Damage Control Read online

  The store clerk had become extremely accommodating upon hearing Dana’s plans to adorn the earrings with a necklace and bracelet. She’d telephoned her husband, who had appeared in the store in under twenty minutes, apparently also convinced that tens of thousands of dollars might be at stake if Dana could find William Welles. The husband told Dana that Welles had been a preeminent designer of jewelry whose name had spread quickly. The fact that he was a recluse and extremely selective of his clients only heightened the interest in, and the value of, his work. Welles could have capitalized on his success by attaching his name to a line of commercial jewelry, but he’d designed only individual pieces and would go months, sometimes years, before agreeing to design another. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, he had stopped designing jewelry altogether and began making metal sculptures.

  Around another turn, Dana saw the roadside snack stand, another of the few landmarks the store owner could provide her. She slowed and again checked the mileage. The owner had described the road to Welles’s home as nothing more than a dirt path approximately two miles beyond the stand. He couldn’t be more specific because he had never met anyone who had actually visited Welles’s home, but said that if Dana reached an intersection and started seeing highway signs for State Route 30, she had gone too far. She checked the rearview mirror and slowed the Jeep to a crawl; the only thing about the road that gave her comfort was there was no way anyone could be following without her knowing it. She surveyed the dense, overgrown brush along side the road. The store owner had also said Welles infrequently came into town to drink at a local bar but went absent for months, perhaps while artistically inspired. If Welles was in the midst of an artistic hiatus, an entire jungle could have grown up to obscure the road.

  Dana spotted what appeared to be an opening just beyond a large chunk of lava rock. She stopped the jeep, jumped out quickly, and looked to be sure she wasn’t about to drive off a cliff. The scrub grabbed and snagged her pants as she pushed through and found an even narrower dirt road. Returning to the Jeep, she drove slowly into the foliage. Branches scraped the sides of the Jeep like brushes in a car wash, and the chassis pitched at awkward angles caused by two deep ruts in the road. If she got stuck, she’d never get out. She leaned forward, slowing, and was about to stop when the scrub suddenly cleared and she drove into a round clearing, a turnabout. In the center was a freestanding metal sculpture she estimated to be perhaps fifteen feet tall—a rusting idol of metal strips welded on a thick stone base like an ancient ruin abandoned from a long-extinct civilization. It seemed at first sight to have no form, but as Dana stepped from the Jeep and circled it, the metal strips appeared to melt together, though she could not quite determine the shape in detail.

  She turned her attention from the sculpture and considered her surroundings. An ocean breeze laden with the smell of salt rippled through the brush and the scraggy branches overhead. She saw a stone wall she had not immediately noticed, partially hidden by a lush tropical vine with budding red flowers. Stepping along it, she came to a rusted iron gate—the entrance to an arched tunnel in the hillside that narrowed to a small circle of light no larger in diameter than a basketball. She looked around, hoping for another entrance, but saw none. If there was a house somewhere, it was, unfortunately, at the end of the narrowing tube of light. With trepidation, she pulled at the gate. It did not swing freely. With effort, the hinges groaned, and she opened the gate just wide enough for her to slip through.

  The inside of the tunnel was damp and smelled of decomposing plants. A trickle of water echoed in the tube and, although she fought against it, she thought of bats and snakes. Goose bumps lined her arms. She could handle just about anything but bats and snakes. She stepped forward, stooping slightly, though she sensed the tunnel was tall enough that she could have stood straight. She kept her hands at her sides, unable to bring herself to touch the walls or look overhead, concentrating only on the circle of light. With each step, it expanded in diameter, giving her comfort that she was making progress. She estimated that the tunnel was thirty yards, the circle becoming as large as the entrance into which she had stepped—the narrowing, like the sculpture in the clearing, some sort of optical illusion.

