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Chapter 13

For a moment she thought he was going to pretend offense, but then his gaze narrowed a bit and he inclined his head. “About 92 percent.”

“So, how am I to know when we’re in the other 8 percent?”

To her shock he reached over and covered her hand with his. The heat of his skin sent a prickle of warning up her arm. Dangerous. He was dangerous. To her.

“Right now, it’s all about truth,” he told her, sounding so serious that she wanted to jerk her hand free of his and wrap her arms around her torso for protection. “I need to talk to you about your neighbor. Trask Martin.”

“You found out what happened to him. Who did you talk to?”

“There was a newspaper left at the deli, and I read what was there. Not much more than what we heard on the news. But I do believe his death, the timing of his death, has to do with you.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened between you and him. He saw the photograph. Who else knew he saw it? His girlfriend?”

She carefully withdrew her hand. “No, she wasn’t there. No one else knew.” She thought back to Trask, feeling a weight on her heart. Another weight, along with the one already in place for Aaron. After a moment, she told him, “Trask did say something to me.”

“What?”

“After I saw Hague, I stopped by his apartment Thursday night, and we had drinks with Jo and then he walked me back to my place. He told me he’d seen someone outside my door, kind of lurking, I think. It gave me a jolt.”

“Did he talk to the guy?” Auggie asked, watching her closely.

“No. The guy took off when he said something to him.”

“What’d he look like?”

“He was wearing a hoodie, so Trask thought he might be young, but he really couldn’t tell how old he was. The guy just turned away and Trask watched him, I guess. Anyway he left in a truck . . . a gray GMC. 2005. Trask said he noticed, because he used to have one just like it.”

“When was this?”

“Sometime in the last couple weeks?”

“Before you got the package from your mother?”

“Yeah . . . I guess so.” Liv stirred, uncomfortable, and got to her feet. “It just made me feel, again, like I was right: someone’s following me.”

Auggie also stood up, clearly rolling that over in his mind. “Maybe that’s how he learned about the package, because he was keeping close tabs on you.”

“I got it at work. I don’t know how he could possibly know. It was always in my bag. Even the people that worked there didn’t know about it, except Paul de Fore, and he never saw what was in it.”

“What about when Trask saw the photos? You said no one else was around. Could there have been someone? Someone you didn’t notice?”

Liv thought back to when Trask stopped by her apartment unannounced. “The door was open for a few minutes. If someone was there, they might have heard him say something about the photos? But there was no one on the balcony when Trask left. I just don’t see how.”

“Somebody killed him, and if it has to do with you, it probably has to do with the package, too. And that may, or may not, have to do with the Zuma killings. But there’s some connection to you.”

She was happy to have an ally. Happy and surprised. She knew she should ask him more questions about himself; something just wasn’t ringing true. But she almost didn’t care. It was just such a relief to have someone listening to her. “What now?” she said into the growing silence where she could tell he was thinking hard.

“You don’t have a cell phone.” He said it as a fact.

“No.”

“You’re twenty-five. I can’t name you one other twenty-five-year-old I’ve met in the last few years who doesn’t have a cell phone.” He paused, then added, “I’m guessing it’s another way to keep the bogeyman from finding you.”

“I do have a land line,” she pointed out.

He half-smiled. “You and everybody else over fifty.”

“That’s . . . not accurate.”

“Close enough, but okay, we’ll use my phone.”

“Who are we gonna call?”

“Your doctor. The one who treated you at Hathaway House.”

“Dr. Yancy . . .”

He nodded. “Maybe she can remember the zombie doctor, and then you won’t have to go through all those bureaucratic hoops.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Liv protested.

“I can check the white pages on my phone. What do you know about Dr. Yancy?”

“Nothing really.”

“No idea where she lived?”

“Somewhere in the Portland area? Not that far from Hathaway House, I think. She mentioned something once.”

He clicked a few buttons, scrolled around a bit, waited a few minutes, then said, “There are about four Yancys listed with a ‘y’ ending, and another three, with an ‘ey’ ending.”

“There’s no ‘e’,” she said.

“Okay, then, how about Buzz Yancy?”

“She wasn’t married.”

“What’s her first name? There are some initials listed for first names here. That’s usually women.”

Liv pictured the slim, middle-aged woman with the dark hair and solemn eyes. Dr. Yancy wore reading glasses, which she had a tendency to set down on her desk and pick up with some regularity, even when she didn’t put them on. “Her first name was Fern. I remember thinking it was a plant. There was a notepad on her desk with initials. FSY. I don’t think I ever knew what the S was for.”

“There’s one F. Yancy listed.”

