Devoted(103)

He was in a living room armchair, a third of the way through a second serving of Scotch, when his personal phone rang. The caller was Deputy Reed Hannafin, one of the loyalists Hayden had appointed.

“Sheriff, I just learned from one of our guys that Dr. Conroy was at the Bookman house last night while we were guarding it.”



Hayden sat up straighter in the chair. “We couldn’t find Carson earlier. Jim Harmon had to run the murders at the heating-cooling plant. What the hell was Carson doing at the Bookman place?”

“Nobody knows. His Explorer was parked in front. Then he left before dawn. You want me to find him? Maybe check out his house?”

After a hesitation, Hayden said, “I’ll have to ask.”

Puzzled, Hannafin said, “Ask who?”

“I mean, I’ll have to think about it, how to approach it. He shouldn’t have gone there, not officially or unofficially. But he’s an odd duck. Testy. Let me deal with this.”

“Just thought you ought to know.”

“Now I do,” Hayden said and terminated the call.

Half a minute later, his phone rang. Rita Carrickton.

“I got some sleep,” she said. “Did you?”

“No. Maybe I’ll never sleep again. I’m wired.”

“I’ll come over and unwire you. I’m horny as hell. All this action, this violence—I don’t know, it just turns me on.”

Hayden consulted his wristwatch. He had almost four hours until Barbizon’s men would show up. A tumble with Rita might be the only way he could relax enough to get maybe two hours of sleep before the Sacramento boys arrived. He needed a little rest to hold his own with them. “Come on over.”

“Be there in twenty minutes.”



The sheriff hurried into his bathroom and downed a fifty-milligram Viagra with a swallow of Scotch.

He turned off the alarm and went into the garage. From the trunk of his patrol car, he retrieved the cash and the jacket with diamonds sewn into its lining.

In the kitchen again, he hung the jacket on a stool and dumped the cash onto the center island.

He wasn’t going to tell Rita about being owned by Tio and most likely by Purcell. Being owned was a good thing. He knew it was a good thing. But Rita might need some persuading. She would want to talk it to death. Right now, Hayden didn’t want to talk; he wanted her to bang his brains out. She was already in the mood, and the sight of all that money would be like feeding her a pound of a powerful aphrodisiac.

He almost put the alarm back on while he waited for her, but she would want to know why it was engaged. He didn’t want her to think he was afraid of Lee Shacket.

Instead of twenty minutes, she arrived in fifteen. She parked in the garage and came into the kitchen through the connecting door. She was off duty, not in uniform, and when she saw the money piled on the island, her nipples swelled instantly, enormously, against her white T-shirt.

She said, “What’s this, some case evidence or something?”

“No, baby, this is righteous spoils.”

Amazed, she said, “Yours?”

“Ours. It was hidden in Shacket’s car.”



She had brought a bottle of good red wine. She set it on the island and buried her face in the money, and inhaled deeply. When she looked up, she said, “You are going to get so totally humped.”

“I need to take a quick shower.”

“It better be quick. I’ll be waiting in bed with two glasses of wine, Mr. Big.”

He loved it when she called him Mr. Big. How astonishing that, only a short while ago, he had been lying on the kitchen floor in the fetal position, convinced that his life must be over or that his future must be diminished to the point that he had nothing to live for anymore. Now a bright future was assured, and he was shortly to be wrung dry by Rita, who was a fabulous ride. She would be even more fabulous if he pretended she was Megan Bookman.





112



The center of the action was upstairs now, and Woody’s mom didn’t have to be concerned about him and Kipp being up here alone, as she had worried when the deputies were first withdrawn.

In his room, with Kipp at his side, Woody had spent half an hour on the Wire with Bella, the golden retriever who lived in Santa Rosa with the Montell family. Of all the members of the Mysterium, she was the most experienced with the uses of the Wire, because for years she had volunteered to remain receptive around the clock, seven days a week, when others were tuned out. And when she had a major news alert to share, she forced connections with all of her kind and implanted the story in their minds. Woody’s awareness of the Wire had at first been subconscious, and his initial use of it had been unintended, when he had drawn Kipp to him. Now he needed to know everything about how to use it. Bella not only advised him but also sent down the Wire a data package that in minutes made him as accomplished at transmission as any of the Mysterians.



The result of this education was a further unlocking of doors that he hadn’t known were closed within his mind, a sense of freedom and completeness rising in him like a helium-filled balloon with the words Happy Birthday emblazoned on it. His metamorphosis had begun with the communion between him and Kipp, when they had stared into each other’s eyes on the bed the previous night, and now thanks to Bella, it was complete.