The Off Season (32 page)

As she opened the door to bring the greyhound back inside, she heard her mother’s landline ringing. Hurrying to the desk nook, she wondered, would it be another family friend offering condolences or assistance, or fishing for details Christina couldn’t bear to speak of? She felt a surge of gratitude when she saw “Not Available”
on the caller ID. A telemarketer, at least, she could deal with.

Scooping up the handset, she said, “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not interested.”

“You didn’t come and find me like I told you, Katie-baby,” said a voice that sliced straight to her marrow. The same female voice she’d heard over the baby monitor and on the telephone what seemed like so long ago.

“You’re not my mother,” Christina shouted, tears springing to her eyes. “My real mother’s dead now.
Dead
—and if find out—if I find out you had one thing to do with it, I swear I’ll choke the life out of you!”

“Oh, but I’m already dead, my darling,” said the woman. “That’s been the trouble all along.”

“Who the hell
are
you? Why are you doing this?” Christina demanded.

“I already have your sister and your daughter with me,” came the icy words. “Now all I need is you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

As Harris approached Millville on tree-lined Route 55, the phone calls never stopped. Once again, he buried any worries over the budget—between arresting Edgewood’s son and having a second officer injured, he figured he’d be out of a job before it caught up with him—and called in extra officers to make sure Seaside Creek had coverage while he and the three other cops scheduled to be on duty were out of their jurisdiction. There were also status calls to and from his dispatcher, as well as an update from the hospital where Zarzycki, Ashley Paxton, and Zach Fulton had all been transported.

Fulton was DOA, he quickly learned, and both of the women had been taken to surgery. A snapped “Critical condition” was all Harris could get out of the ER nurse he’d spoken with, even after he’d identified himself as law enforcement.

At some point, someone from the ER or ambulance crew had contacted Ashley’s mother, and Evelyn Paxton was practically blowing up his phone with increasingly frantic calls and texts demanding information. So it didn’t much surprise him when Maya radioed to ask whether Pete Washington, the officer he’d sent to accompany Annie and Lilly from the mall, had ever managed to get through to him.

“No, why?” he asked as he turned onto Millville’s High Street and spotted a number of police vehicles, their lights flashing, a few blocks ahead. A thin sliver of moon had risen over the little downtown, with its brick-faced buildings, and people were standing on the sidewalk, most in uniform.

“He needs to touch base with you.”

“Now’s a bad time,” Harris said, as he eyed a parking spot. “Tell him I want him to sit tight at the Wallace house with Christina Paxton and her sister until he—”

“He’s there now,” said Maya, her young voice strained, as it had been ever since she’d learned about Zarzycki’s shooting. “And he’s alone.”

He felt the throbbing of his own pulse. “What? What are you saying?”

“He couldn’t find Annie Wallace and the little girl at the mall. Security there said they’d never checked in at their office. Since Pete had been held up in traffic, he’d figured that maybe Annie had gotten impatient and driven home on her own. When he couldn’t reach her on the cell number he had, he hurried back—and nobody was home.”

The beat picked up speed. “You’re sure of this?”

“No cars at the house, and no one inside except the dog. The front door was unlocked, too.”

His gut dropped through the floorboard.
Unlocked?
After what had happened to Christina and Annie’s mother? “Has he tried Dr. Paxton’s cell, too?”

“Yes, I believe so. I just got him her number.”

Harris used a choice word, forgetting for the moment that he was on the radio. A gut instinct insisted this wasn’t going to turn out to be something easy, like Christina going to help her sister change a flat or meeting her someplace to deal with funeral arrangements. With the vandals behind bars and Ashley Paxton and her psycho boyfriend no longer a threat, he’d figured all three would be safe from any further danger, but what if he’d been wrong? Had his leaving Christina alone given someone else a narrow window of opportunity?
How the hell many of them could there be, and what was it he was missing?

His mind rocketed back to the voice on the child monitor and the phone calls that had come after. Communications he hadn’t yet accounted for from a woman who’d claimed to be Christina and Annie’s birth mother. Could she have seen Christina and Annie’s adoptive mother as standing in the way of some twisted plan for a reunion? Or could someone else entirely have been responsible for those calls, perhaps disguising her voice?

