Looking in the rearview mirror for signs of Angelo on his tail, Brian felt his palms start to sweat.
“Nothing, why?” She spoke a little too quickly. Or maybe her voice was too tense.
Or maybe he still had some recovering to do.
“Because I can tell something’s bothering you,” he said. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing.”
And then it hit him, probably would have come to him immediately if he hadn’t been preoccupied with the threat of life in prison.
“You’re scared.”
“No, of course not.”
Was someone listening? In her office? On the line?
“Okay, sorry, I guess I’m feeling jumpy,” he said, giving up far more easily than she should expect.
“That’s understandable.” Her chuckle wasn’t quite natural.
“Hey,” he said, thinking quickly, “I’m at loose ends tonight. How about we meet at that bistro on Mill Avenue and have a beer and some wings?”
Reminiscent of their college days. She’d passed the last time he’d offered.
A return to yesteryear, when they’d felt more in control of their lives and had faith in the world around them, appealed to him.
Even so, Hannah’s instant reply surprised him. “That’d be great,” she said, sounding as relieved as he was. And that’s when he knew something was seriously wrong.
“How soon can you leave work?” he asked, needing to be with her. It was just before five.
“Now. I’ve finished my files for the morning.”
“Great, I’ll meet you on Mill in twenty minutes.”
He didn’t want to wait that long.
19
O dd that Brian had called right when she was sitting at her desk, staring at the closet door, trying not to think about the message concealed behind it. She’d been wondering whether to go home and leave the offensive piece of paper where it was, without telling anyone about it—and yet was afraid to leave, to walk out of her chambers and into the world alone with that photo haunting her.
She didn’t believe in omens, or signs, and yet felt, as she answered Brian’s call, that she’d just been pushed out of her stupor and toward her future.
Walking stiffly, watching her back every step of the way, Hannah made it out of her office without incident. She rode the elevator with a couple of attorneys and another judge, talking about the unusually warm October weather.
The Lexus was just as she’d left it—no notes, no marks, the mail she’d collected on the way out that morning still on the passenger seat. Funny how traffic could be so normal, too, so many people zipping in and out of lanes, desperate for that extra car length—while others muddied the whole system by staying stubbornly in one lane at a slower speed, oblivious to the race they were interrupting.
Didn’t they know that, more than likely, on that very road, was an Ivory Nation supporter? A white supremacist who advocated killing innocent people if their skin was a different color? Or their religious affiliation not Christian?
Didn’t they know that they could be the next victim? Or that their baby could be murdered in the safety and security of his own nursery while they were right there, sleeping while he died?
Supremacists were everywhere. Doctors. Lawyers. The next-door neighbor. Even an Arizona state senator. There was no way to identify the danger.
Or to know if one was safe.
Hannah made it to Mill in record time. And then spent fifteen minutes circling the block until a parking space opened up. She didn’t even consider the covered garage where she normally parked. Too dark. Deserted. Too many posts behind which someone could hide.
And when Brian met her at the door to the restaurant, she fell into his open arms and hung on for dear life.
“They’re waiting to see what you do with that photo,” Brian said, hating the lines of fear on Hannah’s brow, the shadows beneath her eyes. The glint of panic he caught when she met his gaze over the draught beer she’d ordered.
“But who’s waiting?” she asked, her elbows on the tall table for two, a basket of uneaten wings between them. “And for what? How do I play this? I’m stuck here,” she said, “powerless.”
“No.” He couldn’t allow that. If he’d learned nothing else from his ordeal, he knew that everyone had power. They had to recognize it, choose to use it, but it was there. “You always have the ability to make choices,” he said, thinking back to the previous week, the humiliating examination. “Even if it’s just to choose to smile or cry. To be silent or to yell. The trick is not to let them get to you,” he said. “And I’m talking to myself as much as to you. Kind of odd, isn’t it,” he added, sipping from his own beer, “that we’re both being harassed by unknown people?”
Hannah’s smile was weak, but it managed to warm him. “Kind of like we’re meant to be each other’s strength?”
“Maybe.” He could think of worse things.
“Or that we’re in this together,” Hannah said. “Whether they’re out to get you and using me, or out to get me and using you, they’re hitting us both.”
He’d loosened his Beauty and the Beast tie, un-fastened the top button of his yellow dress shirt, and still couldn’t quite breathe easily. He didn’t disagree with her.
“So what am I going to do?” Hannah’s blue eyes were questioning.
He wished he had an answer for her. One that he could live with. Moving to Jamaica probably wasn’t it.
“What does William say?”
“I haven’t told him.” She toyed with a wing, as though fascinated by the sauce. The sleeve of her cream-colored blouse was only inches from sporting a brick-red stain. “This case has become such a sore spot between us that I don’t mention it anymore. He wants me to quit—not because it’s right, but because he’s afraid. I can’t let fear rule my life.” She grimaced as she looked over at him. “I mean, I know I’m not doing such a great job of staying calm, but at least I’m fighting. If I quit, if I run, I’m giving the Ivory Nation control of my life. I’d rather be dead.”
