"He was having an affair with one of your clients?"
"Yes."
Pepperdyne winced, scratched his head, and looked to John for consultation.
"I'm afraid she's right, Jim," he said. "If that comes out in court, it'll make her look like a woman scorned and could weaken her testimony."
"Jeez."
"It doesn't matter, Mr. Pepperdyne," she said in an angry outburst. whole discussion is pointless. I'll be dead before they ever go to trial. The Brotherhood couldn't have endured for thirty years without absolute loyalty from its members and their families. Do you think they're going to let me survive?
"I saw them castrate and crucify a wonderful young man simply because he was Asian and dared to love one of their daughters. To them, my crime is a thousand times worse than that. Even if I refused to testify, they would kill me for betraying them. They would murder me without remorse and feel that they were justified, because what is really frightening about all this is that they believe they're right, that God is on their side. They've been anointed. Everything they do, they do in his name. They sang hymns while Michael Li bled to death. In their regard, I'm a heretic. Killing me would be a holy mission.
"And suppose I live long enough to testify, but they're acquitted? Suppose that the evidence you present, coupled with the weakened testimony of a scorned wife, isn't enough to convict, and they walk? If Matt didn't have me assassinated, he would accuse me of desertion and try and get custody of Kevin."
Pepperdyne harrumphed uncomfortably. "Perhaps you should know, Mrs. Burnwood, that he has already obtained a divorce. He claimed physical abuse."
"Because I was defending myself when I struck him?"
Pepperdyne shrugged. "He filed. You didn't respond within the required time, so the court granted the divorce by default."
"Judge Fargo?"
"Exactly."
John wenched her as she digested the face that she was legally free of Matt Burnwood. -He could tell she wasn't emotionally upset over the divorce, but her brow was puckered.
Her next question explained her concern. "Does my ex husband know about Kevin?"
"Not through us," Pepperdyne said. "We didn't know you'd had a baby until we found you. Of course, there's a possibility that word has reached him by another source."
She sank back into her chair, hugged her elbows, and rocked back and forth. "He will stop at nothing to have me killed and turn Kevin over to some secret member of the brotherhood. No," she said emphatically. "I can't go back. I won't."
Pepperdyne said, "You know as well as I that you have no choice, Mrs. Burnwood. You fled the district where several state and federal crimes were committed. Unlawful flight to avoid the giving of testimony is a federal offense.
"You're scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge in half an hour. He'll issue an order directing that you be detained as a material witness and returned, in custody, to the prosecuting district. You, of course, can retain counsel now if you wish."
"I'm fully aware of the law, Mr. Pepperdyne," she said coolly. "And I'll continue to serve as my own counsel."
"We're willing to drop the charges against you if you'll help us convict them." He gave her an opportunity to speak, but she said nothing. "You came in here thinking you were being arrested for murder. I figured you would be relieved."
She shook her head sadly. "You don't understand. They'll see to it that I'm killed."
"We leave tonight," Pepperdyne said briskly.
John knew that his friend wasn't entirely unsympathetic to her predicament. But Jim was a company man. He toed the company line. He had a job to do, and he would do it.
"Our flight is at three," he said. "You'll be transferred to Columbia, where you'll stay in a safe house until the first trial.
I'll be going with you as far as Dallas, then a female marshal and Marshal McGrath will accompany you the rest of the way."
John felt like the rug had been yanked out from under him.
He followed Pepperdyne out into the corridor and confronted him. "What did you mean by that?"
"By what?"
"I'm escorting her to Columbia? Me?"
Pepperdyne's expression was too innocent to be convincing.
"That's the gig, John."
"It's not my gig. Stewart was supposed to be here, not me.
He called in sick at the last minute, and I was sent in his place."
"Guess it's just your unlucky draw, then."
"Jim," he said, grabbing his friend by the sleeve and forcing him to stand still and listen. "I didn't know she had a kid."
"That surprised us all, John."
"I can't accept the assignment. It'll . . . it'll drive me crazy. You know that."
"You're scared?"
"Damn right."
"Of an infant?"
It had sounded ludicrous even to his own ears. Nevertheless, it was true. "You know what I went through after that fiasco in New Mexico. It still gives me nightmares."
Pepperdyne could have laughed at his irrational fear. John would always appreciate him for not doing so. Instead, he tried to reason with him.
"John, I've seen you bargain with the meanest bastards God ever created. You've talked terrorists into laying down their weapons even though they
believed that surrendering would keep them out of heaven. Such are your powers of persuasion."
"Once, maybe. Not anymore."
"You had one bad day and things went south."
"One bad day? You can reduce what happened to one bad day?"
"I didn't mean to minimize it. But no one held you responsible. No one, John. You couldn't have known that the kook was going to carry out his threats."
"I should have known, though, shouldn't I? That's what all my schooling and training was about. That's what the Ph.D. behind my name was for. I was supposed to know how Or to push and when to pull back."
"You're the best in the business, John. We still need you, and sooner or later I hope you'll forgive yourself for New Mexico and come back." Pepperdyne laid a hand on his shoulder. "You've got nerves of steel. Now, realistically, how much damage can a teeny-weepy, toothless infant inflict?"
