“No, in Nevada. Illegitimate.”
“A son?” Dillon asked.
“I don’t know, the kid just disappears. But guess who the mother’s family line goes back to?” Brent asked him.
“Who?”
“Frank Varny. Bizarre, huh? Landon goes back to Varny himself. So he had an affair with a woman to whom he was distantly related.”
Dillon finally remembered where he had seen the woman in the tapes before, and why she had looked familiar.
“It was a girl,” Dillon said, cursing his own stupidity. He’d been led around by the nose like an idiot. “Get back over to the home and get Jessy and Nikki. And Timothy, too. I’m afraid something is going down right now. I’m going to call Cheever back and get out to the morgue. Brent, I’m scared as hell. Get over there quickly. Please.”
When Jessy came to, her head was killing her. It took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t been dreaming, that Sandra really had shoved her into the car and abducted her.
“Sandra, what the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded, trying to sit up, then failing in the face of the pain.
“Reggie!” Sandra cried.
“Reggie?” Jessy said, baffled.
“They couldn’t get to you because you were with Dillon, so they kidnapped Reggie and told me to get you. They’re waiting in Indigo, and if I don’t hand you over to them in half an hour, they’re going to kill Reggie.”
Jessy swallowed hard. She understood, but she had to find a way to talk Sandra into doing the smart thing. The right thing.
“Did you call the cops?” she asked.
“I can’t call the cops!” Sandra cried hysterically. “They’ll kill her, don’t you understand? She’s nothing to them. Once they have you, they’ll let Reggie go. And they swore they wouldn’t hurt you, either. They just want you as leverage so they can get Dillon to tell them where the gold is.”
“That’s insane. Dillon doesn’t know where the gold is.”
“They think he does.”
Jessy’s head was spinning. Why would anyone think Dillon knew where the gold was? She thought back to Dillon’s theory about the connection between past and present, and then she remembered Timothy’s words. They are assembling. Did someone believe that by putting together the descendants of those who had died and recreating the bloodbath, that would somehow reveal the location of the gold? That Dillon would somehow channel his ancestor’s memory of the past and lead them straight to the treasure?
Jessy blinked, trying hard to clear her head and make sense of what was going on. “Have you got any aspirin or anything up there? You really hurt me—you bitch.”
She was almost sorry for the last when she saw the tears streaming down Sandra’s cheeks.
“I’m sorry, but I had to,” Sandra said.
“Sandra, we have to tell the police what’s going on.”
“I don’t trust the police!” Sandra insisted vehemently.
“Why?”
“Cheever took me home last night. He knows where I live,” Sandra said. “How can I be sure he didn’t tell them where to find Reggie?”
“But…Sandra, you’re listed in the phone book, anyone could have found you,” Jessy protested.
“Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because they said that if they saw the police, they’d kill her.”
“Calm down and tell me about the whole thing,” Jessy said, knowing even as she spoke that she was asking the impossible. Calm down? These people had already killed three times. What would Reggie’s life matter to them?
Sandra drew a long shaky breath. “I went to the grocery store. When I came back, I could tell Reggie had come from school because—I found her knapsack. Then I got the phone call.”
“Was it from a man or a woman?”
“I don’t know! They used one of those things that disguise your voice.”
“Are you sure they really have Reggie? That they’re not bluffing?”
Sandra started sobbing even harder. “They put her on the phone. She was crying.”
“Okay, so they have Reggie,” she agreed. “But, Sandra, we have to call the police. Don’t you see? Even once they have me, they won’t let Reggie go. They can’t. She knows too much. They’ll kill all of us. Indigo’s a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. If you don’t trust Cheever, we can call the state police.”
“We can’t call the police,” Sandra said.
“Why?”
“I forgot my cell phone again.”
Dillon put through a call to Tarleton’s cell, but the M.E. didn’t pick up. He called the main number at the morgue, figuring Doug might be wrist deep in a corpse and unable to pick up his phone. Instead, he discovered that Tarleton was out but due back shortly, and Sarah Clay had taken the afternoon off.
The minute he hung up, his phone rang.
“Dillon, it’s Brent. Jessy is gone, and so are Timothy and Ringo. Nikki’s frantic. That orderly, Jimmy, said Jessy left with her friend Sandra.”
