Minorini got in his car and slammed the door. There were times, like when Showers’s exhaustive work put Alton Coleman away, that Minorini was proud to be with the Bureau. But at times like now, he wished he’d gone into banking.
Twenty-Three
Joanne took her time coming back from lunch. Just enough snow had fallen to wet the streets, the air was warm—around freezing—and misty, making the city look like a grainy, low-contrast photograph. It was the sort of day where the vapors from car exhaust hung in the air like ghosts, long after the cars were out of sight.
A shiny clean, dark green car, the kind she’d come to recognize as government issue, was parked facing the wrong way in front of the Goss building. As she approached, Paul Minorini got out and came toward her. Condensation made him seem to breathe fire and the look on his face reinforced the impression. He pulled an envelope from an inner pocket and thrust it at her.
Joanne resisted the impulse to take it. “For what?”
He said, “I’m sorry.” With his left hand he took her right and shoved the envelope into it. “A subpoena. You’ve been served.” He closed her hand around the envelope. “If you ignore it, we’ll issue another—with your real name on it. Don’t make it come to that.” He let go of her hand and stepped back. “Once your name is out there you’ll be in danger.”
“Damn you!”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea…” He retreated to his car.
“You fucking coward!” Joanne shouted at him.
He opened the door and got in. Before closing it, he glanced up briefly. For a moment his government façade slipped and she glimpsed something else—apology or regret.
She was shaking by the time she got upstairs. Rick was in the hall, hanging up his overcoat. When he looked at her, his face went blank. “Jo—What is it?”
She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t speak yet. She held the envelope up and waited while he opened it and read the contents. “It says ‘Jane Doe.’”
“He told me—Special Agent Minorini said—that was for my protection. If I don’t show up, they’ll go back to the judge and have him issue one with my name on it. Which’ll make it more likely the mob could find me.”
“This is crap! Let me take it. I know a lawyer…If he can’t get this thrown out, he’ll know someone who can. Just forget it. Go spend Thanksgiving with your family and don’t even think about this again. I’ll take care of it.”
“Rick, I don’t want to get you—”
“Forget it!” He put the subpoena in his inside jacket pocket. “I’ll take on the whole damn FBI if I have to.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. “They’re not gonna cost me my best shot.”
She could feel tears wetting her cheeks.
Rick used his thumb to rub the tears away. “We’ll get through this.” He took her arm and steered her down the hallway. “May’s got an assignment for you. Why don’t you talk to her about it?” He patted his jacket over the pocket with the paper. “And let me take care of this.”
Twenty-Four
Two days before Thanksgiving, Joanne and Sean piled their things in the car and headed south on I-294. She brought along all her cameras and a case of oil because the car was leaking almost as much as it was burning, nearly a quart a week. Sean brought his Game Boy and Walkman and a case of CDs. They left around 5:00 A.M. and were on Interstate 80, well past I-55, before sunup.
I-80 ran west through mile after mile of wheat-yellow grasses alternating with fields of stubble poking through skimpy snow and open fields, and horizons that seemed endless after the forested suburbs of Chicago. Joanne switched on the radio, and all the stations seemed to be playing country music—“How Long Are You Gonna Be?”, “Easy on the Eyes, Hard on the Heart,” “Black Eyes, Blue Tears.” There was a difference, though. You didn’t hear Johnny Cash much any more, or Kenny Rogers or even Reba. And she missed Dolly and Conrad.
After trying all the stations, Sean demanded, “What is this?”
“Farm country,” Joanne said. “Country music country.”
Slouching on his spine, he put on his headphones and popped a disk in the Walkman. He folded his arms across his chest and tuned the country out. Joanne turned the radio up and sang along.
Here and there she saw cows or a horse, even a herd of Poland China pigs sunning themselves on the south side of a hill. Occasionally a corn field would be unharvested, and she’d wonder if the cost to bring it in had gotten above the crop’s worth. The country odors—hogs and wood smoke—brought her back twenty years to her high school days.
