Where Angels Rest (16 page)

“You can’t make me go in there,” she said, as Nick pulled into a slot marked
AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY
. It was the closest he could get to the doors without blocking the ambulance parking. “I won’t do it,” she said.

“Yes. You will.”

“Ace’ll… God. He’ll be so mad.”

“I’ll handle Ace.”

She went silent, chewing her lip. Nick wanted to comfort her, even bring her into his arms, but didn’t. “Rebecca, it’s going to be hard. They’ll have to examine you inside and out, and they’ll ask a lot of embarrassing questions and take pictures. But in the end, you’ll give us something to lock him up. And,” he added as an afterthought that just might matter to her, “we can get your mom’s money back.”

She looked up and Nick was stricken by how much of
a child she really was. The idea that she might have been taken by Jack—as Erin kept suggesting—gnawed at his soul. He’d gotten lucky this time; Jack wasn’t involved.

But what if Erin was right?

Rebecca sucked in a shaky breath and looked at the hospital door. “Do you think you should call my mom now?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

The mask was finished; now the clay just needed to dry. It would take a few hours, and John’s breathing had already grown raspy and labored. Even with a tiny hole in each nostril to keep him alive, he’d breathed clay up his nose. It was just one of those things that couldn’t be helped. Not a perfect system.

But good enough. He’d be dead by the time the Angelmaker got back. And then all that would be left was getting rid of the body. Easy.

It was over.

Now, to set up a trail for Mann. A little drive in Jack’s truck, be sure to leave some tire tracks outside Sims’s hotel, or make sure someone sees the Ford there. Mann thought moving her to an out-of-the-way motel was safer, but it just made things easier. It had been a simple matter to follow him there—he wasn’t hiding and had even had cruisers passing by the place all day. So it ought to be easy for someone to see Jack’s truck there tonight.

Tonight, that was important. Jack needed to be noticed.

L
ENI GOT A PHONE CALL
from the sheriff and ran off like a shot. It was almost two in the morning. Apparently, Rebecca was at the hospital, okay, but asking for her mom. Dana tucked Leni’s coat over her shoulders and shut the door behind her.

“Lord,” she said, “it scares me to death to think of my Marissa getting old enough for that sort of thing.” She looked at Erin. “I guess in your line of work you get used to it.”

“Not really.”

“Come on,” Dana said, tugging her dreadlocks into a ponytail. “Nick’s gotta have some decaf tea somewhere.”

Erin was wired, too. Sitting late into the night with Rebecca’s mother had been a nightmare. All she could think about were things Leni Engel didn’t know to even worry about: Lauren McAllister and Sara Daniels. Rebecca
was
similar. A prime target for a man like Huggins.

But then Rebecca had been found, Erin reminded herself. Not entirely safe, perhaps, but at least together enough that she’d be going home later tonight. That was
as much as Erin had gotten out of one end of the phone conversation before Leni rushed out.

Dana found tea bags in the first cupboard she tried.

“You must know the sheriff pretty well,” Erin said.

Dana turned up a flame under the tea kettle. “He and Quent played football together in high school. By the time Quent and I got together, Nick already lived in L.A.—he went to USC when Quentin went to Ohio State—but he’s been back now for a few years.” She plopped two tea bags into a couple of empty mugs. “I just hang out with them so Nick will rub off on me and I’ll turn into a culinary genius.”

“It worked with Hannah.”

An easy smile appeared. “Hannah’s amazing. Most kids come home from school and turn on cartoons. Hannah turns on cooking shows. The Manns’ idea of a great Saturday night line-up is a marathon of
Top Chef
episodes.”

Erin couldn’t help but smile. “I would’ve never guessed it when I met him. When I found him at that empty house in the middle of the night, I thought he was something out of the back woods.”

“He was coming off his hell-weekend. At least, that’s what Quentin calls it.”

“Hell-weekend?”

“Years ago, when they still lived in California, Nick and his wife bought that piece of land up at the clay mine. Nick wanted a place where they could vacation near his folks, but then Allison died. Now, he goes there every year on the anniversary of her death. Spends a weekend alone doing God-knows-what, and looking like hell when he returns.
That’s
where he was when you arrived in town.”

Well, that explained some things. Not others.

“He wants me to leave,” Erin said.

