Wake to Darkness (18 page)

“What are you writing?”

Her fingers stilled the minute he spoke. She blinked twice, and then she seemed to...surface. As if she’d been out of her body for a while there and was just now reentering.

“Everything,” she said.

“Everything?”

“About the murders, what we know, what we don’t, what the possibilities are.”

“You’re
writing
about it?” He was more than a little bit horrified, and she must have seen it, because she made a disgusted face at him.

“Not for public consumption. Jeeze, Mason, what do you think I am, anyway? This isn’t for anyone but us. It’s just... It’s hard to explain. It’s my process. It’s how I think.”

“By writing.”

She nodded. “Something happens when I write. Not in the first few lines, but soon after. Something...takes over. Everything flows. I
get
stuff.”

“You get stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“Like the stuff you write about? All that positive-thinking stuff?”

She nodded again, her eyes dipping back to the screen. “Yeah, most of the time. Not now, though. This is different.” He sensed he was going to lose her to her thoughts if he didn’t hold on.

“So then it’s
not
all bullshit, like you keep saying it is. If you’re
getting
it from...somewhere, it’s more like it’s channeled.”

Her head came up fast and sharp. “Oh, come on, Mason.
Channeled?
Did you
really
just go there?”

“Well, what would you call it?”

She just looked at him for a second, then turned to the screen again. Yeah, he was losing her.

“So what did you come up with? Anything brilliant?”

She nodded fast, scrolling now. “Yeah, maybe.”

He moved around behind her to look over her shoulder as she scrolled up toward the beginning of the torrent of words. Some lines consisted of nothing but random words and a lot of abbreviations, nothing that made a lot of sense to him. She was writing in some kind of shorthand only she could read, he guessed.

She found what she was looking for and stopped. “Okay, so if the guy who attacked Marie was the same guy who killed Alan Douglas, then that means he was inside Marie’s house, right?”

“Obviously.”

“So that means he had the opportunity to take Jeremy’s knife.”

Mason just stood there in front of the fireplace with his ass getting hot, gaping at her while a ten-thousand-pound boulder lifted half its weight from his shoulders. She had just shown him that there was another way, an obvious way, that knife could have managed to end up at the crime scene. A way he’d missed entirely because he’d been so horrified that the evidence pointed to his nephew. Thank God.

No. Thank Rachel.

He couldn’t help the sigh of relief that rushed out of him.

“Good, right?” she asked.

“More than good. More than good, Rachel. It hadn’t even occurred to me.”

“There are other possibilities, too. Joshua could have brought Jeremy’s jackknife up here. You know how little brothers are, always into their big brothers’ things. Josh has been all over this resort. He could’ve had the knife in his pocket and dropped it anywhere. Or the killer could have found it that day he left the angel pin at the door. Maybe it was here in the cabin, and he got inside and took it.”

He was nodding, willing any of those possibilities to be true. “But why? Why would he want to do that?”

“To frame Jeremy for his crimes,” she said quickly. “It makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. Jeremy’s mother is seeing the killer’s intended victim and Jeremy’s pissed about it. He makes the perfect scapegoat. Not to mention that implicating your nephew throws us off track and
you
into a state where you can’t even think straight. Giving the killer the chance to get away or continue his mission or...who the hell knows why? I mean, someone who kills people and cuts out their organs isn’t exactly operating from any sort of logic we can relate to, right?”

“Right.” He nodded slowly, moving to the sofa and sitting down because he was feeling almost weak with relief, not to mention exhaustion.

“Wait, I have more....” She got up, moving to the sofa to sit close beside him, bringing the laptop with her. He didn’t imagine she had any idea how much he needed to feel her just then, touching him. It didn’t even matter where, so long as she was just touching him. “Right, here we go. How on earth would Jeremy get hold of succinylcholine? Hmm?”

He shook his head. “I never suspected him of the other crimes.”

