by Tom Clancy
* * *
“I get to find out what was going on between you and that other detective?” Thibodeau said.
“Sure,” Ricci said. “I aim to please.”
Thibodeau waited. They were back inside Ricci’s Jetta on the shoulder of the road, rain dashing against the roof and windshield.
“Erickson was holding out on us,” Ricci said. “I knew he wouldn’t give up whatever it was and played his partner on a hunch.”
Thibodeau looked across the seat at him.
“That hunch pay off?”
“Yeah.” Ricci told him how he’d seen Brewer in the car with his graph paper and laptop, gone over to check it out, and gotten a look at the crime scene diagram on Brewer’s computer. “It was all right there for me on his screen. The stain on the floor. Its location and measurements. And an outline of a dog. The word greyhound lettered right over it.”
Thibodeau was shaking his head, his brow creased.
“A dog,” he said. “Don’t get it. Erickson said—”
“I heard what Erickson said. Kept it nice and vague for us. Except vague only works when it’s consistent, and he wasn’t making sense. The blood left behind isn’t Julia’s and he’s thinking about other possibles. Maybe one of her attackers, maybe not. But if not, who? If he isn’t looking at anybody besides Julia being in that store when things went down, it would’ve had to belong to whoever came after her.”
Thibodeau tugged at his heavy beard as it all sank in.
“Be damned,” he said. “Be damned if it didn’t slip right by me.”
Ricci stared out into the rain.
“At first I figured he was lying straight out. That the cops had somebody in custody and wanted to keep it secret,” he said. “Wouldn’t have guessed those possibles he mentioned didn’t include human beings.”
Thibodeau was quiet a moment, still plucking his beard.
“We got to be concerned with Erickson. He hear tell about what you did… how you did it… he gonna shut us out altogether.”
Ricci shrugged.
“Let him,” he said. “Gives me one less person to second guess.”
Thibodeau shook his head some more. “I ain’t trying to start a gripe, just saying you might’ve warned me. Never know when we gonna need him. We’d put our minds together, consulted, we might’ve figured a way to get the information out of him so we don’t lose his trust—”
Ricci pitched a glance across the seat at him.
“I don’t want anybody’s trust,” he said. “Just want to know why the cops are keeping that dog’s body under wraps. And where it is.”
Thibodeau started to say something, quickly cut himself off.
“Any thoughts about how you gonna do that?” he said with a kind of yielding resignation.
Ricci thrust his key into the ignition and brought the Volkswagen to life.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
ELEVEN
VARIOUS LOCALES
“This the street?”
“Sheffield’s place is just ahead of us.” DeMarco motioned to a dormered Old Quarter house on the right as he turned a corner in their Land Rover. “When I drove him over from the airport, the boss was in a pretty decent mood. Bushed, you know, but kidding with Wade and Ackerman in the backseat about it being a fancier Motel 6 than the one where he usually grabs a bed.” He shook his head. “I never would have thought I’d be here again tonight, bringing the kind of news we’ve got.”
Nimec glanced at him across the front seat.
“There’s no good time for bad news,” he said. “When things hit us over the head, we cope. Timing isn’t part of the bargain.”
DeMarco checked his mirrors and pulled to the curb. It was almost ten o’clock at night, twenty minutes having passed since he’d met Nimec’s chopper at the same field where Gordian had arrived some hours earlier.
The two men sat quietly in the vehicle’s dark interior.
“You think about how you’re going to break it to him?” DeMarco said.
Nimec’s smile was catacomb bleak.
“If I do that,” he said, “you can forget about me coping.”
He exited the Rover, strode into the building’s forecourt, and went up the steps to its entrance. The penguin who answered his ring reminded him of the waiters at the Rio de Gabao dinner reception. When did the black suits and ruffled white shirts come off?
A hurried introduction. Nimec said he needed to see Roger Gordian alone, was told Monsieur Gordian was in a meeting with his host and fellow house guests, explained he’d come about something very urgent, was then led into a side parlor, and invited to have a seat while he waited.
He stood instead with his back to the plush sofa.
Gordian was smiling as appeared through the parlor’s sliding walnut doors minutes later.
“Pete, hi,” he said. “I heard the doctors were checking you out and didn’t expect to see you until sometime tomor—”
He caught Nimec’s sober, uneasy expression and stopped in the middle of the room. The smile had faded.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Nimec quickly went past Gordian to the doors, drew them shut, and then turned to face him.
“Boss,” he said. His hand went to Gordian’s arm. “It’s Julia.”
* * *
“That’s Rob over there on the tennis courts with the dogs,” Meredith Wagner said from the Jetta’s backseat. She motioned to the small community park on their left with her head. “He wanted to take them running while the rain gives us a letup.”
Pulled up by the park entrance, Ricci and Thibodeau looked out at the solitary figure of Rob Howell on the other side of a high chain-link fence surrounding the courts. His back to the plastic-coated mesh, hands deep in the pockets of his barn coat, Howell stood watching the dogs chase each other in repeated energetic circles around the wet artificial turf.
Thibodeau shifted around to face the woman.
