Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

It was a legendary litigious nightmare spanning years. Clay knew every nuance of it and retold the chronology well enough for me to believe he was at least part of Aaron’s legal department, or had been well briefed. The trial controversially ended when the Llorenzo family was exposed for taking bribes from a rival corporation. Another oil company was bribing Llorenzo to fabricate the entire lawsuit. The whole case was exposed as a lie. That was the brilliant Drake defense team at work. That’s what won.

“I don’t see how this is news,” I replied when he finished. “Ah, okay, good. So you’re up to date,” said Clay. “So what you probably don’t know… what Aaron probably hasn’t told you… is that those bribes never happened.”

“You mean Drake fabricated the bribes?”

“Drake fabricated the family .”

He was no longer the requisite twelve feet ahead of me on the trail. I’d dropped my guard. I’d completely lost focus on our spacing.

Fabricated the family?

“I don’t get it,” I said to him.

“Our legal team found a father of three who was willing to say he was sick.”

“Even though he wasn’t? Sick?” This made no sense. “So Drake invented its own fake case? Against itself?”

He was walking alongside me. My gun was no longer safely defending my personal bubble. He could’ve easily done something to me during this time. He could’ve strangled me, pushed me down, and disarmed me. I’d been completely distracted by his claim.

“It’s a con game,” he said. “We called it a false god. You control your enemy by controlling their hero: you create their hero… then you humiliate their hero.”

“Why?”

“So you can make sure one big case, just one, will lose exactly the way you need it to. And when that case loses, it sets a precedent for all other cases to lose. It sways public opinion. It sways juries. It’s unstoppable.”

“How would you pull that off?”

“Pay everyone. Pay opposing lawyers. Pay the clerks. The cops. Judges. The hardest judge is the first one. But once a few are in, the pressure to conform is enormous. And contagious.” Then he looked over at my face to mention something he knew would jar it. “Like the bonus Aaron got last year. The $145,000.”

He saw me react. I tried to stay unperturbed. But the mention of that $145,000 wasn’t easy to hide.

“Then what does that make us? ” I said, half rhetorically. “What does that make you?”

“Drake is a monster. I work for them. So…” Then came an honest, grave, uninflected admission. “I’m a monster. Aaron isn’t.”

He talked a good game. Too good. His spin was so potent I didn’t even care if he was conning me anymore.

“But I’m trying to makes amends,” he added. “I’m here to help him. I was lucky to be recruited on this hunt but not lucky enough to be put in charge of it. So I had to be patient before making a move.”

I decided to take a risk. “Who’s Jed?”

He scrutinized me again. The gears turning in his head.

“You mean Jedediah,” he said. “He’s a retired judge. Drake has leases on his property for some of our fracking sites.”

“So Jed is helping,” I concluded.

“No, Miranda.” He stopped to look me deep in the eye. “Let me make this crystal clear: you can’t trust Jed.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t tell him to keep moving. I didn’t need to. We had arrived.

We could now see the site where our minivan had crashed. All four wheels were belly-up, facing the sky. The vehicle had been drenched, jostled, twisted ten degrees, carried, scraped, then dumped back on the silt of the same bank several yards downstream.

It definitely looked like a crime scene, though.

“They were at the wreck?” asked Clay, scanning the area in front of us. “They were at the wreck the whole time?”

I kept him in front of me for the final few steps. I wanted to monitor his reactions. I wanted to see if he licked his lips with a thirst for vengeance, or was genuine in wanting to talk to Aaron.

“Here?” he asked again, almost squeaking the word. His incredulity mirrored a growing, nagging, terrifying fear that was welling up within me.

I was about to find out if they made it. If they had an accident. Or worse.

Or if they made it to the SUV, but someone was waiting for them when they got there.

CHAPTER 21

I STARTED SHOUTING for them. “Aaron! Aaaaaaarrrrron!” I repeated the refrain as I stood looking up the cliff face, hoping for any signs of life.

“I thought you said he was here,” said Clay.

I continued to scan the cliff, and that’s when I saw it: a small purple smudge about halfway up.

“What… is…?” I muttered to myself.

Her little kangaroo hat, lodged up in the rock. Which could only be up there if—

“Sierra!” I shouted.

Clay turned around and saw me looking up.

“Aaron!” I shouted.

“So they climbed up,” said Clay. He brushed past me, leaving me in his dust.

He was already on his way.

I ran after him. Soon I was ahead of him. He chose one route. I chose the other. Within minutes we were vertical. I tried to peer downward, directly along the vertical face to inspect the long, thin pocket space that ran along the foothills.

“Aaron!” I shouted upward, past Clay, into the elongated void.

No response.

Clay didn’t stop, and soon our two routes began to converge. They started out parallel but around the halfway point they angled into each other. He wouldn’t look at me. You’d think it was the shame of knowing he’d betrayed me, but I caught sight of a cocky smile.

Without even glancing over he said, “You’re not gonna get there before me, Miranda,” he said.

He was a genuine climber, too. Perhaps better than I was.

“If you were really an ally,” I replied, “you’d call out for him.”

I started to outpace my rival. I was taking more chances than he was, reaching for holds beyond my normal span. But Clay kept up.

“You’re not calling out to him,” I continued, “because you don’t want him to know that you’re with me.”

I was gradually forming a new theory. I didn’t think Mr. Clay Hobson was simply ordered to do the job of attacking my husband. I didn’t think this entire day was merely an assignment. The truth was that my nemesis, hovering twenty feet to my seven o’clock, was directly implicated in whatever ugly history they all shared. This wasn’t a job—it was personal.

“Aaron!” I again shouted upward. “Run!”

CHAPTER 22

I WAS ABOUT fifteen feet ahead of Clay. I would have to use that advantage as soon as I reached the top. If only I had some hot water or oil.

He wasn’t taking any chances. He freed up his right hand, pried loose a small rock, and threw it at me. I thought there was no way it’d actually—

“Ow!” I screamed, as the rock hissed into my hand.

He’d tagged me directly on the knuckles. A one-in-a-hundred shot. The pain was instant, loosening my grip, but it was a miss for my opponent. He was aiming for my head.

I looked down toward him. Thirty feet behind me now—but he’d chosen his route badly and had hit a dead end. He’d have to go down and over to my route and, maybe in a few minutes, catch up with me. But he readied another rock to throw.

I had the rifle on my back. I remembered when I fired it into the air, the recoil. My shoulder was still sore. If I tried shooting it now, it would knock me off the wall. Thinking about the gun, I lost concentration, promptly losing the foothold under my left toe.

I started to fall.

I swung half a pendulum arc, my body anchored only by my middle three fingers on my right hand as I lost three of my four holds. Pebbles crumbled from where my feet were, a hundred feet down to the crevasse below me. My rifle strap slid off my shoulder, down my torso, past my legs, and sailed toward the abyss, ricocheting off the cliff face, past where Clay might have caught it midair—no chance, although he did try—before spinning into the trench below.