“Come on, Mason, if he did this one, he did them all. The guy’s liver was cut out. So just think for a minute, think like the cop you are. Is there any way Jeremy could have gotten his hands on that drug? Any hospital break-ins or—”

“The vet murder.”

“What?”

“Remember I told you about the vet who was murdered and the office burned down? We thought it was drug-related. It was impossible to tell if any drugs were missing, because of the fire damage. But it stands to reason that a vet who did surgery on animals would need the same kind of drugs as a doctor who does surgery on humans.”

“Succinylcholine. So they don’t move. And that gives you another way to protect Jeremy. Just verify where he was when that crime was done and he’s ruled out in at least one crime where he might have gotten the drug. Just like he’ll be covered for a chunk of tonight when we talk to this Marty person who bought him the booze.”

He looked at her. She was animated, blue eyes damn near sparkling, cheeks flushed. “You’re amazing. Do you know how amazing you are?”

“Of course I do.” She lowered her eyes a little, though. “You are, too, Mason. And for what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing taking that jackknife from the scene.”

He felt his shoulders sag a little. “Tampering with evidence is against everything I have ever believed about what kind of a cop I am.”

“And what kind of
man
you are. I know.”

“I made the wrong call with my brother.”

“He shot himself right in front of you. It’s not like you were even thinking straight in that moment, Mason.” She was looking at him intently. “And then, right on the heels of that, you read his suicide note confessing to thirteen murders. He’s dead. His boys are just kids. His wife is pregnant. Your mother is fragile. You were protecting
them
by hiding that note. And it wasn’t like he could go on killing.”

“But he did. Somehow, he did.”

“No. Some of the people who got his organs did. And I don’t even pretend to have a clue how that happened. But it’s not anything you could’ve predicted. Nostradamus couldn’t have foreseen that, Mason.” She set her laptop on the coffee table, turned toward him and grabbed him by the arms. “But we stopped that, too. You almost got killed making it right, but you did. You found the bodies of his victims. You gave the families closure. You saved my ass in the process. Everything worked out.”

He wanted to believe it.

“God, the guilt is still eating you alive, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “Mason, you have to let it go.”

“I don’t know
how
to let it go.”

She drew a breath, a really deep one, then nodded firmly. “Okay, all right, it is what it is. So you don’t know how to let it go. Then you have to set it aside, just for now. Because this is a whole separate thing.”

His jaw tight, he whispered, “Is it? Are you sure about that, Rachel?”

“I am. Look, we’ve got some crazy fuck trying to reclaim all your brother’s parts and kill everyone connected to him for God only knows what insane reason. It’s not a recipient. We’ve ruled out most of them already. We have to find out who’s doing this and put a stop to it, and we can’t do that if you’re too busy taking a ride on the guilt train. You need to focus, Mason. If you want to crucify yourself with guilt, then you can do it later. After we fix this. You got me?”

His eyes snapped to hers. This was the smack upside the head he’d been hoping for. “I’ve got you. And you’re right.”

“Damn straight I am. So can you do it? Let go of everything that happened over the summer and just focus on the here and now?”

“Yeah. I can. I will.”

She smiled at him. “Good. Now eat a damn cookie and let’s figure out who could be doing this.”

He reached for a cookie. “No. Let’s figure out
why.
I think that’ll tell us who.”

“Okay, let’s work on why. But I’ll tell you right now, I do not for one minute believe it’s your nephew.”

Friday, December 22

Strong coffee kept us going until sometime after 4:00 a.m., which was the last time I looked at the clock. After that I must have dozed off. I woke at 7:30, and I was alone on the sofa with a big fat pillow under my head and a heavy blanket tucked around me. On the table in front of the couch the cookie plate was bare except for a few crumbs, and the glass of milk was empty.

I sat up and stretched my arms over my head. It was still pretty dark outside. I knew the sun must be up, even though these were the longest nights of the year. Only three days until Christmas. Some holiday this was turning out to be.

