But for now, Lacey Shannon has shuffled off to the same place Richard Davies’s victims will have to live thanks to the fact that I ended his life. A purgatory of the missing and the lost who have no graves and no obituaries, who veered out of visible life in a tailspin of addiction and bad choices. Presumed dead by the natural causes of self-destructive destruction, not the hands of a psychopath.
Back to what the world knows.
The night after the Econoline was discovered, Jordy’s father, Donald Clements, suffered a massive heart attack at his home in North Carolina. The Tribune speculated that the stress of finding out about his son’s death might have caused it, but I know better.
I watched him die.
After the transmission ended, I walked the Med Ranch for hours in the dark, searching for an easy-to-understand reaction to what I’d just witnessed. But the question of why Cole wanted me to see it was foremost in my mind, and so the endeavor felt analytical and cold in a moment when I thought I should be feeling guilt, anguish, or, God forbid, vengeful satisfaction.
For someone who talks as much as he does, Cole says almost nothing about the things he does that are of actual consequence. I could trick myself into believing I have some insight into how he works, but what benefit is there to knowing that he inherited his immense capacity for psychological manipulation from his father? It’s like knowing where a suspect stores his weapons in a house you can’t find.
The more important question is, why did he ask me to watch him murder Donald Clements?
The cynic in me believes he wanted me to feel implicated, partly responsible.
The optimist wants to believe he was showing his devotion. Making up for his decision to leave us dangerously exposed as he scrambled to protect us with the security he’d claimed we’d had all along.
It’s probably both.
But maybe, just maybe, it was his response to the things I’d said to him before he flew off in his helicopter that night. Maybe he was saying, Yes, you’re right. We are more the same than he first realized. Thrown together against our wills by a man named Noah Turlington, himself a victim whose every attempt to reject victimhood has claimed more lives.
Over time, I’ll probably come to regret what I did to save Luke’s life less and less, so long as Luke is in my life, his very presence reminding me of what I was fighting for that night. Luke.
It’s different with Richard Davies. Try as I might to learn up on them, his victims are abstractions. Words on paper. Social media posts from their few grieving relatives. They’ll never lie beside me in bed, and so when the demons of doubt and self-guilt come for me, they’ll use Richard Davies against me, not Jordy and his men. And if the voices of the demons overpower Cole’s, he’ll have a much harder time getting what he needs out of me.
Consensually, of course.
And so, for now, he has to make me think some degree of killing is essential, obligatory.
And that is what frightens me.
It’s one thing to become numb to the value of life by taking lives to defend yourself.
It will be another if Cole succeeds in making other people seem expendable.
We are on hiatus, Cole says.
A necessary break.
It’s such a bland, corporate word. Wholly inappropriate to describe the kind of emotional recovery Luke and I will need.
In another week, once they’ve finished making it, Cole’s people will bury a vessel just under the earth, off 293, a vessel they claim will be fireproof, earthquake-proof, and possibly even volcano-proof for all I know. Inside of it will be the additional nine pills Noah Turlington directed me to the night of the attack. For now, Cole has allowed me to keep them on my person at all times. Originally, I’d wanted the vessel to be placed at the limekilns so that before I accessed it for whatever reason, I would be forced to remember what I had done there. But even the handful of visitors the place might get in a month poses a risk of discovery. So I’ve selected a spot just uphill from the service road Jordy’s men cut through the woods, not far from where I killed Mike Frasier.
Beneath several layers of soil will be a keypad for which only I know the code. The catch: if I choose to open it, an alert will be sent to Cole’s people right away, and I will be obligated to either explain my reasons for doing so or ignore their request and simply let their security teams respond in the manner they think most appropriate given what they’re seeing on their surveillance.
I partly suspect that Cole’s called a hiatus because he needs time to deal with Noah. As for how he’s going to do that . . . the less I know, the better.
When it came to Luke’s recovery, Cole gave us only one set of instructions.
Don’t let anyone learn that he’d been burned on the same night the Econoline allegedly plunged over a cliff.
To do that, we gave Luke the flu. Not a real flu. But a call-in-sick flu and, wouldn’t you know it, he didn’t get the damn vaccine, so it lasted about ten days instead of five and no way could he go into work because the last thing he wanted to do was spread the virus. Apparently, Mona and her boyfriend managed to patch things up, just in time for another brutal round of chemo, so she’d stayed with him in Santa Ynez as much as she could the day everything went down. Her information about the wreck of the Econoline all came thirdhand. But Luke has said, and I agree with him, she’d be a fool if she doesn’t suspect something eventually.