Nowhere to Run Page 5
“I don’t think it was suicide,” Liv argued. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I have to know. I thought Hague might be interested in helping. We’ve talked about those unsolved strangulations, and whether Mama was one of them. Hague’s the one who first questioned whether she committed suicide. You remember what he said when he was little? About Mama having a friend?”
“Deborah Dugan’s Mystery Man,” Albert said darkly.
She pulled out the picture of the angry man again, the one where he was stalking toward the camera. “Hague said, ‘There he is again,’ when I showed him this.”
“He said ‘zombie,’” Della reminded her. “And he said the man followed him.”
“Hague says a lot of wacko stuff. None of it means a damn thing,” Albert growled.
Liv didn’t want to go into the whole “zombie” thing. “Do you think this guy could be the ‘Mystery Man’?”
Albert’s eyes slid toward the photo again. “I don’t know him.”
“Did you put Hague into this state with these photos?” Lorinda asked Liv, throwing a thumb in Hague’s direction.
“I wanted to talk to him about the contents of the package,” Liv said, defending herself.
Lorinda lifted an “I told you so” eyebrow to Albert, who ignored her.
“None of you seem to care about Hague at all,” Della said angrily. “None of you! Maybe it’s time you all left. When Hague’s like this, it’s pointless to try and talk to him anyway.” She bustled them toward the door and Lorinda, Albert and Liv reluctantly moved into the hallway.
“Tell him I’ll come by again soon,” Liv said, just before Della slammed the door shut behind them. Not wanting to deal with Lorinda and Albert any longer than she had to, Liv headed quickly toward the lift. She wanted to get into it before her father and Lorinda could join her. She didn’t think she could stand being squeezed into that small space with both of them there as well.
As Liv was lowering the elevator bar Albert and Lorinda moved slowly her way. If they wanted to climb in with her, they sure didn’t act like it, and they let her take the rattling cage down on her own, which was a relief. When Liv reached the street floor, a young mother with three children traded places with her, and by the time Liv got past them, out of the building and into the street, she gulped down fresh air as if she’d been strangling.
She was nearly run over by a guy racing down the sidewalk in a rush. He jostled her and she grabbed the envelope closer to her chest as he put out his hands to steady her.
“Sorry. Are you all right?” The dark-haired stranger peered into Liv’s face. “You look familiar?”
Liv pulled herself together and tried to sidle away.
“Can I buy you a beer to make up for it? Please?” He inclined his head toward Rosa’s Cantina with its glowing green and yellow script. “I promise I’m not a homicidal maniac. I own the place and I’m late. Come on in.”
“You own the place?” Liv asked cautiously. She’d been planning how to blow him off, but maybe he wasn’t trying to hit on her.
“With my better half.” He moved toward the bar. “I am really, really late.”
“Do you know my brother? Hague Dugan? I think he comes here . . . sometimes?”
“Hague . . . ah . . .” One hand on the door, he peered at her through the gathering gloom from drifting fog off the river.
Liv could feel the censure, and she could well imagine why. “I’m not like him . . . much . . .”
He smiled faintly and inclined his head as he opened the door and happy music and loud voices spilled from inside.
Liv followed after him, but he strode quickly forward and was already pulling up a section of counter of the brightly tiled bar as she entered and looked around for a seat. He swooped up a woman whose dark hair was pulled back into a bun and gave her a big, sloppy kiss. She grinned, then snapped a towel at him and pretended to be angry.
Liv took a seat at the bar. “La Cucaracha,” or “The Cockroach,” was playing from speakers hidden by a raft of piñatas hung from the ceiling. Twice a year the cantina had an afternoon party for all the neighborhood kids who slammed away at the piñatas until all the candy spilled across the floor. The owners then replaced them for the next bout of pounding. Once a night, Rosa’s Cantina also played the Marty Robbins classic, “El Paso,” from which they’d taken the name for their bar. At least that’s what Hague had told Liv, but now she heard the owner calling his wife Rosa, so it looked like there were other reasons as well.
