SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR / Monday, 12:09 PM

She was dressed casually, in a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of black leggings. She bunched herself together in the cold and jogged down the walkway in front of her apartment building to Brendan’s car, running half-bent like she was leaving a helicopter.

What are you doing? You better be right about this.

As soon as she got in, he looked over at her and said, “No jacket? Nothing?” He put on his best fake smile.

“I hate jackets,” she said. “Too constrictive.”

He pulled away from the curb and merged in with traffic. They didn’t have too far to go – Dobbs Ferry was only about ten minutes away. There wasn’t a lot of time. The first full minute of the drive was filled with a heavy silence. She started fiddling around, like a kid, poking at the radio, dialing through the stations, fingering the heating system, cranking the warm air, and finally opening the glove box.

He would’ve stopped her, but she needed to know anyway.

“Seriously?” she said, looking at the .38. “You’re going to bring your Clint Eastwood gun to visit an old folks’ home?”

Just get right to it
.

“We’re being tracked.”

She tilted her head way back, and wrinkled up her forehead.

“We’re what? You mean, like, by Indians? You really are a cowboy.”

“Seriously, Sloane. There’s a tracking device underneath this car right now. I was looking for the cat and I, uh, I found it.”

“Una? She ran away on you?”

“That’s the cat’s name?”

“Yeah.”

“So, I’m being followed. I swept the interior of the car and couldn’t find any sort of bugs.”

“What about in Argon’s house? You check?”

He threw her another glance. She was either acting cavalier because she was scared, or maybe she didn’t believe him, not really, and was playing along. He couldn’t be sure. She seemed smart, though, so he had to go with scared.

“I didn’t. But, I assumed. I assumed whoever’s listening, watching, that they know about our plans to visit Argon’s sister. That if I started tearing the house apart for bugs, or made a sudden change in plans, they might know they were made. Which could hasten . . . I don’t know. Could make things more dangerous. So I figured I’d proceed as planned.”

“Makes sense.”

“Does it? Look, there’s nothing that says you can’t suddenly have a change of heart. Decide you forgot you had another appointment. Something. Have me drop you somewhere, right now.”

“Would you still go see Mena?”

“Yes. I have to.”

“Well, so do I. The cops called the home, and told the nurses about Argon, but no one has seen her in person yet.”

“I got that feeling.”

“Yeah, so.”

They fell into silence, each of their minds buzzing. In five minutes they would be there.

“Can I ask you a question?” said Brendan.

“Shoot.” She had her palms in front of the heating vents.

“Ever ask Argon how he found you?”

“You mean was it divine intervention or something?”

“Well, I just mean . . . baby in a storm drain, pretty far down there, rainy afternoon, cop who’s on road patrol just happens by . . . I’m sorry if this is uncomfortable.”

“It’s okay. But, what are you saying? That Argon knew to be there?”

“Do you think he did?”

She considered this for a moment. “All I know is that in life, the inexplicable happens. All the time. Every day. Things we can’t explain. They’re connected. We don’t know how, and ninety-nine percent of the time we’re unaware of it, or we deny it. And when it shows up, it’s trivial things. Minor things – you think the same thought at the same time as someone, or you text one another at the same time. It’s stronger with people who are closer together . . . but I read this thing, you know? About the Field. This the mass of everything which surrounds us. Kind of like the frigging Force.
Star Wars
, not cops. But cops too. And in the Field, electrons come together and once they do, they stay in contact with each other forever. Doesn’t matter how far apart they get, or how long. They stay in contact.”

Whether she knew it or not, Sloane was talking about quantum physics. It was outside of his subject of neuroscience, but Brendan had always felt that the sciences had lot of overlap. He gave Sloane a glance, wondering if a nerdy, armchair scientist lurked beneath her tough exterior.

He looked back at the road. “But they have to come into contact to begin with.”

He wasn’t challenging her, just trying something out. He’d been wondering if Argon and Taber’s connection had been more than a tenuous friendship and a mutual interest in law enforcement. Brendan felt that a more accurate understanding of their connection would help.

“You think Argon had something to do with why my whore mother gave herself a late-term abortion and shit me into a storm drain?” she said, with her characteristic linguistic pungency.

Her hostility suddenly filled the car like poisonous gas. It was like she was suddenly radiating energy. Maybe it was just the heat which she had cranked up like a furnace. But he remembered thinking that she was capable of stabbing him with her spaghetti fork, as innocent as she also seemed, with her slight speech impediment and diminutive stature.

“I’m not saying anything like that at all. I just . . . I got a situation I’m trying to figure out. You know? About how Argon died, and what he may have been involved in – something he might’ve known which could have contributed to his death. And maybe, okay? Just maybe, your mother was forced to do what she did.”

He felt something knuckle into his heart as he said the words, a kind of pressure on his chest. Had he just overstepped? The last thing he wanted was to mess with Sloane’s head. Bad enough he’d dragged her into this dangerous situation at all. But there were so many connections to be made – so many of these pulsing electrons in the dark. He thought of Dutko, talking about the baby in the trunk, the discarded infants in the garage of some suburban home.

Sloane had gone quiet, withdrawn towards the passenger door. She had her arms wrapped around her body. She looked out the window, and he felt a mild sense of relief not to be under her scrutiny. He also felt the need to balance the scales, to try to make Sloane feel more comfortable by sharing something from his own sordid past.

He could only think, really, of one thing.

She stayed huddled, looking out the window.

He took the Ashford Ave exit off of the Saw Mill and they were only two miles away from Laurel Grove, the nursing home where Philomena lived.

