“Where?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Good catch, she thought. “No.”
He smiled. “It’s the same spot where the kid was shot. Same spot where my guys disappeared.”
It dawned on her in a rush. “Somebody attacked them,” she said.
He acknowledged the possibility with his eyebrows. “That’s what I’m thinking. Jimmy Henry gave them just enough to figure out a big one.”
Brandy closed her eyes. “So, where do we stand?”
Sjogren made a show of crossing his arms and his legs. “Maybe we can find the guy that owns the camping gear,” he said. “If we do, I guess there’s a glimmer that we might be able to press him for information. Tit for tat. Quid pro quo.”
“Is it wise to bring another stranger into the loop like that?” Brandy asked. “I mean, just by asking the questions, you’re going to make him wonder…” She cut herself off in response to his overplayed look of patience. “Oh, of course,” she said, looking down. Answering questions would be the poor man’s last earthly act. “But you still have to find the body. Someone still has to take care of him. I still don’t understand what went wrong there.”
Sjogren grew uncomfortable. “Well, now, that’s interesting, too. We’re not looking for the kid’s body anymore. We’re looking for the kid. We think he’s alive.”
Brandy’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God.”
“I pressed our friend Mitch Ponder on it pretty hard, and it turns out that Jenkins couldn’t bring himself to shoot a child. Instead, he carried the kid out into the woods and pumped him with an overdose of sedative. He thought it would take care of him. He fired a shot in the air for the benefit of the others, and they left.”
“This is what qualifies for ‘professional’ in your firm?” Brandy asked. She wanted to regain control of the conversation.
Sjogren drew his forefinger from the crook of his folded arm as if drawing a weapon from a shoulder holster, and he pointed it at her. “You’d best be careful throwing that word around, missy,” he said. His cheeks and forehead glowed red. “Until you’ve done some of the wet work you order, you ought to keep your judgments to yourself. I’ll make good what needs to be made good, but you need to remember that you and your boss are two different people. He crosses me, I might take it. You cross me, and I might just give you an inside look at the kind of work I do.”
Brandy broke eye contact.
Sjogren said, “I’m going to sniff around to find this tent-dweller. The fact that he moved out without packing tells me he knows something. My not-insubstantial gut tells me that if I find him, I’ll find the boy.”
“And when you do, will you…” She let her voice trail off, confident that he would catch her meaning.
“You can pull me off of this thing anytime you want,” Sjogren said. “But unless you do, I’ve got a job to finish. You want me to stop looking and just let the kid go?”
Brandy closed her eyes and inhaled. How could it possibly have come to this? “No,” she said, her lids still closed. “I want you to finish it.” The words seemed to come from someone else. Seven years ago, when she was graduating from Georgetown with her degree in political science, the thought of ordering the murder of a child would have been inconceivable. Now she’d just done it for the second time in less than a week.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jonathan entered the mansion at ten-thirty, feeling human again after a very long, very hot shower. The two hours of sleep didn’t hurt, either. Officially, the massive colonial-style behemoth held the administrative offices for Resurrection House and housed Venice and her family. Unofficially, to the rest of the town, it would always be the Gravenow mansion, Jonathan’s childhood home. He’d happily deeded it away at his first chance for the whopping sum of one dollar.
Its towering, wainscoted memories were worthy enough of forgetting that Jonathan rarely entered the place anymore. When he did, it was only for a very good reason.
He barely slowed as he strode the ornately inlaid foyer and crossed under the massive staircase to open the narrow door that led to the basement. Jonathan tried not to remember the days when the basement suites housed teams of servants. Back then, they all worked for Mama Alexander, who, with her daughter Venice, had qualified for better-ventilated quarters on the mansion’s third floor.
Jonathan thought it curious that the basement suites looked bigger than he remembered, and far less like a dungeon. The hallways were wide to accommodate the various food carts and cleaning apparatus that used to be shuttled from one service elevator to the next, and the sleeping quarters on either side were reminiscent of his dormitory days at William and Mary, twelve feet square with ten foot ceilings. Now these spaces were largely empty, except for a few that were stacked with junk that someone had deemed worth saving.
“Ven?” he called.
“Down here!”
He looked behind him to see Venice step into the hallway and beckon with one hand. In her other, she held a manila file folder. She looked five years older than she did two days ago. Her chocolate-colored skin had a slack, sallow look to it that spoke of too many tears shed over too short a time.
“Is Jeremy in there?” Jonathan asked as he closed the distance, nodding to the room Venice had just left.
She shook her head. “No, he’s in the rectory with Dom.”
“Is he okay?”
“Physically, he seems okay,” Venice said. “Dom had Doctor Hamilton come in to take a look at him.”
Jonathan felt a flare of anger. “I thought I told you-”
“Dom impressed on him the need for secrecy,” Venice said, heading off the exact objection that Jonathan was about to launch. “He’d been drugged, Dig. We had to have him looked at.”
She was right, of course, but at this juncture, the best way to keep Jeremy alive was to let everybody think he was still missing. Whoever had lost track of him the first time wanted him back badly enough to dispatch a team of killers. That kind of desire doesn’t go away just because it gets difficult to do.
“Just make sure that the word is limited to as few people as possible.”
“Does that include Doug Kramer or not?”
“Not just yet,” Jonathan said. “Let’s keep him out of the loop until we don’t have a choice. He’s busy enough handling this firestorm. How’s Mr. Stewart?”
Venice winced and shrugged with one shoulder. “They think he’ll come out of it okay, but they’re worried about his liver and spleen. Apparently the bullet did damage to both, and then when they punched him…” She stopped as her voice broke.
Jonathan didn’t need to hear the rest. The important part was that he’d survive. On a day when few things were going well, he’d take it. “And what about our new friends?”
“Of the two you shot, one is invisible. I can’t find any record at all. He’s like you-he never officially existed.”
Jonathan’s stomach tensed. In this day and age, everybody had a fingerprint on file somewhere-all except those whose fingerprints had been deliberately erased. To do that on every file was not easy. “What about the other one?”
“Sean O’Brian,” Venice said. “We only know that because he was fingerprinted as a child offender twenty years ago. That’s the only print on file, even though his juvie record shows that the judge pushed him to join the Marine Corps, which he did. That’s clearly documented in his criminal file.”
“Let me guess: the Marine Corps has no record.”
Venice nodded. “Databases never heard of him.”
Jonathan folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “So they were government agents,” he thought aloud. “Or civilian contractors working for them. That fits with what Jimmy Henry told us, too.” He briefly recapped the prisoner’s version of his role in the kidnapping.
