Teri closed her eyes.
[62]
Apparently there had been an accident somewhere on Grove Street. Traffic had been detoured over to Old 44, across to Sweetwater, then back to Market. It had been stop-and-go for nearly three miles before Walt was finally able to slip onto a back street and work his way over to the City Hall parking lot.
He was nearly fifteen minutes late by the time he arrived at the plaza.
Teri and the boy were nowhere to be found.
The plaza, which was usually teeming with office workers from the surrounding government buildings during the lunch hour, was completely empty now. Walt sat on the edge of the fountain, the soft, whispery sound of the water at his back. He checked his watch, then checked it again a minute or two later.
This didn’t feel right.
They should have been here ahead of him, waiting.
This didn’t feel right at all.
Two women came strolling down the steps, side by side, chatting between themselves. One was in her mid-fifties, the first hint of gray highlighting the sweep of hair over her right ear. Her eyeglasses were thick bifocals. The other woman was younger, maybe in her late thirties. She was wearing a dark gray overcoat and had her purse inside, slung over her shoulder.
Walt approached them. “Excuse me. I was wondering if you might have seen a woman and her son here earlier?”
The younger woman shook her head. “Sorry. This is the first chance we’ve had all day to get out of the office.”
The older woman eyed him with suspicion.
Walt nodded and started away. “Thanks anyway.”
He spent another forty-five minutes at the fountain, pacing on and off, wondering if he had been unclear when he had told Teri what time to meet him. His greatest fear, of course, was that something terrible had happened and that it might not have happened had he been here on time.
Eventually, he decided the best thing to do was to head back to the apartment and wait for another call.
Maybe they had missed the bus.
Or maybe they had gotten caught in traffic like he had.
Or maybe they had simply stopped off somewhere.
There were a thousand possibilities, a thousand things that might have gone wrong. Most of them were perfectly innocent. It was the others, though, that Walt didn’t want to think about. It was the others he feared the most.
[63]
When Teri woke, she found herself in an alleyway between a Wells Fargo Bank building and an old abandoned bar that had once been called The Brewery. The sun had gone down. Twilight had given way to nightfall. The alley was a patch quilt of shadow and light, of faint outlines and buried figures.
She pushed the cardboard boxes off and sat up against the side of the brick building. Her mouth was dry, her throat a little raw, and she could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. The pain was on the right side of her head, just above her ear. It hadn’t started to throb yet, but she was familiar with these things and she knew it wouldn’t be long before it did.
The alleyway was littered with garbage, mostly scraps of cardboard and old food wrappers that had somehow escaped the dumpsters at the far end. A swirl of cool night air kicked up. She watched a newspaper flap its wings and fly past her. She could hear the rush of air past her ears, and somewhere far away there was the soft drone of traffic, people coming and going, never knowing there was a woman in the back of this alley who had lost her way.
Except she had lost more than that.
Teri had lost her son.
She tried to stand up, felt woozy, and fell back again. The world wasn’t exactly spinning, but it was doing a fairly decent interpretation of both ends of a teeter-totter. Perspiration broke out across her forehead. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, and tried to swallow a deep breath. Whatever they had injected her with, the breath felt as if it were part of a miserable winter cold, scratching and kicking, trying to hold on as long as possible.
She was going to have to be patient; that was all.
Just patient.
The cool night air turned cooler.
Teri closed her eyes and tried to regain both her presence of mind and a little strength. Nausea was stirring inside her belly like a bubbling witch’s brew, hot and sour and frightening. The headache began to throb full force, pounding against the inside of her temples.
This one’s going to be a migraine, she thought.
Her stomach lurched. She bent forward, and the lunch she had eaten hours before came up with a vengeance. When it was done, she slumped back against the brick work and closed her eyes.
The migraine began to recede.
[64]
D.C. pulled the Lumina into the parking lot of the Davol Research Institute and found an empty space not far from the front entrance. The Institute was set back several hundred feet from the street, secluded behind a wall of dogwood, European white birch, and sumac. D.C. climbed out, stretched, and wondered if the morning overcast was going to burn off before the afternoon rolled around.
The building was a lone wolf, located on the outskirts of town, not far from the airport. It had been built in the early ’80s and remodeled once in 1994. Three stories high, steel beams, dark-gray reflective glass, it was modern and brooding and a marked contrast to its natural surroundings. The area had once been mostly farm land, but gradually it had begun to give way to commercial zoning as the airport expanded and brought more people into the region. Half a mile down the road, the American Fixture Company had built their headquarters in 1988. They remained to this day the nearest neighbor.
Inside, the lobby was open and breezy, with a marble tile floor. There were two elevators off to the left, and a grand stairway under a chandelier on the right. D.C. walked past the receptionist’s desk without stopping. She looked up and smiled. “Good morning, sir.”
“Morning, Jenny.”
He took the stairs two at a time, adding a little pull to the effort by way of the mahogany banister. At the top landing, he turned left and made his way down a short corridor to the conference room at the end. Mitch was already there, waiting.
D.C. closed the door and leaned against it, his hands behind his back for support. “Is he back in the fold?”
“As of last night.”
“Good. And his mother?”
“We set her loose.”
“Any problems?”
Mitch, who had been leaning back in his chair, with one leg crossed over the other, sat forward. “Nothing we didn’t handle.”
“Nothing like what?”
“There was an accident. The boy grabbed hold of the steering wheel. The car flipped. Anderson didn’t make it. Zimmerman and Wright were banged up pretty good, but they’re gonna be all right.”
“And the boy?”
“He broke his arm.”
“Christ. I told you we needed to keep a low profile on this thing.”
“Hey, I had the clean up crew there in fifteen minutes.” Mitch climbed out of his chair, and paced back and forth in front of the line of windows on the north side. You could see the faint background of the distant mountains behind him. “They got in and out in no time. Except for a handful of bystanders, it never happened. No one else knows about it.”
“Was the Knight woman injured?”
“She had some cuts and bruises, mostly around her eyes and scalp.” He paused and made a sour face. “We had to sedate her. I told you that would be a possibility, remember?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. As long as there’s no chance of her tracing anything back to us.”
“No, we’re clean on this one.”