God love them, but some of these blue bloods were old enough to have come over on the boat itself.
Her mind wasn’t on this ballroom at the Four Seasons, however. Or the man in front of her who was talking to her about . . . What was this party for? The MFA or the ballet?
She glanced across at the placards that had been set up. Reproductions of Degas. Which didn’t necessarily help answer that one: All those fuzzy tutus could have fit into either category.
As the bow tie in front of her kept chatting away, she was not tracking. Her mind was stuck back in that hallway at the courthouse . . . when she’d turned around from the elevators and found herself alone.
She’d never even heard Isaac move, much less leave. One moment he was behind her; the next there was nothing but air where he’d been. How someone that size could pull off a disappearance like that was astounding.
Of course, it hadn’t taken a genius to figure that he’d gone out the back stairwell—so she’d punched through the fire door and started after him, taking her high heels off and jogging down in her stocking feet. She went all the way to the bottom of the stairs, pushed out of the exit, and glanced over at a guy who was lighting up a cigarette. When she’d asked him if he’d seen a big man leave, he’d just shrugged, blown a milky white cloud into the air and wandered off.
After she’d put her stilettos back on, she’d gone to the underground parking garage, gotten in her car and driven over to her client’s apartment again. There had been no lights on upstairs, but she hadn’t expected any. The last place someone on the run went was the address they’d given the police.
She’d known her client was a flight risk. What she hadn’t counted on was him being like that smoker’s exhale in the breeze, gone as fast as he had appeared.
Coming back to the present, Grier put her warm chardonnay on the tray of a passing waiter—just as her phone started to vibrate against her hip.
Excusing herself, she ducked out into the hallway. “Hello?”
“Hey, Miz Childe. How you be?”
“Breathlessly waiting for your call, Louie, that’s how.”
“Aw, now that’s sweet, right there. You’re a good woman.” Louie dropped the affable routine and got down to business. “You’re not going to like what I have to tell you.”
Why am I not surprised? she thought. “Let’s get to it, then.”
“He’s a ghost.”
No disagreement there. Still, considering she’d been chatting up her dead brother lately, ghosts could be real. “He looked pretty corporeal to me when I was sitting across the table from him.”
“Well, the Isaac Rothe I was able to locate died about five years ago. Down in Mississippi. He was found dead in a ditch on a cattle farm, and he was nineteen at the time. The newspaper articles I read said he was busted up beyond recognition, but the photo of him while alive that ran with the obit matched the mug shot taken at the police station yesterday night. It’s the same guy.”
“Jesus . . .”
“Not for nuthin’, but the disappear job back then was expensive and extensive. I mean, for him to have lasted this long undercover? Sure, you can do it—this is a big country and all—but you got to be careful, because there are a lot of central databases. He hasn’t been using his own social security number—that is different than the one with the name originally—so it could be part of how he stayed gone. But my sense is, he knows what he’s doing. And he has some serious backing.”
“What kind of serious backing?”
“I’ll give you two initials: U and S.”
“Last name ‘government’?”
“I was going with Uncle Sam, but yup, that fits.”
“I don’t get it, though. If he wanted to stay lost, why did he keep his own name? You buy a new social, usually it comes with a different first and last, doesn’t it?”
“You’d have to ask him about the whys. But first thing comes to my mind—he never expected to be found. And I’ll tell you this . . . I’d be careful around him. That body in that ditch in Mississippi didn’t get there by accident. I’d bet my retainer on the fact that someone killed a white boy who looked enough like him to pass in a closed casket—and guess what: Your client there is still breathing. So that SOB could be a murderer.”
Grier closed her eyes. Great. This just kept getting better: She’d not only bailed out a flight risk who had bolted, but a man who might well have killed somebody and faked his own death.
Polite and gentle my ass, she thought, wondering how in the hell someone like her, who’d passed nineteenth grade summa cum laude, had managed to be so stupid.
At that moment, the crowd parted to reveal Daniel in a tuxedo lounging next to one of those Degas. As he toasted her with a champagne flute, his handsome face was wallpapered in told-you-so.
The dead sonofabitch had a point. Even though he’d passed two years ago, she was still performing a kind of CPR on him: Desperate to bring him back to real life, she was caught up in other people’s dramas, that urge to get in and help sometimes the only thing that kept her going.
“You okay there, girl?”
She gripped her cell phone harder and wondered what the PI would say if he knew she was staring into the all-knowing eyes of her deceased sibling. “Not really, Louie.”
“He snow you?”
“I snowed myself.”
“Well, I got one other piece of info for you—although I’m not sure I want to give it over. Sounds like you’re in too deep already.”
Bracing herself, she muttered, “Tell me. I might as well know all of it.”
CHAPTER 8
North Lawn, Heaven
Up high above the earth, in the celestial realm, the archangel Nigel strode over cropped green grass, hands clasped behind his back, head down, eyes straight ahead. His croquet whites had not been put to proper use, his failure to concentrate rendering him a pitiful contestant against the archangel Colin’s prodigious skills with a mallet.
Indeed, Nigel’s balls had been rolling thither and yon, going everywhere except through the wickets.
Eventually, he’d given up the pretense. There was no training his mind upon aught save what irritated him so, and therefore he was useless but for ambulation and rumination.
Damn it, rules needed to be followed. That was why in contests of wit and wiles they were agreed upon before play began—so there were no questions or errors due to misinterpretation in the midst of the game. Verily, he had always believed that a fair contest required two things: well-matched opponents and well-defined parameters.
And in the case at hand, namely that of the future of mankind, the first criterion was met rather squarely. His side and the demon Devina’s were equal in strengths, weaknesses, and focus.
Most particularly the focus part, as both “teams” knew well how high the stakes were: The very future of the world below hung in the balance, the great Creator’s patience having been tried over a protracted, inconclusive course of conflict between good and evil on the planet below. Mere weeks ago, it had been declared from on high that there would be seven final opportunities to prevail—and upon a simple majority of them, dominion would be won over not only the physical world but the bucolic heavens and the fiery depths of Hell.
Nigel was in charge of the “good” side. Devina captained the “bad.”
And that scurrilous demon was cheating.
The rules of the game provided that Nigel and Devina were to choose the souls “in play” and then sit back and watch Jim Heron interact and steer the course of events such that the resolution was either redemption or condemnation.
Seven chances. And the first one had been resolved in Nigel’s favor.
The next six were to be conducted in the true arena. And in the course of events, Nigel and Devina were allowed a certain amount of “coaching”: As Nigel had won the coin toss, so he had been permitted to approach Jim first—and for parity to be preserved, Devina had been likewise allowed to interact with the man. But now they were supposed to be off the field and on the sidelines for the most part, with interaction limited to the occasional time-out and the end-of-match recap by whoever’s side won.