CHAPTER
FORTY
“All you have to do is
drive,” Nick mocked under
his breath as he crossed the once-grand lobby of the Radford Hotel.
He carried the pizza box on his shoulder, bearing the logo of Papa
Lorenzo’s Perfect Pizza Parlor. The box was empty, of course. Nick
and his coconspirator had consumed the whole thing while sitting
down the block in Thorne’s rental car, working out the fine points
of the plan. Tasted pretty good, actually, considering the fact
that Papa Lorenzo and his staff all wore turbans.
Even though Little Rock was a small
city by most standards, the task of locating a single needle named
Irene Rivers in a haystack of several dozen hotels seemed hopeless
at first. Then Jake got an idea. In fact, he seemed flooded with
ideas. Good ones, even. An amazing turnaround, Nick thought, given
the quivering mess he’d been just scant hours before.
Their approach was simple: divide the
Yellow Pages in half and burn up a ton of quarters in pay phones
calling front desk after front desk and asking for Irene Rivers’s
room. They were just shy of four dollars into their strategy when
Jake got a hit on the Radford. After the phone in her room rang ten
times without anyone answering, he just hung up, confident she was
still out saving the world from the likes of himself.
Finding the hotel was only the first
step, though. They still needed a room number, and for that, Nick
needed to do some legwork. Between the two of them, his was the
face that hadn’t dominated the news.
The Radford was a big old place, which
once had been the destination of choice for visiting presidents and
celebrities. On the heels of more than a few slow years, though,
the Radford had been unable to keep up with the Grand Marquis and
the Crown Plaza, and its once-dependable clientele had shifted its
loyalties elsewhere. The place was still several giant steps away
from homeless-shelter status, but there was precious little charm
left in the threadbare Oriental carpets and scratched cherry
walls.
To be put up in a place like this was
clear evidence that Irene Rivers had seriously pissed off her
travel agent.
As Nick approached the two teenagers
manning the front desk, they looked up simultaneously and smiled.
“Hi. Can I help you?” one of them said.
Nick noted the similarity of the
girls’ features—even down to the matching zits on their chins—and
he wondered silently if maybe they were sisters. He smiled back,
trying his best to look a little sheepish while praying that his
hands wouldn’t shake.
“Hi,” he said back. “You sure can.”
With hopes of making himself look more like a local, he spoke
around a toothpick he’d picked up at Papa Lorenzo’s. “One of your
guests called and ordered a pizza. Unfortunately, I lost the note
with her room number on it. Got a name, though. Rivers. Irene
Rivers. Can you give me her room?”
The Bobbsey Twins exchanged glances,
then shook their heads in unison. “No, I’m afraid not,” said the
one on the right. “We can’t give out people’s room numbers to
anyone.”
“I can call her, though, and have her
come down and pick it up,” offered the twin on the
left.
Nick’s stomach knotted. He felt a
burst of panic, then forced a smile. “No,” he said quickly. “Please
don’t do that. Listen, truth of it is, I’m already running fifteen
minutes late with this thing, and this is the second time I’ve lost
an address tonight. Boss told me this Rivers lady is a pain as it
is. If she gets ticked and calls, I’m sunk, know what I
mean?”
The girls shared a significant look this time and nodded again.
Obviously, they’d known some difficult customers in their time and
maybe even worked for an asshole or two along the way.
“We really shouldn’t . . .” hedged
Bobbsey Left.
“Please,” Nick begged winningly. “It’s
humiliating enough for a man my age to be delivering pizzas. I
could really do without a lecture to go with it, you
know?”
Another look. And a joint sigh.
“Okay,” said Bobbsey Right as she tapped the keys on her computer.
“Just don’t get us in trouble, okay? Room 405.” She looked up and
pointed across the lobby. “You can take those elevators over
there.”
Nick smiled and thanked them. He
wandered over and pushed the call button, but it seemed forever
before anything happened. Even the elevators in this old barn were
tired. Fortunately, he was the only passenger. After the big doors
rumbled shut, Nick pushed the buttons for both the second floor and
the fourth, so that the floor indicator in the lobby would go all
the way to Agent Rivers’s floor, even after he exited on the first
stop.
The hallway was bright enough, if
somewhat narrow, in the style of old downtown hotels, and he
encountered his first dilemma in trying to figure out what to do
with the damn pizza box. Finally, he gave up looking for a trash
can and just slid it under a Coke machine.