  She raised her hand to deflect the focused glare as she neared the end of the tube. When she did, she saw a stucco structure as if she were staring through the lens of a telescope. She stepped from the tunnel and felt as though she had walked onto the canvas of a painting. The jungle had come to an end. So had the lava rock. The rounded structure before her was built on the edge of a cliff, floating between the crystal-blue waters of the Pacific Ocean and an endless horizon, anchored in a manner hidden from the eye.

  A deep, guttural sound broke the tranquility, and a brick-red Doberman inched its way out of the brush, ears pinned back, teeth bared.

  And mean dogs. Snakes and bats and mean dogs.

  With nowhere to go but the tunnel, a thirty-yard sprint to the gate that the dog would surely win, Dana had little choice but to stand her ground. “Easy, boy. Easy, now,” she whispered.

  The dog inched forward, head down, growling. Her limited experience with dogs amounted to the neighbor’s basset hound and her own untamed golden retriever. She knew the most important thing was not to panic, that dogs could sense fear. Easier said than done.

  “Easy, boy. Nobody means any harm here.” She looked around. There was no safe haven. No weapon miraculously appeared, as in the movies.

  The dog crept closer, then stopped, front legs spread. Dana struggled to control her breathing. She kept her voice soft and reassuring. Slowly, she raised the back of her hand from her side, trying not to shake or curl her fingers into her palm. The dog eyed it suspiciously, then padded forward and stretched out its neck. Dana fought every instinct to pull it back. She felt the cool wet of its nose touch her skin. It sniffed at her hand.

  “Nice doggy. That’s a good boy.” Continuing her slow, deliberate movements, she reached under the dog’s snout and gently scratched its jaw and neck. The dog looked up at her. Its ears relaxed. Then its tongue slipped from its mouth and it stood panting. Dana worked her hand to the top of its head and behind its ears to the scruff of its neck. As she scratched more vigorously, the animal stepped closer, leaning against her with its head turned away, offering its backside.

  “Is your master home?” The dog perked its unclipped ears and looked back at her. “Can I knock on the door?” Hoping the truce would continue, she stepped forward to an unassuming arched door at the bottom of four stone steps and raised a dull iron knocker, rapping three hollow knocks. The dog stood at her side, looking up at her. When no one answered, she reached again, but the knocker pulled from her grasp and the door flew open. Dana gasped.

  28

  THE KILLER HAD toyed with Marshall Cole.

  Logan reached that conclusion as he stood in the gas station bathroom. Reconsidering everything about the crime scene as he drove back to Seattle with the radio off did not change that conclusion. He used the silence to figure out what had bothered him about the crime scene, and the dilemma that Cole’s death presented. Both men who had robbed and killed James Hill were now dead. Neither would provide Logan any answers as to why they had killed Hill, or who had put them up to it, and he was convinced someone had.

  Logan was also convinced that the same person who killed Marshall Cole had killed Laurence King as well, which wasn’t a large leap in logic, given the evidence. There were too many similarities. In each instance, the killer had used a .22-caliber gun that no one heard, fired by a someone no one saw. Both Cole and King were dead before either had time to react. Each shot was accurate and lethal. One bullet.

  Their killer was no run-of-the-mill bookie or drug dealer whom King or Cole had pissed off. Nobody at the Emerald Inn or at the gas station had seen or heard anything, though Cole’s girlfriend was still a possibility. Whoever the killer was, he or she had managed to get into the hotel room and the gas station bathroom undetected.

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nbsp; And yet the killer had still toyed with Marshall Cole.

  There were other possible conclusions. The killer could have been being cautious, as Murphy had suggested, but that led to the same conclusion: He knew Cole was armed. And the person who would have known that was the person Cole had shot at with the 9mm at the Emerald Inn Motel.