Her
voice. He thought back to Christina’s theory about the murder of her mother—her idea that a female attacker might have needed a multitude of blows to kill Elizabeth Wallace. At the time, he’d thought it unlikely, but was it possible Christina had been right?

“Sounds like you’re busy there. What should I tell Pete?” Maya repeated. “Should he sit tight at the mall?”

“You tell him he’d damn well better find her. Find the three of them. Put out a BOLO and get everybody on it, and contact me the minute they’re accounted for.”

“Will do,” she said. “You make it to the hospital yet? How is she?”

Knowing she was genuinely worried for Zarzycki—that everyone within their small department would be—Harris promised, “I’ll be tied up at the scene for a while, but I’ll check on Alex as soon as I can. And I promise you, I’ll let you know how she and Del are. Then I’ll head straight back to Seaside Creek as fast as I can get there.”

As he ended the call, he prayed that his instincts were wrong, that Christina and her family would be quickly located and escorted home . . .

And that his responsibilities to his officers, his department, and his investigation wouldn’t cost him the woman he had, against all odds and reason, allowed into his heart.

You’d best come quick. Tide’s turning.

The woman’s words had replayed inside Christina’s head as she’d dug frantically through her mother’s desk drawers, where she’d kept the spare keys to the Cadillac the police had discovered still parked in the detached garage. Failing to find them, Christina had hurried upstairs, the sounds of her daughter’s weeping in the call’s background playing on an endless loop inside her head. With her heart crashing against her chest wall, Christina found her mother’s purse. A cry bubbled from her throat when she didn’t find the keys there, either.

She found Annie’s, though, in her sister’s old room. Soon, she was pushing the battered red Kia flat out. Its aging engine screamed until she slammed the manual transmission—something she hadn’t driven in at least a decade—into fourth.

She tried to think of how to get there, her mind struggling to dredge up directions to the once-familiar road. With the darkness closing in on her, she felt raw terror pressing the air from her lungs. What if she could no longer find it?

She gulped a breath of cool night air, cursing herself for not stopping to look up directions before she’d left the house—or leave a note telling Harris where she was going.
If you tell anyone, your family’s dead,
the woman on the phone had warned her. But how would she have any way to know what Christina did?

She’s depending on me panicking, losing my head and rushing to her.
But knowing this was one thing. Tamping down the icy fear clawing at her throat was another.
Just how disturbed is this woman, really—enough to hurt them as she threatened if I don’t make it in time?

But staccato images flashed through her brain—the horror of finding her own mother’s body last night around this time. Christina knew then that she’d do anything, take any risk, to keep the same fate from befalling Lilly and her sister.

Just as she was thinking of pulling over to check directions on her phone, her own unconscious mind kicked in as she passed a Y-style turnoff to her right. Though someone had taken down the sign pointing out the way to Willet’s Point after the lighthouse had been abandoned, her instincts screamed that it was the right way, forcing her to slow to make a U-turn.

The car stalled—her own fault, since she hadn’t thought to downshift. Shaking hard, she had to remind herself to breathe, to calm down so she wouldn’t flood the engine.

“Thank you, God,” she said when the Kia restarted on the first try. But she didn’t put it into gear again yet, forcing herself to take her phone out and amend the error she’d made earlier. Because logic, not emotion, was what she needed to get through this—or, for all she knew, her own battered body could be the next one found.

As badly as her hands were shaking, she fumbled with her texting. Feeling time slipping away, she glanced at the half bar of reception and prayed it would be enough. Biting her lip, she hit “Send,” trusting the autocorrect feature to make sense of things before she shoved the cell back into the pocket of the all-weather jacket she’d grabbed from the closet on her way out the front door.

After negotiating an awkward turn onto the pothole-ridden road to the lighthouse, she wondered, was this all for nothing? Some sick joke that would lead her to the dangerously slick rocks hours after a killing January tide had already rolled in, leaving her path underwater? Even if the caller had told the truth, and there was still time, Christina realized that risking the walk out there would leave her trapped by rising water, struggling to climb a ladder crusted with razor-edged barnacles and mossy slime, heaving on a locked entry hatch that had long since rusted shut. Why hadn’t she brought thick gloves—or even a flashlight?

