You Don't Want To Know

  “I just found out myself.”

  “Ian called me a few minutes ago,” Dern explained as he and Ava retraced their footsteps downstairs.

  Ava brushed past Khloe and opened the door. Wyatt was just climbing the front steps. “I’ve got bad news,” he said, his face grim as he walked inside and brushed a kiss across her cheek. He smelled of the ocean and something else . . . the slight tinge of cigarette smoke.

  “We heard,” she said as the twins arrived behind him. Trent gave her a bear hug. Of all of her cousins, he was the closest to her.

  “What a mess,” he said as Ian and McPherson stepped through the door. “Ian says you knew the victim.”

  “Everyone did.” Ava shut the door behind them. “Cheryl lived in Anchorville for years.”

  Unzipping his jacket, Trent said, “But I thought Ian mentioned that you saw her professionally?”

  So much for keeping things to herself, Ava thought, and caught Dern staring at her. “I thought hypnosis might make me remember and . . . and that maybe I would recall something that might help me find Noah.” So now the secret was out.

  Wyatt zeroed in on the shoes dangling from Ava’s fingers. “What’re these?” Lines of concern and frustration etched his forehead. “Noah’s?”

  “I found them in his room. They’re wet. Salt water.”

  “What?” he whispered.

  “Someone put them there. For me to trip over.”

  “Why would anyone . . . ?” At the sound of footsteps on the porch, he said, “We’ll talk about this later.” The doorbell chimed hollowly. “Right now, we’ve got to deal with the police.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “So it looks like you were Cheryl Reynolds’s last appointment of the day. You may have been the last person to see her alive,” Detective Snyder said from his seat on the couch in the library. His partner, Detective Morgan Lyons, stood near the closed French doors to the hallway, as if she expected someone to try and interrupt them. Wound tight, Lyons managed to exude a take-charge aura despite her small size. She was younger than her partner by over a decade, somewhere in her midthirties, Ava guessed. Trim, with wild brown hair that seemed determined to escape the knot she’d pinned at the base of her skull, she watched Ava with guarded eyes.

  Everyone other than Ava had been ushered into other rooms of the house, and she, over Wyatt’s protests, was talking to the police alone.

  “You really shouldn’t,” Wyatt had advised her. “Without legal counsel.”

  “You mean, without you?” she said.

  His eyes darkened and he’d gripped her arm and pulled her out of earshot of the detectives. “I mean a criminal attorney, Ava.”

  “But I don’t need one. I’ve done nothing wrong.” She’d stared up at him only to find doubt in his eyes. “You believe me, right?”

  “Of course,” he’d snapped, then released her.

  She’d walked with the two detectives into the library. Now, both of the officers were looking at her. Bald, no-nonsense Snyder and skeptical Lyons with her large eyes and tight lips. “I told you when I left her, Cheryl was in the doorway to the basement where her studio is. I don’t think anyone else was downstairs, but I can’t be sure. I was, um, being hypnotized, so I wasn’t really aware of what was going on around me, but I didn’t see anyone else there. Just Cheryl and her cats.”

  “Did she lock the door behind you?”

  “When I arrived? No.” Ava thought hard. “But I can’t be sure.”

  “What about when you left?” Lyons asked.

  “I don’t remember her locking the door. Didn’t hear it click or anything. All I recall was that it was dark. The streetlights had come on.” But they came on early this time of year; the clocks had been set back to standard time earlier in the month, and the afternoons were incredibly short.

  Snyder asked, “You said it was after five?”

  “Uh-huh. The session was scheduled for four-thirty, and I remember hurrying to get there. I’d had a really late lunch with my friend. It took up most of the afternoon. So I got to Cheryl’s a few minutes late. Maybe four thirty-five. By the time I left, it was five-thirty or so. Really getting dark.”

  “Your sessions usually lasted an hour?” Snyder adjusted the digital recorder that he’d placed on the table between them.

  “Give or take,” Ava admitted. “Cheryl isn’t . . . wasn’t one to be rigid about time.”

