found the journals when you garroted Ransom like you were supposed to, none of this would have happened.”
“The journals weren’t there. I told you that then. If they had been, I would have found them.”
“Soldan found them, didn’t he?”
Dix pictured Makepeace, a smile on his mouth that should be scaring the crap out of Pallack. Oddly, he sounded amused. “Yeah, Soldan was so good he didn’t even know I was in his ridiculous sheik’s room standing behind him, reading his stupid book over his shoulder. He didn’t look up until I had the wire around his skinny throat. Do you know he’d wrapped the journals in a red silk cloth and just shoved them under that low table? Lots of confidence. The fool.”
“Yes, yes, it’s over now. Forget the rest of it, Makepeace. Take the sheriff out of here, and make sure he’s never found.”
There was a pause, then Makepeace said, “I’ll remove him for you, bury him deep, maybe in one of the forests up in western Marin. Then I’ll kill that Ransom bitch and I’ll be through here, Pallack.”
Pallack’s fist hit his desktop. “Dammit, Julia doesn’t matter now. She doesn’t need to be dead—I don’t care if she lives to be a hundred.”
Dix heard Makepeace say very quietly, “I do. How are you going to speak to your parents now that Meissen’s dead?”
“Only August spoke to them, never Meissen. He was repeating conversations with my parents from August’s journal notes.” His voice filled with grief. “My poor mother has to think I’ve forgotten about her. Six months now without a word from me. She must be distraught.”
“I didn’t think anything could surprise me anymore, but you do,” Makepeace said. “I didn’t imagine a rich guy like you could believe in that crap.”
Dix heard a sneer in Pallack’s voice. “You think I’m a credulous fool, do you? How many times have you tried to kill Julia Ransom, Makepeace? What makes you think you’re smart enough to kill her?”
Dix wanted to yell at Pallack to shut up. Didn’t he realize he was putting the spurs in so deep Makepeace wouldn’t stop until Julia and Cheney were dead? And him too?
“Since you’re paying me handsomely, Pallack, I’m smart enough not to kill you. For one hundred thousand dollars, I’ll take care of the sheriff. Then I’m heading over to Judge Sherlock’s house to take care of Julia Ransom.”
Dix heard the surprise in Pallack’s voice. “How’d you find out where she is?”
“I followed those FBI agents. I saw her through the window with that other agent, Stone.”
Charlotte said, “So what are you going to do? Set off another bomb? Blow up Judge Sherlock’s house with everyone in it?”
Dix lifted his head a fraction to take in the three of them. He saw Makepeace’s dead eyes glitter. “Hey, not a bad idea, wiping out all the losers at once.”
“You go murdering a bunch of FBI agents,” Pallack said, “kill a federal judge, his wife, and whoever else is staying in that house, the cops will hunt you forever.”
“Let them hunt, they’ve done it for years. No cop in the world will ever get close to me. They won’t get you either, Pallack, if you’re as smart as you think you are.”
Charlotte said, “They’re too close now. Kill Julia if you must, but leave the rest of them alone.”
“Look, Makepeace, I’ll pay you the hundred thousand to get rid of the sheriff but you must promise to leave Julia Ransom alone.”
There was thick hot silence.
Makepeace was looking over Thomas Pallack’s left shoulder. He said at last, “We have a deal. Wire the money to the same bank account you wired the other million.”
Dix sensed Makepeace was looking at him now, deciding how to get him out of here, where to kill him.
Dix was wrong. Makepeace wasn’t finished enjoying himself. “Do you know, after I took Ransom’s journals, I found I had a little down time? So I did a bit of reading. In this one section, Charlotte, I read that you look just like Thomas’s mother—like the other woman did—and I found myself wondering what it was all about. Now that I’ve met the sheriff, I’m thinking his wife had the misfortune of looking like Pallack’s mother too. Was she the woman Ransom wrote about in his journals?”
There was stone silence until Charlotte said, “Yeah, can you believe it? Two of us who looked like that old witch. Only the sheriff’s wife, Christie, wouldn’t go away with him, so he killed her.”
“Shut up, Charlotte!”
“I really don’t care if you whacked the First Lady, Pallack. But I do have to tell you—the whole thing with your dead mother— it’s sick, crazy, you know?”
“You call me crazy? You’re a hired assassin, a psychopath. And I didn’t kill Christie, it was an accident, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Makepeace actually laughed. “Maybe she thought you were a little old for her, Pallack. You think?”
Dix’s wrists were raw. He felt the stickiness of his own blood, smelled it. He realized that more than anything he wanted his bloody hands around Pallack’s fat neck. He wanted to kill him the same way he’d killed Christie. He heard Pallack say in a sad, dreamy voice, “I promised her the earth, but she wouldn’t be reasonable. She tried to get away from me. I didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident. My mother wanted to know about her, through August, and he knew. I didn’t want him dead either, I needed him, but I had no choice. None of it was my fault.”
Dix could see Christie arguing with Pallack, begging him, then finally, trying to escape him. Only she hadn’t made it. He’d killed her—and he believed it wasn’t his fault.
Charlotte said aloud what he’d been thinking. “You talk about none of it being your fault, Thomas, yet even now
