business sucks. The payoff is always problematic. Even with electronic transfers, there’s always some trail to follow. You get your money and then the FBI knocks down your door.” Sean drew a breath. “And we still have no idea why they took blood from Pam Dutton.”
“So how do we play this with Tuck?”
“Question him some more, but don’t tip our hand.”
“His buddy Hilal might do that for us. Meaning tip off Tuck.”
“Don’t think so. His primary concern is not to let this contract blow up. And he doesn’t want to fall in this mess with Tuck if he is guilty. I think he’ll keep his distance.”
“So if Pam wasn’t Willa’s birth mother who could it be?”
“It might not matter.”
“But you said earlier that you thought Willa was the adopted one. So I thought you meant it was tied into this somehow.”
“Willa is twelve. If it is tied to her it’s taken somebody a long time to come around to it.”
“Do you remember them ever talking about Willa being adopted?”
“Never. I just assumed all three kids were theirs.”
“Okay, how about Jane Cox?”
“What about her?”
“She knows about our suspicions. What if she tips off her brother?”
Before Sean could answer, Michelle’s phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Oh, hey, Bill. I… what?” Michelle paled. “Oh my God. When? How?”
Michelle didn’t say anything for about a minute, but her breath kept coming in accelerating bursts as she listened. “Okay, okay. I’ll catch the next flight out.” She clicked off.
“Michelle, what is it?”
“My mom’s dead.”
CHAPTER 21
THE STURDY WHEELS of the Cessna bumped against the compacted dirt with the grass topper, slowed, and came to a stop. Sam Quarry taxied down the makeshift runway, worked the foot pedals, and expertly spun the plane around. He climbed out and slung a knapsack over his shoulder. After blocking the plane’s wheels, he unlocked the outer door of the old mine. He walked down the tunnel, his path illuminated by his flashlight and the dull glow of the overhead lights.
A few minutes later he met up with Carlos and Daryl.
“Did you take care of Kurt’s body?” he asked solemnly.
Daryl looked down but Carlos said, “We buried it on down the south shaft. Said a prayer over him and everything. Real respectable.”
“Good.” Quarry glanced over at his son. “You learn anything from this, boy?”
Daryl nodded stiffly. “Don’t never lose control.” His tone didn’t imply that he had actually learned anything. This was apparently not lost on Quarry.
He clapped his son on the back and then his strong fingers dug into the younger man’s skin. “Every time you think about losing your temper, you think about the price Kurt paid. You think about that real good.’Cause let me tell you, I could’ve easily let Kurt be the one walking away. And him and Carlos could’ve been saying the Lord’s Prayer over your hole in the dirt. You hear me?”
“I hear you, Daddy. I hear you.”
“Little piece of me died with him. Maybe more than a little. I’ve damned myself to hell for all eternity by doing that. You think about that too.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in God,” Daryl said quietly while Carlos looked on, his features inscrutable except for the fact he was slowly rubbing the St. Christopher’s medal he wore around his neck.
“I might not believe in God, but I sure as hell believe in the devil.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
“I don’t make many rules, but the ones I do make I expect to be followed. Only way any of this shit works. Okay?”
“Yes sir,” said Carlos, who’d stopped stroking the medallion and slipped it back under his shirt.
Quarry left the men and continued on. A minute later he was sitting across from Willa, who was dressed in corduroy pants and a wool shirt Quarry had provided.
“Got everything you need?” Quarry asked.
“I’d like some books,” said Willa. “There’s nothing else to do so I want to read.”
Quarry smiled and opened his knapsack. “Great minds, you know.” He lifted five books out and passed them over to her. She studied them carefully.
“You like Jane Austen?” he asked.
She nodded. “She’s not like my absolute favorite, but I’ve only read Pride and Prejudice. ”
“That was my daughter’s favorite book.”
“Was?”
Quarry stiffened slightly. “She doesn’t read anymore.”
“Is she dead?” Willa asked with the bluntness of youth.
“Some might call it that.” He pointed to the other books. “I know you’re real smart. So I didn’t bother with crap you’re probably way past. But you let me know what you like or not. I got plenty.”
Willa slid the books aside and studied him carefully. “Can I have some paper and a pen? I like to write. And it would take my mind off things.”
“Okay, that’s not a problem.”
“Did you talk to my parents? You said you would.”
