All he’d really needed was his father’s presence beside him. In the pew at the church, at the graveside, and in the limo on the way home. They both knew what his father thought about the choices he’d made in life. The great and mighty J. R. Mason made no secret of his disappointment in the path his son had chosen, a different path from the one he and his father—and even his before that—had walked. A different path from the one he had plotted out for Mason.
18
Mason’s father stopped by his house on the way to the airport. Mason had been sitting on the front porch with a beer in his hand, staring blankly across the street at the park, when the sleek black Town Car passed across his field of vision. The dark sky had opened and released a torrent that beat a timpani on the overhang above him and flooded the gutters. The rain would probably turn to snow before the storm was through.
The driver climbed out, opened an umbrella and then the door for his father, and walked him up to the porch, where he left him without a word and returned to the car.
The senator sat down beside him and opened one of the beers from the six-pack behind him. They sat without speaking for the longest time, listening to the thunder and watching the lightning crackle though the clouds.
“Do you remember when your mother died?” he finally asked.
“Not the kind of thing a kid is likely to forget.”
“You know what I mean.”
Mason set aside his beer. Talking about his mother with a bottle in his hand didn’t seem right.
“I thought the sun would never rise again,” his father said. “For a long time, it didn’t. Not that I could see anyway. I was thirty-eight years old and had a twelve-year-old son. My job didn’t have the same meaning anymore. Nothing in my life did, for that matter. I reached a point where I needed to make a choice. I could either wallow in self-pity or grab life by the reins and take charge of my destiny.”
“I’m not you, Dad.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that you’re a Mason. Yours was never meant to be a common destiny, son.”
Mason shook his head. Classic J. R. Mason pep talk. From the man whose grand destiny consisted of driving his wife to drink herself into the grave and shipping his son off to private school so he could embark upon a quest to rule the country.
Before he entered the political arena and orchestrated his meteoric rise to prominence in the Senate, he was the kind of lawyer who approached every case as though he were going into battle. Defeat was an unacceptable outcome. Even winning, it seemed, was often not enough. He needed to crush his opponent, to grind him beneath his heel.
As far as prosecutors went, he’d been in a class all his own. His record pretty much guaranteed him the district attorney’s office. It also didn’t hurt that he was the son of James Richmond Mason Jr., whose seat on the U.S. Supreme Court had never really been contested and who had served as chief justice nearly since the moment he first sat behind the bench. As his father, the first James Richmond Mason, had before him.
Mason’s father used to say that you could learn more about human nature during a single day in a courtroom than from any number of textbooks. He said people only lie when they’re talking, but always tell the truth when they shut their mouths. So Mason had taken it upon himself from an early age to learn how to read their tells.
Funny, he used those skills every day in his profession—and he was exceptionally good at utilizing them—but he’d been blind to what was going on with his own wife.
“Thanks for being here, Dad.”
His father nodded and clapped him on the knee. The expression on his old man’s face was impossible to read, as usual. He stood and stared out through the rain toward the distant lake. He looked both regal and old in a way Mason never imagined he would be able to. His father’s silver hair was impeccable, his eyebrows tweezed to perfection, and his profile was the kind that would one day look good on a coin or a bill, if he had his way. And Mason had no reason to doubt that he would.
“What are you going to do from here?”
His father spoke with his back to him, as though he either already knew the answer or it was of no real consequence.
“I’m going to grieve for my wife.”
He signaled to his driver, who scurried back up the walk with the umbrella and guided him back to the Lincoln.
19
According to the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, Mason was stuck in denial. Not the denial of his wife’s death—he’d seen incontrovertible proof of that with his own eyes—but of her infidelity. Granted, one could make a strong case that he’d seen incontrovertible proof of that, as well, but he felt as though he would have known if she had reached the point of seeking physical consolation in the arms of someone else. Maybe known was the wrong word. Sensed. He should have felt it, something intangible, something in her voice or her mannerisms.
But he hadn’t.
Lord knows he’d pushed her away, but Angie had never been one to hide from her problems. Neither of them was especially good at communicating their feelings. They’d both been raised in homes where the outward expression of emotions was viewed as an exploitable sign of weakness, or, at best, an indulgence granted to children of a certain age. Surely she would have told him when she reached the point of cheating. Whatever might have transpired between them, she was his wife, and he believed in his heart that they would have overcome their problems if they’d been given more time.
He tried to think of the last words she had said to him. Instead, all he heard was the determination in her voice when she’d said, “No interruptions.”