That done, he took the stairs down to
a preselected side entrance on the first floor. Checking one more
time to make sure that the stairwell was empty, he opened the door
and nearly screamed. Jake was standing right there, not two feet
away on the other side. “Jesus! You scared the shit out of
me!”
Jake looked at him like he was crazy.
“I told you I’d be waiting here.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Oh, the hell with it. “She’s in room 405.
How’re you gonna get in?”
Jake shrugged and craned his neck to
peer up the stairwell. “I don’t know yet. But I’ll make
it.”
They climbed the first two floors
together before Nick broke off to retrieve his elevator. “I’ll wait
for you in the car,” he said. But his face said something else
entirely.
Jake smiled. “I’ll be there.” He
sounded none too convinced himself.
It was nearly two by the time Irene
returned to her hotel room, exhausted. Her body was whipped, but
her mind whirled way too fast to permit sleep. She’d hoped that the
martini before dinner and the two glasses of wine with the entree
would take the edge off, but it was no use. Slice by slice, her
career had been whittled away to virtually nothing these past few
days, and all the alcohol had accomplished was to give her a
world-class case of heartburn.
A hot bath was her last hope. She
preferred them just this side of scalding, where the skin of her
fingers and toes would prune up in minutes and the heat would suck
away her ability to concentrate on anything but sleep. None of the
worry mattered, anyway. Even with his wife and son in jeopardy,
Jake Donovan still remained out of reach. That part surprised her.
She’d thought for sure he was more of a family man than
that.
Still fully clothed, Irene plugged the
tub and cranked the faucet all the way to hot. After a few seconds,
she eased it back a bit, then closed the door behind her as she
strolled back to the bedroom to change out of her
suit.
They knew for certain now that Donovan
was getting help from someone. The local cop in Newark reported a
third party, as did the paramedics at the Rescue Squad building.
Crime scene technicians had confirmed glove smudges in the Faylons’
Toyota, but no extra prints yet. The Caddy was a rental—under a
fictitious name—and as such had hundreds of fingerprints all over
it. They’d run them all through the computer, of course, but it was
a giant step between having rented a vehicle and being a suspect in
a crime.
Agents from the Chicago field office
had been following through on Irene’s pet theory involving Harry
Sinclair, but after a day of turning his house inside out, no one
had found a single piece of evidence to implicate the old man. Old
Harry had even shown up at the house again, after a day of what he
called “alone time.” Apparently, occasional stretches of
unaccountability helped him cope during his periods of heavy
thinking.
Ted Greenberg in Chicago had sent a
tape of Sinclair’s interview via courier to George Sparks’s office
in Little Rock. Irene had listened to a copy in the car on the way
to dinner. It was funny, really, hearing Ted work to trip up the
old man.
“So, how do you explain the phone call
from Travis Donovan?”
“I suppose he wanted to talk to
me.”
“Did he?”
“Why don’t you tell me.”
“Look, Mr. Sinclair, it’s in your best
interest to cooperate here.”
“Consider me the poster child of
cooperation.”
“Fine. Did you speak to Travis
Donovan?”
“I’m afraid our connection was
broken.”
“So you didn’t speak to
him?”
“If the connection was broken, how
could I?”
“Please answer the question, sir. Yes
or no.” The frustration in Greenberg’s voice jumped right out of
the cassette. “Did you or did you not speak over the telephone with
Travis Donovan?”
“That would be very difficult without
a connection, don’t you think?” Equally obvious was the amusement
in Sinclair’s voice.
And so it went, for forty-five
minutes, with Harry Sinclair neither incriminating nor perjuring
himself. It occurred to Irene that the old man would make a great
politician. In all likelihood, the interview would have continued
ad infinitum had Sinclair’s attorney not shown up and put a stop to
it. He’d already talked an appellate judge into nullifying their
warrant and slapping a stay on their wiretap, due to a lack of
evidence.
What the
hell? she told herself. It was a dead end,
anyway.
She undressed quickly and clumsily,
kicking off her shoes and wriggling out of her suit. She paused a
minute to check a spaghetti spatter on the front of the blouse and
made a mental note to send it out to the cleaners first thing
tomorrow, before it had a chance to set. Next came her weapon, a
black S&W .40-caliber semiautomatic, which she unclipped from
the waistband of her skirt and dropped with a thunk onto the
dresser. In less than a minute, she was naked, ready to soak. On
her way back toward the bathroom, she paused for a moment to view
herself in the mirrored closet doors, first full-face, then
profile.
