No One Needs to Know (38 page)

She remembered the silver minivan that had been following her earlier. Had they caught up with her again?

She glanced around the storage space for something she might use to defend herself. But she didn’t see anything. She spotted an ugly Christmas wreath sticking out of a Nordstrom bag. She carefully took the wreath out, set it aside, and loaded up the bag with the two files.

She heard footsteps. They seemed to be getting closer.

Poking her head out of the stall, she didn’t see anyone coming down the corridor. She grabbed the Nordstrom bag, and crept out of the storage cubicle. The chain-link door yawned as she closed it. She fastened the lock in place, and gave it a spin.

She padded down the corridor—past the clown mannequin locker.

But then she came to a stop. Through the chain-link cages and over the piles of junk, she glimpsed someone moving up the other row of lockers. Laurie wondered if they could see her, too. She thought about making a run for the exit.

Then she heard a girl giggling. She smelled marijuana smoke.

Somebody let out a wolf cry, and it echoed throughout the warehouse.

The girl laughed again. “Shut up!” she said to her boyfriend. “You want us to get caught? Now, I know their locker is around here someplace.”

“Shit, I can’t believe your father has an old
Penthouse
collection in this place . . .”

Laurie let out a sigh, and then took a couple of deep breaths. She retreated toward the door. She thought about switching on the light—to give the kids a dose of the scare they’d given her—but decided to leave them in peace.

Her heart was still racing as she climbed back in the car. She placed the Nordstrom bag on its side on the passenger floor. The rain had eased to a steady downpour. Driving back to the compound’s front entrance, she wondered once again exactly how she’d get out of there. But as she approached the gate, it opened automatically.

She passed through the gate, and glanced in the rearview mirror.

All at once, a van sped by on the access road ahead of her, its horn blaring.

Laurie slammed on the brake. The tires screeched.

Trying to catch her breath, she sat there under a streetlight with her Camry’s nose in the road. The windshield wipers squeaked as they moved back and forth.

Laurie glanced down at the bag on the passenger floor. Some of the files had spilled out. The one on top had shadows of raindrops racing down it. The black-and-white photo was of a policeman standing over a shallow grave. He pointed down at a small, charred thing wrapped in a filthy blanket. Laurie didn’t have to look at the back of the photo to figure out what it was.

She knew it was Baby Patrick, and the sight of it broke her heart.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
EIGHT

Wednesday, July 9, 11:40
P.M.

Seattle

H
e was dead tired. But tonight—like the last couple of nights—Adam was afraid to fall asleep. He was worried he’d be woken by that music again, the same music they’d played while stabbing to death his brother and sister-in-law.

Stretched out on the sofa bed, he stared up at the ceiling of his friends’ garage apartment/studio. He thought about Laurie Trotter. Adam liked her, and trusted her. But he didn’t want to believe her theory about his dad possibly having a connection to the Styles-Jordan murders. Still, if it was true, that might explain why someone was “getting even” by killing Dean and Joyce that way.

Obviously, the secret from his father’s past wasn’t some private indiscretion or small misdemeanor. It had to be something pretty damn serious. But was he really involved in one of the most notorious crimes of the century? Uncle Marty had warned him:
“You can’t keep asking people about this. You ask the wrong person, and you’ll end up like your brother.”

His father was twenty-five when Elaina Styles and Dirk Jordan were murdered. From what Adam knew, his dad was single at the time, making a living in Seattle as a construction worker and going to business school at night. By his father’s own admission, he was “scared as hell” he’d get drafted and sent to Vietnam. He was several years away from meeting Adam’s mother and starting his own successful plumbing-supply business. Except for living in the same city where the Styles-Jordan murders had occurred, how could he be connected to those killings? Trent Hooper and a bunch of hippies had killed those people. The police had proven it, hadn’t they?

Yesterday, Adam had gone online and looked up the murders that had inspired this copycat killer. He hadn’t gotten too far in his research before finding photos of the crime scene from forty-four years ago. They were too sickening—and too damn similar to the scene he’d discovered in his brother’s living room early Monday morning. Adam hadn’t been able to look at any more.

