The Program

by Stephen White

  “I doubt it. But you may end up wishing the U.S. marshals were your main problem.”

  “Why? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t pretend to know the man’s identity. But to me, it sounded like somebody connected.”

  “Connected? What do you mean? Like a gangster?”

  “Yeah, a wiseguy, like Robert De Niro.”

  “How would she be involved with somebody in the mob? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “My thoughts exactly. She’s a prosecutor, right?”

  “Yes, she’s a goddamn prosecutor.”

  “Makes no sense.”

  “A wiseguy warning me? What kind of mess have your people gotten me into? What kind of half-ass operation you running, Prowler? How badly does that ship of yours leak?”

  “We don’t leak. That’s precisely why you should be worried. Your name is written down exactly nowhere in my files. Nowhere. Not on a single sheet of paper. Not in a single computer file. In fact, I don’t even know your whole name. The operatives in the field never learn the identity of the client, so they can’t divulge it, even when they are captured and … tortured. Which I think my man was, by the way.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That it appears that your worst fears are coming true. This man who called me identified himself as a friend of our friend in Colorado. Which I assume means that she knows what he knows. She gave him your name. Which means what, exactly? Given that he knows your identity, it means that she probably knows your identity. And that means that these lawyers you want dead seem to know exactly who they’re after. And maybe why.”

  “Jesus. He really mentioned Duke and engineering, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jesus, Jesus.”

  Prowler clicked off the line before his client did. He sat back in his chair and rotated the mic of his headset so it hung in the air below his chin. He pushed his wheeled chair away from his console and closed his eyes.

  He didn’t tolerate failure. And this whole account was beginning to smell like failure. He had to find Kirsten Lord or Peyton Francis or whatever her newest name was before the U.S. Marshals found her.

  She had a fifteen-hour head start but was probably limited to road or rail travel. Did she have fresh ID? He didn’t know, but he had to assume that she did.

  Prowler got up from his chair and walked to the far side of the office, where he stood in front of a huge map of the United States that almost covered a large wall. He began to calculate radii from Colorado’s Front Range, pausing from the task only long enough to remove a tiny bottle of Coca-Cola from the undercounter refrigerator on the adjoining wall. The Coke was a little seven-ouncer, the kind they used in vending machines when he was a kid. The perfect size for a soda bottle. Every sip of a seven-ouncer was sharp and cold and sweet all at once. There was no deterioration in flavor or carbonation as he drank. The iced glass was exquisitely designed to maintain the perfect temperature of the beverage.

  He flipped off the cap with a bottle opener—the old-fashioned way—and drained the bottle in two long draws as he stared at the map.

  The bottle still in hand, he began to smile.

  He knew exactly where to find the woman and her daughter. He touched the tip of the bottle to the correct spot on the map before he began the short walk back to his perfect desk chair.

  6

  “Carl, she’s gone. Landon’s gone!”

  “Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two”

  Carl had been standing with his hands in his pockets and was looking down at his feet, pondering something through a vision of concrete and asphalt. At my words he jerked his head up and said, “What the …?”

  We both began running. Ernesto Castro’s words hovered over my head like Satan’s halo.

  “Every precious thing I lose, …”

  A chain-link fence about four feet high surrounds the train that is on display in the center of the park. The area between the train and the creek—where Carl and I had been sitting earlier—is mostly grass.

  “… you will lose two.”

  Landon wasn’t in the open area. We had to get all the way around the train to search the other side of the park.

  I yelled, “You go that way,” while I pointed to the near edge of the fence. I assumed I would be a faster runner than Carl and I’d already begun to sprint toward the far edge of the fence surrounding the train.

  Whales, whales, whales. They were everywhere, I swear. It almost felt as though they’d beached themselves in my path and I had to dodge them as I ran.

  Less than a minute later, Carl and I met on the other side of the three-car train. Neither of us spoke; we both just shook our heads, our eyes frantically searching for any sign of Landon. I immediately took off toward the big white bandshell and tiny amphitheater that separates the northern edge of the park from the heavy traffic on Canyon Boulevard.

  Landon, still in her wheelchair, was ten feet from the stage, listening to two boys a few years older than her. They were performing rap.

  They rapped badly. They danced badly.

  But they were game.

  I reminded myself to breathe. I reminded myself to leave my terror at the door. I reminded myself that this—all of this—was already much, much too hard for a little girl.

  Carl joined me at the rear of the amphitheater. He was breathing hard, like an athlete after a long run.

  I said, “Let’s give her a minute.”

  He said, “Yeah. She can probably use one.”

  CARL DROVE US west on Arapahoe before turning left on Ninth. He turned right at the southern edge of the old pioneer cemetery. I asked him to stop and pointed out a little grocery store on the corner behind us. “Next time we need to meet, let’s meet there, okay? It’s easier for me.”

  He said, “Sure,” and headed farther west into the confusing streets on the other side of the graveyard. He stopped his car in the shade of an elm that was badly in need of pruning and suggested I get out of the car.

  Landon said, “Not me, right?”

  Carl answered. “That’s right. We won’t be long.”

  She mumbled something that I was certain I would have considered snide. In other circumstances I would have called her on it. Not that day.

