You Don't Want To Know

Chapter 40


“Son of a bitch!” Snyder slammed down his phone and reached for his shoulder holster in one move. Ten seconds later, he was shrugging into his jacket and making his way to Lyons’s desk. He found her, headphones in place, furrows marring her forehead.

As he closed the distance, she held up a finger to keep him from speaking. “Just a sec.” She said it a little louder than she should have. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” She punched the cassette button and replayed a section one more time. As she listened, the look of confusion on her face gave way to one of surprise and dawning comprehension. Shutting down the recorder, she yanked off her headphones. “We just found out the name of Jewel-Anne’s baby’s daddy. Give it a guess.”

“We can play twenty questions in the car. Right now we need to investigate a possible homicide, and I used the term possible lightly. The first responder has no doubt.”

“What? Who?”

“Evelyn McPherson.”

“The psychologist?”

“Yeah.”

“To Ava Garrison?” Lyons gave him a long look, which he ignored.

“One and the same. Found at her house. The neighbor noticed a change in routine and called; then when no one answered, she investigated and saw McPherson’s car in the garage. She tried the bell several times. When no one answered, she called the city cops.”

Kicking her chair back, Lyons climbed to her feet and reached for her coat, scarf, and sidearm. “What a co-ink-i-dink, as they say. Any other details?”

“Not yet.”

She flashed him a determined smile as she unlocked her desk drawer and retrieved her purse. “Let’s go get some. I’ll drive.”

Together they walked through the building to the back parking lot where they dashed through the spitting rain to Lyons’s car. Once inside, she fired up the engine and hit the defroster.

He rattled off Evelyn McPherson’s address and snapped his seat belt into place. “Okay,” he said as Lyons slipped the car into gear. “I’ll bite. Who knocked up Jewel-Anne Church?”

She slid him a glance out of the corner of her eye. “None other than the hero of Anchorville’s very own favorite ghost story.”

He stared at his partner as if she’d lost her mind. “Lester Reece?”

“Yessirree.” She flipped on the wipers and gunned it out of the lot, taking a corner fast enough to make the tires screech. “The timing’s right, if you figure it out. Jewel-Anne and her family were living on the hospital grounds. She’d met Reece and could have been fascinated. From what I understand, lots of women were.”

Snyder said, “You’re thinking she got involved with him, got pregnant, and then helped him escape.”

Lyons responded, “From what I’ve read on the case, there’s always been speculation that someone helped him, but the focus has always been on his nurse. But what if it was Jewel-Anne? She’s certainly smart enough.”

“That’s a pretty big leap,” he said, glancing out the window to the naked, wet trees lining the street, but as he thought about it over the crackle of the police band radio and the hum of the car’s tires on wet pavement, he thought it might just be a possibility.

She said thoughtfully, “You know, his name just keeps coming up.”

“And?”

“People keep saying they see him, and all of a sudden we have two women who are killed very similarly to how ol’ Lester took care of his victims.”

Snyder didn’t like it, even though it made a certain amount of sense.

“I know it would be easier for you to think Reece is dead, his body rotting in the ocean, but there’s a chance he’s not.” She slid him another look. “This, Evelyn McPherson, could be his work.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “I’m just sayin’. Y’know? We need to keep our minds open.”

“Okay.”

The drive took less than fifteen minutes through rain-washed streets that glistened under the pale light of the streetlamps. As the cruiser rounded the corner to the block where Evelyn McPherson resided, they were greeted by county and city vehicles huddled around the duplex with their lights flashing, strobing the nearby houses. A cluster of neighbors had collected on the sidewalk one house down, and a couple of officers were just finishing stringing yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter of the yard.

“Already a circus,” Snyder muttered under his breath as Lyons pulled into a parking spot across the street from McPherson’s residence.

“Bound to get worse.” She cut the engine and pocketed her keys, then climbed out. They both avoided puddles as they walked through the rain to the front door.

“Careful,” the officer signing people into the scene warned as they each slipped covers over their shoes. “Crime scene guys aren’t here yet.”

“We won’t disturb anything,” Snyder assured him.

