Roarke had questioned the boy about Cara’s possible whereabouts, but he had to be entirely honest with himself: he had no particular skills for extracting information from a five-year old. Maybe the boy knew better than Roarke how to say what Roarke wanted to know.
He was restless, wired. It was barely 8:00 p.m., and the Sebastians lived in San Luis Obispo, en route to San Francisco. He could stay where he was and get a hotel and pace the room for the rest of the night. But from San Diego, now that it was after rush hour, the Sebastians were about a five-hour drive up the coast.
He looked out on the softly shifting moonlit pines, then pulled open the driver’s door, dropped into the car and drove.
Chapter Seven
He woke in another motel, with a completely different landscape out the window: green rolling hills and twisted oak trees.
The Sebastians owned an olive ranch outside San Luis Obispo in central California, for Roarke’s money about the most gorgeous stretch of California in existence. In a state where knockout scenery was the norm, that was saying a lot.
He’d driven five hours the night before, which put him into SLO about half-past midnight. Far too late for a casual drop-in, but he’d phoned Sebastian en route and asked to see Jason the next morning. Sebastian had agreed.
Roarke drove in from the motel as the sun was burning off the coastal mist. The olive ranch was just a few miles inland, a huge spread, rambling over the hills, with the sturdy little trees lined up in rows, not much taller than the grapevines that comprised the area’s famous vineyards. Olives were an old crop in California but the gourmet and organic food craze had launched a whole new demand for artisanal olive oil. Roarke suspected that the Sebastian’s “ranch” would more aptly be called a multimillion dollar agribusiness, and as he drove up the winding road toward the Sebastian home, he felt a tightness in his chest that he was aware was alpha-male competitiveness. He stopped in front of the old Spanish-style ranch house beside a late-model Tundra parked in the drive, and took a deep breath to settle himself before he got out and moved toward the porch. Mark Sebastian stood waiting for him.
Sebastian was in his mid-thirties, dark blond and brown eyes, fit, tan and attractive in the casual way the wealthy and successful in California managed without seeming to spare a thought for it. But a genuine person, Roarke had to admit, a wounded recent divorcé who had succumbed to Cara Lindstrom’s unusual charms.
He pushed the front door open for Roarke and Roarke instantly felt the underlying tension. Neither man would ever say it, but it was silently understood that Sebastian responded to Roarke’s requests because it kept him connected to Cara, and because Roarke was probably the only human being on the planet who would understand that. She had been Sebastian’s lover for three days at most, but her imprint on him would last a long time.
He had been no use in terms of evidence that would lead to her, though. The story she had given him had been completely false, and he had seen only what she wanted him to see.
His son Jason was a force, a quiet tornado of a boy who, like many children of addicts and alcoholics, observed and understood far more about the adult world around him than most boys his age. Young as he was, he seemed to have a better grasp on Cara Lindstrom than his father ever had.
“Special Agent Roarke!” he shouted as he ran into the room and stopped on a dime, two feet in front of Roarke, looking him over. “FBI Special Agent Roarke,” he repeated.
“Hello, Jason,” Roarke said, and felt a disquieting warmth in his chest at the boy’s enthusiasm. Roarke was more than three years divorced himself and wasn’t sure that children of his own were in his future, something he never thought anything about… except lately, in Jason Sebastian’s compelling presence. He sat on a nearby ottoman to put himself at the boy’s height.
“I wanted to talk to you some more, is that okay?”
“About Leila,” Jason stated. It was the name Cara had given the Sesbastians, undoubtedly one of many aliases, but the only name Jason knew her by.
“Yes. I wondered if…” Roarke paused, and surprised himself with his next words. “If you had heard anything from her.”
The boy looked at him, clear gray eyes. “Uh huh. She left me a dolphin last night.”
Both Roarke and Mark Sebastian were electrified. “What?” “Jason,
what
?” The men overlapped each other. Roarke’s throat was suddenly so dry he could barely swallow.
“Dolphin,” Jason said impatiently. “She came and left a dolphin.”
