“A few years ago there was some pretty heavy stuff going down. Some in Oregon, mostly northern California. Letter bombs in the mail, pipe bombs, that kind of deal. Most of the targets were federal agencies, the BLM, the Forest Service, logging and mining companies. Nobody got killed but quite a few were injured. Some senior executive of a lumber business got his arm blown off. Thing is, there was a guy around at that time who a lot of folks figured was involved. Slight European accent, German, Swiss maybe. Rangy, kind of good-looking. Called himself Michael Kruger or Kramer, some name like that. Eventually three or four people got arrested, went to jail for a long time. He just vanished.”
“You think that’s who Rolf is?”
Hacker held up his palms.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Have you told anybody about this?”
Hacker laughed.
“The cops, you mean? No, sir.”
“Well, is it okay if I do?”
Hacker sat back and picked up his beer and gave a wry smile.
“Man, I figure they know all about it already.”
Ben asked him what he meant, but Hacker wouldn’t elaborate. He just asked Ben if the FBI was intending to issue Rolf’s photograph and details as they had Abbie’s. Ben could only repeat what Andrews had told him: They hadn’t yet gotten any ID on the other person involved that was strong enough to go on. Hacker gave a skeptical laugh.
“Yeah, right,” he said. And finished his beer.
As they said good-bye in the street outside the restaurant, Mel shook his hand and said she was sure Abbie wouldn’t have done anything stupid and that everything would be all right. Ben smiled and said he knew it would. She kissed him on the cheek and turned briskly and walked off with the others. Which was just as well because for some reason this small gesture of affection made the tears come rushing to his eyes and he cried all the way back to the hotel.
Sarah had told him to call her after meeting them, no matter how late it was. So back in his room, lit only by the bedside lamp and the flickering blue of the muted TV, he dialed the number that had once been his. But all he got was the answering machine. The voice was still Abbie’s, recorded at least two years ago.
Hi, you’ve reached the Cooper residence. We’re all far too busy and important to talk with you right now, but please leave a message and if it’s really witty and cool, we’ll get back to you. Bye!
“Sarah?”
He thought she might pick up but she didn’t. He left a brief message then decided to try her cell.
“Benjamin?”
“Hi. I tried the house number.”
“We’re at Martin and Beth’s.”
“Joshie too?”
“Yes. We had to get out. It was like a siege. Newspaper reporters, TV crews. We had to sneak out the back. It’s a total nightmare.”
She sounded numbed, fragile, right on the edge.
“They said on the news she’s wanted for murder.” And now her voice cracked. “Oh, Benjamin . . .”
“Sweetheart.”
She was sobbing. He could hardly bear to hear it.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“Please come. Please.”
It was one of those perfect fall evenings, clear and warm and still, everything saturated in a golden light. The maples in the Ingrams’ backyard were a blaze of amber and red, their shadows leaning long across the lawn. Sarah had been staring at them for a full five minutes. She was out on the deck, leaning against the wall by the open doors to the kitchen, smoking another cigarette. It was getting out of hand. She had smoked half a pack today already. She was going to stop. Tomorrow.
“Sarah?”
Beth was standing at the door. She had taken the day off work to stay with her.
“He’s here.”
Sarah followed her inside and through the kitchen to the hallway then across the polished woodblock floor and the elongated triangle of sunlight that fell on it through the window halfway up the staircase. Beth opened the front door and walked out into the glow, the cab pulling away down the driveway, Benjamin standing there in his long stone-colored raincoat, putting down his bag so Beth could give him a hug. Sarah stood in the doorway, shielding her eyes against the sun and watched him walk toward her. He looked tired and strained around the eyes and he was giving her this beautiful, brave, sad smile. Oh God, she thought. At such a time, their world so suddenly askew, how could he not be hers?
He opened his arms and she clung to him as if to life itself, her shoulders, her whole body shaking as she wept. He held the back of her head against his chest and stroked her hair as he always used to. And when at last she could look up at him, he kissed her on the forehead and gently wiped her tears with his fingers and neither had yet spoken a word.
Beth was watching them, mopping tears too. They followed her into the house with their arms still around each other and in the hallway stood again and hugged.
“You smell of airplanes,” she said.
“It’s my new cologne, kerosene for men.”
“Oh, Benjamin. Tell me this isn’t happening.”
“Is Joshie here?”
“He wanted to go to school.”
“Are the reporters still camped out at the house?”
“I drove by around two this afternoon,” Beth said. “There was still one or two. Alan says once you’ve made the statement, they’ll probably leave you alone.”
Beth had put them in touch with a lawyer friend of hers named Alan Hersh who specialized in high-profile cases where there was a lot of media interest. He had been liaising on their behalf with the police. The plan was to hold a press conference the following morning at which Benjamin and Sarah would appear and read an agreed statement. Hersh even wanted Josh to be there too. Sarah was dreading it.
They went into the kitchen and Beth made them sit down and poured them each a glass of wine and though it wasn’t even yet six o’clock they put up only token resistence. Benjamin asked after the Ingram boys who were both away at college. Beth said they were doing just great. They soon ran out of small talk.
