“Probably.”
“No way to be sure, though.”
“Y’know, that’s one of the things I admire about you, Cutler. No excess optimism.”
“Excess optimism is the kind of thinking that can get you killed.”
“Don’t remind me.” She looked at him. “Do you think Briggs is flat-out crazy?”
“No. I think he’s a dirty cop who took a payoff a long time ago to make an evidence box disappear.”
“Bastard.”
“A bastard who is now linked to a couple of attempted murders.”
“Us.”
“He’s also connected to the death of Louise Flint.”
“Think he killed her?”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
“So, there was a third possible reason he invited us up here to chat.”
“What?” Max asked.
“You said there were two reasons why Briggs may have been so helpful. He wanted to see how much we knew and where we were headed with our investigation. But it seems there was a third reason—he planned to kill us if he concluded that we knew too much or that we were going to make things difficult for him.”
“No.” Max helped her scramble over a downed tree. “I don’t think he planned to kill us. I think the decision to try to get rid of us was a last-minute thing. He panicked because he realized that we were going to open up your stepsister’s cold case.”
“Why didn’t he just try to shoot us?”
“Two reasons. The first is that it would have been tough to explain the bodies.”
“And reason number two?”
“He knew I had a gun on me.”
“How?”
“He was a cop. He knew why I didn’t take off my jacket.”
In the end they found the cabin almost by accident. It was veiled by a heavy stand of trees. The road that led to it had been washed out by the rain. Max caught a glimpse of the small structure when some wind-tossed branches parted briefly.
It was a small, one-bedroom structure with a stone fireplace and a tiny kitchenette. It wasn’t hard to snap the lock on the back door. He set about building a fire while Charlotte went into the bedroom to see what she could find in the way of blankets. First things first. They had to get warm.
One thing had become clear in the course of the afternoon, he thought. Charlotte was not the kind of person who wasted a lot of energy whining about a situation that could not be effectively altered. She knew how to prioritize. He liked that about her; liked it a lot.
They had both declared themselves to be the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other type. But there were times in life when the ability to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going was a very handy character trait. It was, he decided, the one thing that might get them safely through the night and off the damned mountain.
By the time Charlotte returned to the small living room, he had the fire going.
“It’s not the Ritz,” he said, “but it will do.”
“Home sweet home,” Charlotte said.
CHAPTER 26
“No one has ever tried to kill me before,” Charlotte said. “It’s sort of a life-changing experience.”
“Definitely, assuming you survive the attempt.”
“Yes, well, we did, thanks to you.”
“We’re not home yet,” Max said.
He cradled a mug of lukewarm coffee in his hands and contemplated a strategy for getting safely through the night and back to civilization in the morning.
He and Charlotte were sitting on chairs that they had pulled up close to the big stone fireplace. They were wrapped in comforters they had found in the bedroom. Their clothes were draped over various items of furniture arranged around the hearth. He had done his best to dry and clean his gun. It was now close at hand on the floor beside his chair.
His cell phone, clipped to his belt in its waterproof case, had miraculously survived, although there wasn’t any service available. Charlotte’s phone had been inside her handbag, which had gone down with the SUV.
The fire was a risk, but it wasn’t as if there had been an alternative, he thought. They had both been dangerously cold and wet. He had drawn the heavy drapes across the windows to ensure that the flames were not readily visible from outside the cabin, but other than that simple precaution there wasn’t much he could do to conceal their presence. He just hoped that he was right about Briggs having given up and gone home.
The cabin’s amenities were minimal. The best news, at least as far as Charlotte was concerned, was that it was still fall, so the owners had not yet turned off the water to protect the pipes during the cold winter months. When she discovered that the toilet flushed, she acted as if she had just won the lottery. He had to admit to having been quietly thrilled at the thought of a hot cup of coffee. Sometimes it’s the small things, he thought.
In addition to some instant coffee, they had found several cans of stew and soup. The electricity was still off, but they had been able to warm some food as well as the coffee by the fire.
Charlotte gazed into the flames, her eyes deeply shadowed.
“I just had a thought,” she said. “Maybe it was Briggs himself who raped Jocelyn.”
Max considered that for a moment.
“It’s possible,” he said. “But I think it’s more likely that he was the one who made sure the case went nowhere.”
“Jocelyn did notice a few details about her attacker. His voice. His shoes. Those kinds of things. Enough to convince her that he was about her own age. That lets Briggs off the hook, I guess.”
“He was the detective in charge of the case. He had the power to lose the evidence box.”
“In other words, he was complicit in a cover-up.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a cop has made a case go away because someone applied pressure and, very likely, a financial incentive.”
