Kiss (21 page)

“Thanks.”

Wayne closed the door and Shauna continued to search for the jacket, remembering a minute later that she had left it in Wayne’s truck. Without a good reason to tell him she needed it, she would have to wait to fetch the address. In the meantime, she would assume Victoria. Yes, she was pretty sure the address was somewhere in Victoria. Her memory of the past few days seemed unexpectedly sharp, sharper than the first few days in the hospital.

Almost anything could explain that. Natural recovery or pharmaceutical help. Shauna considered the pill bottles, still by her bed. Or perhaps her decision to avoid those medications had allowed a fog to lift. Somehow, there was a connection between her memory and those drugs. In her anticipation of meeting Corbin, she had forgotten the morning dose. Tonight, then, she would dispose of twice as much. See what happened.

Shauna picked up one of the bottles. Had she been given these same drugs while she was in the coma, or something different? It hadn’t occurred to her to ask Dr. Carver.

She returned the pills to the nightstand, stepped into the bathroom, flushed the toilet, turned on the shower. Then she opened the door adjoining Khai’s room, and by the light of the bathroom, booted up the laptop.

Khai had said anytime.

She brushed her teeth, then returned to Khai’s computer.

She popped the unlabeled CD into the drive. It contained a single PDF file labeled
MMV Annual
. McAllister MediVista’s latest annual report, easily downloaded from the Web. Why would she have set this aside? She knew two of the firm’s three top executives—Wayne and Uncle Trent—not to mention her father’s role as president. She tabbed through the first fifty pages. MMV had experienced a year of record-breaking profit margins, and the report oozed with self-satisfaction.

Nothing else remarkable. She ejected the disk.

Shauna MapQuested Victoria, though she did not have the address. The town was just over two hours away, in what she guessed was a residential neighborhood.

Then she Googled Miguel Lopez. More than half a million hits. She tried “Miguel Lopez American Statesman” and found hundreds of links, all in the newspaper’s archives.

In the first ten pages she found three articles that were about a Miguel Lopez rather than written by a Miguel Lopez.

The first was about a driver apprehended for driving under the influence during the holidays last year.

The second was the obituary of a beloved local farmer who donated pumpkins to schoolchildren every October.

The third featured a journalist who received an award for his coverage of a flash flood in Austin that destroyed an entire neighborhood and killed five people. The article was accompanied by a picture of him holding the plaque and shaking hands with a man identified in the caption as the publisher.

Even in profile, his face was instantly recognizable to Shauna. Square hair-line, trim beard, full lips. Modestly happy here, furious the only other time she had seen him:

In her vision at the Iguana Grill, pointing a gun at her.

Shauna bolted awake in the predawn darkness of Monday morning as alert as if she’d injected espresso into her heart.

She had a decision. She would drive to Victoria with the picture of Miguel that she had printed off last night, go to the address Corbin had given her, find out if Miguel Lopez lived there. Or if the person who lived there knew of him.

Of course, it was possible that the address had nothing to do with Miguel Lopez.

But if Corbin had gone to such trouble to sneak it to her without Wayne knowing, it must have some connection to her situation.

The thread of possibility was so slender that Shauna realized she had stopped breathing, as if the breeziest wind from her own lungs might snap it in two. She stared at the shadows of her surroundings, aware of many reasons why she shouldn’t go, the first being her slim chance of actually finding Miguel Lopez.

Then there were the terms of her bail. She was not supposed to leave Travis County.

Which was what Wayne would say to try to talk her out of going. And if he did, what would she have then? A name. A collection of articles and e-mails. A picture with no other facts to frame it.

She sat up in bed and swung her feet over the edge. She felt the solid sup-port of the looped berber carpet underneath her toes. She looked at the clock: 4:22. She could take Rudy’s car and get there well before any resident left the house, be back late morning.

Sooner if this was yet another dead end.

How hard would it be to leave without being noticed? She would have to hurry.

She dressed in the dark and gathered up the articles she had stashed in the dresser drawer. She found her purse, which still held Rudy’s keys, and her cell phone.

She wrote a note for Wayne by the light of the phone’s LED display and left it for him to find on her nightstand.
Please don’t worry. I’ll be back by noon.
She would have to think through a reasonable explanation for her absence by then. She waffled, then decided to leave the phone with the note. Wayne would think it had been a mistake, and might be less worried than if she ignored his calls.

Shauna eased open her bedroom door. The silence of the little house generated a hum in her ears and she hesitated. Visions of Corbin bleeding in his own bed challenged her decision not to tell Wayne what she was doing. Did Corbin’s murderer have eyes on her too? Was he waiting for her to be alone?

Wayne would most definitely stop her.

A killer would stop her permanently.

But she had to know about Miguel Lopez.

She passed through the dim living room, exited the house without incident, descended the porch stairs, and approached Wayne’s truck. The cab was unlocked. She eased open the door and slipped her left arm behind the passenger seat to reach her jacket. With any luck the address would still be in the pocket. Her fingers closed around the collar, and she pulled.

The coat snagged, and she gave it a yank. It flew out the door, tossing two silver objects onto the ground, clattering like stones.

She grimaced at the noise, then looked to the house, expecting a light to flicker on.

All stayed dark.

She exhaled and bent to fetch the items, but when she saw them, she hesitated to pick them up. Moonlight glinted off the cool shell of a cell phone that had popped open when it hit the ground. And a camera.

The phone was not Wayne’s. She looked at the backlit display.

C. Smith.

Corbin Smith?

She reached out to pick up the camera, then stopped at the sight of a laminated tag attached to the camera strap by a plastic toggle.

