Meanwhile, she looked like a kid on Christmas morning. I’d given her the gift of fresh evidence. There was nothing better than that for an agent.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Does it bother you that you’re no longer out there chasing Ned Sinclair?”
“Of course it does. Totally. It makes me crazy, actually.”
“And instead of that job, your job now is getting me out of this house, right?”
“Right. That makes me crazy, too.”
“So what would you say if I told you maybe there was a way to do both?”
Sarah thought for a few seconds, those green eyes of hers narrowing to a squint. She was wary. But she was also intrigued.
“I’d say, keep talking, John O’Hara. Maybe we have a couple of things in common.”
Book Four
The Vows We Make,
the Vows We’re Given…
Chapter 71
I REALLY SHOULD’VE called ahead. What was I thinking?
Actually, I knew exactly what I was thinking. Olivia Sinclair was up in Langdale, New York, and I didn’t want to risk being told over the phone, “Now’s not a good time.”
And okay, yes: a small part of me was showing off a bit for the woman sitting shotgun next to me.
“Anytime you want to tell me where we’re going, fire away,” said Sarah more than once as we were driving north along I-684.
“We’ll be there soon enough,” I said.
Part guilt, part curiosity, and a slight sense of responsibility had me checking up on Olivia Sinclair since her daughter, Nora, was murdered. Once a year, sometimes twice a year, I’d call the head nurse, Emily Barrows, to see how her most intriguing patient was doing. In a way, that sort of added to the irony of Ned Sinclair wanting to kill me.
“Pine Woods Psychiatric Facility?” asked a puzzled Sarah as we drove by the sign on the way into the parking lot.
I turned to her as I pulled into a space, cutting the engine. “Pop quiz: What do all serial killers have in common?”
Sarah looked at me blankly.
“They all have a mother,” I said.
Her face lit up. Exactly as I’d thought.
From the moment I’d met Special Agent Sarah Brubaker I could tell how laser-focused she was on Ned Sinclair, presumably even more so since she’d been ordered off his trail. That just made her hungrier for a break in the case. Call it human nature. Also call it the reason she was willing to drive with me for more than an hour without knowing where she was going.
It wasn’t just your rapier wit and charm, O’Hara.
I led Sarah up to the eighth floor nurses’ station, where, sure enough, Emily Barrows was on duty. The last time she and I spoke was the previous summer, but it had been about five years or so since we’d seen each other face-to-face. She looked more tired than I remembered, a bit more run-down.
Time is especially hard on those whose workday is defined as a “shift.”
After introducing Sarah, I apologized to Emily for showing up unannounced. “I was hoping, though, that we could speak with Olivia. She’s still down at the end of the hall, right?”
Emily paused, unsure at first how to respond.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m probably supposed to go through your chief administrator for that request, but we’re sort of pressed for time, and—”
“No, it’s not that,” said Emily. She paused again. “Olivia’s no longer here.”
“Oh, I see. You mean she was released?”
As I said, I really should’ve called ahead.
“No,” said Emily. “I mean she’s dead.”
Chapter 72
“HOW?” I ASKED. “When did it happen?”
“Two months ago,” answered Emily. “Pancreatic cancer. It took her very fast.”
She was about to say something else, but stopped.
“What is it?” I asked. “You were going to say…”
“Nothing, really. I was just remembering what Olivia told me after she was first diagnosed. She said the cancer was from the grief—you know, from her daughter’s death. She holds herself responsible.”
“She loved Nora very much,” I said. I couldn’t resist the segue. “Do you remember her ever mentioning that she also had a son?”
Emily thought for a few seconds before shaking her head. “I don’t believe so.”
I looked over at Sarah, who surely had thoughts of decking me right there in the hallway for taking her on a wild goose chase. To her credit, though, she seemed determined to make the most of it. Or, at the very least, to exhaust every angle.
“Her son’s name is Ned,” said Sarah. “Maybe that helps.”
It didn’t. “You have to keep in mind, Olivia barely talked at all for years,” said Emily. “It wasn’t until after Nora’s death that she actually spoke more than a few sentences to me. But it’s not like we struck up a friendship.”
Sarah listened and nodded, but I could tell she was already a few questions ahead in her mind. “Did Olivia pass away here?” she asked.
“No. Toward the end she was transferred to a hospice. That’s where she died.”
“What about her personal effects? Did they go with her to the hospice?”
Emily hesitated. It was as if she was trying to figure out how to answer without lying. I’d seen that hesitation countless times in the course of interrogations. Clearly, so had Sarah. We traded glances.
“Is there something you need to tell us?” asked Sarah.
It was a simple question, but through her tone and inflection my “bad cop” partner had managed to insinuate that Emily’s world would come crashing down like a house of cards were she not to level with us. Pretty damn intimidating, actually.
Dick Cheney could keep his waterboarding kit. I had Sarah Brubaker.