The men trouped after Jason into his bedroom, a huge room for a five-year old, with a bed area, a TV and computer area, a play area, a low table for art. Jason stopped and pointed.
There was a stuffed dolphin on the bed, a big plush toy. Like the kind you could get at Sea World, or any number of souvenir shops — if you happened to be in San Diego.
For a moment Roarke was back on the beach, watching leaping flashes of silver against the setting sun.
“It’s not his,” Mark Sebastian said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Roarke crouched to the boy. “Did you
see
Leila?” The name was unfamiliar in his mouth. “Did she talk to you?”
Jason shook his head.
“How do you know the dolphin is from her?”
Jason shrugged. “It was outside,” he said. “On the swing.” Irrefutable logic.
“And how do you know it’s from her?” Roarke repeated.
“Because it
is
,” Jason said.
“Jesus Christ,” Sebastian said under his breath. “She was here.”
She’s alive
, Roarke thought.
She’s alive
.
The two men strode out of the house, off the back porch. Roarke saw it immediately, a twisted tree that looked as if it had been there forever. A sturdy rope swing hung from a thick horizontal branch.
“Right there,” Jason said, importantly, now caught up in the men’s excitement. “It was there.”
There was no fence around this part of the property. The house was set on the rolling hills and the wilderness came right up to the house. Roarke scanned the hills, searching between the gnarled olive trees, as if he would be able to see her.
“She’s following me,” he told Sebastian. “She must have followed me up from San Diego.”
And while he’d been sleeping two miles away in a motel, she’d been right here.
Sebastian looked alarmed, and conflicted, parental protectiveness wrestling with something less definable in his face.
“You said she wouldn’t come after Jason,” he said.
No
, you
said that
, Roarke thought, but didn’t argue the point. “I don’t think she’s come after Jason. She left him a stuffed toy.”
“Why?”
Roarke thought of the dolphins, the joyous arcs against the swells of waves. They had put him in mind of Jason, himself.
“Maybe she was just thinking of him.”
And then something else occurred to him.
She wanted me to know she’s out there. She followed me here last night and knew where I’d be going in the morning and she put the dolphin here so I would know she’d been here
.
Was that really true? Or some wild speculation of his own?
But the dolphin couldn’t be coincidence. And he had felt something on the bluffs. He’d felt — not alone.
Oh, yeah. That’s scientific proof, all right
.
He was jolted from his thoughts by Sebastian’s agitated voice. The father was staring at him tensely. “Agent Roarke, I need to know if my son is safe. Any input you have on the subject would be appreciated.”
Roarke stifled a flash of irritation, kept his voice even. “I don’t think that she’s after Jason. But I would take all precautions until…”
“Until you catch her?” Sebastian said, and Roarke’s breath stilled. “Is that going to be soon?”
Roarke didn’t know how to answer that.
He went through several varations of questions with Jason, but the boy was adamant that he had not received any other gifts or messages from Cara until the dolphin appeared.
“If you hear from her, or see her, you’ll let your dad know right away, right, sport?”
“Uh huh,” Jason said, but wasn’t looking at Roarke. Roarke didn’t know if that meant he was bored or upset or lying. He crouched again to look Jason in the eyes.
“Did Leila ever tell you about special places that she has? Places she likes to go? Or a place she said she would take you, sometime?”
“She likes the sky and the wind and the sand,” Jason said. “And storms, she likes storms.”
“She likes the outdoors,” Roarke said.
“Uh huh.”
“But was there any place she showed you on a map, or a place with a name?”
Jason frowned and shrugged. “She likes the beach. And the mountains. And butterflies.”
That narrows it all down
.
“Okay, Jason. You just keep talking to your dad, okay?” Roarke glanced at Sebastian, and the father nodded.
Then Roarke’s eyes fell on the stuffed toy, and something tugged at his mind.
“Did you and Leila ever talk about dolphins?”
Jason considered this, shook his head. “No.”
“Did you ever see a dolphin when you were with her? In the ocean, or in a store?”
“Uh uh.”
