“If he knows where she is. Even we can’t find her.”
“But she’s his only focus. She may have been his only focus for some time. If he’s been watching her, following her, then he may know exactly where she is.” Zucker leaned back, clearly disturbed.
“Why hasn’t she answered her phone? Is it because she can’t?”
Before Jane could respond, the door opened and Frost came back into the room. She took one look at his face and knew instantly that something was wrong. “What is it?”
“Josephine Pulcillo is dead,” he said.
His stark announcement sent a jolt through the room as shocking as the voltage from a stun gun.
“Dead?”Jane shot straight up in her chair. “How? What the hell happened?”
“It was a car accident. But-”
“So it wasn’t our killer.”
“No. It was definitely not our perp,” said Frost.
Jane heard anger in his voice, and she saw it as well in his tight mouth, his narrowed eyes.
“She died in San Diego,” said Frost. “Twenty-four years ago.”
SEVENTEEN
They’d been driving for half an hour before Jane finally brought up the painful subject, a subject they’d managed to avoid during the flight from Boston to Albuquerque.
“You had a thing for her. Didn’t you?” she asked.
Frost didn’t look at her. He stayed focused on his driving, his gaze fixed on the road where the blacktop shimmered, hot as a griddle under the New Mexico sun. In all the time they’d worked together, she’d never felt such a wall between them, an impenetrable barrier that she could not seem to chip through. This wasn’t the good-natured Barry Frost that she knew; this was his evil twin, and any minute now he was going to start speaking in tongues and his head would demonically spin around.
“We really need to talk about this, you know,” she insisted.
“Give it a rest, why can’t you?”
“You can’t keep kicking yourself over this. She’s a pretty girl and she pulled the wool over your eyes. It can happen to any guy.”
“But not to me. ” He looked at her at last, his anger so raw that it silenced her. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it,” he said and focused, once again, on the road. A moment passed, and the only noise was the air conditioner and the sound of their car slicing through the heat.
She had never traveled to New Mexico before. She’d never even seen the desert before. But she scarcely noticed the landscape flying past their windows; what mattered to her now was healing this rift between them, and the only way to do it was to talk it through, whether Frost was willing to or not.
“You aren’t the only one who’s surprised,” said Jane. “Dr. Robinson had no idea. You should have seen his face when I told him she’s a fraud. If she lied about something as basic as her own name, what else did she lie about? She took in a lot of people, including her college professors.”
“But not you. You saw through it.”
“I just got a funny feeling about her, that’s all.”
“Cop’s instinct.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“So what the hell happened to mine?”
Jane gave a laugh. “A different instinct was operating. She’s pretty, she’s scared, and wham-o. The Boy Scout wanted to save her.”
“Whoever the hell she is.”
They still did not know the answer; what they did know was that she was not the real Josephine Pulcillo, who had died twenty-four years ago when she was only two years old. Yet years later, that dead girl managed to attend college and graduate school. She managed to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, and land a job in an obscure Boston museum. The child had been resurrected as a different woman, whose true origins remained a mystery.
“I can’t believe I was such a moron,” he said.
“You want my advice?”
“Not particularly.”
“Call Alice. Tell her to come home. That was part of the problem, you know. Your wife’s been gone and you got lonely. You got vulnerable. A pretty girl wanders onto the scene and suddenly you’re thinking with a different brain.”
“I can’t just order her to come home.”
“She’s your wife, isn’t she?”
He gave a snort. “I’d like to see Gabriel try telling you what to do. That wouldn’t be pretty.”
“I can be reasoned with and so can Alice. She’s been visiting her parents way too long and you need her back. Just call her.”
Frost sighed. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Alice and I-well, we’ve been having problems. Ever since she started law school, it’s like I can’t talk to her. It’s like nothing I say is worth listening to. She spends all day with those smart-ass professors and when she comes home, what’re we supposed to talk about?”
“What you did at work, maybe?”
“Yeah, I tell her about our latest arrest and she asks me if police brutality was involved.”
“Oh, man. She’s gone to the dark side?”
“She thinks we are the dark side.” He glanced at her. “You’re lucky, you know? Gabriel’s one of us. He gets what we do.”
Yes, she was lucky; she was married to a man who understood the challenges of law enforcement. But she knew how quickly even good marriages could fall apart. Last Christmas, she’d watched her parents’ marriage collapse over dinner. She’d seen their household destroyed by one stray blonde. And she knew that Barry Frost was now standing on the threshold of marital disaster.
She said, “My mom’s annual neighborhood barbecue is coming up soon. Vince Korsak will be there, so it’ll be like a team reunion. Why don’t you join us?”
“Is this a pity invitation?”
“I was planning to ask you anyway. I’ve invited you before, but you hardly ever took me up on it.”
He sighed. “That was because of Alice.”
“What?”
“She hates cop parties.”
“Do you go to her law school parties?”
“Yeah.”
“So what the hell?”
He shrugged. “I just wanna keep her happy, you know?”
“I really hate to say this.”
“Then don’t, okay?”
“Alice is kind of a bitch, isn’t she?”
“Jesus. Why’d you have to say it?”
“Sorry. But she is.”
He shook his head. “Is there anyone who’s on my side?”
“I am on your side. I’m looking out for you. That’s why I told you to stay a million miles away from that Josephine woman. I’m just glad you finally understand why I said it.”
His hands tightened on the wheel. “I wonder who she really is. And what the hell she’s hiding.”
“We should hear back about her fingerprints tomorrow.”
“Maybe she’s running from an ex-husband. Maybe that’s all this is about.”
“If she were running from some creep, she would have told us that, don’t you think? We’re the good guys. Why would she run from the police unless she’s guilty of something?”
He stared at the road. The turnoff to Chaco Canyon was still thirty miles ahead. “I can’t wait to find out,” he said.
After merely ten minutes of standing in the New Mexico heat, Jane vowed she’d never again complain about summer in Boston. Seconds after she and Frost had stepped out of their air-conditioned rental car, sweat was blooming on her face, and the sand felt hot enough to sear right through her shoe leather. The glare of the desert sun was so painfully bright that she was squinting even behind the new sunglasses that she’d bought at a gas station along the way. Frost had picked up matching sunglasses, and with his suit and tie, he could have passed for Secret Service or maybe one of those Men in Black, were it not for the fact his face was flushed an alarming shade of red. Any minute now he would keel over from heatstroke.
So how does this old guy manage?
Professor Emeritus Alan Quigley was seventy-eight years old, yet he was crouched down at the bottom of the excavation trench, patiently digging through the stony soil with his trowel. His Tilley Hat, battered and filthy, looked nearly as old as he was. Though he worked in the shade of a tarp, the heat alone would have felled a much younger man. In fact, the college students on his team had already broken off work for the afternoon and were napping in the nearby shade while their far older professor just kept chipping away at the rocks and scooping loose soil into a bucket.