Sophie peeled the menu from the table and opened it more out of habit than hunger.
The usual suspects: variations of eggs and fried meat, a few burgers, a suspicious Cobb salad.
She looked out the window.
The rain had picked up.
At the intersection, a traffic light flashed red to green, but the road was empty.
“Have you decided?”
Sophie turned to find the young waitress standing poised with pad and pencil. She wore her hair in an impossibly tight ponytail, the brown of her roots clinging for dear life.
“Just a coffee.”
“That’s it?” she grieved.
“That’s it.”
The waitress let her pad drop, cocked her head, and popped a smile so enormous it seemed to exceed the square footage of her face.
“Haven’t seen you here before. Your first time?”
Sophie’s eyes cut to Seymour two booths up.
“Just passing through. Needed a caffeine fix.”
“Oh? Where you headed?”
The question boomed in the silence of the diner as if it had been channeled through a PA system.
“Portland.”
“Business or—”
“Just visiting family.”
The waitress held her smile, as if Sophie’s explanation needed more explanation and she had all the time in the world to wait for the rest of the story.
Across the diner, the old man looked up from his pie.
This line of questioning needed to end. Now.
“You know what, Jenny?” Sophie said, squinting at her nametag, “I think I will have a slice of your pie.”
The waitress somehow squeezed out more smile.
“Good choice. Best in the state. Coffee and pie coming right up.”
As Jenny headed off toward the counter, Sophie kept thinking that at any moment Seymour would suddenly turn and make her.
The waitress returned with a steaming carafe, a mug, and a slice of cherry pie.
She set everything down in front of Sophie.
Poured.
“Anything else, ma’am?”
Ma’am?
“No thanks.”
“Enjoy.”
Jenny the waitress moved on to Seymour’s booth.
Sophie straightened in her seat.
The waitress smiled down at Seymour, but the speed at which it vanished indicated there was zero warmth returned from the customer.
“You haven’t touched your coffee, sir. Can I get you something else?”
Seymour lifted his coffee and polished it off in one uninterrupted tilting of the mug.
He set it down empty on the table and looked up at the waitress.
“The coffee is excellent.”
“Um, would you like some more?”
“Yes.”
She filled his mug from the carafe.
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Sophie pulled out her phone and tapped out three texts to Dobbs.
trailed BS to swartwoods diner in north bend
he’s just sitting here being creepy
still no sign of talbert?
• • •
Sophie watched a dreary afternoon unspool through the windows.
Customers came, left.
Three times she pulled out the receipt with Seymour’s sketch, drawn to it on some frequency she couldn’t name.
The weather cleared and rolled in again.
Still, she could count the number of cars that drove by on both hands.
In the beginning, the waitress had come by every ten minutes or so, pushing the menu, pushing more coffee, more pie. But after two hours, she was completely ignoring both Sophie and Seymour.
• • •
The sun dipped behind the mountains.
Darkness roused the streetlights, the empty intersection now washed in yellow light that made the wet pavement glisten.
A neon beer sign blinked to life in the window of a bar across the street.
Fifteen minutes crawled by.
Not a soul darkened its doorstep.
Happy hour on Friday night in North Bend.
And still, Seymour hadn’t moved. Not to use the restroom. Or stretch his legs. Not even to readjust his weight on the hard plastic bench that had kept one or both of Sophie’s legs in a perpetual state of pins and needles.
Out of sheer boredom, Sophie had blazed through four cups of coffee, a mistake she’d been paying the price for over the last hour as she watched customers enter the bathroom at the back of the diner and exit moments later with what she perceived to be orgasmic relief across their faces.
By 5:55 p.m., she couldn’t hold it anymore.
Rising, she walked unsteadily down the aisle of window-adjacent booths, passing Seymour without acknowledgment or glance, and made a beeline for the doors at the back of the restaurant.
It was the first time she’d used her legs in over three hours, and they felt like they belonged to someone else.
She gave one quick look back at Seymour before disappearing into the women’s restroom.
The desperation in her bladder crescendoed as she burst through the stall door and raced to unbuckle her belt.
Epic relief.
So intense it gave her chills.
She washed up quickly, uncomfortable with leaving Seymour out of sight, even for a minute.
She turned off the tap and looked around, hands dripping.
No paper towels.
No electric dryer.
Of course.
She shook them dry, finishing the job on the sides of her pants.
When she opened the door, her stomach clenched.
Three men now occupied Seymour’s booth.
Sophie rebooted, pushed through the shock, and walked right past them, digging the phone out of her purse as she eased back into her booth.
Fired off a new text to Dobbs.
still here … two other men just showed up … come now
She glanced out her window, saw a black van that hadn’t been there before she’d left for the bathroom.
possibly arrived in black GMC savana
Jenny the waitress sidled up to Seymour’s booth, all smiles again.
“Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”
“Coffee.”
“Coffee.”
“More coffee.”
“Sure thing.”
Sophie slid across the bench seat to get a look at the faces of the new arrivals.
One she didn’t recognize—a man in his mid-fifties, ruggedly handsome, with wavy, graying curls that he kept swept back from his face.
The second was Barry Talbert, her other MIA.
Sophie’s pulse rate doubled.
Talbert was the youngest of the trio—early forties if she had to guess. He wore a crisp, pinstripe button-down, open at the collar. Hair pushed back and cemented in place with plenty of product. At least two days’ worth of stubble coming in.
Another text.
talbert just walked in with some other guy
Both Talbert and Rugged-Handsome exuded that same trance-like intensity.
No one spoke.
A minute into the silence, Talbert broke his thousand-yard stare, looked at Seymour, shook his head, and looked away again, as if he’d been offered something and were politely refusing it.
The waitress returned with two coffee mugs and a carafe.
“Anyone interested in dinner?”
Seymour seemed to speak for everyone. “No, we’re fine.”
When the waitress was out of earshot, Talbert said, “We have the van.”
Seymour nodded.
Talbert said, “Any word from him?”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
Silence again.
Seymour looked at Talbert as if he’d spoken. He reached over and grabbed a plastic tub of creamer from a pile that filled a porcelain bowl beside the other condiments. Rolled it across the table t
o him.
Talbert tore off the seal and dumped the creamer into his coffee.
For a moment, he stared down into the cup, mesmerized, as if the swirls of cream were revealing the mysteries of the universe.
Rugged-Handsome said, “The children are there.”
“Full house,” Seymour said.
“He looks a lot like him.”
“So does she,” Talbert said without looking up.
The other two nodded in agreement.
“Won’t be long now,” Seymour said.
Silence descended on their booth again.
Sophie reeled.
On those rare occasions when she escaped the precinct for lunch hour, she liked to head downtown to Lola on Fourth and Virginia. She’d always take a book, intending to read, but inevitably she’d never even power it on. Instead, she’d sit alone, eating and soaking up fragments of conversation from the pleasant noise of the restaurant, reassembling them as best she could into a picture of the lives and stories of the people all around her. She was good at it too. Easy work for a detective and aspiring novelist.
But that particular aptitude was failing her at the moment.
It was different with Seymour, Talbert, and Rugged-Handsome.
Eavesdropping on their conversation was like trying to make sense of a dream. Like reading a code without the cipher. The words were plain enough, but they were fragments of a larger picture that she couldn’t even begin to guess at.
She dug out her phone and sent another text to Dobbs.
something about to happen … how far?
Ten seconds later, her screen illuminated.
10 min
She set the phone on the table.
Seymour straightened.
So did Sophie.
His head ticked to the left, as imperceptibly as the twitch of the minute hand, but she caught it.
The other two men watched him, something like wonder and fear exploding in their eyes.
Sophie thumbed off the brass snap that secured her Glock in the holster.
“The fourth?” Talbert said.
Seymour nodded. “He just arrived.”
Chapter 22
Grant had just thrown up for the third time in the last hour, and he was still hunched over the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, gasping for breath while Paige patted his back.
“You’re going to feel better soon,” she said. “I promise.”
Grant wiped his mouth as an intense shiver wracked his body.
“How long until your client—”
“Anytime.”
“You ready?”
“Yes.”
She looked the part at least, having changed back into her kimono.
“Got your phone set up?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to go in there alone. I’ll do it when I take Steve up.”
“You be careful. Guy could flip out he catches you trying to record him.”
“I will be.”
Grant struggled onto his feet and flushed the toilet. The spinning of the water made him queasy all over again. He ran the tap, bent down, rinsed and spit until his mouth no longer burned with bile.
Already, it was dark outside and even darker in the brownstone. By the illumination of the candle on the sink, Grant studied his reflection in the mirror. The soft light should have knocked off ten years, but instead he looked worse—pallid and sweat-glazed and thinner.
Eyes as dark as pits.
The headache raged on—felt like his frontal lobe had been dropped in a food processor.
“What time is it, Paige?”
“Six fifteen.”
Through the pain and the fog, Grant registered the distant, manic anthem of an alarm, although it took him a minute to land upon the crisis that had triggered it.
He staggered out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, steadying himself against the island where his phone waited. There were candles everywhere—in the living room, dining room, at least a half dozen casting a flickering warmth across the kitchen.
“Stu was supposed to call me fifteen minutes ago,” he said, picking it up.
He held the power button down for several seconds.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, pressing harder and longer, his thumbnail blanching from the pressure.
