“You up for a late-night snack?”
“The same place?”
“See you in a half hour.”
A sign on the door said that The Acropolis closed at eleven P.M., but Ted Schoonover was sitting inside eating baklava and sipping thick Greek coffee when Hobson parked outside at eleven-thirty. Before Hobson could knock, a balding man wearing a white apron let him in, then relocked the door.
“You want some coffee? The baklava is the best,” Schoonover said.
“I’m fine.”
“Then fill me in.”
“Vanessa Wingate called me a few days ago and said that she knew how to find Carl Rice, but she wouldn’t tell me anything else. I had her call traced to a motel, but the clerk said that she’d checked out. I questioned her boyfriend. He says that he has no idea where she went. I didn’t call you, because I didn’t have anything solid and Vanessa is-well, to put it charitably-odd. She was raving about her father trying to kill her. The boyfriend told me that she’d called 911 and told the cops that he was being attacked in their apartment when that wasn’t true.”
“Where is this going?”
“Have you heard about the brawl at that Little League game in Oregon?”
“I read something about it.”
“I think Carl Rice is the man the police arrested at the game. I’m pretty sure that he was in Portland, Oregon, as of last night.”
“What do you mean, ‘was’?”
“A woman broke him out of the security ward of the county hospital.” Schoonover stopped eating and gave Hobson his full attention.
“On TV tonight, they showed a mug shot of the man who escaped. The newscaster called him Daniel Morelli. I can’t be certain, because the photo in Rice’s file was taken when he was in his twenties and the man in the mug shot is years older, but it definitely looks like Rice, and the artist’s sketch of the woman looked a lot like Vanessa Wingate.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I thought I’d send an agent out to Portland to keep tabs on the manhunt.”
Schoonover thought while he dabbed at his lips with a napkin.
“No,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “You take care of this personally.”
“I’m an assistant director. I can’t go running off to Oregon for God knows how long. Rice has hidden successfully for twenty years. I have no idea how long it will take for the police to find him.”
“Don’t worry about your other work. I’ll take care of that with the director. You’ll offer FBI assistance on this. Once Rice is arrested, you’ll call me and I’ll take over. Your job is to make certain that no one gets to this guy before I do. No one, is that understood?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ami nodded off twice during the ride home, but fear erased her fatigue when the patrol car parked in front of her house. Ami and Ryan lived in a yellow-and-white farmhouse surrounded by dense woods. It had a quaint front porch with a swing that she and Chad had rocked in on warm summer nights after Ryan went to sleep. In daylight, it was a picture-postcard house. Tonight, when Ami looked at the woods she painted and the home she knew so well, she saw dark places where a murderer could hide.
One of the officers stood watch while Ami waited in the car. The other officer used Ami’s keys to unlock her front door. When he was satisfied that no one was hiding in the house, the two policemen escorted her inside. While Ami went upstairs to get ready for bed, one officer took up a post in the living room and the second went outside to patrol the grounds. Ami felt better after a shower, though she was certain that she could not possibly fall asleep. For a while her thoughts kept her in turmoil, but she was so exhausted physically and emotionally that she soon drifted off.
Ami’s eyes snapped open. She stared bleary-eyed at the clock on her end table. It was one-forty-six in the morning, and the room was pitch-black. The thud of a heavy object falling had jerked her out of her deep sleep, but she wasn’t certain that she hadn’t dreamed the sound.
Ami sat up and listened. She heard nothing but the ticking of the grandfather clock in her downstairs hallway. The clock was an antique that Chad had loved. The metallic tock of the moving hands could be heard clearly in the middle of the night and had always bothered Ami, but she could not bring herself to get rid of the clock after Chad died. Now it was the only sound she could hear. She had almost convinced herself that the sound that had awakened her was a figment of her imagination when a floorboard creaked.
Someone was walking up the stairs and trying to be quiet about it. Ami got out of bed. Her heart beat furiously until she remembered that there was a policeman in the house. She was chiding herself for being a fool when her doorknob started to turn.
Ami rushed to the door and braced against it. The knob stopped turning.
“Who’s out there?”
The wooden door shattered and flew into the room. Splinters stabbed Ami, and the sharp edge of the door struck her forehead, knocking her onto the bed. A shadow loomed over her. Dressed all in black, the man seemed part of the darkness. He raised a brutal knife whose serrated blade shone in the moonlight. Ami rolled off the bed to the floor and had scrambled to her knees when she was jerked up by her hair. The pain was excruciating. She screamed and the grip on her hair relaxed. Ami rolled to her back, her hands up in self-defense. Her attacker collapsed on top of her. Ami screamed again as she shoved at the weight that crushed her to the floor. The killer did not strike at her and his body barely moved. Over his shoulder, Ami saw another man whose face was concealed by a ski mask identical to the one the first assailant had worn. Ami scuttled from under the first man’s body until her back was pressed against the wall.
“It’s me,” a familiar voice said.
The man peeled back his ski mask. Carl Rice stood above her, a large, blood-covered knife in his right hand. Rice saw where she was looking and laid it on the floor.
“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I heard about Dr. French on the radio and I knew they’d come for you.”
Ami had never been so close to death and she was having trouble breathing.
“I’m going to help you stand up,” Rice said. “Let’s get you away from the body.”
Carl reached down and helped Ami to her feet. She moved sideways so she would not have to touch the corpse but she could not take her eyes off of the dead man.
“Who is he?” Ami asked, terrified that she knew the answer.
“It’s one of Wingate’s men.”
“Oh, no,” Ami moaned, overwhelmed by the idea that someone as powerful as the General was after her.
“This is the worst possible time for me to come back from the dead,” Rice said. “Wingate knows that eventually the police will figure out that I’m wanted for the murder of a general and a congressman. He’s got to be terrified that I’ll barter information about the Unit for a lighter sentence. If President Jennings raises serious questions about the Unit, Wingate’s presidential hopes go down the tube. That’s why Dr. French was killed. Wingate had to find out what I told you and the doctor, and who else knows. Ami, did you tell the police about our conversations?”
Rice’s reference to the police made Ami remember her guards.
“What happened to the two officers who…?”
Carl shook his head. “I was too late.”
“Those poor men, they were only here to help me.”
Ami started to sob. Rice gripped her upper arms. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. We don’t have time for this.”
“