When she saw the signs for Galva, 110 miles west of Joliet, she that knew she was almost home. Then she spotted the faded TRUST JESUS on the bridge spanning Small Creek. Three hundred yards further was the exit, and two miles down County C, the family mailbox with its line of naked black walnuts and brown-leafed oaks marking the drive.
Graveled and graded recently, the long driveway widened at the end to a yard between the house, with its surrounding grove of volunteer catalpas, and the barn. A dark blue van and a white SUV flanked the red Ford Ranger parked at the kitchen door. Joanne pulled in next to the van. Sean took off his headphones and sighed.
She forgot, from trip to trip, the familiar security—or maybe predictability masquerading as safety. From the porch swing to the chrysanthemums freeze-drying in the hollow of an old stump, from sparrows flocking in the yard to the fat orange tabby watching them from the top porch step—the sameness had ceased to be boring. Home.
“Same old farm,” Sean said like an echo. He sounded happy.
The door opened, and a pack of canines poured out, led by her mother’s black-and-white border collie. Joanne’s brothers, Ken and Allen, were right behind the dogs, coatless in the cold, laughing and joking. Their collective breaths rose like a slow shout.
Dropping down to hug Kip, the collie, Sean seemed to forget he was fourteen and sophisticated. He pushed away his cousin’s Golden and his uncle’s Labrador retrievers, and wrestled happily with his grandmother’s mutt.
Allen dragged the other dogs off Joanne as Ken hugged her and took her bags. They ushered her into the house, into the warm cavern of the kitchen and a chorus of “Hi, Jo”s.
Joanne’s mother, Elizabeth, and her sisters-in-law, Kate and Mary, were crowded into the space between the sink and the stove. Kate was kneading bread dough, the others making salad. It got more crowded as Joanne squeezed in to hug each of them in turn. The welcome and the aroma of roasting meat brought a déjà vu of childhood suppers.
Amy, Ken and Mary’s twelve-year-old, was perched on a chair next to the table, painting her nails with an electric shade of violet as she feigned indifference to the adults around her. But she said, “Hi, Aunt Jo,” without taking her eyes off her work.
“I’ll take your stuff up,” Ken said. He favored their father most and was beginning to show the same early signs of wear and tear.
Joanne said, “Thanks,” as she relinquished her coat to Allen. “Oh, but leave the cameras.”
“Cameras?” Amy yelped. “No pictures!” She grabbed her polish bottle and limped out of the room with her toes crooked upward to keep from getting polish on her grandmother’s floor.
Joanne laughed and put her camera case out of the way under the table. “I can’t use the camera till it warms up, Amy,” she said to the girl’s retreating back. Amy kept retreating.
“She’s just looking for an excuse to split,” her mother told Joanne. “You can have her chair and tell us what you’ve been up to.
As a child, Joanne had gravitated to the company of the men. She’d found their talk of hunting and machinery more interesting than the recipes and gossip her mother and aunts exchanged. Elizabeth had always been there, silent, taken for granted like the earth or the horizon. It wasn’t fair, Joanne thought, but her father’s work had seemed more important. In retrospect, it had just been more interesting.
After dinner, when the kids were in bed and while the men watched sports high
lights on the late news, Joanne found herself poring over the family albums with Kate and Mary. They’d traced the family history from her great grandparents’ formal wedding portrait to Kate and Allen’s write-your-own-vows nuptials, when Sean was three.
Joanne and Howie had stayed to the very end, hours after the bride and groom took off. Howie had been drinking, pestering every attractive woman for a dance. Out of boredom, Joanne borrowed someone’s camera to record the professional photographer packing up to leave, and she’d snapped a couple shots of Howie while she was at it.
She closed the album with a snap. “I can’t stand it!”
“I know how you feel,” Kate said. “My sister says that anything that even reminds her of her ex makes her want to slit her wrists.”
