Color Blind (22 page)

Again, the purple of narcissism colored Jenna’s thoughts. Isaac thought he was so smart, brilliant enough to place every piece of a puzzle. But that was a weakness. He didn’t think he could slip.

Isaac would not be another Claudia.

She grabbed the baby monitor and tiptoed past Ayana’s room. She tapped on Vern’s open door ever so lightly. “Dad? You have to take this. I have to go back out.”

Vern rubbed his eyes from where he was reclining on his bed, though she could tell he hadn’t been asleep yet. “Tonight?”

“Yeah. Can’t wait.”

She set the monitor on his bedside table and, before he had a chance to ask questions, left the room. Isaac Keaton might know exactly what he was doing, but she did, too. Games and tricks and even Claudia out of Sumpter didn’t change that. She could outsmart them.

One of them anyway.

“S
o we meet again, Dr. Ramey,” Isaac said when he smelled the pretty young psychiatrist at his back. He’d looked forward to her coming back. To the next move.

She sighed heavily as she sat down in the chair outside the infirmary. He couldn’t see her, but he could tell what she was doing on instinct by her breathing.

“You know, I could live my whole life without knowing you had picked up my scent,” she replied.

Smart girl.

They’d put him in the infirmary, he knew, because it was the best place for criminals like him—the famous ones. Safe from the general prison population, better for watching for suicidal tendencies, as if he’d do such a thing. Still, it was a nice touch, having his own cell. Better for sure than the grime of some cell mate he might loathe.

The infirmary was also great for his purposes.

He turned around to see Jenna Ramey, hair slicked back in a wet ponytail, navy blue blazer over jeans. Classy.

Irresistible.

“Do tell me. Did Ayana enjoy my present?”

She tensed for the slightest, most delicious second. Then her chest relaxed, her nostrils flared.

“I thought we had a deal about that,” she said.

Ah. They had, hadn’t they? Though he’d never exactly applied that logic to
him
. Sure, he’d offered her an agreement. That didn’t mean he ever planned to keep it. Oh, well.

“So we did. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I want to talk about your partner. The ferry shooter.”

Isaac couldn’t suppress the grin that spread over his face. “Fairy shooter! That’s a good name! Though I suspect he’d not be thrilled with it on the whole.”

“Why do you say that?” Jenna Ramey asked.

“No specific reason.”

“Not because the two of you had some type of homoerotic relationship?”

“Are you insane?”

“No. Just observant. He’s submissive, you’re dominant. You’re a male partnership. It’s not that huge of a leap.”

“And how do you know it’s a male partnership, Dr. Ramey? The magic crayon box in your brain tell you that?”

She crossed her legs and leaned back. “No. You told me a second ago he was a he.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“If he’s a male submissive, I’d say that he’s somewhat reclusive, avoidant. Doesn’t make friends easily. Doesn’t trust easily. That probably means you met him in an unthreatening environment before you flattered him into trusting you. That personality type lends itself to overreacting in the most harmless of situations, which probably means you had plenty to feel like you could control him by, be sure he wouldn’t go off his rocker when the big stuff happened. Sexual relationships are powerful mental motivators, strong in emotional attachments. Maybe knowing you had that authority over his psyche helped you feel secure in sharing your jaunts with him. Did it?”

Isaac’s heart thumped hard against his ribs, and he let his breathing accelerate. She wanted to play games, huh? He could play games.

Keep this clean.
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you? Think you’ll tease me with ideas, maybe boil something out of me if you get me angry enough. It’s not going to work.” Now his voice had reached fever pitch, the fast slur of someone angry enough to have a stroke. “Just because that little queer has a preoccupation with me doesn’t mean I had to have one with him. Fucker
lives
in Dreamland!”

Jenna Ramey stood up, smoothed her gray slacks. “Thanks, Isaac. You’ve been a joy, as always.”

Then she walked away.

Go, go, good Doctor. Enjoy the hunt.

T
hadius wasn’t about to try to buy a plane ticket under the circumstances, so he now drove a rented U-Haul through Asheville, North Carolina. It hadn’t taken long to pull up Facebook and search the school networks for the years surrounding Emily’s graduation year, scroll down to the letter W. Only one Waters was listed. Sebastian Waters.

Sure enough, the profile picture looked like the one in the printout he’d gotten from Howie Dumas from the pawn shop video. Among Sebastian Waters’s other networks was Cramer-Corrington High School, class of 2003. Asheville it was.

As he eased into a parking spot at Cramer-Corrington High, he still couldn’t believe he made it. The entire drive, he’d expected to see blue lights in his rearview mirror, to be pulled over. He’d taken precautions to make sure no one traced the U-Haul, but the police resources outmatched his.

Then again, they hadn’t found Sebastian Waters, had they?

Thadius hopped out of the truck and knocked on the walkway door of the room in front of him to his right. Mrs. Eckley told him her room would be directly ahead of her black 4Runner’s parking space.

