David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

He remembered her screaming, her rage as she hit him and scratched him. He’d stumbled out into the night until he found the car where he’d parked it around the corner.

That was all.

He didn’t recall driving, certainly didn’t remember getting on a major highway and coming to this truck stop.

His neck was sore from the contorted position he’d slept in behind the wheel, slumped slightly to the side. The gearshift of the Miata had poked into his ribs, and they were sore as well. He held up his arm to the light that spilled through the window. His watch read 3:56.

Nearly four o’clock in the morning, and he had no idea where he was.

He blinked again. He remembered snippets of other things. Faith had been angry at him…so what else was new? He’d dropped something or knocked something over in his house, but hadn’t cleaned it up. He felt vaguely ashamed about that.

Daryn…Daryn wasn’t going into Department Thirty protection.

He sat up straight. Faith hadn’t protected Daryn. Now Daryn was back in Kat’s apartment.

Sean closed his eyes again. It all seemed to be spinning around him. Daryn, Faith, Kat, Sanborn, Britt, Tobias Owens…

He wrenched open the car door and vomited onto the pavement, heaving until he had nothing left.

Even after he’d emptied his stomach, he still hung out the door, feeling the cool night air. After nearly five minutes, he swung his legs out and stood unsteadily. He slammed the car door, wincing at the sound, and went into the truck stop. He went to the bathroom, emptied his bladder, washed his face. He bought a bottle of water. The clerk, a young Middle Eastern man with a scraggly beard, eyed him strangely as he walked back out into the night.

He turned the corner at the edge of the building, back to where the Miata was parked haphazardly, taking up parts of two spaces.

Franklin Sanborn was leaning against it.

“Hello, Sean,” Sanborn said, in the same genial, easygoing voice he’d used the day Sean and Daryn first arrived at the Mulhall house. “At least I can call you by your real name now.”

Sean lengthened his strides.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Sanborn said. “You’ve done quite enough of that already, don’t you think? It’s all quite complicated, really, and you don’t know anything. Think twice about anything you may think you know, because chances are it’s not true.”

“What…” Sean’s mouth felt like he’d been chewing rocks, and his stomach was still queasy. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

Sanborn looked at his watch. “Well, it’s too late to save Daryn, but maybe if you hurry, you can catch the real killer.”

Sean dropped the bottle of water. It rolled away from him until it smacked into one of the Miata’s tires. Even as his stomach threatened to revolt again, he grabbed Sanborn by the throat and slammed him into the car.

“Go ahead,” Sanborn breathed. “Beat me to a pulp, Sean. You could even kill me and it wouldn’t matter. You’re too late. Way too late.”

“What have you done with her? What the fuck have you done with Daryn?”

“Weren’t you just with her? You probably should have stayed with her, Sean. Maybe she’d still be alive now if you had.”

Sean couldn’t mistake the taunt in his voice, a school bully picking on a weaker child. With all his strength, Sean took both hands and shoved Sanborn to the side. He rolled off the Miata’s hood and stumbled into the ice machine that stood on the sidewalk. Sean was on top of him in an instant, crashing his fist into Sanborn’s face.

“Where is she?” he panted.

“They’ll find her soon,” Sanborn said, his cheek starting to swell. “And then they’ll find you. In death, she’ll be Kat for a little while, but then she’ll be Daryn. She’ll die as the senator’s daughter. That’s rather ironic. Don’t you think that’s ironic?”

Sean grabbed his shoulders and slammed him repeatedly against the ground. “Tell me, you piece of shit! Tell me what you’ve done!”

“It wasn’t hard to follow you from her apartment, you know. The way you were driving, it was an easy trail. You’re just lucky you escaped the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Now that might have been unpleasant.”

Sean slammed him to the pavement again.

Sanborn grunted in pain, but he didn’t stop. “They’ll find you, Sean. See, they’ll find your Jeep-remember it?-and it’ll have Daryn’s blood in it. And in the glove box, they’ll find your gun. You shouldn’t have left it at the Mulhall house. That was very unprofessional. In a day or two, when they do the ballistics tests, they’ll find that the gun that killed the senator’s daughter was registered to Sean Michael Kelly of Tucson, late of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Sean toppled to the side, his head spinning. “I don’t-”

“Then after the autopsy, they’ll find your semen inside her. As a federal law enforcement officer, your DNA is on file and it won’t take long for them to match it up.” Sanborn shook his head, blood trickling down one side of it, just as it had when his car crashed in Bricktown. For a moment Sean thought he was seeing things, time caught in an endless loop.

“Where is she?” Sean muttered, but the vehemence was draining out of his voice.

“She probably had sex with five hundred men in the last few years,” Sanborn said, “and almost as many women, for that matter. But she was careful. Remember how she always had condoms handy for you? What made her decide not to use them tonight?”

“Who are you?” Sean whispered, and then he remembered that those were the exact words he’d said to Daryn as he left her apartment a few hours ago.

“Why, I’m Franklin Sanborn. At least I am to you. Now that was a pointless question, Sean. You know, you might still catch the killer if you hurry. There’s a place in this city where people go to remember, where time stands still. You’ll find it, I think.”

The two men looked at each other. Sean couldn’t feel, couldn’t think. Daryn could not be dead. Sanborn was messing with his mind-that was what Sanborn did. He used that nice, easygoing, let’s-all-be-friends voice, but it was pure manipulation.

“You should go to her, Sean,” Sanborn said. “I think it’s the least you owe her.”

“If you…” Sean pulled himself up, holding to the hood of the car. “If she’s…I’ll find you. If she’s hurt or dead or…Jesus Christ, Sanborn, I will find you and I will kill you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Sean,” Sanborn said, and his voice took on an eerie chill. “I know that.”

A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE GO TO REMEMBER. A PLACE where time stands still.

Sean knew.

He had visited the memorial with Faith and Scott Hendler, on a sunny day when sightseeing seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. Back then, he’d been able to imagine that he was in town on vacation, visiting his sister, and they could go for a few hours and act like normal people, doing the things normal people do.

He first had to orient himself as to where he was. Blinking against the alcohol that was still in his system, along with the emotions raging through him, he figured out that the highway was Interstate 35, and that the truck stop was situated just off Northeast 122nd Street in far north Oklahoma City.

He roared onto the access road, then crossed the highway and merged onto the southbound interstate. He nudged the Miata up past eighty. He turned on the stereo. He knew his sister was into “smooth jazz,” whatever that meant, while he preferred old-time rock and roll, the Doobies, the Eagles, Kansas. He expected soft and flowing jazz on the CD, but to his surprise, it was a rock-jazz fusion led by an electric guitar. He turned it up as loud as he could. His head didn’t hurt anymore, and while his stomach still churned and he had moments of dizziness, his head was clearing. He let the guitar pound into him, absorbing the bass beats as if they were blows raining down on him.