South by Southeast (38 page)

“I'm sorry about . . . your father.” She could barely whisper the words.

“I'm sorry the boat crashed,” I said, and that was true. I would have preferred to rip Escobar's trachea out of his throat with my own hands.

When I mentioned the boat, Cannon looked away as if I'd slapped her. She was mourning him. She folded her arms so tightly across her chest that I wondered how she could take a breath. She nodded. “Thank you. That's good of you to say. You didn't have to.”

One question answered: Escobar had not been in touch with her. Her body language didn't seem to reveal a secret—she missed him.

“This is going to be a difficult question,” I said. “Do you think he could be alive?”

Cannon looked at me, her eyes sweeping me like spotlights. I didn't read nervousness, guilt, or fear in her eyes, just naked hope. “What? Why are you asking that?”

“His body hasn't been found,” I said.

“I've already told the FBI—”

“I'm not the feds or the police,” I said. “We're just talking. I was there. I saw what happened. And I'm still not sure, that's all.”

Cannon waited a long time before she answered me. “He was
very good in the water,” she said quietly. “It's hard to imagine him drowning.”

The word
drowning
froze our conversation for another half a minute. We both wanted to discover that Escobar was alive, but for very different reasons.

“What about . . . deep-sea diving?” I said.

Slowly, she nodded. A hint of triumph lifted the corner of her mouth. “He wanted to get scuba-certified.”

“Wanted to?”

“Never did, as far as I know. He talked about it on vacations. In Maui. The Caymans. We always went snorkeling, even in Miami.”

“But he could have gotten certified without your knowledge?”

After a pause, Cannon nodded again. “Obviously, he didn't tell me everything.” Her voice was raw with too many emotions to decipher.

In the ensuing silence, I considered the scenario. If Escobar had equipped his boat with scuba gear beforehand—even just a tank—he could have found his way to safety. The water might have been as cool as sixty-five degrees, but it probably was closer to seventy, and neither temperature would have caused hypothermia right away. And we hadn't been that far from the shore. If he was a water buff, he might have made it even without certification.

I stared at Cannon. “And you haven't heard from him?”

Cannon tried to look indignant, but she couldn't pull it off. Her face seemed to fracture. “No,” she said firmly. “I knew that was why you wanted to come. To ask me that.”

“You're sure he hasn't tried to reach you?”

Cannon pursed her lips angrily. “I said no.”

“Would you tell me if he had?”

This time, her eyes dropped away. No, she might not tell me—which meant I couldn't believe a word she said. “I wouldn't want him . . . to hurt anyone else. If he did those things . . .”

“You have doubts?”

Cannon sat down in the plush editor's chair, pushing herself away from me to a monitor farther down the counter. She looked up at me with red eyes. “I know you've been through an ordeal I can't imagine, but put yourself in my place. I knew that man for ten years, and for three of them, we talked about having a baby, raising a . . . family.” She stopped herself from sobbing, pressing her fist to her mouth. “He had a temper. He yelled. He pushed me once—and we went to counseling. I never saw anything in him that matches what the FBI is saying.”

“The evidence in his boat? His laptop?”

“I'm not saying he didn't do it,” Cannon said. “I feel terrible for those women, for those families. For you. But if you had showed up here to try to convince me it was all a mistake, all lies, don't you think I could accept that a lot better? I knew a different man. I was hoping you . . .” She didn't finish, shaking her head. “Never mind. Are we done?”

“I understand that,” I said, purposely not answering her question. “The stories don't match the man or the creative genius you knew.” I hoped to keep her talking.

“And he was, you know—he was a genius,” Cannon said. After hesitating, she rolled her chair back toward me to turn the monitor on so I could see Brittany's terrified face. “What he was doing with
Freaknik
had never done before . . .”

She rolled the film, and Brittany's scream filled the room as she backed herself against a Florida coral stone wall, genuinely terror-filled. If I hadn't been there, I wouldn't have known she was acting. A monster in khakis lurched after her with his mouth open wide, teeth drooling blood. It took me a moment to realize that the monster was me.

“I wouldn't try to release that.” If she did, I would sue to try to prevent it.

“Of course not. It would be in terrible taste. But I'm going to finish it with the footage we have . . . and maybe one day, people
will see . . .” She shrugged and sighed. “It's like what happened in Cuba. The walking dead? If Gus was that monster, he didn't start out that way. Castro turned him that way. Do you know he saw his father shot to death right in front of him? His mother drowned on a raft trying to escape with him? Castro was the true monster.” Her voice shook.

I hadn't known about Escobar's mother. The biographies of Escobar floating on the internet had mentioned his father's political assassination but not the drowning.

“His mother drowned?” I said.

“Yes, she drowned off of the coast of Miami trying to save him and his sister during a storm,” Cannon said. “The fiftieth anniversary of her death just passed. He was so distracted he could barely work.”

My heart sped. Despite one guest shot on
Criminal Minds,
I wasn't an FBI profiler. But that did sound like a trigger for the accelerated pace of killings in Miami. “When was the anniversary?”

“About six weeks ago, on August 1. He cried in my arms like a little kid. He was very young when it happened, but he remembers. The idea that it was fifty years . . .”

“Was he in Miami on the anniversary?”

“Yes,” Cannon said. “We were doing last-minute scouting—” She stopped, as if she'd revealed something she shouldn't have.

“You sound like you still want to protect him, Louise.”

“Actually, I was imagining him making excuses, sneaking out of our room to drown those women . . .” She rubbed her arms. “Isn't that when the killings began?”