Might as well have been trying to power up a brick.
He finally dropped the phone and put his head on the counter, the chill of the tile providing the briefest flash of relief.
“Grant, what’s wrong?”
“Battery’s dead.”
“So your friend can’t call you?”
“Right.”
“Just use my phone.”
“I don’t know his number off the top of my head, and he’s not on the Internet.”
“So what do we do?”
Grant looked up from the counter.
It felt like someone was prodding around in his head with a screwdriver.
“I don’t know. That was our best chance.”
Paige came over, laid a cool hand on the back of his neck.
“We’re gonna get through this,” she said.
A noise reverberated down the hallway—someone pounding on the front door. It seemed to shake the entire building.
“That would be Steve,” Paige said.
Grant choked down the despair, the exhaustion, the agony.
No time for pain.
He pulled himself up.
“I’ll be in the closet by the bar.”
Chapter 23
Sophie nearly jumped out of the booth when her cell began to vibrate.
She glanced down at the caller ID—Stu Frank.
It took her a moment to place the name—a semi-shady private investigator she and Grant had used once or twice. If she remembered correctly, Stu was ex-law enforcement. Six or seven years ago, he’d been thrown under the bus over a scandal involving several detectives and an ill-advised beat down of an errant CI. Even during their limited contact, she’d hated working with him. The man radiated an intense skin-crawling aura.
What the hell could you possibly want?
She answered quietly with, “Really not a good time, Stu.”
“I’ve got something for Grant, but I can’t get a hold of him.”
“I’m his partner, not his mother.”
“Be that as it may, you’re still the closest thing to a mother he’s got. Now I have some info on this crazy-urgent request he hit me with this afternoon. I’ve been trying to call him, but he’s not picking up.”
She felt her interest prickling.
Said, “When did he say he needed this by?”
“Two minutes ago. Six p.m. He was adamant. I’ve called five times, and it’s been straight to voice mail. This house got something to do with a hot case or what?”
She didn’t know how to answer that, so she just said, “Yeah.”
“Is Grant with you?”
“No, but I’m going to see him later.”
Through the window, Sophie watched the headlights of what looked like a Crown Vic whip into the parking space beside the black van.
“What do you want me to do with this file, Sophie?”
She opened her purse, dug out her wallet, threw a ten spot on the table.
“Where are you right now, Stu?”
“Cafe Vita in The Hill.”
She slid out of the booth.
“I’ll meet you there in twenty,” she said.
She met Dobbs at the entrance.
“Outside, Art.”
They stood in the drizzle.
“What’s the word, Sophie?”
Art didn’t exactly look like a law enforcement badass with his receding hairline and burgeoning paunch, but the threadbare JCPenney suit belied a damn good shot and one of the best detectives Sophie had ever worked with.
“Talbert, Seymour, and a John Doe are seated at one of the booths by the window. Stay on them.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I thought he was sick.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“He in trouble?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll call you.”
“I had a reservation at Canlis tonight for me and the wife.”
Sophie was already moving across the sidewalk toward her TrailBlazer.
“I owe you one,” she said over her shoulder.
“Yeah you do.”
“Text me when they move. I’ll be in the city.”
Chapter 24
Grant stumbled over to the closet, slipped inside, and pulled the door closed after him.
He sat on the floor.
Drew his knees into his chest.
Buried his head in his hands.
The pain was operatic—audible through the silence like a throbbing timpani drum. He wondered how Paige had held out for three days by herself. In the years they’d been estranged, the memory of his little sister had been replaced by the image of the addict, the fuck-up, and now, the prostitute. It was easy to forget the little girl who would quietly stroke his hair when the tears he had fought back during the day finally arrived in the middle of the night. Those muffled sobs he’d tried to stifle with a pillow. She was stronger than he would ever be.
Now, with his head splitting apart in the darkness, he wished—as he had so many times before—that he could find some of her strength in himself. But he had never been the brave one.
Grant heard the front door close, followed by low voices in the foyer. Reaching up, he gently twisted the knob and nudged the closet door open a quarter of an inch.
He caught a twinkle of candlelight through the crack, and then Paige’s voice.
“I’m so glad you came, Steve.”
“What’s with all the candles?”
“You don’t like them?”
“I can’t tell if it’s romantic or if you’re about to subject me to some Satanic ritual sacrifice.”
Paige laughed, but Grant could tell it wasn’t the genuine article—too quick, too high, definitely forced.
“The boring truth,” she said, “is that the power went out.”
“Bummer.”
Their voices seemed to occupy the same airspace. Grant imagined her arms wrapped around the man’s neck.
“I’m glad you called,” the man said. “Thought you might have forgotten about me.”
“Never.”
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