Howard mean anything to you?" I asked.

"No!" he spat.

He was telling the truth. Joseph Spinotta never told his three companions who had hooked him up with an assassin named Reynaldo Reyez. Maybe he had kept this secret on purpose, in the hope that it would someday bring down the young men who had taken him prisoner.

"Who killed Corey Howard?" I asked.

Terrance didn't answer. He could tell that Caroline and I were already a hundred steps ahead of him, and that seemed to terrify him more than the shrill summons of the perimeter alarm.

"Who killed Corey Howard?" I asked.

I saw Scott Koffler's naked body, wrapped in a towel, murdered before he could tell me what Corey had hired him to do. I heard James Wilton telling me that Corey was the only one with the motive to kill the man, even as I had insisted that Billy Hatfill had done the job. I heard another perimeter alarm, the one on Caroline's property that had gone off the night before, suggesting that we were being followed. I saw a golden chain with a scorpion on the end, tossed at my feet, solid evidence that the man I had known as Corey Howard was dead. If it hadn't been removed from his neck by his killer, then who could have possibly handed it over to the Vanished Three?

"Answer the question, Terrance!" I said. "Who killed Corey Howard?"

"Reynaldo Reyez."

For a long while, the three of us listened to the perimeter alarm. Then Caroline spoke up. "You fucking idiots," she said. "You called Corey and asked him to kill himself."

C H A P T E R 23

Terrance Davidson ripped the phone off the mantelpiece and sent it flying across the room. Then he thrust the gun under my jaw and undid the wooden cuffs around my wrists. He forced me to my feet, turned me around, and jammed the gun into my lower back.

"What the fuck was she talking about?" Terrance screamed in my ear.

"You heard her."

He forced me through the front door of the villa and out onto the porch. The vineyard below us was silent and empty. A vague light came from the barn beyond it. Inside the villa, the perimeter alarm was still howling.

"Where's Caden McCormick?" I asked.

"Why?"

"Because that's who he wants," I said.

I lifted one foot off the edge of the porch and rested it lightly on the top step. I listened to Terrance's ragged breathing. Then I kicked myself backward and felt the barrel of the pistol slide up my spine. Terrance lost his footing, and the two of us stumbled backward through the front door.

We hit the concrete floor and I rolled off him, scrambling to my feet just as he raised the gun at me. I flew out the front door as a gunshot tore through the frame above my head. I hit the bottom of the steps and started running for the cover of the Monterey pines along the side of the house. Corey was on the property and Terrance had just given away his location by firing a shot at me. My only instinct was to get as far away from Terrance as possible.

I saw the squat, rounded building hidden in the trees that I had noticed earlier and ran for it, expecting to find a locked door. But it was open, and I stepped inside and locked it behind me.

Inside was a long wooden table with a flat-screen computer monitor on it and a row of blinking CPUs underneath. There was an open can of Diet Coke next to the keyboard along with a set of keys. I pocketed the keys. Terrance Davidson must have been sitting at this desk when he received the phone call from Caroline Hughes. He had dashed out in a panic. On the computer monitor's screen, I saw an Excel file. It was a customer list. Five of the customers' names were in red, including that of Cameron Davis.

On the wall overhead was a bank of video monitors, three of them showing silent images of the property's distant perimeter fence. Beyond the fence were low, rolling hills dotted by sparse stands of oak trees. The three monitors below them gave interior views of the villa. Another monitor showed a garage buried in the oak trees that ran alongside the vineyard. The Suburban was parked outside.

Terrance Davidson appeared on one monitor at a heavy wooden door somewhere inside the villa. He punched numbers on a keypad in the wall next to the door. I figured he was trying to get to the boys. But I could see the boys' living quarters; a camera was angled down the length of a hallway that had dormitory-style rooms. The doors were open, giving me glimpses of rumpled twin beds. In a central living area, the big screen television flickered. No one was watching it. The boys were gone. They had either been set free or Corey had them in custody. Considering that they were evidence of his crimes, I didn't want to think about what he might to do to them.

A series of soft beeps came from the wall next to me. I saw a keypad just like the one Terrance Davidson was using inside the villa. Next to the keypad was the almost invisible outline of a door in the black-painted wall.

The lock clicked. Whatever code Terrance had entered into the keypad had unlocked the door right next to me. I drew it open slowly and saw a tiny cell with dark-blue walls and a twin bed with white plush bedding. A flat-screen television was broadcasting a succession of pristine landscape photographs designed to soothe the prisoner.

Caden McCormick sat on the floor, his knees against his chest. His head had been shaved, and his cheeks were sunken. He had been in this new home for almost four weeks. Obviously, he had not been ready to play with others. A plate of food lay overturned on the floor in front of him.

"Caden?"

His gaunt, glazed eyes stared at my legs. "I need to see my mom," he said quietly and determinedly.

"We need to go, Caden."

"I
need
to see my mom," he repeated. "She knows about the demon! She wants me to be safe!"

Whatever life had been offered in this place, Caden McCormick had fought it. Maybe that would have changed over time.

"I'll take you to see your mom," I said. "Just come with me, okay?"

He brought his deadened eyes to mine. "Are you lying?"

I turned and looked behind me through the doorway. On one of the interior monitors, I saw Terrance Davidson lying facedown in front of the door he had been trying to open moments earlier. Corey had entered the house and killed him, just like the eight meth addicts whose sons he had taken. Just like his own mother. Now Corey knew that his brother was not among the other boys.

"The demon's back, Caden," I said. "We need to go before he finds us."