After signing the logbook, they walked carefully inside. It was always disconcerting stepping into a murdered person’s home, and Snyder had never really felt comfortable sifting through the personal effects of a life cut so violently short; it seemed like an extra violation of privacy even though he knew he was the victim’s advocate. Today, he carefully stepped through McPherson’s house, where a single half-drunk glass of wine and a plate of sliced cheese sat on the kitchen counter. The knife she’d used to cut the cheese had been left near the remains of a wedge.

“Snack for one,” he observed.

“Maybe dinner.” When he arched a brow, she said, “I’m a single woman. I recognize a meal when I see one.”

“If you say so.”

The living room was untouched, extremely tidy, everything in its place, like a staged room out of one of those decorating magazines. No struggle here.

They made their way into the bedroom and adjoining bath. Evelyn McPherson, fully dressed in slacks and an expensive-looking sweater, lay on the floor, staring sightlessly upward, her eyes already becoming opaque, the deep slit beneath her chin dark red and gaping, blood pooled beneath her and splattered around the small room.

Here’s where the struggle had taken place.

And it had been violent.

The shower curtain had been thrown open, smeared dirt showing where someone had stood in the tub, waiting. Blood had sprayed on the walls, mirror, sink, and counter, some running down the cabinetry in red streaks to pool on each drawer. Bottles and jars of makeup and cleansers were scattered on the floor, glass broken on the tiles, lipstick tubes red from having rolled through the blood.

“Not much of a question of homicide,” Lyons said, her jaw tight as she surveyed the scene.

“Nope.” Such a waste, he thought, not stepping into the room where Evelyn McPherson had breathed her last.

“Look familiar?” he asked his partner.

She was nodding, as if reading his thoughts. “Looks like the Reynolds scene. Victim two of the same killer.” She glanced up at him. “Both of whom were close to Ava Garrison.”

“And possibly a lot of other people.”

“Possibly,” she allowed, but they were both thinking along the same lines. The obvious connection between the two victims was a one-time mental patient who was obsessed with finding her missing son, a boy who most people assumed had wandered out of the house, down to the dock, and into the water where he’d drowned and been swept out to sea as his parents reveled at their Christmas party. Snyder figured Ava Garrison’s obsession with finding her son was all about guilt, though, hell, he wasn’t a psychologist and the one she’d been seeing was now very dead.

“Sick bastard.” He started to step away, then stopped. “What the hell is that?” he asked, pointing to the bathtub. Rivulets of drying blood smudged the polished surface and a single black hair lay across the rim.

“Oh, shit,” Lyons said, leaning down to get a closer look. “That’s our connection to the two crimes.” She glanced up at him. “Kinda makes you wonder if Ava Garrison walked off with Cheryl Reynolds’s Halloween costume.”

“You think she could do this?” He motioned to the bloody, lifeless body of Evelyn McPherson.

“I’m thinking whoever took the wig also took the tapes of Ms. Garrison’s sessions with the hypnotist. Who would want them other than the woman herself?”

Snyder felt a niggle of anticipation fire his blood. “If your theory’s right, then all of the missing tapes are with the killer.”

“Or already destroyed.”

She straightened and crossed the master bedroom to a desk in a corner that was empty except for a spot for a laptop docking station. She pointed to the obviously empty spot. “We need to find this computer.”

“And check her office.”

“You read my mind.”

They looked around for a little while longer and found no murder weapon, unless the murderer had used one of the kitchen knives and either left with it or cleaned it and put it back where he’d found it. Snyder wasn’t betting on that. Also missing was the laptop computer that fit into the docking station on McPherson’s desk, her purse, and her cell phone. None of those items had appeared in her car, which was parked in the attached garage. The house showed no sign of forced entry, either; all the doors were locked and windows latched.

The neighboring unit was clean as well, locked up tight but vacant. Snyder assumed she’d either let the intruder in, or he’d found a key or open door and locked it later . . . Odd. Ten to one, the killer had her personal items, including her computer. They could only hope that McPherson had another one in her office or a backup disk somewhere, and once they got back to the office, they’d start checking her cell phone records and Internet accounts, her e-mail and social media contacts, and try to figure out who was the last one to see her alive.

