Erin picked up a photograph of herself in elementary school, holding the toddler Cindy on her lap. Her hands were trembling. "Well, Mom. If you aren't doing it, someone else is. Any ideas?"
Seconds ticked by, stretched into minutes of awful silence. Barbara Riggs covered her mouth with the towel and shook her head.
Erin shoved her chair back. "I organized our negatives by year in the filing cabinet upstairs," she said. "I'm getting the negatives of these photos, and we'll get reprints made today. Every damn one of them."
"That's not going to solve our problem," Connor said.
"I don't care. It's something to do, and I'll make me feel better. Excuse me, please. I'll be right back."
And she left him all alone with her mother. Again. Dear God, what had he done to deserve this? It was like being roasted on a spit.
They eyed each other like boxers circling in the ring. "You've, uh, noticed no signs of forced entry?" he asked her.
She shook her head.
"And the alarm works? You always set it? You test it regularly?"
She nodded. "Of course. I always check the locks and set the alarm. Religiously. Sometimes I check them over and over."
"Who else knows the code?"
"My daughters and myself," Barbara said. "I had the codes changed after Eddie… left. And the locks, as well."
"Hmm."
"You must think I'm crazy." she said.
It was a statement, not a question, but he took it at face value and slipped into net-and-fish mode to consider it. He cast out the net and threw everything that was happening to the whole family into it.
Barbara's face swam in his gaze while he tried to feel the shape of the ugly pattern that was forming. There was something shifty and corrupt, but the source of it was not the woman sitting across the table from him. The words came out with total conviction. "No, I don't."
She looked almost offended. "Pardon?"
"I don't think you're crazy" he said.
There was a flash in her eyes, almost like hope. Her throat bobbed several times. "You don't?" she asked warily.
"No," he said. "I've dealt with crazy people before. I don't get that feeling from you. You strike me as stressed out, depressed, and afraid. At the end of your rope, maybe. But not crazy."
"Not yet, anyway," she said.
His mouth twitched. "Not yet," he agreed. "But if you're not, that means that somebody with a lot of resources is messing with you."
She pressed her hand against her mouth. "Novak?"
"He's my first choice," Connor said.
"But he was incarcerated until just a few days ago!"
"He's still my first choice. He has an obscene amount of money, a very long reach, a grudge against your husband. And he's crazy. This thing stinks of crazy."
"So somebody is trying to make me think that I'm insane?"
He shook his head. "No. I think somebody is trying to drive you genuinely insane. Like the porno video trick. That could be rigged, and controlled from the outside. It's crazy and improbable, but it's possible."
Her mouth tightened. "So Erin told you about that?"
"I'm not a techie, so I can't take apart your TV and tell you what they did to it," he went on. "But my friend Seth is an expert. I'll have him take a look, if you like."
"But it sounds so bizarre. Like aliens from outer space, or who killed JFK. Like a big… paranoid conspiracy theory."
"Yeah," he said. "I think that's the whole point."
She hesitated, eyes narrowed. "You must be paranoid yourself to even entertain these notions."
It sounded like an accusation.
He shoved down his anger and thought about the nightmare phone call in the hotel. Georg appearing out of nowhere in the phantom SUV The coma. Jesse's death. Ed's betrayal.
"I was a cop, Mrs. Riggs. And you know exactly how that turned out for me," he said. "Can you blame me for being paranoid?"
She looked down into her teacup.
"You've got to trust your senses, and your instincts," he said, but he knew he was trying to convince himself as much as her. "They're all you've got. If you can't rely on them, then you're lost in the void."
Barbara's shoulders sagged. She nodded. "Yes, exactly. That's where I've been for the last few weeks," she said. "Lost in the void."
"Welcome back to the real world, Mrs. Riggs," he said.
She blinked, as if she had just woken up. "Ah… thank you."
The atmosphere was measurably less hostile than before, but he pushed on at the risk of ruining it. "How long ago was the first porno video joke played on you?"
She pursed her lips and thought. "A little over two months ago. Maybe two and a half, because at first I thought I was dreaming."
"Which would have been about the same time that Cindy started hanging out with this Billy Vega, according to her band members."
Barbara gulped. "You mean, you think it's all connected?"
He gave her a brief, tight smile. "You know us conspiracy theorists. We think everything's connected."
"You think Novak could have assigned this Billy to control Cindy, like he assigned Georg to Erin at Crystal Mountain?"
"Maybe. Although Billy Vega's rap sheet is nothing like Georg's. He's just a small-time thief, pimp, and con artist. Not a seasoned killer."
Barbara shuddered. "So… shouldn't we call the police?"
He thought about his latest conversation with Nick. "You know how it is with cops. They don't have the time or manpower to get worked up about things that might or could happen. They're too busy dealing with things that are happening or have already happened. Cindy's not a minor. Billy Vega hasn't done anything wrong yet that we know of, other than be an asshole. As far as the cops are concerned, we're talking about a girl having trouble with a no-good boyfriend."
Erin's light footsteps sounded over their heads as she bustled around, trying to tidy up chaos and madness, trying to make sense of a brutal nightmare. It pissed him off, to see her jerked around like that.
In fact, the whole thing was making him fucking furious.
"There's a down side to not being crazy, you know." His voice came out harder than he'd planned.
She looked puzzled. "What are you talking about?"
"If you're not crazy, then you've got no excuse for lying around in your bathrobe eating Vicodin and letting your daughter do everything for you."
She shot to her feet. Her chair pitched over and crashed to the floor. "How dare you speak to me like that?"
What the hell. Ingratiating himself with this woman was a lost cause anyway. It needed to be said, and nobody else was around to say it. He met her outraged eyes straight on, and let his statement stand.
"Mom? What's the matter? What's going on?"
Barbara's eyes shifted to Erin, who stood in the doorway clutching a manila folder. "Nothing, honey. I'm fine," she said crisply. "Excuse me for a moment. I'm going to run upstairs and get dressed."
She stalked out of the kitchen, head high. Erin stared after her, bewildered. "What happened? What did you say to her?"
Connor shrugged. "Nothing in particular. I guess some problems are just too scary to deal with in your bathrobe, that's all."
He paid through the nose for his snotty remark, all afternoon long. Barbara Riggs turned him into her combined slave, gofer, and whipping boy, and before he knew what hit him, he was taking out her garbage, fixing the drip in her upstairs bathroom, chauffeuring them to the phone center to get the phone turned back on. Then it was the grocery store, the photo shop, and the antique place, where he strained a muscle in his bum leg hauling that goddamn grandfather clock. But he didn't complain. It was all part of his martyrdom.
Back at the house, they argued about the dead TV She wanted him to haul it away to the trash, and he wanted to leave it for Seth to dismantle. He won that dispute, but was forced to carry the damn thing out onto the back porch so she wouldn't have to look at it. Worst of all, she forced him to call Sean at ridiculously frequent intervals to check on his progress. Which meant that his wiseass little brother got to witness all this humiliation first hand.