A Minute to Midnight

by David Baldacci

  “I don’t know for sure. I’m just trying to get to the truth.” She paused. “Who brought the used joints and empty beer bottles to our house?”

  Britta looked at her blankly. “Someone had to, to make it look like my parents were there that night. Otherwise the story wouldn’t hold.”

  Britta said in a hollow tone, “That was Myron’s idea. He was afraid he might get into trouble. I don’t believe your parents even noticed.”

  As a disgusted Pine was about to walk out, Laredo turned to Britta. “Does your husband have any hobbies?”

  Pine stopped and turned back around, awaiting the woman’s answer.

  “He likes cars, but you saw that. Spends way too much on them, in my opinion. But it’s his money.”

  “Was he into movies?” asked Pine.

  “Movies? No, not really.”

  “Does he travel to South Florida?” asked Laredo.

  “South Florida? I…Not that he’s mentioned.”

  “Is that where he might be now?”

  “He didn’t say anything about taking a flight.”

  “But did he take an overnight bag with him?”

  “He might have. I wasn’t up when he left.”

  “But you heard him leave?”

  “We…sleep in separate bedrooms.” She added quickly, “As you know, he’s a night owl, and I like to go to bed early.”

  “And what car was he driving? Obviously not the Pagani.”

  Britta looked confused. “I’m not sure. I…I didn’t see any other cars missing from the garage.” Britta put a hand on Pine’s arm. “What is going on here?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Chapter 67

  AS THEY WERE DRIVING back to town, they got hung up in traffic heading into Andersonville. There were RVs and pickups and cars and SUVs and even a Hummer with the faces of the Confederate leaders depicted on Stone Mountain painted on one side.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said Laredo. “I never expected a rush hour in Andersonville.”

  “The Civil War reenactment is coming up tomorrow,” replied Pine. “The ‘armies’ are marching in.”

  “Didn’t know it was that big a deal.”

  “You’re in the South now. The Civil War will always be a big deal. And it gives overgrown boys an excuse to play soldier.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’ll be a parade on the main street, and then mock battles on Saturday and Sunday afternoon on the Civil War Village grounds.”

  When they got back to the Cottage they found Blum in the breakfast area tapping keys on her laptop. She looked up and said, “And what did you find with Myron Pringle?”

  They sat down and took turns filling her in.

  “Never took him for a porn producer,” said a visibly surprised Blum.

  “I doubt Britta knew, but she did confirm that my parents were at their house the night Mercy was kidnapped. My mom woke up the next morning and ran back to the house.”

  “I’m sure that was quite a shock for her,” noted Blum.

  “Well, she brought it on herself.”

  “That’s a little cold,” said Laredo, shooting her a glance.

  Pine shot him a glance right back. “No, what’s cold is that she never owned up to it. All those years she could have told me the truth and she didn’t. And they lied to the police, too. They obstructed the investigation. They messed with the crime scene. The police always assumed the guy came from outside because my parents were downstairs. Only they weren’t.”

  Blum said quietly, “I’m sure your mother never imagined anything would happen to you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Britta said. She defended her, too.”

  “I’m sure that Britta feels incredible guilt for what happened to her children. There was apparently not much she could have done, but a mother always feels that guilt when something happens to her kids. The second guessing, the what-ifs. It can consume you.”

  Pine looked at Blum, her expression becoming contrite. “I didn’t even think about Britta’s situation while I was talking to her.”

  “Well, you were focused on your situation. Most of us do that.”

  Pine said, “I wonder if they were at the Pringles’ just to party, or whether there was another reason.”

  “Well, both couples had young children. Maybe they visited back and forth after the kids were asleep. And that night it was just when they went to the Pringles’.”

  “Nice, thoughtless routine,” said Pine bitterly because she was feeling bitter. “Go party and leave your kids home alone.”

  “They probably thought Andersonville was the least likely place for something like that to happen,” said Laredo.

  “It was just…a disaster from A to Z,” snapped Pine.

  “But do you really think it was a coincidence?” asked Blum suddenly.

  “What?”

  “That the night your parents decide to party at a neighbor’s house after putting their girls to bed, someone just happens to come to your house, nearly kills you, and takes Mercy?”

  Pine let out a long, tortured breath. “He could’ve been watching the house.”

  “I believe he was definitely watching the house.”

  Blum sounded so certain that Pine looked at her funny and glanced at the open laptop. “What did you find out?”

  Blum slid her computer around. “After we spoke earlier, I started doing some digging into the mob world in New York in the eighties. See this guy here?”

  They both bent down to study the picture of a tough-looking man in a dark suit. He was on the steps of a federal courthouse in New York City.

  “Who is he?” asked Laredo.

  “Bruno Vincenzo.”

  “Bruno Vincenzo? How does he figure into the equation?”

  Laredo scrolled down to some writing beneath the photo. “Vincenzo was a big-time foot soldier for the Castellano crime family. He was convicted, ratted some people out, went to prison, and within two months got a shiv in his carotid for his betrayal. He bled out before they could get him help.”

  Pine looked up at Blum blankly. “Am I being obtuse, or are you?”

