rings.’
‘I suggest you figure out how to ring that bell yourself.’
Dial tone.
William set down the phone and spit a scattering of seeds across the porch steps. The wind picked up, sending dead leaves rattling across the uneven boards. But aside from that, silence. The house wasn’t the same without Hanley.
Still buried in the comic, Dodge turned the page, a rare smile twitching his lips. William glanced over at the facing page, where a scrawny guy with Orphan Annie eyes wearing a wife-beater exclaimed, “
William thought about what he’d just told Boss Man:
Dodge blinked twice and swiveled his head back over to his graphic novel.
William said, ‘No – wait. Too obvious. And he’d want her below the radar.’ Behind them the leaves kept scraping along the boards of the porch.
Dodge set aside the comic, lumbered down the stairs, and began towel-drying his tools with the oversize hankie he kept stuffed in a pocket. His attention was loving, absolute.
A scud of wispy clouds had materialized from nowhere to confer a halo on Mount Shasta’s glorious peak. ‘He’s a foster kid himself,’ William said. ‘He’ll go back to his roots.’ He spit into the weeds and turned for the door. ‘Let’s start checkin’ foster homes.’
Chapter 45
They’d put only a few miles between the car and the parking lot where Mike had left Kiki Dupleshney, but already his thoughts had migrated back to that look on Kat’s face when he’d left her on the bench. Guilt came alive as an itch under his skin.
The red-tabbed file sat across his knees, “
‘How do we run this plate number?’ he asked.
They throttled along, Shep looking ridiculous crammed behind the Pinto’s wheel. ‘Hank Danville. License plates are a PI’s bread and butter.’
‘They’re watching him. Tapped lines.’
‘Call his cell. He’ll give you a pay-phone number.’
Mike dialed. When Hank picked up, Mike said, ‘Hey.’
‘Maurice,’ Hank said. ‘You’re looking for that shop number, yeah?’ He rattled off ten digits. ‘I hear they open in five minutes.’
Mike pocketed the phone. The file in his lap seemed to have taken on a weight commensurate with its potential significance. The air gusting from the vents smelled of hair spray. Cars flashed by. He stared down.
Shep said, ‘Open it already. The thing won’t bite.’
Mike complied. The glossy photo on top, the one Dana/Kiki had revealed to him at the cafe, captured his childhood house. And there were a number more beneath, taken from various angles. Some compulsion made him turn one over, as if checking the potter’s stamp on a china plate. Taped to the white rectangle was a cutout of an undated real-estate listing, the newsprint brittle and faded but still legible enough for him to read the address.
Chico.
He’d come from the town of Chico.
Which was an overnight drive – about seven hours in the family station wagon – to the Los Angeles playground he’d been left at as a four-year-old. He thought about waking up in his clothes, not his pajamas.
Shep looked over at him inquisitively.
Digging in the glove box, Mike found a map buried beneath a raft of cassette tapes and fought it open across the dash. ‘The house I grew up in. It’s about fifty miles from here.’
‘Which way?’
‘Southeast. On the 99.’
Shep wheeled sharply left, Mike nearly banging his head against the window. When he looked up, he saw the freeway sign fly past on the ramp entrance. Within the hour he’d be standing on the front porch of his childhood home. It didn’t seem possible.
A throb at his temples reminded him that he’d stopped breathing. He caught a glimpse of himself in the sun visor’s mirror. His different-colored eyes – one brown, one amber – peered back from a face that had gone pale. A few deep inhales brought back a bit of color to his cheeks.
He found a red pen in the glove box and circled the towns that had popped up in name since Dodge and William had fastened onto his trail. Sacramento, home to Rick Graham’s State Terrorism Threat Assessment Center. Redding, William Burrell’s last-known address. Red Bluff, Kiki Dupleshney’s stomping grounds. Chico, former home of Mike’s parents. All within a 150-mile span of Northern California.
Shep kept driving and kept silent, and Mike loved him for it. He pushed aside the map and flipped deeper into the file. That old Polaroid of his father, the sun-faded face so much like his own. And endless data on Mike and his friends and acquaintances, much of the same information he’d found in the folder he’d taken from the smashed-up van.
The bottom page featured a single typed note. No letterhead, no signature, no watermark.
Parent names: John and Danielle Trenley. Your cover: Dana Gage, the grown daughter of the Trenleys’ former next-door neighbors. You are the Trenleys’ will executor. You have significant assets to assign but can do so only once you’ve corroborated Michael Wingate’s heritage and family history. If he is our target, he should prove emotional and unpredictable on the subject of his parents. He was abandoned by them at the age of four.
Do not try to contact us.
We will find you.
Mike was gripping the page too tightly, his thumb leaving an indentation. He relaxed his hand and read the note a second time.
The language seemed too crisp to have been written by William or Dodge. Mike pegged it for a document generated by Rick Graham out of his impressively titled state agency. As for “Trenley”, Hank had turned up nothing for a John or a Danielle by that name. Had Graham given Kiki a fake name to foil any prospective searches?
Shep had said something.
Mike said, ‘What?’
‘You were supposed to ring Danville ten minutes ago.’
Mike placed the call. Hank answered in the midst of a coughing fit.
‘You okay?’ Mike asked.
‘Pain meds have me shitting like a rabbit, but at least I’m not a terrorist on the lam.’
Mike gave him the broad strokes. He glossed over leaving Kat behind, trying to make it a fact like all the others. Nonetheless Hank offered a quiet, ‘Jesus.’
‘They still have an eye on you?’ Mike asked.
‘I checked the office phone yesterday, and it showed an extra voltage draw on the line. They probably have something up at the junction box. Which is noteworthy.’
‘Why?’ A highway-patrol car passed, going in the opposite direction, and Mike twisted to watch until it faded from sight.
‘Because if it was legit,’ Hank was saying, ‘they’d tap the line from the phone company’s switch or use electronic intercept, both of which are undetectable. So Graham’s doing this without a warrant. If you can produce some evidence – I mean
‘We’re working on it. And along those lines, we got the plate number of the truck Dodge and William drove