It was a press badge. Corbin’s photo ID smiled up at her from the ground.

All lingering doubts she had allowed herself to entertain regarding the intentions of Wayne Spade solidified into certainty.

The fear that rushed her now was new and unfamiliar. Blood rushed out of Shauna’s head, causing her to drop to her knees for balance. She shivered.

It occurred to her that Wayne’s decision to hide these here made no reason-able sense. Did he mean to point the finger at her?

She had the presence of mind not to touch Corbin’s things with her bare hands. Holding her jacket in front of her, she slipped her arms into the sleeves and swaddled the camera, then the phone, and held the bundle close to her chest.

When her lightheadedness eased, she closed the door of the truck with only a click—loud in her ears—and moved as quickly and smoothly as possible to Rudy’s little two-seater.

Inside, she locked the doors right away. She was parked at the front of the guesthouse and knew that firing the engine would awaken someone. So she slipped the car into neutral and allowed it to roll backward down the sloping drive that led up to the guesthouse. She backed it into the area near the garages of the main house, then turned the key in the ignition and drove off the property.

No doubt one of those security agents had caught sight of her. They didn’t worry her, though, not like Wayne worried her.

Within minutes she was on the 183 headed south out of Austin.

As she passed through Lockhart, she spotted a WalMart, took the next exit, and doubled back to buy a box of latex gloves. When she couldn’t find these, she settled for a pair of rubber cleaning gloves. They were bulky, but at least she was still able to handle the phone and camera.

Parked under a lot light, Shauna pulled Corbin’s things out of her jacket, then fished for the slip of paper she hoped was still there. It was. She opened it up and stuck it on the display panel in front of her speedometer.

Then she flipped Corbin’s phone open. She scrolled through the contacts list but didn’t recognize any of the first few names. She quickly scanned the list of calls made and found, at the very top, all three of the troubling text riddles sent to her phone the morning of Corbin’s murder. There was her reply as well:
Who are you?

Corbin had sent these? Why?

These riddles taunted.
Shauna take warning . . . 4get and b happy.
Her two encounters with Corbin were full of mystery but not threat. These messages were closer to the poetry, the fragment the killer had left for her to read.
Better
by far to forget and smile . . .

She checked the times. Nearly half past three in the morning. Had Corbin’s killer sent these, wanting her to make the connection? Why? To frighten her into giving up this pursuit?

Was Wayne the killer?

He had known Corbin wanted to see her in the morning.

He could have left the bungalow that night without her detecting it.

She hadn’t mentioned these text messages and wondered now what he made of her keeping the information from him. She returned to the contacts list and searched for Miguel Lopez. She found him, listed with just one number, an Austin area code. Without thinking of the time, she sent the call and hoped for—

What on earth was she hoping for?

A message told her the number had been disconnected or was no longer in service. Of course. He wasn’t in Austin anymore. Only then did she realize how foolish she had been to use the missing cell phone of a murdered man.

Even so, she forced herself to check every other entry, just in case. Near the bottom, she stopped.
Sabueso
. The handle on the e-mails from Khai’s envelope. The phone number was attached to a 312 area code. Corpus Christi?

Was
Sabueso
Miguel Lopez? The hidden Lopez? She had no idea, only a Latino name and a Spanish word . . . maybe.

Should she use the phone at all? She’d already made one call. A second couldn’t make anything worse than it already was. She pressed
send
. It was not even a quarter after five.

The phone rang and rang, without a voice mail service to pick it up.

Discouraged, she tossed the phone into the plastic shopping bag on the floor of her car and picked up Corbin’s camera, a high-end digital Nikon. D3, the face said. She didn’t know much about cameras but imagined a professional photographer would have invested generously in something like this. Shauna hoped she hadn’t damaged the mechanisms in dropping it.

It took a few minutes of fumbling, but Shauna figured out how to power up the LCD monitor and scroll through the stored images.

First were photos of an accident scene. Auto versus motorcycle. Dated Saturday. Then what appeared to be a board meeting of some sort. Perhaps a school—angry young people and their (she guessed) parents. Dated Friday. A few other images.

Shauna caught her breath. Digital time stamps for Friday and Thursday ran at the bottom of dozens of photos of her. Standing in line at the Dobie Theater with Wayne. Entering her appointment with Dr. Harding. Wayne kissing her at Barton Springs. Arriving at the guesthouse on her father’s estate! How had he gotten onto the property? Outside the courthouse. Outside the courtroom. Her making a plea at the arraignment.

Corbin Smith had documented her every move in the days following her arrival home. Had she known, she might have been more frightened of him than she had ever felt toward Wayne.

Scrolling past Thursday, into the earlier part of the week, Corbin seemed to have been entirely focused on work.

Shauna viewed the stories in images all the way back to the previous Saturday and was prepared to shut the camera down when she spotted a familiar face.

Wayne, in conversation with two other men at a location she couldn’t identify. A dozen photos of the same gathering gave her only slightly more context; they were in an industrial complex of some kind. A shipyard, maybe.

The battery in the camera died. For now at least, there was no way for her to recharge it. Taking caution, she shut off Corbin’s phone too.

What was Corbin’s interest in Wayne? Surely these photos were taken on the sly. Wayne had not recognized Corbin outside the courthouse. Either that or Wayne had lied. Again. Everything Wayne had ever said to her was open to question now.

Shauna sighed, knowing nothing more than she had a half hour ago. She looked at the clock on Rudy’s dashboard. Nearly five twenty-five. She retraced her path and headed back toward Victoria.