“If they’re being watched, it’ll do no good, only take them farther from us. Look, they may simply know our kids are gone and be using this to trick us into leading them to Miles and Sarah.”
“This can’t be,” she said too loudly. Heiman turned his head slightly, and then thought better and returned to his sandwich. Liz suddenly felt as if eyes from everywhere were upon them. It felt claustrophobic to her. Oppressive.
“We… don’t… know,” Lou said firmly. “We can’t jump to conclusions. It does no one any good. But at the same time, we have to be wise about this. We have to rethink everything.”
Not really listening to him, she said, “We-you-could send police cars. A whole phalanx of them. Middle of the night. Get them out of there. Use dummy cars like they do with the president. They can’t follow them all.”
“Then it’s Kathy they go after,” he said, meeting eyes with her. His were filled with pain. “Or your parents. Or you. Or me, even. Maybe they wait six months, a year-and then go after the kids. The point being, if this was meant as a threat-and we don’t know that for sure-then there’s no way to beat it. You don’t beat these people, Liz. Not at their game.”
“This is not a game.”
“You know what I meant.”
“There must be a way.”
“For the time being, we cooperate.”
He stunned her with this announcement. Her eyes searched the various tables, the people working the sandwich line, wondering if they were watching them right now.
“Are you saying the money’s tied to these people?”
“We don’t know that either.”
“You’re just a wealth of information, aren’t you?”
“It’s fluid,” he said.
She disliked that term. He used it all the time.
He said, “We work on a couple of different assumptions. One is that they may know that Miles and Sarah are with Kathy. The other is that it may have been their money-this Russian’s money. It makes some sense because his business is in trouble with the government right now, and he’s probably cash shy. It makes that seventeen million all the more tempting. He hires Hayes’s new lawyers, gets him out on parole, and puts him to work.”
“What have I done?” she asked, a desperate sadness permeating her.
“You can’t beat them at their game,” he said in that Lou way that suggested he’d already thought this through to where he was now ahead of it. She knew this about him, loved him for it-always looking around the next corner, but could hardly see clear to understand what he meant.
“We beat them, we make it safe, by either playing along or putting the whole lot of them in jail. We’ve already taken certain steps, and there’s more I have planned, but in the meantime, no matter what, you play along. That was the message I took away from there. That’s something I won’t even share with my own team. If you get a call, when you get a call, you call me first and we decide how to play it. Whether or not, and how I include our guys, I don’t know yet.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“It’s not right,” he said. “But it’s necessary.”
“I just go back to work now? Just another day at the job?”
“You have a reception to plan.”
She couldn’t believe he’d said that. Her expression told him so.
“There’s a second interpretation to the story about the magpie, an interpretation that is further confused, or maybe supported, by physical evidence.”
“I don’t see how you can be so calm about this,” she blurted out.
“Either Danny Foreman or a DPA-a deputy prosecuting attorney-named Paul Geiser could have been partnered with Hayes, could be behind the crime scene we found. They’re the magpie, stealing Hayes out of the nest and away from the Russians.”
“And David? Is there a body yet?”
Lou didn’t answer that. “It’s incredibly important that should you hear from either Foreman or Geiser, regardless what either may tell you, you must come to me first-even if he makes a convincing argument to the contrary. Don’t believe anyone but me, Liz.”
She nodded, confused, unsure whether David Hayes being alive or dead benefited her family more. Amazed to be in a position to even think such a thought.
Lou reached across the table and took her hands in his. To her surprise, his were colder than her own.
FIFTEEN
DEPUTY PROSECUTING ATTORNEY PAUL GEISER’S OFFICE reminded Boldt of a librarian’s or research assistant’s with its untidy stacks of papers covering every horizontal surface, the dust, the unsavory smell of old food. He knew Geiser by reputation: a courtroom bully; opinionated to a flaw; outspoken. He’d languished in the prosecuting attorney’s office significantly longer than even the prosecuting attorney himself, destined to never be recruited by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the proper career track, because his mouth had made him more enemies than it had won friends. The question on Boldt’s mind was whether Geiser could help him learn more about the federal case against Yasmani Svengrad, and what, if anything, Geiser knew about Liz’s affair with Hayes, given his prints on the tape. If Boldt were going to attempt to sting the very investigation he found himself a part of-this in order to protect his family from Svengrad-he had to know all the players, their roles, and their weaknesses.
A man who probably sweated in his sleep, Geiser wore a sheen of perspiration, as if he’d showered too quickly after a run. He was said to be an expert in the martial arts, and this rumor was now confirmed by a group of photographs on the wall, one of which, a triptych, showed him breaking a small concrete brick in two with his bare hand gripped in a fist. He was said to play the bars for the young impressionable women new to jurisprudence, scoring more often than not, considering himself a real ladies’ man, though Boldt doubted real ladies ever looked his way.
“Lieutenant.” Geiser’s voice sounded sadly misplaced-a nasal-prone adolescent stuck in a forty-year-old’s well-conditioned body, a voice useful in court no doubt, but lost on conversation.
“You mind?” Boldt asked, indicating Geiser’s door.
Judging by his eyes, Geiser did mind, though he nodded. Boldt shut the door, moved a pile of papers aside without asking, and took a seat. By moving that pile, he wanted Geiser to understand he was taking charge. As a rule, attorneys believed they could win any argument. Boldt was here to prove that wrong.
“You’re familiar with David Hayes,” Boldt began.
“I convicted him. What’s this about?”
“Are you aware we found blood evidence in a cabin north of the city that we believe will come back positive for Hayes?”
“Yes, I am. Have you found a body yet? No?”
Boldt fought the urges that rushed to the surface, forcing an artificial calm in their place, believing it a mistake to confront Geiser on his prints being lifted from the videotape, because according to Foreman, Geiser didn’t know the content of the video. There was no sense in bringing his attention to it. Boldt toed a tentative line between exploration and revelation.
“I could use a favor,” he said, beginning to walk that line. Attorneys loved negotiation.
“What kind of favor?”
Geiser wore frameless glasses, a thin length of silver wire hooking behind each ear. He’d lost two front teeth-to the martial arts perhaps-their unnatural white giving his ironic smile a glint that drew Boldt’s eye. Boldt did not find him handsome, but saw how some might. He had an intensity about him. The type of man who might go unnoticed when entering a room and yet would later commandeer the conversation at the dinner table; not exactly charming, but not feckless either.
“You must have associates, within the USAO for instance, with whom you’re on good terms.” Boldt knew Geiser’s failure to reach the U.S. Attorney’s Office had to weigh heavily on the man, and tried to say this in a tone that did not imply he was taking a shot at him.