Betrayal

'No way, Evan. How could I have known then?'

He shrugged. 'Well, when did you start seeing Ron Nolan?'

'What does Ron have to do with that?'

'I would have thought he'd have mentioned it, that's all.'

'He never knew about it, Evan. You guys all got transferred out of his base the week he got back.'

Evan canted his head a bit to one side. Studying her expression, he read only sincerity, openness, perhaps a bit of confusion. But one thing was clear-she was telling him the truth as she knew it.

'We got transferred?'

'That's what Ron said.'

'Where'd we get tranferred to, Tara? Did he tell you that?'

'No. I don't think he knew.'

'Right. He didn't know. You know why? Because we weren't transferred. We ran our last mission out of Baghdad Airport, where we'd been with Ron all along. You can look it up.'

The germ of confusion spread like a plague over her features. Mouth tightened, brow furrowed, eyes darting, seeking a place to land. 'But…' The word hung in the room between them. Her arms hung down, inanimate at her side. 'I don't get this.'

'Ron was with us in the convoy, Tara. He was in my Humvee. He was next to me when I got hit.'

'No. That can't be true.'

'Why would I make it up, Tara?'

'I'm not saying you're making it up, Evan. Although I could see a reason why you might. But I don't think you'd do that.'

'I wouldn't. I'm not making it up,' he said. 'It's what happened.'

She held his gaze for a minute, and then, her voice barely audible, grabbed at the next straw. 'Maybe…I mean, I'm just thinking, could it be with what happened to your head…maybe you don't remember it all exactly?'

He nodded-sober, patient, restrained. 'That's a legitimate question. I have forgotten some stuff. I don't remember whole days and weeks from when I woke up. But Ron was with us in that convoy. I remember everything about that. If you still don't believe it, you can look it all up on the Web. Just Google Masbah.' He spelled the name of the neighborhood in Baghdad. 'It's all there. He's the reason it all went down. And that's the reason he had to get out of Iraq so fast. They were starting the investigation, and he knew it led straight to him.'

The color had drained from her face. Her eyes flitted to the corners of the room as though she hoped to find some answer there. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Placing her hand flat on one of the students' desktops for support, she lowered herself into the connected chair. 'He told me he had no idea you'd been hurt,' she said, 'that he found out about it from me after I ran into your mom that night and she told me.'

'Christmastime.'

She nodded. 'Definitely.'

'And he told you he knew nothing about it before?'

'Nothing. I swear, Evan. No, he swore. He'd never heard a thing about it.'

'He didn't have to hear about it, Tara,' Evan said. 'He was there. He fired the first shots.'

Spinoza poured them both a cup of coffee and took Evan out into the backyard so they wouldn't interrupt the movie Leesa and their four young kids were watching in the family room. The day, with at least another half hour of light in it, continued warm and fragrant. The two men sat down at a picnic table under a vine-covered trellis. 'So,' Spinoza began, 'did you get your dope dealer yet?'

'Not yet,' he said. 'He's out of town.'

'Timing's everything,' Spinoza said.

'I don't know,' Evan replied. 'Timing's important, but I'd give points for location too. A quarter inch either way and my story's different. That's been pretty good nightmare material.'

'I'd imagine so.' Then, going back to his original subject, Spinoza said, 'You know he's out of town?'

Evan shrugged. 'His car's gone. Nobody answers the door.'

'Don't do anything stupid, Ev,' the lieutenant said. 'If you think there's really something to this guy, send him to the narcs.' Spinoza blew on his coffee and took a sip. 'And in other news, you know Mr. Khalil, who we talked about at lunchtime? As of a couple of hours ago, Mr. Khalil is officially a joint-jurisdiction case. You remember the frag grenade issue we talked about? Well, the feds have conclusively determined that that's what blew up the room and started the fire. So they're in the case, in spite of the fact that it also looks like Mr. Khalil and his wife were first shot in the head with a nine millimeter bullet.'

Evan's face must have betrayed something. Spinoza abruptly put his coffee cup down on the table. 'What?'

'Nothing,' Evan said.

Evan left Spinoza's home in great frustration. He'd planned-hoped-somehow to get the picture from Nolan's computer in front of Spinoza, but there was no way he could tell his lieutenant how he'd gotten it-that he'd broken into someone's home-and that rendered hopeless his entire ill-conceived plan. But cruising down to the Khalils' ruined house, Evan had satisfied himself that the house in the picture was in fact theirs, then decided that the thing to do would be simply to send the disk to the FBI. The Bureau would have Nolan in their database and know all about his history. The advantage to his new idea was that both the ATF and the FBI were known to play fast and loose with due process and probable cause. If they came to think that Nolan had killed the Khalils, especially if there was an Iraqi or terrorist connection, they would find a way to question him and perhaps even get inside his house, where they would discover the grenades, the other pictures, the guns. In any event, after they got the disk, Nolan would be on their radar. After that, it would only be a matter of time before they could take him down.

Now night had fallen. In his kitchen, Evan's head throbbed and again the pinpricks of bright light at the edges of his vision presaged the onset of a migraine. He'd already taken a couple of Vicodin, and as soon as he finished the last of his business, he had to get to bed if he was going to work tomorrow.

Wearing blue latex gloves, he pulled the self-adhesive manila envelope over closer to him. It had taken a while, left-handed, to write down both Nolan's address on a piece of notepaper and the FBI's address on the envelope. But now he was satisfied-the writing was legible yet unidentifiable as his own. He slid the slip of paper with Nolan's address into the envelope along with the disk, then pulled the paper strip from the adhesive and closed the top. He peeled off ten self-adhesive stamps from the roll he'd bought and stuck them on. Tomorrow he would stop off in another neighborhood and drop the envelope into a mailbox.

Now he set the thing on his table and gave it a quick once-over. Satisfied that it couldn't be traced back to him, he walked back through his apartment to his bedroom, turning off the lights as he went. Lying down on the bed, his clothes still on, he pulled a blanket up over his shoulders, turned on his side, and closed his eyes.

A little while after it was truly dark, Tara called Evan's mother, Eileen, and got his address. She waited and thought and second-guessed herself and eventually left her place sometime after eleven o'clock and drove. Parking out in the dark street across from his apartment, she sat for another five minutes or so with her car windows down, her hands in a prayerful attitude in front of her mouth.

By the time she got to the door, she barely heard her own timid knocking over the beating of her heart. After a minute, she knocked again, harder. And waited.

A light came on inside and hearing his footsteps, she held her breath.

The door opened. He'd been sleeping in his clothes. His hair was tousled, his eyes still with that sleepy look she remembered so well. She looked up at him, realizing that she loved having to look up, had missed that; loving the size of him, so different from looking across at Ron Nolan. Everything was so different and so much better with Evan. How could she have forgotten that?

She couldn't get her face to go into a smile. She was too afraid, the blood now pulsing in her ears, her hands unsteady at her sides.