by Andrew Gross
It suddenly hit me: Hofer had mentioned something about his daughter in my office. He was looking over the photos on the credenza. He’d noticed Hallie. He asked me—
“Apparently she was whacked out on OxyContin at the time of the accident,” Carrie’s brother said.
“Oh my God!” I suddenly understood why Hofer had asked me about my clinics. The pain centers . . . His daughter had been high on OxyContin at the time of her accident. Somehow he blamed me for what had happened to her. OxyContin had taken a piece of her life. Now he was taking mine.
“I know. . . !” I turned to Carrie. “I know why he’s doing this to me.”
“Who’s there with you?” her brother asked. He sounded alarmed. “Look, I know from Pop what you’re doing up there. You’re in totally over your head. Do you understand what you’re getting yourself into . . . ?”
“I have to go, Jack. But it’s okay. I’m not—”
“Carrie, listen to me. I’m starting to get concerned that all this has gotten to you. After what happened to Rick and Raef . . . If you’ve got something to share, it’s time to turn it over. To me, or to the JSO. But you can’t be putting your neck out, least of all with someone like this.”
“Steadman didn’t do it, Jack.” Again, her gaze locked onto mine. “This other guy did. Hofer. I’m positive.”
I grabbed her phone and put my hand over the speaker. “I have these pain centers. Hofer asked about them. We prescribe Oxy, but only with a doctor’s scrip. But a lot of the others are merely shills, storefronts . . .” The color drained out of my face. “Somehow he’s blaming me for what’s happened to his daughter!”
“I’m sorry, Jack, but I gotta go,” Carrie said, taking back the phone. “Don’t do anything. I’ll call you later, and when I do, I’m gonna be able to prove it. I give you my word.”
“Carrie, listen to me, please. This guy—”
She disconnected the line, her face clouded with both resolve and worry.
“You have proof?” I asked.
She nodded, though a little tentatively. “I can get it.”
“Where?”
“A couple of hours from here.” She started up the car again. “We’re going to see a guy about a gun.”
“Wait.” I put my hand on her arm and stopped her. “Carrie, before you do, there’s something you have to know. This guy, Hofer . . .” I took a breath and felt all the anxiety of the last few days finally come to the surface, my whole body going weak and numb. “He has my daughter!”
Chapter Fifty-One
Carrie’s face went pale. She looked at me, her blue eyes wide, starting to put it all together.
“That’s what I wasn’t able to tell you,” I said. “Why I can’t turn myself in. He told me if I did, or if I happened to get caught, or if the news somehow got out about Hallie being kidnapped—he’d kill her! Just like he killed Mike and Martinez. He called me on Hallie’s phone—she was away at school—and he put her on. She’s terrified, Carrie! You can imagine! She’s sure he’ll do what he says.”
“Oh God . . .” I saw her look change from resolve to sympathy and she put her hand over mine.
“That’s what I tried to say when I first called you. When I asked about your son. And why I couldn’t just give myself in. Any more than I can now. No matter how much evidence we have.”
“Why do you think he’s so determined to ruin your life?”
“I don’t know why! Maybe his daughter came to one of my clinics. You need to have a scrip for Oxy, or be evaluated with a set of X-rays by a doctor, but I don’t know, I can’t completely control where these things might end up. You know what’s going on out there.”
“We have to tell Jack,” Carrie said firmly. “You can’t keep this to yourself any longer.”
“No, no!” My heart almost jumped out of my chest in alarm. “You can’t! You can’t!”
“We have to. This is what they do. They’re professionals at this. We’re just . . . You can’t get her back by yourself.”
“Can you promise me that word won’t get out the minute the JSO finds out I’ve turned myself in? My name is already on every newscast across the country! You’re saying they won’t go public when I land in the hands of the FBI? They still think I’ve killed one of their own! They’ll think I just made this whole story up, to shift the blame. I can’t live with what might happen!”