Emily nervously looked left and right to make sure no one else was within earshot. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be right back. Please. Just give me a minute.”
She disappeared into the room behind the nurses’ station. No more than ten seconds later, she returned with something wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.
“Olivia kept it hidden at the bottom of a box in her closet,” said Emily. “I know it was wrong of me, but after everything I learned about her daughter, Nora…well, I just couldn’t help myself.”
And with that, she handed the bag to Sarah.
Chapter 73
I DROVE. SARAH READ.
“Hey!” I must have called out a half dozen times when Sarah’s voice would trail off. She was so engrossed she didn’t realize she’d stopped reading aloud.
The date of the first entry was August 9, 1990, right as Olivia began her prison sentence for murdering her husband. Only she wasn’t the one who killed him. It was Ned. She took the fall for her seven-year-old son. Or so she claimed.
Would she lie to her own diary?
There was no denying the unsettling, slightly disconcerting nature of what Sarah and I were doing—and, yes, what nurse Emily Barrows had done before us. This was the ultimate invasion of privacy, and the fact that Olivia was dead hardly mitigated that fact.
Still.
If there was one iota of information in this little brown leather-bound book that could help us catch Ned Sinclair before he killed again, then that justified our actions. It didn’t get more Machiavellian than that.
And, oddly, having met Olivia Sinclair, I had the feeling she’d completely understand.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Sarah, interrupting herself midsentence.
I glanced over at her from behind the wheel. She looked disgusted. “What is it?” I asked.
“Nora was molested by her father,” she said. “Repeatedly.”
The rest was like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It all fit together easily.
Ned had known about the incest, taking matters into his own little hands. The fact that Olivia knew nothing about what her husband had been doing—until it was too late—surely accelerate
d her decision to take the fall for Ned. It was her last act of motherhood.
Sarah continued to read. In gut-wrenching detail, Olivia described the guilt she felt, the pain of learning that her children would be sent off to an orphanage.
It only got worse. A year later, she learned that Ned and Nora had been separated, sent to two different state-run foster care facilities.
Sarah suddenly closed the book, snapping it shut.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Taking a break. I can’t read any more right now,” she said. “What a terrible story.”
For someone so intent on bringing down Ned Sinclair, that was saying a lot. Not that I could blame her. Olivia’s diary described a nightmare come to life—for all the Sinclairs.
No matter where you stood on nature versus nurture, it was all but impossible to think that this hadn’t permanently scarred both Ned and Nora.
I glanced over at Sarah, who was holding Olivia’s diary like I hold the refrigerator door when I’m trying to lose a few pounds. Sure enough, she opened it again.
“That was a quick break,” I said.
“Can’t help it,” she said. “I need to get through this, to read everything. Probably a couple of times.”
I understood. She was really intent on bringing down Ned Sinclair. She had total focus on her goal. So much so that everything else seemed inconsequential. For example, where the hell were we heading? South, yes, but certainly not to my house. At least not on Sarah’s watch.
I kept driving while she kept reading, both of us unsure of what lay ahead. Then, about ten miles and twenty pages later, everything changed.
“Holy shit,” muttered Sarah, her head still buried in the diary.
“What is it?” I asked.
As I turned to look, she held up the page she was reading. I saw it immediately.
The key to everything.
Chapter 74
SARAH SHOOK HER head for practically the entire flight out to Los Angeles. After a while, I had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“You,” I said. “You’re like my mother when I was a kid. I’d come home from school boasting that I got ninety-eight percent on my math test, and the first thing she’d say was, ‘Who got the other two percent?’”
Sarah had been savvy enough to do a title search for any property that Ned Sinclair might still own. But now she was beating herself up because—the other two percent—it didn’t occur to her to also check for property owned by other members of the Sinclair family. Especially Nora. Just because she’d been dead for years didn’t mean she still couldn’t own a home.
Sure enough.
It was a two-bedroom split-level in Westwood near the UCLA campus, where Ned had been an associate professor. Nora had bought it for her brother and, according to the diary, for Olivia as well.
Here’s the key, Mother, for the day when you get released.
That’s what Nora had told her during one of her visits to Pine Woods. The key was a token of optimism, something to keep Olivia’s spirits up. Nora wanted her mother to think that one day she might actually be set free.
Deep down they probably both knew it would never happen.
So it was only Ned who lived in the house. That is, he lived there until he was committed to Eagle Mountain Psychiatric Hospital.
But what had Sarah and me flying across the country was that the place was never sold. It still belonged to Nora’s estate.
Welcome to a very special episode of House Hunters.
“That’s it over there,” said Sarah about thirty minutes after we were on the ground in Los Angeles. She was pointing from the backseat of the cab we took from LAX. “The number’s on the mailbox. Two seventy-two.”
