Never Coming Back (40 page)

“That's not the truth.”

“It's close enough.”

“You lied to everyone.”

“What about Lee?” he said. He was smiling again, a mirror image of his son. “
That
was a good turn, wasn't it? Asking him to come and entertain us. I was thinking of Ray.” The smile lingered on his face—and then it dropped away. It felt like we were at the end of the road now. All the secrets were out. Now there was just me and him and a gun.

I drove them up into the hills.

Then I cut them both into pieces and buried them in the desert.

“Open the trapdoor,” I said.

“I'm the one with the gun, David.”

“It's over for you. In a week, everyone will know who you are. You think holing up here in the wilderness is going to stop the tide from turning? You're done, Graham.”

He got out of his seat, shotgun against his hip, pointing it at my stomach.

I held up a hand. “It's over. You know it is.”

“It's over after I put a hole in your chest.”

Then something moved on the monitors.

We both flicked a look at the monitors, an automatic reaction. Someone was approaching the house. As Graham moved, the shotgun moved with him; a foot, maybe less.

But enough.

What he'd done seemed to hit him.

By then it was too late.

I smashed into him, chair toppling over, both of us crashing into it and falling to the floor. I already had hold of the barrel of the gun, wrestling it from his grip, directing it up to the ceiling. He pulled the trigger. The sound was immense: a throaty
boom
that sent a debilitating ringing through my head. It took everything I had to cling on. He pulled the trigger again, more desperate this time; and while it wasn't as loud, my hearing dampened, defective, it was painful, like he was sticking his fingers into an open wound.

But I held on.

We rolled half a turn, side to side on the floor, and then—with every last drop of strength I could pull out of the ground—I yanked it free from his grasp, the momentum carrying me across the room and into the bank of monitors. They rocked on the table and fell to the floor, coming to rest next to me. But the feed didn't cut out. Through the corner of my eye, I saw an indistinct figure was almost at the house, a gun down at their side.

I didn't try to get a better look.

Not until Graham had been properly put down.

Getting to my feet, I headed across the room and pressed the end of the gun into the center of his spine. He'd been trying to scramble across the floor, back out the door.

“Where do you think you're going?”

I glanced up, into the room full of photos, then back to the monitors.

The figure was on the front porch.

It was Carlos Soto.

I didn't try to put it together, didn't think about anything else apart from the girls. “Give me the keys for the trapdoor.” Graham remained still. “Give me the fucking keys!”

He slowly moved his arm, sliding it down his side to his pocket. I
pressed the end of the gun harder into his back so he knew not to screw around. As he reached in and I heard a faint jangle, I glanced back at the monitor. Soto was inside the house.

What the hell is he doing here?

Graham got out the keys and held them up to me.

“No,” I said. “You're unlocking it.”

I reached down, grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him into the center of the room. Then I pulled the door closed. It clanged shut. There was a lock on the inside, a wheel, like you found in bank security vaults. I spun the wheel once, hard, and it went through a series of rotations by itself. Then it made a soft sucking sound. It was locked. On the other side of the room, Graham had backed up against one of the walls. There was blood on his face.

“Unlock it.”

He crawled across on all fours and started going through the keys. I glanced at the monitors. Soto was on the stairs, coming down to the panic room. When I turned back to Graham, he'd selected a key and was sliding it into the padlock. A turn. It popped open.

“Take off the padlock.”

He did as I asked.

“Now open it.”

He looked from the gun to the trapdoor, knowing there was no choice now. Then he slid his fingers in around the handle welded into it, and slowly pulled it up and over.

A smell instantly took flight across the room.

I tried to ignore it, tried to fight against the voice in my head.
Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it
. But I had to. I had to make sure it was them. I had to see my daughter.

Stopping on the edge of the trapdoor, I looked down.

A square metal chute, about four feet wide and about thirty feet long, dropped down to the side of the mountain, stopping about six feet above it. What I could see of the slope, visible beyond the end of the chute, was steep: a forty-degree gradient, maybe more. It was why the deck had been built on stilts. Below the end of the chute, a hole had been cut out of the dirt and the rock, and then filled in again. It was a rough circle, full of sand.
A burial ground
. Items were scattered in the scrub around it: a necklace, the broken heel of a stiletto, a torn shred of blouse pierced on a clump of cholla. And then, in the center, something else.

