Snakes and Ladders Page 10
Millard slipped into a seat two stools down from Castillo. He didn’t like sitting so close, but the room was buzzing, and it was the only way he’d hear anything if Castillo talked with the bartender or another patron.
Millard pulled out his phone. He missed the days when an open newspaper provided all the excuse you needed to sit and listen to a target—it not only gave him the appearance of being engrossed in something other than his actual focus, but also hid his face—but he was savvy enough to realize that these days a man with an open newspaper was an attention-getting sight.
He ordered a Corona. The bartender brought him the beer, then returned to Castillo. The conversation between the two of them wasn’t worth the price of the beer—a lot of talk about sports and a little conversation about women, mainly the bartender’s girlfriend. Millard had a hopeful moment when the bartender asked Castillo about his clients, but the answer he got was vague, which seemed to be what the bartender expected.
After Castillo had finished the bourbon, he ordered a burger and a beer and, defying convention, pulled a paperback from his jacket pocket. Millard angled his phone and snapped a picture over his elbow, then zoomed in to see the title: The Monkey Wrench Gang. Millard tapped the name into his phone and perused the Wikipedia entry.
The restaurant got louder, and the bartender no longer had time to chat with Castillo, but Millard had gotten enough. He paid his tab and stepped into the cool Arizona evening. He wandered up and down the street for half a block on either side of the restaurant, looking in windows of shops that were mostly closed, keeping an eye on the restaurant entrance.
Half an hour later, Castillo emerged and turned right. Millard followed. Castillo turned right off the main drag, and then right again onto a residential street. Earlier that day, Castillo had arrived at his office on foot, so Millard had spent some time researching where he might live that would be within walking distance. The apartment options were limited and the houses were pricey. If Castillo lived in Uptown Sedona, maybe psychic counseling paid better than Millard thought.
Castillo turned in at a driveway halfway down the street. Millard stopped short of the driveway and waited for lights to go on in the house, but none did. After a minute he strolled by the house and glanced up the driveway. From that vantage point, he could see lights from a structure behind the house, and Millard realized that Castillo had gone to a small, detached casita behind the main house, next to which a dark blue Ford Ranger stepside was parked.
A few minutes later, Millard heard the faint sounds of music—Rush’s Subdivisions—coming from the casita. He walked up the driveway, keeping near the shadows cast by the red-tipped leaves of the hedge that separated it from the neighbor’s yard, and knelt beside the pickup. He pulled a disc-shaped object from his pocket and reached into the wheel well, where it snapped on with a dull, metallic thunk.
Gotta love technology, he thought as he retreated down the driveway. One of those trackers on Castillo’s truck and one on McNally’s SUV made it possible for him to keep tabs on both of them without Mortensen having to send a second person out to Arizona. And who would she send? He couldn’t see Pieda in the role.
With Castillo apparently in for the night, and with Millard being able to track his location if he were to go anywhere not within walking distance of the casita, Millard strolled back to the Cowboy Club. Castillo’s burger had looked pretty tasty.
He got a table, not wanting the bartender to note his return, and placed his order. Ballard had met twice with this guy who styled himself a “psychic counselor.” It seemed like a ploy to fleece tourists of their vacation dollars, but the question of whether the guy was a fraud was less important than whether Ballard thought she was getting anything out of his spiel. Castillo’s brochure claimed he could tap into his client’s powers to help them achieve their dreams. He knew what Ballard’s power was. What was her dream?
The girl didn’t fit anyone’s picture of revenge killer, but Millard had cleaned up after the death of one of her victims—Anton Rossi—and was in the process of cleaning up after another—Gerard Bonnay. Millard didn’t want to be within Ballard’s striking distance when he took her out. And he wanted to do that soon, before she spent much more time with her new counselor, fraud or not.
25
Lizzy was lying on the couch in the living room reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, recommended by Uncle Owen. She had noticed that her home schooling assignments changed dramatically whenever a new adult took charge of the curriculum. She had been focusing over the last couple of weeks on Oliver Sacks and Daniel Pink, switching it up with the history of furniture design and, by her own choice, online Spanish courses.
Owen stood up from his de facto desk—the kitchen table—and stretched. “I’m making grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, want one?”
Lizzy glanced at the time on her phone and jumped up. “No, I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late.”
“Yoga?”
“Yup.”
“On an empty stomach?”
“You can’t do yoga if you have a big belly of food,” she said. She grabbed her knapsack, ran down the steps to her bike, and pointed it toward Sedona.
It was Lizzy’s third session with Philip in three days. The advance from Owen wasn’t going to last long at this rate, but she was finding the experience of sharing her story with someone who could be considered an impartial third party to be cathartic … and, to be honest, somewhat thrilling.
She switched her phone off as she entered the waiting room. Philip emerged from the back room.
“I had an idea for something a little different today,” he said. “If part of what we’re supposed to be doing is figuring out how you can control yourself around other people, it’s probably not so useful for us to be sitting in my office for all our sessions.”