Dana looked into her cup. “Maybe we all do.”

Erin frowned. “You’d rather live with your heads in the sand?”

“Jack Calloway, a serial killer? That kind of thing doesn’t happen here.”

“Forgive me, but wasn’t there a woman murdered here just a few days ago?”

Dana tightened up. “I don’t know what to think about that. Quent won’t talk about it—departmental policy. If there’s one thing Nick Mann hates, it’s rumor.”

“I thought it was shrinks. And the media.”

“There’s a list.” She seemed to have more to say but the tea kettle whistled and she poured steaming water into each mug. Erin used a favorite trick of counselors: She waited.

“You’ve seen the scar on Hannah’s forehead?” Dana finally asked, into the silence.

“Yes, I saw it.”

“That was from the gun that killed Nick’s wife.”

“Oh, God,” Erin said. “What happened?”

“Nick had been working on a big case for months—involving L.A.’s organized crime ring. They were supposed to attend a big birthday gala for Allison’s dad—he was pretty famous—but the case was going down that night so Nick couldn’t go. Allison didn’t want to go without him; she was afraid of the fallout from his case. But he told her to go. He swore that he had everything covered, that she’d be fine. He was so tied up making arrests he didn’t know what happened until it was over.”

“What happened?”

“She and Hannah were waiting for her father outside the restaurant when a man named Bertrand Yost drove up and opened fire.”

“On
her
, specifically?”

Dana nodded. “The bust had happened an hour earlier. Yost slipped the net. He couldn’t get to Nick, so he went for Allison. She died instantly. And another bullet hit Hannah.”

Erin couldn’t think of anything to say. She was imagining a three-year-old girl in a spray of bullets, watching her mother die. “What a nightmare.”

“Yes. And after the nightmare ended, the hell began. Nick tracked down Bertrand Yost. Yost came at him, armed, and when Nick got the upper hand in the fight, he didn’t stop. He was beating the hell out of Yost when his brother, Luke, pulled him off. Nick was suspended from duty and required to do therapy with some quack psychologist from Internal Affairs.”

“Dear God,” Erin said. A few more things fell into place about him.

“Allison’s parents wanted Hannah and they used Nick’s outrage against Yost to get her away from him. They accused him of affairs and violence against Allison—which was all bull, of course, but once the press got into it, the media uproar was amazing. There were rumors that Nick planned his wife’s death, that he hired Yost to do the killing.”

“Where did all that come from?”

“It’s what happens when the murder victim is an heiress and her husband is the LAPD’s star detective.”

Erin choked on her tea. “Heiress?”

“Allison Taylor, the daughter of Jessup Taylor.”

Jessup Taylor, Jessup Taylor. “The real estate guy. The one who’s always talking about trumping the Trump?”

“In California, he’s a household name. He makes
People
magazine about every three months, not to mention the business magazines. By association, Nick and Allison
were constantly in the spotlight. They were hounded by the press, mostly because her father had never made any bones about how he felt when his daughter married a common cop. L.A. loves the rich and the famous, loves a juicy story, and loved its local über cop. This story had everything: Jessup Taylor’s daughter and granddaughter, the L.A. mob, a vengeful cop husband, and eighteen million dollars in Allison’s trust.”

“Eighteen—” She couldn’t say it.

“Nick’s never spent a dime of it. This house… it was a fixer-upper. He laid every tile and hammered every nail himself, with his dad.” Dana canted her head in thought for a moment, then said, “He would have rather stayed in L.A. and cleared his name. But the media was bad for the department and vicious for Hannah. She asked Nick once if it was true he’d paid Yost to kill her mother.”

“Oh, my. Does she still remember the shooting?”

“She still has nightmares. That’s why Nick left L.A. and came back here.”

“To Mayberry.”

“That may be what he was trying for, but he didn’t get it. Hopewell had changed since he’d been gone. There were drugs here and everything that comes with them. Hilltop was a meth house and the old sheriff got killed there. Nick was a natural to finish his term. No one around here, not even the older deputies like Wart Hogue—who should have been a shoo-in—had the type of experience he did. He didn’t want to do it at first, but Quentin was a cop in Cleveland, and we were looking to get the kids into a smaller town. A safer place. They decided to work together. And then Jack Calloway came.”

“In May of 2007,” Erin said. Huggins’s history wasn’t news to her.