Chapter 23
As they boarded the airplane in Denver, John had a prescience of disaster. He was gripped by a powerful premonition that this trip was doomed.
Now, weeks later, as he lay in the bed he had shared with his prisoner, his leg broken, a fresh scar on his head, and recently cured of amnesia, he asked himself what, if anything, he could have done to alter the chain of events.
He couldn't have prevented them from boarding that air craft. Pepperdyne would have thought him certifiably nuts if he had pulled him aside and told him that this wasn't a good idea, that his gut instinct was urging him to rethink the situation and come up with another plan.
Pepperdyne was to remain in Dallas while John and his partner, Ruthie Fordham, a pleasant, soft-spoken Hispanic woman, were to fly with Mrs. Burnwood and her child on to Birmingham, then catch a connecting flight to Columbia.
That was the itinerary.
Fate intervened.
Shortly after takeoff from Denver, Kendall's ears began troubling her.
Marshal Fordham called her discomfort to the attention of the flight attendant, who assured her that once the plane reached its cruising altitude, the pain would abate. It didn't.
For the duration of the hour-and-forty-minute flight, she was in agony.
Sensing his mother's distress, the baby fretted and cried. Seated across the aisle from them, John gripped the arms of his seat and prayed that the kid would stop squalling.
But the harder John prayed, the louder the baby wailed.
"Maybe you should order a drink," Pepperdyne suggested when he noticed the beads of perspiration on John's forehead.
"I'm on duty."
"Screw the rules. You're turning green."
"I'm okay." He wasn't, but he focused on one of the rivets in the ceiling of the cabin and tried to block
out the baby's crying.
Taxiing to the gate seemed to take almost as long as the flight. When the plane finally stopped, John elbowed aside other passengers in his haste to get off the aircraft. As soon as they came through the jetway, Marshal Fordham hustled Kendall into the nearest ladies' room. Pepperdyne had been left to carry the baby and was looking ill at ease in his new role as nanny. At any other time, John would have laughed at his bachelor friend's awkwardness. Now he couldn't muster a smile or a quip.
"This husband of hers, what's he like?" he asked. He didn't care, he was just talking to ignore the baby in Pepperdyne's arms.
"I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting him." The baby had stopped crying. Pepperdyne gingerly bounced him up and down. "From what I understand, Matt Burnwood is your basic white supremacist in a classy three-piece suit. He's handsome, articulate, educated, and cultured. But he's also a weapons expert' a gung-ho survivalist, and fanatical as hell. He believes his daddy has God in his hip pocket. Gibb says jump and he asks how high." He paused before adding, "Anyone who crosses them is as good as dead." - John looked at him sharply.
"She's right, John," Pepperdyne said, guessing his friend's thought. "Her ass is dust if they or any of their cronies get close to her."
"So this isn't just a baby-sitting job."
"Far from it. The Burnwoods might be behind bars, but they've got long tentacles. Some maybe even most we might not know about yet."
"Jesus."
"You can't let her out of your sight. Suspect everybody."
A few minutes later the women rejoined them. Kendall took the baby from Pepperdyne. Marshal Fordham broke the news that changed the course of events. "Mrs. Burnwood can not get on another airplane until her ears have been checked by a doctor."
"I've recently had problems with allergies," Kendall explained. "An infection must have settled in my ears. The pressure in the cabin caused excruciating pain."
Pepperdyne dumped it on John: "It's your call."
McGrath turned to her, the first time they looked each other straight in the eye. He couldn't say why he had avoided looking at her closely before. Maybe for fear of what he might see and how it would affect him.
Lisa had split. While he was away on assignment, she had moved out, taking with her all her belongings and a number of his. She left no note, no phone number, no forwarding address. Nothing. Zip. He hadn't cared, except he wished he could let her know just how little she was missed. Since her departure, he had been enjoying his solitude. He had sworn off women for a while.
But there was something about this one . . .
She had looked directly at him, without flinching. That's when he first suspected that she was an accomplished liar. Her gaze was too steady to be entirely honest. Candor to that extent could only be achieved with many hours of practice.
He guessed that this alleged earache was a ruse to delay their trip. She might even try to escape, to elude them in the swarm of travelers at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
However, on the outside chance that her discomfort was genuine, he had to take her to a medical facility and schedule them on a later flight.
Outside the terminal, Pepperdyne abandoned him. As he said goodbye, he slapped John on the back. "Have fun, pal."
"Fuck you," John muttered. His friend merely laughed and hailed the next taxi in line.
John was then crammed into a taxi with a nonEnglish speaking driver, two women, and a crying baby. Relying on a few key words and hand gestures, he communicated to the confused driver that they needed to be taken to the nearest emergency hospital.
When they arrived, Marshal Fordham stayed in the waiting lounge with the baby. John accompanied Kendall into the examination room. A nurse took her blood pressure and temperature, asked a few pertinent questions, then left them alone.
She sat on the padded examination table, her feet dangling over the side. John shoved his hands into his pants pockets and, keeping his back to her, studied a color diagram of the human circulatory system that was taped to the wall.
"Are you afraid I'll bolt?"