“In Wyoming, there are no requirements for private investigation beyond a normal business license. I got started right away and had plenty of time to work. But in two years, I’ve barely had a real case. Just little things. Background checks on people, wife suspecting her husband of cheating – he wasn’t, that I could find – and one stolen vehicle case where the guy was a pot dealer and didn’t want to involve the cops. I’ve been living in Laramie, beautiful spot, but I barely go out. I don’t ski, I don’t even sled. I’ve spent just about all of my free time for the past two years doing the same thing. God, it’s been a long time.”

He thought maybe she was sitting up a little straighter, not recoiled so much toward the passenger door, but he wasn’t sure. He pressed on.

“My wife and daughter died. It’s been ten years now. In fact, the anniversary of their death is in two days; November 17th.”

He glanced sideways at her. Sloane was now facing front, looking out the windshield.

“After I moved out west, I started going online, and looking into chat groups – something I had never done – about people who’d lost loved ones like I did.” He shifted in his seat, trying to get more comfortable. “It was my fault that they died. I was supposed to be driving them home from a night out at a restaurant. My wife hated driving at night – it affected her eyes. But I was drunk, and wanted to get drunker, and she and I were arguing – or, I was making some shit up to argue about – and so I stayed behind at the restaurant bar.”

“What do you do online besides chat rooms?” He saw her glance at him for a second.

“I sort of spy on Angie’s parents. That was my wife: Angie. Her mother actually keeps a blog. She’s a very smart woman. So I check into them. I sneak looks at her mother’s Facebook page.”

“You’ve never spoken with them?”

“No. I haven’t seen them in person since the funeral. They knew who I was, what I was like. I couldn’t even make eye contact with them that day. I didn’t even do the eulogy – her father did. He’s a pastor, so I got a get-out-of-jail-free card, I guess. My response was to sit in my garage with the engine running. I tried to kill myself.”

Ahead, Laurel Grove was a series of single-story buildings on a campus that overlooked a foggy Hudson River. A few snowflakes were blowing in on the river breeze.

He navigated to a small parking lot, expecting a reaction from Sloane, but she merely faced forward, profiling her small, ski-jump nose, her large lashes, her slightly longer upper lip. She looked fine, like a pixie, but Brendan knew what lay beneath.

He steered into a parking spot. He gazed out at the river. “I was a wimp – I couldn’t shoot myself. I’ve sat with the gun pointed at my temple. I chose a coward’s way out. And I still go to bed most nights hoping . . . that’s it. That something comes crashing down on me in my sleep.

“I had one case as a detective in Oneida County. I’ve never really been able to let it go, even though I’ve tried to put so much distance between it and me, to forget about it. I have trouble with that, I guess. Forget about the girl I saw, dead, forget about the escort service she was a part of. She’d had two children, kept hidden in order to protect them from the organization she worked for.”

He glanced at Sloane for a reaction, but she remained unreadable.

“We’re here,” she said. She nodded once at the glove compartment. “Better get your gun, cowboy.” Then she got out.

* * *

They were asked to sign in at the front desk. Brendan lingered over the guest sheets, a single piece of paper on a clip board, doing a scan of the names and dates.

Seamus had been the last person to visit Philomena. Before that, Sloane’s name was on the register. There were two names he did not recognize, both female. Luella Brown and Carmella Enduche. His eyes continued scrolling up, taking in each name, and something occurred to him. Just a hunch.

He looked at Sloane, her eyebrows raised to indicate she was waiting long-sufferingly.

“You want to go ahead? I just need a minute.”

“Sure,” she said, and flashed the desk nurse a pleasant smile, which she then dropped abruptly for Brendan, and walked away. It felt like they were in some kind of fight, almost a lover’s quarrel.

The nurse looked up at him with a friendly, patient expression. She was a pretty woman with her black hair in a bun.

He offered a wan smile. “How far back do these guest logs go?”

“Um, we keep them for five years, I think.”

“And how long has Philomena been here?”

“Um, going on just about five years now. Wow, the time flies . . .”

“Could I look at them?”

She looked skeptical.

“I’m a private investigator. The woman we’re here to see, Philomena, her brother was a police officer for Mount Pleasant who recently died in the line of duty. I’m helping out the department, just checking on a few things.”

“Oh.” The nurse glanced in the direction Sloane had gone. Brendan could tell by that one look that more than anything he had just said, the nurse would let him go through the guest log because he had arrived with Sloane. The nurse trusted her.

“One moment,” she said.

The nurse withdrew from the desk and went into a room off to the side. The windows behind the desk opened to a long, well-manicured lawn which ended in a line of craggy rocks demarcating the shore of the Hudson. Not a bad place, Brendan thought. It likely cost Argon a bit of coin.

He turned away and looked around the front lobby, he glanced at a few ferns amid the chairs placed just-so in front of coffee tables with their fanned-out magazines. Out the front, through the glass door and floor-to-ceiling windows, he could see the parking lot, and the rental.

That tracking device hidden beneath the car. Right now his position was known. It was unsettling. For two years he’d stayed off the radar – or so he’d hoped. And in two days he’d gone from being a bearded, anonymous, bullshit P.I. in Wyoming to a man in the middle of some sordid conspiracy, his best friend at the heart of it, and he himself in the crosshairs. And he couldn’t be sure who was watching him. Titan? More and more he was beginning to wonder about Titan. The medical technology company, the construction company, right out there in plain sight. A red herring, perhaps.

I was born under the dark smoke of September
.

The words were like a cold breath against his neck.

When someone spoke, Brendan jumped.

“Sir?” the nurse said.

He spun around to face her, his heart thumping.