Virginia snapped awake from the all-too-familiar nightmare. She sat up abruptly, trying to orient her skittering senses. It took a few seconds to remember that she was in a guest room at the Lost Island B and B.
You’re safe. There’s no fire. And even if there were a fire, you’ve got two exits marked – the door and the window. You’re on the second floor. You can use a sheet to get down. The worst that can happen is you’ll break an ankle. You’ll survive a broken ankle.
It was the mantra that she had established back in her teens. Before going to sleep in an unfamiliar environment, she always made certain to locate at least two exits in case of fire.
She had a third option tonight, she reminded herself – the connecting door between her room and Cabot’s. Earlier he had made a point of unlocking it on his side. He hadn’t asked her if she would feel safer that way, he had simply told her that the door was unlocked. She had very quietly unlocked it from her side as well. She knew that neither of them expected to be overcome with uncontrollable lust. There had been no need to discuss the real reason the door was unlocked. It was all about creating a third escape route in case of fire.
So, three exits. It was okay.
Aware that she wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep for a while, she pushed the covers aside and pulled on her robe. Guided by the dim glow of the little night-light that she always brought with her when she traveled, she made her way across the room and pushed the small table out of the way. She needed space for the nightly routine.
It was time to run through the exercise ritual. The alternative was using the meds. She resorted to them when the anxiety overwhelmed her, but usually the exercise worked.
She summoned a vision of a figure dressed in black and reached for the nearest object, an empty flower vase. One by one she went through the series of short, slashing blows designed to smash the vase against the imaginary attacker’s face. She went for the eyes and then the throat.
The old rage welled up within her, washing away the anxiety in a white-hot blaze of energy.
When she was finished with the first series of exercises, she set the vase back down on the table and grabbed the next-nearest weapon, an old-fashioned candlestick holder. Once again, she went through the moves, chopping, slashing, stabbing – letting the fury cleanse her of the panicky sensations brought on by the old dream.
Twelve minutes later she sank down on the end of the bed. The anxiety attack had been quelled, but now, of course, she was too wired to sleep. If she were at home, she would have wandered down the hall to the kitchen and made herself a cup of herbal tea. But she was stuck in a room at the B and B, and she was pretty sure that Rose Gilbert would be unnerved if one of her guests started prowling the halls.
When her pulse settled back to a normal pace, she got up, went to the window and looked out. She always slept with the curtains open. On the bad nights she found it reassuring to be able to look out and see lots of city lights. But on the island there was only the light of the moon, and tonight it was only half-full. The woods that bordered the clearing around the B and B were so dark and thick they might as well have been a jungle.
The soft rap on the connecting door startled her so badly she jumped and uttered a half-strangled yelp.
When she had herself under control, she crossed the room, opened the door a couple of inches and saw Cabot. In the pale glow of the night-light, she could see that he was dressed in trousers and a dark crew-neck T-shirt. His feet were bare.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, fine. I got up to get a glass of water.”
Okay, so that wasn’t entirely true. She had a right to her privacy.
“Heard you moving around,” Cabot said. “Figured maybe you couldn’t sleep.”
“I’m a crappy sleeper,” she admitted.
“You’re not the only one. I can usually get to sleep for a few hours but I often wake up about now. Takes a while to get back to sleep.”
“It’s one thirty in the morning.” She glanced at the clock. “Make that one forty-five.”
“No kidding.”
“That’s the time that Zane torched the compound.”
“Sure is. Damn. You think there might be a connection?”
“Call me insightful.”
“My nighttime habits ruined a lot of my relationships,” Cabot said.
“I know what you mean. I’ve given up on what people like to call relationships. I’m what you might call a serial dater now. Haven’t even done any of that for a while.”
“Commitment issues?”
“Oh, yeah. Also abandonment issues and anxiety attacks,” she said. “All in all I’m not good relationship material.”
“Sounds like we have a few things in common.”
“You’re still dressed,” she said. “Didn’t you even go to bed tonight?”
“Yes, but now I’m up and thinking about the investigation. I’ve got a question for you. Want to talk for a while?”
“Now?”
“Not like either of us is getting any sleep,” he pointed out.
“True.” She hesitated, glanced past him into the small space and then, on impulse, stood back and pulled the door wider. “We might as well use my room. It’s bigger than yours. I’ve got two chairs.”
