When she was dry-eyed, she pocketed the cameo and started the engine and followed the directions to the library that she’d gotten from the clerk in the mailbox store. At a computer, armed with the address she had pried from William Overton, she used Google Earth to make a quick study of Shenneck’s ranch in Napa Valley, especially the gatehouse at the entry and the area around the main house.
From the library, she drove south on Interstate 5, determined to be in San Diego before noon. There might be nothing there for her, but she had nowhere else to go.
4
* * *
HAVING COME A LONG WAY for a short interview, Nathan Silverman was back in Austin International hours before his flight to D.C. Claiming a seat near the gate by which he would later be boarding, he returned to his copy of Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, the true story of an American family in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. Soon he was enthralled by it again.
At first he didn’t realize he was being spoken to. “Is that you? Good heavens, it is.” He assumed someone seated nearby was the target of the query. “Nathan? Nathan Silverman?”
For an instant, the face looming over him seemed to be that of a stranger. Then he recognized Booth Hendrickson. Booth had been a special agent with the Bureau for more than a decade, during which he had earned a law degree, after which he had transitioned out of the FBI into the Department of Justice proper, three or four years earlier.
“No, no, don’t bother getting up,” Booth said, taking the seat beside Silverman. “Austin isn’t at the end of nowhere, far from it, but it’s rather a small world when two old Quantico dogs find themselves knocked together in the capital of the Lone Star State.”
Booth Hendrickson had the diligently practiced grace of a bad but earnest dancer, the air of a patrician New Englander who in fact had been born and raised in Florida, and the face of a hawk, though he was barbered to suggest a lion. As an agent, he had worn custom-tailored suits and shoes that cost as much as a mortgage payment, and he currently dressed in that same fashion.
Although they had crossed paths many times, they had not often worked the same case. Now Silverman remembered that he didn’t much like the man. “Looking well, Booth. Justice must agree with you.”
“The place is a maelstrom of ambition—or instead of maelstrom, should I say cesspool? In either case, I swim in it well enough.” He laughed softly at this self-deprecation. “Some good gets done, of course. It always does no matter what.”
“What brings you here?” Nathan wondered.
“I was on the flight that just landed, saw you as I came off the air bridge. I’ve got to get my luggage if it isn’t still stuck somewhere on the East Coast. I’m on vacation. First here and then San Antonio. How’s Rishona? Well and good, I trust.”
“Very well, thank you. And your missus?” Silverman asked, unable to recall her name.
“Divorced. No, don’t commiserate. I’m the one who filed for it. Thank God, we never had children. How are your kids, Nathan? How are Jareb and Lisbeth and Chaya?”
Silverman was only mildly surprised that Booth remembered their names. The man assiduously memorized such things to later flatter valuable contacts, like Silverman, with the implication that he actually found them interesting and memorable.
“All done with college. Lisbeth graduated last year.”
“All safe and healthy and taking on the world?”
“Safe, healthy, and best of all employed.”
Booth laughed more than the line deserved. “You’re a lucky man, Nathan.”
“As I tell myself every night and first thing every morning.”
Booth tapped the Erik Larson volume that Silverman held. “Terrific book. Read it a couple years ago. Makes you think.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Makes you think,” Booth repeated. He glanced at his watch, shot to his feet. “Got to run. A week of leisure calls.”
He thrust out his right hand, and they shook, and Booth held it a beat or two longer than he should have.
“Lucky man,” he repeated, and then he was off.
Silverman watched Booth Hendrickson blend in with travelers on the concourse and dwindle away through the terminal.
He didn’t at once return to the Larson book.
Did even a man like Booth Hendrickson go on vacation in a three-piece suit and tie?
He hadn’t seen Booth in maybe three years. He wasn’t sure he would have recognized him from a distance, as Booth had spotted him.
Unless the man had the memory of an array of supercomputers, which he didn’t, it was remarkable that he recalled the names of the kids. Rishona, yes. Booth had met her once or twice. But he’d never met the children. Jareb and Lisbeth and Chaya. The names had come off his tongue as if he’d heard them only an hour earlier.
And now it seemed to Silverman that when Booth had spoken their names, his stare had sharpened and a different tone had come into his voice. A subtle solemnity.
Perhaps Silverman’s many years with the Bureau had steeped him too long in suspicion. Or maybe Ancel Hawk’s tight-lipped paranoia was a bit infectious.
All safe and healthy and taking on the world?
Most people would ask if your kids were healthy and happy. How odd for anyone to ask if they were safe.
In memory, he heard Booth’s voice: Makes you think. Makes you think.
Silverman looked at the book in his hands.
He had asked Booth what brought him to Austin, but Booth had not returned the question. As if he already knew what Silverman was doing there.
5
* * *
THE FREE KITCHEN that he had mentioned, to which he intended to contribute the forty dollars that Jane had given him, turned out to be only a block from the branch library in San Diego where she had first seen him five days earlier. The librarian gave her directions.
The operation was housed in what had once been a building owned by a fraternal club. The letters of the club’s name had been removed from the limestone façade, but the ghost of them remained lighter against the time-darkened stone.