“It’s not that. It’s these pictures. I can’t believe I took them. They’re awful!” She handed the book to Kate, and reached under the coffee table for her Nikon. No flash. She’d splurged and loaded fast film, hoping to get some candids.
Kate immediately reopened the album.
“Oh come on. You were pretty good even then. Look at this one of Howard.”
“Completely overexposed.” Joanne removed the lens cap and checked the internal light meter.
“Joanne!” Mary said. “Is that all you can see? The man you married!”
“And divorced. Give it up, Mary. Howie and I aren’t even prehistory. I think we were finished before we went west. I just didn’t know it.”
Mary shook her head, and Kate laughed. “You’ve met someone new. I can tell.”
Joanne thought about Paul Minorini and said, “He’s married.” No point in explaining that it was to his job.
Kate nodded. “Sis told me, recently, she hadn’t let herself feel anything forever, because what’s the point? All the good guys are taken.”
“She’s right.” Joanne shrugged. “But I have to admit, I haven’t felt this way about a man since before marriage turned Howie back into a frog.” She looked up and caught her mother’s eye. Elizabeth had just come into the room with a tray of mugs. Irish coffee; Joanne could smell it. She thought she detected sadness in her mother’s look, perhaps because of what her daughter had just confessed—a crush on a married man. Gone from bad to worse.
But Elizabeth would never say so. She had tried to tell her daughter that Howie was a poor choice, had asked Joanne to hold off on marriage until she’d finished college. And when Joanne told her to butt out, she’d promised never to offer her advice again. She put the tray down, just as she always had. She wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Can I get anyone anything?”
Joanne snapped her picture, then her slightly annoyed look at being photographed.
Allen switched off the television and walked over to sit on the arm of the couch next to Kate. Joanne caught the look Kate gave him as he helped himself to coffee and handed her one.
Ken got up and swiveled his chair around to face the group. “C’mon an’ sit down, ma.”
She smiled at him, her firstborn. Joanne clicked the shutter again. This time Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice. “Thanks,” she said, “but I’ve had a day. Lock up before you turn in.”
There was a chorus of “Good nights,” then a long silence. Amy materialized from somewhere, hanging over her mother, retreating into the dark edges of the room whenever Joanne pointed the camera her way. Joanne got up to take several more pictures of the others; Ken squeezed into her place beside Mary. He started poring over the albums. Joanne remembered that she’d brought copies of Sean’s school portrait. The pictures were in her camera case, so she dug them out and gave copies to Mary and Kate.
“I can’t believe how much he’s grown,” Mary said.
“God!” Ken said. “When I was his age, I was praying the war wouldn’t end till I was old enough to join.”
Joanne sat cross-legged on the floor across the table from them. “You weren’t ever that dumb, were you, Ken?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you how dumb I was. I supported the war just because you and Dash were against it.” Dash was an old friend of the family, a local hippie and like a third brother.
Joanne shook her head.
Ken said, “One question you never did answer for me, Jo.”
“What?”
“What would you have done if we were invaded?”
“Joined the resistance.”
“Remember how the old man always swore he’d get you hunting?”
“Well, he did. Sort of. I’m a pretty fair shot with a camera.” She stood up, suddenly, and shot her reticent niece with a finesse that would have done credit to Hemingway.
During her exile in California, she hadn’t let herself think of family—too painful, too apt to remind her of the void in her relationship with Howie. Now that she was home, she couldn’t imagine leaving them again.
Twenty-Five
Minorini lowered his binoculars and slouched back in his seat. Trailing Lessing on the interstate had been easy; she drove a conservative five miles over the limit and signaled her turns and lane changes well in advance. He’d been able to hang back almost out of sight without danger of losing her. Trailing her through open farm land was quite another thing.
