Harrison shrugged. “Kind of a common complaint from your age group, isn’t it?”
“So what? We did something about it. That’s what I’m saying.” He turned a sharp blue gaze Harrison’s way. “We hit their weak spot. Opened up their Pandora’s box. Showed ’em they weren’t gods.”
“You broke into their houses and trespassed and pilfered.”
Noah frowned. “Pilfered?”
“Stole,” Harrison explained with a straight face.
“Yeah, well, we formed an alliance to fight back,” he said with sudden passion. “They treat people like they’re nothing! We made them realize that we could enter their world anytime we wanted. Anytime! And take things from them. We’re deadly, man. The Seven Deadly Sinners.”
Harrison wrote down a few notes and said, “But you’re from their same world, economic-wise. How does that translate?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, but he knew.
Still, Harrison would play his game for a while. “Your father is Bryce Vernon. He’s a successful land developer who’s hung on to his wealth, even throughout this whole recession. Your family might be—and probably is—as well-to-do as the Bermans or any of the other families you hit.”
“The Bermans suck!” he said through clenched teeth. He turned away, trying to hide from Harrison’s gaze suddenly, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Harrison noted how his face grew red with some kind of emotion: anger, frustration, maybe . . . even embarrassment?
Ping. Harrison felt the answer resound in his brain. For all Noah’s posturing, for all his “leading” of his band of entitled misfits, for all his crowing that he needed to be heard—it wasn’t about any of it. This was something to do with the Bermans themselves, and Harrison had a pretty good guess what it was.
“Britt,” he said, and the stunned look that crossed Noah’s face was all the answer Harrison needed.
“Britt?” Noah repeated carefully.
“That’s what set this in motion. Britt Berman. Your imagination did the rest. Your initials . . . your need to make something big and important out of mere jealousy. You turned your rejection and angst into a whole thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. This Deadly Sinners alliance. It’s all smoke and mirrors. A way to attack those who’ve wronged you. You. Noah Vernon. And you got your posse to go along with it because they bought into your whole alliance thing. What did she do? Berman. Set you up to watch you fall? Humiliate you? Crush you? Maybe just never even look at you?” He paused, then said, “She doesn’t even know you exist.”
“Oh, yes, she does.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Yes, she does!”
Harrison shook his head.
“She knows me!” he insisted. “Especially now!”
“Now that you’ve broken into her house and got your Deadly Sinners in the news? And then tomorrow, when you’re eighteen, you want me to blast your name across the paper and increase the Myth of Noah Vernon. How am I doing so far?”
“You’d better take me back now, or I’ll scream that you kidnapped me. I really will.”
“Go ahead. You called the paper and left your number.”
“And you’d better not print any of that, either!”
“You don’t want to be heard anymore?”
“Not the way you’re doing it!”
“By pointing out the truth?”
“You say anything about Britt and I’ll sue you for every cent you own!” He spat out his cigarette and stomped the smoldering butt with his heavy boot.
“You and dear old Dad?”
Noah looked trapped. He glanced around, as if searching for somewhere to run. Harrison waited a few moments and could almost see the air seep out of his balloon as his shoulders slumped and his body sank onto the bench.
“Don’t worry, badass. Your secret’s safe with me,” Harrison said. “I don’t have to tell the world you’re just another lovesick loser. I’ll say you’re a Deadly Sinner and you’re the brains of the group and should be tried as an adult. You want to go to jail for this fiction, be my guest. It’s up to the judge, not me and not public opinion. I could put a different spin on it, if you want me to. Write that you were going to extreme lengths to be noticed by a girl and that—”
“No.” He was firm. “That’s not what it’s about.”
Noah got to his feet and started heading back to the car. Harrison fell in step beside him.
“If this is just about some cockeyed version of street cred,” Harrison said, “it won’t be worth the consequences you could face.”
“I don’t care.”
“You sure?”
“Yes!”
Harrison climbed into the car, and Noah flopped into the passenger seat, his face turned away, his shoulders hunched. Harrison almost felt sorry for the kid. Almost. But he definitely felt both relief and frustration that this story was ending and he could jump fully onto the Justice Turnbull one; relief that he could move on without worrying he was leaving something big, and frustration because the damn thing had taken so much energy in the first place. He needed to be with Lorelei.
And then he should be writing her story. And the Colony’s. And Turnbull’s. They were all interwoven, and it was several serious levels more intense than the Deadly Sinners’ teen drama.
Harrison dropped Noah off back at his house. Then he stopped at the Breeze and typed up a rather banal account of his meeting with Noah, explaining that Noah Vernon, a boy of privilege who was turning eighteen by the time this story would be published, had been bored and wanted to be something bigger, something important, and he coerced his friends into breaking and entering and robbery and trespassing as their golden ticket into another world, the world of crime.
When he turned in the story, Buddy remarked that he’d pretty much nailed Noah Vernon by naming him, but Harrison just ignored him, heading for the door. Noah’s father and a sympathetic judge would foil Noah’s plans to be infamous. Chances were the kid would be in college in a year, joining a fraternity, with a clean, or expunged, record.
That was just how it went a lot of times.