The door opened to reveal a woman a bit younger than he’d expected. The teacher he’d talked to on the phone sounded at
least
seventy. This woman couldn’t be a day over forty. Either that or she knew the city’s finest plastic surgeon.

“Mr. Gilmer,” she said, offering a hand. “So nice to see you. Come in, come in.”

People. So full of crap. He should be used to this by now, but somehow it never ceased to amaze. Mrs. Eckley greeted “Mr. Gilmer,” the father of her well-remembered former student, Emily Gilmer. Too bad Emily Gilmer wasn’t a student
or
a real person.

“I was so sorry to hear of Emily’s situation. She’s such a sweet girl,” the teacher lied.

“Thank you,” Thadius said. He squeezed into one of the wooden desks.

Mrs. Eckley propped her hip against her own desk. “I’m surprised she got involved with someone like Sebastian personally.”

“Why do you say that?” Thadius inquired. Never mind that he’d told her Emily Gilmer ran away to elope with Sebastian Waters. Never mind he hadn’t mentioned he’d found out that Sebastian Waters had killed his daughter.

Mrs. Eckley shifted on her feet, suddenly uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t have said that . . .”

“Please. That’s why I came to you. You taught psychology to both of them. I don’t know Sebastian that well. If I knew more about him, I might know where to look for them, or at the very least find some kind of peace that she’s okay with him,” Thadius said.

She crossed one ankle over the other. Still seeming to weigh her words, she said, “It’s not that he was a bad kid. Not really. It’s just . . . his emotions took him over. Anger. He was
very
smart. Don’t get me wrong. He was a gifted kid. But he was negative and moody. Those moods manifested in outbursts when things were going badly for him, you know?”

Strange how she remembered so much about this “not bad kid” and couldn’t even remember that she’d never taught an Emily Gilmer.

“He sticks in my brain for that reason, actually,” Mrs. Eckley said like she was reading his thoughts. “Sebastian and I argued once over a test grade he received. I confronted him about his study habits, because his grades had dropped off. He’d gotten the first F I’d ever known him to have, and I served as the Beta Club sponsor at the time. Because he was a Beta Club member, his other teachers had to notify me about his grades slipping. The organization requires us to keep records of everyone in the honor society. So when I started to hear from his other teachers, too, I asked him about it. I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for his reaction.”

Thadius stared at her, unable to speak.
Violent? Cold? Unfeeling? What?

“I’m sorry. I’m probably not helping your peace of mind,” Mrs. Eckley said.

“No, no. I’m just trying to understand,” Thadius said, waving his hand. “How did he react?”

“Well, he cried. Hard. More depressive than anything I’d seen up to that point from him. He wanted extra help. Asked me if I could find a tutor for his algebra class. Yet when I found someone to tutor him, he screamed at me. Told me I was nosy, that he didn’t need anything from me or anyone, to back off. I wrote up the incident for the principal, because I thought we needed to inform his parents. Nothing came of it.”

“Ever? No more incidents?” Thadius asked.

“Not until
the
incident,” she replied. She squirmed again, stood straight up.

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Eckley cocked her head. “Obviously you know about what happened before Emily’s graduation.”

Thadius quirked his head.
Think!

“Apparently, I haven’t been informed of everything.”

“Oh, my. Sebastian didn’t graduate. As a private prep school, we hold our students to high standards, as you well know. The police arrested Sebastian the Friday before graduation on Monday. He was expelled.”

E
ven though Jenna picked Yancy up in the wee hours of the morning, he looked like he hadn’t been asleep. Either that or his good looks were immune to fatigue.

“So why are we doing this again?” Yancy asked as he climbed into Jenna’s Blazer.

She’d thought and thought about her interview with Isaac, but she kept coming back to a bright burnt orange that popped in her mind when Isaac made a certain statement. It had long been the color that showed up when her instinct said something was a lie.

That color was the reason Jenna and Yancy were now on their way to meet up with the ex-girlfriend he’d been going to see at the theme park when he was shot. What she was looking for was anybody’s guess. Either way, she wasn’t leaving until she found it.

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure Keaton tried to send me on some kind of tangent. I need to make sure I’m right.”

Yancy groaned. “If you’re gonna make me call up my ex at four a.m. to ask if she can return us to the scene of my own shooting, the least you can do is to tell me why I’m doing it.”

Probably anything to keep from stalking the governor in the middle of the night to convince him to stop Claudia’s release. “I went back to interview Keaton tonight on a whim, and he said something. It wasn’t even what he said so much as how he said it. Or what he
did
when he said it maybe. He was trying to play me.”

“You mean like a tell? I thought body language stuff didn’t apply to psychopaths. They can lie to you and look you in the eye, right?”

Unfortunately.
“Yes, that’s true, but it wasn’t that. Not quite. Some of it I chalk up to the way sociopaths talk in general. You ask a question, they don’t give a direct answer. They talk around things.”