They talked a little with the forensic guys when they showed up, then with the neighbor who had called the city police, but learned no more than what the first responding officer had reported.

They left deputies in charge and headed to Dr. McPherson’s office just as the first van from a local television station was parking at the end of the street.

“You know we’re going to end up heading to the island to talk to Ava Garrison,” Lyons said as oncoming headlights illuminated her face.

“Yeah.”

“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” she added, almost to herself. “What’s so damned important that two women are slashed to ribbons?”

“It’s personal,” Snyder said as he looked out the passenger side window, thinking about the violent way the women had been killed. In Cheryl Reynolds’s case, she’d nearly been strangled to death, but the killer had taken the time to finish the job with a knife that had a serrated, nine-inch blade. He was willing to bet a year’s vacation pay that once the autopsy on Evelyn McPherson was complete, they’d discover the exact same MO.

And the killer still had the murder weapon.





Seated at his kitchen table, Dern took a swig straight from his bottle of Jack. The TV was on, turned low, an old Clint Eastwood movie playing, not that he cared.

From the rag rug near the woodstove, the dog cocked his head, his dark eyes focused hard on Dern. “It’s waaay after five, Buddy, so no judging,” Dern said, but he capped the bottle anyway. It had been a long day after a crazy night. He’d heard the ruckus when Ava had flown down the stairs to the nerd’s apartment and nearly beat down the door with her bare fist after, from what he’d discerned since, nearly killing her crippled cousin. Not that Jewel-Anne hadn’t deserved it, from what he could tell by comments made by Ian earlier in the day.

“It’s a goddamned house of horrors,” Ian had confided while smoking near the greenhouse where Dern had been looking for another shovel. “Ava’s gone totally around the bend and Jewel-Anne . . . well, she’s been messed up for years. I guess having to give up a baby and losing the use of your legs can do that, but wow. She’s been terrorizing Ava ever since Ava got back from the hospital.” He relayed the events of the night as he’d heard them, though both he and Trent, after knocking down “a few drinks” in Anchorville, had slept through all the commotion. That, in and of itself, was incredible, Dern thought, but didn’t say so.

Drawing hard on his Camel filter tip, Ian had tossed the butt into the wet grass where it had sizzled. “And it’s contagious, you know? The other day, I swear to God, as I was driving the boat back from Anchorville, I thought I saw Lester Reece, right here on the island, up at the point, kind of in the fog and staring down at the boathouse.”

He reached into his pocket for his pack of smokes and shook out a fresh cigarette even though the last was still smoldering in the lawn. “Crazy, right? Now I’ve caught Ava’s f*ckin’ paranoia!” Fumbling in his pockets, he found his lighter and jabbed his cigarette into his mouth. “No way Lester Reece could still be alive, much less be on this damned rock, right?” he asked, the filter tip bobbing as he clicked his lighter several times before a tiny flame appeared and he was able to light up. Sucking hard enough to inhale every iota of nicotine from his cigarette, he paused, letting the smoke fill his lungs before exhaling. “I blinked and he was gone, just like that.” Ian snapped his fingers. “Probably a goddamned hallucination, but that’s it. I’m getting the hell out.”

“And do what?” Dern spied the shovel through the dirty panes of the greenhouse.

“Don’t know. But I’ve got friends in Portland. I could crash with them for a while.” He’d seemed freaked out at the time, but then the entire household of Neptune’s Gate had been on pins and needles. “All I know is, I’m soooo outta here.” Then he’d walked around the house, leaving Dern to grab the shovel and head back to the stable and his apartment.

Thinking about everything now, Dern reluctantly found his untraceable cell phone and made the call he’d been dreading for hours.

Reba picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Hey.” He smiled at the sound of her voice. “How’re you doing?”

“I’ve been better.”

“Any more phone calls?”

“No.” He imagined her shaking her head, her forehead wrinkling. “Have you found him?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he admitted, “but he’s here, on the island. I can feel it. I just can’t prove it . . . yet.” He didn’t add that he’d thought he’d caught a glimpse of the bastard, but like smoke, Reece had disappeared before Dern could reach the spot where he’d seen him. He’d been riding near Sea Cliff. Dern had a feeling Reece was holed up in the old asylum, but there were just too many places to hide for Dern to find him or even where he was camping out. The trouble was that Reece knew the place like the back of his hand. Once Dern had proof that Reece was there, he would call the police. He just wouldn’t tell his mother until after the fact.