After she turned into a drive marked by a mailbox labeled SCHROEDER, he scouted the “neighborhood.” He found a “driveway”—actually a turn-in over a culvert in a ditch separating the road from a fenced field of timber. The turn-in was just below the crest of a hill overlooking the Schroeder farm. It didn’t appear to have been used for months. The gate was a tricky arrangement of barbed wire and two-by-fours that had been dragged to one side and left, tangled in the weeds stretching between the fence and the shoulder. He backed his gray rental in and got out to see how it looked from the road. Between its nondescript color and the coat of salt dust it had picked up on the trip, the car faded nicely into the background.
He’d brought binoculars, a thermos of coffee and sandwiches. He’d made a name for himself in the Bureau for his patience. Not even the longest stakeouts fazed him. But now he was restless, impatient to get the weekend over, the holiday. He had too much time to think.
It seemed that he’d spent a large percentage of his life on stakeout. It had become as automatic as driving. He didn’t question the necessity of the job or the time it soaked up. What was problematic here was his motive. Keeping an eye on a witness, he told himself. Lessing was a witness of sorts, but in a case they had yet to make against a criminal they’d only tentatively identified. She wasn’t a flight risk. And at this stage of the investigation, she was only theoretically in danger. One day she’d be called to testify, then ushered into the witness protection program. After which, he’d never see her again. That would be a relief because she was starting to get to him, starting to disturb his concentration. It had gone way beyond wondering how she’d look naked, gotten into how she would look in a wedding dress. She was so far out of the loop she was a different species. It was nuts.
Even so, he envied her, especially the kid. He was tired of one-night stands with desperate women. At forty-five he had no wife and no kids, no fixed address. The only family he did have was his sister, with whom he had nothing in common, whose feelings for him seemed more theoretical than real. He was tired of coming home to an empty apartment, not that it was a bad place—state-of-the-art stereo and 47-inch TV—but he had no one to listen or watch with. No one to share his bed. He needed a woman. And maybe he needed a shrink to help him figure out why he didn’t have one.
The car was much less comfortable than his office but there were fewer interruptions. He’d brought files with him, transcripts of the various wiretap sessions in which a mysterious hit man was mentioned. He was almost certainly the mysterious shooter who took out Circone. The million-dollar man, who for a million dollars deposited in a Cayman Island bank account—never the same one—would take care of anyone. No one had ever seen him. No one knew his name. No one knew how to contact him.
There was nothing but Lessing’s
ID to connect Dossi to Siano. Even that just put him in the neighborhood—nothing definitive. There were 33,000 other people in the neighborhood of Northbrook at any given time.
Minorini went over what they’d gleaned on Dossi. He’d been a successful investment manager before he retired at age sixty-three. What was suspicious was that all his assets were in his wife’s name. And she was in Italy visiting relatives. Dossi’d been at the Daley Center to back up his daughter in a divorce hearing. The Bureau’d dropped the ball on that one. They knew the Dossi girl was married to a made man; they just hadn’t picked up on her father. And they hadn’t expected him to testify in her divorce.
That connection and Lessing’s ID were enough to get a wiretap. And that would be enough to get Lessing killed if Dossi was their guy. It was something he was willing to bet his Thanksgiving weekend on.
Except for a trip into the timber to relieve himself, Minorini kept at it, restarting his car when the windshield got too frosted up to see through. It was late when the last light went out in the farmhouse—after two A.M. His gas tank was close to empty and he felt as if he were running on fumes. He went back to the highway for gas and food, then found a small motel where he could get a shower and a few hours sleep. He was back on duty by seven A.M.
The Schroeders came and went, ice skating and shopping—judging by what they took out and brought back.
Thanksgiving day, Minorini knocked off early and had dinner at a truck stop. It wasn’t a real surveillance. A real surveillance required authorization and someone to spell you. For the first time in years, he felt like a voyeur.
Twenty-Six
They were nearly through Thanksgiving dinner, into pie and coffee, when Elizabeth held her hands up for silence. “I want you all to take your stuff out of the attic. Anything left here by spring, I’m going to sell at a yard sale.”
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