“He wanted to buy the Hilltop property and set up shop for his wife. Nick knew the renovation would help Hopewell. He supported Jack all the way, and got just about everyone in town working on Hilltop. He even got the commissioner to put prisoners out there doing the county stuff—the roads, easements, electricity. Nick whipped Hopewell into shape and when the election came up, no one ran against him. You know what his campaign motto was?”

Erin shook her head.

“ ‘Not on Nick’s watch.’ It wasn’t something he came up with; it was just what everyone said about him.”

Frustration knotted in Erin’s chest. “Look, I’m not the one who brought crime to Nick Mann’s watch. Huggins is.”

“I underst—”

“No, you don’t. No one here does.” Erin pushed from the island. “You all believe that there are places in the world where bad things don’t happen. Well, let me tell you: Bad things happen everywhere. In big dirty cities and in quaint little towns. In trailer parks and hospitals and alleys and in nice, expensive homes behind closed bedroom doors and—”

She stopped, memories clambering to the surface. She clutched her arms around herself, tamping down the emotion that threatened.

Dana stared at her.

“I have to go,” Erin said. “Tell the sheriff I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

She was shaking as she drove away. And no matter how much she scrubbed at her eyes, they kept filling.

Not here, on Mann’s watch.

Fools. Blind, ignorant jerks. The whole damn town had their heads in the sand. And while people here were refusing to look at John Huggins—really
look
—Justin had inched one night closer to death.

Erin drove with her hands clenched on the steering wheel, fear squeezing her heart. She had to stop it from happening somehow. This couldn’t be the end of the fight. There had to be a way to—

The headlights came from nowhere. Erin winced. Bright beams, closing in on her rearview mirror so fast and so close she had to squint and turn away. Her heart dropped to her stomach and she swerved to avoid being rear-ended. A horn blasted in her ears and the headlights swung out around her. She tried to move over, but there was no shoulder, and her eyes watered from tears and the glare of the headlights. The truck came up beside her from behind, too close, then even closer, then—

Impact. The car careened. She hit grass and gravel and wrestled the tires back onto the road, but the dark beast of the truck was right there. Metal crunched in her ears and the Aveo jumped, the pavement spinning beneath her. The world swirled for two seconds, then lurched.

Then faded.

T
HE
A
NGELMAKER SAW
Erin Sims’s car wheel off the road, a gush of excitement spilling out in laughter. Holy Mother of God, how perfect.

Who’s watching now, Jack?

Now, keep driving, don’t look back. The extent of her injuries—whatever it was—couldn’t be changed, and it was too risky to stop. If anyone saw this truck now, with the damage from having just hit her car, it would be over.

So, go on. With any luck, Sims was dead, though the chances of that were slim. The plan had just been to be sure someone would know Jack’s truck had been outside Sims’s motel; having her come tooling along in the middle of the night had been sheer luck. It would be interesting to know where she’d been at such a late hour, but then again, there was no need to question fate.

Now, get out of town. It wouldn’t take long for someone to find her, even in the middle of the night. When they did, Jack’s truck needed to be long gone.

An hour and two county lines passed before the turnoff came into view, the truck’s headlights leading the way through a cut in the chain-link fence. The Angelmaker
climbed out of the Ford, looked out into the pitch black acreage surrounding the quarry, and peered into the sky. It was cold—dangerously so. Just thirty-eight degrees, said the thermometer on the dashboard. But it wasn’t predicted to drop much more and there was a seventy percent chance of rain, so the plan should work.

But what if it didn’t? What if it got colder and stayed that way until morning, or didn’t rain?

Forget it. Just do it.

The Angelmaker went to the back of the Ford and unhitched the ramp, maneuvering a small motorcycle to the ground. It was an old 150 that leaked oil, but it had only cost a hundred dollars, was easy to conceal and easy to handle. Like the stun gun: Sometimes the simplest things were the best.

The Angelmaker slipped back into the driver’s seat and inched the truck forward, riding the brake, heart drumming as the distance between the front tires and the overhang to the quarry grew shorter and shorter. Good that it was dark; it had been scary enough in the daylight to be this close to the edge, and able to see the depth of the quarry pit below. Now, only the two columns of headlights were visible, disappearing into darkness that seemed infinite.