“We won’t trouble him any more ’n we need,” he said. “I promise you.”
She nodded without turning from her window. Dressed in jeans and a light brown corduroy jacket that closely matched the color of her hair, Meredith Wagner was about thirty-five, plain, thin, soft spoken, and visibly worn. They had found her at the ranch-style house she shared with her husband, Nick; three-year-old daughter, Katie; and, since yesterday, her brother Rob and his five greyhounds in a quiet suburban development outside Sonoma.
“He’s so used to caring for those animals… I don’t think he could make it if not for them,” she said. “I don’t think he’d have anything left to keep him in one piece.”
Thibodeau did not comment. He wasn’t sure whether she had been addressing him or thinking aloud to herself. In either case, he could say nothing except what she would already know — that he wished things were otherwise, wished events hadn’t brought them to where they were right now.
He thought in silence a few moments. When you went fishing for information, you could never predict which facts would take a long cast of the reel to pull in, which ones would jump into your hands, and which would lead you toward a rich bounty of others. After Ricci had reminded him how he’d gotten Erickson to let out that Rob Howell was staying with relatives, Thibodeau had thought it might be a while before they could identify the particular family members and track them down. But that had proven to be as easy as stopping at a gas station to buy the Monday-morning edition of a regional newspaper called the Mountain Journal. Though they had originally picked it up to see what the police and emergency freq chasers might have found out about the crime from early dispatcher-respondent radio exchanges that would flurry over the air before law-enforcement put a stopper on open communications, it had been of far greater help than they’d bargained for. The paper’s freelance police stringer had picked up on the double homicide near the state park in time to get a jump on local television stations, learn where Howell had gone through his homespun contacts, and include the sister’s name and t
own of residence in his story. Once they read it, Ricci had only needed to call directory information for her phone number and street address.
And so they had found themselves here not two hours after leaving the rescue center. Thibodeau was convinced it was partly just luck that had delivered them to the Wagner family’s front door before a crush of media vans — if it wasn’t profane to use a word such as luck under these circumstances. The violence at the center had taken place on a Sunday morning, when the TV and radio crews were skimpiest, especially in the state’s more remote, unpopulated areas. What had given the Mountain Journal a chance to trump the competition also gave the police some time to go into clamp-down mode and keep the name of Roger Gordian’s daughter from surfacing as part of their investigation… for the time being. With the weekend over, things would start to percolate. The Journal people would want to spread its story around to make certain they got credit for breaking it first. Morgue beat reporters would get on the trail. Big-market newshounds with deeper and wider sources than some country red-bone with a police band radio in his Chevy would smell blood — literally smell blood, Thibodeau thought — and reports would be flying everywhere by the evening news cycle.
He and Ricci were ahead of the pack but Thibodeau believed it wouldn’t be long before the rest caught up. And while Ricci’s gut might fill with acid when he thought about the FBI joining the case, his own concern was having the press toss themselves into the mix. For reasons that didn’t exactly align, both men were very eager to talk to Rob Howell before others got wind of his whereabouts.
As a result, Thibodeau could sense the impatience with which Ricci glanced at their passenger’s pale, exhausted face in the rearview mirror.
“Okay,” Ricci said in his peculiar uninflected tone. “You want to go tell your brother why we’re here?”
Meredith Wagner nodded and reached for her door handle.
“I’ll let you know when he’s ready,” she said.
She went and talked with Howell for a couple of minutes. They saw him abruptly turn toward their parked car, saw him look back at his sister and talk to her some more. Then she waved them over, waited for them to approach, and sort of drifted off along the tennis court’s painted white foul line. Giving them room for privacy, Thibodeau supposed, but remaining close enough to cut short their conversation if Howell became too upset.
“Mister Howell—” Thibodeau began.
“Rob’s fine.” He shook their hands. “Meredith says you work for Julia’s dad. Private security, is it?”
Peripherally aware of the dogs in their circular sprint around the court, Thibodeau nodded, gave him their names, told him how sorry they were for his loss, and explained that what they wanted to ask wouldn’t take long.
“We know you been through everything with the police, ain’t about to put you on that go ’round again,” he said.
Howell cast his sunken eyes down at the ground a moment. Then he raised them to Thibodeau’s face and shrugged. “It’s all right. If it can help you find Julia, I don’t mind.”
Ricci looked at him. “Julia,” he said, “and the people who took what they did from you.”
Howell turned his way.
“My daughter was only six months old,” he said.
Ricci remained tunneled on his eyes, noticing their glazed appearance. Tranquilizers. A CNS depressant. Probably lorazepam.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I got a call from him this morning, you know. The detective in charge. He didn’t want me to talk to anybody about what happened, mentioned you two in particular. In case you showed up at Merry’s.”
“He say why?”
“I guess just what you’d expect,” Howell said. “Something about how they don’t want their investigation compromised by outside parties.”
“You’re allowed to talk to whomever you want. Nothing legal they can do to stop you.”
“I figured that,” Howell said. “And if he’s right and we’re wrong, I can always claim not to remember his words.”
Ricci nodded a little.
