Harlan Coben 3 Novel Collection Page 23

  “Anyway, the place was totally trashed. The drawers had all been dumped out, clothes everywhere. And there, near Cassandra’s bed, where the blood trailed off, I could see two legs on the floor. I ran over and I just pulled up short.”

  Olivia looked him straight in the eye. “Cassandra was dead. I didn’t need to feel for a pulse. Her body was on its side, almost in a fetal position. Both eyes were open, staring at that wall. Her face was purple and swollen. There were cigarette burns on her arms. Her hands were still hog-tied with duct tape behind her back. You have to remember, Matt. I was eighteen years old. I may have felt older or looked older. I may have had too much life experience. But think about that. I’m standing there looking at a dead body. I was frozen. I couldn’t move. Even when I heard the sounds coming from the other room, even when I heard Emma scream out, ‘Clyde, don’t!’ ”

  She stopped, closed her eyes, let loose a deep breath.

  “I turned just in time to see a fist flying at my face. There was no time to react. Clyde didn’t pull the punch at all. His knuckles landed flush on my nose. I actually heard the crack more than I felt it. My head snapped back. I fell back and landed on top of Cassandra—that was probably the worst part of all. Landing on her dead body. Her skin was all clammy. I tried to crawl off her. Blood was flowing down into my mouth.”

  Olivia paused, swallowing air, trying to catch her breath. Matt had never felt more incompetent in his life. He did not move, did not say anything. He just let her gather herself.

  “Clyde rushed over and looked down on me. His face . . . I mean, he usually had this smirk. I’d seen him give Emma Lemay the backside of his hand lots of times. I know this sounds foreign to you. Why didn’t we act? Why didn’t we do something? But his beatings weren’t unusual to us. They were normal. You have to understand that. This was all any of us knew.”

  Matt nodded, which felt totally inadequate, but he understood this thinking. Prisons were filled with this sort of rationale—it wasn’t so much that you did something awful as that the awful was simply the norm.

  “Anyway,” Olivia went on, “the smirk was gone. If you think rattlesnakes are mean, you never met Clyde Rangor. But now, standing over me, he looked terrified. He was breathing hard. There was blood on his shirt. Behind him—and this is a sight I’ll never forget—Emma just stood with her head down. Here I was, bleeding and hurt, and I was looking past the psycho with the clenched fists at his other victim. His real victim, I guess.

  “ ‘Where’s the tape?’ Clyde asked me. I had no idea what he meant. He stomped down hard on my foot. I howled in pain. Then Clyde shouted, ‘You playing games with me, bitch? Where is it?’

  “I tried to scramble back, but I bumped up into the corner. Clyde kicked Cassandra’s body out of the way and followed. I was trapped. I could hear Emma’s voice in the distance, meek as a lamb, ‘Don’t, Clyde. Please.’ With his eyes still on me, Clyde reeled on her. He had the full weight of his body in the blow. The back of his hand split Emma’s cheek wide open. She tumbled back and out of sight. But it was enough for me. The distraction gave me the chance to act. I lashed out with my foot and managed to kick the spot right below his knee. Clyde’s leg buckled. I got to my feet and rolled over the bed. See, I had a destination in mind. Kimmy kept a gun in the room. I didn’t like it, but if you think I had it tough, Kimmy had it worse. So she was always armed. She had two guns. She kept this mini-revolver, a twenty-two in her boot. Even onstage. And Kimmy had another gun under her mattress.”

  Olivia stopped and smiled at him.

  “What?” Matt said.

  “Like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t think I know about your gun?”

  He had forgotten all about it. He checked his pants. They’d taken them off him in the hospital. Olivia calmly opened her purse. “Here,” she said.

  She handed him the gun.

  “I didn’t want the police to find it and trace it back to you.”

  “Thanks,” he said stupidly. He looked at the gun, tucked it away.