  “Barry Vincent? Bruno Vincenzo? You don’t see the similarities?”

  Pine scanned some of the article. “I do, but Vincent couldn’t be Vincenzo. This says he died in prison in 1987. What happened to Mercy and me took place two years later.”

  “But Bruno had a younger brother, Ito. I found a picture of him too.”

  She went to another screen on her laptop.

  “The brothers don’t look alike,” said Pine.

  “Well, here’s a likeness you’ll find interesting.”

  She opened an email. “I know you had asked Max Wallis to look into Barry Vincent. When I found what I did about the Vincenzo brothers I called him to talk. He had pulled the DMV records and gotten a hit on Barry Vincent. He sent me what he found. It’s a photocopy of a driver’s license issued by the state of Georgia back in early 1989. This is Barry Vincent. The guy who had a fight with your dad. Look familiar?”

  Pine took the photocopy and compared it to the photo of Ito Vincenzo.

  “Oh my God. Ito Vincenzo is Barry Vincent.” She looked up at Laredo. “Why in the hell did no one see this before?”

  “Don’t look at me. I was in third grade.”

  Blum said, “Ito was enough of a degree of separation, I guess. And he wasn’t here long. And he so kept to himself that almost no one remembered him, other than Myron Pringle.”

  “He came down here all those years ago to avenge his brother,” said Pine.

  Blum nodded. “Apparently so.”

  “But how did he find them? How did he even know my mother was involved in all of it? Lineberry told me that she never testified. She just acted as an undercover agent and wore a wire.”

  “What?” exclaimed Laredo.

  “I forgot. I didn’t fill you in on my conversation with Jack Lineberry.”

  She spent the next few minutes doing just
that.

  “I doubt there’s any way for us to find out for sure that he discovered your parents were here. Unless we can find this Ito guy and ask him, and then he has to tell us the truth.”

  “But why not just kill us? The mob had apparently tried to do that before.”

  Blum said, “Maybe Ito Vincenzo didn’t have it in him to kill. I couldn’t find anything that showed he had mob connections. I think he did what he did for his brother. He obviously blamed your mother for what happened to Bruno.”

  “What happened to Bruno falls squarely on Bruno,” said Pine sharply. “But if his brother didn’t intend to kill me, just knock me out, maybe…maybe he didn’t have it in him to hurt Mercy.”

  “That’s possible,” said Blum. “But we can’t know for sure.”

  “You can have hopes, Atlee,” said Laredo. “But don’t get them up too high.”

  “Because it’s a long way down. Yeah, I know. I’ve been there.”

  Blum said, “We need to find Ito Vincenzo. I can start searching databases and making phone calls and sending emails.”

  “I can work on that too,” volunteered Laredo, but Pine put her hand up.

  “You’re on the clock, Eddie. I’m not letting you get in trouble on my account. So, let’s let Carol do her thing while we run some things down based on what we learned today.”

  “Namely, where the hell is Myron Pringle,” said Laredo.

  But Pine didn’t hear him. Since it now seemed clear that Barry Vincent/Ito Vincenzo had taken Mercy and nearly killed her, the man’s words, as recounted by Myron Pringle, came back to her.

  He said my dad had killed one daughter and nearly killed the other. So had he killed Mercy?

  Pine just sat there, her whole body feeling numb.

  Chapter 68

  PINE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING after a mostly sleepless night. She had just finished showering when her phone buzzed.

  It was the ME with an answer to one of her questions.

  She sat on her bed and quickly read through the brief but detailed email.

  The damage to the St. Christopher’s medal had been caused, in the ME’s opinion, by a gunshot. She had found powder burns and the partial indentation of what looked to be a shotgun pellet. And she had, on a hunch, hit the medal with luminol, which would show blood traces. And she had found them. And they didn’t match Freddie Gomez’s blood type.

  She could make no sense of that.

  Pine called the hospital to check on Jack Lineberry. His condition hadn’t changed, which she was told was a good thing. They expected him to grow stronger each day.

  She put her phone away, got dressed, and contemplated what to do next.

  They had to find Myron, and fast. She was fearful that he had sensed trouble coming his way and had maybe gone on the run. With his money he could already be in another country courtesy of a private jet. But the last time she had spoken to him, the man had not seemed nervous or threatened. If anything, he had seemed concerned about Pine and all the information she was finding out about her family, in particular her mother.

  So maybe his going away had nothing to do with his feeling the walls were closing in on him. But if he was their killer, he might be out there right now planning his next crime.

  She wandered to the window and looked out on the main street. She could see men in Civil War uniforms moving up and down the pavement. Some carried muskets, others had rolled-up sleeping bags, and still others sported what looked to be unfurled battle flags. People were gathering along the sides of the street. The parade was to take place that morning.

  She had read that many reenactors were fastidious about their uniforms and equipment, even down to the details of their uniforms’ buttons and materials. She had never gotten the appeal of refighting these battles, but if it brought in much-needed tourist dollars, there was nothing wrong with that. Towns needed to do what they had to in order to survive.

  And so do people.

  She lay back on her bed and looked up at the ceiling.