“Where would we go?”
“Anywhere there are people.”
Lizzy looked uncomfortable.
“What’s the matter? Worried that you’ll fly into a rage if someone cuts in front of you in line at Starbucks?”
“No, not that so much. But Uncle Owen doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Why haven’t you told him?”
“He’s a scientist. He’d be skeptical.”
“But he believes that you can do what you can, right? Is he skeptical about that?”
“I think he was at first, when I was little, but then evidence built up that even he couldn’t ignore. But he’s still a scientist first. He wants to find a scientific solution to the problem.”
“We’ll see if we can make some progress on the problem in our own unscientific way,” he said with a wry smile, “and then you can decide if you want to bring him up to date.” He thought for a moment. “Does he go shopping? Not grocery shopping, but ‘ladies who lunch’-type shopping?”
“Not usually. He does like to go to lunch, but usually when I’m with him.”
“Then I know just the place we can go. And there are lots of nooks and crannies if he suddenly gets the shopping urge and we need to slip away from him.”
They got in Philip’s pickup truck and drove to a high-end shopping area further south on Oak Creek. Philip parked in one of the small, tree-shaded parking areas.
“Phone off?” he asked.
“Yup.” She looked around. “What are we going to do?”
“Just wander around, look in shops, get ice cream. Whatever you want.”
Lizzy climbed out of the truck. “There’s not going to be a lot of actual shopping going on because I only brought enough money to pay you.”
“Then the ice cream’s on me.”
Owen noticed Lizzy’s rolled-up yoga mat by the front door. He glanced at his watch. She’d only been gone a little while. She might not notice that she didn’t have the mat until her yoga class started, and if she had to ride her bike all the way back to the house for it, she’d miss most of the class. If he left now, he might be able to get it to her before her class started.
He texted yoga mat is here, i’ll bring it over
A few minutes later, he pulled into a parking space in front of Namaste Yoga and Meditation. He got the mat out of the back seat, went to the door of the yoga studio, and gave it a pull.
Locked.
He stepped back, checked the sign over the door, then gave the door another half-hearted tug.
He knew this was where Lizzy took lessons—he had driven her here before she got her bike. Was she going to another place now?
As he stood there, a brutally fit woman in a form-fitting top and harem pants rounded the corner of the building, sorting through her keys. She looked up and saw him.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“I thought my goddaughter had a class now. She forgot her mat so I brought it over.”
“We don’t have any classes until four o’clock. What’s your goddaughter’s name?”
“Elizabeth Bal—trick.”
“Excuse me?”
Owen coughed delicately. “Patrick. Elizabeth Patrick.”
“Oh, yes, Elizabeth—she’s a sweetheart. When she comes, it’s usually to the four o’clock class.”
“She’s become quite the convert,” said Owen. “Yoga every day now.”
“That’s great to hear she’s practicing outside of class as well.”
“Um,” said Owen, not quite knowing how to respond. “Anyway, I must have misunderstood where she was going today.”
“I’ll mention that you were looking for her if I see her this afternoon.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay—I don’t want her to think I’m hovering.” He laughed weakly.
She laughed too. “You could leave the mat with me if you’d like, but if she shows up without a mat, it’s okay—we have extras she can use.”
“If you have spares, I might as well take this one back home with me.”
“That’s fine,” said the woman. “Namaste.”
“Namaste to you,” said Owen.
As he headed back to the car, an uneasy thought began building in his mind. He got out his phone. There was no response from Lizzy to his earlier text.
He climbed into the car and hit her speed dial. The call rang directly to voicemail.
“Oh, Lizzy,” he groaned, “what are you up to?”
Soon Lizzy was enjoying herself—looking in shop windows at the high-end wares, trying on a lapis ring in a jewelry store. They struck out on ice cream, but got two chais at a boho clothing store. They settled down on a low wall surrounding a lawn on which dozens of graceful metal sculptures rotated lazily in a light breeze.
Lizzy took a sip of her chai. “So, do you always take your clients shopping?”
“Hardly ever,” said Philip breezily. He took a sip of tea. “A lot of my clients are tourists, and I only see them once or twice. Usually they just get intrigued with the idea of a psychic counselor and come in as a lark, but their money spends the same whether they’re serious about it or not.”
“Must be kind of a drag if they’re just doing it as a goof,” said Lizzy.
“It’s not like they’re obnoxious about it, and they generally seem to get something out of it, but I do sometimes feel like it’s a toss-up between me or the Pink Jeep Tours.” He took another sip of his tea. “Didn’t seem like you had much trouble dealing with the people here.”
She shrugged. “It’s a beautiful day, most of the shoppers are probably on vacation, the people who work in the stores were friendly. There wasn’t anything to upset me.” She looked up at the hypnotic movement of the sculptures. “Dad and Uncle Owen used to take me places on the weekends. Restaurants. Museums. Shopping—although not as fancy as this.”
“But it sounds like you led a pretty circumscribed life.”