  But Logan didn’t think the killer was being cautious. Cole had placed the gun on the back of the toilet and sat reading the sports page—a man’s God-given right, as Murphy had said. That meant Cole wasn’t concerned that he’d been followed. He wasn’t worried that the person who walked into the bathroom and sat in the stall next to him was his killer. He was content to catch up on the latest scores, to read about his favorite sports teams. That meant two things. Cole had no idea he’d been followed—the killer was that good, and Cole hadn’t given the killer any indication that he was concerned. If that were also true, then the killer, who had followed Cole, knew Cole was a sitting duck, and could have just walked into the bathroom, yanked open the stall door, and shot Cole in the head. But he hadn’t. It also didn’t appear the killer had tortured or tormented Cole. He had just toyed with him like a cat does with a mouse, let him live long enough to think he might survive. Then he had killed him.

  The killer’s motivation had not been robbery; he had not taken money or wallets or jewelry. And it was not out of concern that Cole had been going to the police. He’d been running, apparently to Idaho, where he had relatives. He got on the road sometime early that morning, and a couple hours into the drive, he needed a bathroom, the car needed gas, and the woman had a change of heart. The fact that the killer went to considerable trouble to hunt down and kill a man clearly on the run meant he had been determined to kill Cole from the start. If not for money, then because Cole knew something; something the killer considered a danger, something related to the burglary at James Hill’s flat. It explained Cole’s bloody clothes being dug up, and Hill’s watch being left in plain sight at the motel. The killer wanted it known that Cole and King had killed James Hill, but he did not want anyone to know who had hired them to rob the house in the first place. Those thoughts floated in Michael Logan’s head along with another. In his experience, the only plausible reason why the killer had toyed with Marshall Cole was because the person gained some pleasure from it. And people who enjoyed killing usually kept on killing.

  29

  DANA STUMBLED BACKWARD. The bottom step hit the back of her calf, and she nearly fell over but managed to regain her balance. A man in a metal hood stood in the doorway, a flame emanating from a spear held in his gloved hand.

  “Freud!” The voice echoed hollow, like a shout into a metal drum. Then the blue flame extinguished with a pop, and the gloved hand flipped the lid of the welder’s hood to reveal the sweat-stained face and salt-and-pepper beard of a dark-skinned man. He disregarded Dana, focusing his glare on the dog. “No visitors when I am working, Freud. No visitors.”

  The dog sauntered past him, unrepentant at the apparent breakdown in the security system. The man eyed the dog, then turned his attention to Dana. “Who are you?” He spoke with an English accent, his voice deep and full.

  “Dana Hill,” she said, uncertain what to add.

  William Welles’s face knitted. He seemed to consider her intently. Dana was certain from his annoyed expression that he would slam shut the door. But he took a breath, and his features softened, as did his tone. “Well… Freud seems to regard you with interest.” Saying nothing more, he turned and walked back inside his home, leaving the front door open for Dana to follow.

  Each room resembled an igloo. The ceilings were concave, with thick wood beams riveted to posts by square black bolts and metal plates that shaped the walls like the skeletal structure inside an animal. There appeared to be no order to the home—pieces of furniture arranged amid sheets of metal, piles of metal strips, and sculptures. And yet, in some mystical manner, the rooms appeared to blend together, unrestricted by wooden studs and Sheetrocked walls. The large wings of a sculpted eagle framed an entryway that led to a sitting area with bench seats and pillows. It flowed to a table with chairs, which flowed to a workshop at the back of the home. The jewelry store owner had told Dana that Welles’s genius was no two people saw precisely the same image in his work. As with his sculptures, Welles had put together his home with just the bare essentials, preferring to allow the imagination to fill in the empty spaces. Or perhaps he didn’t care. Perhaps anything beyond the essentials was unimportant to him.

