“You’re authorized to say you told me so,” Irene growled to Paul as they walked inside.
Unable to read his boss’s mood so early in the morning, Paul said nothing as he strolled around the storage bay, surveying the scene.
Zeroing in on the discarded license plates and identification, Irene stooped down to examine them. “Look here,” she said. “The Brightons are officially dead. And what do you bet they’re clever enough to kill off the Durflingers, too? These guys are smart, Paul. They’ve got a ton of cash, by all accounts, and they’re adept at changing identities. It’s almost like someone trained them.”
Paul sighed and arched his eyebrows. “At least we’ve still got the van,” he said hopefully.
She laughed. “Undoubtedly with new license plates. Care to guess how many white vans there are in the world?”
As the crime scene technicians arrived with their cameras and their evidence bags and their fingerprint kits, Paul and Irene did their best to stay out of the way. By rights, Irene should have left Paul here to manage the scene himself, but truth be known, she didn’t have all that much to do. In the absence of leads, an investigator’s job was pretty damned boring.
“So who do you think trained them?” Paul asked out of nowhere.
“Come again?” She hadn’t been paying attention. Her mind had been reliving Peter Frankel’s third sputtering tirade in the last twenty-four hours.
“To disappear,” Paul clarified. “Who do you think trained them?”
She scowled. “You’re smirking. If you’ve got a theory, let’s hear it.”
Suddenly self-conscious of his expression, he made the smirk go away. “I was reading the Donovans’ file last night at the hotel,” he explained. “I didn’t realize that Harry Sinclair was their uncle.”
Irene saw where he was headed and dismissed him with a shake of her head. “If you read it all, then you know that he was investigated back in ’83 and came up clean.”
“No one with that much money is ever clean,” Paul snorted. “Seems like an awfully convenient resource to have when you’re on the run.”
She considered that for a moment. “Sinclair would be crazy to get himself involved in something like this. Too much to lose.”
Paul shrugged. “Hey, family’s family. I think we ought to check it out. It’s not like we’ve got a lot to lose. From where I stand, we’ve got a ton of evidence but not a single clue.”
Irene weighed the idea. “Want to go for a phone tap?”
“Why not? God knows we’ve got probable cause.”
A slight nod served as his order to go ahead.
“Great. I’ll call the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” He moved quickly toward the overhead door, dodging the sea of evidence technicians. “Oh, by the way, Irene,” he said, just short of the exit.
She looked over, eyebrows high.
“I told you so.”
Carolyn screamed.
Jake rocketed upright in his seat, ready to do battle. His mind registered that it was light again, but he couldn’t figure out what had happened to the dark. She was sitting up now, too, still in her seat, but barely. Her eyes were wild, unfocused. Her hands were poised in front of her, fingers spread, as if frozen in the midst of pushing something away. He knew then that she’d had The Dream.
“Carolyn!” he said sharply. “Carolyn, you’re here. I’m here. Everything’s okay.” He wriggled as best he could across the center console and tried to pull her close. That’s when the crying started. That’s when the crying always started.
“Oh, God,” she gasped, finally tuning into reality. “Oh, my God.” She let herself be rocked back and forth in her seat, but she remained stiff in his arms, hugging herself instead of her husband.
“You gonna tell me about it this time?” he asked after a while.
She shook her head against his jacket. “No. I can’t.”
No, you won’t, he thought bitterly. He wished he were a better man, but this game she played of keeping her past hidden away had bugged him forever. They were husband and wife, dammit. Two lives, one person. Three lives, really. They faced a whole future together, after facing down a whole past, yet she guarded her childhood horrors as if they were nuclear launch codes. Unless she was willing to be a wife, how could he ever be a husband?
He said none of this, of course, and right away he felt ashamed that he’d even thought such things. These were the times when she needed him most, weren’t they? And his job was simply to be there; to help her through the nightmare. He’d swallow his anger one more time, and a thousand times after that, probably. He kissed her hair and stroked it. She smelled horrible, a musky combination of dirt and sweat, but in some ways she was more beautiful right then than when she primped for a night out. This was Carolyn unveiled; the person she fought so hard to hide from everyone she knew.
A few minutes passed before she pulled away from him. She looked away as she mopped her eyes and her nose with a shirttail. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I.” He stroked her face with the back of his hand.
Part of her still hadn’t returned to the present. Jake had seen the mood last for hours. Last time, they’d had a fight over it, prompting him to leave the house and catch a zillion-calorie breakfast at I-HOP. Nothing like a pound of pancakes in your belly to douse your fires.
After a cold night in the van, he felt miserable. Shortly after they’d crossed into West Virginia last night, the skies had opened up, making the mountain passes slick and nearly unpassable. Rather than risk an accident, and the attention it would bring, he’d pulled into the parking lot of the Rebel Yell Motel outside White Sulphur Springs at about ten o’clock and declared it their home for the night.
As a precaution, just in case the cops who stopped them at the school had finally made the connection, Jake had changed their plates, driver’s licenses, and registration one more time, transforming them into the Delaney family-James and Clarissa. Because Travis was a kid, and kids never carried ID, Jake decided to limit the boy’s trauma and keep his first name the same. For the time being, he’d just avoid using any last name at all.
Using an Army-surplus entrenching tool off one of the shelves, Jake had buried the old plates and IDs out in the woods.
He and Carolyn had discussed the possibility of checking into the motel but jointly vetoed the idea as something the police would be expecting them to do. They’d also thought about parking in a less-public place but decided in the end that a white van in a parking lot would draw far less suspicion on a rainy night than a white van pulled off into the woods.
True to form, Travis had slept soundly through the whole night, while Jake and Carolyn took turns pretending to sleep and watching for trouble. The direness of their situation still hadn’t hit either one of them fully, although, as the hours stretched on, Jake found himself becoming progressively more bitter about the whole thing. What kind of warped individual could put another human being through this kind of torment? He berated himself for not having done something about it fourteen years ago, when all the evidence trails were still fresh, and when people might actually have believed as outlandish a story as the one they had to tell.
Such thoughts were counterproductive, he knew, but at zero-dark-early, in the hills of West Virginia, when you’re sitting with a gun in your lap wondering if you’d actually have the guts to shoot someone to protect your family from harm, it was hard to keep your brain on track.
Finally, as the sun rose above the horizon, he’d had enough of waiting and decided it was time to move on. Carolyn had fallen back to sleep, though, and as he turned the key, she jumped.
“Sorry,” he said, trying not to laugh at the outrageous look on her face.
It took her a second or two to figure out what was happening, and then she relaxed, bringing her hand to her chest. “Jesus, that scared me.” She stretched and yawned noisily.
“Is Travis still asleep?” he asked, not wanting to turn all the way around to look.
She pivoted in her seat. “I think so,” she said. “His eyes are closed, anyway.”
They drove in silence for a long time after that, something clearly on Carolyn’s mind. Jake didn’t press, though. He knew she’d come out with it sooner or later. “You shouldn’t have told him everything,” she said at last. “Why get him so involved?”
“He’s got to be aware of the danger.”
