Jeff Abbott - Fear

The door opened. No alarm chimed. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him. He left the lights off.

He nearly tripped over Hurley’s body, sprawled on the floor.

‘Dumb-ass,’ he said under his breath. He drew his weapon, borrowed from an off-duty guard at the hospital, with a grimace of pain. Did a search. The house was empty.

He checked Hurley without touching him, but he didn’t need to touch him to see that the man was dead. The man who had been a pain in the ass but could have helped his Amanda.

‘I told you I should have come with you,’ he said to the dead body.

He searched the house. No one there.

If the cameras ran constantly, they could tell him a story. He found a computer in the bedroom, with a massive external hard drive attached and video cables that fed into the walls. He fired up the computer. No login password. Not a surprise: no one ever used this system other than Celeste Brent. He searched the external drive; she kept the cameras’ images in digital form for only a few days, then reused the drive’s real estate. He accessed the video files, starting with yesterday’s. The camera was motion-activated, saving frames when people neared the front door.

An older lady, matronly – probably a caretaker. Arriving, letting herself in with a bag of groceries, letting herself out. Then Michael Raymond showed up. Held up a sign.

I KNOW ALLISON’S SECRET.

Holy Mother of God. Groote’s stomach churned. He fast-forwarded. Michael waits, then steps in. Nothing. Then Hurley arrives, waits. Goes inside. More nothing. Then Michael and a woman – clearly frightened, as though she were unexpectedly walking on the moon – sticking close to Michael, stumbling out of frame. Damn. No sign of a car, no plates to trace.

He jumped back to the video files from Tuesday, the day Allison died. Fast-forwarded through the day until Allison appeared on the doorstep. Fast-forwarded until she left. Nothing else.

Celeste Brent had been in league with Allison Vance and so had Michael Raymond.

I KNOW ALLISON’S SECRET.

Four words to chill the bone.

He had to figure out where they had gone – because from the date/time stamp on the image, he guessed they had gone from here to the hospital. But first deal with Hurley. He couldn’t leave the body. Celeste Brent was a has-been celebrity, but she was still a known name to many people; a body found inside her house would earn national attention. The caretaker woman might come back tomorrow; Hurley dead might be more of a problem than Hurley missing.

He stripped apart the computer system; maybe there would be helpful information on the hard drives to tell him where Miles and Celeste might run. He carried the hard drives out to the car, put them inside the backseat of the rental. Now. The trunk for Hurley, then the desert.

He closed the door and there, on the other side of the low adobe wall that separated the yard from the dirt road, stood DeShawn Pitts.

‘Hello,’ Groote said. Calm. You can talk your way out of this, man, you have to, for your daughter.

‘What happened to you, Mr. Groote?’

‘An accident at the hospital. My own fault, I slipped and fell down a flight of stairs.’

‘You okay?’

‘Yes. How’d you find me here?’ He put a laugh in his voice.

‘I parked down near the hospital. Wanted to grab Doctor Hurley for a talk. Saw you leaving, saw your face all beaten. Made me curious. Followed you.’

Too much suspicion from the guy. It saddened Groote.

‘This your place?’ Pitts asked.

‘I wish. No, it’s a patient of Doctor Hurley’s.’

‘That’s Doctor Hurley’s car parked there. His plates. I checked. He normally spends the night with his patients?’

‘No, but last night was a special case.’

‘I get the feeling Hurley’s avoiding me. Is he here or not?’

Groote weighed the options, life or death.

‘I really have to insist, Mr. Groote. At the least Doctor Hurley can step outside and talk to me for five minutes.’

Groote decided, with regret. He slammed the car door closed and tried to seem embarrassed under his bandage. ‘Hurley talked to your person of interest; Hurley was the one at the hospital who called him. He’s been calling all of Allison Vance’s patients. A mild form of ambulance chasing.’

‘Excellent.’

Groote jerked his head toward the house. ‘Why don’t you come on in and we’ll talk?’

Miles awoke to screams.

He lurched out of bed, unsure if he had actually slept. He had no morning aftertaste of nightmares: no Andy dying crumpled on concrete, no cries of horror echoing in the dreamy cave of his brain, no office of Allison’s blasting into flaming rubble. The screams were from another’s throat, thrashing cries of terror.

He ran up the stairs. Nathan lay in a tangle of bedsheets, fists clenched against air, kicking in a rage of shock.

‘Nathan. Wake up. Wake-’ and Nathan’s fist closed around his throat, fingers of iron digging into Miles’s windpipe.

‘I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t break it!’ Nathan screamed. His voice crumbled into a ragged moan. ‘I fixed it I fixed it I swear!’

‘Nathan!’

Nathan jumped up from the bed, drove Miles hard into the wall, staring into his face.

‘It’s Miles. Let go,’ he managed to say, sucking in the scarce oxygen.

‘Nathan, stop it,’ Celeste ordered from the doorway.

Nathan released Miles, stumbled back wordlessly, and sat on the bed.

‘Bad dream,’ Miles said. ‘Just a dream, man, you’re okay.’

An anger close to hate gleamed in Nathan’s dark eyes. ‘I don’t dream.’

‘Dream and scream. I been there.’

Nathan went into the bathroom – the mirror shrouded with a towel – and splashed water onto his face. Miles saw Nathan’s hands were shaking.

‘I don’t dream,’ Nathan said again.

‘Whatever.’ Miles rubbed the finger marks out of his throat.

‘Screw you. I served my country, I was a soldier. What were you? A mobster, Miles, so don’t talk down to me.’

Miles said, ‘I won’t, as long as you don’t try to strangle me more than once a day.’

Nathan started rummaging in the guest closet for spare clothes. ‘Miles. Listen, thanks for getting my ass out of the hospital. Appreciate it. But you and me, we’re settled, I told you everything I know. Time to part ways.’

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Don’t know yet.’

‘I need your help.’

‘Help.’

‘We believe Allison sent the Frost research to a Web hosting company called Mercury Mountain. Probably to hide it from Sorenson, or to give it to someone else who could access the Web server. We need to find out where this server is.’

Nathan stopped at the door.

‘Groote and Sorenson will want you dead. They’ll want us all dead. Our only chance is to get Frost, prove what they’ve done to the world.’

‘You do expose them, you ruin any chance for you or Celeste or me, or anyone else with PTSD, to use Frost to get better. You think any drug company’s going to produce a drug that the world knows was based on illegal experiments? Hell, no. You expose Frost, then you cut our own throats, man, we’ll be broken forever.’ His fists clenched. ‘I agreed to the VR testing because I wanted to help my fellow soldiers. That matters more to me than some sad, pointless revenge.’

‘We get Frost, we can help every soldier coming back from the war. Every child that’s traumatized by abuse. Everyone who needs Frost,’ Miles said. ‘A legit company could do the research ethically, build on what Hurley did. There’s nothing unethical about the chemical formula of Frost.’

Nathan nodded his head.