Harrison’s head was full of thoughts of the Deadly Sinners until he passed by the drive to Ocean Park Hospital on his way into Deception Bay. He almost pulled in, just to see Lorelei, but forced himself to let her work at her job. He’d told her to keep her phone on her whether it was hospital rules or not, and figured she would call him if there was trouble.
Still, it was with great difficulty that he let the hospital grounds disappear in his rearview mirror. Justice had attacked her the night before. Harrison was going to make damn sure he was with her before nightfall this evening, but for now, he wanted to speak with Zellman, if he could talk the man into an interview.
He’d just passed the access road to Lorelei’s house when something caught his attention, and he turned around at the first available empty drive and retraced his route back to her access road. As he drove up it, he saw a vehicle nearly obscured by the brush running riot on either side. A black Range Rover. The one he’d damn near sideswiped the night before.
Now he pulled up beside it and got out, circling the black vehicle. Nobody inside. Empty. He tried the driver’s door and was amazed when it opened. The interior light came on. Sliding inside, he popped the glove box and pulled out the registration. He stared at it, perplexed, for almost a full minute.
The Range Rover was registered to a Brandt Zellman.
Zellman?
The Zellman he was on his way to see?
That Zellman?
“Huh,” Harrison said.
What were the chances that this Brandt Zellman was related to Dr. Maurice Zellman? Like 99.99 percent? Maybe Brandt was the man’s son? Harrison was pretty sure he remembered the doctor was married and had one teenaged son.
But what the hell did this have to do with Justice Turnbull? Anything?
Had Justice “borrowed” Zellman
’s son’s car?
Harrison felt a chill roll down his back at the thought of what that meant. Was Zellman even okay? Maybe he should call the authorities and have them send a patrol car to check on the good doctor.
Better yet, he decided, he should check things out for himself first.
CHAPTER 32
Harrison headed south toward Zellman’s house but wheeled into the Ocean Park Hospital drive first, squealing a little as he took the turn at the last moment. He drove fast to the parking lot and practically leapt from his vehicle, checking his watch. About three o’clock. Laura would be on the floor somewhere, and he really needed to see her first.
But he was thwarted almost immediately by a flurry of activity in the ER that had the whole hospital hopping: a three-car pileup just north of Deception Bay. Racing teens, he learned, but that was all he got from them.
He tried phoning Laura’s cell, but it went straight to voice mail. He started feeling anxious, berating himself for not hanging closer to her, and had to give himself a stern talking-to. She’s okay. She’s at work. Getting panicky isn’t going to help anyone, or solve anything. Besides, the TCSD had called; they were scheduled for another interview later in the day, after the detectives had gone over all the initial information.
Phoning her cell again, this time he left a message confirming that on her dinner break, which she’d said tended to be in the late afternoon, they were going to meet with the authorities.
Hanging up, he wondered if he should have told her about finding Brandt Zellman’s Range Rover abandoned near her house. Once more he considered going to the police. Once more he decided to be first on the scene himself.
Feeling superfluous with hospital personnel rushing all around him, as if he were the rock in the middle of the stream, Harrison headed back out to his car. The clouds had fully dissipated, and the beat of the sunshine on his head and shoulders was downright hot. He would go see Zellman now. On his own. Geena had told him where the doctor lived, so there was nothing stopping him.
As he turned out of the hospital drive onto Highway 101, his cell phone rang. Damn. He was going to have to get Bluetooth or risk being pulled over for talking while driving. He answered anyway.
“Frost,” he said.
“Hi, this is Dinah Smythe. You left a message on my phone?”
“Yes, I did,” Harrison confirmed, his eyes peeled for the law as he drove along. “I met with your father.” He sketched out his visit with Herman and finished with, “He told me to call you to confirm everything he said.”
“You’re writing an article?” she asked carefully.
“Just doing research.”
“I’m going to guess this has to do with Justice Turnbull’s escape, since you’re asking about the women of the Colony.”
“Your father . . . intimated . . . that you might be related to them.”
“He believes he’s at least one of thems father, so maybe. Or maybe not. It’s not some burning issue I need to know.”
“He says he had sexual relations with Mary Rutledge Beeman, who is the documented mother of the women who live there.”
“Ahh . . . you’ve read his account.”
“I was curious,” Harrison admitted. He wondered how long it would take to get to Zellman’s.
“My father likes to act as if there were a time when free love reigned at Siren Song. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. There are definitely a lot of women living at the lodge, so somebody fathered them. It’s a lot of hearsay, but my father isn’t exactly what I’d call a reliable source anymore.”
“He alluded to the fact that I should talk to you about them.”
“Because I’m the one who still has an accurate memory,” she said dryly. “But if you’ve read his book, you know about as much as I do.”
Harrison talked to Dinah Smythe for a few minutes more, until he saw a TCSD patrol car coming his way and hurriedly hung up. After the cop flew on by him, he pulled the note from his pocket with the other phone numbers from Herman’s list. He called the first and learned it was a clinic specializing in gerontology. Herm’s doctor, apparently. The second was a pizzeria that delivered.
So much for that.
