Anger failed to age Linette’s middle-school face but made her look even younger, like a petulant child in the flush of a tantrum. “Police. The shitheads found his car in a canyon off the Ortega Highway, two hundred feet below the road, totally racked up. He’s as dead as dead gets. What the hell was he doing way the hell out there on the damn Ortega Highway, middle of nowhere? Being killed, that’s what he was doing. You know what I think? I think some crazy bitch killed him somewhere else and drove his body out there and pushed the car over the edge to make it look like an accident. When they do an autopsy, they’ll find a dozen stab wounds or a slit throat, or all of that plus his balls are missing.” She picked up an eight-inch-tall crystal obelisk from a sideboard and threw it at a wall.
The dog ran to hide under the poker table, and as if listening from another room, David heard himself offer his condolences to the woman. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Billions!” she declared. “I’m so pissed, I wish I’d killed the sonofabitch years ago instead of wasting all this time on him.”
“I’ll just let myself out.”
When she followed David to the front door, he felt pursued, not just by Linette but also by his fear of what the news about Lukas Ockland might portend.
“I am so screwed,” she said. “This is a total shitstorm. Give me your card.”
“What?”
“Your card, your card. We’ve got to plan our book. It’ll be the tell-all of tell-alls. I’ll rat out that perverted creep, scandalize the university pooh-bahs who enabled him, they’re a bunch of chicken hawks and cokeheads, and those geek legions of fanboy biotechies who idolize Lukas on their circle-jerk websites.”
To placate her, he fumbled a card from his wallet. It bore a number that he gave to contacts when doing book research. He never answered that line. All calls went to voice mail, and he returned them when he saw fit. “I’ll give you a call Monday,” he lied, “when you’ve had time to”—grieve was not just the wrong word, but also absurd—“when you’ve had time to deal with all this.”
He opened the door and stepped outside, into a suburbia that seemed to have subtly tilted while he’d been in the Ockland place, each house and identical mailbox and street sign and meticulously pruned tree ever-so-slightly aslant from all the others, as if a former unity was on the brink of fragmentation.
Linette followed him onto the stoop. “Your last name—is it spelled with an e or not?”
“With an e, like on the card.”
“I’m going to get your books, check out your style. But I already know you’re a really bright guy. I feel like we’ll mesh, like we can get this on and do it right, make something big of it. You’ll call me Monday?”
“Definitely. We’ll meet. We’ll get this going.”
“It’ll be fucking great, the book of the year.”
“Monday,” he lied, and he made his way through a world out of kilter, to his car at the curb.
| 53 |
David drove two blocks to the nearest park and got out of his car and walked to a lake and sat on a bench and stared out at the water, which mirrored the heavens. Sky above, sky below. As if he had come unmoored from the earth. Which was in fact how he’d begun to feel while in the Ockland house.
Lukas Ockland, first missing but now dead, might have been murdered. But he might not have been. An autopsy would eventually establish the truth.
If he had been murdered, his killer wasn’t necessarily Maddison Sutton. By the testimony of his wife, he was sexually reckless, with a special fondness for edgy situations with women who perhaps were not mentally sound. Linette had half expected that he would sooner or later encounter a violent lover.
But a woman alone could not likely have killed him and loaded him in his car and sent it plunging into a canyon. And even if she had done that herself, she would have been without a vehicle, on a lonely stretch of the Ortega Highway.
Unless she had an accomplice. Someone like Patrick Michael Lynam Corley. No.
David had committed to her, pledged his heart to her, had told her that he loved her. If life had taught him one lesson above all others, it was that happiness did not proceed from the breaking of vows. She did not deserve his suspicion. She needed his help. She was under someone’s thumb; she had said as much. And if he truly loved her, he needed to be focused on freeing her.
She was Emily. Somehow. Figuratively if not literally. Magically. Emily. She had to be. He could endure nothing else.