He threw back the covers, and crawled out of bed. He figured if his father had something to do with those infamous murders, he needed to learn more about them—no matter how uncomfortable it made him.

But when he tried to start up his mobile device, he found it was out of juice. He got the cord out and plugged it in to recharge. His laptop was in the basement apartment, part of the crime scene—and inaccessible.

“Shit,” Adam muttered, pacing around in his undershorts. He sat down on the unmade sofa bed, and glanced out the window at Dave and Stafford’s house. Stafford had a desktop computer in his study.

Adam threw on his jeans, sneakers, and a
Family Guy
T-shirt Joyce had given him years ago. Grabbing the house keys, he headed out the door. “Eek, squeak, eek, squeak,” he muttered to himself as he climbed down the outside stairs. He’d only been staying in the studio above the garage for three nights now, and the sound of these stairs was already a familiar sound to him.

He let himself in the front door, and then made a beeline to the alarm box and punched in the disable code. His friends were well-off and had a big, beautiful, three-story mission-style home. Stafford’s study was on the second floor. They’d told Adam to please raid the refrigerator, because most of the food in there would go bad by the time they returned from their trip. So he poured himself a glass of milk, hoping it would make him fall asleep a little faster.

He drank it in front of the computer at Stafford’s desk. He read the Wikipedia entries for “Elaina Styles Murder” and “Trent Hooper.” He didn’t see how his father was even remotely associated with the case. Trent Hooper and his gang were never tried for the murders. But if the group’s suicide at the Biggs Farm wasn’t an admission of guilt, the police had mountains of evidence placing Hooper and three of his followers in that house in Magnolia the night Elaina, Dirk, and their son’s nanny were murdered. One of the killers even wrote a letter to a friend, bragging about what they’d done.

Adam started to nod off in front of the computer. He figured if he could fall asleep reading about this stuff, he could fall asleep anywhere. It was 12:36
A.M.
according to the clock at the bottom right corner of the monitor. He clicked out of Internet Explorer, and picked up his empty glass.

That was when he heard the noise downstairs—a squeak, like a chair moving across a hardwood floor.

Suddenly, he was wide awake. Adam told himself that it could have just been the house settling. It was a big old house, it made noise. With the glass in his hand, he crept out to the hallway and glanced down from the top of the stairs. The foyer looked empty. He couldn’t see any other room from where he stood.

He’d deactivated the alarm. He tried to remember if he’d locked the door behind him. It was on the catch, he knew that much. But it might not have been double-locked.

He heard a repeated
click-click,
the exact same sound his basement apartment door had made on the night of the murders.

Adam felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

He knew he was probably overreacting, but he couldn’t help it. He remembered Stafford once admitted that they kept a gun hidden on the top shelf of the bookcase in his study. He hurried back into the study and set down the empty glass. Then he grabbed the straight-backed desk chair, and pulled it over to the bookcase. Climbing up on the chair, he reached his hand behind the row of books on the top shelf. His fingers brushed against a small box. Grabbing it, he heard it rattle. He found a dark gray box with
Atlanta Arms & Ammo
on it. He set it on top of the row of books and hunted for the gun. He hadn’t handled a gun before, and wondered about the likelihood of it going off if he grabbed it the wrong way.
This was how the artist blew off his fingers.
Carefully, he took the gun by its muzzle and fished it out from behind the books. It was black—with Glock 19 imprinted along the top.

It sounded like floorboards creaking downstairs. Or was the noise coming from outside? He couldn’t tell.

Any minute now, he expected the sound of romantic bells chiming, and Dirk Jordan singing about Elaina.

Clutching the gun and box of bullets to his chest, Adam jumped down from the chair and almost tipped it over. He returned to the top of the stairs, and glanced down at the foyer once again. He almost expected to find the front door open, but it was shut. He didn’t hear anyone trying to get in. Had he imagined it before?

Or were they already in the house?

He heard a faint rustling. It seemed to come from somewhere between the side of the house and the garage. Then there was another sound:
Eek, squeak, eek, squeak, eek, squeak . . .