  I climbed out of the car. Carl did, too. We stood leaning against the trunk, staring back toward downtown.

  “What’re you going to do?” he asked me.

  “I need to find out what happened to my friends. That’s first I guess.”

  “Doesn’t sound good. What you heard on the phone doesn’t leave me thinking you’ll learn good things.”

  My voice shook with reverberations of suppressed rage and with the hydraulic pressure of thwarted tears. “What would they do to her, Carl? If they were to kill her in those circumstances. In her condo like that. How would they do it?” I shivered at my own words.

  He shrugged. “Depends what their intentions were. Sometimes you want people dead and you want everyone to know it. Sometimes you want ’em just to disappear like you vaporized them.”

  “Dave Curtiss’s death was… clean, right? The heart attack thing? They wanted that to look like natural causes? Not to draw attention?”

  “Yeah, that was clean.”

  “So they went to some trouble to make that look like something natural. Let’s assume they wanted Andrea to be clean, too. How would they do it?”

  “If it was me? Given that what you heard on the phones was probably their backup plan—seeing there was no way for them to know she’d stay home sick from work—I probably would have done something straightforward and quiet.” He raised his chin and glanced quickly at me. “I would have strangled her. Probably with a wire. Had something all ready for her body.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Even though it was the backup plan, I still would’ve been ready to go in if I needed to. Disposing of the body is the complicated part. I probably would’ve gone into h
er building dressed like a repairman, you know, maybe had a washing machine or a refrigerator with me on a dolly. Once she was clipped I would’ve stuffed her inside, then rolled her back out inside the appliance. No one would have given it a second thought. You walk into a building with a refrigerator, nobody’s surprised when you walk back out with a refrigerator. Then I would’ve stashed the body where nobody would ever find it.”

  “It’s that easy to get away with it?”

  He shrugged. “I never got caught.” He allowed that thought to permeate my membranes before he said, “Stranger hits are hard for the cops. Motive is elusive. Unless you get sloppy, it’s easy to get away with it. Well maybe not easy. But if you’re careful, not too hard.”

  As a prosecutor I knew that, of course. But I didn’t want it to be true about Robert’s killer. I was still hoping and praying to see the man in the chinos join Ernesto Castro behind bars.

  Carl continued. “After you find out exactly what happened to your friend, then what are you going to do?”

  “For now? Try to stay hidden.”

  “What about the guy who’s about to fry in Florida? You going to forget about him?”

  “No, I’m going to need to get some help with that.”

  “What kind of help? Something I can do?”

  “No, I wish. Andrea and Dave were going to do all the legwork on the case. They were down there; they knew the players. Dave had already talked to Mickey Redondo’s old partner. He was helping us.

  “Let’s face it, given what’s going on with me, I can hardly go to Florida and start asking around about this old case. If I’m going to be effective down there, I’m going to need a lawyer, somebody who has a privilege to protect. Somebody willing to go to Florida for me. Somebody willing to go to bat for me.”

  He grunted. “And for that guy who’s about to fry.”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged. “And for Khalid.”

  “There might be someone.”

  “What? What are you thinking, Carl? Do you know a lawyer who can help me out?”

  “No, not exactly. What kind of lawyer are you looking for? What about a lawyer like you? A prosecutor. Would that work for what you need?”

  “Sure. If they’d be willing to do what I want. A prosecutor would understand my position.”

  “Then I might know of someone you could talk to.”

  “You know prosecutors? Of course you do. What? Federal prosecutors? U.S. attorneys? The people you testify for? Who?”

  “No. I’m thinking about Dr. Gregory’s wife.”

  I almost laughed. “Excuse me.”

  “Dr. Gregory’s wife is a DA. Here in Boulder.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m not a … trustful person. I checked him out before I started seeing him. She’s a DA. Doesn’t have the same last name as him. I have it written down at home. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  I didn’t doubt it for a minute. “Do you know her, Carl?”

  He shook his head. “Not personally. Wouldn’t be hard to make her acquaintance, though.”

  A FEW MINUTES later Carl dropped Landon and me at the entrance to the Dining Hall at Chautauqua. It was risky; I felt very exposed being dropped off in broad daylight in front of a dozen people, but I didn’t feel that I had the physical energy required to push Landon up the steep hill that led from Baseline Road to our cottage. The walk from the Dining Hall would be much easier.

  I had already begun to rethink the wisdom of sticking Landon with the wheelchair.

  After Carl drove away, I pushed her and her wheelchair over to Kinnikinic and then up toward Lupine and our little cottage, smiling at a couple of my new neighbors along the way.

  Once we were inside the screened-in porch, Landon vaulted out of the chair, spun on me and said, “This is so, so not fair.”

  I replied, “Yes, you’re right, it is. It’s the epitome of unfair.”

  She surprised me by smiling. She said, “It’s not only the epitome. It’s the entire paradigm.”

  She pronounced it para-diggim.

  I didn’t correct her.

  TO MOLLIFY HER I played, and lost, three quick games of Scrabble before she decided to withdraw to the bedroom with her portable CD player and the latest Harry Potter.