  “Why do you keep it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think Kimmy did either. But it was there. And when Clyde went down, I dove for it. I didn’t have much time. My kick hadn’t incapacitated Clyde—it’d just bought me a few seconds. I dug my hand under the top bunk’s mattress. I heard him shout, ‘Crazy whore, I’m gonna kill you.’ I had no doubt he would. I’d seen Cassandra. I’d seen his face. If he caught me, if I didn’t get the gun, I was dead.”

  Olivia was looking off now, her hand raised as though she were back in that trailer, digging for that gun. “My hand was under the mattress. I could almost feel his breath on my neck. But I still couldn’t find the gun. Clyde grabbed my hair. He was just starting to pull when my fingers felt the metal. I gripped for all I was worth as he tugged me back. The gun came with me. Clyde saw it. I didn’t have a real grip on it. My thumb and forefinger were wrapped around the butt of the gun. I tried to snake my finger around the trigger. But Clyde was on me. He grabbed my wrist. I tried to fight him off. He was too strong. But I didn’t let go. I held on. And then he dug his thumbnail into my skin. Clyde had these really long, sharp fingernails. See this?”

  Olivia made a fist, tilted it back so that he could see the crescent-white scar on the underside of her wrist. Matt had noticed it before. A lifetime ago, she’d told him it was from a fall off a horse.

  “Clyde Rangor did that. He dug his fingernail in so deep that he drew blood. I dropped the gun. He still had me by the hair. He flung me onto the bed and jumped on top of me. He grabbed me by the neck and began to squeeze. He was crying now. That’s what I remember. Clyde was squeezing the life out of me and he was crying. Not because he cared or anything like that. He was scared. He was choking me and I could hear him pleading, ‘Just tell me where it is. Just tell me . . . ’ ”

  Olivia gently put her own hand up to her throat now. “I struggled. I kicked, I flailed, but I could feel the power draining out of me. There was nothing behind my blows anymore. I could feel his thumb pushing down on my throat. I was dying. And then I heard the gun go off.”

  Her hand dropped to the side. The antique clock in the dining room, a wedding gift to Bernie and Marsha, started to chime. Olivia waited, let it finish playing.

  “The gun wasn’t loud. It was more like the crack of a bat. I guess that’s because it was a twenty-two, I don’t know. For a second, Clyde’s grip somehow tightened. His face looked more surprised than pained. He let go of me. I started gagging, choking. I rolled to the side, gasping for air. Emma Lemay was standing behind him. She pointed the gun at him and it was like all those years of abuse, all those beatings, they just boiled over. She didn’t cower. She didn’t look down. Clyde spun toward her, enraged, and she fired again, right in his face.

  “Then Emma pulled the trigger one more time and Clyde Rangor was dead.”

  Chapter 38

  MOTIVE.

  Loren now had motive. If the video was any indication, Charles Talley, a scumbag by anyone’s calculations, had not only slept with Matt Hunter’s wife—Loren was betting that it was Olivia Hunter in that video with the blonde wig—but he’d gone through the trouble of sending the pictures to Matt.

  Mocking him.

  Pissing him off.

  Calling him out, if you will.

  It added up. It made perfect sense.

  Except too many things in this case made perfect sense at first. And then, after a few minutes, they didn’t anymore. Like Max Darrow being rolled by a prostitute. Like the murder of Charles Talley looking like a common jealous-husband scenario when, if that indeed was the case, how do you explain the connection to Emma Lemay and the Nevada FBI and all the rest of the stuff she’d learned at Joan Thurston’s office?

  Her cell phone trilled. The number was blocked.

  “Hello?”

  “So what’s up with this APB on Hunter?”

  It was Lance Banner.
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br />   “Do you ever sleep?” she asked.

  “Not in the summer. I prefer winter hibernation. Like a bear. So what’s up?”

  “We’re looking for him.”

  “Stop with all specifics, Loren. I mean, no, really, I can’t handle all that detail.”

  “It’s a long story, Lance, and I’ve had a long night.”