From her viewpoint Liv could see through the front window to the stretch of sidewalk outside the cantina’s doors. As she settled herself onto a stool, she saw her father and Lorinda pass by. Albert glanced in but Liv didn’t think he noticed her on the far side of the rectangular, center bar as she was squeezed up tightly against the young couple on the bar stools to her right.
The bar owner was pulling glasses down from the overhead rack. “What’ll you have?” he asked Liv. “My treat.” He pushed two empty margarita glasses toward Rosa. “I’m Jimmy.”
“And I’m Rosa. His better half,” the woman said, grabbing up the glasses. “What’d he do? If he’s buying you a drink, he did something.”
“He can buy me a drink,” the man next to Liv said. “And Nicole here, too.”
Nicole looked up from under her date’s arm and said, “El Grande Margarita.”
“I nearly ran her down,” Jimmy said to Rosa. “She deserves a margarita.” He gave Nicole a mock glare through narrowed eyes. “You don’t.”
“Yes, I do!” she declared. “I’m your best customer!”
“You’re not even close,” Jimmy snorted.
Her date said, “She’s close. Maybe she’s not first, but she’s close.”
Jimmy gave them both a look that said, “Bullshit,” but he relented, and Rosa whipped up two margaritas and slid one to Liv and one to Nicole.
Liv was pretty sure she abhorred tequila, but the drink was free and she was desperate to shake off the bad feelings meeting with her family had brought on.
Rosa slid a small bowl of chips and salsa Liv’s way, and Jimmy revealed that she was Hague’s sister. “The Hague?” Rosa asked.
It was a nickname that had followed her brother throughout his life, a reference to the city that is the governmental center of the Netherlands. It seemed that anyone who got to know Hague, even marginally, called him The Hague.
“If someone’s in his seat, he gets worse than upset,” Rosa said. She jerked her head toward the northeast corner of the bar, where a man and woman were staring at each other and holding hands, he with his back to the booth, she across from him in a chair. “That’s Hague’s place, and he makes sure everyone knows it.”
“It’s not that bad,” Jimmy said.
“Hah,” Rosa snorted. “We’re just lucky The Hague’s not here tonight, otherwise those two lovebirds would have to move. He’s not coming, is he?” She looked a bit stricken.
“No,” Liv said. She felt like apologizing for her brother, but knew it would do no good. Hague was Hague. He couldn’t be changed.
“He mutters to himself, and then shouts, then waves his arm, then goes into a trance,” Nicole said.
“He swears at people that pass by,” her boyfriend offered up.
“Stop it. Stop it.” Jimmy waved a towel at them. “You’ll make her want to leave.” To Liv, he said, “Don’t listen to them. The Hague’s just part of the colorful group that makes up our clientele.”
Liv nodded. She couldn’t think of anything to say, but when they clearly expected her to add something, she asked, “Does he come in here alone?”
“That nurse is with him sometimes. Or, whatever the hell she is,” the boyfriend said.
“Caretaker,” Nicole clarified.
Rosa shook her head. “I think he likes to get away from her. He mostly comes when she’s out, but then she always comes looking for him.”
This little insight into her brother’s life gave Liv some hope. At least Hague se
emed to want to escape Della’s smothering sometimes, maybe even often. In her mind, she couldn’t see how that was a bad thing.
Forty-five minutes later, and after refusing another margarita several times, she thanked them all and headed out. Jimmy and Rosa urged her to come by again soon, and Liv promised to stop in the next time she visited her brother.
As soon as she was outside the establishment again, however, she felt her skin prickle as age-old fears crept up again. Talking about her mother with Hague first, and then her father, had jarred something loose that wouldn’t go back into its place. With one eye looking over her shoulder, she hurried to her Accord and jumped inside, driving a circuitous route home, wondering if her paranoia was overtaking her good sense once and for all.
When she got back to her apartment Jo and Travis . . . Trask . . . whatever . . . were out on the balcony and they invited her to have a drink with them. She almost said no, but decided she needed to foster neighborly relations since Trevor, or whoever he was, had seen the contents of the package. It just felt rude not to.
“Come on in,” Jo said, and as Liv entered, she added, “Get her a drink, Trask! We’re having gin and tonics, or just gin, as in martinis. Whaddya want?”