I got up and shuffled into the kitchen to put on a pot of fresh coffee, noticing things as I did. Mason had lined up rows of wineglasses on the floor in front of the back door. Clever. I would have heard anyone who tried to get in. Once the coffee was brewing and I headed back into the living room I saw the same thing in front of the front door.

He’d gone upstairs at some point, but he had made sure I would be safe down here while he was gone. I tiptoed up to check on everyone else. Misty’s bed was empty. That gave me a scare on more levels than I cared to analyze at that moment. But I found her soon enough, and Myrtle, too. Both of them had curled up on Josh’s bed. Poor little guy must have been too scared to sleep. They were all still snoozing, so I backed out quietly and continued on my way.

Mason was in Jeremy’s room. He’d tossed a pillow and a blanket on the floor and was lying there, awake, watching his nephew sleep.

That kid wouldn’t be sneaking booze again. Not on Mason’s watch.

Mason met my eyes and put a finger to his lips, and I nodded and backed out into the hallway, then waited.

He joined me a few seconds later.

“Did you get any sleep?” I whispered.

“Yeah, a couple of hours. I’m good now. Could use a shower, though.”

“Take a quick one and I’ll make breakfast.”

He looked back worriedly toward the bedroom.

“It’ll be okay. He’s a teenage boy—he’s not going to wake up for at least an hour. You can shower inside ten minutes. Right?”

He nodded.

I said, “Thanks for the blanket and pillow. And the wineglasses in front of the doors. Nice touch.”

“I doubt anyone would bother us right now, anyway. Have you looked outside?”

I frowned. “No. Why?” We were outside my bedroom by then, and he nodded at the open door. So I went in and took a look out my bedroom window. The sky was gray and dull, and the wind was blowing snow sideways. I couldn’t even see the trees out back. “Holy crap, this is worse than last night.”

“Way worse. We’ve got a meeting with Finnegan, Cait and Rosie this morning. They’re coming to us.”

“Then I’d better make a quadruple batch of whatever it is I’m making for breakfast. What time?”

“They didn’t say. What are you making?”

“I have no idea. Something easy. Waffles and sausage?”

“Sounds great,” he said. “But...that’s easy?”

“Waffles are one of the few meals I do well. And I saw a waffle iron in the kitchen and a mix in the cupboard. I’ll need the shower when you’re done, so be quick, okay?”

He nodded, but didn’t turn toward the bathroom. He just stood there, looking at me until I wondered if I still had food coloring staining my teeth from the cookie frosting marathon of the night before.
“What?”

He shrugged. “Just...thanks. For putting all that together last night. For giving me hope.”

“Oh. Yeah, you know.” I shrugged. “It’s kind of what I do.”

“And you do it well. Really well, Rachel. You’re a modern-day guru in complete denial.”

“Yeah, right. Send me fifty bucks and I’ll see to it you reincarnate as a prince.” I winked. “Go soak your head, Mason. It’s full of cobwebs.”

I walked away. And I totally ignored the rush of blood to my face and pleasure to my belly that his undeserved praise gave me. I ought to be irritated that he was still insisting on seeing me for who he wanted me to be instead of who I was. But at least this time it was because of something I’d actually done. So I decided to accept the compliment gracefully and let it go at that. And to make waffles. Stacks and stacks of waffles. And sausage. And a lot more coffee.

14

Friday, December 22

F
innegan Smart, Rosie and Cait Cole were sitting around the kitchen island by the time Mason got out of the shower, dressed and followed the scents of breakfast sausage and fresh coffee downstairs. When he walked in, Rachel was filling coffee cups and setting stacks of blueberry waffles in front of the guests. Her hair was in a messy ponytail, and there was flour on her cheek. She was wearing a little snowflake-patterned apron.

An
apron.

She met him in the doorway, ostensibly to shove a hot mug into his hands, and whispered, “You didn’t tell me they’d be here in minutes.”

“I didn’t know.” He eyed her attire. “You look like a regular Suzy Homemaker.”

