Marcus stepped back from my door. “We will. See you tomorrow, Miss Bracca.”
He went back inside, and I went for the interstate.
CHAPTER 35
First thing I did when I got home was get out of my new clothes and into a hot shower. I’d gotten stuck in traffic coming into town through the Curves, the winding portion of Five that descends through the South Hills before you hit the Marquam Bridge, and that’s when the sky had really opened, and I’d begun to feel an itchiness along my legs, and I’d convinced myself it was Chris Quick’s blood, dried and flaking on my skin.
When I was dry and dressed again I checked my voice mail, and among the garbage was a message from Chapel. He wanted to see me first thing tomorrow morning, and said that Hoffman and Marcus had been in touch.
I fixed myself dinner, a pot of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and I really wanted a drink or three, but kept myself to a couple of cigarettes and a diet Coke. I’d given things a lot of thought on the drive up from Eugene, and the only conclusions I’d come to were that I didn’t really have any conclusion at all, and I was getting very scared, indeed.
If Brian Quick was the Parka Man, and if he was on the loose, then he now needed me as much as I needed him. But if he had another accomplice aside from his brother, then maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Why Brian had shot Chris, I didn’t know, but greed seemed like a good motive for it. Remembering Anne’s reaction to the scent of my money in the air, there was certainly a precedent for it in the family.
Maybe Brian had decided he didn’t want to share a million dollars with his brother.
So the question really was, did I believe that Brian Quick and the Parka Man were the same person? And I just didn’t know the answer to that. If I trusted my memory, the voices didn’t match.
It was obvious that Brian and Chris were responsible for the pictures. They’d been at my home the night I’d returned from the tour, Chris inside, working on the cameras, Brian waiting outside. And when Brian had seen me, he’d seen all of their preparations for my return vanishing with my untimely arrival. He’d been so focused on keeping me out of the house, he’d panicked, and that’s how I’d ended up in the truck without my clothes. It explained why he hadn’t escalated; a rape would have sent me to the hospital, and maybe even more. All those cameras would have gone to waste.
Greed.
One or both of them had gotten into my home on several occasions, frequently enough to plant the cameras, to set up all the wiring and things that Burchett and his crew had discovered. If Brian could do that, then he could certainly bypass my alarm and take a fancy infrared photograph of me, then get out again without waking me up.
So there was evidence Brian could plan, he could do that. Yet he hadn’t anticipated me showing up in Junction City, and when I had, his first instinct had been to open fire, a panic response, like the night I’d returned home. He’d reacted as if cornered.
That wasn’t the Parka Man at all. The Parka Man had planned everything to the last detail, had predicted how I would react to the photograph, had been waiting for me at Mikel’s place when I arrived.
Which brought me back to the accomplice angle, but now I was out of luck. There was no one left. “You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man had told me, but everyone who knew that was accounted for. I’d seen Gareth Quick, and his Alzheimer’s had seemed real enough, especially when coupled with Anne’s hostility. Chris was in a Lane County morgue, and Brian was God Only Knew Where, intent on keeping the cops from sending him back to OSP. The Larkin brothers were supposedly in Alaska, and while I only had Sheila’s word for that, hatching a plot from Nome that would be contingent on knowing when I was in Portland just didn’t seem plausible.
What I needed to do was remember. Remember who it was I’d overlooked.
Who I’d forgotten.
The debate started around nine-thirty, while I was sitting in the living room with the Taylor, trying to rediscover what I’d wanted to play the night before. It wasn’t going well, and the more I fought it, the worse it went. My fingers ached, and wouldn’t take instruction right, gone sloppy, missing strings, too far from the frets. I was bearing down on the back of the neck too hard, and my left thumb started aching immediately, but instead of relaxing my hand, I fought it and gave myself more pain.
Then I lost my pick in the hole, and I had to shake it free of the chamber. When I finally got it out and tried again, I discovered I’d knocked the guitar out of tune, and almost every string had gone sharp, and the discord felt like it went straight up my spine.
Then I broke the high E on the Taylor.
I sat there with the silent guitar in my hands, feeling everything crashing over me. The smell of mint so strong I thought I would gag. Tommy, wherever he was, if he was still alive, and if he was, maybe that was worse, Steven, ashes, floating on the Pacific, and Mikel in his best suit in a box in the ground.
And I wanted a drink so bad, there didn’t seem a point in staying sober.
I wanted to get the bottle of Jack out of the pantry and pour myself a glass and blast myself into oblivion, and I couldn’t even do that, because once I had one, I knew I’d have another, and another, and another.
I’d never seen my father drinking liquor, only beer. It was my mother who had drunk Jack Daniel’s, always on the rocks, always in a dark glass, so she could pretend it was iced tea.
I was a liar.
I was an alcoholic, just like my father, just like my mother.
Maybe it was just time to admit that I was my parents’ daughter.
There was knocking on the door and I went to answer it, then stopped halfway down the hall. I checked from the window of the living room, pressing my face against the cold glass, and I could see a car parked across the street, and I could make out a woman on my porch, waiting at the door.
“Dyke Tracy,” I said, when I opened up. “What a surprise.”
“You drunk?”
It was a stupid question. I had the glass in my hand. “Go away.”
“We need to talk.”
“Oh?”
“Please.”
It was the way she said it, nothing behind it or in it except fatigue. I knew the feeling.
“Yeah, come in,” I said. “Fix yourself a drink. There’s even beer in the fridge, untouched, pristine. Are you off duty? You can drink off duty, right?”
I went to my cigarettes and lit one, watched as she moved through my kitchen. She went to the fridge and looked inside, brought out a bottle of beer. I clapped one hand on the counter in approval, because I didn’t want to spill my glass. She’d gone with the IPA.
“Click would approve,” I told her.
“You’re hammered.”
“Nailed, baby.”
She set the bottle on the counter. “That’s not terribly smart, Mim.”
“I’m not terribly smart, Tracy.” I took a gulp of my drink, maintaining eye contact. “Bet you don’t think I’m drinking iced tea, do you?”
She didn’t answer.
“It’s Jack rocks. It’s a man’s drink, but strong enough for a woman,” I said. She didn’t laugh. I finished what was in my glass, then went for the bottle to refill.
“They rushed the job on that computer they took from the Quicks’ place,” she told me.
“Shack. Not a place, a shack. I’ve been in places, they don’t look like that.”
“They found multiple files, images of you. They were in different stages of being doctored up like the ones that already went public.”
