“What about the people at the hotel who were exposed to the contagion? What about all of us?”
Ralph answered as he punched at the keys on the PSP, which he’d started playing when I was talking to Tessa. “With Marcie’s help the CDC was able to vaccinate us. Lots of people are sick, but no fatalities so far.” Then he looked up from his game. “Without her help, though, we’d all be goners.”
“And, oh yeah,” said Lien-hua, “Jason Stilton won’t be seeing the outside of a jail for a long time. He was found with an envelope full of cash and a short list of excuses. He’s facing corruption charges as well as conspiracy to commit murder.”
“He’s the one who delivered the necklace to Kincaid, isn’t he?” I asked.
She nodded. “Of course, Stilton is saying he didn’t know anyone was going to get hurt, just that Trembley had offered him a way to make some easy money by delivering something of Tessa’s to a guy at the hotel, a guy Trembley had worked with before.”
She paused to collect her thoughts. “Oh, I almost forgot, Margaret called a couple hours ago to tell us she’ll be returning to teach at Quantico. It seems the director was very impressed with how quickly the team that she’d assembled was able to solve this case.”
“Wonderful.” I shook my head. “So, what’s next for you and Ralph?”
“I’m looking over a case from San Diego. A series of arsons. They want me to work on the profile.”
“And I gotta testify at a hearing,” Ralph said with a heavy sigh. “Seems an old friend of ours from Illinois was able to swing a retrial.” I gasped. “Not Richard Basque?”
“One and the same.”
“But how? That doesn’t make sense!”
“DNA. He’s been fighting for years to have it reevaluated. Finally got his wish. Samples didn’t match. Looks like it might clear him.”
Great. If there was one man I wouldn’t want to see walking the streets again, it was Richard Basque. He was one of only two people I’d ever met who made me genuinely, deeply, insanely afraid. Thankfully, the other one was dead. Ralph shot him in a hostage situation back in 2004. The Illusionist came in a close third.
“By the way, Pat,” said Ralph, “where’s my phone?”
“Oh,” mumbled Tessa, “so it was yours.”
“What do you mean was?”
“The killer… well… he dropped it.”
I saw Ralph getting ready to cuss. “Not in front of Tessa, you don’t,” I said. He caught himself, sighed, and shook his head. Then he mentioned something to Lien-hua about the arsonist case and a string of grave robberies somewhere in the Midwest, but I didn’t really hear him. I was too busy watching my daughter look out the window. She was still dressed in black, but I saw she had painted one of her fingernails pink. She saw me staring. “It’s a start,” she said, glancing at her fingertip. “I’m getting used to it, but don’t get your hopes up.”
I decided to ask her about her arm. “So, how are you feeling? Is your arm OK? Where he cut you?”
“It will be.” Her voice faded to a whisper. “It’s gonna leave a scar, though.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not so bad. Back when I was a wilderness guide, we used to have a saying: ‘Scars are tattoos with better stories.’”
She smirked. “I like that.” She held her right arm out to me. “Here, help me. Pull up my sleeve.”
I gently nudged her sleeve up to her elbow and saw the series of straight scars on her forearm.
Cutting. So she is into cutting.
“Do they have good stories?” I asked softly.
She thought for a moment. “No. And for most of them, it’s the same story, over and over again.”
I struggled for the right words to say. “Well, maybe we can write a better one,” I said at last.
She nodded. “OK.”
Then I remembered the words of Zelda Fitzgerald: “I don’t need anything except hope,” she wrote, “which I can’t find by looking backwards or forwards, so I suppose the thing is to close my eyes.” No.
Zelda was wrong.
The thing is to finally open your eyes. That’s the only way to find hope.
The only way to find anything that really matters.
“And what about you, Pat?” asked Ralph, interrupting my thoughts.
“Me?”
“What’s next for you? You going to stay in Denver or go back to teach at the Academy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to talk that over with the rest of the family.”
Tessa nodded ever so slightly to me, and I nodded back.
Moments passed by, and that was OK.
She leaned forward and peered out the window. I tried to see what she was looking at but couldn’t quite get the right angle. At last I asked her what she’d found.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
She pointed. “A unicorn. Up there in the clouds.”
I leaned over as far as I could to follow her gaze. I didn’t see the unicorn, but I did see the tourmaline necklace dangling from her neck, collecting sunlight with wide-open arms. And the glistening black necklace looked right at home as it swung across the skull on her shirt.
And then landed again.
Right beside her heart.
Epilogue
The Pentagon
Department of Defense
Sublevel 4
4:58 p.m.
General Biscayne scratched his signature across the last two forms and was just pushing back from his desk to head home when his phone jangled to life.
“Yeah,” he snapped. “What is it?”
“Hello, Cole. It’s Sebastian.”
A chill ran down the general’s spine. Sebastian Taylor frightened him. Always had. He’d suspected Sebastian was responsible for the disappearance of two operatives back in ’78 and a couple of others in the ’80s but had never been able to prove it.
General Biscayne tried to mask the fear in his voice. “What do you want?”
“You called Margaret Wellington, didn’t you?”
“Sebastian, I-”
“You told her to keep everything quiet. To make the case go away. But you made one mistake. You mentioned my name.”
A pause. A decision to lay down all his cards. “So maybe I did. You’re a fugitive. What are you going to do about it now?”
“I think, General, that I’m going to go fishing.”
The line went dead.
And with trembling fingers, the general set down his phone.
And so.
Now it begins.