But I also had to consider the grim possibility that he might’ve been lying—and that Kayla might already be dead. In that case, he would simply want to escape.
But then why would he have shown up here?
Why ask for your help?
I didn’t care that Alexei was cuffed and without his bone gun. In the last eight months he’d killed and then eluded capture in countries all over the world, and, handcuffed though he was, if he wanted to take out these two men on the way to the station I doubted they would be able to stop him.
They were twenty meters from the elevator.
Don’t leave him alone with them, Pat.
Jake had joined me in the hall. “I’m going with them,” I told him.
“We’ll both go.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I need you to initiate the search for Kayla Tatum. I’ll send one of the troopers back to help you.” I took out Lien-hua’s cell and emailed him Kayla’s DMV photo. “Her car isn’t here, so I’m wondering if Alexei stole someone else’s vehicle, maybe left hers at that person’s house. Follow up on every vehicle in the parking lot. Check all the trunks. Also, search this hospital room by room. Talk with Tait and get as many other officers as you can on this. Go to every house, every business within walking distance of the hospital. Work your way out from there.”
“Okay.”
“Fill in Natasha and Lien-hua. You know everything I do now.”
The officers had made it to the elevator. “Hang on,” I called to them. “I’ll be right there.” Then I said to Jake, “By the way, how’d you find me?”
“I tracked your location with the GPS from Lien-hua’s phone.”
Not bad.
“I didn’t know there was a woman who was . . .” He sounded defeated. “I should’ve trusted you, Pat.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He was quiet.
“Shake it off. I need you on your A game. Are you good?”
A small nod. “Yeah.”
“All right.” I left for the elevator. “Get started looking for Kayla. I’m going to see what I can find out from Chekov.”
59
After sending the lower-ranking trooper inside to assist Jake, I joined Burlman and Alexei beside his cruiser.
The rental car that Jake and I were using this week sat near Amber’s snowmobile. I was surprised Jake had been able to navigate the drifted road in front of the motel, but if a snowplow had arrived with food, the timing would’ve just barely worked out for him to arrive when he did.
Burlman opened the door to the backseat, but as he grabbed Alexei’s collar to shove him in, I noticed something and said, “Wait!”
I felt my left pocket.
Empty.
Unbelievable.
Going to Alexei, I patted him down again and found the bone gun concealed along the back waistline of his jeans, a narrow, barely noticeable bulge hidden by his belt.
I retrieved it. “It was when I cuffed you, wasn’t it? I leaned a little too close?”
“You really are good, Agent Bowers.”
So was he.
“Get in.”
After starting the cruiser, Burlman said to Alexei, “Bryan Ellory was a friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Burlman’s jaw tensed. “I’m gonna kill you, you son of a—”
“No, you’re not,” I corrected him. Then I faced Alexei, looking at him behind the police cage partition. It bothered me a little that I was about to ask him for his motive, but at the moment I was willing to try anything to get him talking. “I know you don’t want to hurt Kayla, that she’s your leverage for finding the other people. But why? What’s at stake here, Alexei?”
“This isn’t the time to talk.”
As Burlman pulled onto the road, he eyed Alexei in the rearview mirror. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk soon enough.”
Alexei licked at some of the blood on his swollen lip.
Burlman grinned. “Yeah, I know you felt that one. Give me five minutes alone with you and you’ll never forget it.”
“I have no doubt,” Alexei replied, his voice even. Measured.
“No more threats,” I told Burlman unambiguously. I didn’t even want to think about what Alexei Chekov could do to this guy if I left them alone for five minutes. “I won’t tell you again.”
He clenched the steering wheel. “He resisted back there.”
All three of us knew that wasn’t the case, but arguing right now wasn’t going to serve any useful purpose. I called Lien-hua to get an update. She told me Jake had already contacted her and brought her up to speed about Alexei and Kayla.
“Windwalker just got here with the trail groomer.” She sounded exasperated at the long wait. “We’re on our way out the door now. You wanted me to check on Donnie—he’s worked at the sawmill since 2004, when the base closed. He left work on Thursday at lunchtime, no phone calls to him that morning before he did; that’s about all we know. I need to go. I’ll call you if I find anything at the ELF site.”
“Talk to you soon,” I said.
After she hung up, I tilted the rearview mirror so I could keep an eye on Alexei. And I watched him watch me as Burlman maneuvered us through the storm toward the sheriff’s department.
60
Tessa sighed.
A few minutes ago the sports wrap-up show had ended and a reality show about some people who investigated supposedly haunted libraries had come on.
How thrilling.
As the library program began, Sean had left with Lien-hua and this big Native American guy on a snowmobile-trail-groomer thing.
Amber was the one who’d suggested that Sean go along. “There’s nothing for you to do here right now anyway,” she’d told him. “And this’ll give me and Tessa a chance to get to know each other. A little girl time. Besides, you know those trails out there better than anyone. It might be a good way for you to help out.”
Lien-hua hadn’t seemed too excited about the idea, but when Sean assured her that he did know the area and could help with whatever it was she was looking for, she finally gave in.