“Not bad for forty-two,” she told
herself. Then, to remember what she looked like at twenty-two, she
sucked in her stomach until she couldn’t breathe. “It sucks to grow
old,” she grumbled. Hearing the vernacular, she reminded herself
how much she was beginning to sound like her kids.
I’ve got to
call them, she thought. First thing tomorrow. It’s been two days.
And two days alone with their father was more than anyone should be
asked to endure.
By the time she finished brushing her
teeth, the water level had reached the danger line, and she had to
take care as she lowered herself into the steaming bath not to
slosh anything over the sides. It was wonderful; better, even, than
she’d hoped. In the oversize tub, the water came past her breasts,
just high enough to tickle the underside of her chin. The tension
and the worry drained away as she leaned her head back against the
tile and closed her eyes. This was heaven. If only she’d thought to
turn out the lights, she could’ve fallen asleep right
there.
In fact, she’d nearly nodded off when
she heard the bathroom door open.
“Don’t scream,” Jake warned as he took
aim at Irene’s left eye. “In fact, don’t say anything. If you try
to call for help, I’ll kill you.”
Irene didn’t move, other than to begin
trembling in the scalding water.
“Do you believe I’ll kill you?” Jake
asked.
The fugitive’s face was blank, yet his
eyes remained warm. The contrast petrified her. She nodded. Yes,
she believed him.
He nodded along with her. “Good.” He
pulled a towel off the metal rack next to the sink and handed it to
her. “Here,” he said. “Cover yourself up.”
She reached for the towel too quickly
and caused a wave of water to arch over the porcelain edge and slap
down onto the black and white tile floor. As she tucked the towel
around her body, she realized with a shudder that she was staring
down the barrel of her own gun. A humiliating end to a humiliating
day.
“What do you want?” she demanded. The
strength she heard in her voice surprised her.
“How’s my son?”
She glared at him, her fear dissolving
quickly into anger. “Who do you think you are, charging into my
hotel room—”
“You know who I am,” Jake interrupted.
“And if you truly believe all the bullshit they say I’ve done, then
you should be scared shitless right now. If you don’t believe it,
then you should know just how angry and unstable I have a right to
be.” He helped himself to a spot on the vanity and drew one knee up
to help support the weight of the pistol. “Either way, it seems
that you should think twice before pissing me off.”
She continued to glare. There was fear
in his eyes now, and combined with the complex assortment of other
emotions he projected, she didn’t know what to make of his
stability. Perhaps it was, indeed, time to be careful.
He took a deep, shaky breath and tried
again. “I’m not asking you for state secrets, Rivers. I’m a father
whose son is sick. Now, please answer my question. How is
he?”
The way she broke eye contact said
more than her words ever could. His shoulders sagged.
“They say he’ll live,” she said
softly. “But it’s too early to tell the full extent of the damage
to his lungs.”
Jake felt the sadness return and
closed his eyes. At least he’s
alive, he told himself. This was a time to focus on
the positive.
He heard movement in the water and his
eyes snapped open, freezing Irene in midlunge. If her foot hadn’t
slipped, she might have made it.
“Don’t!” he yelled, more loudly than
was prudent this late at night. His finger was half a pull away
from killing her, and she seemed to know it, her full attention
focused on the barrel of the pistol. “Sit down!” he commanded
sharply. “Dammit, Rivers, don’t do that to me!”
She did, indeed, sit back down, and
she watched as Jake struggled with his emotions. Sure as hell he’d
have killed her, and from all appearances, that fact scared him
nearly as much as it scared her.
A full minute passed before anyone
said anything. Then he asked, “Have you seen him? Travis, I
mean?”
She nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen him. He
seems to be resting comfortably. They’ve got him in pediatric ICU,
and he’s on a respirator, but he doesn’t seem to be in any
distress.”
He considered that, then nodded to
himself. “That’s good,” he said. “It’s good he’s comfortable. We
can handle anything as long as he’s alive.” Another long pause
followed. “Do you have children, Rivers?”
The question made her uneasy, but
there seemed to be no threat in it. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Two
daughters.”
He nodded again, though she wasn’t at
all sure he’d heard her answer. “Kids are a hoot, aren’t they?