He came around. "Sorry?"
"Did you come in here with me because you think I might escape through the back door?" He said nothing, but he didn't have to. She laughed softly. "Do you think I would abandon my baby?"
"I don't know. Would you?"
Her pleasant expression turned wooden. "No," she said curtly.
"It's my job to protect you, Mrs. Burnwood."
"And then to deliver me to the authorities in South Carolina."
"That's right."
"Where I'll probably be killed. Don't you see the irony in that? You'll guard my life while returning me to the place where I'll be in the greatest danger?"
Actually, he could see the irony in that. But, hell, he was only doing his job. He wasn't paid to question the pros and cons of it. "While you're in my custody, I can't let you out of my sight," he said stiffly.
When the doctor came in, he looked at John curiously.
"You Mr. Burnwood?" he asked, referring to the form Kendall had filled out upon being admitted.
He showed the doctor his ID.
"U.S. marshal? Really? Is she your prisoner? What'd she do?"
"She got an earache on an airplane," John said with a distinct edge in his voice. "Are you going to examine her or what?"
The doctor listened to her chest, fingered the glands in her throat, and remarked that they were slightly swollen, then checked her ears, after which he confirmed that she had a nasty infection behind both eardrums.
"Can she fly?" John asked.
"Out of the question. Unless you want to risk having her eardrums burst."
He waited in the hall while a nurse administered an injection of antibiotics. Kendall emerged and, as they walked down the corridor to the waiting area, she surprised him by saying, "You thought I was lying, didn't you?"
"It crossed my mind."
"I wouldn't waste a lie on something that could be so easily disproved."
"Meaning that you'd save lying for when you were likely to get away with it."
She stopped and turned- to him. "Exactly, Mr. McGrath."
"It shouldn't be too bad."
"That's easy for you to say." John was in a foul mood and found Pepperdyne's banalities irritating. "You don't have to make the thousand-mile road trip."
After securing a motel room for the two women and the baby, he had gone to report directly to Pepperdyne, who was coordinating Mrs. Burnwood's transfer with the U. S. Marshal's office in Columbia.
"There's no help for it, John," Pepperdyne said patiently.
"According to the doctor, she shouldn't fly for at least a month.
We can't wait that long. This trip will only take three days'
travel, two nights on the road."
"I could make it in two days, easy."
"Alone. Not with passengers. Especially an infant. You'll cover approximately three hundred miles a day. It won't be a picnic, but it won't last forever."
Ignoring John's pained expression, Pepperdyne handed him an itinerary and a road map. "You'll leave in the morning and spend the first night in Monroe, Louisiana. Second night in Birmingham. Next day, you'll go on to Columbia."
Would he live to see it? he wondered. "At least Ruthie Fordham is along," he said, trying to look on the bright side, if there was one. "She seems to get along well with both of them."
"She'll stay with Mrs. Burnwood and the baby. We've arranged for you to have the connecting room at each of the motels."
John glanced over the itinerary. "I dread every mile of it.
Do you think we can trust her not to try something crazy?"
"Like escape, you mean?"
"She's scared, Jim."
Pepperdyne grinned. "Couldn't help it, could you? You've analyzed her in spite of yourself."
"I didn't have to analyze her. A blind fool could see that she's terrified."
"She won't go anywhere without her baby. It would be
awfully difficult for her to overpower you and His. Fordham, and make a run for it while toting a child."
"You're probably right, but the lady has moxie. And there's something else you should know. She's a liar."
"A liar?" Pepperdyne repeated with a laugh. "What do you - .. mean!
"I mean," John said drolly, "that she tells stories."
"You don't believe she's making up this"
"No. She's telling the truth about the Brotherhood. The evidence you've got so far bears that out. But Mrs. Burnwood holds her cards very close to her chest. There's something she's holding back. She has a devious streak."
"She's a lawyer."
Pepperdyne's offhand comment prompted a snicker from an agent who was manning a computer printer across the room.
Pepperdyne turned to him. "Got anything yet?"
"Nope."
Pepperdyne said to John, "We're running a routine back ground check on her, although she seems to be on the up and up. According to her win/loss record, she was a shrewd public defender and gave the good-ol'-boy legal system in Prosper a run for its money. Knowing what we do now about the people in key positions there, she'd have to be tough to have survived as long as she did."
"So what's the problem?" John asked, nodding toward the computer, which he knew was linked to numerous national and international information networks.
"Apparently there's a bug in our system. The data we received made no sense. He's trying to straighten it out."
"Let me know when you get something."
Jim chuckled. "Dr. McGrath is curious to see what makes her tick, huh?"
"It's nothing for you to get a hard-on about, Jim," John said as he turned to leave. "Old habits are hard to break, that's all."
"You can have your job back whenever you want it. I'd love for you to work out of my division."
Pepperdyne was serious, and John was grateful for his former John's recollections brought him to the morning of the accident. When they left Birmingham, he was grumpy and eager to relinquish Mrs. Burnwood and her baby. He estimated that they would reach the South Carolina capital around sundown.
As soon as they had eaten breakfast in the motel coffeeshop, he hustled them through a light rain to the car.
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