  “The APB was mainly on the Newark wire.”

  “So?”

  “So has anyone checked out Hunter’s sister-in-law’s?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I live right down the block,” Lance Banner said. “Consider me on the way.”

  Chapter 39

  NEITHER MATT NOR OLIVIA MOVED. The story had drained her. He could see that. He almost made a move to come closer, but she put up her hand.

  “I saw an old picture of Emma Lemay once,” Olivia began. “She was so beautiful. She was smart too. If anyone had the wiles to get out of this life, it was Emma. But you see, no one does. I was eighteen, Matt. And I already felt like my life was over. So there we were, me retching, Emma still holding the gun. She stared down at Clyde for a long time and simply waited for me to catch my breath. It took a few minutes. Then she turns to me, all clear-eyed, and says, ‘We need to hide his body.’

  “I remember shaking my head. I told her I didn’t want any part of that. She didn’t get upset or raise her voice. It was so strange. She looked so . . . serene.”

  Matt said, “She’d just slain her abuser.”

  “That was part of it, sure.”

  “But?”

  “It was almost as if she’d been waiting for this moment. Like she knew it would one day happen. I said we should call the police. Emma shook her head, calm, in control. The gun was still in her hand. She didn’t point it at me. ‘We could tell them the truth,’ I said. ‘That it was self-defense. We’ll show them the bruises on my neck. Hell, we’ll show them Cassandra.’ ”

  Matt shifted in his seat. Olivia saw it and smiled.

  “I know,” she said. “The irony isn’t lost on me. Self-defense. Like you claimed. We were both, I guess, at that same fork in the road. Maybe you didn’t have a choice, what with all those people around. But even if you did, you came from a different world. You trusted the police. You thought that truth would win out. But we knew better. Emma had shot Clyde three times, once in the back, twice in the face. No one would buy self-defense. And even if they did, Clyde made big money for his mobbed-up cousin. He’d never let us live.”

  “So what did you do?” he asked.

  “I was confused, I guess. But Emma kept explaining the predicament. We had no choice. Not really. And that was when she hit me with her best argument.”

  “What?”

  “Emma said, ‘What if it all goes well?’ ”

  “What if what all goes well?” Matt asked.

  “What if the police believe us and Clyde’s cousin leaves us alone?”

  She stopped, smiled.

  “I don’t get it,” Matt said.

  “Where would we be? Emma and me. Where would we be if it all worked out?”

  Matt saw it now. “You’d be where you were.”

  “Right. This was our chance, Matt. Clyde had a hundred thousand dollars hidden at the house. Emma said we’d take it. We’d split up and run. We’d start new. Emma already had a destination in mind. She’d been planning on leaving for years, but she never had the courage. Neither did I. Neither did any of us.”

  “But now you had to.”

  Olivia nodded. “She said that if we hid Clyde, they’d figure the two of them ran off together. They’d be looking for a couple. Or they’d think they were both killed and buried together. But she needed my help. I said, ‘What about me? Clyde’s friends know what I look like. They’ll hunt me down. And how do we explain Cassandra being dead?’

  “But Emma already had that covered. She said, ‘Give me your wallet.’ I dug into my pocket and pulled it out. She took out my ID—back in those days, Nevada didn’t require you to have pictures on the ID—and she jammed it into Cassandra’s pocket. ‘When is Kimmy coming back?’ she asked me. In three days, I told her. Plenty of time, she said. Then she said, ‘Listen to me. Neither you nor Cassandra has any real family. Cassandra’s mother threw her out years ago. They don’t talk.’

  “I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  “ ‘I’ve been thinking about this for years,’ Emma said. ‘Whenever he beat me. Whenever he choked me until I passed out. Whenever he said he was sorry and promised that it would never happen again and that he loved me. Whenever he told me he’d hunt me down and kill me if I ever left. What . . . what if I killed Clyde and buried him and just took the money and ran someplace I knew was safe? What if I made amends, you know, for what I’d done to you girls? You have those fantasies, don’t you, Candi? About running away?’ ”

  Matt said, “And you did.”