Brian wanted her alive. Period.
And he understood. “You’ve made your decision,” he said.
“I have?”
Nodding, Brian took the wing she was desecrating but not eating from her fingers, motioned to the top she’d just barely missed with the sauce. “You’re going to show them that they can’t manipulate you by fear. You’re going to go back to work, and turn that photo over to the proper authorities.”
“But if they’re the ones who’re crooked?”
“You’ll find that out sooner or later, right?”
“Yeah.”
Hannah studied him grimly. “Will you come with me?”
Try to stop him. “Of course.”
And he’d follow her home afterward, too.
Wednesday nights were quiet. Church night. Confinement was getting to him. He’d be released in the Lord’s time. Bobby knew that. His stillness was serving God. He knew that, too.
He saw again the face of the new guard who’d visited him earlier. Earnest. Serious. Adoring. As he’d offered Bobby a white female guard for his pleasure.
“You name it, brother—blonde, brunette, blue eyes, brown, long hair, short, big tits or small…”
It hurt Bobby to look at the red laces in the man’s boots. A top honor. Sign that he’d shed blood for the cause.
Laces he’d been awarded the same night Bobby had confessed to the brethren that the Lord God had appeared to him with the instruction to remain celibate for the rest of his life.
And here this man was, two years later, offering Bobby a woman.
Like Jefferson last year, he just didn’t get it. Didn’t understand that love of God was higher than any love of woman. That passion for Christ surpassed all earthly, human passions.
What was happening to them? Why were brethren changing the message? The messenger didn’t change.
Nor did the Sender of all messages.
Bobby’s Bible h
ad been open for more than an hour, but the thin, rich, worn pages weren’t offering the solace he normally found there.
And the cell walls seemed closer tonight. Trapping him in a hunting trailer with a man who thought fatherhood meant owning another human being. One there to serve whatever purpose you needed served. Be it cooking, cleaning, stealing, being a punching bag.
And more.
Closing the Bible, Bobby leaned back against the wall behind his cot, closed his eyes and recited the entire first chapter of Mark. The exercise consumed every part of him, his skin open to God’s touch, his mind hearing God’s word, his heart touched by the love he found within the sacred verse.
The cell hadn’t changed when he opened his eyes. He’d arranged to have himself moved to the end of a row of unoccupied cells. A solitary confinement of sorts. Mostly a place he could use his laptop—brought to him folded in a blanket and kept hidden on his cot—during the day without question or explanation. The camera that was supposed to monitor him had been turned slightly, so that his calves and feet were in plain view.
The authorities knew he was here.
That was all they knew.
Or needed to know.
Calm again, he opened the laptop powered by batteries that came in and went out with his food tray, accessed the county’s wireless network, a bit disgusted by the ease with which he circumvented all rules and regulations, all security measures that were meant to keep citizens safe. If he’d been an ungodly man he could have done so much damage.
A couple of quick seconds of typing and he was in a private community on the Internet—one that he’d designed himself. Space he owned.
Scrolling down, he read through the postings, all seemingly innocuous chatter between high school girlfriends on the other side of the country. Giving him the reports he expected twice a day during his sabbatical. Reports in code from trusted members of the brotherhood.
At the bottom he saw an image that made his heart pound.
God, she looked good. Even with that hair, those clothes—even with the twenty extra pounds, she stirred his blood. One of his brothers had found her. It was the only way she’d be here. No one else had permission to post to the site.
She was in a room—a hospital room by the look of it. Bobby clicked, zoomed, captured. There was a dated clock through a window behind her. It was missing a corner of the decorative scrolling around it. That clock hung outside a hospital in Mesa. And it displayed yesterday’s date.
Amanda was still alive. In Phoenix.
With shaking fingers he opened his imaging software. And within seconds, had an enlarged picture staring out at him.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered as he quickly took in details. Amanda was at the bedside of the Alliance bastard who’d sent his apologies. He knew the man’s eyes. The Judas had burns over most of his body, if the bandages were any indication. The picture had been taken from a cell phone outside the room, he’d guess, based on the pixels, resolution and the situation.
Amanda was gazing at the man as she’d once gazed at Bobby.
And beneath that first photo was a second. In that image she was kissing the man as she’d once kissed Bobby.
This image had been widened, letting him view the entire room. Enough to see that Luke wasn’t with her.
Trembling, he saved, converted, zoomed. Still no child.
What had she done with his son?
Left him alone in a hospital hallway, where anyone could speak to him? Teach him? Snatch him? Left him with, God forbid, a babysitter?
No, the faithful brother who’d been watching the room and taken the picture would have Luke if he’d been there.
And Amanda had obviously managed to slip away from anyone who tried to follow her. She’d been trained by the best.
So where was his son? With a black man? A Hispanic woman? A Jew? He’d kill her. He’d kill her again and again.
He’d follow her to hell and obliterate her soul.
Arms around his chest, Bobby rode the pain as he’d learned as a child, purging through silent tears that which he could not bear.