  Welles removed the welder’s hood and gloves and placed them on a thick wooden table. He hung his apron on a wall peg. As he peeled off his armored suit, he revealed himself to be a gnome of a man, much like his home—short and round. Not over five feet tall, he had a rim of hair encircling his head like a monk. It continued down his neck, disappearing below the collar of his sweat-stained white T-shirt. He had large ears and deep-set eyes that looked out from beneath thick eyebrows. The salt-and-pepper beard covered much of his face. Welles shuffled about the floor as if trying to keep his feet from slipping out of oversize slippers. His arms and legs seemed too short even for his small body, though he had no difficulty lifting a large black kettle. He filled it from a crude piece of galvanized pipe protruding through the stucco wall and placed it on a burner of a cast-iron potbellied stove that vented through a pipe to the roof. Then he bent to unlatch a door and shoved two pieces of wood into the fire, stoking the flames by stepping three times on a billow in the floor.

  On a nearby table lay an elaborate scattering of metal strips. Welles had apparently been assembling them when Dana interrupted him. The sculpture looked to Dana like some sort of bridge spanning jagged metal—perhaps meant to signify rocks or waves. She studied the piece for a moment, then closed her eyes. She saw the image of a bridge, though she did not get the feeling that it was suspended over water. There was something disturbing about it, but further concentration revealed nothing more. She opened her eyes, concluding that the sculpture was a work in progress, perhaps a scale-size model of a piece to be constructed and too early in the process for the imagination to complete.

  Welles readied two porcelain cups while waiting for the water in the kettle to boil, content not to speak or to ask her more questions about the purpose of her visit. Dana turned toward a picture window that faced the ocean—drawn to it, as to the light at the end of the tunnel in his yard. As she approached, she had the uneasy desire to continue right through it and step into the blue sky. She had to close her eyes to fight the feeling of vertigo.

  Thwack.

  The sound startled her. She turned to see a meat cleaver embedded in the wooden block and a lemon split in half.

  “Lemon?” Welles’s voice remained deep but gentle. He peered at her over the bottom half of bifocal glasses.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you take lemon in your tea?” he asked with the politeness of a British gentleman.

  “Yes, thank you.” She walked back toward him. “Your home is amazing. The view is beautiful. Did you design it?”

  “One bag or two?” Welles looked up at her. “Your tea. One bag or two?”

  “One,” Dana said.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He shook his head and spoke as if to himself. “I shall never understand you Americans and your tea.” To her, he gestured with his hand. “Please, be comfortable.”

  Dana sat on the edge of a bench seat covered in thick blankets. When the kettle on the stove hummed like the whistle of a steam engine, Welles slipped his hand inside the welding glove and lifted the kettle from the stove, deftly pouring the two cups. He added a slice of lemon to each, placed the cups on saucers, and put two cubes of sugar and cream in his own cup, hesitated, then dropped a cube in the other. He walked to where Dana sat and handed her the cup. “Tea without sugar is simply not civilized,” he said.

  She noticed that his hands were meaty paws and stumpy fingers twice the diameter of h
er own. She wondered how such hands could have created jewelry so delicate and fragile, so beautiful. Welles shuffled away from her into the living portion of the structure. When she realized he was not coming back, Dana stood and followed. She found him sitting in a rocking chair with his back to the view. He stared at the floor and sipped from the edge of the cup. She sat on a stool across from him and noticed that the scattered furniture had actually been arranged to accommodate an intimate conversation. She sipped her tea, a blend she was certain she had never tasted. Sweet, it had a hint of licorice that the lemon slice did not completely conceal.

  “It’s very good. Thank you.”

  “You are most welcome.”

  “May I ask the brand?”

  “My own.” Welles took another sip.

  Dana looked at the sculptures in the room. Each was unique and intriguing in its own way, and some were more easily identifiable than others—an eagle in flight, two whales side by side, a school of fish.

  “I don’t get many visitors. I have a rum cake.”

  “I’m not hungry, but thank you. I’m sorry to disturb your work.”

  “You have come a long way to disturb my work. A cup of tea is the least that I can offer.”

  “From Seattle, Washington, actually.”

  “Hmm.”

  She cleared her throat. “And the tea is more than enough. I do apologize for dropping in unannounced.”