  Snyder asked, “And you were there because . . . ?”

  “For the same reason I came to see you earlier,” she said, showing a little irritation. “I’m trying to find out what happened to my son. I’ve had memory issues, and I was hoping hypnotism might unlock something in my subconscious, something I can’t recall.”

  “But you remember everything about your session?” Lyons clarified from the doorway. “The ‘memory issues’ weren’t a problem yesterday.”

  Ava had to bite back a smart retort. “No. I remember what happened before and after being hypnotized. Just not during.” Ava glanced up at the stiff-backed detective. “I’m not really in touch with what’s going on around me when I’m under.”

  Snyder said, “But Ms. Reynolds was in the room with you the whole time.”

  “I think so, yes, but I can’t swear to it.”

  Snyder frowned. “Could someone else have come in?”

  “To the room? I doubt it.” She tried to remember if she’d felt any change while under hypnosis.

  “What about to the rest of the house?”

  “I don’t know. I think Cheryl rents out the upper floors, so I suppose someone could have come or gone . . .” Ava frowned.

  “And the basement?” Lyons pushed.

  “I was there in her office, but there are other rooms, so it’s possible. The door between the hall and the room I was in was closed while I was in a session. All I can tell you is that I don’t remember hearing anything out of the ordinary,” she said with forced patience.

  Before Detective Lyons could ask another question, Snyder clarified again, “You were her last scheduled appointment.”

  “I don’t really know what her schedule was,” Ava answered.

  “She didn’t talk about seeing anyone else?” Lyons asked.

  “No.”

  The questions continued and Ava went over everything again. And then a third time: What time had she arrived? How long had she stayed? When she left, did she see anyone suspicious on her walk to the marina? Ava answered as best she could: No, she didn’t know of anyone who would want to harm Cheryl. She’d known the deceased casually about ten years, been a client more recently. She’d had a session less than a week earlier and then the last one yesterday.

  “And you got a ride back to the island nearly forty-five minutes after your session?” Lyons asked after over an hour of what was beginning to feel more like an interrogation than a simple questioning.

  “Yes. I picked up a latte at a shop in town, The Local Buzz, and then caught a ride from the marina with Butch Johansen. He’s a friend of mine and captain of the Holy Terror.”

  For the first time, a hint of a smile brushed Detective Lyons’s lips.

  “So you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary?” Detective Snyder asked.

  “No,” she said, and then decided to go for broke. “One thing: I did feel like someone was watching me. From the time I left Cheryl’s until the time I got on the boat, I just had this weird sensation that someone was . . . following me.” She saw both detectives straighten a bit.

  “Who?” Lyons asked.

  “I don’t know. And look, I’m not even sure about it. It was just a feeling I had.” She caught Detective Lyons looking at her wrists, just visible beneath the cuffs of her sleeves, and when their eyes met, she said evenly, “I know the rumors about me. That I’m crazy. And they’re true. I wasn’t myself after my son disappeared, but I’m not mentally ill. Can I tell you one hundred percent that someone was following me? No. Just like I can’t tell you that no one else was in Cheryl’s hou
se when I left there. Did she seem troubled? Maybe. She warned me to ‘be careful,’ that things ‘weren’t what they seemed to be.’ She said something about there being ‘bad blood’ out here on this island and that she was worried about me.”

  The detectives exchanged glances. “Why was she worried?” Snyder asked.

  Ava shook her head. “Maybe because I keep pushing to find Noah, my son.”

  “And that would put you into danger?” Lyons asked.

  “I’m just speculating. I don’t really know.”

  The detectives asked a few more questions but still seemed dissatisfied when they finally called it quits. Snyder pressed his card into her palm. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”

  “I will,” she promised, but knew it was as empty as the rooms at Sea Cliff. She tucked the card into the front pocket of her jeans and felt something inside her pocket . . . cold metal. She was reminded that she’d never found the lock for the damned key.

  Maybe there was none.

