See How She Dies (15 page)

Almost imperceptibly, the corners around the younger Polidori's mouth tightened. “I know her.”

“The way I heard it, you knocked her up.”

“What's your point, Logan?” Mario's eyes snapped with an inner fury as dark as hell. Despite all his wealth, the boy carried one helluva chip on his muscular shoulders.

“Somehow Danvers put a stop to it. Wouldn't let his daughter be seen with a Polidori. Made sure she never had the kid.” Logan set his empty glass on the desk.

“Is that so?”

“I don't know all the details, but I'm looking into them. My guess is you've got plenty of motive to get back at Witt Danvers.”

“Lots of people in this town would like to see Danvers go down,” Anthony said from his position behind the desk.

Logan lifted a bushy eyebrow. “Some more than others.”

“I was in Hawaii. On business. At the time of the attack on Zach Danvers. I was—”

“I know, sipping Mai Tais on the beach in Waikiki.” Logan set his glass on the desk. “But somehow Joey and Rudy messed up Zach Danvers and at the same time his kid sister and nanny were abducted.”

“My money's still on Zachary.” Mario's smile had turned cold. He shifted on the desk. “It's no secret that Zach hates Witt. If you ask me, he staged the whole thing about the attack against him to get back at his father. If you want to find out what happened to London, talk to Zach.”

 

“You think Dad would go to this much trouble if anyone else had been abducted?” Trisha demanded, her blue eyes cloudy with anger. “No way. He's in a state because it's London!”

Zach didn't want to hear it. Stretched out on a chaise near the pool, he closed his eyes behind the lenses of his sunglasses and wished Trisha would just go away. No such luck. She set up her easel in the shade from the old-growth fir trees that towered along the brick wall rimming the grounds. Sunlight dappled the grass and reflected off the water as Trisha adjusted a three-legged stool, trying to catch the right light.

The day was sweltering. Heat rose in waves that shimmered off the concrete near the pool house. Zach's head throbbed and his shoulder ached. He was recovering, but slowly. He grabbed his can of Coke and smiled to himself because he'd had the foresight to pour “the real thing” out of the can and fill it with Colt 45 malt liquor from a bottle he'd taken from the refrigerator. He'd probably get caught, but he really didn't care. He took a long swallow of the ale and felt it cool against the back of his throat. In a few minutes, he'd relax. In the meantime he'd ignore his sister.

“Dad's fit to be tied because the police and the FBI can't find out who's behind it,” she said, smudging her charcoal drawing with the tip of her finger. “He wants to blame the Polidoris just because those two guys who attacked you worked for them once.”

Why was she bothering him? Zach had only been home from the hospital for four days and this was the first time he'd ventured out of his room. He'd decided to rest by the pool because the four walls were closing in on him and he was going out of his mind staring at posters of Jimi Hendrix and Ali McGraw.

“Mom called the other day to see how you were doing…but you were sleeping or something.”

He didn't want to think about his mother. Eunice. Some mother she'd turned out to be.
A mother shouldn't admit this, Zach, but you've always been my favorite
. Her words still echoed in his mind. His chest was suddenly tight and he had trouble saying, “She stopped by the hospital.”

“And you wouldn't talk to her.”

“Nothin' to say.”

“Christ, Zach, you can be such a prick,” Trisha said, frowning at the image on her easel.

“Family trait.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” If she only knew. He reached onto the table and flipped on his transistor radio, hoping that music, hard rock, would drive her away. The radio crackled with static before he found a station blasting an old Rolling Stones hit. The throbbing beat of “Satisfaction” echoed over the aquamarine water.

“I can't get no…no, no, no, no…”

“I can't hear myself think with that blaring at me!”

He didn't respond. He didn't give a damn if she was stone deaf, he just hoped she'd quit yammering at him. He needed to be left alone. And he didn't want to think about his mother. Or London. Or anything. He took another gulp of the brew. Most of the time he felt that everyone, including Trisha, was pumping him for information about the kidnapping, as if they could make him slip up and admit that he'd taken the kid. But why? And how? And where?

He didn't trust anyone named Danvers. Maybe there was some truth about Polidori blood running through his veins, he thought with a sarcastic grimace. Wouldn't that be something—if he really turned out to be Anthony Polidori's son after all these years? It would explain a helluva lot—why he was Eunice's favorite, for crying out loud. But he didn't like the idea. Not a bit. It was true that Witt was a class A-1 bastard, no doubt about it, but Polidori was no better. For years the police had tried to connect him to organized crime.

“Turn that thing off!” Trisha screamed.

Zach ignored her request. “They have any luck trying to track down Ginny Slade's relatives?” he asked. Jason had told him how they'd torn the nanny's room apart. She seemed to be the key in the kidnapping. Her references had proved false and her family had all but disappeared.

“Not that I know.” Trisha angled her head, wrinkling her nose as she eyed her work. “But no one thinks she was in on it, otherwise she would have demanded money. And her checking account hasn't been touched. Still has a couple of hundred dollars in it. She's got savings, too, over at First National, I think. Nearly a thousand dollars. Still there.”

“How do you know so much?”

Trisha glanced at him a second. “I listen. At keyholes and open doors and air shafts.”

For the first time, Zach was interested in what his sister had learned. For years he'd thought Trisha totally self-absorbed. He assumed that she didn't care about anything other than herself, her manicure, and her latest boyfriend or a new mind-expanding high. Though lately, come to think of it, she hadn't gone out much. After the fiasco with Mario Polidori…Zach squinted at his sister. She was pretty, he supposed, with her thick reddish-brown hair and blue eyes. She wore too much makeup and her clothes too tight, but there was something about her that was appealing. For the most part, though, she was a pain in the ass.