But as dangerous as this trip was, what choice did she have? Unless—what if the phone call she’d received—all of the communications from her biological mother—had really been hallucinations after all?

No. It wasn’t possible, not when Annie, too, had heard from a woman issuing nearly identical commands. But as Christina forced the car over the ruts and rocks of the point, a sense of the surreal clung to her, along with the memory of those disappearing taillights reflected in Lilly’s eyes.

The Kia’s right side dropped with a bone-jarring thud, jolting her in her seat. She tried to steer out of the hole, to back out, but the car refused to budge. Shifting out of gear, she left the motor running and the headlights aimed farther down the pitch-black point, where the jagged tops of the spinelike slabs were just visible above the slapping surf. With over half a tank of gas, the engine should run for some time, keeping the battery alive to light her way at least partway across the rocks. Other than the car’s light, there was no illumination, only the all-too-distant stars and a fingernail-thin crescent moon that rose behind the dark hulk jutting from the sea a half-mile ahead . . .

A lighthouse she must walk to, with the waves breaking around her and terror propelling every step.

As she opened the car door, a cold gust tore it open wide, submerging her in the smells of salt, seaweed, and the inescapable hint of decomposing dead things. Apprehension shuddering through her, she pulled out her cell phone one last time to check it, only to see the text she’d written to Harris still sitting unsent in her outbox.

But there was no time to delay, nothing to do but hope the message might get out at some point . . . and that it would be in time to lead him to her living, breathing little family, and not three more battered corpses.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Millville might be considered a small city, but it was still ten times the size of tiny Seaside Creek—a fact that its police chief, Charles Guthrie, whose thickly grizzled mustache and brows brought to mind an angry walrus, was quick to point out when Harris tried to speak up on Marco Del Vecchio’s behalf.

“This is
my
damned jurisdiction you let your mess spill over into,” Guthrie said, his face ruddy beneath the lights of the café, where he, Harris, and Marco stood beside the counter. “Which makes it
my
mess, now that young Dirty Harry here’s shot up the damned Arts District.”

Del Vecchio grimaced, his gaze straying to two more Millville cops who were carefully photographing the small seating area, with its crimson puddles, bloody footprints, overturned chairs, and pushed-back tables, several of which were covered with shards of broken window glass. Other cops and CSI milled about, some of the officers holding back a gathering crowd. Among those pushing toward the front, Harris had spotted at least one cameraman, who most likely belonged to the Philadelphia network affiliate news van that had arrived to document the mayhem.

“My officers didn’t come here expecting trouble,” Harris protested, though he knew he would have had plenty to say if a couple of Guthrie’s officers had left a mess like this in his town. “Del Vecchio here took out a dangerous criminal—a cop killer who’d already stabbed one woman—before he could do any more damage.”

“
Alleged
cop killer,” Guthrie corrected him.

Harris nodded. “That’s right. If we’d known for sure this was our guy or had any idea he’d show up for a public meeting we’d set up with his girlfriend, believe me, I would’ve gone through proper channels to ensure the public’s safety—and my own officers’.”

“Regardless, you still should’ve touched base with us. Instead, I end up with all this, right down the street from City Hall,” Guthrie said, gesturing toward the north. “It’s a freaking PR nightmare, Bowers.”

“You’re right, and I’m sorry. If you want me to, I’ll step up, take full responsibility for the error in judgment.” Why the hell not? Seaside Creek’s city council could only fire him once.

Harris felt the vibration of a couple of incoming texts in his pocket, one after the other. But with Del Vecchio looking as if he might tell Guthrie to go screw himself at any second so he could rush off to Zarzycki’s side, Harris didn’t dare look away to check his messages.

But Guthrie held up his meaty palms. “Forget it. It’s done now. Just fill me in enough that I can sound like I knew all about this from the start, maybe grab a share of credit for nabbing your cop killer.”