  All those years that her mother knew the truth. Even if Julia or Amanda, or whatever the hell her real name was, didn’t know who Barry Vincent was or why he was there, she well knew of her own past. She knew they were all targets. Apparently not even the U.S. Marshal’s Service could protect them. And yet she had gone off to party with a neighbor and left her young daughters defenseless all night.

  Pine suddenly sat straight up as though someone had hit her with a cattle prod. She’d had no revelation or epiphany; she was just angry. Furious, white-hot, beyond anything she had felt before. And it was all directed at her mother.

  Slowly, far too slowly for her personal comfort, Pine calmed. Still, she felt weak, and sick. She snatched a complimentary bottle of spring water off the nightstand and drank it down so fast, some of it missed her mouth and dribbled down her front. She wiped the droplets off her with her hand and set the bottle down.

  Get a grip. This is not productive. You’re no longer a helpless little girl. You’re an FBI agent—start acting like it.

  Her phone buzzed. She didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway.

  “Agent Pine?” It was a man. The voice was familiar, but in her current frame of mind, she couldn’t place it.

  “Who is this?”

  “Tyler Straub. I work for Mr. Lineberry. We talked before?”

  “He’s not—”

  “No, he’s fine. He’s awake now and the doctors are in there now checking him out.”

  “So why are you calling?”

  “You told me to give you a ring if anything seemed off.”

  “And something does?”

  “Well, I can’t find Jerry.”

  “What do you mean? He was at the hospital yesterday. I didn’t think he ever left.”

  “Operative word being was. No one’s seen him for a while.”

  “You checked Jack’s place?”

  “Checked everywhere I could think of.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Not that long after you left. The thing is, I’ve been on duty all this time and I’d like to get some relief. But I have no one to hand off to.”

  “The cops are guarding Jack’s room, too.”

  “Yeah, but the guy is my responsibility. He pays my salary. So…”

  “Maybe Jerry’s gone back to the house for some reason.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t reach him. And I can’t leave here to check.”

  “I’ll go over there and see what I can find out.”

  “That would be great. Just let me know as soon as you find out anything. His cottage is the blue one. It’s about three hundred yards directly behind the main house and right next to mine.”

  Pine clicked off and hustled down to her SUV.

  She drove straight out of Andersonville and headed north.

  Then she stopped when she got to the scene of the shooting.

  There was police tape up at various spots around the area. The Aston Martin was still there, though it was cordoned off with more police tape wound around orange cones. Two forensic techs were going over the car, and there was a county cop standing guard next to his cruiser.

  She parked and got out of her SUV, flashing her FBI creds and badge at the trooper on duty.

  “I’m working the case with Detective Wallis from GBI,” she noted.

  He nodded at her before leaning back against his vehicle.

  She walked under the police tape to where the techs were working on the car.

  “Anything?” she said.

  “Pulled a round from out of the dashboard,” said one, a young woman.

  “What was the type?”

  “Five point five six.”

  “That’s a NATO round,” said Pine. “Very reliable killing at long distance.” Lineberry was even luckier than she had thought.

  “Lot of blood, too,” said the other tech, a man in his forties.

  “Yes, there was,” replied Pine.

  “Is th
e guy okay?” said the woman.

  “He’ll make it.”

  She got back into her SUV and drove on, coming to the spot where the shot-up truck was being hoisted onto a flatbed wrecker service. After she showed her creds to the cop stationed there, he told her the truck was being taken back to a police facility to be thoroughly checked for trace including more blood, DNA, and prints.

  She eyed the bullet holes in the windshield, in the grille, and the shredded tire.

  The cop noted this and said, “Whoever did all that was a damn good shot.”

  “Thanks.”

  The startled deputy said nothing but looked at her suspiciously.

  Pine drove on, arriving at Lineberry’s about an hour later. The massive estate was unsettlingly quiet. Lineberry was not here, of course. Tyler Straub was at the hospital. Jerry Danvers was the wild card.

  The gate was closed, and no one answered her call on the video screen. She drove past the main house and to the rear of the property. This was all fenced in as well, but she managed to clamber over a section of wall and dropped inside the grounds. She stood and looked around. There was a lot of land back here, outbuildings, impeccable landscaping, hardscapes, formal and informal gardens. Lineberry had spared no expense in making his home an exceptional place.

  She walked along a pea-gravel path and was surprised not to encounter anyone. She assumed that Lineberry employed people to take care of the grounds, too, and there was the house staff as well. But she was all alone right now.

  That did not make her feel any better.

  She saw the twin cottages, one blue and one green.

  Straub had been right. They weren’t your typical “cottage.” They looked to be about thirty-five hundred square feet each.

  She walked around the blue cottage and looked in the windows. They all had shades pulled down, so that was terrifically unhelpful. She knocked on the door, no answer. She knocked again and heard nothing from inside.

  She went around to the back, put her elbow through a pane of glass in the back door, reached through, undid the lock, and opened the door. She expected to perhaps hear the beep of an alarm system about to start shrieking, but there was only silence.

  She closed the door behind her and looked around. This was obviously the kitchen. It was scrupulously neat and clean, with everything stacked and placed just so. In addition to maybe being a serial killer, Danvers could possibly be OCD, she thought.