“She must have left for the day and she’s not answering her cell. But I sent an official expedited request through to the Pentagon for the schematics.”
“How long will that take?”
“They assured me you would have them as soon as possible.”
I cursed under my breath, hiding my frustration from Angela. I wanted a time frame-like maybe five minutes ago.
“I know, Pat,” she said, reading my silence. “Believe me, I made sure they know how urgent it is.”
“All right. Keep me posted.”
Shortly after I hung up, Tait updated me that his officers had found nothing at the cabin, the Schoenberg Inn, or any of the residences or buildings in the area I’d suggested they focus their search; neither had Alexei shared any information or made his one phone call. To make matters worse, when I contacted Anton Torres for an update, he told me his SWAT team had gotten caught behind a truck accident on Highway 8 that shut down the road. Anton figured they were still at least two hours out.
I went back to the Reiser case. Bypassing the videos for now, I spent some time studying his residential history and comparing it to the locations of the crimes. I realized that, while he could have traveled to commit the murders and follow the news stories, the locations didn’t overlap like I would have expected.
Reiser was killed Tuesday night…
DNA from two missing people was found on his knife-a man from Milwaukee, a woman from DC…
Clippings were found from the Rockford Register Star newspaper…
The facts revolved, spiraled through my mind, but I was mentally exhausted and couldn’t seem to sort them out. I rubbed my head, stood, and stretched my back.
I hadn’t noticed before, but now I overheard Lien-hua and Amber talking in the living room, and I found myself being thankful, since the more understanding there was between those two women, the better off everything between me and Lien-hua was going to be-at least that’s what I hoped.
Sean was outside, shoveling the driveway so that we’d have our vehicles available in case we needed to get out of here. Earlier when he was getting his boots, I’d suggested he snowblow it, but he told me he didn’t own a snowblower, and then added in no uncertain terms, “Three things real men don’t do: they don’t tweet, they don’t wear Velcro shoes, and they don’t snowblow their driveways.”
Nope. No arguing with that.
As far as I knew, Tessa was still downstairs reading.
I tapped my spacebar and saw the frozen image of Basque, scalpel in hand, leaning over a dying woman in Monona, Wisconsin, and decided I needed a break from this, even if just for a few minutes.
It occurred to me that with so many things in play all day long, I hadn’t really had much of a chance to talk with Tessa, and, to put it mildly, our short conversation at the motel before I went to meet Chekov hadn’t ended especially well. I had a feeling things were only going to get more complicated from here on out tonight, and I might not even be around the house, especially if we located Kayla, so if I were going to get any chance to connect with my stepdaughter, now was the time to do it.
Besides, I still had the pills Amber had given me to pass along to her. I hadn’t yet come up with a good way of broaching the topic of Tessa’s undisclosed prescription-honestly, I hadn’t thought about it at all in the last hour- but regardless, it was something I needed to at least address.
Going downstairs, I found her lounging on the couch, rereading Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn, a book she’d described to me once as “an underground, anti-establishment creative nonfiction classic.” She looked like she was really into it.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up. “Hey.”
“How’s the book?”
“Sick.”
“Sick.”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that supposed to mean gross?”
“It’s a versatile word.”
“Now it means, what, cool?”
“Sure. It’s like stupid. If I say, ‘That was just stupid,’ it means it was awesome, righteous, wicked.”
I looked at her curiously. “But if you say, ‘That’s stupid-’”
“I mean it’s stupid.”
“Oh. So, stupid means brilliant and sick means sweet.”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s stupid.”
A tiny smile. “Now you’re catching on.”
Tessa set down the book.
She was totally curious about what had gone down last night between Patrick, Amber, and Lien-hua, and she wanted quite badly to ask him about it but wasn’t exactly sure how to bridge into the topic.
Patrick took a seat on a footstool across the room from her. “Are you still mad about earlier today, at the motel when I had to leave?”
“Naw. It’s all good.”
“So the winter session class at U of M, that was, what, kind of stupid-in the stupid sense of the word?”
“Yeah. But it was nice to see some of the spots Mom used to visit. Dad too.”
Ask him about Amber.
No, start with Sean.
The lights in the house flicked off then on, and a moment later Amber’s voice floated down from the top of the stairs. “Sean? We should really bring in some more firewood, in case the electricity goes out.”
“He’s still shoveling,” Patrick called up to her. “But I can get some for you.” Then he made eye contact with Tessa, and she realized that was probably not a good sign. “Tessa and I will get some.”
“Seriously?” she said unenthusiastically.
“Seriously. Come on.”
A few minutes later she was dressed for the weather and meeting him outside the patio door. He was wearing his snazzy new camo jacket. “Promise me you’ll leave that here when we go back to Denver,” she said.
“Deal.”
He clicked on his flashlight, and they started trudging through the driving snow toward the woodshed.
After a few steps she said, “Patrick, what was it? Whatever happened between you and Sean?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened. It’s always there, between you two. A wall. Was it an argument or something?”
He didn’t answer right away. “It wasn’t an argument.”
“What then?”
“Life,” he answered vaguely. “Schedules, work. His family and my career. Hey, I was really hoping we could talk about-”
“That’s weak.”
“Weak?”
“Every family has that stuff. You either choose to stay close through it all or you don’t.”
For a few moments he walked in silence through the night, holding his flashlight steady against the weather. “I guess we never did.”
“So you’re saying you never did, or that you both never did?”
“Tessa, this isn’t really-”
“Okay, whatever.” She waited. It wouldn’t be long.
She started counting to herself to ten, made it to six before he said, “All right.”
They reached the shed, and he muscled open the snow-sealed sliding door but didn’t enter. “When I was seventeen, Sean and I were driving home from a party one night. The roads were icy and I was dozing off. He swerved. We hit another car and”-Patrick took a small breath-“tragically, Tessa, a woman was killed.”