“I sent out a message, yep. Told’em you were okay.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
Quarry flinched back like she’d sucker-punched him, and maybe she had. He found his voice. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“Sometimes kidnappers don’t give the person back. They kill them.” Her wide eyes remained steadfastly on his. She was obviously not interested in retreating off this subject.
Quarry rubbed his jaw with a callused, weathered hand. Then he glanced down at it, as though he was seeing it for the first time. It was the same hand that had ended Kurt’s life, so maybe the girl had something. I am a killer, after all.
“I appreciate that. I can see where you’re coming from, sure. But if I were planning on killing you, I could just lie and say I wasn’t going to. So what does it matter?”
She was ready for him in this little logics duel. “But if you tell me you are planning on killing me it’s probably the truth, because why would you lie about that?”
“Damn, I bet sometimes people say you’re too smart for your own good, don’t they?”
Her bottom lip trembled just a bit as she transformed from Einstein to the frightened preadolescent she was. “I want to go home. I want to see my mom and dad. And my brother and sister. I didn’t do anything wrong.” Tears spilled from her eyes. “I didn’t do anything wrong, and so I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I just don’t!”
Quarry looked down, unable to confront the wide, wet eyes and the terror they held. “This isn’t about you, Willa. Not really. It’s just… it’s just that this is the only way it’ll work. I thought it through a lot of different ways and this is the only one that made sense. It’s the only chance I had. The only cards I had to play.”
“Who are you mad at? Who are you trying to get back at?”
He rose. “You need any more books, you just let me know.”
He fled the room, leaving Willa to cry alone. He had never felt more ashamed.
A few minutes later Quarry was eying Diane Wohl as she sat on her haunches in the far corner of her “cell” from him. He should have felt sympathy for her too, but he didn’t. Willa was a child. She hadn’t had a chance to make choices. And mistakes. This woman here had done both.
“Can I ask you a question?” Wohl said in a shaky voice.
Quarry sat down at the small table in the middle of the room. Part of him was still dwelling on Willa. But he said, “Shoot.”
“Can I make a phone call to my mother? To let her know I’m okay?”
“Can’t do that. These days they can trace anything. Government eye in the sky. Sorry. Just the way it is.”
“Well, then can you let her know I’m okay?”
“I might be able to do that. Give me her address.”
He handed her a pencil and a slip of paper. Her brow
furrowed as she wrote it down and then handed him back the paper. She asked, “Why did you take my blood?”
“I needed it for something.”
“What?”
Quarry looked around at the small space. It wasn’t a fancy hotel, but Quarry had lived in worse. He had tried to provide everything the woman needed to be comfortable.
I’m not evil , he told himself. If he kept thinking it, maybe he’d start believing it.
“Can I ask you a question?”
She appeared startled by this but nodded.
“You have any kids?”
“What? No, no, I never did. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
She drew nearer to him. Like Willa she had changed into fresh clothes. Quarry had brought along the outfits she’d purchased from Talbot’s. They fit nicely.
“Are you going to let me go?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how things turn out. I can tell you that I am not by nature a violent man. But I also can’t predict the future.”
She sat down at the table across from him and clasped her hands together.
“I can’t think of one thing I’ve done in my life that would make you do this to me. I don’t even know you. What have I done? What the hell have I done to deserve this?”
“You did one thing,” said Quarry.
She looked up. “What? Tell me!”
“I’ll let you think of it yourself. You sure got some time to do that.”
CHAPTER 22
IT WAS EARLY MORNING as the puddle-jumper bounced along the tops of the grayish clouds lingering from a storm that had already passed over the Smoky Mountains. Later, as the plane descended into the Nashville airport, Michelle continued to do what she had done the entire flight: stare at her hands.
When the plane door opened she wheeled her bag out, grabbed a rental, and was on the road within twenty minutes after arriving at the gate. However, her foot was not mashing the gas pedal to the floor as usual. Instead, she drove at a sedate fifty miles an hour. Michelle had no desire to rush toward what she had to face.
According to her brother Bill, their mother had woken up in good spirits, eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast, and worked in the garden. Later she had played nine holes of golf at a nearby course, returned home, showered, gotten dressed, warmed up a casserole for her husband, watched a show she had earlier recorded, and was heading out the door to meet with some friends for a late dinner when she collapsed in the garage. Frank Maxwell had been in the bathroom. He had gone into the garage a bit later and found his wife sprawled on the floor. Apparently, he believed Sally had been dead before she’d hit the cement.