At twenty, she was still taking art classes, had moved out of the house three or four times and had always returned with a broken heart, busted for drugs, or flat broke. Sometimes all three. The drug busts—mainly marijuana and once in a while a little hash—were handled discreetly and without arrest by good ol' Detective Jack of the Portland police, and Witt had always covered her bad checks and escalating credit card balances. The broken hearts weren't so easily mended. Trisha had a long track record of picking losers. Including Mario Polidori.

No matter what the circumstances of her latest source of rebellion, Trisha always returned—tail between her legs, fingers stretched toward Daddy's wallet. Zach figured it was because the world, with its demand of rent and electricity payments, was too difficult for his sister. She was better off having Daddy pay the bills.

He leaned back in the chaise and regarded her. Already, she had a pinched set to her mouth that reminded him of his mother. In the past few years, ever since the Polidori mess, Trisha had changed. Zach didn't know exactly what had happened between Mario and her, but he'd heard arguments that had reverberated through the timbers of the old house and Zach had guessed that Mario Polidori had used his sister to get back at Witt. Trisha had been an innocent, but more than willing, accomplice in the war of hate that had existed between the families for nearly a century. The feud didn't seem to be stopping anytime soon. Not that Zach cared.

“You know, Zach,” Trisha said, spinning her easel around so he could see her work, a caricature of him as a laid-up, unshaven, generally slovenly teenager lying on a chaise lounge and swilling Coke. A blaring radio and can of Colt 45 were propped on a nearby table. “You'd better be careful.”

“Very funny,” he remarked, pointing at her picture.

“I'm not the only one who can see through you, you know.” She stuffed her charcoal back in its box. “Kat and Dad, they're on to you. There's a lot of talk about boarding school or sending you off to the ranch to and I quote, ‘work his butt off and keep him out of trouble.'”

“No way,” he responded. He gazed up at the thin clouds moving in from the west.

“Any way you look at it, boarding school or shoveling shit at the Lazy M beats MacLaren,” she said, mentioning the Oregon school for underage male criminals.

“Is that where they think I'll end up?”

“I don't know what they think, but it's my guess, Zach. You haven't exactly been easy to live with since you got out of the hospital and that stunt with the reporters—”

He grinned, rubbing the swollen knuckles of his fist with his other hand.

“—you're not winning friends.”

“The guy deserved it.” Zach could still hear questions, see the cameras pointed at him as he'd tried to get out of Witt's Lincoln and away from the reporter who had appeared from behind the hedge.

“Can you explain why you were attacked on the night your half-sister—”

He'd reacted and his fist had slammed into the guy's jaw with a bone-jarring crunch. Blood had spurted. Pain had ricocheted up Zach's arm and the man had fallen, groaning to the ground. There was already talk of a lawsuit.

Now, as if reading her brother's thoughts, Trisha sighed and gathered up her easel.

“You think I kidnapped London?” he asked, telling himself he didn't care one way or the other.

Shaking hear head and staring pointedly at the scar that still edged his face, she said, “I don't know what you did that night, but you're not telling the truth…not all of it, and you're going to end up taking the blame for this one unless you come clean.”

The muscles in the back of his neck tightened because he'd thought the same thing. “Since when are you the goddess of virtue?” He took another gulp of beer, drained the Coke can and crumpled it in his fist.

Trisha pinned him with eyes that had seen too much pain for so short a life. “You don't know anything about me, Zach. You've never even tried to get to know me, have you? Look, I was just trying to do you a favor, but forget it.” She headed back to the house. “I made a mistake. It's your funeral.”

 

Katherine's eyelids stuck together. Her mouth tasted like she'd been licking an ashtray and her head pounded above her temples. She forced one eye open and sunlight streaming through a partially open window, nearly blinded her. Groaning, she rolled over and wondered about the sadness that was a horrible weight on her heart.

She was in her own bedroom and…Oh, God…the reality came crashing back to her fragile brain. London was gone, abducted nearly two—or was it three?—weeks before. Desperation, like the horrid beast it was, clawed at her from the inside. She needed a cigarette. With numb fingers she reached to the bed table and found an empty pack of Virginia Slims, which she flung onto the floor. Tears flooded her eyes. She couldn't take this, day after day. The bumbling policemen, the useless FBI, and the media. Damn the media. The few reporters who had gotten past the guards had asked questions that made her heart bleed and the fire in their eyes, all looking for a story, and insensitive to her pain…No wonder Zach had punched out a reporter and broken a photographer's camera as he'd returned to the house from the hospital.

She stood on unsteady legs, then drew the drapes open a little farther. Two squad cars and a plain, stripped-down Chevrolet were scattered on the circular drive. Farther away, past the sloping front lawns and tended rose gardens, she caught a glimpse of the front gates where the vultures gathered. Two or three cars were parked in the shade of an ancient oak that spread its branches over the brick wall which kept the scavengers at bay.

“I hope you all rot in hell,” she muttered, letting the drapes fall back into place.

What time was it? Bleary eyes focused on the clock. Two in the afternoon. She'd slept seventeen hours, drugged by Doc McHenry's sleeping pills and God-only-knew what else. Somehow, some way, she'd have to pull herself together. With or without London.

That thought caused her knees to buckle and she grasped the edge of the bureau to steady herself. She'd find her baby. She had to. She couldn't trust the federal government or the police, and Witt, well, he hadn't been much help. The fact that he would no longer sleep with her, insisting that she needed her rest, bothered her. She knew the real reason. He was afraid that she would require more than a pat on the head, that she might need a kiss, a hug, even her husband to make love to her to comfort her.

God, she needed a cigarette.