The boy tensed, assessing my face with what seemed like desperate calculation. Then he mustered some reserve of courage that I would have never expected to find in a thirteen-year-old and got to his feet, his chin held high. I took his hand. Corey was nowhere to be seen on the video monitors. I studied the image of the Suburban and the garage and mapped our course.

The boy's legs gave way as we started to move. He was skin and bones. I squatted and told him to get onto my back. He climbed on. When his hands met in front of my chest, I got to my feet, opened the door, and ran.

I ran through the Monterey pines, down the hill, and into the oaks that ran alongside the vineyard. The oak branches were low, and I felt Caden tuck his face to my left shoulder as we went. We reached the barn. On the other side of it, I could see the garage and the Suburban in the distance. Getting there meant a long run through open space.

I didn't stop to doubt myself. Caden let out a small wail when he realized we were out in the open. I kept running. The barn shielded us from the villa for a few seconds, and then we were out in the open again. I was running so fast that I slammed into the side of the Suburban. Caden dropped from my back and fell to the dirt on his side. In one motion, I opened the driver's-side door. Caden crawled over the gearshift and into the passenger seat. I stabbed Terrance's key into the ignition, started the engine, and slammed on the gas, ripping the steering wheel to one side so I could accelerate and avoid hitting the garage at the same time.

We rocketed forward and plummeted down a long grassy hill. The trees broke and I saw an expanse of hills before us offering no sign of civilization. I glanced at Caden and told him to put his seat belt on. Instead of obeying, he pulled an oily black pistol out of the armrest by the handle.

"Put your seat belt on!" I shouted.

He had seen stronger anger than mine. Without so much as blinking, he turned forward, buckled his seat belt, and held the barrel of the gun in both hands. I swerved to avoid a gnarled oak tree and felt the impact of a large rock against the front tires. The land bucked underneath us like ocean waves.

Finally the perimeter fence rose in front of us, yards of moonlit chain link topped by coils of razor wire. Beyond it, more grassy hills like the ones we had just traveled. No dirt road. No highway. No lights in the distance. I had to drive right through the fence and keep going.

Then I saw the headlights behind us, cresting the hills we had traveled, disappearing from view only to reemerge again. At the top of a hill, when the front tire of the Suburban exploded, I assumed we had been shot at. Then the entire carriage jerked and screamed beneath us. In the rearview mirror, I saw a dark shape fly backward away from the car. The tire. The Suburban had been sabotaged before we set foot in it.

The entire nose of the carriage dropped. I slammed on the brakes too late. Speed and gravity formed a deadly union. My stomach rose into my throat. I realized we had left the ground. I heard Caden scream, saw the rocky slope slide beneath us across the windshield.

I tasted something coppery. I felt fingers stroking my face and a powerful arm encircling my lower back. I felt my shoulders scraping against the mangled frame of the Suburban's driver's-side window; then I was lifted into open air. When I opened my eyes, the man I had known as Corey Howard didn't smile. He lowered me to the earth and set my back against the side of the black Lincoln Navigator he had pursued us in. Several yards away, the Suburban lay on its roof, the weight of its carriage resting forward on its crushed nose. The driver's-side headlight shot a mangled beam across the wind-rippled grass.

Corey held my face in both hands to make sure I could keep my head steady. He was clean-shaven, his long dark eyes unblinking, and there was nothing in them to suggest that he had almost driven me to my death.

"They told you to kill yourself," I said.

"Yes."

"You pretended to be Reynaldo Reyez," I said. "You abducted those boys. You killed those people."

"I saved them. You know that," he said. "That's what Joseph Spinotta said he wanted to do."

"It was Everett, wasn't it?" I asked him. "You saw Everett come off of your uncle's yacht, and you thought that's what your brother was going to turn into. So you tried to get your brother back."

He nodded emphatically. Too emphatically. I realized I was giving him his story, taking the burden off him. He had been alive the entire time. He had known what Billy Hatfill was going to do to me and he had done nothing to stop it.

"I made a mistake, Adam," Corey said. "You're right. I saw Everett. I had to go to Billy. I wasn't scheduled to deliver another kid to them, so I wouldn't have a chance to follow them afterward. But Billy said he didn't know where Spinotta was."

So far his story matched the one Billy Hatfill had given me. I stayed silent. There was still something he wanted from me, and if I kept him talking I would find out what it was.

"But Billy had a plan," he said. "He said we could get you to go after them."

"And you did," I said. "You set me up. You used Daniel Brady to do it."

"You're right. As soon as I gave Billy the tape, I got a phone call. It was Roger Vasquez. He asked me to kill a man named Corey Howard." He sneered at the damp earth between us and shook his head, as if the two of us had been snared in a practical joke without real consequence.

"He said I needed to do it to protect the operation and all the good work they were doing. Billy thought it was you on that tape, and I knew he'd show it to you."

He squeezed my shoulder. "But I knew you were stronger than Billy thought you were."

He seemed to sense my skepticism. He grabbed me by both shoulders and brought his face an inch from mine. "I believed in Billy's plan, Adam. I knew you would find Spinotta. So I waited. I watched you become the kind of man you always wanted to be, the kind who never gave up.

Most of the time I had tears in my eyes, watching you . . . grow."

"You killed Scott Koffler."

"I was protecting you."

"You killed him before he could tell me anything."

"He wasn't going to tell you shit! He went after your friend Nate!"

He took my face in his hands. "I
chose
you, Adam. I knew you could do it. Come on, Adam.

Look at all the things you've done."

"I can't. I'm too busy looking at the things I've seen."

"They paid me six hundred thousand dollars for each boy," he said. "I saved it all. We could have a life together. The three of us. You, me, and Caden. I want my brother to see your courage. I already made one terrible mistake with him. You can keep me from making another."