Irene stared off to a spot on the floor, lost in the meaning of it all.
“You still with me?” Paul asked.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure. Just getting a headache.”
He snorted. “Yeah, well, tape it up, because this gets better. Remember Tony Bernard? The guy at the motel?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Okay, well, listen to this. He was the only son of a couple of flower children. Real doper types, who dragged baby Tony through all kinds of hippie shit at Berkeley, and later got his picture in the Chicago Tribune as a-and I quote-‘young rioter’ during the Democratic convention back in ’68.”
She looked confused. “I don’t get it.”
“Sure you do. What better bio to hang a ‘crazy environmentalist’ tag on? He was the one who was supposed to go down for the whole thing, not the Donovans. They just got tagged because they had the poor taste to survive it all. With them alive, Frankel had no choice but to kill Bernard. Whatever holes the sudden change left in his plan, he just covered over with a little hysteria.”
Irene’s eyes got wider, and she took a deep breath. “Holy shit,” she said.
“The holiest,” Paul cheered, still at a whisper. “Here we were worried about career damage control, and instead, we strike gold!”
Irene shot him a glare.
“What?”
“You’re nuts,” she declared. “We don’t have squat here.”
“Bullshit.”
She realized she’d made him defensive, and she waved it off. “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s a good case, and I think we’ve found the answer, but Frankel’s not just going to cave. Christ, he’s got a confession and a truckload of circumstantial evidence. Certainly as much circumstantial evidence as we have.”
Paul shrugged. “Reasonable doubt, right?”
She laughed. “Oh, yeah, this is great news for the Donovans. They’re home free, if we ever get them to trial. But you were talking about your career. If we can’t put Frankel away, then all we’ll do is set the Donovans free and shoot ourselves in the feet.”
Paul opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. “Shit.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Melissa Thomas loved her big old house. She just wished she had the money and time to take care of it the way her mother and father had. The house and its surrounding six and a half acres of woods were her parents’ legacy for their only child. And their curse. Her parents had been dead nearly ten years now, yet Melissa still couldn’t afford to replace the furniture she’d known as a child. Wisely invested, her inheritance would spin off enough cash to pay the property taxes every year, with enough left over for three college educations. But that defined the limit of the Thomas family’s solvency.
Still, the place was home for her; the repository for all her good memories. And, more recently, for her bad ones as well. Although solidly built at a time when carpenters took pride in their work, the place was beginning to show serious signs of age. The roof needed replacing, the walls screamed for a coat of paint, and the soil had begun to erode away from the foundation out front. It was a real worry. They couldn’t afford to have the work done by a contractor, and Nick was worthless with tools. He couldn’t drive a nail if it had tires and a steering wheel. So the repairs went undone, waiting for that time when they’d find themselves with a few dollars they didn’t already owe to someone else. Nick’s solution was just to sell the place. Typical. Address a temporary problem with a permanent solution. Kill a fly with a shotgun.
Ticked off as she was about Nick’s being gone at the precise time she most needed his help-she’d received twelve more Christmas orders just this morning-she had to admit that it was kind of peaceful, just her and the kids. At one level, that’s all she ever really wanted out of a marriage, anyway. And if this job interview could somehow jump-start his dead career, then maybe it would be good for all of them. This whole business with the Donovans in the news made her nervous, though. If Nick were anyone but his spineless self, she might even have been worried.
The pot on her wheel was giving her fits. The Aztec Urn, as it was called in the catalog, had a long fluted neck that ordinarily would have been the simplest thing in the world to fashion, yet for some reason she couldn’t get the proportions right. And this was her third try.
“Darn it!” She stopped the wheel and hammered the misshapen pot back into a lump of red clay with the palm of her hand. What she needed was a break, but she knew better than to take one. Not just yet. Once this one was molded, she’d have a full load to stick in the kiln, and then she’d reward herself with a late lunch. She should have grabbed a bite when she fed Lauren at noon, but she hadn’t been hungry.
Come to think of it, Lauren hadn’t made a peep in a long time. Probably still watching her Lion King video. Melissa knew her daughter needed more stimulation, but she just didn’t have time to be a mommy anymore. Next year, though, her baby would start school, and everything would work out just fine.
Maybe I’m trying too hard, she thought as she started up the wheel again. That was often the root of her creativity problems. Sometimes she’d get so tense about doing it “right” that she’d lose the feel for the clay. She tried closing her eyes this time. The tiny foam earphones on her head filled her mind with the peace of Copeland’s Quiet City, and as the haunting sounds of the solo trumpet ebbed and flowed with the melody, the base of the pot magically formed in her hands.
A shadow fell across Melissa’s face, and her eyes snapped open. A man she’d never seen before was standing in the archway that separated her studio from the kitchen. He held a package of some sort in his arms. In the green-filtered light cast by the tinted jalousie windows, the package looked almost human. A doll maybe? And it was dressed in the same outfit Lauren had been wearing.
Melissa screamed.
Nick slid the telephone receiver back into its clamp and thrust a hand angrily through his hair. “Dammit!” He looked at his watch. “It’s after two, for Christ’s sake. I thought these planes were supposed to be fast!” Under the circumstances, the Gulfstream could have been rocketing through Mach 3 and it still wouldn’t have been enough.
“Stay off the phone,” Thorne growled for the thousandth time. “Every one of those calls is like a trail of bread crumbs for the feds.”
Nick responded with an angry glare. At that moment, reinforcements from the FBI didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
“She could just be out of the house, you know,” Jake offered.
Nick shook his head. “No chance. She’s buried in catalog orders. She wouldn’t leave the house if it was on fire.” He sat back down in the overstuffed captain’s chair and rested his forearms on his knees. “She does this all the time when she’s really busy. She just turns off the phones. We’ve got one of those answering services through the phone company, and she just checks the messages at the end of the day. Drives me nuts. Suppose one of the kids was sick at school or something, you know?”
“They have a place to go, though, right?” Jake asked. “I mean, once you get word to them, they can leave right away?”
Nick opened his mouth to answer but closed it. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I guess they’ll just stay in a hotel.”
“Make sure they pay with cash,” Thorne warned. “If we miss this guy, he’s gonna be pissed. The last thing you want is another electronic trail.”
Nick’s features sagged. “I don’t know that I have that kind of cash.”
“Don’t worry,” Jake said. He patted the ever-present gym bags. “I’ve got you covered there.”
A speaker popped overhead, and the pilot asked everyone to return to their seats and to fasten their seat belts. They’d be on the ground in about ten minutes. Their destination was the Manassas Regional Airport, a discreet commercial airstrip in the far-west Virginia suburbs of Washington; large enough to accept corporate jets yet small enough to allow passengers to remain anonymous.