“It was.”

“Well, then. Stop trying to read my mind.”

I'd have cut off a finger to read her mind. Instead, I nodded. “Sorry.”

“Tell me why you're really here.”

“A woman I knew and worked with has been murdered,” I said.
“Evidence on the scene is pointing to me, and I didn't do it. The only explanation I can think of is that someone very smart and very angry is trying to set me up. I only know one person that smart and angry, and there's no proof he's dead.”

“The Hollywood Madam,” Cannon said, realizing. “I heard. But I thought that was organized crime, some Russian connection.” At least Nelson had stood by his promise to keep my name out of the investigation. Temporarily.

“Serbian,” I corrected her. “It wasn't.”

Unlike the police, Cannon didn't ask me why Escobar would target Mother. She understood right away. “That's horrible. But like I said, I haven't heard from him.”

“I hope you'll let me know if you do. My family might be in danger. My daughter.”

Cannon nodded, accepting. “Yes, they would be,” she said. “He held grudges. If it's Gus . . . I don't have to tell you there's no end to his creativity. He was a practical joker, always surprising people. I would be very careful if I were you. You would never see him coming.”

Her voice was so dispassionate that it chilled me, as much a threat as a warning. Her eyes didn't blink as she gazed at me. I saw a glimmer of madness.

I'd gained everything I could from Louise Cannon, the woman who might have known Gustavo Escobar best, so I thanked her and left her to the editing bay. After I closed the door, I heard Brittany Summers's frantic scream as Cannon edited Escobar's scene.

I usually pride myself on how well I read people. Cannon might not have known anything about Escobar's violent past or his whereabouts, or she could have been harboring him right under her desk.

For once, I had no idea.

BY SIX O'CLOCK,
Chela was sorry she'd stayed at the house by herself. The sun was still bright through the windows, but the day's colors were shifting. The idea of night took Chela back to Miami Beach, flashing her images of Maria's smile and Escobar's horrible disguise.

Chela was ashamed of her panic, but she scurried from the doors to the windows to make sure they were locked. In the living room, she peeked through the blinds to see if the paparazzi vans were still outside, and she was disappointed to find the street empty. Ten had installed a new video camera to monitor the front door, but that wouldn't protect her from Escobar.

Chela moved away from the window. A loud
click
when she walked past the kitchen made her jump. Her hand brushed against the Glock's lump in the back of her jeans, ready to draw. She stood frozen in the hall until she remembered that the fridge was getting loud and cranky with age. When the fridge's familiar whirring began, she exhaled and felt silly for her pulse pattering in her neck.

For the third time in ninety minutes, Chela pulled out her cell phone to call Bernard. He was still at work at Lionsgate, where he had an internship, but maybe his schedule had changed.

“Are you sure you can't get off early?” she said when he answered, her voice hushed.

“What happened?” he said, instantly concerned.

I'm a loony jumping at my own shadow,
she thought. “Nothing. I just . . .”

“Chela, I already told you—there's a meeting tonight. I might not get out until seven or seven thirty, and then there's the traffic from Santa Monica.” He didn't sound irritated, exactly, but he'd told her he could get in trouble with his boss if she kept calling. “What about Ten?”

Her eyes swept the room for movement or shadows. Nothing stirred.

“He's still with Little Miss Innocent, that freak's girlfriend,” she said, disgusted anew by the idea of Louise Cannon letting Escobar touch her and tell her God knows what. A bad taste furred her tongue. “Never mind. I'm sure he'll be back soon.”

“You sure you're okay?” Bernard said. “Maybe you could call Ten's girlfriend or—”

Chela rolled her eyes. “Thanks, but I'll talk to you later,” she said, and clicked off.

She felt her temper rising—that anger phase again—and she didn't want to take out her frustrations on Bernard. April wasn't all bad, but what could that clueless princess do to help her against Escobar?

It was as though Gustavo Escobar had been chasing her through her whole life. Chela remembered having vivid nightmares after her mother left, when she was alone with Nana Bessie and her grandmother got sicker and sicker, coughing through the night. Nana Bessie's wet coughs had sounded like death, growling to life in her room's dark corners as if to claim them both. Chela had dreamed about the coughing and the shadowy death for years after she left Minnesota—until she moved into Mother's.

Last night, for the first time in years, she'd had the dream again:
a shapeless mass spilling from the shadows, reaching out to touch her. Ten had called to tell her Mother was dead when she was barely awake, as if it were a part of her dream. No wonder she was spooked. Even the living room looked ominous to her, with its walls covered in old movie posters and a parade of dead stars. Everywhere she looked, she saw dead faces.

Everyone died. Everyone. Life was a lie. A joke.

Chela considered camping in the living room to watch TV, but a glance toward the Captain's half-open room door swamped her with sadness. She missed the sound of the news playing or the judge shows he'd liked so much. The living-room TV had been his, not hers. She could watch TV in her room with the door locked.

But as Chela walked toward the stairs, a sound above her froze her with her hand on the banister as soon as she clutched the polished wooden globe. It had sounded like a groan or a squeak, the sound of weight on wooden floorboards. Was someone upstairs?

Ten's house had seemed like the perfect playland in the beginning, with its hidden rooms and custom-built doorways that were too tall or too short, like a funhouse. Ten said that the actress who owned the house was eccentric and had built it a piece at a time whenever she got money. But now, all Chela could think about was how some of the walk-in closets upstairs had entrances on two sides and how much room there was to crouch and hide in the linen closet and the vast space in the unexplored attic upstairs. The house felt like a trap.