Harris snorted, nodding. “I see department politics aren’t restricted to
pissant little shore towns
, then,” he said, quoting Guthrie’s earlier assessment of tiny Seaside Creek.

The two shared a wry smile. The guy wasn’t such a hard-ass after all, just another police chief doing his best to keep his job.

“Happy to do that, yeah,” Harris agreed, “but how ’bout we let Officer Del Vecchio head over to the med center, while we’re talking, so he can check up on his partner and our female suspect? Then after you finish whatever damage control you need to do here, you can have your detectives meet him over there to get his official statement.”

Guthrie gave Del Vecchio a searching look. “You won’t take off on me before we get all our questions answered, will you?”

“You have my word, sir,” Marco said earnestly, extended a right hand still smeared with blood. Guthrie shook it before stepping back to give the young officer room to leave the café.

“He’s a good guy, a good cop, and he’s been through a lot tonight,” Harris told the other chief as he watched Del jog toward his department sedan. “I’m trusting you to handle him like you’d want one of your own treated.”

As Guthrie offered his assurances, the phone in Harris’s pocket vibrated once again. Only this time, Harris murmured an excuse to check the incoming message.

“You look confused,” said Guthrie moments later. “What is it?”

Harris shook his head. “It’s not what’s there,” he said, studying the close-up photo Maya had sent showing a highlighted page from the cell-phone records he’d requested last week. “It’s what
isn’t
that’s the issue.”

Had he gotten the wrong dates and times from Annie on the anonymous calls she’d received from the woman who had claimed to be her mother? Depending on how the originating number had been disguised or possibly spoofed using a third-party Internet application, these communications might not be traceable. But still, they should appear on Annie’s bill detail pages, giving him the opportunity to do further research.

But these questions, he decided, could wait a few more minutes. With Guthrie taking notes on dates and names, Harris finished briefing the man on the critical events leading up to the café incident.

“You’ll be there with me for the statement?” Guthrie asked, probably thinking that the public would find the appearance of unity comforting.

But by that time, Harris was once more staring at his cell, his heart stuttering as he opened and read a message that had gotten lost among so many others . . .

The text, from his ex-wife, read:
Need you over here NOW. She’s gone—Jacob too! —Mom

What the hell?
Mom
, he knew, was surely Renee’s mother, who rarely carried her own cell phone. What was she doing texting him on her daughter’s phone? And what in hell was Renee doing without the iPhone she’d been all but glued to since he’d bought it for her last year? Especially considering his belief that she was somehow tied up with Zach Fulton. What if the crazy bastard had decided to silence her before coming to deal with his pink-and-blue-haired girlfriend? And if Renee had happened to have Jacob with her at the time . . .

With Christina and her family, too, among the missing, his head spun with possibilities—each one more alarming than the last.

“What’s going on, Bowers?” Guthrie asked.

“It’s my kid and my ex-wife,” Harris told him, “so you go ahead and run your dog and pony show any way you want to. Take the credit, blame it on me—I don’t give a damn right now.”

“Slow down,” Guthrie ordered. “Tell me, what can I do to help?”

“I have no idea,” said Harris as he headed for the exit. “All I know is, I have to get back to Seaside Creek fast—because it’s starting to sound like all hell’s breaking loose.”

Relief flooded through Christina when she saw the spine of rocks still visible above the waves, the carved surfaces that formed the old path evident as far as she could make out. No, she hadn’t missed the tide yet, but her teeth pinched her lip at the sight of the churning water lapping greedily only a few feet—or was that inches?—below where she’d be walking. If she fell, what then? Would she smash her head on a submerged rock or drown fighting to swim against the treacherous currents?

“Don’t think about it. Think of them,” she said aloud, focusing on an image of Annie holding Lilly. Drawing a deep breath, Christina swallowed back her fear, then took her first tentative steps onto the mossy rocks.

“Please don’t let me fall,” she prayed, tears in her eyes as she forced herself to move faster. “Don’t fall. Don’t fall. You can’t.”

Within moments, cold seawater had swamped the workout shoes she wore, and the spray had her face, hands, and legs dripping wet. Her mother’s all-weather jacket, with its insulated hood, protected her head and torso, though. And her pounding heart—especially when she slipped as she jumped a watery gap where part of the ridge had collapsed—kept hypothermia at bay.

