‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. After the FBI dragged us over the coals, she told me she wished she’d never got involved. It was in the sixties, when that kind of thing was popular. The people who ran it were hippies. Most of them are in retirement homes now. They had nothing to do with the Nazis who revived the cult recently.’
That had been Nora Jacobsen’s line during questioning. She had apparently been credible enough-until last night.
‘Look, Mary, this is important. It’s likely that Heinz Rothmann is involved in the murders. There’s no telling how many more innocent people may die. We have to find him.’
‘What’s that got to do with my mother?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re crazy, all of you.’
I looked at her until she returned my gaze. ‘Mary, you have to accept that your mother has been hiding things from you. Jesus, she blew up your home-what does that tell you? She’s become a willing fugitive. Where do you think she is?’
‘I don’t know!’ The scream resounded against the hard wood walls.
‘All right.’ I kept my voice low. ‘Is there anywhere else she might have hidden things?’
Mary shook her head, and then wiped her sleeve across her eyes. Even though her face was lined and tear-stained, she was still an attractive woman. I remembered what had happened to us in the motel near West Point. She had taken me to bed and I had almost gone along with it. I caught her eye and saw immediately that she was thinking of that time, too.
‘Matt,’ she said softly. ‘Why are you doing this?’
I felt revulsion at what I was about to hit her with, but there seemed to be no other way. She didn’t deserve to be burdened by the deaths of Karen and…our son-Christ, his name had gone from me already and I couldn’t bring it back, our son…
‘Matt?’
I heard her voice, but I had gone elsewhere, into a silent world of shadowy figures with their arms outstretched. They were begging, not for forgiveness-they weren’t sinners, they were the pure of heart-but to be remembered…
‘What is it, Matt?’
I felt her touch on my hand and I came back to my vacant self.
‘I…I’m sorry…’ Then I took a deep breath and told her about Karen and our son-and about Rothmann’s responsibility for their deaths.
Mary was crying before I finished. She got up and came round the table to take me in her arms. I felt her tears on my forehead, and my own tears running down my cheeks.
The minutes passed and I shook her off gently. She went back to her chair and wiped her eyes again.
‘You…you really think my mother is in contact with him?’
I nodded.
‘I think you’re maybe right. But I don’t know what I can do to help.’
I gave her time, feeling that I’d betrayed her again. She was a good person at heart and I was taking advantage of that.
And then she remembered.
‘Fred Warren,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘I heard her say that name several times recently. She’s begun talking to herself quite a lot, especially when she’s in the kitchen…’ Mary broke off as the loss of the house hit her. ‘In the kitchen,’ she repeated. ‘I even wondered if she’d got herself a man, after all these years. Fred Warren.’ She shook her head. ‘I never heard of him before. Oh, and something else-there was a year as well, she would say it after the name. “Fred Warren 1943.” I suppose it was the year he was born. That would make him sixty-eight. Five years younger than her, lucky woman.’ She smiled sadly.
The name meant nothing to me, but I was sure that Sebastian and his people would already be working on locating the man who bore it.
Gordy Lister watched as his brother’s coffin disappeared through the beige curtain. There had been three living people to send him off-apart from Gordy, a balding funeral director in a too-tight black suit, and a young Hispanic woman with a spectacular chest. Gordy didn’t know what Hispanics normally wore to funerals, but he was pretty sure tight gold tops with sequins and thigh-hugging shorts weren’t favored. Not that he was complaining. If she was one of Mikey’s friends, then his brother had more going for him than he’d thought. Gordy had chosen the closing music himself. Mikey had always had a thing for underdressed female singers, so Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ it was. It was only as the song came to an end that he remembered the video that had accompanied it. The male lover had ended up burned to death. Which was appropriate for a cremation, but in even worse taste than the Star Reporter would have dared try.
Outside, the funeral director gave him a sharp-toothed smile and said he hoped he could be of service again in the future. Gordy wiped his brow and watched the asshole head for his corpse-mobile. This was the last time a Lister would be in Florida. It was hot, sultry and full of wrinkled people wearing not enough over their shrunken limbs.
‘You Mikey’s friend?’ the bronze looker asked, blowing smoke past his left ear.
‘Brother. You?’
‘Lucky,’ she said, extending her hand.
He stared at her. ‘Lucky I’m his brother?’
‘No, my name is Lucky,’ she said, with a wide smile. ‘Lucky Sanchez.’
‘Oh, right. So, you a friend of Mikey’s?’
‘Sure.’ The woman tossed her cigarette. ‘Terrible thing he die.’
‘Yeah.’ Gordy moved closer to her. ‘Say, you didn’t happen to be around when he…when he was hit by that car?’
Lucky suddenly looked shifty. ‘No, no. But I talk to his neighbor next day.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Gordy led her under the shade of a palm tree. ‘What they say?’
‘Saw pickup truck come very fast, drive into Mikey.’
‘See, that’s strange. The police told me there were no witnesses.’
Lucky raised her smooth shoulders. ‘People no talk to police.’ She paused. ‘You pay me for telling this?’
Gordy studied her. He was interested, and not just in her bod, but he wasn’t going to show it. ‘Nah, Mikey should never have been out in the road. It was his own fault.’
The woman glared at him. ‘How you say that about your brother? He need fresh air like anyone else.’
‘Fresh air? It’s winter and it’s like a sweat bath down here.’
Lucky Sanchez looked at him suggestively. ‘I tell you more, you pay?’
‘What more is there?’
‘Hundred, okay?’
He had a stab at looking reluctant.
‘Hundred and blow job?’
Now you’re talking, he thought. He handed her the C-note and led her to the rental Taurus parked by the crematorium wall.
‘Driver was woman,’ Lucky said, as she tugged down her top. ‘Short, blond hair.’
Gordy Lister grabbed hold of her breasts as she went down on him, unsure whether the lead or her mouth was giving him greater pleasure.
Quincy Jerome was sitting at the table with the rest of the guys, but his mind was far away. He hadn’t the first idea how to track down this Fred Warren, so he left it to the law enforcement professionals and Matt, who seemed to be full of ideas. He was replaying what had happened over the last twenty-four hours. Never mind his first trip in a Learjet-he’d almost forgotten that.
He’d seen plenty of dead bodies in Iraq, but none of them was as creepy as the human jawbone in the barn house. The local detectives were trying to locate the rest of the body, but there was nothing in the immediate vicinity. Then there was the explosion at the house and the total destruction of everything inside. The crazy old woman had set it off with some kind of remote timer before slipping away. He had a bad feeling about what else had been in the bag she took with her-the knife she’d left behind was wicked-looking enough. And then there was Matt playing interrogator and pulling it off. The guy had hidden depths, even if he had the advantage of knowing the blonde woman from before.
But all that was nothing as compared with the upturned crosses in the barn house. They had really bothered the shit out of him and he was struggling to understand why. After all, he was Jewish, his mother belonging to a tiny group of Somalis who had ended up in Mobile. His father had been a drifter, a bluesman who showed up every few months to yell at them and drink away his meager earnings from the road. He’d been a Southern Baptist and he wasn’t marrying no Jew woman, not that his mother wanted a ring. She was the mystical type and she’d instilled in her son a high regard for things with symbolic value. He wasn’t the kind of Jew that went to synagogue often, but he stood up for his religion when he had to-often enough when he was a kid and before he got his stripes. He had one big problem. Because he was both black and a Jew, he hated racists twice as much as other people. That made him the perfect person to take part in the hunt for Hitler’s Hitman and the Nazi piece of shit who had messed with Matt’s brain, even if Matt and the cold-eyed FBI man didn’t know it-or maybe Sebastian had read his service file.