“Where are you?”
“I’m sorry, Bob.” Oh, God, Anne… How can I let her… “I can’t tell you.”
“Art.”
“Tell Anne everything will be all right. I’ll figure this out.”
“Art! Don’t do it this way.”
“Bob, if you believe me, follow your own advice. Look at the holes. This is a big one and you know it.”
“Art.”
The line clicked off.
“Well?” Breem asked.
Lomax hung his head. When it came up he threw the U.S. Attorney’s cell phone at the wall, breaking a vase in the process.
“Hey!” Breem protested angrily.
Lomax afforded him just a brief glance, then said to Anne, “Sorry about the vase.”
One of Kasvakis’s men came hurriedly in, interrupting the heated moment. “We got a cell hit.”
Kasvakis and Breem looked at the slip of paper the Deputy Marshal held out.
Anne caught Lomax’s eye. “Bob, is Simon all right?”
“Simon?” Breem asked. “Who’s Simon?”
“That’s the Lynch kid,” Kasvakis recalled aloud, turning to Breem and adding, “His parents were killed last week.” The U.S. Attorney’s blank stare requested more information. Kasvakis gave it with an edge. “Chrissakes, Breem, don’t you read the intel attached to your warrants? Under ‘Occupants’?”
Breem looked to Anne. “This Simon is with your husband?” Then to Lomax. “Now he has a hostage.”
“Art is running the investigation of his parents’ murder,” Lomax explained.
“Was,” Breem corrected.
The Deputy Marshal that brought word of the cell hit now had the warrant out and was flipping through the attached information. “Hey, look at this.”
Kasvakis did first, Breem joining him a second later, peeling his eyes from Anne and Lomax.
“The cell hit,” the Deputy Marshal said, pointing. “The repeater that bounced the call is here. And look where the Lynch house is.”
Breem looked instantly to Kasvakis. “Get there. Fast.”
“We’re an hour away.”
“Get someone there! NOW!”
With an apologetic glance at Lomax, Kasvakis left through the front door.
“Bob?” Anne said, her eyes pleading, for an answer, for a solution, for anything that would end this.
“Anne—”
But Breem cut him off, saying to the Deputy Marshal guarding her, “Get her out of here.”
The man helped Anne to her feet, carefully, gently, lest the FBI agent with the scar lay one on him like he looked he wished he could do. Anne’s eyes trailed back toward Lomax as she was led out of her house.
“So help me, Breem, if anything happens to her…”
The threat from the Chicago SAC amused Breem. “You’re in no position to make threats.”
Lomax took two steps forward, making Breem back up one until his back was against the wall under the stairs. “I’m not the one you’ll have to worry about.”
Breem felt Lomax’s hot breath on his face, then the bigger man turned for the door. “He’s finished, Lomax!”
With a slight, confident shake of his head, Lomax said, mostly to himself as he trotted down the steps from the porch, “Not by a long shot.”
The sheer curtains that hung in the front windows of the Lynch household glowed in the bath of pale lunar light. At one window that looked out onto the porch, the curtain moved aside.
Art stared out into the street, at the Volvo parked at the curb. He wasn’t a praying man, but his eyes angled up as he asked, “God, what am I going to do.”
From behind, Simon said, “God is up, up, up!”
“Yeah. Yeah, he is.”
But they were there, feet on the ground, and in the worst spot Art figured he’d ever been in. Others had been tight, but he’d always been a good guy in those.
You are still a good guy.
The one line pep talk, true as it might be, brought little comfort. Someone had painted him a bad guy, and he had to make that right, and he had to see that whoever was doing this didn’t succeed. Didn’t get what they wanted. Didn’t get Simon.
And then there was Anne, the mere thought of her in handcuffs twisting a knot in his gut.
Not now. Focus. She’s strong. She’ll understand. He looked to Simon, who was sitting in a big chair next to the window, his face sideways against the headrest. Anne would do the same thing.
Art put his hand out to Simon, and a second later the little hand was in it.
The knot in his stomach disappeared. There would be time for anger. Plenty of time, he assured himself, and for sure there would be targets for it.
But later. For now, he had to think. Like the professional he was. And like others he had come to know.
The Chicago Police Department cruiser closest to 2564 Vincent approached the house with its lights blacked out just minutes after their dispatch center put out the call. The passenger officer had his gun out before his partner stopped two houses away. They both saw the silver Volvo parked in front.
The driver, after opening his door and taking cover in its V, lifted his radio from its place on his belt. “The car’s here. Where’s our backup?”
A minute later the first backup arrived from the opposite direction, then three more cars within five minutes. In ten minutes there were thirty officers on the scene and they had a perimeter set up around the house.
After trying to make phone contact for twenty minutes, the senior officer on the scene ordered his men to approach the house. Receiving no resistance, they entered through an open back door and checked the house from top to bottom. It was empty.
So was, they discovered, the garage.
He hadn’t hot-wired a car in fifteen years, but considering Martin Lynch’s Ford pickup was about that old, Art was able to get it to turn over with only a few shocks to his fingertips.
With the tank halfway between E and F, he drove slowly away from the area, knowing he would have to find someplace for them to stay for the night. Knowing that he could not use his credit cards, or his ATM card, or go to a friend, or, he was beginning to believe, lift a phone from its cradle. Maybe he was being paranoid, but someone with power had decided that his life was expendable. All because of the kid sitting close to him on the truck’s bench seat.
Simon laid his head on Art’s shoulder, twisting his nose toward the seatback. He sniffed. “Daddy,” he said.
Art patted Simon’s leg and noticed that Martin Lynch had done one thing to bring his aged vehicle into the future. A radio poked from the center of the dash. In it, a tape player. Art took the cassette from his pocket and slid it in. It began to play.
“Wander boy, wander far…”
Simon snuggled closer to Art.
“Wander to the farthest star…”
Art drove on, the song playing, tearing holes in his heart, but putting Simon fast asleep in nothing flat.
Chapter Fifteen
Offers, Favors, and Worries
Precisely at ten in the morning, G. Nicholas Kudrow crossed the Beach Drive bridge over Rock Creek on foot and turned left toward Miller Cabin and a gathering of benches nearby. The sun was out and stealing the bite from the morning chill, and as he strolled he could see that a woman seated on one bench was staring at the rising ball of yellow, sunglasses black against her brown face.
When he was close enough he saw that her nails were painted blue.
Keiko Kimura looked briefly at the stranger as he took a seat on the bench adjacent to hers, the sculpted metal armrests of each separating them. An older man, she saw, at least older than she, with features so plain that they could become agonizingly boring in short order. And the eyes. She didn’t care for the eyes at all. Even through the tint of his glasses she could see that they were little more than immature olives lost among folds of pale skin.