  Olivia held up her index finger. “With one difference. I said before that my life already felt over. I disappeared in my books. I tried to keep upbeat. I imagined something different. Because I had something to hold on to. Look, I don’t want to make too much of that night in Vegas. But I thought about it, Matt. I thought about the way you made me feel. I thought about the world you lived in. I remember everything you said—about your family, about where you grew up, about your friends and your school. And what you didn’t know, what you still don’t understand, is that you were describing a place I couldn’t let myself imagine.”

  Matt said nothing.

  “After you left that night, I can’t tell you how many times I thought of trying to find you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  She shook her head. “You of all people should understand shackles.”

  He nodded, afraid to answer.

  “Didn’t matter anymore,” Olivia said. “It was too late for any of that now. Even with shackles, like you said, we had to act. So we came up with a plan. It was simple, really. First, we rolled Clyde’s body up in a blanket and dumped it in the back of the car. We padlocked the Pen. Emma knew a place. Clyde had dumped at least two bodies there, she said. Out in the desert. We buried him in a shallow grave, way out in this no-man’s-land. Then Emma called the club. She made sure all the girls were made to work overtime, so that none of them would be able to go back to the Pen.

  “We stopped at her place to shower. I stepped under the warm water and thought, I don’t know, I thought it would be weird, showering off the blood, like something out of Macbeth.”

  A wan smile crossed her face.

  “But it wasn’t like that?” Matt asked.

  Olivia shook her head slowly. “I had just buried a man in the desert. At night the jackals would dig him up and feast. Carry his bones away. That’s what Emma told me. And I didn’t care.”

  She looked at him as if daring him to challenge her.

  “So what did you do next?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I . . . I mean, Candace Potter was nothing. There was no one to even notify in the event of her untimely death. Emma as her employer and almost guardian called the police. She said that one of her girls had been murdered. The police arrived. Emma showed them Cassandra’s body. The ID was already in her pocket. Emma identified the body and confirmed that it belonged to one of her girls, Candace ‘Candi Cane’ Potter. There was no next of kin. No one questioned it. Why should they? Why would anyone make something like this up? Emma and I split the money. I got over fifty grand. Can you imagine? All the girls at the club had fake IDs anyway, so getting a new one was no problem for me.”

  “And you just ran off?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Cassandra?” Matt asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Didn’t anyone wonder what happened to her?”

  “We had a million girls come and go. Emma told everyone she’d quit—been spooked off by the murder. Two other girls got scared and ran off too.” />
  Matt shook his head, trying to wrap his brain around all this. “When I met you the first time, you used the name Olivia Murray.”

  “Yes.”

  “You went back to that name?”

  “That was the only time I used it. With you that night. Did you ever read A Wrinkle in Time?”

  “Sure. In fifth grade, I think.”

  “When I was a kid, it was my favorite book. The protagonist was named Meg Murray. That’s how I came up with the last name.”

  “And Olivia?”

  She shrugged. “It sounded like the direct opposite of Candi.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “Emma and I made a pact. We would never tell anyone the truth—no matter what—because if one of us talked, it could lead to the death of the other. So we swore. I need you to understand how solemnly I made that promise.”

  Matt was not sure what to say to that. “Then you went to Virginia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was where Olivia Murray lived. It was far away from Vegas or Idaho. I made up a background story. I took courses at the University of Virginia. I didn’t officially attend, of course, but this was in the days before strict security. I just sat in on classes. I hung out in the library and cafeteria. I met people. They just figured I was a student. A few years later, I pretended to graduate. I got a job. I never looked back or thought about Candi. Candace Potter was dead.”

  “And then, what, I came along?”

  “Something like that, yeah. Look, I was a scared kid. I ran away and tried to make a life for myself. A real one. And the truth is, I had no interest in meeting a man. You hired DataBetter, remember?”