Liv felt her pulse start to beat hard. “Well, that’s probably her, don’t you think?”

“One way to find out . . .” He dialed the number, then handed Liv the phone.

Auggie’s stomach muscles were tight. He’d put his phone in her hand and there was a chance, even though she wasn’t familiar with cells, that something could give away his deception. September could call back, for Chrissake. He was pushing it, but there it was.

“It’s just ringing,” she said after a tense moment. “If it goes to voice mail, I can’t tell her who I am. People are looking for me.”

“Then name someone else from that time you were there. Use another girl’s name. Say you’re her.”

“I—maybe Talia . . . O’Conner.”

Auggie nodded encouragingly. A moment later Liv stumbled through the voice mail giving Talia’s name while Auggie quietly whispered his cell number in her ear and she repeated the digits into the phone.

After she hung up she handed Auggie back the cell, which he tucked into a pocket. Then they just looked at each other.

“You’re good at this,” she observed.

“Eight percent of the time,” he answered. Then, “What about your birth certificate?”

“What about it?”

“Why was it in the package?”

Liv cocked her head and frowned. “I have no idea. It just listed my birth parents, but I always knew I was adopted.”

“Well, maybe your mother just wanted you to have it,” Auggie posed, “or maybe there’s something else there. Some other meaning. She had a purpose in keeping these things together, setting it up for you to receive them at twenty-five.”

“You’re thinking she was getting ready to take her own life,” Liv said tiredly, looking away.

“Nope. I’m going with your theory that something else happened. Maybe something that set up what happened at Zuma. Or, maybe something your mother knew or suspected that put her in danger. She sent this to you, just in case. Your brother didn’t get anything, did he?” he asked as an afterthought.

“Not that I know of.”

He shrugged. “You were the oldest.”

“I was adopted and Hague’s theirs.”

Auggie gave her a long look. “Now there’s a difference we haven’t explored. Your mother put your birth certificate in the package, and not your brother’s. So, who are your birth parents?”

“I don’t know them. My father never mentioned them, so I doubt he knows who they are,” Liv said.

“Let’s look at that birth certificate again.”

“It’s the hospital certificate,” Liv said, as she dug into her backpack, pulled out the package and slid the contents onto the table once again. “The one with the impressions of my feet. My parents’ names are written on it.”

“How did your adoptive mother get this?” Auggie wondered aloud, picking it up. “Father, Everett LeBlanc. Mother, Patricia LeBlanc.”

Liv took the paper from him. “Malone General Hospital. The closest one to Rock Springs.”

“So, maybe your mother knew the LeBlancs,” Auggie hazarded a guess. He pulled out his cell and tried the white pages for Rock Springs and some of the neighboring towns. “There’s an Everett LeBlanc in Malone,” he said.

Liv inhaled and exhaled, her eyes huge. “Okay.”

“Want to call?”

“Who should I say I am this time? If I tell them Olivia Dugan, they could know I’m their daughter. And even if they don’t, my name’s been all over the news the last couple days.”

“We don’t know what they know,” Auggie said. “I’d be honest but a little careful. Tell them you’re Liv Dugan, not Olivia, just in case they’ve been listening to the news. Say you’re looking for the Everett and Patricia LeBlanc who gave up a girl baby for adoption twenty-five years ago.”

He punched in the numbers and handed her the phone again. She listened as it rang and rang and then left a voice mail almost verbatim to what Auggie had told her. Auggie quietly repeated his cell number and she echoed it into the receiver. She handed him back the cell and he clicked off.

“Now what?” she asked.

“We wait.”

September got the call from Channel Seven just after five-thirty. Luckily, it wasn’t Pauline Kirby but an underling, trying to find out information, and since there was really nothing new to report, their conversation was over in a few minutes. When she was off the phone, September assessed her feelings about the whole thing and decided she hadn’t liked being asked question after question by someone who was basically reading a script and hurrying her through the answers. She filed that aspect of the job under the heading of Try To Avoid.

It was getting later and she fooled around at her desk until nearly seven before she finally left. She would have stayed on, for lack of anything better to do with her time, but perversely she didn’t want her coworkers to think she was a loser without any social life. It wasn’t like she hadn’t dated. She just hadn’t dated in a while . . . a very long while.

She’d texted Auggie numerous times since his abrupt phone line cutoff. So far he’d been singularly unwilling to respond. How like him to play the cowboy and just run off with the investigation anyway he liked. Her investigation. Well, hers and Gretchen’s. She kinda wished Wes Pelligree were a part of it, too, but he was busy with other things, cases that were wrapping up and a court appearance where he was a witness for the prosecution against a man who’d faked his own death for the insurance money, which his wife then promptly absconded with and he’d run her down and shot her and now they were both having separate trials and heading toward prison terms.