Brian was at work again early the next morning. Before the crack of dawn, actually. He’d woken in a cold sweat, sitting straight up in bed, and after assuring Cynthia that he was fine, he’d showered, checked on Joseph and left the house.
Driving like a bat out of hell, all he could think of was his patients. And saving their lives. If six of his infant patients had been murdered, and the killer hadn’t yet been caught, there could be a seventh. Today, even. He should have thought of this before. Should have thought of this first.
If another child died, because of him…
It took him an hour to go through the charts for patients under a year old. And another two to make the necessary phone calls.
By the time his staff began to arrive that morning, he was no longer pediatrician to any children under the age of one.
The following week was relatively, blissfully, uneventful for Hannah. A week without threats. Without trauma.
Without William.
She would have liked a week without fear, but she’d yet to manage a day free from panic.
She missed William. He’d had Francis since Saturday—part of a makeup plan for days he’d missed—and needed the time alone to forge a new relationshiop with his son.
He’d called Hannah every day, but when the conversation repeatedly turned to his pleas for her to recuse herself on the Bobby Donahue case—even going so far as to invite her on a Mediterranean cruise, his treat—she’d begun to cut the calls shorter and shorter.
She understood that William was worried about her. Frightened for her. She was frightened for herself.
But she could not quit. Quitting was tantamount to declaring her support for a cause she abhorred. To giving up her freedom.
Brian still had his. Tests had come back positive for HGH on one of the five exhumed bodies. They were still awaiting results on the other four. Carlos included.
The idea that her baby boy, so carefully entombed in the tiniest casket imaginable, so mournfully buried, was now a test sample in a morgue made her heart-sick.
And physically sick as well.
She’d lost six pounds over the past two weeks.
There’d been no identifying marks on the photo left in her office, nor had anyone claimed it.
“Donahue’s on the calendar for tomorrow.” Susan delivered the bad news on Thursday afternoon, a week and a day after Hannah’s beer-and-wings date with Brian.
It was a capital murder case. There would be many pretrial hearings. Mostly attempts by his lawyer to get the case thrown out. The charges dropped. Or lessened.
“A motion from Keith?” she asked.
Susan nodded. “He’s objecting to one of the state’s witnesses.”
“Who?” The judge was usually the last to find out. Whether because paperwork was slow, or because she didn’t need to know before she heard it in court, Hannah had never completely decided.
“Courtney Moss.”
“The senator’s daughter?”
Susan nodded. “One and the same.”
“Camargo Cortes’s girlfriend,” Hannah said, to confirm. The senator had more than one daughter.
“Yep.”
“Another interesting morning,” she said, trying to stay calm as she reached for the file.
She would not be intimidated.
She would not.
The words spent the night with Hannah. And accompanied her in to work the next morning.
I love Thee, Lord God, with all my heart. I love Thee, Lord God, with all my heart. I love Thee, Lord God…
Dressed in his Sunday-night-meeting best, Bobby sat next to Robert Keith at the defendant’s table, his litany blocking out most of what was going on around him.
The courtroom was closed to the public due to the sensitive nature of the upcoming proceedings.
I love thee, Lord God, with all my heart.
Courtney Moss,
sitting with her father behind the prosecutor’s table to his left, looked fresh and pure in her white blouse and navy skirt. Bobby loved the child—God’s child. He loved the judge they were waiting for as well.
I love Thee, Lord God, with all my heart.
The judge should be home having a white man’s babies, serving God with the tools He’d given her, but Bobby still loved her. As God did. As God wanted him to. He wondered how he could tell her so.
And wondered, too, how much longer his Father in Heaven would have him remain here, this space of waiting, until His purpose was served and Bobby could breathe fresh air again. Work by doing, rather than by faith.
I love Thee, Lord God, with all my heart…
Courtney would have her chance today. She had penance to do. Amends to be made to the Father who’d given her soul life, as well as to the earthly father who’d raised her. But she was young. She’d bear them good children.
Bobby already had a man picked for her. One who would be able to control her. Teach her God’s plan for her. Keep her pregnant and nursing—white babies, and him.
I love Thee, Lord God, with all my heart…
Tonight sweet Courtney would know how it felt to have a real man between her legs. Filling her with clean seed. By tomorrow she would be speaking of love and telling her father she wanted to get married.
Bobby’s penis grew hard, thinking of how pleased God would be, knowing that one more of His precious children was set for life. Serving Him. Protected.
One at a time.
Bobby was to bring them home one at a time.
I love Thee, Lord God, with all my heart…
“Judge, they’re ready for you.”
With her shoulders back and her stomach relatively calm, Hannah looked up as Susan appeared in the open doorway, and nodded. She wasn’t going to think about this, wasn’t going to leave any room in her mind for anyone else. She would simply do her job.
She was good at it.
Her morning files were already on her bench. Standing, she reached into her top drawer for the pen she always took with her to the court and—
“Oh! Ow!”
At Close Range Page 19