He stood on the outer edge, cutting through the darkness with his?ashlight. The cave was empty, save for him.
Latrell didn’t stop to marvel at the limestone formations dripping from the ceiling like melted wax. He didn’t stop to light the candles he had left hidden on ledges along the wall. He didn’t look for the occasional salamander that crawled out of the ink-black water to lounge on the rocks.
He went straight to the deepest recess of the cave, his most private space, where behind a small barricade of rocks he kept the photograph Johnny McDonald had taken of him and his mother in front of the house when he was fifteen. There, the rocks had been scattered, kicked to the far corners. The photograph was gone. His breath was coming in gasps, his belly churning.
He checked his other hiding place, an alcove Latrell could only reach by climbing ten feet above the?oor and holding tight to natural footholds cut into the rock face. That’s where he kept his gun and night-vision goggles. They were gone, too. He cocked his head toward the cavern roof, certain that he heard laughter deep in the darkness. He dropped to the?oor, spotlighting the ceiling with his?ashlight, the beam bouncing back at him from the empty shadows.
Latrell lit every candle, painting?ickering images on the limestone canvas, kicking small rocks out of his path, hurtling larger ones into the shallows of the lake. The rest of his things, the canned food, the sleeping bag, the change of clothes he kept neatly stacked and folded, were untouched.
He found more footprints, these coming from the water’s edge as if the person leaving them had emerged from the lake. If someone had crossed the lake, how did he do it? By boat? Then where was the boat? Swimming? How could someone swim across the lake in the dark without getting lost or drowning? Latrell followed the footprints from the lake, tracing their route across his cave, eventually coming to each of his hiding places.
He walked back to the water, peering out into the darkness. Latrell had never crossed the lake, had no idea how far it extended or how deep it was. He’d only waded out until the water touched his chin, retreating to the safety of dry rock.
Now someone had crossed the lake, found his hiding place, and stolen his special things and his gun, coming and going through his hidden entrance like they were roommates. He didn’t believe such a person was an accidental explorer. No, it had to be someone who had sought him out, someone who had spied on him until he had unwittingly led him to the cave.
What was it the FBI agent had said? That someone always sees something. The agent was taunting him, telling Latrell that he was the one who’d seen something and that it was Latrell he had seen.
This FBI agent who didn’t have a badge, who had tried to trick Latrell into remembering a man who wasn’t there, he had to be the one who’d followed him to the woods, found the cave, and found a way across the lake in the dark, perhaps in one of those in?atable dinghies Latrell had seen in movies.
This agent who shook so much he couldn’t work. That was nothing but a trick meant to throw him off. Latrell should never have given Marcellus’s dog to him. He should have taken the agent like he took Oleta when she interfered with his plan. That’s what he would have to do now if he were to put things right.
Latrell waded into the water until it covered his ankles. The invisible insects attacked again. He clawed at his?esh until blood ran down his arms, wanting to peel his skin from his bones. Then he dropped to his knees and began to scream.
Chapter Thirty-five
I learned two things at the radiologist’s office. The first was that no one would tell me the results of my MRI. Everyone had a friendly smile, offered a helping hand, and gave me the same answer. Your doctor will tell you.
If they had seen something awful on the films, if I only had twenty-four hours to live, or if all was well and I could look forward to being interviewed for my hundredth birthday by the Today show weatherman, they wouldn’t tell me. Telling me nothing came as easily to them as breathing.
I imagined the radiologist sitting in her office,?ipping through films, tossing them into separate piles marked yes, no, and try again later, the medical version of a fortune-telling eight ball. Whatever the news, she would pick up the phone and hand it off to the patient’s primary doctor, whose job it would become to break it to the patient while she receded, Oz-like, behind the lead curtain.
My life, my future, had become a digitized entry in the American medical machine. I’d been reduced to a one-dimensional collection of data points, diagnostic codes, and billing schedules. The system knew everything about me, but I was the one who remained in the dark, enlightenment waiting on the other side of the weekend, another version of the neon sign in the bar on Strawberry Hill promising free beer tomorrow.
The second thing I learned was that an MRI made a hell of a racket.
“It’s the magnets,” the technician explained, her genial disembodied voice filling my headphones as I lay inside an elongated tube that with only a few inches between my nose and the ceiling was more coffin than diagnostic dream machine.
“Just relax,” she told him, “and don’t move.”
“Easy for you to say,” I answered.
“That’s why we get to say it,” she said with a practiced laugh.
My appointment was at eight o’clock. I was finished at eleven. While the MRI was thin-slicing my bones and tissues, relieving them of their secrets, my squad was being x-rayed by the polygraph examiner. I was lying still. I wondered if any of them were still lying.
Kate had left a message on my cell phone that our class in facial micro expressions would begin at seven o’clock at my house. She was, she said, bringing dinner and a toothbrush. I heard the echo of advice I had often given Wendy: “Be careful what you ask for.” I had eight hours to ponder the women in my life. That was plenty of time to sort things out, even if I spent part of it chasing bad guys.
Chapter Thirty-six
I pulled into the driveway of Jill Rice’s house as the door to her three-car garage was going up. I waited while she backed a Mercedes sedan onto the driveway, braking just in time to avoid crashing into my Chevrolet’s grille. She laid on her horn and mouthed something in her rearview mirror that looked like asshole but could just as easily have been fucking asshole.
I was glad to catch her off guard and angry. That made it more likely I would learn something useful. I’d put on an old sport coat and tie that didn’t match. My attire was intended to depress expectations, another effective tool in lowering someone’s defenses. The more they looked down on you, the more likely they were to underestimate you.
I had slipped my Detective Funkhouser ID into the clear plastic slot of my wallet normally occupied by my FBI credentials. I knew the shelf life on my phony ID was running out, but I needed all the time I could get before Colby Hudson found out I was investigating him. I got out of my car, holding my ID in the palm of my hand, and approached her car.
“Jill Rice?”
She rolled her window down, her eyes obscured by oversized dark glasses. “Yes. You’re blocking my driveway. Who are you?”
“Detective Funkhouser. Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department.”
I?ashed her my ID. She took off her sunglasses, double-checking my picture against my face.
“I hope this is important.”
I stepped closer to her door. “Are you in a hurry, Mrs. Rice?”
“Yes, detective,” she said, one arm resting in the open window, the other on the steering wheel. “I’m in a hurry.”
She was an attractive woman, forty-plus, her tanned arms lightly muscled, her auburn hair cut short, her pink lip gloss gleaming, and her face unburdened by crow’s-feet, laugh lines, or other evidence of natural life. She was wearing a pale green, low-cut tennis top, and a black tennis skirt that was hiked above her well-toned thighs. Rice leaned forward just enough so that her top billowed out, offering me a fuller view of breasts that either defied gravity or weren’t original equipment, assuming the sight would either shorten our meeting or distract me from its purpose. I kept my eyes locked on hers until she straightened her blouse, which she finally did, neither of us blushing.