“You all right?” Cheryl asked as she leaned down to kiss Bill’s cheek on the way out of the room.
“Fine. Why?”
“You’re not yourself tonight,” she said as she headed for the door.
“That’s ridiculous. And do not bring that baby back in here.”
“See?”
“Stop it, Cheryl.”
“I know you too well,” she said as she reached back for the handle to close the door behind her. “Something’s not right.”
When she was gone, Bill muttered a few unintelligible words and then pointed at Troy without looking. It was another sure sign that something was wrong. He always made direct eye contact when he was giving an order. It was a holdover habit from his Marine days.
“Come on out, Major,” Troy called toward the closet.
When Travers had emerged from his usual hiding spot and was seated at the table again, Bill took a deep breath. “Where are we?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“We wanted to give you an update.” He and Travers had been at the house for an hour, but Bill had been on the phone until ten minutes ago, supposedly dealing with an issue at First Manhattan. Troy could tell Travers was starting to get impatient. Taking another roundabout way through the woods to get to the mansion tonight hadn’t helped the major’s demeanor, either. “It’s important.”
“Okay, go.”
“I know you weren’t happy about me seeing this Jennie Perez woman in the first place, but—”
“It wasn’t that,” Bill interrupted. “I just thought it was a distraction.”
“Well, it turns out it wasn’t.”
“Oh?”
His father’s tone just then had seemed odd. It was almost as if he’d been expecting this development, Troy thought. “She knew a woman named Imelda Smith,” he explained. “Or was at least having consistent contact with her.”
“Imelda Smith is the person Kaashif went to see in Manassas, Virginia,” Travers reminded Bill. “It was the day I followed him all the way down there from Philly. Kaashif is the young man who I interrogated last—”
“I remember, Major. How do you know they were in contact?”
“Phone records. Apparently, Ms. Perez and Imelda spoke nine times in the two weeks prior to the attacks. Some of the calls lasted for over ten minutes.”
“After we left the hospital the second time,” Troy spoke up when Travers was done, “we drove out to Imelda’s place in Manassas, but nobody was there. A neighbor told us he’d seen a van out in front of her place a few days ago. He’d never seen the van before, and since then Imelda hasn’t been around. He admitted that maybe it was just a coincidence, but he was genuinely concerned, no doubt. He told us Imelda has a five-year-old son. The guy hasn’t seen the boy lately, either, and he was worried about it. We went inside after we finished talking to the guy, and it looked like there’d definitely been a struggle in the kitchen. Dishes and pans were scattered everywhere, and there were several chairs overturned. The door to the outside wasn’t locked, either.”
“That’s terrible,” Bill said quietly, chin almost on his chest.
“You okay, Dad?”
“I’m fine,” Bill retorted angrily, forcing emotion into his voice. “I’m dealing with something at the firm, that’s all. You all need to stop this crap.”
His father dealt with difficult issues all day long at First Manhattan, and he never acted like this. Oftentimes, in fact, he seemed to revel in problem-solving through confrontation. The explanation about First Manhattan causing his sour mood seemed pretty lame.
“You said you went to the hospital a second time today,” Bill spoke up. “Why?”
“I wanted to see Ms. Perez’s physical charts.”
“Why?”
“I just did.”
“And?”
“And we got into a records room, and it turns out she hadn’t been shot in the back like Dr. Harrison told me she had. That was all a lie.”
Bill’s expression remained impassive.
“She’s Lisa Martinez’s cousin,” Troy continued. “I ran a background check on her, and that connection came up right away. Ms. Perez was born in Brooklyn and moved to Virginia when she was ten. But I’m betting she and Lisa stayed close after she moved.”
“What are you saying?” Bill asked.
Troy glanced at Travers, then back at Bill. “I think what’s going on is pretty obvious.” He and Travers had run this logic through their collective gray matter several times today on the way up to Connecticut. “Jennie Perez is working with whoever’s behind the Mall Attacks.” Troy waited for a response from Bill, but got nothing. “These people must know something about Red Cell Seven, Dad. They must have contacted her to try to get to us, maybe to you specifically. I think they figured out somehow that Lisa and I were involved and that I was in RCS.” He paused. This was the key to the connection. “Maybe Maddux had something to do with them finding out — maybe everything, in fact. Maybe Maddux put together the whole thing, like he did with the LNG tankers heading for Boston and Virginia. Maybe the terrorists told Ms. Perez that I murdered Lisa after Maddux told them to tell her that.”
“Why would you murder Lisa?” Bill asked, obviously unconvinced.
“Maybe because Troy had told her to get an abortion,” Travers spoke up, “and she wouldn’t.”
“She’d already had the baby at that point.”
“Maybe we argued about it,” Troy said. “Maybe it was just passion boiling over. Ms. Perez would have been bitter and ready to believe anything if she and Lisa were close. They figured she’d want to get revenge, and they were right. They would have had an easy time signing her up to be their agent if they fed her all that. Look, it could be the same terrorist group Maddux was involved with on the tankers. In fact, it probably is.”
Bill shook his head. “I don’t think—”
“So what was Jennie Perez doing talking to Imelda Smith? And what was she doing in the mall right before the attacks went down? It’s too coincidental.” Troy was getting revved up, pissed at Bill’s stonewalling. “The sales guy at the cell phone store said Ms. Perez was real calm one second, but when she suddenly realized what time it was, she took off. Why would she do that?”
“It’s a stretch, Troy. And you know it is.”
“Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire.”
“Usually but not always.”
Why was his father doing this? “We couldn’t find her new phone anywhere. It wasn’t with her possessions at the hospital, and no one turned it in. I think she had information on it that was important to them. The guy at the store who helped her said he transferred a lot of data over from her old phone. It’s a natural to think that’s what was going on.”
“Someone at the mall must have gotten the phone,” Bill said. “If she was working with them, why would they shoot her?”
Bill kept putting up roadblocks everywhere on this. Unfortunately, that was the one question Troy and Travers couldn’t find an answer to, either.
“What about Kaashif, Major?” Bill asked, glancing at Travers. “Did you get any data on him from your phone, from the TQ app?”
“Yes, sir. We believe Kaashif met very recently with a man named Jacob Gadanz who lives in Manassas. The data from my phone shows us that Kaashif went to the offices of a company Gadanz owns, and then later went to a location very near Gadanz’s home. So we assume it was Gadanz who Kaashif was meeting with.”
“What kind of company is it?”
For the first time tonight Troy saw fire in his father’s eyes. “Gadanz and Company operates a chain of convenience stores.”