“I’m sure I can get Jack to keep it under wraps. These people aren’t savages. They’ll know what to do. What other possibility is there?”
“I know who it is now. He’ll contact me. It’s me he wants! Me he’s put in this rat’s trap. Not Hallie. He’s just using her to lure me.”
“He’ll kill her too,” Carrie said, steadfast. “You know he will. You’re playing with fire.”
I brought my hands up to my forehead. I didn’t know what was right. Or maybe I knew what was right, I just didn’t want to lose control. Now that I was finally so close.
“Once he tells me where he is, then I can call in help.”
“And what if he never calls. What if that phone never rings again. And that’s his revenge. How will you live with that?”
I didn’t answer.
“We need to get the proof,” Carrie said, letting her words sink into me. “Once we can prove it’s Hofer who’s behind it, then you have to let me bring in Jack. Or whoever his team is. I won’t walk away from you.” She clasped her hand over mine. “I promise. I won’t! But this is the only way I can go on with you. This is a murder investigation. I can’t withhold evidence. Not if I know—
“You’ve done everything you possibly can. You found out who it was! But you can’t get her back . . .” She shook her head. “Not by yourself. You trusted me enough to tell me this, now you have to trust we can work out the rest of it. It’s the only way.”
I think the only thing that scared me more than the unknown surrounding Hallie was the thought of what I was capable of doing to get her back once I had the proof I needed. I also knew it wasn’t all my call. Liz had a say as well, and I knew exactly what she’d say. She’d agree with Carrie in a heartbeat.
I nodded, about as halfheartedly as I ever had in my life.
Carrie blew out a breath and nodded too. “We get the proof it’s Hofer, and then I call Jack. He’ll get her back for you. Are we all right?”
I slowly nodded again, and Carrie squeezed my hand one last time. And I squeezed hers back.
She smiled. “Now let’s go see a man about a gun.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
We doubled back to Orangeburg and picked up Interstate 77, which headed north. It was only a couple of hours straight up to Charlotte.
To Bud’s Guns. In Mount Holly, North Carolina.
I leaned back and shut my eyes for a while. For the first time in ages I actually didn’t feel freaked out. No one would be looking for us in Carrie’s Prius. No one had any idea where we were headed.
In a matter of hours, we’d have the proof that Hofer was setting me up.
Carrie turned on the news, and a troubling report came on: I’d been spotted in Orangeburg at the diner. Apparently the waitress, Nanci, had recognized me, after seeing a newscast that evening, and once word got out, the night clerk at the motel did too, and they had found the Lexus I’d stolen.
The report also said that I’d been spotted with a woman. And might be heading north.
Carrie’s name would eventually come out.
“Congratulations.” I turned to her. “You’ve graduated from Community Outreach. You’re now an accomplice.”
“Hopefully not for very long.” She smiled at me through her sunglasses. “I intend to set the record straight on that in a matter of hours.”
“I’m sorry to have gotten you into this,” I said.
“You didn’t get me into it. I got me into it. And you know what?”
“What?” I shrugged.
“Whether it’s crazy or not, I’m glad I’m here.”
“I’m glad yo
u’re here too,” I said. “Your brother, Jack, however, may not be equally ecstatic when he hears the news.”
“I can handle Jack,” Carrie said, pressing her lips together. “I always have. Now my dad, the ex–police chief, he’s a completely different story . . .”
I dozed for a bit, and when I came to we were on the highway, doing seventy.
“You were out for a while.” Carrie smiled, glanced over.
“Guess something’s been keeping me from getting my usual eight hours lately,” I said back. “Can’t imagine what that is . . .”
I looked at Carrie, her pretty blue eyes firm with both determination and resolve, and I suddenly felt something else there, how much courage there was in this tough little package, how much she had risked for me.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“I was wondering, what did your brother mean when he said he was worried how everything might have gotten to you. He mentioned Rick. And Raef . . . It made me think, when I spoke to you that first time, you said it was your first day back at the job . . .”