Nothing makes you laugh as hard or cry as hard as a kid.” Again, he
seemed to disappear into a distant room in his mind.
“Why are you here, Donovan?” she said,
interrupting his thoughts. “No offense, but for an intelligent guy
like yourself, this is a stupid place to be.”
He looked up again and chuckled. “So
I’ve heard. Well, I’ll admit it seemed a much better idea when I
was planning it than it did once I got here. But sooner or later, I
figured I had to trust someone. You’re it. What does that tell you
about my available options?”
“How did you get in?”
Get him talking about
himself, she thought, remembering her hostage
negotiation training. As long as he felt like he had a friend, he’d
be less likely to harm the hostage. She must have skipped the
lesson on what to do when the negotiator and the hostage were the
same person.
“You’d be surprised how many master
keys they’ve got lying around the Housekeeping Department at this
hour,” he said.
“That’s smart,” she said. “I’m not
sure I would have thought of that.”
The comment brought a smirk to Jake’s
face, and then the smirk turned to a smile and the smile to a
laugh.
“What?” Clearly, she didn’t like being
laughed at.
“Why, Agent Rivers, I believe you’re
trying to suck up to me. Is that one of the lessons in Hostage
101?” He laughed again.
She scowled. “I don’t
know—”
“Please,” he interrupted with a wave.
“Spare me. If it sets your mind at ease, I don’t want anything from
you except conversation, okay? If you just stay put and do what I
tell you, I’ll be on my way in a little while. As you might
imagine, I feel a little exposed here.” He eyed her towel and
chuckled again. “Well, okay, maybe not as exposed as you, but still
. . .”
She smiled in spite of herself and
pulled the towel a little closer.
“So, tell me, Rivers, do you really
believe that we killed all of those people back in
1983?”
Her eyes narrowed as she searched for
the right answer.
He sighed. “Relax, okay? This isn’t a
quiz. It’s a fact-finding mission.”
She shrugged. “Well . . .
yes.”
He considered the answer. Certainly,
it was no surprise. “That all makes perfect sense to you, does it?
That my wife and I—neither of us with the slightest hint of a
violent past—would shoot our friends, blow up half the state, and
then leave a note?”
She shrugged. “With all due respect,
Donovan, crooks have been known to do some pretty stupid things.
Zealots, in particular, have a long history of
stupidity.”
“Zealots.” He said the word softly, as
if testing its flavor. “So that’s what we were, huh? Zealots? I
suppose the record is full of documented examples of our zealous
causes? Or was this environmental thing our first?”
“Look Jake . . .”
“No, you look, Irene,” he pressed. “Have you found any
evidence at all to substantiate this zealot crap? Registration
cards for the American Nazi Party, maybe? How about—oh, damn, who
was it that burned all the campuses in the sixties? —SDS, that’s
it. Students for a Democratic Society. Have you found that? How
about the NRA? Have you been able to dig up a single example of
Carolyn or me being zealous about anything?”
Irene rolled her eyes. “Come off it,
Donovan. Even Fidel Castro had a first time. The evidence speaks
for itself. Frankly, this little campaign of yours to dream up a
conspiracy about some skeleton is kind of sad. Maybe if you’d come
forward at the time, but really . . .”
He recoiled a bit at the mention of
the skeleton, but then he realized that she must have interviewed
Carolyn. “That proved to be a dead end,” he said. At this point,
honesty could only help.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The skeleton we came after turned out
to be a dog. Must have wandered in and died before any of this
happened.”
Now she was really confused. “So,
what—”
“But getting back to the note,” he
said, gesturing with the gun as if it were an extension of his
forefinger. “You’re telling me you don’t find that even a little
absurd? A little convenient? Jesus.”
She didn’t know where this was going,
so she remained silent. She figured he’d get to his point sooner or
later.
“Have you investigated many arsons,
Rivers?”
She shrugged with one shoulder, the
abrupt change of subject putting her on edge. “My share, I
suppose.”
He nodded approvingly. “I thought so.
I remember seeing on television once that sometimes arson is used
to cover up an entirely different crime. Has that ever been your
experience?”
She regarded her visitor for a long
moment before answering. “Let’s say I’ve heard similar
rumors.”
“Okay, fine. Let’s say that. It
wouldn’t be out of the question, then—I mean, it wouldn’t be
inconceivable—if you found out that such was the case in Newark
back in ’83, right?”