They weren’t sure what had killed the woman—stroke, heart, aneurysm—but dead she was. As the trees on either side of the road flew by, Michelle’s mind raced even faster, from her earliest memories with her mother to the last few encounters, none of which had been particularly memorable.
An hour later she had talked with her four brothers, two of whom lived relatively close by their parents, and one, Bobby, who lived in the same town. The fourth, Bill Maxwell, who resided in Florida, had been driving to see his parents for a visit when he’d gotten the news barely an hour out. Michelle was the last to arrive. She had next spent several hours with her father, who was equal parts mute and staring off, before erupting from his malaise periodically to take control of the funeral arrangements.
Frank Maxwell had been a cop most of his life, ending his career as a police chief. He still looked like he could jump out of a patrol car and hoof it after someone and do something with the person once he caught him. It was from her father that Michelle had gotten her physical prowess, her drive to succeed, her sheer inability to ever finish second with a smile on her face. Yet as Michelle watched from a distance, catching her father in unguarded moments, she glimpsed an aging man who had just lost everything and had no idea what he was supposed to be doing with the time he had left to live.
After absorbing all she could take of this, she retreated to the backyard where she sat on an old bench next to an apple tree weighed down nearly to the ground with fruit, closed her eyes, and pretended her mother was still alive. She thought back to her childhood with them both. This was tough to do because there were blocks of her youth that Michelle Maxwell had simply eliminated from her memory for reasons that were obviously more apparent to her shrink than to her.
She called Sean to let him know she’d arrived okay. He had said all the appropriate things, was supportive and gentle. And yet when she hung up, Michelle felt about as alone as she ever had. One by one her brothers joined her in the backyard. They talked, cried, chatted some more, and cried some more. She noted that Bill, the biggest and the oldest, a tough beat cop in a Miami suburb that could reasonably be classified as a war zone, sobbed the hardest.
Michelle found herself mothering her older brothers, and she was not, by nature or inclination, a nurturing type. And the close, grief-stricken company of her male siblings started to suffocate her. She finally left them in the backyard and returned to the house. Her father was upstairs. She could hear him talking on the phone to someone. She eyed the door to the garage accessible from the kitchen. She hadn’t gone in there yet. Michelle didn’t really want to see where her mother had died.
Yet she was also one to confront her fears head-on. She turned the knob, opened the door, and stared down the three unpainted plywood steps leading to the two-bay garage. A car was parked in the nearest bay. It was her parents’ pale blue Camry. The garage looked like any other. Except for one thing.
The splotch of blood on the cement floor. She drew closer to it.
Blood on the cement floor?
Had she fallen down the steps? Hit her head? She eyed the door of the Camry. There was no trace there. She gauged the space between the rough steps and the car. Her mother was a tall woman. If she had stumbled forward, she had to have hit the car. She really couldn’t have fallen sideways because the stairs had half-walls on both sides. She would have simply ended up slumped there. But if she had stumbled because she’d had a stroke? She could have bounced off the car and then hit her head on the floor. That would account for the blood.
That had to account for the blood.
She turned and almost screamed.
Her father was standing there.
Frank Maxwell was officially six foot three, though age and gravity had stolen more than an inch from him. He had the compact, dense muscle of a man who had been physical his entire life. His gaze flitted across his daughter’s anxious face, perhaps trying to read all the content there. Then it went to the spot of blood on the floor. He gazed at it as though the crimson splotch constituted an encrypted message he was trying to decipher.
“She’d been having headaches,” her father said. “I told her to go get them checked out.”
Michelle slowly nodded, thinking that this was an odd thing to open the conversation with. “She could have had a stroke.”
“Or an aneurysm. The neighbor down the street, her husband just had one. Nearly killed him.”
“Well, at least she wasn’t in any pain,” Michelle said, a bit lamely.
“I don’t think so, no.”
“So you were in the bath, Bill said?”
He nodded. “Showering. To think that she was lying there while I…”
She put a hand on his shoulder and clenched it tightly. It scared her to see her father like this. Right on the edge of losing it. If there was one thing her father had always been, it was in control.
“There was nothing you could have done, Dad. It happens. It’s not fair. It’s not right, but it happens.”
“And yesterday it happened to me,” he said with finality.
Michelle removed her hand and looked around the garage. The kids’ things had long since been purged from her parents’ lives. No bikes or wading pools or T-ball bats to clutter up their retirement. It was clean, but stark, as though their entire family his
tory had been washed away. Her gaze went back to the blood as though it was the bait and she was the