Carrie glanced away, checking her mirror, and changed lanes.
“I know you said you’d tell me, later on, when I turned myself in. But it’s not like we don’t have a couple of hours here to ourselves . . . Your husband?”
“Uh-huh.” Carrie finally nodded, letting out a breath. “And my son.”
She drove on a ways, still seeing I was waiting for an answer if she felt like giving me one. “Last September, my son, Raef . . .” She drew in a breath. “He was eight. He went into a seizure on the soccer field at school. He lost consciousness. Rick got the call and I was about two hours away . . .”
I nodded.
“I rushed to the ER, but Raef was already in the ICU. A ruptured AVM. You know it?”
I nodded again.
“The doctor said it would be touch and go for the next forty-eight hours. He’d lost a lot of blood flow to the brain. He said Raef was putting up a good fight, but that something else had happened. He sat me down . . .”
She blinked and again pressed her lips tightly together. “Rick was in the OR, undergoing emergency surgery. He had what’s called a dissected aorta. You probably know what that is too . . .
“They said he probably had it from birth. Apparently he’d sat down in a chair in the waiting room and all of a sudden he just felt woozy. It had to be dealt with immediately. The procedure took four hours.” Carrie forced a smile, different from any I had seen from her thus far. “I had a kid in the ICU clinging onto his life and a husband in the OR who could go either way . . . I kept running back and forth, checking on Raef, holding his hand, telling him to hang on, then I’d go back up and watch Rick . . .”
I frowned and swallowed. “How did he do?”
“He didn’t make it,” Carrie said, with the slightest shake of her head. “He stroked out on the table. Like a ticking bomb, they told me. I suppose it could’ve gone off anywhere. It just happened there. You would have thought . . .” She glanced in the mirror again and shifted lanes.
“Would have thought what?” I asked her, noticing the tears shining in her eyes.
She shrugged. “Rick did two tours in Iraq. Before law school. He lost a lot of friends there. You would have thought if it was simply a matter of stress, it might’ve happened over there . . .”
“What do you think it was?”
She blinked almost distractedly and shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”
She held the wheel with one hand, and I reached out and put my hand on her arm and squeezed. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I don’t really talk about it much. I suppose it’s all still pretty new. Raw . . .”
“I didn’t mean to make you go through that.”
“Here . . .” She reached behind the seat, pulled out her purse, and opened her wallet. There was a picture of a nice-looking guy with short, light-colored hair, wire-rim glasses, and bright, intelligent eyes. “He was a lawyer,” Carrie said proudly. “Damned good one. He handled military cases. Rape. Sexual assault by superiors. Even Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell defendants . . . He pushed to have them adjudicated in civilian courts. Rick was a stand-up, guy . . . About the most stand-up guy I ever knew.”
“I think you do him proud,” I said, “when it comes to that measure.”
Our eyes met, and we didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I saw a Florida driver’s license next to Rick’s photo. “You mind?”
She shook her head.
I pulled it out. With my new cropped hair and glasses, I kind of resembled him.
“I should probably take that out now,” Carrie said. “I guess it still makes me feel like he’s here. There are times I just want to feel close.”
“I think you should keep it there as long as you like,” I said. Our eyes met. “I think you’ll know the right time.” I was about to put the photos back in her wallet. “So how’s your boy doing?”
“He’s doing great,” Carrie answered with a resurgent smile. “He’s back at home now—at my parents’ actually. He suffered some cognitive loss that they’ve been working on at the hospital, as well as some motor paralysis on his left side. But he’ll be back to school in the fall. Little guy’s the love of my life. But you must understand that, Dr. Stead—”
She caught herself, in an awkward pause. “Sorry.”
I looked at her. “You think it’s time you start calling me Henry? Nothing special, it’s just that I kind of let everyone who saves my life call me by my first name. It’s a rule with me . . .”