“Yeah. After Mom and Dad realized what I could do, the only people I had much to do with other than them were Uncle Owen and our housekeeper, Ruby.”
“No school?”
“I was home schooled.”
“No friends your own age?”
Lizzy thought back to Christine, the young woman she had met when she was hiding out in Smoketown. The thought that that brief acquaintance was the only one she could call a friendship with someone near her own age was too pathetic to share with Philip.
“No, not really.”
Philip leaned back against the wall and crossed one ankle over the other. “You know, your situation isn’t all bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“In a lot of ways, your life has been limited by what the people around you tried to do to control the situation. But in other ways, it’s opened up opportunities for you. For example, most seventeen-year-olds wouldn’t have the freedom to walk into the back room of a locked office with someone they didn’t know—especially when that someone just asked them to turn off their cell phone. The biker you encountered on the trail turned out to be just a jerk, but if he had been a rapist, you could have defended yourself.”
“Yeah …” Lizzy said cautiously.
“You could walk the streets of Phoenix or Philadelphia in the middle of the night and unless you encountered someone with a weapon, you’d be fine.” He turned and rested his forearms on the wall, looking out at the rotating sculptures. “I don’t think you can fully appreciate how different that makes you, and how powerful that difference is. You might consider whether your ultimate goal is to create a situation where you never use your ability, which is what I gathered was your goal last time we met, or whether it’s to create a situation where you use your ability only when you want to.”
“I guess so,” she said after a few moments. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Philip pushed himself up from the wall. “Let’s go back to the office. There’s something I want to show you.”
From a balcony fifty yards away, Millard watched Castillo and Ballard talk and sip their drinks. When they were walking, the shopping village was a bitch to tail in—he had almost walked right into them in one of the courtyards when they had doubled back, evidently for their drinks. When they were stationary, though, the buildings provided plenty of second-floor vantage points from which to observe them.
He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of them, texted it to Mortensen, then hit her speed dial.
“Yes?” she answered.
“I just sent you a picture of Ballard and that counselor she’s seeing.”
“I’ve got it,” said Mortensen. “In what sense is she ‘seeing’ him?”
“Just professionally, as far as I can tell. This is their third meeting—twice in his office, once in this fancy shopping center.”
“He’s taking her out and, it appears, is having coffee with her, but you don’t think it’s gone beyond professional?” Millard began to bristle at the question, then realized that Mortensen was really asking.
“I don’t think so. He’s got to be almost twice her age—probably early thirties. I realize that doesn’t mean much, but I only saw him touch her once, to get her attention to point out a bird in a tree. If I had to guess by the body language, I’d say that she has a little crush on him, but that it’s all business on his side.”
“Just as well,” said Mortensen. “A romantic entanglement is an added complication we don’t want to deal with. Castillo’s more likely to shrug off an accident involving a client than a girlfriend. Does McNally go with her to see this counselor?”
“No. He might not know—being a medical doctor, maybe he wouldn’t be so thrilled about his goddaughter going to see someone who looks like a New Age huckster.”
“Do you have a plan for how to take care of them?”
“I’m still trying to figure out a good way to make it look like an accident. I’ve got the trackers on Castillo and McNally’s vehicles, so none of them are going anywhere without me knowing about it. I think that as long as they’re not showing signs of doing anything more proactive than taking yoga lessons and visiting psychics, we don’t have to be in a big rush.”
; After a pause, Mortensen said, “I agree with not hurrying to action unnecessarily, but I don’t want to wait long, especially if Ballard is striking up a friendship—romantic or otherwise—with a local.”
“It won’t take long—another day or two and I’ll have a plan.”
“No longer than that.”
“Gotta go,” he said. Ballard had hopped off the wall and she and Castillo were walking toward the parking lot. “They’re leaving and I want to keep an eye on them.”
“But with the tracker you can tell where they go without having to follow them,” said Mortensen.
“It’s not where they’re going that interests me,” said Millard. “It’s what they do when they get there.”
He ended the call, slipped the phone in his pocket, and jogged toward the parking lot.
Philip drove them back to the office. He locked the door behind them, leaving the Closed sign in the window, and led her to the back room.
He turned a knob on the light switch and a spotlight came up on the painting on the back wall, which had always been in shadow during Lizzy’s previous visits. The grid of squares on the antique paper contained delicately inked characters, like an exotic periodic table. At the top corners were multiarmed men, the one on the left riding what looked like an antelope, the one on the right riding a multiheaded horse. On top of the large grid was a smaller grid, looking like the cross section of a tiny castle, each room of the castle occupied by one or two seated figures. She could now see that the forms stretching across the large grid were writhing black snakes.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Did you ever play Chutes and Ladders when you were little?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a silly game, but it’s based on an ancient game called Snakes and Ladders.” He nodded toward the painting. “That game was meant to teach a morality lesson—that a person’s virtues, the ladders, help them through their life journey, and their vices, the snakes, hinder them.”