Irene didn’t like being cross-examined
by a murderer. “The water’s getting cold, Jake. Please get to the
point.”
“Fair enough.” It was time to play the
Big Bluff. “Living underground as I have these past years, I’ve
developed some interesting friendships with people who have access
to information you wouldn’t believe.”
“And Harry Sinclair is one of them,”
she interrupted.
Jake was ready for that.
“Who?”
She rolled her eyes. “Right,” she
groaned. “Go on.”
He shrugged it off. “Well, this
information, I’ll admit, is not always put to good use, but it’s
proved to be very reliable.” He paused for a reaction, got none,
then moved on. “These friends have recently given me proof that
your boss, Peter Frankel, was up to his elbows in illegal
activities back in the early eighties . . .”
“Oh, please!” she scoffed. “I don’t
even need to listen to this.”
“Hear me out,” he
insisted.
She looked poised to argue but then
seemed to give up. “I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do
I?”
Okay, here
we go. It was time to sell guesswork as
fact.
“Frankel was a senior guy in Little
Rock, wasn’t he, back in ’83?”
“Are you telling me or asking
me?”
“I’m trying to get you to open your
mind.” Jake barked.
She smiled smugly. “Then you’re
wasting your time here.”
Okay, fine.
False start. He tried again. “Well, if you do some
research, you’ll find that he was in charge of the whole
investigation back then. Fact is, he was senior enough to be
involved in just about everything coming out of your Little Rock
office.”
“As the supervisory agent in charge is
wont to do,” she interrupted.
Bingo.
Guess number one confirmed. “Well, my people tell me
that your boss knew all about the chemical warfare shit that was
stored back in that magazine but had reason to keep it a secret
from everybody—including his bosses.”
“And what reason might that be?” She
pretended to be amused, even as a tiny light came on in her
brain.
“Lots of money to be made in illegal
weapons sales, you know.”
Irene’s heart skipped a beat as she
recalled George Sparks’s recent mission to Iraq. To Jake, the
recognition registered only as a slight tic in her right eye and a
slight parting of her lips. Like a silent sigh. She said nothing,
and she recovered quickly.
“So he’s having this regular yard sale
out of Uncle Sam’s general store, when bingo! up pops the EPA and
slaps a lock on the door. He’s cut off from his supplies, and all
the evidence in the world is just sitting there waiting to convict
him.”
“You’re guessing,” she hedged. “You
don’t have any evidence.”
Jake was encouraged, even as she hit
the nail on the head. It made too much sense for it not to be true,
but he was powerless to verify anything. If he did his job right,
she’d do the research for him.
“Oh, there’s evidence,” he bluffed.
“You already see it in your head. I know you do. You don’t want to,
but it’s there, isn’t it? If you want the same proof I have, all
you have to do is look for it.”
“Where?” she pressed. “Where do I look
for this earth-shattering revelation? Who do I talk
to?”
“C’mon, Rivers. People can die for
answering questions like that.” It was the response he’d rehearsed
in the car with Nick. Mystery masks any
lack of substance.
She shook her head vehemently. She
refused to buy into it. “Why not just blow the place up, then? Why
go to all the effort to kill so many people if he was just trying
to hide some evidence of missing inventory?”
Her question stopped conversation
dead. Jake narrowed his eyes and allowed himself a bitter smile.
“Why kill so many people . . .” He savored the words as he repeated
them. “You ask that question when it’s one of your own, yet you
assume simple insanity when it’s Carolyn and me. Strange,
huh?”
She acknowledged the point by looking
away.
“Think about it, Rivers,” Jake urged,
his tone growing more insistent. “Assume for just a second that I’m
telling the truth here—that Carolyn and I are innocent. Now look at
the facts. If you want to truly hide a secret, it’s not enough
merely to destroy it. You’ve got to provide an alternative
explanation for the destruction. The last thing Frankel wanted was
an open-ended investigation. Without evidence to point to someone
else, the trail might very well have led back to him. As it was, he
got his bad guys on the first day and got the entire episode
cleared up within a couple of weeks. Because of who he was, no one
questioned anything.”
Irene considered it, and the more she
thought, the more frightened she looked. “How could he have known
that you and Carolyn would survive? If he was planning to pin this
elaborate conspiracy on you, how could he know you’d get
away?”