With a feeling of hitting a dead end, he shoved the Colony aside and concentrated on the road ahead. Here, 101 cut inland for a stretch of miles before jogging out to the coast again. His stomach growled, and he reminded himself that the Subway sandwich he’d bolted down for lunch in Seaside wasn’t sticking with him as much as he’d hoped.
He drove through Tillamook, spying the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department, which was located in a building in the strip of land between the northbound and southbound lanes of the highway, the very spot he and Lorelei would meet with the cops. He knew she was uncomfortable talking about Turnbull and how he was connected to her and Siren Song.
Then again, who wouldn’t be?
He glanced at the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of his reflection. “You really know how to pick ’em,” he said to the eyes glowering back at him. Lorelei Adderley was trouble with a capital T. Aside from her weird childhood at the Colony, there was her mental connection to a madman, whether real or imagined. Either way, it spelled disaster. Then there was that imperious son of a bitch to whom she’d been recently married, a prick if there ever was one. Yeah, Lorelei came with a lot of baggage, and the worst part of it was, he didn’t seem to care. She was charming and smart, clever, and had a wicked sense of humor, and when she kissed him . . . oh, hell, he was lost in the wonder of her.
“Fool,” he ground out, knowing he was falling for a woman he hadn’t known a week, a woman who seemed to attract the worst kind of trouble.
And as intriguing as hell.
He, a man of fact and science, who had carefully avoided any serious relationships for all of his adult life, was falling for a woman whose beauty and spirit called to him, touched him in a spot he’d kept closed off for years. Just like her damned namesake.
It was a real pisser and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
He forced his concentration back to the road, where he was following a flatbed truck that was hauling a load of berries, crates and crates of them strapped to pallets that seemed to shift beneath the tethers that bound them.
He sped past the truck and noticed an SUV follow suit, right on his tail. The minute he tucked into the right lane again, the SUV, with a surfboard atop and what looked like paraphernalia for hang gliding, a sport that was popular on the series of capes that rose above the ocean in this part of the state, along the coastline, flew past.
Yet another idiot, who took the next turn toward the west.
Harrison followed, but the SUV was sprinting and disappeared from sight before he reached the next corner. Once again on the coastline, he drove through a small hamlet, which boasted Carter’s Bait Shop and not much else, then on past Bancroft Bluff, where he noticed several sheriff’s department vehicles and realized they were still swarming around the double homicide, which had come into the paper earlier and which Buddy was writing up. More investigation to follow.
Zellman was lucky he hadn’t built on that unstable section of land; his home was on a rock table, and Harrison slowed down at the sight of the stone pillars that marked the drive and the opened wrought-iron gates. He turned into the long, winding drive, which was asphalt bordered by cut stone, and wound through tortured pine trees and a riotous fifteen-foot-high laurel hedge. The woods thinned out closer to the house, and he suddenly burst into a clearing where an imposing house of sand-colored stone stood, shaped into an obtuse angle, the massive garage one arm, the house the other.
The windows were trimmed in cedar, and there were several flower boxes full of petunias. A few cars were parked along the garage side. Harrison slotted the Impala beside the end one, a dark blue Mercedes. He glanced at it as he headed toward the front door and saw the keys were in the ignition. The car beside it was a white BMW, also with keys in the ignition. A car thief’s dream.
/> Harrison walked along an auxiliary stone pathway that led to the front door, which was protected by a post-and-beam cedar portico. Massive wrought-iron door handles were bolted to the double doors, and as he pressed the doorbell, he saw it, too, was a wrought-iron rectangle with a raised design of what looked like beach grass.
The door opened, and a young man stood in the aperture, gazing at Harrison through worried eyes. He was thin, with wavy dark hair longer than Harrison’s own, and he was fighting an attack of acne along his jawline. He gazed at Harrison expectantly.
“Brandt?” Harrison guessed.
The worried look turned to a controlled panic. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Harrison Frost. I’m actually looking for your father. Is he home?”
“Oh . . . yeah . . . He can’t talk, though. . . .” He glanced over his shoulder to the dim interior of the home. Harrison could see down a long hallway to a burst of light where windows opened onto the back view. “I thought you were . . . I don’t know. Like coming to tell me something bad.”
“About your car?”
Brandt looked thoroughly confused. “My car? No. Not mine. Matt Ellison was driving a red Blazer.”
“Matt Ellison?”
“I think he’s at the hospital now. It’s senior skip day, and that’s why they weren’t in school. They’re not saying on the news yet.”
“The three-car accident,” Harrison realized. “No, I don’t know anything about that.”
Nodding resignedly, Brandt turned and led Harrison into the house and down the hall to a large, domed room with windows that curved to allow a view of 180 degrees of sky and distant sea. Buttery leather armchairs were arranged in conversation groups. A glossy black baby grand sat to one side.
Dr. Maurice Zellman was seated on a chaise, holding a book. A sweating glass of iced tea sat beside him on a coaster on a side table made of cherrywood and wrought-iron detailing. The doctor was small and wiry with a sharp chin, and he gazed at Harrison with piercing eyes. A white bandage was wrapped around his throat beneath a casual blue shirt. He wore tan chinos, and his feet were encased in matching tan socks.