A new and simple sign identified the place as RED, WHITE, BLUE, AND DINNER. Lest anyone misunderstand that only dinner would be served, an explanatory line promised three square meals a day.
The interior layout seemed unchanged from the days when a fraternal order ran the place. The bar was still there, though it no longer operated. The dining room was paved with terrazzo. A long-unused wood dance floor lay in front of a raised bandstand.
In the past, no doubt round tables had been encircled by elegant, upholstered dining chairs. Now there were folding chairs and rectangular tables without cloths.
Lunch service began at 11:30. Now at 11:50, already thirty or forty people were eating or in the cafeteria line. The majority were men, most gray-faced and trembling alkies burned out on booze. Eight women sat alone or in pairs, and though a few might have known a bottle or two, the others appeared just sad, weary, and worn out.
The lunch theme was Mexican. Aromas of onions and peppers and cilantro and limes and warm corn tortillas threaded the air.
Jane stepped to the end of the cafeteria line but didn’t pick up a tray. When she got to the first server—CHARLENE, according to the name tag—she said, “There’s a man comes here to eat. I wonder if he’s been here lately.” She had in hand the old newspaper photo that she’d printed out in the Woodland Hills library Friday morning. “His name’s Dougal Trahern. He doesn’t look much like this anymore.”
Charlene declared, “Lordy, but he looks no way the same these days. The man has thrown himself off some high cliffs in his time, and it shows.” She called the attention of the next server to the photo that Jane held up. “Rosa, give this a look.”
Rosa shook her head in what might have been a mix of dismay and wonderment. “If the fella in that picture had made TV commercials, he could’ve sold a girl anything from perfume to fish sticks. How many buses have to run a man down to change him so?”
“You have business with Dougal?” Charlene asked.
“Yes. If you can give me any lead on him, I’d be grateful.”
“Is he expectin’ you?”
“We met once, briefly. But, no, he’s not expecting me.”
“Good. If he was expectin’ you, he’d duck out the back door just when you were supposed to arrive.” Charlene put down the soup ladle. “Come with me, dear. I’ll take you to him.”
“He’s here?”
“He better be if we are.”
Jane followed Charlene into the busy restaurant kitchen and from there into what seemed to be a kitchen manager’s office with a desk and computer and shelves of cookbooks. For some reason, the two windows were painted black, giving the room a subterranean feel.
Behind the desk sat the bearish man from the library, his hair a wilder mass than she remembered, his dark bristling beard shot through with a bride-of-Frankenstein bolt of white. When Jane and Charlene entered the room, Trahern looked up from his work, his face as menacing as a thunderhead just before a storm broke.
“This fine young lady,” Charlene said, “has business with you.”
“Get her out of here,” Trahern growled, as if his hibernation had been interrupted midwinter.
Charlene took offense or pretended to take it. “I’m a cook, not a porter who hauls whatever you need hauled anywhere you say to haul it. I’m already cookin’ and workin’ the line. You want her out of here, you pick her up and throw her out your own self.”
As she left the room, Charlene winked at Jane.
Trahern aimed the full force of his glower on his one remaining annoyance. “You come here to get your forty dollars back?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“What is it, then? There’s a long way to Thanksgiving.”
Uncomprehending, she said, “Thanksgiving?”
“Every damn politician and celebrity wants to work the line on Thanksgiving, when the news people come take pictures.”
“I’m not a politician or a celebrity.”
“Then why the hell do you look like a celebrity?”
“I wasn’t aware that I did.” Frustrated by the man’s needless hostility, Jane put the photo of a beardless, barbered Trahern on the desk. “What happened to this guy?”
Trahern turned the photo so that his younger self was looking not at him, but at Jane. “He got wise.”
“So now he does what—menu planning for a soup kitchen?”
“And you do what—rescue babies from burning buildings?”
“DDT—the tattoo. It’s your initials and your nickname, because you took out bad guys the way DDT took out mosquitoes. I read about you years ago. It took me a while to remember.”
His impatience was colored now by alarm. He glanced at the open door between the office and the kitchen.
She said, “You were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, just below the Medal of Honor. At great jeopardy, you rescued—”
“Keep it down,” he grumbled. “What’s wrong with you, barging in here and talking about stuff like this?”
Jane went to the door, closed it. No ready chair was provided for a visitor, but a folding version leaned against one wall. She unfolded it, said, “Don’t mind if I do,” and sat down. “You regret those things you did? Are you embarrassed about them?”
He looked like the wrathful Old Testament God getting ready to throw down some well-deserved punishment on the earth. “This might be hard to understand, lady. But in war, you do the right thing, whatever it takes, and if you come out alive, you know how easy you could have screwed up, so bragging on it is dead-solid wrong. Only assholes do that. I don’t Facebook. Don’t tweet. Don’t Instagram. I don’t talk about the past, and it pisses me off that you remembered that old DDT thing and were able to find that newspaper photo.”
For a long silence, she met Trahern’s fierce stare, and then with relief, she said, “Maybe you’re not a shithead, after all.”