“I had to cover up the fact that I’m not wearing a bra.”

He choked on his first sip, drawing the gazes of everyone in the room.

“Mornin’, Mace,” Rosie said.

Mason nodded at him, noted the tight and drawn expression and frowned. “Marlayna didn’t come with you?”

“She’s...pretty pissed I didn’t tell her why we were really coming up here.”

“I don’t blame her,” Cait snapped. “I’m pissed, too.”

“Now, Caity—”

“Don’t ‘now, Caity’ me, Finnegan Smart. These people brought a murderer to Pine Haven at the height of the holiday season. This could ruin me.”

“Watch what you say, Ms. Cole,” Rachel said. “There are kids in the house who don’t need to know all the details about this right now.” She leaned through the doorway to check for accidental eavesdroppers, but Mason was pretty sure they were all still in bed.

Cait paced to the window, coffee mug clutched in her hands, staring outside and apparently not inclined to apologize. No doubt from her point of view they had far more to apologize for than she did.

“I’m sorry,” Mason said, stepping up. “I hope you know we had no idea this person would manage to trace us up here. We booked under my mother’s name, and we didn’t tell anyone we were coming.”

“Someone found out. Murderers are clever that way, aren’t they?” She didn’t face him as she spoke, but her anger was clear all the same.

Sighing, Mason gave up. “What’s the situation, Finnegan? I assume you’ve talked to the authorities?”

The older man dragged his eyes from Cait’s rigid spine. “Not since last night. The phone lines and internet are down, and something’s interfering with the radio at the moment. Walkie-talkies are still good, of course, but they only have a ten-mile range. I sent a team out this morning by snowmobile to assess our predicament, and it’s a doozie, I’ll tell you. The only road out is completely blocked. The only cell tower in the entire area has an eighty-foot pine lying across it. For all I know, that could be the same problem the radio tower is having, though my team didn’t go far enough to find out for sure. It could just be cloud cover.”

Mason swore and looked at Rachel. She’d gone white.

“Are you saying we’re trapped here?” she whispered.

“For the time being, yes, but—”

“No. No way,” she said. “We can get out with that giant machine. The Abominable. Or the snowmobiles, what about those?”

“And go where?” Finnegan asked. “The village is just as snowed-in as we are, and their power went out last night, to boot. We’re all on the same grid. When we’re down, they’re down. At least we’ve got the emergency generators.”

Mason frowned. “I didn’t realize we’d lost power.”

“You’re not supposed to,” Cait said. “We have a state-of-the-art backup system. The whole lodge is wired, as are all the cabins. It kicks in automatically.” She sounded proud and heartbroken at the same time. “You wouldn’t have noticed more than a brief flicker of the lights.”

“I assure you, Ms. de Luca,” Finnegan said, “if the radio towers are intact we’ll have radio contact with emergency services again the minute the storm begins to ease.”

“And how soon will that be?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’s a whopper of a storm. Last time I could get the radar map up, it looked as if it could take ’til the wee hours of tomorrow morning. The police’ll be out to check on us just as soon as they can safely get through, though. They know about the killing, after all.”

Rosie was the only one eating, but he stopped long enough to say, “You all ought to pack up and move into the lodge. We stick together, we’ll all be safer.”

“We can’t do that,” Rachel said softly. She looked at Mason.

He read her loud and clear. If there was any chance, even a minute one, that Jeremy had become violent, they could not bring him into a lodge full of potential targets. No, it wasn’t likely that any of the guests were recipients of his father’s organs. But violence didn’t have to make sense, or even be consistent. They had to keep him here, where they could watch him carefully.

Everyone else was staring at her now, though, expecting an explanation.

Finnegan said, “Frankly, Detective, I could use all the help I can get protecting the guests.”

“I know. The thing is, Rachel is a target. Taking her to the lodge might mean we bring the killer with us.”