“Don’t hurt him,” she begged, and Dern knew he’d have to lie. Again. Well, hell, he was getting good at it. Had years of practice.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Promise me, Austin. You have to bring Lester in alive. He has to be safe.”

“If I can.”

“Promise me!” she insisted, her voice rising, and he thought of her in her wheelchair, staring out the window, her fingers gripping the arms. “If I could, I’d be there with you, but I can’t, so you have to do this for me. For us. Our family.” Her voice broke, but he knew she was dry-eyed. She’d learned not to cry years before.

“I promise, Mom,” he finally said, though he was certain they both knew he might not deliver.

“Don’t get the police involved. They’ll . . . they’ll shoot to kill and you know it.”

She was referring to his own stint as a cop. It had been short-lived, but he knew the police, too, wanted to catch Reece and bring him to justice. “I know they’ll do their best.”

“Oh, Austin. Don’t let them—”

“I’ll try to bring him in alive. Get him safe.”

“Thank God.” She sounded so relieved and his heart twisted a bit. “Just go find your brother.”

He hung up with that same hollowness in his soul he felt whenever he talked to her. She was dying, prematurely, but living on borrowed time according to all the doctors.

He knew it.

She knew it.

Reece knew it, too. That’s why he’d surfaced again, taken the chance and contacted a mother he’d barely known, a woman who had let a rich, if abusive, father take away her firstborn. Lester had been a wild boy of four when she started a new life with a new man who wasn’t much better than the first, but a man who gave her a second son whom she’d named Austin, for the town to which she’d fled.

Lester Reece had then grown up privileged and educated, but he had suffered at the hands of his father and a series of stepmothers who were more than a little responsible for his criminal ways, at least according to his defense team at his trial.

Dern, on the other hand, had been raised in a relatively stable, if poor household with his other siblings. His old man, a ranch hand who had taught his boy his trade before taking off when Dern was ten, had been a hard-drinking, hardworking man who seemed to like horses better than people.

To this day, Dern never knew what happened to him.

When his mother, a few years later, had taken up with a new man, a stepfather Dern didn’t care to know, he’d moved out. It wasn’t until much later, when he was doing his time in the service overseas, that he’d learned the truth. Reba, facing her first serious health scare, had written him, finally explaining about her first short marriage and the child she hadn’t seen in over a quarter of a century, a man who was accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend, a man who was dangerous.

She’d felt guilt for abandoning him, but Dern had thought Lester Reece was best left alone. He didn’t need to meet this half brother who had a tendency to cut up women.

Then Reece had been caught, tried, and sent to the mental hospital. Good riddance, Dern had thought.

Until the son of a bitch escaped and pulled the best damned disappearing act in recent history. And now his dying mother wanted to know that he was safe and not hurting anyone else.

So that was Dern’s mission.

He looked at the dog again, frowned, and opened his bottle of Jack once more. With one finger pointing at the dog, he took a long pull, felt the whiskey warm his throat, then said, “We’ve still got our deal, right? No judgments.”

Rover thumped his damned tail just as Dern heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs leading to his apartment. The dog gave off a soft, and much-too-late warning bark.

He glanced at the clock. It was after ten-thirty. Odd time for a visit. Who knew what was coming? Quickly, he pocketed his phone. When he opened the door, Ava Garrison stood on the landing at the top of the stairs.

His gut tightened as she turned those incredible gray eyes up at him. Shit, what was she doing here?

“I saw that your light was still on, that you were still up and . . .” She shrugged. “I’d like to talk to you.” Then, as if realizing she could be interrupting something, added, “If you’re not busy.”

“Come on in.” He pushed the door open a little wider so she could enter and see that he was entirely alone, only the muted TV and the shepherd for company. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Stepping inside, she glanced at the small plank table in the kitchen and the open bottle of whiskey. Without a second’s hesitation, she nodded. “You know what? I could use one.”