“Wait!”
“Can’t wait, O’Hara. I’ll see you in your dreams.”
Click.
I flipped my wrist and locked in on the second hand of my watch. “Please,” I whispered. I called down to the tech guys. “Tell me you got a location!”
The initial silence ripped through my ears. “Sorry,” I was told. “We missed her.”
I picked up the phone, base and all, and whipped it against the wall. It shattered into pieces.
I’ll see you in your dreams.
Chapter 108
THE GRAY-HAIRED GEEK installing my new phone the next morning gazed down at the scattered pieces of my old one. Then he looked at me with a knowing, seen-it-all smile. “It just fell off your desk, huh?”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said. “Trust me on that one.”
Minutes later the new phone was up and running. At least something was. I remained deskbound, tormented by boredom, not to mention self-doubt and a whole lot of guilt, truckloads of the stuff.
The new phone rang.
My first thought was that an encore was on its way—Nora wanted another conversation, another chance to turn the screws. On second thought, I knew better. Everything about her call the day before said it was a one-time-only event.
I picked up. Sure enough, it wasn’t Nora.
It was the other woman in my life who currently had it in for me. Needless to say, Susan and I weren’t exactly on the best of terms. Still, we remained professional.
“Any word yet from the audio lab?” I asked right away. The recording of my conversation with Nora was being analyzed for possible background noises that suggested her general, if not specific, location. An ocean wave; a foreign language being spoken by a passerby. Just because I couldn’t hear it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
“Yeah, I got the report back,” said Susan. “Nothing they could pick up.”
Technically, it was more bad news, but the way she delivered it—as if it were irrelevant—told me something.
Susan knew something.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“What’s going on? You’re still incredibly fucking stupid, John. If you could hurt me, you would have broken my heart again.”
She was holding out on me.
“I know that, Susan. There’s something else.”
She chuckled at my intuitive grab. “How fast can you get to my office?”
Chapter 109
TWENTY MINUTES LATER Susan and I were speeding north out of New York City, and after an hour-fifty on the road we pulled onto the grounds of the Pine Woods Psychiatric Facility in Lafayetteville, New York.
“This should be interesting for you,” Susan said as we got out of my car and headed toward the main building, a brick tower of eight floors. “Meet the parent. Nora’s mom lives here, O’Hara.”
I gave a half smile. I could tell that Susan was enjoying this.
Soon we were sitting in a small conference room on the psych facility’s top floor. Seated across from us was the head nurse on the disturbed ward.
I couldn’t tell if the heavyset woman was scared or simply nervous. Either way, she looked extremely uncomfortable. Meeting a couple of FBI agents does that to some people.
“Agent John O’Hara, I want you to meet Emily Barrows,” said Susan, who had made the original contact with the folks from Pine Woods.
I turned to the woman, extending my hand. “Pleasure,” I said.
“I think Emily has valuable information for us about Nora,” said Susan.
I sat there with all the anticipation of a kid on Christmas Eve. Not once did I take my eyes off this woman, who was wearing white slacks and a simple white blouse, her hair pulled back and held with bobby pins. She was no-frills all the way down to her rubber-soled cordovans.
“Well,” she began, her voice shaky, “one of our patients at Pine Woods is a woman by the name of Olivia Sinclair.”
This much I knew.
“Nora is Olivia’s daughter,” said Emily. “At least, I’m pretty sure she is. It just dawned on me that I never saw any proof of that.”
“I have,” said Susan. “After I spoke with you on the phone, Emily, I pulled the prison file.”
I raised an eyebrow at Susan. “Prison file?”
“Olivia Sinclair began a life sentence when Nora was six,” she said.
“For what?”
“Murder,” said Susan.
“You’re kidding me.”
Susan shook her head. “It gets better, O’Hara. She murdered her husband. And the couple’s little girl, Nora, was there when it happened.”
Susan went on. “A few years after Olivia Sinclair was sent away, she seemed to lose touch with reality. That’s when she was transferred to Pine Woods. In the meantime, Nora bounced from one foster home to the next. She moved so much, there was never a cohesive file on her.”
Susan glanced at Emily, who now looked completely lost.
“I’m sorry,” Susan said to her. “We have good reason to believe that Nora killed her first husband a couple of years ago. Based on that, and everything else that’s happened, we have even better reason to believe she killed her second husband.”
“She and Connor Brown were only engaged to be married,” I said, reminding Susan.
“I’m talking about Jeffrey Walker,” she said.
I was now more lost than Emily. “Jeffrey Walker?”
“You know—he writes all those sappy historical novels. Or at least he did.”
“Yeah, I know who he is. You’re saying that Nora and he were—”
“Married.”
“Christ,” I said, putting the pieces together. “The news reported that he died of a heart attack. And let me guess,” I said. “He lived in Boston.”
Susan touched her finger to her nose.
“Which brings us back to Emily,” she said. She turned to the nurse. “Go ahead, tell him what you have. This is good, O’Hara.”
Emily nodded and asked that we follow her. “I’ll show you,” she said. “Let’s go see Olivia.”
Chapter 110
WE WALKED DOWN the hospital corridor to meet Nora’s mother, Olivia.
“One day I’m talking to Nora about the writer Jeffrey Walker, and the next I’m reading in the papers that he’s dead,” said Emily as we walked.
Susan and I just listened. “Of course, I didn’t think there was any connection. I didn’t even know Nora was in trouble until I saw it on TV.”
Emily stopped walking in the hall. There was obviously something she needed to tell us before we got to Olivia’s room. “A couple of weeks ago, I happened to read a note that Olivia had passed to Nora. In the note was a secret that blew all of our minds. But it also told us a lot about Olivia, and maybe Nora as well. You’ll see in a minute.”
Emily started to walk again. She continued past another few doorways, then she reached out for one of the handles. “This is Olivia’s room.”
The nurse opened the door and I could see a very old woman propped up in bed. She was reading a novel and she didn’t look up from it as the three of us entered her room.
“Hello, Olivia. These are the visitors I told you about,” said Emily in a clear, loud voice.
Finally, Olivia looked up. “Oh, hello,” she said. “I like to read.”
“Yes, Olivia likes to read.” Emily nodded, and then a smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. The nurse turned to face Susan and me.
“For a long time, Olivia fooled us about her actual condition. She used to play all kinds of tricks to make us believe she was a lot worse off than she actually is. One time, when Nora was here, she pretended to have a seizure because her daughter was going to reveal something she shouldn’t, and Olivia knew we tape all patient visits. Olivia is a very good actress. Isn’t that right, dear?”