“On the off chance he’s not already there, you mean?” Cait asked. She was looking at him now, narrow-eyed. “Which begs the question—if he’s not at the lodge, then where the hell do you think he
is,
Detective?”

Rachel stood a little straighter, and she moved to put herself between him and the angry resort owner. “He could be anywhere, Ms. Cole. Serial killers are pretty good at staying under the radar, or they wouldn’t be on the loose long enough to get to
be
serial killers.”

“With any luck he was staying somewhere else,” Mason said, “and is stuck there now.”

“With a whole other roster of potential victims,” Rosie muttered.

Mason shot his friend a quelling look. “Stop borrowing trouble, Rosie. There’s nothing we can do about that right now.”

“So what exactly
can
we do right now?”

Mason lowered his eyes. His best friend was upset; it was probably killing him being away from his wife while a killer might be on the loose. But he couldn’t help that. He wished to hell he hadn’t asked Rosie along and put him in this situation. He nodded at Finnegan. “Did you find that guest I asked about?”

“Young Marty and his fiancée checked out early yesterday morning, before the storm moved in,” Finnegan said.

“Marty who? What’s this about?” Cait asked, finally turning from the window. “Is he a suspect?”

Mason held up a hand. “No. I thought he might have seen something, that’s all.” So Jeremy’s alibi was out of reach, at least temporarily.

Shit.

“We’ll have to call him as soon as the phones are back,” Rachel said. “I assume you keep contact numbers in your records.”

Cait nodded. She paced to the island and set her empty mug down on it none too gently. “How the hell do I protect my guests from a serial killer while we’re all snowbound? Tell me that.”

“Well, we can’t tell ’em, that’s sure,” Finnegan said. “They’d panic, and that would make things worse.”

Mason nodded. “I agree on that. Cait, this guy is going after a very specific group of victims. I am extremely doubtful any of your guests fit his profile.”

She looked him squarely in the eye. “One did.”

“He’s the only one.”

“Are you going to tell me what this profile is? What the victims have in common—besides being connected to you, that is?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

She glared at him. Finnegan broke her stare by grabbing her mug from in front of her and holding it up as if to ask whether she would like a refill. She shook her head no.

“I believe the wise course of action,” Finnegan said, “is to behave as if everything is fine. We’ll institute some security measures, lay everything off to the storm. We instruct guests to go about the lodge in groups of two or more, in case the generators go out and they’re trapped in an elevator or a pitch-black corridor. We insist no one ventures outside until further notice, because whiteouts up here can have a man lost a hundred feet from his front door.”

Cait heaved a sigh. “Those are good ideas, Finn. But are they enough?”

“My entire security team and two shifts of the staff, minus one or two, are snowbound here like the rest of us. We put ’em all to work, let ’em know we need their eyes and ears open, to report anything unusual. Say there might be a fugitive from the law hiding out here, and tell them no more than that. Swear ’em to silence on it, as well.”

Mason nodded. This guy was good. “Meanwhile,” he added, “we can start interviewing some of the guests.”

“That’s over four hundred people,” Cait said.

“We rule out anyone who was here more than a day before we arrived and anyone who checked out before Douglas went missing.”

Grudgingly, the woman nodded, her short blond curls moving with the motion. “That should rule out a few of them, at least.”

“My instincts will rule out a lot more,” Rachel said.

Mason shot her a look. She couldn’t be at the lodge interviewing guests, and neither could he. He had to keep her here, safe, where he could protect her, not to mention Marie and the boys. And he had to keep a constant eye on Jeremy.

She looked back at him, seemed to read him and nodded. Wordless communication. They were getting better and better at it. He noticed it, wondered at it, then forced his focus back to the job. “We should take another look at the scene now that it’s daylight. Though with the snow, I doubt there’ll be much to see.” He got up from the table, leaving an empty plate behind him. Cait hadn’t touched hers. Rosie got up rather reluctantly, eyeing the stack of waffles still left behind.

