I am about to call Howard with my grudging thanks when Mariah bustles in again, telling me I look ready to travel and informing me that the Navigator will be downstairs when the “big day” comes, plenty of room for me to stretch out on the trip to Darien.
I consider. A private guest house, space to walk on their seven wooded acres, a housekeeper to wait on me, probably a private-duty nurse and an occupational therapist to get me going again. And Mariah to listen to, all day long, and five-no, six now-children to stumble over. And so many miles away from my boy.
“Thank you,” I tell my sister, bewildered at the way my options have managed so swiftly to shrink.
The next afternoon, Special Agent Nunzio comes by, and I know they are about to shrink further.
“I can’t tell you everything,” he says sadly, as though he wishes he could.
“Can you tell me anything?”
“That depends on what you want to know.”
“Start with all the lying,” I suggest.
Nunzio runs a rugged hand through shiny black hair. When he speaks, his face is turned partly away. He does not want to be here. Mallory Corcoran must have pulled the string of all strings to get the Bureau to send an agent up from Washington to brief me. But, then, Uncle Mal owes me, several times over. Oh, does he owe me!
“Nobody lied to you exactly, Professor Garland,” Nunzio begins. We are on formal terms once more.
“Oh, no? Well, you did, for one.”
“I did?”
I nod. I am sitting in my chair by the window again, the sun warming the back of my neck. “It wasn’t coincidence that you were the one who came to interview me about the fake FBI agents who came to Shepard Street. If I hadn’t been so busy worrying about everything else, I would have figured that out for myself. The Bureau moved awfully fast, didn’t it? But it wasn’t because of the impersonation. It was because you already suspected that one of the fake agents was Colin Scott. You had lost track of him, hadn’t you? And you needed me to help you find him again.”
Nunzio gazes at the various medical devices lined up next to my bed. “Perhaps it was something like that.”
“No, it was exactly like that. I must be some kind of idiot to have missed it. You never even tried to discourage me. You never said I was nuts. You never told me to go away. I would call you with the wildest theories, and you would take them seriously. Because you wanted me to keep looking. You wanted me to find Scott for you.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s why Bonnie Ames asked me all those questions about the arrangements. They were your questions, not hers, but you didn’t want to interview me formally about my father’s arrangements because I might get suspicious. So you let her do it.”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly. Right. All that because you wanted me to flush out Colin Scott. A murderer.”
“You were never in any danger,” he sighs, finally conceding the main point.
“That’s what everybody keeps telling me. But look at this.” I lift my hospital gown to show him the bandages all over my abdomen. He does not flinch. He has seen worse.
“I’m sorry about that, Professor. Truly sorry. Maybe we should have given you more formal protection. We did look in on you from time to time. You didn’t know we were there, but we kept an eye out. Then, after Scott died- after everybody thought he died-we thought you were safe. I guess we miscalculated.”
“Somebody did, anyway.” I gather my waning strength. “Now, tell me about Ruthie Silverman.”
“Ms. Silverman? What about her?”
“She’s the deputy White House counsel. She helps pick judges.”
“I know that. But I’m not sure why you’re bringing up her name.”
“You know what I’m talking about. My wife was never going to be a federal judge, was she? That was just a cover. A cover that let you investigate my family’s life while you pretended that you were collecting data on Kimmer. A cover that was conveniently yanked away as soon as it looked like it was going to keep me from going to see Jack Ziegler.”
“Exactly what are we supposed to have been covering?”
“No, you tell me.” I want to keep punching, but I am wearing out. “I’m tired of guessing.”
Special Agent Fred Nunzio stretches out his strong arms, links his fingers, cracks his knuckles. His shoulders seem too broad for his dark suit. Another agent, similarly attired, is waiting out in the hall-I saw him-and I suspect that it is contrary to Bureau policy for Nunzio to talk to me alone. Which means that Washington wants everything he tells me to be deniable.
“You have it wrong, Professor. Ms. Silverman never lied to you. Nobody from the White House lied. They weren’t involved, not the way you seem to think. Your wife really was a candidate for that judgeship. We didn’t manipulate that. I doubt we could have. The White House runs us, remember, not the other way around. But we took advantage of it, no question. It allowed us to… well, to delve into various things we could not otherwise have investigated.”
“Such as my brother’s finances.”
He is more uncomfortable than ever. “This was not about your brother, Professor. I would call that… coincidence.”
“Oh, really? The Bureau is doing a background check on one Kimberly Madison and, by coincidence, turns up information about the financial problems of her brother-in-law?”
“We have to look at every lead,” he says unctuously.
“No. There’s something more here. This wasn’t even just about Colin Scott. He was… he was…” I cannot find the word. Then I have it, thanks to my father. “He was a pawn, wasn’t he? Just like me. One black pawn, one white pawn.”
Nunzio ignores the last part of my comment. “Colin Scott was a bad man, Mr. Garland. That’s what we do down at the Bureau, we catch bad men.”
“Oh, really? So was it the Bureau that shot him in the cemetery?”
“No, of course not,” says Nunzio, too quickly. I do not think he is lying exactly. He is just telling less than the whole truth. The FBI may not have killed Mr. Scott, but it has a pretty good idea who did. And will never tell me. Which is okay: I have secrets I will never share, too. I just wonder if the Bureau could tell me where she is.
I am tired, and so many parts of my body are aching that my nervous system cannot decide which pain signal to send along first. So it sends them all at once. The sutures in my belly itch horribly, but I cannot scratch them. I have been warned by Dr. Serra, who says he does not intend to do all that work over again.
“Tell me about Foreman,” I say quietly. “He’s one of yours, isn’t he?”
The agent closes his eyes briefly, sighs. “He wasn’t from the Bureau. He was from… a cooperating agency.”
“Was?”
“A hunter found what was left of him in some woods upstate. It wasn’t pretty. You saw the pictures of Freeman Bishop, right? Well, this was a thousand times worse.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, resolutely refusing to imagine what could be a thousand times worse than what happened to Father Bishop.
“Foreman was a good man. He joined up with Scott to do an arms deal. It doesn’t matter where. The point is, he managed to win Scott’s confidence. Or so we thought. When Scott came back from overseas to track down your father’s arrangements, he brought Foreman along to help.”
“Or to keep an eye on him.” Nunzio’s earlier euphemism implied that Foreman was from the Central Intelligence Agency, which makes legal sense, if the operation against Scott began overseas. “Scott might have suspected him from the start…”
“Yes. That’s possible.” He shrugs again. “Anyway, he obviously suspected him at some point.”
“Now I see. You didn’t just lose track of Scott. You lost track of Foreman. That’s why… that’s why…”
That’s why you panicked, I decide not to say. That’s why you kept encouraging me to keep looking. That’s