Charlotte drank some coffee and lowered the cup. “You mean he was probably paid to shut down the case.”
“At the moment, that appears to be a likely scenario.”
“We now know that Briggs is capable of attempted murder. That means we can’t believe anything he told us.”
“Well, practiced liars usually sprinkle some truth into their stories. But, yes, everything he said is suspect.”
“So maybe Louise Flint really did drive to Loring to speak with him the day she died,” Charlotte said. “And whatever she said made him decide he had to get rid of her.”
“Maybe. What is clear is that what we told him was enough to make him panic. Hard to make a tough cop panic.”
“When you think about it, all we really told him was that you were investigating the murder of a woman with a close connection to my stepsister.”
“No, we indicated we were looking for a connection to Jocelyn Pruett’s cold case. That’s what scared the hell out of him.”
“Briggs must have been the one who murdered Louise. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Max said. “The thing is, Louise was murdered by someone who got close enough to her to use drugs. That suggests she knew her killer.”
“Not necessarily. In fact, if you hadn’t warned me off, I would have had some of the coffee that Mrs. Briggs made and thought nothing of it.”
“When drugs are involved in a case, I tend to err on the side of caution. But that said, I think Briggs would have been more likely to use a gun or maybe brute force to get rid of someone.”
“Like he did when he tried to kill us.”
“Yeah.”
Charlotte closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, her expression was stark but determined.
“We’re stirring up a hornet’s nest, aren’t we?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
He drank some more coffee.
/>
She surprised him with a faint, wry smile. “You really know how to reassure a client. Yes, sir, I feel a lot more confident now.”
He suppressed a sigh. “You’re not a client, remember?”
She tilted her head slightly to the side. “Do you talk to your actual clients any differently?”
“In my experience, it’s usually best not to raise false expectations.”
She nodded and gazed into the fire for a long time.
“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” she said eventually.
“Depends,” he said.
“Always the cautious type,” she said.
He didn’t have an answer for that, so he drank some more coffee.
“How did you end up in Seattle?” she asked.
“I told you. I burned out on the profiling job. Got divorced. I needed a change of scene.”
“Yes, I know the short version. I just wondered about the rest of the story. You said your last case went bad. Will you tell me what happened?”
“You sure you want to know?”
“Only if you feel comfortable telling me. I’m well aware that I have no right to pry. You don’t owe me any explanations.”
He watched the ghost of the nightmares shiver in the flames on the hearth for a moment. And then, somewhat to his own surprise, he started talking.
“By definition, all of the cases we handled at the profiling agency were bad. But the last one got to me in ways the others hadn’t because, among other things, it involved fire.”
Charlotte looked at him. “Fire?”
“I have a thing about fire. When I was a kid, I and some other kids were trapped in an old barn that was deliberately torched by a psycho named Quinton Zane.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Oh, Max. How did you get out?”
“We were rescued by the local chief of police. It’s a long story. My mother was a single mom. She was an artist and what people like to call a free spirit. She was really into the metaphysical thing.”
“The metaphysical thing?”
“She was always looking for enlightenment. We moved around a lot—going from one guru type to another. Trust me, there are an astonishing number of con artists out there posing as gurus and cult leaders. And an even greater number of people like my mom who desperately want to believe the pitch.”
“Yes, I know. It’s very sad.”
“The year I was ten, we ended up on a commune run by Zane. One of his followers had provided some land, an old ranch located just outside a small town on the California coast. There were several buildings on the grounds. The women lived in one of them. The men in another. And the kids were all required to sleep in an old barn.”
“What about Zane?”
“He took over the original ranch house. And every night he sent for one of the women. It was supposed to be an honor for the chosen wife of the night.”
“How ghastly.”
“Like most cult leaders, Zane was focused on two things—money and power. But Zane was young—in his midtwenties—and he was also a very modern kind of cult leader. He took his business model online. The adults in the commune brought in the cash in a variety of different ways. They surrendered all of their worldly possessions, including money and stocks and properties, when they joined the group. After that, they continued to have to pay their way—mostly by operating a variety of online cons devised by Zane.”
“What about the children?”
“We were required to do most of the physical labor around the ranch, but mostly we were groomed to work the online scams. I will admit that we liked that part. It was like playing real live video games. You won, you made some money.”
“But you didn’t get to keep the money.”
“Of course not. It all went into Zane’s offshore account.”
“What happened?”
“The sex factor kicked in. Historically that’s usually what destroys a cult from the inside. Eventually some of the men got pissed off because their wives and girlfriends were sleeping with Quinton Zane. Several of the women got upset because they weren’t allowed to refuse Zane for fear of being tossed out of the compound. For those who had children, it would have meant losing access to their kids.”
