"This has been eight months, since the only thing I had left to go on was Drama's 'Mr. Collins' bullshit."
"And before then, Elliot?"
"Why did you come back?" he demanded, and it was as hostile as anything he had said to us before. "You and Drama, you were gone. No one would have ever found you. You could have stayed hidden until your sins finally found your address, you could have died from old age before anybody knew you were still even alive. Why did you come back, Atticus?"
"I had something to do."
"And is it done, now? Have you done it? While you were killing Matthew Bowles in Montana and wrapping the Lynch PD's pants around their fucking ankles, have you managed to do what you set out to do?"
"Not yet."
"Because you don't know how. Do you? You're missing that one little piece you need, and you haven't the first idea where to find it."
I stared at him, trying not to hope that he had what Bowles had died without sharing.
"We want the same thing," Elliot Trent said. "We want the son of a bitch who murdered my daughter dead."
Panno returned, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand, carrying a bottle of Budweiser in the other. He took the chair at the desk, turning it so he could watch the three of us while we spoke. Outside, night had dropped the curtain, and when there was silence in the room, all of us could hear the sound of the waves on the beach.
"Explain him," I said to Trent after Panno had settled himself.
"John's the son of a friend," he said. "He's going to help you out."
"We don't want his help."
"You're getting it whether you want it or not. I don't care how good she is, how good you think you are, you're going to need his help. He's got connections, he's my man on this, and the trouble you're in at the moment, you need both those things."
"Just give me the name," I said. "I'll handle the rest."
He laughed at me. "Simple as that, huh?"
"Simple as that."
"No." Trent shook his head. "You think if it was that simple, I'd need you? I'd need her? You don't have the first idea who you're going after."
"He's in the White House."
Trent reacted to that, mildly surprised. Panno gave a slight shake of his head.
"And that doesn't scare you?" Trent asked. "That doesn't make you pause? What if I told you it was the President of the United States, Kodiak? What if that was the name I gave to you? Would you still be so full of yourself, so damn stupid, you'd take that on?"
"Is it?" I asked.
He laughed again, in spite of the pain it caused him. "No, we're not going to work like that. I don't want favors from you. The last thing I want is you doing me a favor. I'm hiring you and your girlfriend there for this. I'm paying you. What's the rate?"
Now it was my turn to shake my head. "Elliot-"
"Dammit, what's the rate?"
"It depends on the target," Alena interposed softly. "If we're talking about the President of the United States, you don't have that kind of money. Nobody does."
"It doesn't go that high."
"I'm somewhat relieved," I said.
"Don't worry," Trent said. "What I've got for you will still shrink your balls to acorns."
"So give me the name."
"How much?" Trent asked. He directed it at Alena.
"As I said, more information is required before that can even be discussed."
"I want to do this right. The way it's supposed to be done. What happens now? We've made contact, what happens next? You vet me, right?"
Alena hesitated, glancing to me as if to check for my permission to continue. I didn't move my eyes from Trent.
"Yes," she said. "The next step would be to verify that you are sincere. And that you are not setting us up."
"You do that how? General surveillance? Background check?"
"That and more. But in this case it is unnecessary. You have already demonstrated your sincerity."
"Have I?"
"You once protected the President of the United States, Mr. Trent. No man who has done that job would even dream of joking about trying to assassinate him. It would be inconceivable to even suggest such a thing. Simply joking about the solicitation of such an act is a federal offense. Yet here we are, and you are ex-Secret Service, and you are talking about this to us here, now, in front of a witness. You are more than sincere, Mr. Trent. You may be insane."
Trent's expression changed, like someone was tugging its corners like smoothing the sheet on a hospital bed, and he lost his focus on her for a moment, considering her words. I had no doubt in the truth of what Alena had just said, though I hadn't consciously realized just how enormous a sin Trent was committing. For a moment, it seemed that Trent hadn't, either.
He got out of his chair, and he did it awkwardly, and it made me wonder if he'd had bypass surgery, and if so how many times, and how recently. At first, I thought he was heading to Panno, but then I realized he was after the shrine to his lost family. He picked up the photograph of his wife, staring at it for several seconds before setting it carefully back precisely where it had rested.
"You don't have children, do you?" He turned to look at us, on the love seat. "The two of you, wherever it is that you've been hiding, you haven't started breeding?"
"No," I said, and Alena glanced over at me, probably wondering why I'd bothered to even answer the question.
"Then you can't understand. You cannot possibly begin to understand. We're talking about my daughter, my only child, and the man who murdered her. We're talking about the life that her mother and I created between us. Our child. When Maggie died, I had Natalie and that was all. Breast cancer's genetic, you know that? It's not the only risk factor, but it's probably the most major one. There were times I'd look at Natalie and I swear my heart would stop at the fear of it growing inside her, too.
"You know how you can tell a real parent, Kodiak? It's not biological. I don't give a damn if you've adopted or warded or fostered, that's not it. You know how you can tell? It's a simple test, really. Doesn't take much to prove it.
"A parent would give anything, do anything, to keep his child from harm, to spare his child pain. That's what it means to be a parent. It means that the life of your child is more important than your own."
He stopped speaking, focused now on me, making certain I understood.
"If there was any chance the law would take the man responsible for what happened to her, I would let the law do just that," Trent said. "But the law won't. The law will never touch him, because he's protected himself from it. He's wrapped himself in it and then elevated himself high above it. He's not alone in that. There are a lot of them like that in Washington, there always have been, but these days I swear to God it's worse.
"That's why I want the two of you. We're at war here, the fucking country's at war, and there are bastards like this man more concerned with protecting what goes into his pockets than the people he purports to serve."
"I'm not taking your money," I said.
"You will," Elliot Trent told me. "Because I won't give you his name unless you do. I'm buying a murder, and I don't want any of us to have any illusions about it. And I don't want either of you forgetting that you're working for me on this. That's what my money's buying."
Alena moved her hand, resting it on the back of mine. I looked down, saw her long, strong fingers on my own. When I moved my eyes up, she met them with hers, and there was a sorrow in them unlike any I'd seen before, and it was all for me. Even if she forgave herself every other crime she had ever committed, this was the one she knew was coming and the one she would never allow to be absolved. This was what she had done to me.
I looked away from her, to Trent.
"All right," I said. "But we need the name."
"He's the White House chief of staff," Elliot Trent said. "His name is Jason Earle."
CHAPTER
Jason Earle was born in Point Au Gres, Michigan, the eldest of four children, with three younger sisters. His parents were both deceased. His father had worked in insurance. His mother was a homemaker, and took home the blue ribbon at the county fair for her bread-and-butter pickles thirty-three years in a row, up until the year she died. I was born in San Francisco, California, the eldest of two children, with a younger brother. My parents and brother, to the best of my knowledge, are still living. My parents are both academics, my father a professor of religion, my mother a professor of English, which goes a long way to explaining how I ended up with a first name like Atticus.