Olivia Ling's Mickey Mouse doll.

“That's where he would put the bodies,” Graham said quietly, matter-of-factly, as if he were describing something routine.

It felt like everything was moving in slow motion.

I felt dizzy.

“I'm sorry, David. But they had to go.”

My vision blurred.

“You must understand that.”

I moved quickly.

He held up a hand. “Wait, David, it's—”

“Shut up,” I said, jamming the end of the shotgun into his face, forcing it into his mouth. He started gagging on it.
“Shut the fuck up!”
I could hear the tremor in my voice but didn't care, didn't care about anything anymore. “You're going to pay for this.”

He tried to speak, his voice muffled.

I jammed the stock in against my shoulder, gripped the fore-end and pumped it once. His eyes widened, his noise getting worse, an animal going crazy. Images flashed in my head: running through the woods as a boy, Dad setting up targets for me to shoot; a farm up in Scotland, an east London forest, the moment I thought I'd breathed my last, all the cases that would never leave me. And then Derryn, behind me, as I looked out through a hotel bedroom window across a vast desert, at two graves.

It's okay. They're fine.

They're in a better place now
.

Annabel.

Olivia.

“No,” I heard myself saying, like someone else was speaking the words. “No, I'm not the same as you.” I slid the shotgun out of his mouth, hearing him take a deep breath, like he'd been underwater, drowning. “No, whatever else, I'll never be the same as you.”

I flipped the gun in my hands.

Leveled the stock at him.

And then smashed the butt of the gun into his face.

He went out cold.

Getting to my feet, unsteady, emotional, I went to the door of the room, spun the wheel and stepped back. Raised the gun, ready for Soto. The door popped gently away.

A pause.

A couple of seconds later, fingers fed in around the edge, gripping it. Then, very slowly, the door started to arc back, revealing the room full of photos.

Then Carlos Soto.

“What do you want?” I screamed at him, looking down the sights. I brushed an eye with my shoulder, trying to clear my vision while keeping both hands on the gun.

But everything just blurred again.

“It's okay.”

“What are you
doing here
?”

“It's okay,” he repeated. He reached down, carefully placed his gun on the floor, then straightened. His eyes moved from me, to Graham, to the hole in the floor. He could smell it too. He could see the flies that had come up the chute from the sand-covered pit, escaping into the room we were in. “Everything's okay, David,” he said. “I'm on your side.”

Twenty-four hours later, I sat at the same table overlooking the same part of the pool as the day before. The morning was completely still. No breeze, just desert sun arrowing out of a clear sky. I ordered a beer and a Cobb salad, and realized how alien this place felt after five months in a tiny Devonshire fishing village. Not just the huge fake facades and the sweeping excess of it, but other, smaller things, like the weather. I couldn't remember the last time I'd ever felt a day like this, when there wasn't even a faint stirring in the air.

All the loungers were taken, men and women baking in the heat, and the pool was full. Old men swam lengths. Glamorous couples dipped their toes in. Kids screamed with laughter. I watched a brother and sister, no more than six, chasing each other around its edge, the girl laughing riotously as her brother failed to catch her. Eventually the boy started to cry, and his dad pulled him in for a hug, asking him why his sister was so cruel, before winking over the boy's shoulder at the girl. She laughed and returned to the pool.

After my lunch arrived, I picked at it while rereading the
Las Vegas Sun
, flicking all the way through to sports I'd never really understood, even when I'd lived here, then back to the front page. Carter Graham looked out at me. It was the photograph he used on his company's website.
EMPYREAN CEO: BODY FOUND
AT VEGAS HIDEAWAY
. Beneath that was a sub-headline:
MU
LTIMILLIONAIRE CARTE
R GRAHAM ACCUSED OF
KILLING MISSING PROS
TITUTE. SOURCES SAY M
ORE BODIES TO COME
. They didn't realize yet that it got worse still, echoing across decades and spanning continents.

I folded up the paper and pushed it aside.