“Sandra?” Dillon said incredulously.
“That’s what the man said.”
“Call the cops—I’m on my way out there,” Dillon said, pulling a U-turn and ignoring the horns blaring at him.
“Where’s ‘there’?” Brent said.
“Indigo.”
It had been a hell of a long time since Timothy had driven, but it really was like riding a bike. He was sorry that he’d sneaked out and left without them, but his time was coming to a close. He’d had a long full life, and he was comfortable with whatever came his way.
Billie Tiger had warned him that it was happening, that Jessy was in danger, and Timothy had known then that he had to get to Indigo. If it was going to play out again, it was going to do so with him, not with Jessy.
Driving was fun. He would never have predicted that an ambulance could be so much fun to drive—or that it could go so fast. It was good to be on the road. They would come after him soon enough, the minute they realized they had a vehicle missing.
Before long he could make out the town of Indigo just ahead, though it was so weatherworn it blended right into the desert, like a mirage.
He heard a voice in his mind and recognized it as Billie Tiger’s. Billie warned him not to take the main road all the way into town and not to leave the ambulance where it would be seen—although if anyone was looking, they would have to see him. You couldn’t hide something as big as an ambulance in the vast flat expanse of the Nevada desert.
He heard an annoying clinking sound. It had been plaguing him for the entire trip, and sounded like the constant jingle of a pair of old spurs.
It was time to slow down if he was going to make a quiet entry this way.
He veered off the road, and the ambulance shuddered across the uneven ground.
If they were looking, they would definitely see him.
But they probably weren’t looking, he thought as he pulled up to the rear of the buildings on Main Street and was surprised to see that their vehicles were all parked back here, too. Three of them, so far.
They were assembling.
Sandra finally slowed the car as they neared the town; if she hadn’t, Jessy thought dryly, they would have shot right through it.
Sandra brought the car to a halt in the middle of Main Street and leaped out, screaming her daughter’s name.
Jessy was stunned when a woman came out of the building whose peeling sign identified it as a bank.
“You made it!” she cried cheerfully.
“Where’s my daughter?” Sandra demanded. “Jessy is here. Now where’s my daughter?”
Sandra started to rush the woman in a frenzy, but Jessy dragged her back when she saw that the woman was holding a small gun. Despite everything, she wasn’t going to let Sandra get herself killed.
“Slow down,” the woman said to Sandra, all the while looking Jessy up and down. “So you’re Jessy Sparhawk.”
“Yes—who are you?” Jessy asked.
“Sarah Clay,” the woman told her.
The name meant nothing to her.
“Who the hell is behind this?” Jessy demanded. “Emil Landon?”
Sarah started to laugh. “Emil Landon? The son of a bitch who won’t accept me as his child? Who claims my mother fooled around with so many people that half of Las Vegas could be my father? The guy who won’t take a paternity test?”
“Emil Landon is your father?” Jessy said in shock.
“Where’s my daughter?” Sandra demanded.
“Mom!” The cry came from the bank. Reggie came out then. She would have run, except that she was being held.
By Hugo Blythe.
He was followed out of the bank by Darrell Frye.
“Hiya, Jessy,” he said.
She was too dumbfounded to say anything, and she felt like throwing up.
“Won’t you let my daughter go now—please?” Sandra begged.
“Go to Mommy, kid,” Blythe said, letting go of Reggie.
Reggie seemed to fly off the raised sidewalk and down to her mother. Sobbing, Sandra wrapped her into her arms.
“Now, if you will kindly move this way…” Sarah Clay said to Jessy.
“Who the hell are you?” Jessy demanded.
“I told you, I’m Sarah Clay,” the woman said, frowning. “Hasn’t Dillon ever mentioned me?”
“No, he hasn’t,” Jessy said, surprised that the fact seemed to upset the other woman.
“Well, then, he’s just being a man,” Sarah said. “I mean, if he’s got a thing going with you, he wouldn’t mention the fact that he’s got a thing for me, too.”
It had to be a lie, Jessy thought, but she felt her temper soaring nonetheless. She forced herself to rein it in and looked at the woman with as much contempt as she could summon. “Frankly, I just think he’s never thought of you as anyone important—or sexy, for that matter.”