“The medication,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Besides,” Ricci said. “We aren’t at Merry’s.”
A faint, desolate smile touched Howell’s lips, revealing little white flecks of dried saliva at their corners. He checked on the dogs with a glance over his shoulder, thrust his hands back into his pockets, and quietly bowed his head toward the synthetic grass again, his thoughts slipping into their own nebulous, faraway space.
“We were at the center before,” Ricci said. “The cops gave us a look around. Probably decided to phone you because I got on their nerves asking questions they didn’t want to answer.”
Howell brought up his head, slowly, working against the heavy resistance of the tranqs.
“What sort of questions?”
“There was blood on the floor of the shop,” Ricci said. “Near the door. The detective was ready to tell me it wasn’t Julia’s, but he wasn’t so ready to tell me the blood came from a dog that’d been shot.”
Howell nodded.
“Vivian,” he said.
“That be one of the rescues?” Thibodeau said.
Another nod.
“Julia favors her. The first day she came to work for me, I remember lecturing her about how our policy’s not to become too attached.” Howell gestured toward the whirling dogs behind him with a slight roll of his shoulder. “Being firm’s how I wound up with five of my own.”
Ricci looked at him. “With all the things the police shared with us, we have to wonder how come they kept quiet about the dog. Vivian.”
Howell’s mouth worked.
“Evidence,” he said after several moments. “She’s just evidence to them. It’s why they won’t let me anywhere near her. They call it a safeguard.”
Ricci let his eyes rest on him. “It’s important for us to know what’s happened to her body.”
Howell’s expression was odd.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
Ricci paused a beat.
“When a pet’s remains have to be examined during an investigation, the police bring them to a lab for tests,” he said. “Depends on the case, but they’ll usually give them back to the owner after they’re through—”
Howell was shaking his head.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
Ricci looked at him.
“Don’t understand what?”
“Viv’s alive,” Howell said.
* * *
Aware Gordian would want to see it with his own eyes, Pete Nimec had hardcopied the e-mail aboard the chopper, printing it out on a single sheet of paper he’d folded into his wallet. Behind the closed sliding doors of Sheffield’s visitor parlor now, he sat on the couch with him and heard that paper rattle in his trembling hand.
“There’s nothing else?” Gordian said. His face was chalky. “This message is it?”
“So far,” Nimec said. “Yeah.”
Gordian shook his head. “Ashley…”
“She doesn’t know yet. Meg’s been leaving messages for her to get in touch.”
“I’ll contact her myself.”
Nimec looked at him and nodded. He heard the paper rattle.
“You’re sure it’s the truth… about the tattoo?” Gordian said. “Because if Julia had gotten something like that put on her body, she’d tell me just to see my face turn red. You know her, Pete. How she is. She acts like it’s amusing when my dander’s up. She’d tell me—”
“She told Megan. Some kind of secret thing between them. I think she was going to make a presentation of it the next time you saw her.”
“My God,” Gordian said through a harsh exhalation. “If not for that poor woman… her baby… killed, shot dead… I’d think it was all some kind of hoax. That maybe someone who knows Julia found out she’d gone out of town, sent this poison over the Internet for a sick thrill…”
He let the sentence trail,
recognizing the uselessness of trying to bind it in logic and reality. Nimec heard his agitated snatches of breath, the paper rattling again between his fingers in the silence of the room.
“Who’s on it?” Gordian said.
“Ricci and Thibodeau. If there are any leads, any paths they need to follow, every man, every resource, everything we’ve got is available in a heartbeat. You know that.”
Gordian nodded.
“I need to tie things up, get back home right away—”
“Boss,” Nimec interrupted. “You can’t leave Africa.”
Gordian looked at him. “No,” he said.
“Gord—”
“I know what you’re thinking. It doesn’t matter. Somebody has to be with Ashley.”
“Meg plans to stay with her, look after her for as long as she has to—”
“No, Pete. Forget it. I won’t let you decide this for me. That demand in the message… the announcement I’m supposed to make… we can’t jump to the conclusion it has anything remotely to do with the actual motive or motives for what’s happened. It could be a red herring. Meant to throw us off.”
“Or not,” Nimec said. “You really feel we’re in a position to take chances right now?”
Silence clapped down over them again. But now Gordian became very still, staring at the wall opposite him, the printout no longer rattling in his hand. The thick doors and walls of the room blocked out any sounds from elsewhere in the old French mansion.
After a long length of time, he turned to Nimec.
“The path you need to follow starts here,” he said, and put a hand to his chest. “Whatever the reason for what’s happened to Julia… those other innocents… they’ve fallen into the middle.”
Nimec said nothing for a while, and then nodded pensively.
“Find who’s at the other end,” Gordian said.
* * *
UpLink SanJo. Mid-afternoon. Their secure conference room’s sound-baffled, audio-secure walls once again enclosing them in an electronically fortified cocoon of silence. On one of those walls, a flat plasma screen jacked into a digital viewer showed an enlarged image of the e-mail Megan had received hours earlier. It struck the eye like the Mark of the Beast, a reminder that nothing in this technological age can make us impervious to its stain.