The smell of cannabis was thick in the air, but neither one of them was smoking a joint at the moment. “Gin and tonic,” Liv said.
“Comin’ right up,” Trask said, dropping ice into a glass, splashing in a healthy dose of gin, then topping it off with tonic. He added a lime wedge and handed it to Liv, who was committing his name to memory.
Jo was half-drunk and dancing to some rock music with a lot of bass that Liv thought might bring the downstairs neighbors up and pounding on their door. As if reading her mind, Trask turned down the volume.
“How ya doin’?” he asked.
“I’m okay. How about you?”
“Can’t complain,” he said, nodding as if they were involved in a truly meaningful conversation.
“Doesn’t anybody wanna dance?” Jo asked.
Liv shook her head and sipped her drink, which was way too strong and made her feel like her bones were melting. She stopped about halfway through, knowing she had work in the morning.
Still, she stayed at their place until past midnight. Trask gallantly offered to accompany her the ten feet from their door to hers. She tried to decline but he insisted, saying, “Trask Martin always walks a lady home.” At her door, he looked over his shoulder, focused a bit fuzzily on the parking lot below, and said, “Hey, y’know, I saw this dude outside your door a couple weeks ago. He was just standin’ there and I asked him, ‘What’s up, dude,’ and he just turned and left.”
A cold jolt of fear ran through Liv. “My apartment?”
“Uh huh. Acted kinda weird, I thought.”
“What did he look like?”
Trask screwed up his face like he was really thinking hard. “Wore a hoodie and jeans. Didn’t turn my way. Headed down the stairs to the lot and went over there. . . .” He gestured to the far end of the parking lot which was lined by thick Douglas firs. “Gray truck. GMC. 2005. I know ’cuz I had one just like it once,” he said wistfully. “Now, I’ve got a piece of shit with a bad alternator. One of these days I’ll get it fixed.”
“How old was the guy?” Liv asked. She was coiled and tense.
“Don’t know. Young? With that hoodie, I kinda thought . . . Hard to tell, though.”
“And he was at my door? Just mine?”
“Maybe he was sellin’ somethin’. You just seemed kinda freaked out earlier, so I thought maybe you should know.”
“Thanks,” she said with an effort.
“No problemo.” He headed back toward his door and Liv hurried inside hers and slammed the dead bolt shut. The apartments didn’t come with dead bolts as an option; she’d had hers installed when she’d moved in. Now, she wondered if she should move out.
Was someone looking for her?
There was no reason for someone to be looking for her. No reason at all. That was her problem . . . this deep-seated fear that could never be fully quashed. She just couldn’t help feeling like she was being watched. Like someone wanted something from her.
She rechecked the locks on her door, then made sure all the windows were closed, then rechecked everything again before heading to her closet, pulling out the shoe box on the floor, the one she’d buried beneath a pile of shoes that she never wore. Placing the shoe box on the bed, she lifted the lid, then gently reached inside for her handgun. She hadn’t purchased it; Della had confiscated it from Hague years before when he’d been suicidal and had found it at some gun show. Back then, Della thought Liv was an ally, that they were both interested in Hague’s well-being, but she’d slowly lost faith in Liv over the years. Now, Della only warmed to her when they had a common enemy like Lorinda. Liv had gotten the .38 out of the deal, however. Sometimes she asked herself why she had a gun. She knew how to load and unload it, but she wasn’t proficient in its use. Still, it made her feel secure, just knowing it was at hand, and tonight she put the .38 under her pillow and fell asleep wondering if she should load it, never wakening to do so.
Chapter 4
On Friday Liv was late for work and caught the stink-eye from Paul de Fore as she hurried through Zuma Software’s front door. She’d almost parked her car in front of the building instead of the employee lot on the west side, just to save time, but she sensed that might come back to bite her somehow, so she backed into her usual spot and walked around to the front, taking the heat from Paul as she strode quickly to her desk. Paul had no serious authority to admonish her, but that never stopped him. She listened with half an ear for his footsteps, expecting him to follow after her to give her a good tongue-thrashing, but he got tied up at the door when Jessica Maltona slipped outside for a coffee on an unscheduled break.