Jake watched her for a few seconds,
waiting for her to see it for herself. “The name Tony Bernard mean
anything to you?” he asked.
It took her a moment to place him.
“Yes. He’s one of the people killed that day. Back at the motel
room.”
“And why was he back at the motel? Do
you remember?” If this was going to work, she had to put some
pieces together for herself.
Irene closed her eyes. She’d just
reread the file that morning, but it felt like years ago. “He was
sick, wasn’t he? Some stomach thing.”
Jake waited, but she still didn’t get
it. “Awfully odd, don’t you think? Young man like that suddenly too
sick to work, and then these murderous barbarians go all the way
back to the motel just to pop him—and to leave a
note?”
Irene’s eyes grew intense enough to
spark a fire as the pieces fell into place. “You think that Tony
Bernard was the original patsy?”
Jake smiled. “In fact, I know he was,”
he lied.
“But what about his illness? There
were witnesses—”
“And how tough is it to give somebody
a bellyache? I saw him that morning, too. He was heaving his guts
out. He thought it was something he ate. I bought it at the time,
just like everybody else did. But hell, we all ate the same stuff
at the same place. Why was he the only one to get sick?” He let the
words settle for a few seconds. “When Carolyn and I survived,
Frankel had to shift gears a little, but he stayed with essentially
the same plan. I figure that Tony was killed as an insurance
policy. No telling what he might have known.”
She considered it all for a moment
longer. “And if you and your wife had gotten arrested, it wouldn’t
have mattered a bit, would it?” she thought aloud.
“Not with the case that Frankel put
together,” Jake agreed. “And the further false evidence I’m sure he
would’ve found if he was pushed to the wall. Plus, when emotions
run as high as they did after Newark, the standards for evidence
decrease. Why scour the bushes when the answer is delivered to your
door? People want a quick conviction in these things. In the end,
nothing we said could have gotten us off.”
Her head spun with new possibilities.
It had never occurred to her to believe Carolyn’s story. Was it
possible the Donovans were telling the truth?
“So how’s Carolyn?” Jake asked,
another radical change of subject. Irene looked at him, confused.
“I trust you’ve spoken with her?”
Irene nodded. “She’s fine. Frightened,
angry, and sad, but otherwise fine.”
He smiled. “Good. Next time you see
her, will you tell her I love her? And that I’m doing my best to
fix everything?”
She saw a chance. “Why don’t
you tell her, Jake? Let me
take you in, and we’ll get this all straightened out. I promise
you, I’ll pursue every lead you give me.”
That one made him laugh. “You’re
kidding, right?” She wasn’t, and he knew it. “Well, I appreciate
the offer, but forgive me if I decline. I’m not entirely convinced
that trusting you this much hasn’t been a huge mistake. Somehow my
faith in the criminal justice system just isn’t as strong as it
used to be.” As he spoke, he dropped the clip out of Irene’s weapon
and started thumbing the bullets into the toilet. He saw her look
of disgust and smiled. “I know, it’s kind of gross, but I can’t
very well leave you with a loaded gun, can I? I don’t think either
of us wants the hassle of a shoot-out at two-thirty in the
morning.”
“So what’s next?” she asked
cautiously.
He shrugged. “I guess that’s up to
you. You need to decide if your job is about justice or simply
about following orders.” With the bullets removed, he dropped the
clip into the bowl, then drew his own weapon before snapping the
last of Irene’s bullets out of the chamber and closing the toilet
lid. “I do have one last thing for you to think about,
though.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I know you’ve been wondering why we
came back here today, and I’ve done my best to explain that. We
came for that dog skeleton, and it was a horrible miscalculation.
Stupid reason, isn’t it? Made no sense. So how come you were
expecting us?”
Without waiting for an answer, he slid
down off the vanity and turned the doorknob to let himself out. “By
the way,” he said with a grin. “I was hiding in the closet when you
came in, and I have to agree. You’re not bad at all for
forty-two.”
Sleep now was out of the question.
Irene considered trying, anyway, if only in deference to the time
of night, but even as her body screamed for a place to lie down,
her mind spun like a top.
Donovan’s visit had left her stunned.
All day long, she’d tried to think of a sound, logical reason for
the couple to return to Arkansas. Clichés notwithstanding, smart
criminals never returned to the scene of the crime. And after
fourteen years on the Ten Most Wanted list, the Donovans had proved
themselves to be very smart indeed.
