The Killing Game(9)

The storm reminded her of one evening vacationing at one of the cabins with her mother, father, and brother. Jarrett had shaken her awake to watch the lightning with him. Their parents were already on the back porch overlooking the lake, each with a glass of scotch. It was the summer before her parents split up, but she was blissfully ignorant of any familial disharmony as they all waited for the next brilliant flash.

Jarrett had pointed to the black water. “If you were out there in the middle. you’d get zapped and you’d be dead.”

“It’s a good thing we’re not out there, then,” her father rejoined, his voice slightly slurred.

“Like in a boat,” Jarrett stressed, “all by yourself.”

“I’d never do that,” Andi told her brother indignantly.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Mom responded.

Jarrett had ignored them both. “If you wanted to get rid of somebody, that’s how you’d do it, and no one would ever know. Take ’em out in a boat in a lightning storm.”

“Timing wise, that would be impractical,” her father said, though it came out impragdigal. “You want to kill somebody you’d need a better plan.”

“Jim,” Mom warned.

“Come on, Diana. We’re just talking. Your coddling knows no bounds.”

And then he’d tossed the rest of his drink onto the ground, splashing Mom’s pant leg in the process before stomping off to bed.

Now, Andi crawled back into her own bed and wondered at the vagaries of memory, how sharp that one was, though her father had been out of their lives for years, succumbing to liver cancer five years earlier. Her mother called sporadically from Boston, where she’d moved after the divorce from Andi’s father. Soon, thereafter—too soon, in Andi’s opinion—she’d married a man named Tom DeCarolis whom Andi barely knew. Her mother had given birth to two more children with him whom Andi knew mostly through dutiful Christmas cards. Diana Sellers DeCarolis had drifted out of Andi and Jarrett’s life and into a new one across the country. Jarrett had moved to California for a while, tried a few different colleges but had returned to Oregon several years earlier and now worked for a wealthy restauranteur. She didn’t see much of him either. He’d called her after Greg’s death, but the conversation had been stilted, more because he’d once dated Trini and, after their ragingly dysfunctional relationship’s blowup ending, he didn’t seem to know how to deal with his sister any longer.

Now Andi stared up at the ceiling and listened to distant thunder, remembering uneasily that Jarrett had occasionally passed out unexpectedly when he was younger as well, although she was pretty sure his blackouts had been heat-related. A hot room with little or no air flow had contributed to the problem, which was common for lots of people. Nothing malignant about it. Still, she should probably ask him if he still experienced blackout periods.

She finally drifted back to sleep and woke with a heavy feeling that dogged her while she was getting ready to go to the club. She pushed her worries aside, concentrating instead on her pregnancy, as she drove to SportClub Laurelton and headed for her favorite treadmill. Light exercise, Dr. Schuster had said, and Andi planned to follow her advice to a tee. In black sweats and a dark gray tank, she kept a steady pace just under a jog. With her gaze on the television news program overhead, she tamped down the questions that circled endlessly through her mind. The current broadcast was from a blond woman who was delivering a stern reminder of the fire hazard that still was in evidence; they’d had little to no rain throughout August and September.

Sweat beaded on her forehead, but Andi doggedly pushed forward, internally monitoring her body’s vitals. Her heart rate was elevated some, but she was still breathing fairly easily, unlike the man who’d taken the treadmill to her left and was now running full tilt, each step accompanied by a huh of effort, so that she heard huh, huh, huh, huh, huh in counterpoint to the newscaster.

She thought about her cabin, wondering how many boxes she could fit in her car. Most of the boxes were filled with Greg’s belongings; of the two of them, she’d had lesser “things” when they’d entered into their marriage, and she hadn’t amassed tons more since.

The blond newscaster turned over the program to an earnest-looking, dark-haired male reporter who was standing in front of the Multnomah County Courthouse in downtown Portland. “. . . hearing is slated for nine a.m. for Ray Bolchoy, who’s been accused of allegedly creating false evidence to prove twin brothers Blake and Brian Carrera used coercion to gain control of property around Schultz Lake . . .”

Andi looked up sharply. She knew about the Portland homicide detective who believed the Carrera brothers were responsible for several mysterious deaths around the greater Portland area. However, she hadn’t known his hearing was today. She wondered if the DA had enough evidence to convince the judge to go to trial. She didn’t know if Bolchoy was guilty of falsifying evidence or not, but she knew the Carrera brothers’ tactics were just short of criminal . . . maybe flat-out criminal.

There was a picture of the gray-haired Bolchoy with a much younger man whose rakish good looks Andi had seen before. Bolchoy’s ex-partner. “. . . Lucas Denton,” the reporter said, reminding Andi of his name, “who gave up his career as a homicide detective when Bolchoy was put on administrative leave . . .”