We pulled up, paid the driver, got out, and stared at Ned Sinclair’s last known residence. I expected it to be run-down and creepy, with overgrown grass and weeds. Instead, it was in great shape, well maintained and impeccably manicured.
That somehow made it really creepy.
“Nora’s estate probably provided for a caretaker on the assumption that Ned would one day be released,” said Sarah.
“Maybe,” I said.
She looked at me. “Why? You don’t think—”
“That he’s in there? Nah. He’s been killing in only one direction: east,” I said. “Lousy odds that he’d be commuting back and forth.”
The better odds were that Ned had made a stop at the house after springing himself from Eagle Mountain, only twenty miles away. Pack a suitcase? A shower and a shave? Grab a little travel cash?
The real question, though, was whether he’d managed to leave something behind—some clue, anything, that could help us track him down.
“I’ll let you do the honors,” I said as we approached the front door of the cedar-shake house with white trim.
Sarah removed the key from her pocket. It was still a little sticky from all the tape Olivia had used to adhere it to her diary.
“Tell me again there’s no chance he’s in there,” she said.
“Okay, there’s no chance he’s in there.”
We both laughed. Ha-ha. Then we both quickly took out our guns.
Just in case we were both wrong.
Chapter 75
KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO’S THERE?
Nobody.
After a quick sweep of the entire house, there was no Ned to be found. Sarah and I were back in the small ceramic-tiled foyer, where we began.
“You take the upstairs, I’ve got downstairs,” she said.
Now it was all about finding clues, something that would point us in the right direction. A Ned decoder. Where was he heading next?
Had this been a movie, it would’ve been so simple. We’d walk into a room and discover with mouths agape that every inch of every wall was covered with pictures of me, each one with a giant X over my face. Then we’d stumble upon some marked-up road map that gave us the exact location of where Ned was planning to kill again.
But as close as we actually were to Hollywood, this was no movie.
There was no shrine to me, no obvious clue ready and waiting for us. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything. Talk about minimalist. Nora Sinclair, the interior designer with a killer eye, may have bought the place for Ned, but she clearly didn’t decorate it.
No one did.
In the two bedrooms upstairs, the only pieces of furniture were the beds themselves. There were no dressers, no nightstands, not even a lamp.
That left only the closets. Two of them, to be exact. So much for the first one in the guest bedroom, though. It was empty.
Finally, in the closet in the master bedroom, I found the only sign that someone had actually ever lived in the house. Ned’s clothes. At least I assumed they were his.
Hanging very neatly on some wooden hangers, which looked to be purposefully aligned at exactly two inches apart, were some pants, shirts, and a few sport coats. Checking the pockets, though, was a swing and a miss. They were all empty.
I’d normally feel a little weird about going through someone’s personal belongings—Olivia’s diary notwithstanding. But there really wasn’t anything that seemed “personal” here.
Until I turned around and saw it.
There was something tucked underneath the bed. I thought maybe it was a suitcase at first, but dropping to my knees for a better look, I could see that it was a wooden storage chest. An old one at that.
Pulling it out, I lifted the scuffed brass latch, the hinges rusted and squeaky. What have you got for me, Ned?
Disappointment, that’s what.
It was toys. The chest was stuffed to the brim with children’s toys.
I stared at them all, frustrated. Then suddenly I realized something. They were all the same.
Not exactly the same, but a version of the same thing. Big, small, broken, or in perfect condition. Everything in the chest was a toy version of a very specific car. A one-of-a-kind car, actually—a blast from the past
.
The DeLorean.
Huh.
Chapter 76
I DIDN’T WANT to overthink it, especially because I couldn’t see any way in which Ned’s interest or even obsession with this one car would get us any closer to him. Sometimes a box of toys is just a box of toys.
Still, I had to go through them all. You never know.
One by one I began pulling them out. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. With any luck, I’d know it when I found it.
But all I was finding was one DeLorean after another, whether it was wooden, plastic, or metal.
Until I reached the bottom.
There, lying facedown, was a small picture frame. Even before I picked it up and turned it over, I knew whose picture I was about to see.
Nora Sinclair.
I wiped away some dust on the glass and stared. She looked every bit as stunning as I remembered. The high cheekbones and full lips. The radiant eyes and sun-kissed skin.
Yep: by far the most beautiful serial killer I’d ever slept with.
“How’s it going?” Sarah yelled up. “Anything?”
Freud would’ve had a field day with the way I suddenly fumbled with the frame, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.
“Not yet,” I yelled down, putting the frame back on the bottom of the chest.
Almost immediately, though, I picked it up again.
It wasn’t Nora’s picture I was staring at now. It was the back of the frame, where it opened.
I’m not exactly sure why I did what I did next. Was it my once reading about a guy who discovered a copy of the Declaration of Independence behind a painting he bought at a yard sale? Was it the way my grandmother used to add new photos of me to her frames while leaving the old ones behind them?
All I knew was that something made me open the back of that frame.