“Did you hear they arrested Ty today?” Sarah said.
“They what?”
“I had a call from his mother. She was in a terrible state. The father of the boy who got shot in Denver owns the company that’s been drilling gas on their ranch. They’ve had a lot of trouble with him. Apparently he’s ruined the whole place. The police know about Ty and Abbie and all the calls he made to her cell phone. They seem to think he must be involved in some way, maybe even that he was the other one in the van with Abbie.”
“Ty?” Benjamin said. “No way.”
“That’s what I said. But they say he has a motive.”
Sarah also relayed what Hersh had told her that afternoon about taking care what they said in their phone conversations and e-mails, that there was a “strong possibility” that they were being monitored to see if Abbie might try to contact them. Her bank account and credit cards would already have been closed, he said. And Benjamin’s and Sarah’s accounts would no doubt be under scrutiny too in case they attempted to forward money to her.
“They can’t do that, surely?” Benjamin said.
“He said it was safe to assume we would be under surveillance.”
“What, everyplace we go? All the time, somebody’s going to be tailing us? Joshie too? At school?”
Sarah shrugged. Benjamin shook his head.
“I don’t believe that. Beth, do you?”
“Maybe I’ve seen too many movies.”
Josh arrived back from school and Benjamin got up and gave him a long hug. Then Martin came home and the five of them had supper and tried to talk about other things but it all seemed a little phony. Martin and Benjamin hadn’t spoken in a long while and though they both made an effort there was clearly a mutual residue of hurt.
And the phone never stopped ringing. The FBI and Alan Hersh wanted to finalize the details for the press conference and e-mailed them a draft
of the statement. Sarah and Benjamin and Beth all went into the den and stood around Martin at his computer, reworking it then e-mailing it back. All it basically said was what a wonderful girl Abbie was, how proud of her they were, and how they were convinced of her innocence. It ended with a direct appeal to her to come forward and help clear things up. We love you, honey, it concluded. Please come home.
“You realize it has to be you who reads it out,” Benjamin said.
“I can’t.”
“Sweetheart, I’ll be there beside you. Joshie too. You know I’d do it, but with the way things have been between Abbie and me, she needs to hear it from you.”
Sarah argued for a while but she knew he was right. Somehow she would have to find the strength.
The Ingrams’ house had a guest annex that jutted in a typically Martinesque flourish into the back garden. It had its own deck and three double rooms, each with its own bathroom. The arrangement neatly got Beth off the hook about who was going to sleep where. Sarah and Josh had the previous night each taken a room and Ben had already put his bag in the third. After the late TV news—on which, thank heaven, there was no mention of Abbie or the murder—the Ingrams said good night and retired and the Coopers made their way upstairs to the annex.
They sat, all three of them, for a while on Sarah’s bed and talked. Josh told them about the video he and Freddie and some of the other senior-year kids were making at school. Then he got up and said good night and went to his room. Benjamin seemed to take this as his cue to leave too. Now that it was just the two of them, he suddenly looked awkward and he stood up and stretched. Tomorrow was going to be a long and heavy day, he said. And he bent and kissed her on the cheek and walked toward the door.
“Don’t go,” Sarah said quietly.
He turned and looked at her.
“Sleep here. Please. I need you with me. Just tonight.”
He shut the door and came back to the bed and sat beside her and put his arms around her and held her.
They undressed discreetly, like strangers. It felt odd to see his washbag beside hers in the bathroom and all the things she recognized but were no longer in her life. His razor, the little red leather manicure set she had once bought him, the deodorant he always used. When she came out of the bathroom he had already turned off the bedroom lights and she slid into bed beside him and for a long time the two of them lay there, separately staring at the ceiling and the slowly configuring shapes and shadows of the room.
“I miss you, Benjamin. So much.”
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“I get by without you. From day to day. But it’s as if . . .”
She had to swallow hard. Don’t cry, she told herself, don’t cry.
“. . . as if there’s only half of me now. The other half has gone.”
He rolled toward her and put his arm around her. And at his touch, of course, she couldn’t help but cry.
“I love you, Benjamin.”
He would probably think, later, that she must have planned it. But it wasn’t so. There was no plan. Just the slow, inexorable conjunction of two wounded souls. She turned toward him and put her arm around his waist and felt the warmth of his body, the familiar shape and angles of him, the press of his chest against her breasts. Her cheek against the roughness of his jaw, her lips in the softer hollow of his neck. She breathed the ever-remembered smell of him.
“Sarah, listen. We—”
“Ssh. Please.”
She had already felt him stir against her thigh and now she pressed her pelvis into him and felt him swell and harden. She reached down and lifted her nightgown and reached for him inside his shorts and held him and felt him quiver. And now he’d found her mouth and was kissing her and raising himself across her and upon her, tugging down his shorts and lowering himself between her opened thighs and sliding up and into her.
And he was hers again. If only for this sorrowful and stolen night. He was hers.
