Eyes Wide Open

Chapter Fifty-Eight





I parked the Taurus underneath the carport and followed Charlie in.

He went into the living room and knelt beside the chest that contained his old keepsakes. The old pictures of his family back in Miami. His medical diagnoses, kept like grade school report cards. The Billboard Top 40 sheet he had shown me.

He pulled out a thick folder and leafed through dog-eared sheets of music and lyrics until he came upon a manila envelope. He took it out and handed it to me, barely looking me in the eye.

“I got this about a week ago,” he said, shrugging. “A couple of days after Evan died . . . I can’t remember exactly when. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I hid it. I didn’t even tell Gabby. I was scared. I knew they had found me. I didn’t want to believe they had anything to do with my son.”

The envelope was addressed to Charlie. No return address.

“You have to believe me, Jay, if I knew this could have ever hurt anyone . . . Evan, Gabby . . .” Tears glistened in Charlie’s slate-gray eyes. “You. I would never have kept it to myself . . .”

The envelope was torn open at the top. I slid out the contents and stared in shock at what I was now looking at, reacting as if I’d been punched and recoiling.

There were photos of a dead woman.

Not just dead, it became clear to me, mutilated. My mouth went dry. She was naked, her face and torso cut up. Red slits and bloody lacerations disfiguring her all over.

The woman was blond, kind of pretty in a way, I could still detect. Her hair was strewn to the side in long braids. Maybe in her fifties. I leafed through the shots one by one, my stomach clenching. Only someone who wanted to cause terrible suffering to someone could have done something this cold-blooded.

They’d tortured her.

“Who is she?” I asked, but something made me think I knew.

“Her name was Sherry.” Charlie let out a deep, pained exhale. “I hadn’t seen her in over thirty years. I knew her back then—on the ranch . . . She’s—”

“I know who she was.” I looked up at him. “It’s Katya.”

He just stood there staring at me, his eyes wide. Then he sank onto the couch and ran his hand through his ponytailed hair. “Katya . . .” He smiled fondly and gave me a slight nod of confirmation. “She didn’t deserve something like this, Jay.”

“Both of you pointed the finger at Houvnanian. And the ones who went with him down to Santa Barbara. You helped the police in their investigation?”

Again, he gave me the slightest nod. Then he looked up, befuddled. “How do you possibly know all about this?”

“It doesn’t matter how I know. What matters is what we do about it now. You’re who they want, Charlie. Greenway. Zorn. Evan. Sherry . . . This has all been leading up to you. For what you did. They’re torturing you, just like they did to this woman. By killing off the things you love.”

Charlie rubbed his brow in anguish. He leaned forward and picked up the photos, leafed through them again, pressing his lips in sadness and a held-in anger. “She was a beautiful person, Jay. She wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Look at her. The kind of people who could do this . . .”

“You already know the kind of people, Charlie. We were with one the other day. But now you have to step back. Out of the prison you’ve been in. You have to help me bring them down.”

Charlie nodded, exhaling a breath that might have been in him thirty years. “There’s something else . . .”

He went over to the chest and dug around in the back of a drawer. He came back with something wrapped in a blue towel and handed it to me.

“How long have you known?” I asked as I took away the towel and stared at what was inside.

“That first week. After you came to dinner. It was in the trash.”

“You could have told me,” I said, and Charlie simply nodded, sorry.

I was staring at a black Nike sneaker.