At least he could count on his partner. Trapp not only took a huge risk slipping him files related to the fire at the motel, but also offered to back him up during a meeting he’d called with Christensen, who’d expressly prohibited him from participating in any portion of the investigation, even though the nature of the murders fell squarely in line with the MO of the perpetrators he’d been tracking. Call it a gut instinct or even wishful thinking, but the pieces fit. The monsters who had killed Kane and deliberately infected the immigrants he’d seen hanging from chains had an affinity for fire and knew how to cover their tracks, as they’d demonstrated time and time again, most recently in the building by the old airport.
The problem was, he was the only one approaching the deaths of his wife and her presumed lover as murders. Of course, he was also the only one who’d heard the message on his voice mail. Nothing good could come from releasing it, though, especially considering it supported the official narrative. He needed to find whoever had recorded the conversation and figure out why. And to do so, he needed his special agent in charge’s blessing to formally work the investigation.
Unfortunately, Chris had a pretty good idea why he’d called the meeting and was ready and waiting the moment he and Trapp walked through his office door.
“You stay away from it,” he said. “Anything you do will only compromise the investigation.”
“What investigation?” Mason asked. “As far as I can tell, no one’s doing a damn thing.”
“How would you know?”
Mason realized his mistake too late.
Chris tugged his fingers through his hair and glared at Trapp for several seconds before sitting in the chair behind his desk. He gestured for them to take seats across from him. Mason plopped down into the proffered chair and watched a flock of geese cut across the gray sky over his boss’s shoulder.
“Look, Chris, I—” Trapp began.
“You and I will talk later,” Chris said, and turned to Mason. “I won’t pretend to know what you’re going through. I don’t even want to imagine it.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re not doing a very good job.”
“It’s not my job to make you feel anything. My job is to give you a kick in the ass when you need it. And right now it’s taking what little patience I have left not to do just that.”
“You know as well as I do that something’s not
right here.”
“Know? What I know is that I have a stack of reports written by everyone from the ME to the fire inspector to half a dozen different officers at the DPD that tell a different story.”
Mason knew exactly what they all said. He’d been relegated to reading reports written by others, reports that he shouldn’t even have. The police interviews had been brief and superficial and riddled with innuendo. The manager of the Peak View Inn had remembered Angie, but he’d claimed not to have seen anyone else enter her room. None of the witnesses questioned had noticed anything out of the ordinary, at least not until they heard the explosion, which the fire inspector had ruled to be accidental, a consequence of faulty wiring and a pinhole leak in the radiator. The combination had blown out the front wall and dropped the flaming roof onto the foot of the bed.
Locker had even gone out of his way to personally deliver the news that the medical examiner had formally filed the cause of death as asphyxiation, which meant that Angie had been alive when the room filled with smoke. Mason had asked if that precluded some other form of incapacitation. The expression on Locker’s face had been one of sympathy as he awkwardly took his leave. It was at that moment Mason realized the people in his life were merely humoring a man they believed was trying to absolve himself of the guilt of sending his wife to her grave.
“They’re wrong,” Mason said.
“I’ll let you be the one to tell our experts they don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Not their observations. Their conclusions. They’re missing the bigger picture.”
“And what is that?”
“That this case is related to both what happened out by the old airport and down in Arizona last year.”
“So show me your proof and I’ll lead the investigation myself.”
“In all three instances, an explosion was used to erase the physical evidence.”
“Did they use the same explosive devices? The same detonators?”
“No, but—”
“What about the crimes themselves? What’s the relationship between them?”
“I’m still working on—”
“So what you have is a theory uncorroborated by anything resembling actual evidence.”
Mason stood and planted his hands squarely on Christensen’s desk.
“Damn it, Chris! They killed my wife!”
Christensen raised his eyebrows and cocked his head.
Mason closed his eyes, blew out a long, deflating breath, and slumped back into his chair.
“Give us the room,” Chris said.
Trapp glanced at Mason from the corner of his eye. They both knew how badly he’d screwed up. Christensen had baited him and he’d stuck his head right into the snare. Trapp rose without a word and disappeared with the soft click of the door closing behind him.
Chris sighed, swiveled his chair, and looked out the window. When he turned around again, his expression had softened.
“Now’s an emotional time for you. I get that. Every day I have to focus all my energy on distancing myself from the realities of this job, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for what you’re going through.”
“I know how I must sound—believe me—but you know me. You know how I work. Tell me you have another agent with better instincts.”
“That’s not the point.”
“That’s precisely the point. Right now every fiber of my being is telling me that the same people who killed Kane and the SWAT guys out at the old airport are responsible for my wife’s murder.”
Christensen looked Mason squarely in the eyes. His lips writhed over his teeth.