Marie came into the kitchen then. She looked far better than she had last night. She must have managed to get a few hours’ sleep, Mason thought with a surge of relief. She’d needed it.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’ll fill you in, Marie,” Rachel said.

Mason nodded his thanks to her, grabbed a waffle off the stack, rolled it around a sausage and led the way back through the house, eating on the way to his coat and boots.

* * *

I didn’t get the chance to fill Marie in on much, because two minutes after Mason, Rosie, Cait and Finnegan were out the door, the kids came dragging in, with Myrtle in tow.

Marie picked at her food for a while. Jeremy and Josh ate like a pair of horses. Big ones. Budweiser Clydesdales. But Misty seemed to be forcing herself. I could tell from the look on her face that Jeremy had told her about the murder, about him being a suspect and maybe about Marty bringing him the booze. She kept looking at me like she wanted to talk about it, then looking at Josh and biting her lip. Like me, she wanted to keep Josh as much in the dark as possible.

And he seemed okay, amazingly. He wolfed down a half dozen syrup-soaked waffles while Myrtle lay under his chair, scarfing every dropped crumb with uncanny accuracy. Josh held an entire sausage link down, thinking no one noticed, and she snagged it without even sniffing first. Fussy, she wasn’t.

After she swallowed and Josh stopped laughing at her, I said, “She needs to go outside. And as much as I love her, you need to ease off on giving her junk food, Josh. It’s not good for her.”

At the word
outside,
Myrtle’s ears perked up and she looked in my direction.

“I’ll take her!” Josh volunteered.

“I don’t think—”

“It’s okay,” Marie said. “I’ll go with them. I need to stretch my legs anyway, get some air.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and nodded. “Okay. You’d both better bundle up, though. Put Myrt’s sweater on her, too, would you, Josh? It’s still storming like crazy out there.” I met Marie’s eyes as Josh scrambled to get the sweater and leash. “Don’t go far from the cabin, okay?”

She covered my hand with her own. “Thanks for caring.”

“I do, you know,” I said. And then I wanted to gag at my uncharacteristic bout of female bonding.
We should just break into a round of “Kumbaya” already.

Marie went to the closet to begin donning her layers. Josh and Myrtle were already there. The bulldog would follow Joshua off the edge of the planet. The minute the front door closed behind them, Jeremy said, “Did Uncle Mason talk to Marty yet?”

I drew a breath. “Not exactly.”

He frowned at me. Misty put her hand on his shoulder and said, “What do you mean, not exactly?”

“Marty and his fiancée checked out yesterday morning before the full brunt of the storm hit.”

“So call him.” Jeremy pulled out his cell. “I have his number right here.”

“It isn’t going to matter, Jer. The tower is out. The power’s down, too. This entire place is running on backup generators.”

Misty got up from the table and went to the back door, parting the curtains to look outside. “I didn’t realize the storm was so bad.”

“They’ve even closed the slopes. Everyone has to stick to indoor activities until further notice.”

Misty turned from the window and met my eyes. “We should just leave, Aunt Rache. If there’s a killer here somewhere, we should just—”

“The road is completely blocked.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “This is like something out of a slasher flick.”

She looked at Jeremy. He got up from the table and put his arms around her.

“Whoa, no PDAs, all right? You’re too fucking young.”

“Get over it, Aunt Rache,” Misty said, gripping his wrists to keep his arms right where they were. “We have a connection.”

“Yeah, it’s called hormonal overdrive.”

“Don’t assume I’m driven by the same shit you are,” she snapped.

My jaw dropped. I clamped it shut. “God, I hate when you sound like me.”

She rolled her eyes and turned to look back outside. “Josh and Myrt are heading back.”

“What about Marie?” I asked, going to the window to look over her shoulder.

“I saw her heading into the woods. I think she went out to find Mason.”

“And left Josh out there alone?” Jeremy turned and went into the living room, grabbing a coat and opening the front door before he even put it on. Conscientious about protecting his kid brother. That didn’t really seem in character for a crazed teenage serial killer, did it?