“Is your opinion supposed to matter to me? I don’t even know your name. You have a name, or are you just some anonymous gremlin who spins into people’s lives and wrecks their mood?”
She rummaged in her handbag, pulled a rubber band off a bundle of five forged driver’s licenses, and spread them out on his desk. “I’ve got a lot of names, but none of those are true. My real name is Jane Hawk. I’m FBI on leave, although they might have suspended or dismissed me by now.” She threw her Bureau ID on the desk. “My husband, Nick, was a decorated Marine, received some big medals, including the Navy Cross. Full colonel at thirty-two. They killed him, tried to make it look like suicide. They threatened to rape and kill my five-year-old boy if I didn’t fade. I’ve hidden him. They’ll kill me if they find me. I’ve killed one of them. I know where to find the guy who is the biggest sonofabitch behind it all, but I can’t get at him alone, and I can’t turn to anyone I know because they’ll be waiting for that. I need someone with your exact skills, if you still have any. Skills, that is.”
He watched her as she picked up the forged licenses and the FBI credentials, and as she returned them to her handbag. Then he said, “Why should I care? I wasn’t Marines, I was Army.”
She stared at him, speechless.
He said, “Relax. It’s a joke.”
“I didn’t know you were capable of making a joke.”
“That’s the first in a while.” He looked at one of the blacked-out windows, as if he could see through the opaque pane to a view that troubled him. “You’re desperate or delusional, coming to me.”
“I confess to desperation.”
“Nothing I can do for you.”
“There is if you want to do it.”
“My wars were a long time ago.”
“All wars are one war. And it never ends.”
“I’m not the man I was then.”
“Any man who earned the Distinguished Service Cross is always going to be that man, somewhere in himself.”
He met her stare. “That’s just rah-rah bullshit.”
“Maybe to an Army prick, but not to a Marine’s widow.”
After a silence, he said, “Are you always this way?”
“What other way is there to be?”
6
* * *
THE BLACKEST, RICHEST COFFEE that she had ever tasted got Jane through the next hour and a half. Dougal Derwent Trahern was only slightly less of a bee-stung bear than he had been when she first entered his shabby office. Blunt, gruff, often rude, grumbling when he wasn’t growling, his stare like surgical steel, he had a drill-into-it interrogation technique straight out of Quantico. He made notes, looped back to issues she had already discussed, to see if she contradicted herself, and sweated her through her story as if he must be convinced she was a serial killer rather than a hunter of them. He read Emily Rossman’s autopsy report and listened to Jane’s account of what the pathologist had told her at the animal hospital.
She watched over Trahern’s shoulder as he used Overton’s smartphone—and the forty-four-character Web address Jane had found on it—to plunge into the Dark Web and review the messages that Aspasia presented to a visitor. She had not seen this before, and she was chilled when Jimmy Radburn’s description of the experience proved to be spot-on. After getting to the screen that promised beautiful girls who were incapable of disobedience and whose permanent silence was assured, Trahern issued a colorful curse.
“The world is zombified,” he said. “They’re just sleazeballs and freaks instead of the walking dead, but more of them than us.”
Jane returned to her folding chair. “What now?”
Trahern switched off Overton’s smartphone. “Why don’t you go out to the dining room for a while. I need to talk to some people.”
“What people?”
“You’ve made a convincing case. I’m not going to rat you out.”
“What people?” she repeated. “You make a mistake, talk to the wrong one, I’m finished. I’m dust. And my boy.
”
“I may look deranged, but I’m not. You either trust me or you don’t. If you don’t, just leave and we’ll forget each other.”
She stared at him. He returned the stare.
After a silence, she said, “You’re one hard-nosed bastard.”
“What do you want—someone who breaks the grindstone or someone who’s broken by it?”
She got to her feet but didn’t move toward the door. “One big question. On Monday, at the library, you were looking at porno.”
“Not for pleasure. As a citizen activist.”
“That sounds real to you?”
“Look, I work with various concerned groups in the city. We try to set things right where we can. It took a while to get libraries to block the nasty websites so kids couldn’t get on them. Now and then a librarian or somebody decides it’s a free-speech issue and opens the lid on the sewer. I was told that branch was backsliding. I had to see for myself. Today, the lid’s back on, kids are safe.”
She remembered how he had considered the pornography on the computer screen with a combination of boredom and puzzlement, not with lascivious interest. And he had soon switched to dog videos.
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad I asked.”
“You want to ask if I bathed this morning?”
“I know you did. When I was looking over your shoulder, I could smell your shampoo.”
7
* * *
DURING THE HOUR and a half she had spent in Trahern’s office, the lunch rush had subsided. Two men, five women, and three children were finishing their meals at the long tables. For just a moment, when the kids looked at Jane, they all seemed to have Travis’s face.
Charlene, Rosa, and two other women were cleaning the serving side of the cafeteria line. As Jane approached them, Charlene said, “Goodness be, look at this, Rosa. Her eyebrows aren’t even singed.”
“Seems to still have all her teeth, too,” Rosa said.