The previous day, I'd spent four hours in a police interview room telling them what I knew. It helped having Soto there. He vouched for me, and that seemed to carry a lot of weight. He'd run Robbery-Homicide for seven years before making the switch to casino security, and the assistant sheriff still seemed to rate him highly, even more the people who'd once called him captain. I told them everything I could, only holding back on details that might lead me into trouble. Back home, I'd broken the law, I'd used hackers and informants, and I didn't want that reverberating from the other side of the world. But I painted them enough of a picture: of Graham, of what he was protecting, of the son
he let loose on the streets of a city the cops here cared about deeply. I didn't worry that the men and women interviewing me might have been on Graham's payroll; if they were, they were sweating it out waiting to be found, and unlikely to do anything to make themselves known. And, anyway, I sensed that Soto wanted that to be his job.

That, once I left, he'd find them and have some kind of revenge.

•   •   •

As the sun started to drop out of the sky, I headed back up to my room, showered, and then watched it fall the rest of the way, melting into the ridges of the Spring Mountains.

The lead on the Graham murders, a cop called Cowen, had told me to remain in the States until they'd given me the all-clear to go home. I didn't anticipate leaving anytime soon. It would be difficult enough pulling together every loose end from what had happened on their own doorstep, let alone coordinating tasks and tethering leads with a police force five thousand miles away. Cowen told me he was due to speak to McInnes over video link, and after he told me, I wondered what McInnes would make of all this. I'd only met him once, stumbling around in Rocastle's shadow, but now he was going to be investigating Carter Graham, and would eventually find his old boss at the end of the trail.

At about eight o'clock I started to fall asleep, my body finally giving in after days of irregular rest. But then my phone began buzzing across the bedside table. I reached over and looked at the display. It was a text message from Healy.
Graham is all over the news here. THANKS, Raker. I had £
100
worth of shares in Empyrean, you arsehole
.

I smiled to myself.

This was his way of reestablishing contact after our last conversation had ended so abruptly; hidden deep down, as hard as it was to believe, it was probably even an apology too. It was Healy all over: not willing to concede all the ground, but cognizant enough to know that, when it came down to it, I was the only person he had left. His wife was gone, his sons barely wanted to know him. Whatever else I was to him—however much he tried to fight me, tried to plow a lone furrow—in the end, he knew that much.

You're welcome,
I replied.
I'll give you a call when I get back
.

And then an image of Emily came into my head.

I'd called her the day before, briefly, to tell her what I'd found, and it had been the most difficult call I'd ever had to make in my life. Inside three days her whole family—everyone she'd ever cared about—had
been committed to the ground. She may have prepared for this moment, tried to harden her resolve and accept the reality of what was coming, but a small part of her would have clung on to the idea that they were alive.

I dialed her number and waited for it to connect.

“Hello?”

“Emily, it's David.”

“David,” she said quietly.

I could hear she'd been crying. “How has today been?”

“Hard.” She paused. “Really, really hard.”

I sat up in bed, then moved across the room, back to the windows, neon blinking in the glass. Five years ago, what felt like a lifetime ago, I'd promised Derryn I'd bring her to the city. She'd always wanted to see Las Vegas—but I'd never had the chance.

She was gone before I could make it happen.

Back then I'd been a different man—yet to be marked by the death of my wife—a man who knew nothing of the missing, of the world of the lost, of the way life tethered you to people and to moments, over and over in different ways. The Lings, Annabel, they all could have lived if I'd recognized Cornell for what he was the first time I saw him. I could have cut him off at source. I could have saved them all. But I never would have known about my daughter. I never would have met Emily and found out the truth. Because if I'd been a different man, I wouldn't have been with Derryn, and she wouldn't have persuaded me to start finding missing people, and her death wouldn't have helped me find my place in the world. And all that followed—the case that almost killed me, the move to Devon—would never have taken place.

Nothing was random.

Everything was connected.

“I'm sorry, Emily,” I said to her finally.

“For what?”

“For this.”

I could hear her voice start to turn again, tears twisting her words: “You don't have to apologize to me. I asked you to find them. You found them. You brought me . . .”

Closure
.

Except, for her, it wouldn't feel like that.

And, as I looked out at the millions of lights, I knew—for a long time—it wouldn't feel like that for me either.