As she approached the lighthouse, she heard a hollow banging against the lighthouse base but couldn’t yet make out what was causing it. Then her eyes were drawn to the dark cylinder that loomed above, and at the level of the living quarters, she spotted a light inside the window and gave a cry of pure relief. She hadn’t risked drowning here for nothing; someone was definitely waiting for her here. But had this someone really brought her baby and her sister out here? Could they have made it, walking this same treacherous path?

As she reached the level of the ladder to the door hatch, she spotted the source of the banging sounds: an older, open-bowed boat tied nearby, a smallish runabout being repeatedly bashed against the lighthouse with the rising water.

The hull wouldn’t last long moored like that, Christina thought, wondering if the person who’d left it tied there knew much about boating. The woman who’d phoned her might well be trapped as she was, if she didn’t get out of here before the vessel was destroyed.

Taking a deep breath, Christina rubbed her hands together and looked back to where the Kia still offered its weak—and distressingly distant—illumination. “I’m bringing them both back,” she told the little hatchback.

The wind snatched away the promise as she began to climb.

“I’m heading back from Millville fast as I can,” Harris said after putting his cell phone on speaker and calling Renee’s mother’s landline. “What can you tell me, Kathleen? When did you last see Renee and Jacob?”

“What’s that?” she asked. “I can barely hear you.”

He turned off the Tahoe’s siren but left his emergency lights flashing as he goosed his speed to eighty—as fast as he could reasonably drive this stretch of highway. “Sorry,” he said before repeating the questions he’d just asked.

“It was—I think it was just after lunchtime.” Though Renee’s mother sounded breathless, he could tell she was making an effort to hold herself together. “I had to run some errands that kept me out for a few hours. When I came back a while ago, she wasn’t here, but I found the phone between the sofa cushions when I heard the little chime.”

“Could be she was in a hurry and she’d just misplaced it,” he suggested. A huge hurry, if she’d left without bothering to try to locate the cell phone by ringing it from her mom’s landline. “Is her purse there? What about the Jeep?”

“Both gone,” her mother said, “but—but she’d been acting funny.”

He flipped on the siren long enough for it to emit a single whoop, waking up the left-lane driver who’d failed to yield at his approach. “Funny, how?” he asked as the pickup pulled to the right.

“Nervous, I think. This job she’s interviewed for. It’s not the day-care center like she told us. It’s a full-time teaching job in Wilmington,” she said, naming a city more than an hour and a half away.

“She’s thinking of moving to Delaware?” The terms of their custody agreement wouldn’t allow her to take Jacob out of state, not without Harris’s permission. That explained why she would have lied about it—at least until she had a solid offer.

“It wasn’t just that, Harris. She kept saying she’d made a terrible mistake, that she needed to talk to you.”

“To me?” Did his ex-wife have regrets about what she’d gotten involved with? Had Zach Fulton tricked her somehow, possibly by striking up that conversation at the store she’d mentioned, before using violence to control her, too?

“Yes, and I think—I could be wrong about this, but I believe it had something to do with her friend, Christina.”

“They’re not speaking anymore.”

“I know they had a falling out, but when I went to text you—my calls kept rolling over to your voice mail—I found a message from Christina, sent just a little while ago.”

Had all of them met up someplace in an attempt to hash out the differences between them? “What message? Can you read it to me? This could be incredibly important.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t make sense. It’s all garbled.”

“Just read it verbatim. Please, if you ever want to see your daughter and my son again.”

“
What?
You think they’re in danger, Harris?” Kathleen asked, her voice high and tight with panic. “Oh my Lord—I heard about Christina’s mother, h-how they found her dead at her house. Could my sweet babies—could they be—”

“I don’t think so. In fact, I’m sure not—I’m sorry for upsetting you,” he said. “I just need you to read the text from Christina.”

“All right. Here it is.” She sniffled and then cleared her throat, clearly fighting to pull herself together. She read the message to him, but it made little sense, even after he had her spell out some words. “What could any of that mean?” she asked.