“Did you find Sevren’s body?” I asked Ralph at last.
“Not yet.”
“What?” I gasped. “He was in the ambulance when it fell!”
“Those things are built like tanks,” said Ralph. “If he slipped inside it, it’s possible-”
“No,” I said. “He couldn’t have survived.”
“We’ll find him.”
The nurse finished up and disappeared again.
“Any word on the governor then?” I asked.
I saw Tessa smirking. “The tape,” she said.
“What?”
“From the mic patch.”
Ralph grinned. “Yup, it’s made quite a splash on the Internet.” Tessa tapped her chest. “I posted it for him.”
“In one day Sebastian Taylor went from being a presidential hopeful to the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. I think that’s a record. You should see the cable news coverage.”
“No thanks.”
“His wife returned from Barbados last night only to find out her husband used to be a CIA assassin. She’s been thrown right into the middle of the international media spotlight.”
“I’ll bet she’s right at home.” Then I had a sobering thought. “Sebastian will be tough to find. He’ll know how to drop off the grid.”
“Yeah,” said Ralph, “but he likes the media too. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing from Sebastian Taylor again.”
“Enough about all that,” said Lien-hua. “Are you OK, Pat? Seriously? You were in pretty bad shape.”
“I’m all right, but I could use some coffee.”
She reached behind her and then handed me a cup of the good stuff: shade-grown Yrigacheffe from Ethiopia’s Sidamo region. I could almost smell the bananas growing above the beans.
Now I was in heaven.
“Cream and honey, no sugar,” she added. “It’s a little cold, though. I didn’t know when you’d be waking up.”
I tried to sit up, cringed, fell back.
“You sure you’re OK?”
“You want me to be honest?”
“Always.”
“Come here, then.”
She leaned closer. The scent of vanilla.
“Yes?” she said.
I spoke quietly, so no one else would hear. “I’m sorry about that stakeout.”
A pause. “Let’s not be sorry, let’s just be careful.”
“OK.”
“I was really worried about you, Pat. I was afraid we might lose you. And, well…” She was searching for the right words to say. Never found them. “One more thing. When I was talking about motives and I mentioned fear, you could see it, couldn’t you?”
“See what?”
“The history. In my face.”
I lowered my voice. “Something happened to you, didn’t it?”
She was quiet.
“When you’re ready,” I said, “if you want to tell me, I’ll listen. You can trust me, Lien-hua.”
“I know I can.”
“What are you two whispering about?” asked Tessa.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she said in her wonderfully sarcastic teenage way. Lien-hua returned to her chair. “Hey, come here, Tessa,” I said. I patted the bed next to me and, somewhat reluctantly, she joined me. “There’s something your mother wanted me to tell you, but I never did. I’m sorry, I just didn’t know if I believed it before.”
“What is it?”
“‘Our choices decide who we are,’” I said, “‘but our loves define who we’ll become.’ She wanted you to know that.” I paused for a second and then said, “I’m sure she would have told you herself if only.. ”
“She did.”
“What?”
“She did tell me. And she said you would too, someday. When you finally understood what it meant.”
Tessa waited for you, Pat. She’s been waiting for you this whole time.
I took a deep breath. “Thanks for sticking with me until I got the chance to say it.”
“Like I had a choice,” she grumbled. But she let the wisp of a smile flicker across her face as she did.
Over the next couple minutes Agent Jiang told me that Alice and her children were doing fine and that Alice was even getting some reward money for helping us corner the killer. “She’ll be able to cut back on her hours at work to spend more time with her kids. She seemed thrilled by the deal.”
“What about the people at the hotel who were exposed to the contagion? What about all of us?”
Ralph answered as he punched at the keys on the PSP, which he’d started playing when I was talking to Tessa. “With Marcie’s help the CDC was able to vaccinate us. Lots of people are sick, but no fatalities so far.” Then he looked up from his game. “Without her help, though, we’d all be goners.”
“And, oh yeah,” said Lien-hua, “Jason Stilton won’t be seeing the outside of a jail for a long time. He was found with an envelope full of cash and a short list of excuses. He’s facing corruption charges as well as conspiracy to commit murder.”
“He’s the one who delivered the necklace to Kincaid, isn’t he?” I asked.
She nodded. “Of course, Stilton is saying he didn’t know anyone was going to get hurt, just that Trembley had offered him a way to make some easy money by delivering something of Tessa’s to a guy at the hotel, a guy Trembley had worked with before.”
She paused to collect her thoughts. “Oh, I almost forgot, Margaret called a couple hours ago to tell us she’ll be returning to teach at Quantico. It seems the director was very impressed with how quickly the team that she’d assembled was able to solve this case.”
“Wonderful.” I shook my head. “So, what’s next for you and Ralph?”
“I’m looking over a case from San Diego. A series of arsons. They want me to work on the profile.”
“And I gotta testify at a hearing,” Ralph said with a heavy sigh. “Seems an old friend of ours from Illinois was able to swing a retrial.” I gasped. “Not Richard Basque?”
“One and the same.”
“But how? That doesn’t make sense!”
“DNA. He’s been fighting for years to have it reevaluated. Finally got his wish. Samples didn’t match. Looks like it might clear him.”
Great. If there was one man I wouldn’t want to see walking the streets again, it was Richard Basque. He was one of only two people I’d ever met who made me genuinely, deeply, insanely afraid. Thankfully, the other one was dead. Ralph shot him in a hostage situation back in 2004. The Illusionist came in a close third.
“By the way, Pat,” said Ralph, “where’s my phone?”
“Oh,” mumbled Tessa, “so it was yours.”
“What do you mean was?”
“The killer… well… he dropped it.”
I saw Ralph getting ready to cuss. “Not in front of Tessa, you don’t,” I said. He caught himself, sighed, and shook his head. Then he mentioned something to Lien-hua about the arsonist case and a string of grave robberies somewhere in the Midwest, but I didn’t really hear him. I was too busy watching my daughter look out the window. She was still dressed in black, but I saw she had painted one of her fingernails pink. She saw me staring. “It’s a start,” she said, glancing at her fingertip. “I’m getting used to it, but don’t get your hopes up.”