He hurried to the guest room, where the window looked out to the garage. Catching his breath, he hid behind the curtain and peered out toward the apartment. He didn’t see anyone on the stairs. Had they already ducked inside the studio? He was pretty sure he hadn’t locked the door. He hadn’t meant to stay here this long.

In the window across the way, he noticed he’d left the light on. He could see the foot of the bed and, in the background, some of Dave’s paintings leaning against the wall. A shadow swept over the room. Someone was in there, he was almost certain.

A small fogged window for the bathroom was near the top of the stairs. It was dark. Adam kept the bathroom door closed, because it blocked the entryway when open.

He watched a light suddenly appear on the other side of that fogged glass.

Someone had just opened the bathroom door to check if he was in there. They were looking for him.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured. Still clutching the gun and the box of bullets, he hurried back to Stafford’s study. He didn’t know the first thing about how to load and fire a gun. But he figured he’d have to learn fast. Once they realized he wasn’t there next door, they’d probably try here.

Adam’s hands were shaking as he set the gun and the box of bullets down on Stafford’s desk. He grabbed the cordless phone off its cradle and clicked on the Talk button.

Then, for the second time that week, Adam called 911.

Thursday, July 10, 1:06
A.M.

Laurie woke up with a start. She heard Joey crying.

Laurie had nodded off on the sofa in the living room. She still had a stack of papers from Maureen’s folder in her lap. Joey’s wailing came over the baby monitor, which was propped up against the second folder on the coffee table. The documents, photos, and news clippings slid from her lap and scattered to the floor as she jumped off the couch. She staggered upstairs to the baby’s room.

Standing up in his crib, Joey clutched the railing with one hand and banged at it with the other. Laurie rushed to him. He stopped crying long enough to catch his breath.

“What is it, sweetie?” she asked, picking him up. “Did you have a nightmare? Oh, and you have a wet diaper. C’mon, let’s take care of that . . .”

Laurie stepped back into her bedroom. “Mommy’s going to get you changed in just a minute,” she said over his fussing. Meanwhile, she checked her closet and the bathroom. No one, they were alone up here. Joey crying out in the middle of the night was nothing novel, but tonight it unnerved her.

Joey continued to fuss after she’d changed his diaper. “Well, you’re wide awake—unlike your dear mother,” she murmured, picking him up again. “Let’s go downstairs. Maybe you’ll doze off down there. The couch worked for Mommy, it might work for you . . .”

Back in the living room, she stepped over the papers on the floor and made her way back to the sofa. Joey quieted down while she rocked him in her lap and quietly warbled “Sweet Baby James.”

Laurie gazed down at the mess of documents and photos. She’d barely scratched the surface of what Maureen had collected.

By the time Laurie had gotten back home from E-Z Safe Storage—and then picked up Joey at the Cassellas’—it was after seven. She’d just put him to bed when Cheryl called, asking if she had drafted her response to Gil Garrett yet. And what was she planning for tomorrow’s dessert?

Desperate, Laurie went through her pantry, and found the ingredients for about three dozen Toll House cookies, which wasn’t nearly enough. After that, she got creative. She made thirty oatmeal raisin cookies with some cereal and a packet of Ocean Spray Craisins. Finally some leftover Granny Smith apples from today’s pie went into the forty cinnamon apple cookies.

Then she sat down and drafted her e-mail reply to Gil. She was exhausted and a bit peeved at Cheryl. After begging for help to get her an audience with Gil, suddenly Cheryl got picky about just who could attend this meeting. Laurie figured she should have told Cheryl to write the damn e-mail herself. It took her twenty minutes to compose just a few lines:

Dear Uncle Gil,

Thank you for getting back to me. I’m thrilled you’re considering our company to cater your surprise party in September. Any time you’d like to meet on Saturday afternoon works for us. We will have food samples for you to taste. My partner requests that we meet with you alone in order to make sure the focus is on your reaction to the food, without any outside influences. I hope that will be possible. We want to make certain your individual tastes and wishes are met. And please, do let us know if there’s any kind of food or theme you’re leaning toward for this party. Thanks again for considering us, Uncle Gil!