Before they left, Lien-hua mentioned to Tessa that she was staying at the motel with this other agent named Farraday. “But”—she handed Tessa a keycard—“if you need some privacy, here’s the key to Patrick’s room. He’s in 106. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you hung out in there.”
Tessa knew things were pretty serious between the two of them; she even had the impression Patrick might be thinking about proposing. But she was a little surprised Lien-hua had a key to his room. She might need to have a little talk with this stepfather of hers.
Then they left.
Everything was sort of in limbo until they got back, or at least until Patrick did.
But it’d already been nearly two hours since he took off on the snowmobile, right after promising that he was gonna come back as soon as he could. Sure, Tessa knew he had a job to do, but still, she wished he would have at least touched base, sent her a text, something. A bunch of times she’d thought about calling or texting to see where he was, but then decided she didn’t want to seem too needy or puerile.
Now she was alone with Amber in the motel room, and despite the time of day, she found herself eyeing the bed. Even after sleeping in until 11:00, for some reason she was already feeling drowsy.
A burst of ominous music interrupted her thoughts, and Tessa went back to staring unemotionally at the group of ghost hunters stalking through the reference section of a small county library in Connecticut.
A couple of minutes later the show cut to commercial, and Amber asked, “Did you ever play Guess the Plot?”
“What’s that?”
“Well.” She repositioned herself on the bed so she was sitting cross-legged. “We surf to a random show, give it thirty seconds, and see if we can guess the plot.”
Oh joy.
“It’s the opposite of watching a movie trailer from a Nicolas Cage flick,??
? Amber explained. “You know, when there’s no good reason to watch the film.”
Tessa looked at her quizzically.
“With his trailers, you get the whole plot in thirty seconds. Here we guess it.” A smile. “Wanna try?”
Um . . .
C’mon. She’s just trying to be nice.
Tessa shrugged. “Sure.”
Amber punched in channel 142, and a news show came on saying that the secretary of state’s meetings in Tehran were moving forward despite the “strained diplomatic relations between the two nations.”
She had to click up through three channels of commercials before she finally found a movie.
The scene: a hip, young guy in a suit speaking to a bunch of government officials seated around a large conference table. Within a couple of seconds it was clear that this person was supposed to be from another planet.
“So, okay,” Amber said. “Aliens are testing the human race to see if we can learn to stop going to war with each other, and if we don’t pass the test, they’ll be forced to blow up our planet.”
“Kill the people off before they can kill off each other,” Tessa observed. “A perfectly natural response from peace-loving aliens.”
“Nice.” Amber handed her the remote. “You try.”
After flipping through a few more channels, Tessa came to a scene of two bishops whispering to each other in a shadow-enshrouded Vatican hallway. Shifty eyes. Foreboding music. The whole nine.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s an Ancient Deleterious Manuscript that’s been hidden in the Vatican archives For Thousands of Years and there’s A Secret Organization That’s Sworn To Protect It At All Costs so that the Church Can Retain Its Power.”
“Wow. That’s never been done before. How clever.”
Tessa was beginning to like this woman.
Amber eyed her. “By the way, deleterious?”
“It means detrimental, injurious, nocuous.”
“I figured something like that. I was just . . . surprised by your vocabulary. It’s impressive.”
Tessa was a little embarrassed. “Sorry, sometimes stuff just slips out.”
Now she thinks you were trying to show off!
“No need to apologize. I like it.”
They did a few more shows—a buddy cop movie, a zombie flick, and a romantic comedy that they actually ended up watching for a few minutes and saw that it really was about a guy who spent too much time at the office and ends up falling for a klutzy cat-owning librarian lady who astonishingly becomes a complete babe when she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down. What a plot twist that was.
Groundbreaking cinema this afternoon.
Finally, Amber shut off the TV and said, “So when you’re not watching bad movies, what do you like to do?”
“I read. Mostly. Listen to music. Patrick’s into all this outdoor stuff, like rock climbing and rafting and everything, but that’s not really my thing.”
“Those Bowers boys do like the outdoors.”
“Yeah.”
“So what do you like to read?” Amber sized her up. “I’m thinking fantasy, right?”
“More horror, actually. Gothic stuff. Poe, like that. Some of the French realists: Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola, you know. Poetry sometimes. I never got into fantasy. The authors just aren’t creative enough.”
A pause. “Fantasy writers aren’t creative enough?”
“Yeah, I’m like, I get it, but could you please come up with a better way of creating your character names? Just add ‘or,’ ‘en,’ or ‘ick’ to any name and you get a fantasy novel name. Choose whichever one you prefer. I’d be probably be Tessaor. You’d be Amberen.”
“Or Amberick. Hmm. Yeah. Or Amberor.”
“See?”
“Patrickick doesn’t quite flow,” she said, “but Patricken works. Patrickor’s not too bad. Nice.”
“Yeah. And your husband would be Seanor or Seanen.”
“Or Seanick.”
“It doesn’t quite work with everyone, though,” Tessa admitted. “Patrick has this guy at the Bureau that he’s friends with—Ralph Hawkins.”