They sat down in front of the window, the little round table between them. Neither of them made a move to turn on the light. It was as if they had both independently reached the conclusion that it might be more comfortable to talk in the dark.
“What is your question?” she asked.
Cabot leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, his fingers lightly clasped. “We know that Zane started his operation in the Seattle area.”
“At the house outside of Wallerton. I remember that horrible old place.”
“So do I. But he kept us there for only a couple of months before he moved all of us to the California compound.”
Virginia shuddered. “Fortunately for you and me, that turned out to be the town where Anson Salinas was the chief of police. Otherwise we both would have died in that barn fire.”
“Yes, but my point is, Zane recruited most of his followers from the Pacific Northwest.”
Virginia contemplated that briefly. “I’ve never really thought about Zane’s past. He was always just the demon from my childhood. A cold-blooded killer. Do you think he was from the Seattle area originally?”
“We can’t be absolutely sure,” Cabot said. “We never managed to identify any of Zane’s family. For all intents and purposes he was a true orphan. He did a very thorough job of erasing his past. But he was familiar enough with the Northwest to choose the Wallerton house, an isolated place, for the first compound. In my experience, the bad guys like to operate on familiar territory whenever possible.”
Virginia studied Cabot’s shadowed profile. There was a dark intensity about him again, the same intensity she had witnessed that afternoon when he had worked through the logic of how Hannah Brewster had died. She could have sworn that some eerie, dangerous energy shivered in the atmosphere around him.
“Why would he move the cult to California if he felt more comfortable here in the Pacific Northwest?” she asked.
“Could be any number of reasons, but the most logical one is that there were people here who knew him. He was trying to reinvent himself as a cult leader. He preferred a location where no one would be likely to recognize him.”
“So you and your brothers and Anson have concluded that there is a very good chance he was from this region,” Virginia said. “That makes sense. He was still a young man when he fired up his cult.”
“We’ve never even been sure of his age, but according to the fake ID he was using in those days, he was probably twenty-four or twenty-five when he started recruiting.”
Virginia thought about that. “He must have started out with very little cash. How did he manage to acquire the Wallerton house?”
“We tracked that down easily enough through the property tax records. It belonged to one of his followers, a man named Robert Fenwick. Shortly after he gave Zane the deed, Fenwick died in a car crash.”
“Convenient.”
“Zane didn’t need him anymore.”
“No.”
The room seemed to have gotten colder. Virginia wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the chill.
“Zane was a manipulative sociopath,” she said. “That kind of evil shows up at a very young age, so it’s safe to say he must have made some enemies before he turned twenty-four or twenty-five.”
“Zane was a sociopath but he was not crazy, not in the sense that he believed himself to be a real prophet or supernatural leader. He wasn’t delusional. He was in the cult business for the money and the sense of power he got when he manipulated people like our mothers.”
Virginia thought about that. “You said he was in it for the money.”
“His operation didn’t last long – about eighteen months. But during that time he raked in a lot of cash or, rather, his followers raked in the money for him. Many of them turned over their life savings. As far as we can tell, he didn’t take any followers who were not useful to him.”
“I’ve always wondered why he recruited my mother. She was a young woman on her own with a child. I know she didn’t have any money to give to Zane.”
“I don’t know why he wanted your mother in his cult, but I know exactly why he wanted to control my mother,” Cabot said. “She was a trust-fund baby. Her father disowned her when she ran off with my father, but the old man couldn’t prevent her from accessing her trust fund.”
“What happened to your father?”
“He was killed in a car crash.”
“Like the man who gave Zane the Wallerton house? I’m starting to see a pattern here.”
“Oh, yeah. What happened to your father?”
“Killed in a car that was rigged to explode,” Virginia said. “They never caught the person who planted the bomb on the vehicle. The authorities decided Dad must have had mob connections. It was ridiculous. He was an artist.”
“Turns out there were a lot of convenient deaths around the time Zane was setting up in the cult business.”
“No wonder he decided to move out of the Pacific Northwest.” Virginia thought for a moment. “Did Zane manage to blow through your mother’s fortune? Was he finished with her? Do you think that’s why he murdered her?”
“No, he killed her well before he had exhausted her trust fund. And before you ask, no, due to some technicality in the way the fund was set up, I was never included in the trust. My grandfather couldn’t stop my mother from accessing her inheritance, but he did manage to tie things up in such a way that I never got a dime.”