“So… why do you think she left you a dolphin?”
Jason shrugged. “Dophins are awesome.”
Roarke stood, and felt a rush of certainty.
No, the dolphin isn’t some special message to Jason. It’s a message to me
.
Chapter Eight
The team looked up simultaneously from the conference table to see Roarke walk into the conference room. He hadn’t called in from the road to tell them where he was, but after leaving the Sebastian ranch, he’d driven straight back up to the city.
“Boss. Weren’t expecting you,” Epps said. “Any luck?”
“In a weird way.” The weirdest way possible. The trip he’d taken that seemed only to yield clues on a twenty-five year old case that wasn’t his to investigate had resulted in not a trail to Cara, but to Cara herself.
Epps was staring at him. “You found Lindstrom?”
“She found me,” Roarke said.
He filled them in about the dolphin toy. Even as he was recounting it he knew that it sounded absurd, no kind of proof at all. Jones was looking perplexed. “Because of a stuffed dolphin? I don’t get why you think it was her.”
“It was her,” Epps said. “Of course it was her.” He looked at Roarke. “She’s alive. And she’s after you.”
“I wouldn’t say she’s
after
me,” Roarke said.
“What would you say?” the agent demanded.
Roarke found he didn’t have any immediate answer, so he just shook his head. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t.”
They all sat in silence. Roarke looked at the white board, at the police sketch he knew so well by now. Sunglasses, turtleneck, those fine, carved features.
“This is how we catch her,” Epps said suddenly, with a tension Roarke recognized as excitement, and for a moment he had no idea what Epps was talking about. “We tail you and wait for her to show.”
Roarke felt a sudden sinking in the pit of his stomach. “That’s if she isn’t three states away by now,” he said.
Epps looked at him strangely. “She isn’t.”
He was right, of course. Roarke didn’t know what Cara was doing following him, but he knew if that’s what she was doing, she wasn’t about to stop.
“What does she want?” Singh asked. Concern was grave in her voice. “Are you in danger?”
“I don’t think so,” Roarke said automatically. Cara could have killed him any number of times already. He said it aloud. “If she wanted to kill me, I’d be dead.”
The fact was they had no evidence that she had ever killed anyone who wasn’t dangerous or just plain evil. And she didn’t seem to care much about self-defense, either, although he didn’t want to think about what might happen in a law enforcement standoff, either to her or to law enforcement.
So what
did
she want? And how long had she been watching him?
And then the obvious hit him.
“Blythe,” he told them. “It had to be in Blythe. She followed me from there.”
She must have picked up his trail when he’d gone back to her old home, the site of the massacre of her family. It made the most sense that she had been drawn back there, just as he had, but with a much stronger pull.
Epps was speaking. “So we stake out your place, we put a team on you everywhere you go. And you should be wearing a vest at all times.”
“She’s not going to shoot me,” Roarke said, stiff with annoyance, and a tension that went deeper than that.
Epps looked at him stonily. “All due respect, you have no fucking clue what she’s going to do. No one does.”
He was right. Not that Roarke had any say in the matter, ultimately. Since he was suddenly the center of the investigation, it was on Epps to dictate the terms. Epps briefed Reynolds and pulled two other agents from another team in to rotate shifts with them. Roarke felt relegated to the sidelines as Epps conferred with the backup. He finally went for coffee to avoid looking useless.
When he came back to the conference room, Epps had the game plan. “So we start with you going home, in plain sight. No point in you staying in the building. She’s not going to come after you here.”
Roarke barely refrained from answering back about her “coming after him.”
“We don’t know she knows where I live,” he said, but that was just contrariness, and Epps didn’t even bother responding. No one in the room had any doubt that Cara Lindstrom could find out where he lived.
Epps continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “We stake out the house today and tonight, see if we can just pick her up watching you. Let’s remember that she uses wigs, sunglasses, to change her appearance.”
And costumes
, Roarke thought. He knew now she had gone with Mark and Jason Sebastian to a Halloween festival dressed in a Catwoman costume. Under the circumstances, a perfect disguise.