After fishing the ammunition out of
the toilet bowl—thankfully, she’d flushed after using it last—she’d
strolled back into the bedroom, where she found her weapon in the
middle of the king-size bed. She didn’t bother calling to alert
anyone about Jake. He’d be long gone as it was, and the last thing
she needed was another documented getaway.
Pulling on the lightweight flannel
nightgown she always kept stuffed in her garment bag, she sat
heavily in the hardback desk chair in front of the faux-wood desk.
The Donovan file lay in her briefcase, just out of reach, but she
didn’t want it right now. She wanted to reconstruct the case
against them from memory.
What did the Bureau have, really? The
note. Sixteen dead bodies. The fact of their survival and escape.
What else?
Nothing. The thought made her gasp. What had
seemed so ironclad—so obvious—only an hour ago now seemed pitifully
superficial. Fragile almost. There was enough there, she supposed,
to win a conviction in the hands of a skillful prosecutor; but
suddenly, there seemed to be huge holes in the case. Holes big
enough for a skilled defense attorney to drive a Mercedes
through.
Maybe that’s what this was all about,
she mused, resurrecting her natural cynicism. Maybe their return
and the attendant shenanigans were merely stunts, designed to build
a case for reasonable doubt in the minds of a future jury. Lord
knew that the standard for acquittal was getting lower these days.
Maybe this was just a high-stakes roll of the dice. They’d made
their stand, and if they won, they’d be able to reenter society as
full-fledged citizens. Was such a plan truly out of the question
for people as intelligent as the Donovans? Especially if they had
Harry Sinclair’s money behind them?
Certainly, it wasn’t as absurd as
Jake’s assertion that Peter Frankel was involved in arms
trafficking and murder.
So why did the Donovans return? Why didn’t they
just disappear one more time? They’d made it, for heaven’s sake;
they’d dropped completely off the radar screen after they snagged
their kid from the school. Certainly, Sinclair would have helped
them one more time. Why risk so much just for a jury
stunt?
And why the hell would they just give
up like that, after all this time on the run?
But they didn’t give up, did they?
Their kid got hurt, and they sought medical attention. If that
hadn’t happened, would they have disappeared, anyway? Dammit, why
weren’t these questions in her head when Jake was in her
bathroom?
Maybe hurting the kid was part of the
plan. Certainly, that would garner more sympathy from the jury.
Wouldn’t it be harder to send grieving parents up the river than it
would a pair of hardened killers?
Perhaps. But she’d seen the pain on
Carolyn’s face. And on Jake’s. As a sometimes-negligent parent
herself, Irene easily recognized parental guilt in others, and the
emotions she saw in the Donovans today were as genuine as any she’d
ever seen. There was no faking that kind of pain.
What was Jake’s challenge to her?
Is your job about justice or merely
about following orders? She wondered bitterly if
salvaging a career might be a noble third option.
So if the day finally came to testify
against the Donovans in open court, could she sell a jury on the
idea that all of this conspiracy crap was merely an absurd stunt to
deflect attention away from their heinous crimes? Absolutely. And
in so doing, did she believe in her heart of hearts that justice
would be served? The answer to that one scared her.
But
Frankel? Jesus.
Jake’s claims of hard evidence were a
bluff, and she knew it. Clearly, lies were not his strong suit,
even after so many years of living one. Still, even though she
wished with all her heart that she could dismiss his theories as
crazy, she had to admit that he made a lot of sense.
What was it he asked on his way out?
The question she was supposed to ask herself? Ah, yes. Frankel was
the one who told her that the Donovans were coming to Arkansas.
Something about a computer geek at EPA. So what was the big deal
there? They put triggers on computer files all the time. If someone
tried to access it, then a warning . . .
Then she saw it. “God
damn it,” she breathed.
“He knew they’d go back,
sooner or later.”
Her face flushed hot as the pieces
fell into place. Oh, God, this is
suicide.
Now it was just a matter of proving
her case without detonating her career. Fact was, she found herself
liking this criminal named Jake Donovan. Much as it sickened her to
think it, he seemed far nicer—and far less likely to take another
life—than Peter Frankel ever had.
Moving quickly to make the most of the
few hours remaining before dawn, she opened her briefcase and slid
her laptop out from under the Donovan file. Damn thing took forever
to boot up, but once running, the rest was a breeze. The Internet
was never busy at this hour.