Chapter Fifteen
Nick’s cell phone rang as he was finishing up his report on Sheila Burks, now safely returned home for the evening to her ever-loving, PI-hiring husband.
He was hoping it might be Perry again, but the number that flashed up was not one he recognized.
“Reno.”
“Reno, it’s Denis Camarillo.”
“Hey,” Nick said, surprised. “What’s up?”
“I went ahead and ran a background check on your communicating threats suspect. There’s no record of Tom Ciesielski aka Troy Cavendish after 1979.”
Nick couldn’t quite read Camarillo’s tone. “You mean no further criminal activity on his jacket?”
“I mean no record, period. He dropped off the map after he got out of jail. And by map, I mean any and all maps. He disappeared completely.”
“Voluntarily?” Nick didn’t expect Camarillo to have an answer. He was just thinking aloud, and voluntarily was the best-case scenario of the options that occurred to him.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Camarillo said. “But whoever is sending nastygrams to Daly, it’s not his ex.”
Nick suddenly had a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach—and it had nothing to do with the burrito he’d had for lunch.
“Thanks, man. I owe you.” He disconnected, threw the clipboard to the seat beside him, and turned the key in the ignition.
* * * * *
Birds.
The east tower had become an aviary for the ravens. Perry could see them silhouetted briefly against the moon as they swooped in and out through the tall broken windows.
Now that he knew what they were, he was struck by the almost magical beauty of the scene before him. It looked like something out of a fairy tale: the birds and the moon and the shards of broken glass glittering like ice scattered across the floor.
Beautiful or not, he did not think he should be breathing that air, and he buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his arm.
In the silvery light he could see bowl-shaped piles of straw and sticks on the floor. Nests.
He did not see a projector or cannisters of film. Frankly, he had thought from the first that this seemed an unlikely place to keep film or even film equipment, and he was glad Enzo had thought better of it—though it would have been nice to know before he spent twenty minutes wandering around the east wing of the hotel. Nice to know before he climbed eight fucking flights of stairs.
Was he missing something in the shadows? The tower room was not large, but there were plenty of shadows stretching like long fingers across the dirty floor. No. No projector. No round tins of film.
There was a bundle of old clothes against one wall—he’d missed that at first.
As Perry stared, the hair rose on the back of his neck.
He shook his head. Because no. No, no, no. That could not be.
All the while he was reassuring himself that no, that was not what he was thinking it was, he was walking toward it, picking his way through the large, bulky nests, careful not to step on those dull, greenish-blue-spotted eggs.
Perry reached the pile of clothes and knelt. For an instant he was relieved, because this was not a body or even a skeleton. For a second or two he thought he was looking at one of Horace’s movie props. A mummy. The wisps of hair, the leathered skin, the broken teeth. Very lifelike.
Then he saw that the remaining rags of garment consisted of denim jeans and what had probably been a red or purple shirt. He saw too that the floorboards were visible through the head of the mummy.
His stomach lurched, his lungs seemed to close up, and he struggled to pull in enough air—and not be sick.
This dusty trinket box of a room, scraping the bottom of the clouds, had become Troy Cavendish’s coffin. The dry California winters and blazing hot summers had done their work. The birds had helped. There was almost nothing left of him.
Perry felt for his inhaler, clicked, sucked.
Calm down. He can’t hurt you. Just breathe.
A floorboard creaked. He looked toward the doorway, and his heart nearly stopped.
A black, burly shadow stood in the archway.
He must have made some sound of alarm because the figure shifted, then seemed to settle into place. Decision made.
A flashlight beam hit him squarely in the eyes.
“Who…is…it?” Perry asked. He thought he knew. He clicked his inhaler again.
“Why did you have to come here?” Enzo asked. “Why did you have to make yourself a part of it?”
“Why…did you…have to…kill him?” Perry got out.
“Because he wouldn’t stop! Because he was making Horace crazy. They made each other crazy. I told him not to come back. He wouldn’t listen. I told him.”
“Horace…wanted him…back.”
“Yes! He did. Because he’s nuts. I had to protect him from himself. He’d have been right back in the loony bin if I’d let that go ahead.”
Does he have a gun?
Keep him talking.
The crazy thing was Perry couldn’t think of anything to ask. Terror seemed to have sped up his mental processes. He already knew why Enzo had been so terrified of the police hunting around the hotel. He knew why he had been upset that Horace had hired a private investigator. He even knew that when he took too long finding the projector, Horace had gone ahead and woken up Enzo—and when Enzo heard where Perry was going, he had raced to try and head him off. He knew that Enzo was going to try to kill him as soon as he ran out of questions.
