“So did they just hang out at your house?” Ethan asked.
“No,” Caleb said. “My dad tried to stop her from leaving, but when he went to the phone to call her parents, she took off. She made it home safely before anyone could do anything about it, but she was mad, and said some things about my dad that Mason didn’t like much, and so they split up.”
“So that’s why he stopped drinking?” I asked.
“No. Two weeks later, she hit a kid on a bicycle-killed him. He was eleven. I didn’t know him, because he went to a different school, but he was my age. Eleven. That’s how old I was when it happened. Mason kept saying, ‘It could have been you,’ to me. So I finally said, ‘It could have been you,’ right back at him. Kind of shut him up, you know? Anyway, he never did any drugs or booze after that.”
“He was lucky to have someone confront him,” Ethan murmured.
“I don’t know that it was what I said to him. I think he saw how many lives got totally screwed up because of that accident. The parents of the kid, the kid’s sister, Jadia’s parents-but it was really hard on Jadia, too. And I don’t mean because of the drunk-driving charges and all that. Mason told me that she never forgave herself for it. I think he knew that he was the type of person who never would have forgiven himself, either, if he ever did something that hurt somebody while he was drunk.”
Caleb glanced at his watch and said, “I’d better get going. I’m working on some things with Ben tomorrow morning.” He paused. “He’s always good about giving me Sundays off-that’s when I see Mason.”
“Is Ben doing okay?” I asked.
He shrugged.
When I saw he wasn’t going to say more, I said, “Thanks for bringing these notes over. I’ll look through them before I talk to the Garcias.”
“Thanks. There’s not much there. I never was able to be of much help to Mason.”
Our protests that he was wrong about that seemed not to make an impression on him. Ethan walked with him to the front door. As Caleb was leaving, I overheard Ethan say, “You believe in him. Don’t underestimate how much that means to someone.”
ETHAN asked Frank for a painkiller-something he almost always waits too long to do. When he first got out of the hospital, Ethan worried about the possibility of dependency problems with them, and talked things over with his AA sponsor. The decision was made to put Frank in possession of the pills, to dole them out on request, but he was supposed to call the doctor if the requests were too frequent.
So far, there had been no need for a call. If anything, Frank and I worried that Ethan was trying too hard to do without them, and losing sleep to pain.
“Tired of me yet?” he asked us as he headed toward his room.
“No,” we answered in unison, and wished him good night.
CHAPTER 31
Monday, May 1
9:30 A.M.
A CONDOMINIUM IN LAS PIERNAS
CLEO sat on her balcony wearing nothing but a fluffy white bathrobe. She sipped fresh-squeezed orange juice and watched the ocean. The morning was overcast, the gray clouds reflected in a gray sea. Her mood matched the grayness.
She stretched her legs out and rested her heels on a nearby chair. The onshore breeze made it a little nippy out here, but quieter than usual-the air was cool enough to keep all but a few joggers away from the beach.
Her own workout had gone well this morning. A little later today she might put some time in at the firing range. She reflected on the fact that much of her life was spent preparing for incidents that rarely occurred. Hours and hours spent training and planning for an action that might take place once a year. The most exciting part would be all over in a few moments. Adrenaline-loaded moments, to be sure, but few of them.
This didn’t bother her. She knew that many people worked for years in jobs that never produced one second of excitement.
For her own safety, it was best that she did not work too often. She knew her success depended on controlling certain factors, and one of those factors was the frequency of abductions and kills. If she were to work too often, inevitably a pattern would be seen, small mistakes (a shoe lost!) would be connected to one another, and then to her. She was confident of her abilities, but luck could go lousy on anybody. There were things no one could plan for-like those reporters being at Sheila’s house, just at that time. A shoe coming loose, sticking in the mud.
Long ago she had been questioned in connection with a criminal investigation, and she remembered how unnerving that had been. This had taken place in her childhood, when she was known by a different name, and she had never come close to facing charges of any kind. Her memories of her earliest years she kept locked away in a distant corner of her mind, but she clearly remembered the fire and all that had followed.
Investigators believed a set of tragedies had befallen her. Her parents, known by everyone in the neighborhood to be heavy drinkers and smokers, died in a fire. Smoking in bed, arson investigators said. The ten-year-old girl had barely escaped with her life. That’s the way it looked to all the adults.
She had been sent to the home of her only living grandparent. Her father’s mother, as wicked as he was and as much a drinker. Grandmother had drowned in her swimming pool. There were questions then. A rail-thin detective, with eyes like black buttons, had asked them, while his partner, who looked to Cleo to be yet another drinker, looked on unhappily. Did she know, the thin one asked, why her grandmother had decided to go swimming at night? No, she didn’t. Why she went swimming with her clothes on? Cleo shrugged.
The questions had stopped when Vera, her mother’s younger sister, arrived from California to take care of the twelve-year-old girl. Vera had two attorneys in tow, both by the last name of Fletcher. She was married to one of them. Within a few days, they were on their way to California, where Cleo would live with her aunt.
Aunt Vera had run away from home at the age of sixteen, pregnant and unmarried. She had the good fortune to be taken in by a family that had a habit of caring for stray kids, and when she decided she was too young to raise the baby, they adopted her infant out to a good home. By the time Cleo arrived on the scene, Vera was married to one of the Fletchers. Cleo quickly learned that Vera was an entirely different kind of person than the other family members she had known, and not just because she didn’t smoke or drink. She had not lived under her aunt’s roof for twenty-four hours when Vera looked her in the eye and said, “You thinking of trying to bump me off, Cleo? I hope not, because if I die in any kind of accident, the world is going to know exactly what you are.”
Cleo didn’t say anything. She tried not to let her nervousness show.
Vera’s smile got bigger, then she said, “And besides, it would be a waste of your talents. I’ve been talking to one of my cousins. The family could use someone like you.”
Cleo had never felt warmth toward anyone, and she didn’t develop an attachment to her aunt. But Vera and her husband, Uncle Greg, provided a kind of consistency and reliability that had not been part of her life up to that time, and that steadied her. They were strict, but that helped Cleo to develop discipline. And Uncle Greg turned out to have skills in self-defense and weaponry that Cleo had only dreamed of possessing, skills he enjoyed teaching her. She decided they would live.
To Cleo’s dismay, her decision was not enough. Vera became the first of Cleo’s relatives to die in a true accident, a car wreck. Cleo was fifteen then. For a time, remembering Vera’s threat on that first day, Cleo was certain that all her training would go to waste, that a twist of fate was going to cause her to be known as a murderer before she really had a chance to practice it as an art form.