bring him in with Evelyn. Jorge Alonzo she would have liked to see in a cage. But Mendez was this damaged kid, acting out of his own abused spirit. He’d live with the hell of what he had done every day for the rest of his life.
Jesamyn left the precinct a few hours later after helping Evelyn get started with the paperwork, then leaving her to finish it up. It was Evelyn’s collar, after all. She’d get the glory, which Jesamyn didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t have to do all the typing and waiting around that followed an arrest. Stepping onto the concrete, she saw Dylan across the street on the swing set in the park beside the lot. She crossed the street and laced her fingers through the chain-link fence.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said, coming around the fence. “I have something to show you. You need to come with me.”
“What do you need to show me?” she asked, suspicious. She wondered if he was just dangling a line to get her to spend some time alone with him.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said, moving toward his GTO. She could see the fin and the white stripe that ran from the hood to the trunk just a few cars down. She didn’t follow him right away.
“Where are we going?” she asked again, but the wind took her words away. He didn’t appear to hear her question.
He turned around and extended a hand. “Come on. What are you waiting for?”
Though her feet felt like they were made out of lead all of a sudden, though something inside her resisted, she followed him. She always followed him.
The moon shone through his window and bathed his legs in its milky light. He was watching for her, the phone in his hand. He could hear the laugh track from whatever his brother was watching on the television downstairs; his family didn’t want to leave him alone now. All he wanted was to be alone and wait for Lily in peace. If it was Lily he had seen at all. If there had been anyone there on the street outside his house. He wondered absently if he was losing his mind. He didn’t think so; he still felt like himself, if a little numb, a little emptied out.
He’d tried to call Jesamyn but she hadn’t picked up the phone and he hadn’t left a message. He’d checked his messages and found three from Lydia Strong. The last one had been left just a few hours earlier.
“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “We’re in Florida. We’re going to find Lily and-” The cell phone connection had cut out before she’d finished her message. He wondered if she knew that he’d been accused of murder and arrested. He thought about calling her back but he didn’t know what to say. The phone had sat limp in his hand for the better part of an hour while he scrolled through all his options, rejected each, and eventually wound up doing nothing except sitting by the window, waiting.
“What are you doing, bro?” asked Theo, who had appeared in the doorway. He looked worried. No, that wasn’t right. He looked scared.
“Just sitting here.”
Theo nodded in the solemn way he had. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”
“I will,” said Matt.
Theo nodded again and put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and pulled his shoulders up, took a deep breath. “It’s going to be okay, you know?”
“I know.”
Matt was older and bigger than Theo, but Theo had always been the one to take care of him. When Matt was taunted at school for his height and awkwardness, it was Theo who always took up the fight. When Matt was tortured by his shyness around girls, it was Theo who advised him. Matt felt guilty that Theo had to sit on his couch while his wife was home alone.
“Go home, man,” said Matt. “You don’t need to be here. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
“I don’t want you to be alone, Mateo,” his brother said sadly. He’d been a sensitive, compassionate kid who’d grown into a kind and caring adult. Matt was proud of Theo.
“I’m okay. Really. I’m just going to go to bed. Before? I was probably just dreaming. The stress of everything, maybe just got to me for a minute. But it’s fine, you know. I’m fine.”
He tried to make himself look normal by sitting up straight and smiling. But from the look on Theo’s face he suspected that it wasn’t successful. Theo walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder, bent down and kissed him on the head.
“Just call me if you see anything else, you know, before you go running out into the street like that?”
“I promise,” said Matt, inwardly breathing a sigh of relief.
Theo gave him a quick pat on the back and moved backward toward the door.
“You sure-?” he started to say, but Matt lifted a hand to stop him.
“I’m sure, Theo. Thanks.”
When he heard the door close downstairs, he stood and quickly got dressed, pulling on a pair of jeans, a gray wool sweater and a pair of Timberlands. He took his wallet from the dresser and from a lock box in the back of his closet he removed his off-duty revolver, a five-shot Smith & Wesson. He moved quickly to his office and took out a file that contained all his banking records, his life insurance policy, of which his parents were the beneficiaries, and all of his investments. There was another file that contained his will. They were papers most cops had in order, someplace easy to find. He left them all on the kitchen table. There was enough, he thought, to cover his bond if he didn’t make it back. He pulled on his leather jacket and walked out the back door of his house. He told himself not to look back and he didn’t.
Too many bodies and a struggling old window air-conditioning unit made the hotel room too warm. Lydia shed the tailored black gabardine jacket she’d been wearing and laid it on the bed beside her. She pulled her hair back into a twist at the base of her neck as Special Agent John Grimm spoke. She liked him. He was sarcastic and tough, but not disrespectful of why they’d come to Florida.
“We first heard about Trevor Rhames in 1994,” said Grimm, crossing his legs and tapping a finger on the tabletop. His eyes were on the satellite image of the New Day compound. “He was arrested in the former Yugoslavia for selling arms to the Bosnians after the UN had imposed the embargo that pretty much left them at the mercy of the Serbian nationalists.”
“There are plenty of people who think the UN never should have imposed that embargo,” said Dax, a little defensively, thought Lydia. John Grimm gave him a long, hard look.
“Anyway,” said Grimm, looking away from him and turning his eyes to Jeffrey. “He was found to be working with a company called Kintex.”
“The arms company owned by the Bulgarian government,” said Jeffrey with a frown. “How did he wind up working with them?”
“It’s a bit of a mystery,” said Grimm. “Rhames, as you probably know, is an American. You might not know that he was a decorated Marine, honorably discharged from service after touring in Rwanda, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia. For a couple of years, he kept a very low profile, worked in security systems in the private sector with the training he’d received in the Marines. He dropped off the radar for a while, then he turned up overseas in Bulgaria.
“Bulgaria has been notorious for decades as an anything-goes arms bazaar, selling things like assault rifles, mortars, antitank mines, ammunition, all kinds of explosives to anyone who has the money to buy, no matter what their agenda,” said Grimm. “They’ve supplied-utterly without code or conscience-arms in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Libya, regions riven with conflict, rebel governments guilty of the most heinous civil-rights violations.
“The government keeps trying to get it under control because they want very badly to become part of NATO and the European Union,” he continued. “But the arms business is so entrenched in that culture that it’s almost impossible to be rid of it without bankrupting the economy. Then of course there’s all the corruption.”
“Okay,” said Lydia, thinking this was the first she’d heard of Bulgaria’s weapons activities. “So he wound up there doing what?”
“We’re not sure exactly. But he was apprehended during an Interpol sting where Kintex was selling guns to the Bosnians in direct violation of the UN embargo. He was extradited to the United States. He was charged and indicted for illegal weapons sales and did two years in a military prison.”
