He let the words sink in for a long moment, then straightened. “Well, this has been fun.” He called for the matron. “By the way, where did Travis get that scar on the sole of his foot?”
Carolyn’s heart cramped hard, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. This man had been looking at her little boy.
“He’s growing up fast, too, isn’t he?” he added with a smile.
She felt ill. She wanted to rip this man’s eyes out, but even as the image flashed through her brain, she knew the futility of it. Her mind swirled out of control, propelled by the purest form of fear she’d ever known.
A key slid into the lock. “I’ve got to go,” he said heavily.
“Wait!” she insisted, even as she heard the lock turn. “How do I know you won’t kill him, anyway?”
The door opened, and they weren’t alone anymore. He flashed his humorless grin one last time. “You don’t,” he said. “Sweet dreams, Carolyn.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“All you have to do is drive,” Nick mocked under his breath as he crossed the once-grand lobby of the Radford Hotel. He carried the pizza box on his shoulder, bearing the logo of Papa Lorenzo’s Perfect Pizza Parlor. The box was empty, of course. Nick and his coconspirator had consumed the whole thing while sitting down the block in Thorne’s rental car, working out the fine points of the plan. Tasted pretty good, actually, considering the fact that Papa Lorenzo and his staff all wore turbans.
Even though Little Rock was a small city by most standards, the task of locating a single needle named Irene Rivers in a haystack of several dozen hotels seemed hopeless at first. Then Jake got an idea. In fact, he seemed flooded with ideas. Good ones, even. An amazing turnaround, Nick thought, given the quivering mess he’d been just scant hours before.
Their approach was simple: divide the Yellow Pages in half and burn up a ton of quarters in pay phones calling front desk after front desk and asking for Irene Rivers’s room. They were just shy of four dollars into their strategy when Jake got a hit on the Radford. After the phone in her room rang ten times without anyone answering, he just hung up, confident she was still out saving the world from the likes of himself.
Finding the hotel was only the first step, though. They still needed a room number, and for that, Nick needed to do some legwork. Between the two of them, his was the face that hadn’t dominated the news.
The Radford was a big old place, which once had been the destination of choice for visiting presidents and celebrities. On the heels of more than a few slow years, though, the Radford had been unable to keep up with the Grand Marquis and the Crown Plaza, and its once-dependable clientele had shifted its loyalties elsewhere. The place was still several giant steps away from homeless-shelter status, but there was precious little charm left in the threadbare Oriental carpets and scratched cherry walls.
To be put up in a place like this was clear evidence that Irene Rivers had seriously pissed off her travel agent.
As Nick approached the two teenagers manning the front desk, they looked up simultaneously and smiled. “Hi. Can I help you?” one of them said.
Nick noted the similarity of the girls’ features-even down to the matching zits on their chins-and he wondered silently if maybe they were sisters. He smiled back, trying his best to look a little sheepish while praying that his hands wouldn’t shake.
“Hi,” he said back. “You sure can.” With hopes of making himself look more like a local, he spoke around a toothpick he’d picked up at Papa Lorenzo’s. “One of your guests called and ordered a pizza. Unfortunately, I lost the note with her room number on it. Got a name, though. Rivers. Irene Rivers. Can you give me her room?”
The Bobbsey Twins exchanged glances, then shook their heads in unison. “No, I’m afraid not,” said the one on the right. “We can’t give out people’s room numbers to anyone.”
“I can call her, though, and have her come down and pick it up,” offered the twin on the left.
Nick’s stomach knotted. He felt a burst of panic, then forced a smile. “No,” he said quickly. “Please don’t do that. Listen, truth of it is, I’m already running fifteen minutes late with this thing, and this is the second time I’ve lost an address tonight. Boss told me this Rivers lady is a pain as it is. If she gets ticked and calls, I’m sunk, know what I mean?”
The girls shared a significant look this time and nodded again. Obviously, they’d known some difficult customers in their time and maybe even worked for an asshole or two along the way.
“We really shouldn’t…” hedged Bobbsey Left.
“Please,” Nick begged winningly. “It’s humiliating enough for a man my age to be delivering pizzas. I could really do without a lecture to go with it, you know?”
Another look. And a joint sigh. “Okay,” said Bobbsey Right as she tapped the keys on her computer. “Just don’t get us in trouble, okay? Room 405.” She looked up and pointed across the lobby. “You can take those elevators over there.”
Nick smiled and thanked them. He wandered over and pushed the call button, but it seemed forever before anything happened. Even the elevators in this old barn were tired. Fortunately, he was the only passenger. After the big doors rumbled shut, Nick pushed the buttons for both the second floor and the fourth, so that the floor indicator in the lobby would go all the way to Agent Rivers’s floor, even after he exited on the first stop.
The hallway was bright enough, if somewhat narrow, in the style of old downtown hotels, and he encountered his first dilemma in trying to figure out what to do with the damn pizza box. Finally, he gave up looking for a trash can and just slid it under a Coke machine.
That done, he took the stairs down to a preselected side entrance on the first floor. Checking one more time to make sure that the stairwell was empty, he opened the door and nearly screamed. Jake was standing right there, not two feet away on the other side. “Jesus! You scared the shit out of me!”
Jake looked at him like he was crazy. “I told you I’d be waiting here.”
“Yeah, but…” Oh, the hell with it. “She’s in room 405. How’re you gonna get in?”
Jake shrugged and craned his neck to peer up the stairwell. “I don’t know yet. But I’ll make it.”
They climbed the first two floors together before Nick broke off to retrieve his elevator. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he said. But his face said something else entirely.
Jake smiled. “I’ll be there.” He sounded none too convinced himself.
It was nearly two by the time Irene returned to her hotel room, exhausted. Her body was whipped, but her mind whirled way too fast to permit sleep. She’d hoped that the martini before dinner and the two glasses of wine with the entree would take the edge off, but it was no use. Slice by slice, her career had been whittled away to virtually nothing these past few days, and all the alcohol had accomplished was to give her a world-class case of heartburn.
A hot bath was her last hope. She preferred them just this side of scalding, where the skin of her fingers and toes would prune up in minutes and the heat would suck away her ability to concentrate on anything but sleep. None of the worry mattered, anyway. Even with his wife and son in jeopardy, Jake Donovan still remained out of reach. That part surprised her. She’d thought for sure he was more of a family man than that.
Still fully clothed, Irene plugged the tub and cranked the faucet all the way to hot. After a few seconds, she eased it back a bit, then closed the door behind her as she strolled back to the bedroom to change out of her suit.
They knew for certain now that Donovan was getting help from someone. The local cop in Newark reported a third party, as did the paramedics at the Rescue Squad building. Crime scene technicians had confirmed glove smudges in the Faylons’ Toyota, but no extra prints yet. The Caddy was a rental-under a fictitious name-and as such had hundreds of fingerprints all over it. They’d run them all through the computer, of course, but it was a giant step between having rented a vehicle and being a suspect in a crime.
Agents from the Chicago field office had been following through on Irene’s pet theory involving Harry Sinclair, but after a day of turning his house inside out, no one had found a single piece of evidence to implicate the old man. Old Harry had even shown up at the house again, after a day of what he called “alone time.” Apparently, occasional stretches of unaccountability helped him cope during his periods of heavy thinking.
Ted Greenberg in Chicago had sent a tape of Sinclair’s interview via courier to George Sparks’s office in Little
