Chapter 14

Jacob Mark said, “It doesn’t explain the coat.” But I thought he was wrong. I thought it explained the coat pretty well. And it explained the fact that she parked downtown and rode up on the subway. I figured she was looking to come upon whoever she was meeting from an unexpected angle, out of a hole in the ground, armed, dressed all in black, ready for some conflict in the dark. Maybe the winter parka was the only black coat she owned.

And it explained everything else, too. The dread, the sense of doom. Maybe the mumbling had been her way of rehearsing pleas, or exculpations, or arguments, or maybe even threats. Maybe repeating them over and over again had made them more convincing to her. More plausible. More reassuring.

Jake said, “She can’t have been on her way to deliver something, because she didn’t have anything with her.”

“She might have had something,” I said. “In her head. You told me she had a great memory. Units, dates, time lines, whatever they needed.”

He paused, and tried to find a reason to disagree.

He failed.

“Classified information,” he said. “Army secrets. Jesus, I can’t believe it.”

“She was under pressure, Jake.”

“What kind of secrets does a personnel department have anyway, that are worth getting killed for?”

I didn’t answer. Because I had no idea. In my day HRC had been called PERSCOM. Personnel Command, not Human Resources Command. I had served thirteen years without ever thinking about it. Not even once. Paperwork and records. All the interesting information had been somewhere else.

Jake moved in his seat. He ran his fingers through his unwashed hair and clamped his palms on his ears and moved his head through a complete oval, like he was easing stiffness in his neck, or acting out some kind of inner turmoil that was bringing him full circle, back to his most basic question.

He said, “So why? Why did she just up and kill herself before she got where she was going?”

I paused a beat. Café noises went on all around us. The squeak of sneakers on linoleum, the clink and scrape of crockery, the sound of TV news from sets high on the walls, the ding of the short-order bell.

“She was breaking the law,” I said. “She was in breach of all kinds of trusts and professional obligations. And she must have suspected some kind of surveillance. Maybe she had even been warned. So she was tense, right from the moment she got in her car. All the way up she was watching for red lights in her mirror. Every cop at every toll was a potential danger. Every guy she saw in a suit could have been a federal agent. And on the train, any one of us could have been getting ready to bust her.”

Jake didn’t reply.

I said, “And then I approached her.”

“And?”

“She flipped. She thought I was about to arrest her. Right then and there, the game was over. She was at the end of the road. She was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. She was trapped. Whatever threats they were using against her were going to come to pass, and she was going to jail.”

“Why would she think you were going to arrest her?”

“She must have thought I was a cop.”

“Why would she think you were a cop?”

I’m a cop, I had said. I can help you. We can talk.

“She was paranoid,” I said. “Understandably.”

“You don’t look like a cop. You look like a bum. She would more likely have thought you were hustling her for spare change.”

“Maybe she thought I was undercover.”

“She was a records clerk, according to you. She wouldn’t have known what undercover cops look like.”

“Jake, I’m sorry, but I told her I was a cop.”

“Why?”

“I thought she was a bomber. I was just trying to get through the next three seconds without her pushing the button. I was ready to say anything.”

He asked, “What exactly did you say?” So I told him, and he said, “Jesus, that even sounds like Internal Affairs bullshit.”

I think you tipped her over the edge.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

For the next few minutes I was getting it from all sides. Jacob Mark was glaring at me because I had killed his sister. The waitress was angry because she could have sold about eight breakfasts in the time we had lingered over two cups of coffee. I took out a twenty-dollar bill and trapped it under my saucer. She saw me do it. Eight breakfasts’ worth of tips, right there. That solved the waitress problem. The Jacob Mark problem was tougher. He was still and silent and bristling. I saw him glance away, twice. Getting ready to disengage. Eventually he said, “I got to go. I got things to do. I have to find a way to tell her family.”

I said, “Family?”

“Molina, the ex–husband. And they have a son, Peter. My nephew.”

“Susan had a son?”

“What’s it to you?”

The IQ of labradors.

I said, “Jake, we’ve been sitting here talking about leverage, and you didn’t think to mention that Susan had a kid?”

He went blank for a second. Said, “He’s not a kid. He’s twenty-two years old. He’s a senior at USC. He plays football. He’s bigger than you are. And he’s not close with his mother. He lived with his father after the divorce.”

I said, “Call him.”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning in California.”

“Call him now.”

“I’ll wake him up.”

“I sure hope you will.”

“He needs to be prepared for this.”

“First he needs to be answering his phone.”

So Jake took out his cell again and beeped through his address book and hit the green button against a name pretty low down on the list. Alphabetical order, I guessed. P for Peter. Jake held the phone against his ear and looked one kind of worried through the first five rings, and then another kind after the sixth. He kept the phone up a little while longer and then lowered it slowly and said, “Voice mail.”