TWENTY-TWO
Abbie had been to San Francisco only once before. It was on a family vacation when she was about twelve years old and they had stayed in a hotel that turned out to be a place where people came to recover from cosmetic surgery. Everybody had been wearing bandages, some with their heads and faces completely wrapped, trying to eat their breakfast through the slits that had been left for their mouths. Her dad said it was like an audition call for The Invisible Man. It was high summer but they never once saw the sun because the city was shrouded in a damp fog. Even so, they’d had fun, done all the tourist things, the streetcars, the cable car, browsed the stalls on Fisherman’s Wharf, bought the T-shirts.
This time it was a little different.
She was standing in the dirty little corridor outside the manager’s office, just along from the restrooms, waiting for her money. There was a single bare lightbulb and the walls were gloss red with lots of little white patches where notices had been ripped off and the paint had come away with the tape. The only one left said Private, Keep Out on which some great wit had inserted the word Parts after Private and, for those who didn’t get it, scrawled an obscene illustration beneath.
At the other end of the corridor, she could see the smoky red glow of the bar where the jukebox, as usual, had been commandeered by the heavy-metal freaks. They always played it so loud she’d had to learn how to lip-read to take people’s orders. When her shift ended, it was normally at least an hour before her ears stopped ringing.
It was after midnight and she had already been waiting five minutes. Behind the locked door, Jerry the manager, all two hundred and fifty disgusting pounds of him, was counting out the tips while at the same time talking on the phone to one of his crass friends. Which was presumably why it was taking so long. Multitasking was not among his gifts.
“Far out,” he was saying. “Okay, you got it, big man. I gotta go. Yeah. Later.”
The door was being unlocked now and as it swung open she saw Jerry, propelling himself on the casters of his chair back to the desk where the money stood divided into five little stacks among a decaying clutter of old burgers and pizza and coffee cups and God only knew what lived among them. The office, like everything else at Billy Z’s, including the kitchens, was a health hazard. Who Billy Z was or might have been Abbie had no idea. Maybe he ate something off the menu and died. Or survived, which was why he was famous.
“Hey, Becky, sorry about that.”
Abbie just nodded. He picked up one of the stacks of bills and handed it to her. Abbie counted it.
“There’s only eighteen dollars here.”
He took a bite of the burger and shrugged.
“It’s been quiet.”
She wasn’t going to argue. She stuffed the money into her coat pocket and turned to go.
“You okay?”
“What?”
“You don’t say a whole lot.”
“So? I don’t get paid to.”
“Hey, chill, babe. Whatever.”
She wanted to throw something at him but instead just gave him a look and turned and walked out.
“Love you too!” he called after her.
The fat jerk had kept her waiting so long that she missed her bus back to Oakland. She ran down the hill but it was already pulling away up onto the freeway, so she sat on the wall and lit a cigarette and waited for the next. Apart from the traffic up on the freeway, the only sign of life was a black cat, sitting on the sidewalk across the road, outside the salvage yard with its stacked towers of flattened cars. He was grooming himself at the edge of a pool of cold light cast by a solitary streetlamp. Every so often he would freeze and fix his yellow eyes on Abbie for a few moments, then nonchalantly go back to licking his paws.
“Hey, boy,” she called softly. “Come on now, come over here.”
But, of course, he didn’t.
It was nearly April but the night was cold and damp and still felt like winter. Maybe it was the weather that was making her feel so down. When it was clear and sunny she found life a lot eas
ier to handle but when it was like this her spirits seemed to plummet. And when that happened all she could think about was calling her mom.
The last time she had heard her voice was on the TV, begging Abbie to give herself up. It was pretty heavy watching it though Abbie couldn’t remember all that much about it because she was a little out of her head with the pills Rolf had given her. It was just after they’d gotten to LA and were holed up with some people he knew there. One day had blurred into another, weeks into months. Just lying there on the bed with the drapes closed and the TV always on, Rolf bringing her food or something to smoke or making love to her. She couldn’t even remember Thanksgiving or Christmas. But she could still conjure the image of her mom and dad and poor Josh standing there, so pale and nervous and brave in front of all those reporters, cameras flashing and microphones bristling, her mom saying how they knew she was innocent and how much they loved her.
Maybe, if her head had been clearer, she might have called them right then and there or even walked into a police station and announced who she was. Not that Rolf would have let her out of his sight long enough to do either. She knew he’d been worried that she might do something stupid like that. He’d kept telling her that they had to give things time to blow over, let all the media madness die down. And, of course, as always, he was right.
The house where they had first laid up was in Whittier, out in the endless sprawl of eastern LA. It was a run-down but not overly rough neighborhood, the kind of place where people minded their own business and the cops kept away unless someone got murdered. There were two guys and a woman living in the house and Abbie was never quite sure what they did. Two went out every morning, as if to work, but one always stayed home. From the regular flow of visitors, she figured they were most likely dealing drugs. She knew one of the guys had a gun and she figured there were probably others. But they were all kind to her, much kinder than those creeps she had met at Rolf’s squat in Seattle. They treated her with sympathy, even with respect. Then again, she was no longer just a rich little college kid on leafy-spurge patrol.
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