“I want you to go home,” Chris said.
“Chris—”
He held up his hand to silence any dissent.
“Take some time to grieve. Come back Monday morning. We’ll sit down and talk. See if things still look the same after you’ve had time to process everything.”
“And if they do?”
“Monday, Mason. Until then—like I said—leave this alone.”
Chris abruptly returned to his work and Mason recognized the conversation was over. While it hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped, it hadn’t gone as poorly as it could have, either. He didn’t look forward to going back home, but maybe if he stared at the maps in his den long enough, he might be able to find the proof he needed to convince his SAC that there was a connection between the events in Arizona, at the airport administration building, and at the motel, which resulted in the death of his wife. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was running out of time to do so.
The drive home passed in a blur. He was already mentally examining every facet of his proposed ninth trafficking organization when he pulled into his driveway, killed the engine, and bounded up to the porch.
He threw open the front door and stepped into the foyer.
Caught a flash of yellow in his peripheral vision, streaking toward his right foot.
It was a piece of paper, a single sheet torn from the Yellow Pages of a phone book. Folded, as though it had been wedged into the crack of his front door. He picked it up and opened it.
Nine words had been written on it in pen with an unsteady hand.
Big, bold words scribbled across columns of names and advertisements, from Hospital Equipment and Supplies through Housecleaning Services.
IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
I NEED YOUR HELP.
PART II
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942)
20
Denver, Colorado
NOVEMBER 12
Mason called in a favor to get the letter fingerprinted and run through the NGI—Next Generation Identification—system, a national database that contained biometrics, including fingerprints and facial recognition, for more than 100 million people. He was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, when no match was found. All it meant was that he was going to have to dig deeper into his bag of investigative tricks.
The failure to find a match wasn’t the end of the world, either. The database included every civil and government employee, all military personnel, and every person who’d ever been arrested. Much of the investigative process involved the elimination of potential suspects, and in one fell swoop, he’d cleared a full third of the population. That left a mere 200 million, which was a much more manageable number.
The problem now was that unless he got lucky and stumbled into whoever had left the note, he was going to have to wait for further communication. And waiting was something he was not prepared to do. He needed to maintain what little momentum he had going, which meant that, despite the glaring lack of evidence, he needed to revisit the case files.
Any crime essentially boiled down to three critical factors: means, motive, and opportunity. Means could vary and opportunities could be manufactured. Motive was the key. And motivation was a constant. The way he saw it, everything came back to whoever was attempting to smuggle the virus into the country and their ultimate goal, which he had to believe was weaponization. Homeland might have been convinced that the threat had been eliminated, but if he was right, the motive behind the ambush in Arizona was also the same as it was in the airport administration building and, later, at the motel where his wife was killed. He had to consider himself coincidental to the first case, and probably even the second, but he couldn’t rule out the personal nature of the third.
It was a distinct possibility that he’d gotten too close and his adversaries had lashed out at him by hitting him where he was most vulnerable. That logic had a gaping hole right in the middle of it, though. If they could find his wife, then they could easily locate his house, and most nights he was inside, fast asleep and unprepared to defend himself. And why call to let him hear his wife registering for a hotel room? Whoever had left t
hat message wanted him to believe that his wife had gone to that motel with only one intention, and one that could be corroborated by the physical evidence after the fire. So why go to that extreme unless the person wanted to leave no doubt about the story he or she was selling? As far as he could see, that was the weakest link in the chain and the one he most needed to exploit.
Mason used a reverse phone number lookup site to find out the cell phone’s service carrier. This, in turn, provided him with its registered serial number, which could be traced through the manufacturer to a Radio Shack in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Store records confirmed that it had been paid for in cash and not activated until three months later. Video surveillance was limited and the digital files were purged every other week. The SIM card had been removed and undoubtedly destroyed immediately after the call was placed.
The way he saw it, that left two potential approaches: the direct and the circuitous routes. The direct meant that he was going to need to return to the motel in order to actually investigate the scene. If that turned up nothing, then the circuitous meant he was either going to have to sell a judge on a subpoena there was no way in hell he’d grant, or get in touch with an old friend he hadn’t seen in years.
Whatever the case, at least he had something vaguely resembling a plan.
The Peak View Inn still looked a lot like it had the last time he was there, only not actively burning. Although that might have been an improvement. The parking lot was still discolored and the building itself had taken on an ash gray cast. The weeds and bushes overgrowing the sidewalk were brown and wilted. There were only two cars in the lot, one of which presumably belonged to whoever was working the desk. According to the police report, the man who had registered his wife was the thirty-six-year-old manager, Terrence Everett.
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