  Maybe, after all of this, the key was meaningless, just something she’d found one day and slipped inside her pocket. After all, her memory had some major holes in it.

  And that, as ever, was the problem: She just couldn’t remember. She was close, or at least she thought she was, to recalling something important. Something vital. It was like a cloud on the horizon, wispy and thin, shifting into a shape that didn’t quite form into a clear picture. She just couldn’t seem to get there.

  Maybe it was time to do something about the key. Maybe someone in the house knew what it was about. Maybe the same someone who’d left Noah’s shoes for her to find. Now, she picked them up from where she’d set them down and headed out.

  It was time to figure out who that someone was.

  “She’s hiding something,” Lyons said later, once the detectives had boated across the bay and driven to the department. She snapped her keys out of the ignition of the department-issued cruiser, a tank of a car complete with big engine, a screen separating the front and backseats, and that undisputed aroma of stale cigarette smoke.

  Snyder climbed out of the car and walked with her up the cracked cement path that split twin patches of lawn and past the flagpole that held Old Glory and the Washington State flag with the first president’s face stamped across its emerald-green field. Both flags snapped in the same stiff breeze that had buffeted the detectives as they’d cut across the bay.

  Stride for stride, Snyder and Lyons reached the door, and by training, Snyder held the door for her, though, by God, he knew she didn’t expect anything the least bit “macho” or “condescending.” She’d been adamant, though he’d explained it was just common courtesy. Didn’t matter, though.

  Today, however, she did mutter a quick, “Thanks,” under her breath as they stepped into the long, flat building whose roof seemed to forever leak and smelled vaguely of some pine-scented disinfectant.

  Snyder was tired, the muscles in his lower back aching, the result of an old football injury that flared up whenever he spent too many hours on his feet and not enough in his La-Z-Boy in front of his sixty-incher and SportsCenter. “You think Ava Garrison killed Cheryl Reynolds?” he asked as he reached into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes. The pack was empty, save for one Marlboro that he kept just in case he really needed a hit of nicotine, a rush that e-cigarettes just didn’t deliver. The damned things might be great for avoiding lung cancer and emphysema and the like, but they just weren’t the same as a real smoke. “What’s the motive?”

  “I didn’t say she did anything,” Lyons snapped. She was touchy. Maybe that time of the month, but he didn’t dare suggest it. She might come unglued and go all ape-shit on him and accuse him of not being PC. Well, hell, he knew that. He’d crossed that line before. Truth to tell, he liked the woman, even if she was a little on the high-strung side. “But who knows what she said when she was under hypnosis?” Lyons went on. “Maybe she didn’t like someone knowing so much about her.”

  “Then why go?”

  “I’m saying maybe she’s hiding something. Might have something to do with the case; maybe not. Just sayin’.”

  They walked into the cubicle that Snyder called home, and he began peeling off his jacket. His computer was still running with information on the Cheryl Reynolds case, along with pictures of her basement; her dead body was visible on the monitor. They were still waiting for the autopsy, but it was a formality. The bloody gash across the front of her throat was evidence enough for him to know it was a homicide. He hung up his jacket and slid his arm out of his shoulder holster as Lyons checked her smartphone for the thousandth time today. It was all business, he trusted, but man was she addicted to that thing.

  “I’ll be right back. Gonna hit the ladies’ room.” Texting now, she walked off, toward the back of the building.

  Over the last few hours, they’d talked to all of the hypnotherapist’s clients, especially those she’d seen the day she died. All of Cheryl Reynolds’s friends and acquaintances had been astounded that anyone would do anything to hurt their own personal hypnotic guru.

  Snyder had also managed to speak with each of the two ex-husbands, but so far they were both off the primary suspect list: One lived over fifty miles away, was remarried, and had been at work all day; the other, a more likely suspect, lived in Seattle and though out of work had been “hanging out” with his friends at a local bar. The bartender had confirmed. Both the alibis seemed solid enough.

  So far.

  As a landlord, Reynolds had no tenant disputes.

  Nor, apparently, any angry ex-lovers.