“Who were locked up every night so that their parents couldn’t decide to take them and leave,” Charlotte said. “In other words, they were hostages.”
“Right. Predictably, the situation at the compound deteriorated. Looking back, I’m sure the cult was about to fall apart. Zane must have known that. He didn’t want to deal with the fallout and he didn’t want to risk losing all the money he had stashed offshore. One night he set off several explosions designed to destroy the compound, all the computers and the evidence of the scam. It’s unclear whether he meant to kill a lot of people in the process or if the fires just got out of control.”
“You and the other children were trapped in that barn?” Charlotte asked, horrified.
“Yes. And we would have died there if Chief Anson Salinas hadn’t crashed his vehicle through the front of the barn, shoved eight terrified children into his SUV and reversed like hell out of that damn inferno.”
“I’ve got cold chills just listening to you tell the story. He saved you and the others. What an incredible thing to do.”
Max smiled faintly. “Especially when you consider that everyone outside was warning him that the entire structure was about to collapse.”
Charlotte hesitated. “What about your mother?”
Max turned his attention back to the fire. “She and several other women didn’t make it out of their quarters. Zane had locked them in for the night, as well.”
Without a word Charlotte put out her hand and touched his bare arm.
For a moment he let himself absorb the warmth and tenderness of her touch.
“What happened to Zane?” she asked after a while.
“In the chaos and confusion of the fire, he got away.”
“Was he ever caught?”
Max met her eyes. “No. But a few months later a man matching his description, and carrying identification that was the same as one of the identities Zane was known to have used, rented a yacht at a marina near L.A. He took the boat out alone. There was a fire on board. The boat sank. Zane’s body was never recovered. Officially he is presumed dead. But my brothers and I don’t buy that version of the story. We’ve been searching for him ever since.”
“Your brothers? They were there at the compound?”
“Of the eight kids in the barn that night, three of us lost our mothers in the fire. None of us had any other family, at least no other family that was willing to come forward and take responsibility for us. We were headed for the foster care system. Anson Salinas came to the rescue again. He took us in. Got himself licensed as a foster parent. Raised us. So, yes, I’ve got a couple of brothers, Cabot Sutter and Jack Lancaster.”
Charlotte gave him a searching look. “And you’ve got a father, too, from the sound of it.”
Max smiled. “Oh, yeah. I definitely have a dad.”
“So what went wrong on your last job with the profiling agency?”
“Everything. My colleagues, my friends and my wife were all convinced that I was obsessed. Maybe paranoid. Maybe flat-out crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because, for a while, at least, I was convinced that Quinton Zane had somehow come back from the grave.”
CHAPTER 27
It was the haunted look in Max’s eyes that chilled Charlotte to the very core of her being.
“We knew we were dealing with a serial arsonist,” Max said. “He targeted lonely people he identified at online dating sites. He made them believe that they were connecting with their soul mates. Sooner or later he suggested that they meet.”
“And then he killed them?”
“Yes. The pattern seemed straightforward. He had sex with his victims, murdered them in a location where he felt safe and then dumped the bodies. He always tried to destroy the evidence by setting a fire. Sometimes he torched the victim’s car. Sometimes he set fire to the house where the victim lived. Sometimes he left the body in a trash bin and poured accelerant on the contents. Sometimes he used an old, abandoned building. But there was always fire.”
Charlotte studied Max’s grim face. “Did you catch him?”
“We put together a special team. We created a fake online identity that matched the profiles of the victims the killer targeted online. When the killer went for the bait, Beth, one of the women on the team, posed as the date. But something went wrong. Turned out the killer was onto her almost from the start. Beth was wired and we were tracking her, but the bastard found the devices. He destroyed them.”
“What happened?”
“My only hope was that he hadn’t killed her. I figured he might want to keep her alive for a while because he wanted to taunt those of us who were looking for him. I took another look at the pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“The bodies were found in different locations, but when I looked hard I could see that those locations formed a pattern. And at the heart of that pattern was an old, abandoned hospital. I wondered if he was using it as the killing ground. I tried to convince the team that it was worth a look. But there was a new guy who was supposed to be some kind of wonder boy. He was always carrying on about his algorithms and his computer models. He was sure that the perp was using another location as his base. The cops focused on it. In the end I went out to the hospital on my own.”
“No backup?”
“I was afraid that if the killer saw cops, he would kill Beth—assuming he hadn’t done so already. I pulled up a floor plan of the hospital and discovered that there was an underground tunnel that connected two of the wings and the morgue. I took a chance and went in that way.”
“The tunnel was open?”