James Patterson - Second Honeymoon

No matter where you stood on nature versus nurture, it was all but impossible to think that this hadn’t permanently scarred both Ned and Nora.

I glanced over at Sarah, who was holding Olivia’s diary like I hold the refrigerator door when I’m trying to lose a few pounds. Sure enough, she opened it again.

“That was a quick break,” I said.

“Can’t help it,” she said. “I need to get through this, to read everything. Probably a couple of times.”

I understood. She was really intent on bringing down Ned Sinclair. She had total focus on her goal. So much so that everything else seemed inconsequential. For example, where the hell were we heading? South, yes, but certainly not to my house. At least not on Sarah’s watch.

I kept driving while she kept reading, both of us unsure of what lay ahead. Then, about ten miles and twenty pages later, everything changed.

“Holy shit,” muttered Sarah, her head still buried in the diary.

“What is it?” I asked.

As I turned to look, she held up the page she was reading. I saw it immediately.

The key to everything.

Chapter 74

SARAH SHOOK HER head for practically the entire flight out to Los Angeles. After a while, I had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“You,” I said. “You’re like my mother when I was a kid. I’d come home from school boasting that I got ninety-eight percent on my math test, and the first thing she’d say was, ‘Who got the other two percent?’”

Sarah had been savvy enough to do a title search for any property that Ned Sinclair might still own. But now she was beating herself up because— the other two percent —it didn’t occur to her to also check for property owned by other members of the Sinclair family. Especially Nora. Just because she’d been dead for years didn’t mean she still couldn’t own a home.

Sure enough.

It was a two-bedroom split-level in Westwood near the UCLA campus, where Ned had been an associate professor. Nora had bought it for her brother and, according to the diary, for Olivia as well.

Here’s the key, Mother, for the day when you get released.

That’s what Nora had told her during one of her visits to Pine Woods. The key was a token of optimism, something to keep Olivia’s spirits up. Nora wanted her mother to think that one day she might actually be set free.

Deep down they probably both knew it would never happen.

So it was only Ned who lived in the house. That is, he lived there until he was committed to Eagle Mountain Psychiatric Hospital.

But what had Sarah and me flying across the country was that the place was never sold. It still belonged to Nora’s estate.

Welcome to a very special episode of House Hunters.

“That’s it over there,” said Sarah about thirty minutes after we were on the ground in Los Angeles. She was pointing from the backseat of the cab we took from LAX. “The number’s on the mailbox. Two seventy-two.”

We pulled up, paid the driver, got out, and stared at Ned Sinclair’s last known residence. I expected it to be run-down and creepy, with overgrown grass and weeds. Instead, it was in great shape, well maintained and impeccably manicured.

That somehow made it really creepy.

“Nora’s estate probably provided for a caretaker on the assumption that Ned would one day be released,” said Sarah.

“Maybe,” I said.

She looked at me. “Why? You don’t think—”

“That he’s in there? Nah. He’s been killing in only one direction: east,” I said. “Lousy odds that he’d be commuting back and forth.”

The better odds were that Ned had made a stop at the house after springing himself from Eagle Mountain, only twenty miles away. Pack a suitcase? A shower and a shave? Grab a little travel cash?

The real question, though, was whether he’d managed to leave something behind—some clue, anything, that could help us track him down.

“I’ll let you do the honors,” I said as we approached the front door of the cedar-shake house with white trim.

Sarah removed the key from her pocket. It was still a little sticky from all the tape Olivia had used to adhere it to her diary.

“Tell me again there’s no chance he’s in there,” she said.

“Okay, there’s no chance he’s in there.”

We both laughed. Ha-ha. Then we both quickly took out our guns.

Just in case we were both wrong.

Chapter 75

KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO’S THERE?

Nobody.

After a quick sweep of the entire house, there was no Ned to be found. Sarah and I were back in the small ceramic-tiled foyer, where we began.

“You take the upstairs, I’ve got downstairs,” she said.

Now it was all about finding clues, something that would point us in the right direction. A Ned decoder. Where was he heading next?

Had this been a movie, it would’ve been so simple. We’d walk into a room and discover with mouths agape that every inch of every wall was covered with pictures of me, each one with a giant X over my face. Then we’d stumble upon some marked-up road map that gave us the exact location of where Ned was planning to kill again.

But as close as we actually were to Hollywood, this was no movie.

There was no shrine to me, no obvious clue ready and waiting for us. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything. Talk about minimalist. Nora Sinclair, the interior designer with a killer eye, may have bought the place for Ned, but she clearly didn’t decorate it.

No one did.

In the two bedrooms upstairs, the only pieces of furniture were the beds themselves. There were no dressers, no nightstands, not even a lamp.

That left only the closets. Two of them, to be exact. So much for the first one in the guest bedroom, though. It was empty.

Finally, in the closet in the master bedroom, I found the only sign that someone had actually ever lived in the house. Ned’s clothes. At least I assumed they were his.

Hanging very neatly on some wooden hangers, which looked to be purposefully aligned at exactly two inches apart, were some pants, shirts, and a few sport coats. Checking the pockets, though, was a swing and a miss. They were all empty.

I’d normally feel a little weird about going through someone’s personal belongings—Olivia’s diary notwithstanding. But there really wasn’t anything that seemed “personal” here.

Until I turned around and saw it.

There was something tucked underneath the bed. I thought maybe it was a suitcase at first, but dropping to my knees for a better look, I could see that it was a wooden storage chest. An old one at that.

Pulling it out, I lifted the scuffed brass latch, the hinges rusted and squeaky. What have you got for me, Ned?

Disappointment, that’s what.

It was toys. The chest was stuffed to the brim with children’s toys.

I stared at them all, frustrated. Then suddenly I realized something. They were all the same.

Not exactly the same, but a version of the same thing. Big, small, broken, or in perfect condition. Everything in the chest was a toy version of a very specific car. A one-of-a-kind car, actually—a blast from the past.

The DeLorean.

Huh.

Chapter 76

I DIDN’T WANT to overthink it, especially because I couldn’t see any way in which Ned’s interest or even obsession with this one car would get us any closer to him. Sometimes a box of toys is just a box of toys.

Still, I had to go through them all. You never know.

One by one I began pulling them out. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. With any luck, I’d know it when I found it.

But all I was finding was one DeLorean after another, whether it was wooden, plastic, or metal.