Lindley went on in the same monotone. He stayed in his seat. “Would you be willing to show us where you took her?” he asked.
“
“You know, your compassion’s a little underwhelming,” I said.
“Yeah, so’s your police work,” he shot back. “Jesus. If Ethan and Zoe do wind up dead, at least we’ll all know whose fault it is.”
That was it. I snapped. The next thing I knew, I was halfway across the table with two handfuls of Glass’s shirt.
“Where are they?” I yelled.
“Alex!”
“
It was a moment of pure adrenaline. If I could have split open his head for the information, I might have done it.
“Get him out of here!” Lindley shouted behind me.
“This isn’t going to bring back your son!” I told him. “Give it up, Glass — for God’s sake! Don’t let those kids die!”
I was still yelling as they pulled me out into the hall. The last thing I saw before they closed the door was Rodney Glass, raising a hand my way to wave good-bye.
Jesus. What had I just done? He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted, hadn’t he?
I’d risen to the bait.
I WAS CROUCHED down in the hall, trying to regroup, still angry but also embarrassed about what had happened with Glass, when I realized someone was standing over me.
“Take a walk?”
I looked up from a pair of black steel-toed boots to see Ned Mahoney, holding out a hand.
“How’d you know I was here?” I said.
“After that little scene? I think everyone knows you’re here,” Ned said. Several other people had stopped and were still staring. “Come on. Let’s go breathe some air.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I told him.
“That’s true,” he said, and headed up the hall. So I stood and followed.
We wound our way down to the ground floor of Liberty Crossing and out through the west lobby. The whole place is a huge X-shaped complex, with one of those sterile concrete plazas in the crook of the two main wings. We stopped there and took a seat on one of several empty benches overlooking the parking area down below.
The dropping temperature outside didn’t do much to cool me off while I told Ned what had happened. In fact, talking about it only made me feel worse.
“I screwed up, Ned. Glass is probably going to be home in his own bed tonight, while Ethan and Zoe …” I shook my head. I couldn’t even finish.
“That would have happened whether you went off the deep end with him or not,” Ned told me. “You said so yourself. He’s too clean, too smart.”
“Clean as dirt,” I said. “Goddamnit. But I know we can get him.”
Mahoney was uncharacteristically slow to respond. Usually his brain has a direct line to his mouth. Then finally he said, “You’re sure Glass is the one?”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
“And you can’t prove it?”
“I can prove it,” I said. “Just not fast enough.”
“So maybe it’s time to think about some alternatives,” he said.
I felt a chill down my back, and not because of the stiff breeze blowing up from the parking lot. I let Ned go on.
“Listen, I’m a company man when I need to be one,” he said. “If the system didn’t work at least some of the time, I couldn’t do this for a living. But guess what, Alex? It’s not working. Not on this one. It’s not even coming close to working.”
“Hard to disagree. Glass is unusual, smarter than most.”
I couldn’t get Ned to look at me. He just stared down at the pebbled concrete between his feet while he talked. This was Langley, after all. You never knew which bush had eyes, or which bench had ears.
“Ned, you’re talking about —”
“I’m not talking about anything,” he said. “But if I were, I’d tell you that I could pretty easily put my hands on