On her way out she passed Wes’s empty desk and noticed the picture of Sheila Dempsey—something from her high school days, September guessed—which was propped up against his desk lamp. Dark-haired, in her thirties, slim and attractive, Sheila’s body had been found in a field just outside the city limits, in Winslow County, though her place of residence was an apartment complex not all that far from the station. She’d been strangled and the flesh on her torso had been scored with lines that resembled letters, but maybe weren’t. It wasn’t Wes’s case, it was county’s, but he’d met her once at a bar sometime recently and her death bothered him.

Or, at least that was the word around the office. Wes hadn’t said anything about her himself, but September had kept her ears open on the subject and had queried George about it a bit, at least until George had given her a look that said, “What the hell is it to you?”

There was no way September was going to admit she had a mild attraction to Wes, especially since he was deeply invested in his own relationship with a woman from his days as an athlete at a junior college. Their relationship was solid; that was fact. So, September kept her case of “the warms” to herself.

Liv lay on the couch in the darkness, staring at the ceiling once more. She moved onto her side and punched up the pillow, squeezing her eyes closed. Auggie was back in the bedroom and they were waiting for morning. Maybe someone would call them back.

There’d been an awkward moment or two when neither of them knew what to do. Auggie had finally said he was going to bed, but he was taking a shower first. Liv thought that sounded like heaven, but was too uneasy to strip off her clothes and spend a few moments naked with him around. Maybe in the morrow.

But then, before he’d gone to sleep, he’d actually walked past where she was sitting on the couch, removing her shoes. He was wearing boxers and nothing else as he strolled into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.

He stopped by the couch briefly, made a comment about trading places with her, the bed for the couch. She’d vehemently shaken her head, and he’d shrugged and moseyed on.

She, meanwhile, had lain back on the sofa cushions fully clothed, her mind caught on the smooth muscles she’d seen moving beneath the skin of his shoulders, the hard curve of his back, his taut, hair-dusted thighs.

She was shocked at herself. In the midst of her terror and anxiety, this was the overriding emotion quickening her blood? Desire? Lust? Sex?

With an effort, she dragged her feminine attention away from him and concentrated on the more urgent problems at hand. Dr. Yancy. Think about Dr. Yancy. But a pair of faintly amused blue eyes crowded her inner vision. She flung her arm over her eyes, as if that would help, and squeezed her brain shut.

“Liv.”

Immediately she flung back her arm and popped her eyes open. The room was empty and dark. She was alone. Had only heard him in her head.

What? she answered silently.

The room was quiet. There was no sound anywhere. All in her head.

Then, a voice said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Yancy.”

She recognized it. It was her own voice. Sullen and combative.

She saw herself at Dr. Yancy’s desk and the doctor was regarding her with concern.

“You saw something,” Dr. Yancy said. “Something you’re repressing.”

“What?” Liv demanded. “What? I didn’t see anything!”

“Something,” the doctor insisted. She was fading in and out, a watery vision.

“All I saw was my mother, hanging by her neck!” Liv practically screeched.

“Something else . . . maybe something that didn’t actually have to do with that day. . . .”

A cracked door. A beam of light. In the glint of illumination, the wetness of an eye as he turns and sees her . . . outside . . . outside . . .

“I don’t want to talk anymore!”

Slam! She was out the door. Running. Running. Running!

And Dr. Yancy’s voice was calling after her, “It was him, Olivia. You saw him.”

The memory sank away and Liv came fully awake, drenched in sweat. She heard the door to Auggie’s bedroom slam open and suddenly he was there, beside the couch, kneeling beside her.

“You cried out,” he said.

“I saw him. The monster. I saw him through a crack in the door. Dr. Yancy made me remember at Hathaway House but I ran away from her.”

“Who is he? The monster?”

“Monster?” She blinked.

“You said ‘the monster.’”

“I meant . . . the doctor. The zombie. The bogeyman. I think maybe I saw him, and he’s the serial strangler. But if he’s the doctor in the picture, that means Mama knew him. . . .” She swallowed. “Maybe she knew about him and that’s why he had to kill her.”

“Okay, wait. Take it slow. We’ll start with him. We’ll call Dr. Yancy again in the morning, if she hasn’t called back. See what she knows about the doctor.”

“Okay.”

He smiled at her and actually had the audacity to sweep her hair back from her forehead before he turned to leave. Liv had to fight the desire to call him back. She kept her lips pressed tightly closed with an effort. The last thing she needed was to suddenly depend on him too much.