Oh, my God, Henry thought, because he knew.Private detectives! That’s what it was, that’s what it hadto be!
Muriel must have found out the way he’d been flaunting himself, for God’s sake, she hadto find out and instead of confronting him, she’d done it this way. Private detectives.
Yes, that was her style, that’s how she’d handle it. No discussion, no hope for forgiveness. Just get the evidence, sue for divorce, all open and public and forever damning.
Darlene paced, frowning at the carpet. ‘All I can think is,’ she said, ‘the IRS. Or more likely the state tax people. That’swhy she’s paying cash, trying to trap us, see what we do with unrecorded income.’
I can’t tell her the truth, Henry realized. I should pack a suitcase, keep it in the trunk of the car. In case
Whenever
‘The little bitch!’Darlene raged. ‘Henry, am I right? What else could it be?’
‘You’ll just have to’ Henry began and coughed, and tried again: ‘You’ll just have to keep an eye on her. I believe I’ll I believe I’ll have a drink now, too.’
‘No, wait,’ she said, surprising him.
He paused, halfway to the drinks cabinet. ‘Why not?’
‘That class is almost over,’ she told him. ‘Go get your car, bring it around front. We’ll follow her. We’ll seeif she doesn’t wind up in the State Office Building.’
Or the private detective’s office, Henry thought. Much more likely, the private detective’s office.
But wouldn’t it be better to know the worst, knowit and be able to decide what to do?
Looking around the office, eying the open bedroom door, he said, ‘Our lovely afternoon.’
‘We’ll still have it, Henry,’ she promised him. ‘We’ll follow her, we’ll find outwhat she’s up to, and then we’ll come right back here. Henry
‘
He looked at her. ‘Yes?’
He loved that lascivious smile she sometimes showed; not often enough. ‘It’ll be better than ever,’ she whispered.
On the way back to the Infiniti, he thought, I’ll have to phone Muriel, I’m going to be later than I thought. I’ll have to phone her, I’ll have to tell her
whatever I tell her.
6
When CID Detective Jason Rembek, a big shambling balding man with thick eyeglasses sliding down his lumpy nose, reached his cubicle at Headquarters at 8:34 Saturday morning according to the digital clock on his desk, which was never wrong the overnights were stacked waiting for him, escape-related materials on top, lesser cases underneath, just as he’d instructed.
The flight of the three hardcases from Stoneveldt Thursday afternoon had kept him on the hop all day yesterday. He hoped things would be quieter today. He had other Opens on his desk, not just these three punks taking a little vacation.
Detective Rembek had been on the state force fourteen years, with very little experience of prison breaks. None, from Stoneveldt; that trio had made the record books. Nevertheless, it was his own experience and the experience of others he’d talked to or read about, that the boys in prison were mostly there in the first place because they didn’t know how to handle life on the outside, not even when they weren’ton the run. Very very rare was the guy who disappeared forever, or showed up thirty years later a solid citizen, mayor of some small town in Canada.
Mostly, the escapees ran until they got tired and then just stood there until they were rounded up. Sometimes they’d steal a car or rob a convenience store, but there was no planin their lives, no long-term goal. Three, four days, they’d start to get hungry, they’d start to miss that regular life they had in the cells, and they’d call it quits. Detective Rembek believed it was true almost without exception that once an escapee had thought about escape,he was finished thinking.
Were these three going to fit the pattern? Why not? On Rembek’s desk were photos and bios of the three, and there was little in them to make him believe they were going to beat the odds. The two local boys, anyway. Given their histories, their family ties, their dependency on this small area of the world, it was only a matter of time before they’d show up somewhere they’d been before, that they just couldn’t stay away from. A relative, a girlfriend, a bar, a fellow heister. And then the net would scoop them up, put them back where they belonged.
The out-of-towner was the wild card; Ronald Kasper, or whatever his name was. No one had ever escaped from Stoneveldt, but these three had, and neither Marcantoni nor Williams seemed to Rembek the kind of guy to break that cherry. So was Kasper the one who’d made it happen? Was he the one they had to find, the one they had to outthink and outguess, if they were going to collect all three?
Rembek studied the few pictures he had of Kasper. A hard face, bony, like outcroppings of stone. Hard eyes; if they were the windows of the soul, the shades were drawn.
Rembek didn’t pick up any of the pictures, but leaned closer and closer over them, his nose almost touching the surface of the desk. Had this bird gone through plastic surgery some time in the past? Did he have other histories, beyond the broken burglary at the warehouse and the escape from Stoneveldt? Rembek craved the opportunity to interrogate that face, see what was behind those eyes.
Well. There were other ways to come at them. The three escapees now on his desk had three contact points, being the people who had visited them during their time inside; one each. Ronald Kasper had been visited several times by his brother-in-law, named Ed Mackey. Thomas Marcantoni had been visited twice by his brother, Angelo. And Brandon Williams had been visited three times by his youngest sister, Maryenne.
The first of these was the most interesting. After Kasper broke out, police naturally went to the motel where Mackey was living, only to learn he’d checked out that morning, no forwarding address, no useful ID. Detective