“That’s harsh.”
“The old man was thoroughly pissed because Mom ran off with a man he disapproved of.”
“Did you ever meet your grandfather?” Virginia asked.
“No.”
“You mean your family let you go into the foster care system rather than forgive your mom for running off with the wrong man?”
“Up until his death a couple of months ago, my grandfather controlled the Kennington family with what people like to call an iron fist,” Cabot said. “Anyone who wanted to keep his or her share of the inheritance had to toe the line.”
“A real control freak.”
“Yeah. But I got lucky.”
Virginia smiled. “Anson Salinas.”
“Right.” There was a short pause before Cabot spoke again. “As I told you, Whittaker Kennington died recently.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t go to the funeral.”
“No, but evidently he left me a bequest in his will.”
“So he had a change of heart there at the end?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it,” Cabot said. “I think it’s more likely that his first wife – my grandmother – left the bequest to me before she died. Maybe something the old man couldn’t touch. Who knows? It’s not a lot of money. Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Still, twenty-five grand is twenty-five grand.”
“True. It will buy some upgrades for our computer system. I’ll find out the details soon enough. I’ve got an appointment with a Kennington family lawyer. But let’s get back to the real question here. I know why Zane found my mother useful.”
“Her trust fund.”
“Right. Do you have any idea why he might have recruited your mother?”
Virginia turned that over in her head for a moment.
“I’ve never asked the question from that point of view,” she said. “I’ve often wondered why my mother joined the cult, but I’ve never thought about why Zane lured her into his web.”
“You were just a kid, but what do you remember about the situation?”
“My mother fell in love with an artist. She got pregnant and dropped out of college. They eloped. Her parents were furious. There was a huge quarrel. Things were very strained between my parents and my grandparents after that. And then my father was killed and Mom somehow fell under Zane’s influence. She never explained why.”
“You grandparents must have been shocked.”
“Horrified is more like it. They were both college professors, you see. They moved in serious academic circles. The fact that their daughter had gotten sucked into a cult was not only emotionally devastating for them, it was also enormously embarrassing.”
“You said your mother didn’t have much money, but maybe your father had a life insurance policy that was worth a lot of cash,” Cabot suggested.
“No, I’m sure there was no insurance money. Mom was smart – my grandmother always says she could have had a brilliant career as a mathematician – but she certainly didn’t have access to a fortune.”
“Did your mother work?”
“Of course. I told you, my dad was an artist. He never did make any money.”
“What did your mother do?”
“She became a bookkeeper. Why?”
“Zane’s scam was, in essence, an old-fashioned pyramid scheme,” Cabot said. “One of those operations that depends on a lot of people at the bottom sending money up the chain to the people at the top.”
“The people at the bottom never get rich but the guy at the top does. All right, so that explains the business model. Go on.”
“Zane would have needed the basic infrastructure that any successful scam or legitimate business requires, including someone who could handle the money that poured in.”
Understanding slammed through Virginia.
“He would have needed a bookkeeper,” she whispered. “One he could control. My mother. He needed her skill set.”
“Zane built a highly profitable business, but he was the CEO. He couldn’t spend his time dealing with the day-to-day financial aspects of his operation. He needed someone he could trust to handle the money.”
“No one knows the secrets of a business operation as intimately as the bookkeeper,” Virginia said. “Mom must have realized what was going on.”
“Yes.”
“But if Zane was running a successful business, why did he torch the compound and destroy the people who were bringing in the cash for him?”
“Good question,” Cabot said. “My brothers and I have given that a lot of thought. The only conclusion we’ve been able to come to is that for some reason, Zane decided that it would be in his own best interests to pull the plug on the cult operation and move on. He used fire to destroy as much as possible.”
“Covering his tracks and silencing witnesses,” Virginia said. “But that all happened twenty-two years ago. Why kill Hannah Brewster now, after all this time?”
“Because something has happened,” Cabot said evenly, “something that has brought Zane or someone else out of the shadows. Whoever that person is, he either viewed Hannah Brewster as a threat or else he wanted some information he thought she had. Given that I think Brewster took her own life, I’m almost certain that it was the latter.”
“She had some dangerous information and she died in an effort to take her secret to the grave. But at the same time she sent me a warning.”
“She must have believed that you were in danger.”