“Why…didn’t you…feed him…to alligator?” The inhaler was helping. It was a little easier to get his breath now. Or maybe that was the fight-or-flight response kicking in, because if he was going to survive, he would have to do one or both.
“I thought of it. Maybe I should have. I didn’t want to have a man-eater on my hands, for Chrissake.”
“Horace is going to…remember… he sent you after me,” Perry said.
“I don’t think so. And so what if he does? I didn’t find you. Horace is used to people letting him down.” Enzo shrugged. “You won’t be the first who checked out early from this hotel.”
All the while they were talking, the ravens continued to fly in and out, agitatedly circling the tower room in an attempt to protect their nests. Now one of them flew toward Enzo as he stood blocking the doorway.
Enzo gasped and swung at the bird with his flashlight. Something heavy hit the floor.
A gun? A knife?
Perry scrambled for the door. The only way out was through Enzo, but Enzo instinctively dived for his weapon, leaving just enough space for Perry to slip through. Perry jumped the stairs and darted through the door into the hall. His legs felt like straw, and his lungs were laboring to get enough oxygen to fuel this mad dash to escape.
He pounded down the hallway, thinking every moment now he would be shot. Instead, he heard Enzo thudding after him, and he knew Enzo either didn’t have a gun or was afraid to risk the sound of firing.
He made it to the head of the stairs and half ran, half fell down the first flight. He was dizzy with the need for oxygen—he’d lost both his phone and inhaler when he’d leaped for the door—and dropped to his knees on the landing.
Someone was coming up the stairs. A black shape loomed out of the gloom, towering over him. A hand like a boulder landed on his head, pushing him down, and Nick yelled, “Move a fucking muscle and I’ll kill you.”
“It’s me,” Enzo cried. “Don’t shoot.”
Perry wheezed, “It’s…him…”
“I know it’s you,” Nick said, cold and steady. “One more step and you’re dead.”
Enzo stopped. Something metal clanged on the step. He began to cry.
* * * * *
“How did you know?” Perry asked.
It was seven o’clock on Monday morning, and they were sitting in the middle of workday traffic as they made their way home from Angel’s Rest. Stop-and-going past pumpkins smashed on the roadside and bedraggled black and orange streamers. Halloween was over. Back to real life, and thank God for that.
Perry was still wrapped in Nick’s jacket. He was sipping Starbucks hot chocolate and holding his inhaler, but he was fine. A little pale, a little shadowy-eyed, a little disreputable-looking under the blond stubble, but fine. Alive and well. Older and wiser.
Every time Nick thought of him making that trip through the deserted east wing and up to the tower, he felt like someone punched him in the heart. That had been too fucking close. But at the same time, he was awed by Perry’s sheer guts. And not for the first time. He had to have been scared out of his wits, but somehow he’d kept it together.
“Process of elimination,” Nick said. “Horace clearly believed Troy was haunting him. The Nevins weren’t killers, or Horace would have been dead long ago. Duke and the girl were too young to be involved. Wynne only moved back West ten years ago. And Gilda the Great had no motive that I could see. That left Enzo.”
Perry swallowed. “Thank you for coming for me.” He sounded uncharacteristically subdued. As much as Nick wanted him to be more cautious in the future, he didn’t like that squashed note in Perry’s voice.
“I’ll always come for you,” he said.
Perry blushed and then offered that half-shy smile. “I’ll always come for you too,” he said mischievously, and it took Nick an astonished second to get the joke.
“What do you think will happen to them?” Perry asked after another mile or two of poking along past disheveled witches and windblown ghosts posted in front yards.
“I think Enzo will go to jail for whatever’s left of his life. I think Sissy and Jonah will also go to jail.”
“That was clever how Sissy hid her typewriter in that refurbished sewing table.”
“What was really clever was Marin finding it. I think Duke will probably get off with probation. And I think Horace will relent and let him and the Savitri girl continue to live there.”
“Really?” Perry asked in surprise.
Nick shrugged. “I have no idea.” He threw Perry a sideways look. “What did Horace whisper to you before we left?”
Perry bit his lip.
“What?” Nick pressed.
“He said, ‘One day, not too far in the future, my boy, this will all be yours.’”
“What?”
At Nick’s look of horror, Perry began to laugh.