“Hey,” he yelled after her. “You can’t leave without authority! Mr. Upjohn will hear about this!”
Definitely a tool.
Liv ducked down below the half-wall of her cubicle, switching on her computer and locking her purse in the drawer as she settled into her rolling chair and wheeled up to the desk. She laid down the package from her mother, eyeing the manila envelope thoughtfully as she waited for the machine to click and burp its way to “ready.”
It was the envelope that had made her late, or more accurately, the contents within. She’d pored over the pieces again this morning while she was drinking her coffee and the time had swept by so quickly that she’d looked up at the clock and gasped, and then raced to the office.
Was the stalking, angry man in the photo Hague’s zombie, and therefore the person the police had dubbed Deborah Dugan’s Mystery Man? Was he her mother’s friend? Her lover, maybe? Why was he in the photos? And what was its meaning to Liv?
What did she know about her mother, really, she asked herself now. Only vague childhood memories that had been tainted and colored with time.
About lunchtime Aaron came around her partition and rapped his knuckles on her desk while she was on the phone with a supplier missing an invoice. She shook her head at him, and he motioned for her to meet him outside. Nodding, she waved him off, and as soon as she finished her call and hung up, she grabbed her purse from its locked cabinet, got up from her chair, straightened it, threw a glance at the package which she’d now stuck in the slot of the message holder at the side of her desk, then turned—and nearly ran smack into Kurt Upjohn, owner of Zuma Software.
“Hi,” Liv said in surprise.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
Upjohn was a short man with a tight mouth, a smoothly shaved head and one earring. He wasn’t all that bad looking, but he was always filled with tension, like a coiled spring, and it invariably made Liv feel uncomfortable.
“Just . . . getting ready for my lunch break.” She picked up her mother’s package and stuffed it into her purse, deciding she didn’t want to leave it at her desk after all, then slung the purse strap over her shoulder.
“I’ve been running late all day,” she admitted.
“Phil said he gave you the financials from last quarter. . . .” He sounded cautious, his brows pulled together.
“Um, no. I don’t think so. I haven’t seen them.” And why would he give them to me, anyway? Liv thought. Phillip Berelli was Zuma’s internal accountant whereas she was an inputter, not an analyst.
“Okay.” He seemed relieved. “Maybe he said something else.”
Liv lifted her shoulders and after a moment Upjohn walked off. She’d heard rumors about Zuma, about how they could be in financial trouble, but if they were she didn’t know anything about it. She had pieces of the financial mosaic, but getting the whole picture was way above her pay grade.
She’d heard other rumors as well, though. Like how Zuma’s war games were so accurate and well thought-out that there was some military connection—the think-tank guys upstairs being secret government employees—and that Zuma Software itself was merely a cover.
Even with her paranoia, Liv didn’t buy that one. She’d seen the guys upstairs when they came out of their locked room, walked down the stairs, and passed by her with barely a look as they headed out the front door. Invariably, their conversation made her feel like she was listening to the goings-on inside a thirteen-year-old boy’s mind; mostly they talked about other games and popular movies and their eyes darted quick looks at Jessica Maltona’s breasts when they thought she wasn’t looking. Jessica was the only other woman on the main floor with Liv. Count in Aaron, Paul and Kurt Upjohn, and that was the extent of the business staff, except for Phil, the accountant, whose office was upstairs with the game builders.
Aaron was just stubbing out a cigarette when Liv opened the unlocked exterior door and met him on the side patio. “Man, this place is boring,” he said, punctuating his statement with a yawn.
Liv merely nodded. Her mind’s eye wouldn’t stop going over the papers from inside the package whenever she had a free moment. The birth certificate named her biological parents. She’d never known who they were. Hadn’t really cared. But now she wondered if she should make an attempt to meet them . . . like maybe that was important to Deborah? Did that sound right? It was much more likely that her mother had just wanted Liv to have the information in case anything happened to her. . . . Maybe she was toying with the idea of suicide when she’d made up the package? Or, maybe she’d sensed something else . . . something coming toward her . . . something—