Carrie smiled, brightness coming back into her face. “I don’t know. Maybe we should keep it like it is for now . . .”
“You’re right. Anyway, Doctor Steadman will probably get us a better table at the Denny’s in Mount Holly if we have lunch there . . .”
Suddenly I realized what the answer to my question about Carrie was.
It had to do with what I had said to her that first time I called in that somehow made her trust in me and look for that car. When everyone else had me tried and convicted as a ruthless killer and just wanted to bring me in.
I had asked if she had kids . . . And now I remembered, after a long pause she had answered yes, she did, a son. Her first day back, from such an abominable tragedy . . .
And then I had said: “Well, then you’ll know exactly what I mean . . .”
Then I swore, on Hallie—the love of my life—that I was completely innocent of all the things they were saying.
And somehow that had cut through all the convincing evidence and the rush to judgment. And it had made her believe me. In spite of everything to the contrary. All the evidence, all the crimes Hofer had managed to pin on me—
“What?” Carrie glanced at me staring at her, and it suddenly was like she was reading my mind as she smiled, a bit fuzzily. “So you want me to tell you what it was? That made me believe you that day. Seems a little stupid now, in light of everything, but—”
“No.” I shook my head at her, smiling. “I think you just did.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Mount Holly was a sleepy North Carolina town, like so many I’d been through lately. We made it there by 2:30 that afternoon.
Around Charlotte, the traffic narrowed to a single lane, a bunch of police lights flashing. Carrie pushed Rick’s license back to me, saying, “You may want to hold on to this. And while we’re at it, maybe this too.” Underneath it was Rick’s business card.
Worriedly, I started thinking maybe those sightings of me were more dangerous than I’d thought.
But it was just an accident. We passed right on through the line of police cars. The road was clear the rest of the way.
Bud’s Guns was located in a small strip mall on the outskirts of town, in between a wheelchair outlet and a Dairy Queen.
“Ready?” Carrie asked, parking the car and reaching around to the back for her file of photos and my iPad. She took in a breath.
Carrie went into the store, the iPad armed with two bookmarked photos: one, from the Jacksonville News, of me, which must have been found on my website. Clean-shaven, smiling, confident, the way I looked just days ago.
And the other of Vance Hofer, which I had taken in my office three weeks before.
I followed her in, but stayed back in the aisle.
A barrel-chested, wide-shouldered guy with curly reddish hair and a thick mustache was behind the counter, just hanging up the phone. Carrie went up to him, resting my iPad on the counter.
“Help you, ma’am?” the amiable gun dealer asked with a wide grin. “Hope I’m not saying something wrong, but you look like just the kind of gal who’d line up pretty nicely with an extended-mag TEC-9.”
“Already got one.” Carrie smiled, as if he had complimented her hair. “You the owner?”
“That be me.” He nodded. “Bud Poole. And you . . . ?”
“My name’s Carrie Holmes.” She pushed her sunglasses up on her head, all business. “I’m with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.” She flashed her JSO ID.
“Jacksonville, you say . . . ? Been getting a bunch of you folk up here these past few days, you must know what I mean . . .”
“I do . . . Hope you don’t mind if I ask you some questions . . . You were at the Mid-Carolina Gun Fair a few weeks back?”
“I was.” Bud nodded again. “Make it every year . . . Some of my steadiest customers are up there . . . But somehow I thought this business was all wrapped up . . .” He shifted a little uncomfortably.
“Just a question or two. Kind of a follow-up. You were the dealer who sold the gun to Henry Steadman?” Carrie opened her file. “An H and K nine-millimeter . . . I can show you a copy of the invoice here . . .”
“Save the effort,” Bud said obligingly. “Everyone in the damn country has seen that invoice by now. That was me.” He shrugged, his ruddy face sagging a little like an old orange. “Look, I told all this to the people who were up here before. I always do things by the book. Anyone got a problem with it, write your congressman and change the law . . .”