“So Ralphor, Ralphen—”
“Or Ralphick.”
Amber grimaced. “Yeah, not as good as Patrick’s.”
“Or Sean’s.”
“Right.”
For a moment the conversation pooled into silence, but it was more friendly than awkward.
“So, you’re a pharmacist?” Tessa asked her, but it was one of those conversational pseudo-questions because she already knew the answer.
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
More silence.
Hmm. An idea.
“So then, if I had a prescription, you could fill it?” Another blatantly pseudo-question.
“You’re from out of state so I’d need a paper script, but sure. Is there one you need?”
“I take these pills to help me sleep. I forgot ’em in Minneapolis.”
“Well, do you have the prescription with you?”
“Uh-uh. It’s in Denver.”
“Well,” Amber said reflectively, “I guess I could call your doctor, he could fax me your prescription, but it’s a Saturday. Maybe your regular pharmacy would have a copy on file?”
Tessa wasn’t excited about the idea of telling her that her doctor was a psychiatrist or that Patrick didn’t know about the shrink or the pills. “Yeah, um, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll be okay without ’em.”
Silence again, longer this time.
Finally, Amber said, “Tessa, how are you doing since your dad’s death?”
Wow. That was a leap.
“Um . . .”
“I’m sorry if that’s too personal, I was just . . .”
“No. It’s okay,” Tessa replied. She tried to think of what to say. “It was hard, you know, but it seems like it’s getting better. With my mom it was worse. I was into this pretty intense self-inflicting stuff for a while. You know, cutting, that sort of thing.” She paused. “This friend of mine, Anisette, she started in with bulimia after her parents divorced. That was just harsh. I’m glad I never ended up going there.”
A brief pause. “I’ve been praying for you.”
Her comment about prayer and the previous exchange about meds made Tessa think of her last session with the shrink—when he’d asked her if she thought God wanted her to forgive herself.
“So you pray a lot, then?”
“Probably not as much as I should.”
“But you believe in God? Forgiveness? That sort of thing?”
“Yes.”
“So did my mom.”
Tessa remembered that after her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, even though she seemed to take the news relatively well, Tessa had been devastated. Her mom had told her more than once that she needed to learn to believe in grace as much as she did in pain, in forgiveness as much as she did in shame.
Just ask her.
“So do you ever think about what it means to forgive yourself?”
“To forgive myself?”
“Yeah.”
Amber considered the question for a long time. “Honestly, that sounds kind of arrogant to me.”
“How is it arrogant?”
“Well, that someone could claim to have the power to cancel the debt that they owe God.”
Tessa tried to let that sink in. She remembered her little object lesson with the glass coffee table in the shrink’s office and understood where Amber was coming from with the debt idea but hadn’t exactly thought of it in any kind of religious terms before.
“When you ask someone to forgive you,” Amber said, “you’re really asking the other person to sacrifice for the benefit of the relationship.”
Duh. If you would’ve shattered the doctor’s end table and he forgave you, he would’ve been the one to pay for it, the one to sacrifice.
“But what if you wrong yourself?” Tessa retorted. “I mean, can’t you—oh, I get it. We’re accountable
to someone else besides ourselves. To God.”
Amber said nothing, and it looked to Tessa like she was deep in thought.
Regardless of the theological ramifications, the idea that this whole forgiving yourself deal was an act of arrogance seemed kind of weird, and Tessa wasn’t sure she bought it.
She stood. “You know, I’m gonna go to Patrick’s room. Maybe lie down.”
“You’re welcome to stay in here.”
“That’s okay, I’ll see you in a little bit. Hey, it was cool, though. Thanks for hanging out.”
“Any time.”
Patrick’s motel room looked pretty much like Tessa expected—a clutter of papers on the desk, clothes strewn across the floor, sweaty workout stuff hanging up in the bathroom. Disgusting. A couple buckets of water on the floor—no idea what those were for. A brand-new camo jacket flung on the chair. Wow. How very Wisconsin of him.
She pulled the shades shut, grabbed the extra blanket from the closet, flopped onto the bed. Closed her eyes.
And thought of arrogance.
Was it really an act of arrogance to be haunted by guilt? Or was it an act of humility, admitting that you weren’t living up to the standards you’d set for yourself?
Two ways to look at it.
Guess the plot, huh?
Yeah, well, she really didn’t have any idea where this one was heading.
61
Sheriff Tait was waiting for us outside the building when we arrived.
He looked about sixty, was a little too round, but still had a formidable appearance. His face was chiseled with creases and shadows, and as we approached he snuffed out a cigarette against the wall and flicked the butt into the snow.
An observation of Tessa’s came to mind: Smoking is suicide. It just takes longer than a gun, but I kept it to myself.
Alexei remained silent while he was processed and fingerprinted and then led to a cell. “You get one phone call,” Burlman taunted. “You better make it a good one.”
“I’ll wait on that for now.” He was looking at me.
I tried to think what to do.
How are you going to find Kayla without his help?
Once Alexei was out of earshot, I said to Tait, “I want two people watching his cell at all times. Rotate them in and out.”