The room was lit only by a small table lamp in the corner. Already there were a half-dozen flower baskets on the window credenza. Cynthia was pretty, slightly plump, but Latham bet that bothered her more than anyone else.
“Ms. Hostetler, my name is Charlie Latham, and this is Paul Randal. We’re with the FBI. How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” she said fuzzily. “Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s on his way. Do you feel up to talking to us?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you remember anything about the accident?”
Cynthia shook her head. “We were almost on the ground, then there was a loud boom, and I looked over, y’know, across the aisle, and there it was.”
“What?”
“The hole, and the ground going by really fast. There was a flash, too, and then heat.” She bit her lip and her eyes welled with tears. “Those people, they… they were just gone, their seats and everything.” She started crying. “Are they dead?”
“Yes.”
“What was it, what happened?”
“A bomb.”
Latham wasn’t sure how to proceed. He had a guess about where his questions would lead; if he were right, it would mean more pain for her. On the other hand, once her father arrived, their access to her might disappear.
“Cynthia, I want you to listen to me: You haven’t done anything wrong, okay? You’re not in trouble. Do you understand?”
“Yes….”
“We think the bomb came from your bag.”
She stared at him. “What? No, no… that can’t be….”
“We need to know—”
“I didn’t…” She broke into tears again. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Cynthia, your bag was leather, right, green-checkered leather?”
“Y-y-yes. It was new.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It was a gift.”
“From who?” Latham steeled himself.
“From a friend. A man I met on vacation, in Jamaica.”
Son of a bitch. “What was his name?”
“Ricardo.”
“Ricardo what?”
“I don’t… I can’t remember. He was Italian. He’s coming to visit me in a few days.”
“Describe him for me.”
She did so, but the image was vague. Latham was unsurprised; these people knew how to pick their targets.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What’s going on? What are you saying?”
“Cynthia, I’m sorry. We think it came from him.”
“What?”
“The bomb. We believe he may have planted it.”
“No, no, he wouldn’t. He said he loved me. He… Oh, God.”
She curled herself into a ball and began sobbing. Latham squeezed her arm and pulled the doctor toward the door. “You have someone who can stay with her?” Latham whispered.
“You think she might hurt herself?”
Latham shrugged. What the hell do you think, Doc? he thought. The man of her dreams lied to her, betrayed her, then used her to kill five people. Yes, I think she might want to hurt herself.
Latham said, “She’s going to need help, Doctor. Lots of it.”
8
Following Butcher’s orders, Tanner loitered about, sunbathing and drinking Alcapulcos, neither of which he minded, but he quickly grew restless. He wanted to either jump into the mystery of Ohira’s murder or be done with it.
The previous night Camille had left him a message saying her business in Tokyo was taking longer than she anticipated, but she would be returning in a day or so. She was looking forward to dinner. In spite of himself, Tanner was, too.
Lurking in the back of his mind, however, was a hesitancy to get involved with her or with anyone else for that matter. It was a familiar feeling, one with which he had made a shaky truce after Elle’s death. There had been other women since her, but nothing of any permanence. He’d never been a fan of the “better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all” theory. As far as he was concerned, the jury was still out.
He’d been at Holystone a year when Elle died. Dutcher had pushed him to go see a counselor. Tanner balked, so Dutcher made it easy. “Go. You’re on vacation until you sort out what’s going on in your head.”
To Tanner’s surprise, the half-dozen visits to the counselor had helped. He hadn’t talked to anyone about the accident, or his feelings, or that hollow ache he carried around in his chest. “You’re going to find it hard to trust again,” the psychologist had warned him. “No matter what your head says, subconsciously you believe anything is better than going through this again. It’s a kind of self-preservation mechanism… and given the business you’re in, that mechanism is pretty damned strong. Problem is, left unchecked, it’ll do more damage than good.”
Even before he heard the words, Tanner knew they were true. Time had dulled the mechanism, but at times — like right now — it still talked to him.
He picked up his jogging pace and turned away from the tide line, digging his heels into the softer sand. A quarter mile ahead, a figure sat on a driftwood log. Tanner stopped and sat down.
“You did not have to run, Mr. Tanner,” said Sato Ieyasu. “But I admire your desire to be punctual.”
Tanner laughed. “Exercise, Inspector.”
“Ah, I see. I admire your discipline. Thank you for meeting me.”
“My social calendar is uncluttered at the moment.”
“I brought something for you.” Ieyasu handed him a photograph. “Tange Noboru, Takagi’s chief of security.”
“That’s him. He was the one driving.”
“At the murder.”
“No, here.”
“Well, if he’s watching you, you can be sure it’s on direct orders from Takagi himself. Have you seen him again?”
“No.”
“That is best,” Ieyasu said. “You don’t want Noboru interested in you.”
Too late, Tanner thought. Now I’m interested in him.
It was midevening, and Walter Oaken was still at the Holystone office. As Dutcher’s deputy, most of the routine administrative tasks fell to Oaken, but unlike most men, he thrived on detail work. In his world there was a place for everything, and everything had its place. A dedicated indoorsman, Oaken preferred the neatness of the office. So strong was this idiosyncrasy that Tanner had long since given up trying to lure Oaken on a camping or hiking trip.
“No chance,” was Oaken’s standard reply. “I like my adventure predictable, preferably on the pages of a magazine.”
“Planned spontaneity?”
“Exactly. You’ll be happy to hear, however, I just renewed my subscription to National Geographic.”
“I’m proud of you.”
Oaken smiled at the memory. Though opposites in many ways, he and Tanner counterbalanced one another, and their friendship was stronger for it. He wondered what Briggs’s love of the unknown had gotten him into this time.
A voracious reader and an information pack rat, Oaken loved reports, forms, cereal boxes; if it had print on it, he read it. His wife Beverly fought an ongoing battle to keep his “gonna get to ’em soon” magazine stacks below three feet tall, lest one of their daughters bump one of the monoliths and be crushed by an avalanche of U.S. News & World Report. Whether at his home office or at work, a television was always tuned to CNN, and whenever Bev came in to clean, her opening of the door stirred up a blizzard of newspaper clippings that took hours to settle — or so she joked.
At forty-eight years old, Oaken had assimilated enough knowledge about the world — past and present, scientific and cultural, obscure and pertinent — to speak authoritatively on almost any subject. That which he didn’t know, he learned.