  I made tea from a Lipton tea bag that I guessed had been in the back of an upper cupboard in the cottage’s kitchen since the early part of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. I carried my mug out onto the screened-in porch and lay back on an old wooden chaise that was covered with cracked vinyl cushions that were the color of dried parsley. The chaise was much more comfortable than it looked.

  The screened-in porches that were so common around my new home kind of threw me. Before I’d discovered Chautauqua, I hadn’t seen a single screened-in porch in Boulder. Nor had I seen many bugs. Certainly not like the South.

  The neighborhood of my little safe house was pure Norman Rockwell. Across the way, I watched as a big sister pushed her little sister in a stroller, an old one, almost a buggy, not one of those strollers that look like they’re made for day hikers. The sisters were coming right at me down Lupine. The big girl was singing a song that was making the little girl laugh. Across the street from them a woman about my landlady’s age was hanging bed linen on a clothesline that was strung between two trees.

  The sheets were white. Just white.

  None of the cars I could see that were parked on the narrow lanes of Chautauqua was a new model. Not even close. Although real estate in Boulder was absurdly expensive, this wasn’t a rich neighborhood. The tiny lawns were ragged. No air conditioners hummed.

  If I ever got to stay in Boulder, I thought it might be a perfect place for Landon and me to have a life.

  Having a life, now that was a fantasy.

  I closed my eyes and wondered if Carl Luppo was right, if Dr. Gregory’s wife could really help me.

  I ALMOST FELL asleep while I was thinking about getting older.

  I had been looking at my hands and noticing that my once almost flawless skin had begun to stretch and wrinkle. Each morning when I woke, the mirror revealed that my eyes and the corners of my mouth sagged slightly in places they were once taut. My butt was busy proving the law of gravity.

  That’s what I was thinking when a whale breached and came into view. It was a gorgeous beluga.

  • • •

  THE NIGHT BEFORE he was killed, as we were getting ready for bed, I was standing at the bathroom sink vainly lamenting the loss of my youth to Robert, who was leaning back against the headboard of our bed, reading a report for work. I was bitching and moaning and prattling on, but I didn’t think he was really listening.

  Silently he joined me in the bathroom. I watched him approach me in the mirror. Without warning he lifted my nightgown over my head so that I stood before him completely naked. He leaned around me and he lightly kissed my scrubbed face, touching his lips to the wrinkles at each corner of my mouth, and then to the tiny ridges that had recently developed on the outside of my eyes.

  Next he lowered himself to his knees and placed his lips on my belly where, once flat, it was now gently rounded. With his large hands he turned me around and kissed my gravity-challenged ass.

  When he stood again to face me, he moved his lips to within an inch of my ear and he whispered, “Your beauty has changed, K. It has not diminished.”

  The memory brought on tears, and the tears chased the whales away.

  I FELL ASLEEP on the porch.

  My last waking thought was that Carl Luppo had killed someone for me.

  I couldn’t find a compartment in my life where such a thought could fit.

  chapter

  nine

  HOUSE CALL

  1

  Midday, Alan Gregory’s pager alerted him to a message from Ron Kriciak. He returned the call only a few minutes after he felt the pager vibrate on his hip, and just before the arrival of his one-o’clock patient, Car
l Luppo.

  Given the contentiousness of their confrontation earlier in the day, Alan decided to try mending fences by trying to be overtly cordial with the marshal. He replied to Kriciak’s curt greeting—“Kriciak”—by saying, “Ron, nice to hear from you again. It’s Alan. How you doing?”

  Ron wanted none of it. “Heard anything from her?”

  Alan fought a sigh. “As I explained earlier, I couldn’t say if I did, Ron. Unless she gave me her permission to talk with you, of course. If she does call me, I’ll be certain to ask her if it’s okay with her for me to call you.” All the information Ron needed to answer his original question was readily available in the faint etchings between those lines. Alan hoped Ron recognized it. He asked, “You guys hear anything?”

  Ron didn’t answer his question. “Then you’ll page me the second you hear from her?”

  “The second she gives me permission.”

  Ron hung up. Alan concluded that cordial hadn’t been the best possible strategy for dealing with him.

  CARL LUPPO WAS right on time for his appointment. As he sat in his usual place on the sofa across from his therapist, Dr. Gregory thought his new patient seemed upbeat, less somber than usual.

  As though he could read his doctor’s mind, Carl started off by saying, “I been busy. I like being busy.”

  Dr. Gregory waited. Carl waited. The doctor’s anxiety exceeded his patient’s. Finally, Alan Gregory said, “You’ve been busy. What have you been up to?”

  “Helping a friend. Somebody who needs some assistance.”

  He found it odd that Carl was suddenly being coy with details. “You’ve talked before about a young woman you’ve been spending time with? The one with the ‘issues.’ The one who you think isn’t scared of you. Is that the friend who you’ve been helping out?”

  Carl smiled. He said, “Yeah. I feel useful with her. I don’t feel that too often anymore.”

  Dr. Gregory misread Carl’s intention, thought he was talking about feeling useful, not about the girl. He said, “The marshals find you useful, don’t they? The testimony you give?”