  He rubbed the kinks from his neck as he reviewed his notes.

  According to the will they’d found in a desk drawer, the heirs to Reynolds’s meager savings account and her interest in the rambling old house included an out-of-state niece who was nine, the only child of her now-deceased sibling, and the local animal shelter, which, according to the terms of the will, was supposed to house her “babies”—a total of seven cats—until they died. He’d seen at least five of the felines when he’d first been called to the scene. Who the hell knew where the other two were? The first quintet had already been taken to the shelter; they’d round up the others today or tomorrow.

  Cheryl Reynolds’s cell phone, home phone, and computer records were being checked, but so far no red flags had popped up.

  The house didn’t appear to have been robbed . . . or at least it didn’t look like it at first pass, but the crime scene team was still working the house and surrounding area.

  It was still early in the investigation.

  There was a lot of ground yet to cover.

  Friends and neighbors might have seen or heard something.

  A fingerprint might be found.

  Someone might remember seeing a car or person out of the ordinary. Her taped interviews might unlock a clue. . . .

  Lyons reappeared at the opening to his work space. She was tucking her phone into her pocket and had a package of peanut M&M’s she must’ve grabbed from the vending machine located in the lunchroom near the lavatories. “Biggs brought up the idea that this could be the work of Lester Reece,” she said.

  “The missing Lester Reece,” he reminded her, though he didn’t add that he didn’t think much of the sheriff’s opinion. J. T. Biggs was a mediocre lawman at best. “Why would a killer who escaped from Sea Cliff hospital return to the one town where people would remember and recognize him?”

  “He was in a mental hospital. Determined to be certifiable.”

  “Paranoid schizophrenic, or something.”

  She slit open the package of candy with her thumbnail. “The guy’s nuts with a capital N. He could do anything.”

  “Nah.” Snyder wasn’t buying it. “I was around for that one. You weren’t. Lester Reece wasn’t any crazier than any of the other sick bastards we lock up. He just had a much fatter wallet and a damned good attorney.” Frowning at the image of Cheryl Reynolds on his computer screen, he added, ??
?If you ask me, Lester Reece is fish food.”

  “He killed his ex-wife, right?”

  “Deena and her friend . . . what was her name?” he said, then snapped his fingers. “Mary or Marsha or . . . Maryliss, that was it. Thought I’d never forget it. Maryliss Benson. They were best friends, but at one time Reece had an affair with the friend, so who knows if his intended victim was the ex-wife or the ex-girlfriend? Cruel, privileged son of a bitch. Thought he was above the law.”

  “Reece was a lady-killer, literally.”

  Snyder snorted. “He was involved with a lot of women around here before anyone realized what a whack job he was. Even then, a few still hung out, got off on his fame or infamy or whatever the hell you want to call it.”

  “Oh what a tangled web we weave,” she said as she popped a few of the peanuts into her mouth.

  He laughed. He hated to admit it to himself, but he liked Morgan Lyons, all bristly five-foot-four inches of her. Sassy, smart, with a quick wit and a sharp tongue, she held her own with most of the veterans around the department even though she’d been hired less than a year earlier. For the five years previous, she’d worked for the Oregon State Police and had never really copped to why she’d jumped ship there. All he knew was that she was a good detective and too good-looking for his own good. As tightly packed as she was wound, she had breasts too big to completely minimize, a nipped in waist, and an ass that caused him and the rest of the male population to fantasize what she’d be like in bed.

  He, of course, knew better. He had the two ex-wives to prove it, so Detective Morgan Lyons, sexy as she was, was off-limits. Beyond off-limits.

  He wasn’t that crazy.

  Not anymore.

  He’d trained his dick to be a little smarter. At least he hoped he had.

  Besides, she was rumored to have a serious Bad-Ass of a former husband. The guy just happened to be an ex-cop who had a bad temper and was into authority trips. And, oh, yeah, he had a hard-on for guns, all kinds of guns. From assault rifles to Saturday night specials, the guy collected firearms.