“They’re expecting you to receive a call. Everything hinges on them listening in to our land line and both our mobiles. You get the call and a clock starts. A substitution is planned-here at the house, if possible; in the field, if not.”
“But how has that changed?” she asked, still puzzled.
“You arranged for the costume to be delivered to my office, did you not?”
“I did.” It took her a moment to realize he intended that as his explanation, not a question for her to answer. “The costume,” she said.
Lou pointed to the top of his yellow pad and a box there so heavily outlined the ink had smeared. “It all starts with the costume.”
She didn’t know what that meant, not exactly, but resolved herself to the fact he was now calling the shots. He saw some way out of this, however dim. No matter that she struggled to have faith in him and his yellow pad, she was bound to him body and soul. He ran the early part of the show, and she committed herself to doing exactly as he instructed, even if it struck her as an exercise in futility, which it currently did. The later part of the show, inside the bank, was all hers.
“I’m never going to sleep tonight,” she said.
“Yeah,” Lou agreed. “I know.”
TWENTY-ONE
LIZ WENT TO CHURCH SUNDAY morning, and Boldt went with her both out of a longing to be near her and a desire to protect her. Over her objection, she carried her mobile phone, set to vibrate if called, and the two sat on the aisle so that she could jump up if it rang. Boldt didn’t mind the services, appreciated that there were two readers instead of a minister, that the sermon derived from the Bible and an interpretive work, not the pulpit and preaching. The hymns, sung robustly, often ran gooseflesh down his arms, praising love and promising hope. Of all things dear to Boldt, hope was perhaps the greatest. He reflected on his motivations for becoming a cop all those years ago, aware that hope factored into it, a belief in a moral code and the knowledge that someone had to uphold that code. Other cops had brothers who had been shot, sisters raped, homes vandalized, all valid reasons for signing up. But for Boldt it had amounted to something far less visceraclass="underline" a cause, a calling. The church and its parishioners represented the community he felt he was there to protect. And so the service was filled with irony for him, as the person who needed the most protection was his own wife, and for reasons of adultery and what the church would call sin. In the past few days he had worked his way to a form of understanding that made their time together tolerable. He felt forgiveness a long way off, a firefly at the end of a very long tunnel, but a necessary step toward a full healing between them. Whether he and Liz made it fully back to sharing love or not, there was no abandoning the family.
“What if I’d gotten the call last night?” she asked over a salad at a sandwich shop after church.
“You didn’t.”
“But if I had?”
He shrugged off the question. “You roll the dice, you take your chances.”
“We weren’t ready.”
“The costume was delivered to my office late Friday,” he said. “I checked,” he said, when she gave him an inquisitive look. “After we talked last night, I thought I’d better check.”
“So why’s it so important?” she asked. “The costume? Or aren’t you going to tell me?”
“You have enough on your mind.”
“That’s a lousy excuse.”
He stabbed his salad. A little salty for his palate. “Too much anchovy in the dressing.”
She eyed him across the table, annoyed by his avoidance. “So we were ready,” she asked, adding, “if I’d gotten the call?”
He said, “The complication was no delivery on Sunday. I had to find a way around that. John’s gone to help us out. Then again, maybe it won’t be you at all. Maybe you’re a diversion, nothing more. Maybe Phillip is inside the bank at this very moment making the wire transfer.”
“You’d have heard, wouldn’t you?” She sounded deeply concerned, and he realized that she was already exhibiting some hostage traits, involving herself emotionally to the point that if someone took her place it registered as disappointment instead of relief.
“I would have,” he confirmed, worried about her once again. His concern came in waves, but he noticed a tendency for the troughs to run lower as the minutes ticked on. “If the call had come early, my plan wouldn’t have flown,” he admitted. By prior arrangement, they both knew what came next. Liz was to throw herself into it, while Special Ops looked on in befuddled confusion. If all went well, for a brief few minutes Daphne Matthews would play his wife. There had been a time when he would have welcomed that thought. He now understood far better the pain such fantasy represented.
“What are you thinking?” she asked. “You’ve gone silent over there.”
For over six years he had kept a secret, and now it seemed there was no room for such artifice. Her past had been stripped off her without choice, dogs tearing at the hem of her clothing until exposed. The process had allowed Boldt to remain sanctimonious, when in fact he had his secrets too. “The woman I slept with… the one-night stand when we were separated-”
“I don’t begrudge you that,” she said, interrupting. “I was running around with David. You were hurt. We’ve been through this.”
“It was Daphne,” he said, identifying his partner for the first time. Crushing Liz, judging by the surprised look on her face. She gently placed her fork down onto the edge of her plate, some salad still attached, the dressing now dripping onto the table. Too salty, he thought, as she quietly excused herself from the table and walked toward the rest rooms.
A full ten minutes passed before she returned solemnly to the table, her face and neck glowing red as they did after a hard cry. Boldt had paid. She stood there by the table, never making any move toward the chair. “Ready?” she asked. She turned toward the door before he answered, and he followed, resisting her effort to make him feel bad for telling the truth. In his mind there was a time and a place for everything, and this had been both. He felt he needed to explain Daphne’s willingness to go along with this, to put herself and her job at risk; he felt obligated to be as honest with her as she had been with him, and there was just no good time for such revelations. They came when they came, and his had come in a sandwich shop after church and the call for redemption in the beautiful hymns. The other thought on his mind, the one he dared not share with her, was that he might be in jail by the end of the night, and that if he were arrested, the one person he could count on to fight for him was Daphne Matthews, and that Liz should understand the connection they all three shared. The truth could hurt no one. Our strength is not lessened by giving utterance to truth. One of the readers had read that line during the service and it had stuck in Boldt’s craw as he had realized all the pain she carried for bearing the burden of her truth, while his own truth remained guarded. No more. He had not said this to wound her, despite what she might think. He told her because he had a bad feeling about the events to come, and he needed to bare all before their arrival.
She kept to their bedroom for the first few hours of their return to the house, and he left her there to deal with it.
She ventured out only once, stopped in the doorway, and said to him, “It’s all right. What you did. Telling me, I mean. It’s my problem, not yours.”
“If you believe that, we’re in trouble.”
“If you believe we’re not in trouble already, you’re fooling yourself,” she fired back. “Danny Foreman said I’d get a call Sunday evening. Tonight. That the call would arrange for me to pick up David’s software, that I’d make the transfer and the money would go to a government account.”
Boldt had expected the conversation to remain on his brief affair with Daphne Matthews-that Liz would make him pay for that. But now he realized she was looking for a way out of that morass while at the same time attempting to remain clear about what was expected of her. He picked up her lead and explained, “Danny is the one who’ll be making the call. Danny must be the one with the software. I’m guessing he was the one who ran me on my goose chase. The Palm Pilot-when he was talking to you-wireless Internet access. He was following my every move in the car that night. According to Geiser, there is no deal between him and Danny Foreman, which means either Geiser is lying as Danny said he would, or Danny is pulling a Lone Ranger in order to make these arrests and recover the money. The third possibility is that Danny’s planning an early retirement by keeping the money for himself. I don’t want to believe that. The one who got burned by Hayes’s disappearance is Svengrad-and he’s also the one with the long reach, the one to watch, which is why he directed that you would be using his account for the transfer and no one else’s.”