anywhere else. You can’t live like this. Our daughter can’t.”
Janie’s breathing quickened. “So what’s that leave us?”
The starlight softened the room’s edges, and he thought about the previous night here in this bed, how everything had been safe and promising then. A fantasy, sure, but one well worth having.
He touched her cheek gently. “No way out but through.”
“What are you gonna do?” She pulled away. “Go to war?”
He said nothing.
She coughed out a one-note laugh and looked to the ceiling. “With what? Yourself? No weapons? You had one gun, and they took that.”
“I’m going now to figure that out.”
She covered her mouth, a gesture that might have looked prudish if not for her anguish.
“I’ve made so many mistakes,” Nate said. “But the ones I regret the most are the things I
She squeezed his hand, hard, holding on. “What are you gonna do?”
“Anything I have to.”
His knuckles ached, but she didn’t relent.
“You come back.” She bit her lower lip hard enough that the color left beneath her teeth. “You come back and say good-bye first.”
It took some effort for him to let go of her hand.
Casper followed him down the hall, his nails making too much noise on the floorboards. Nate tapped a knuckle against his father’s door and heard a muffled answer: “Come in.”
He stood in the doorway as his father rustled up against the headboard, pulling on a pair of spectacles. Early morning leaked around the curtains, a pale shade of gray.
“Dad,” he said. “It’s gonna get bad.”
“Hardly call it a picnic now.”
“Worse. Soon enough I’ll be framed as a cop killer. The whole law-enforcement community is gonna come after me, on top of those men. I gotta leave and take care of some stuff. It’s dangerous for you to stay around Janie and Cielle-”
“I got them.”
“It’s much safer for you to go back-”
“I’m not asking, Nate.” The hard words rang around the room. He cleared his throat apologetically. “I can help protect them from those men. And anyone else.”
“I don’t want you to be at risk, Dad.”
Nate’s father pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, his weathered face was as vulnerable as Nate had ever seen it. “I haven’t done anything worth anything in a long time. Don’t take this away from me, son.”
They regarded each other in the semidarkness.
Nate nodded once and withdrew.
Beneath the fan that had been half torn from the ceiling by the weight of his daughter’s body, Pavlo spread Nastya’s clothes across her luxurious duvet. With a razor blade-
Beyond the picture window, the lights of the Strip were on a low simmer, daybreak still barely a notion at the horizon. The spectacular city view had been freed once and for all, the curtains torn from the rod and shredded at Pavlo’s hand. Traces of Nastya’s lipsticked message remained, red smudges on the pane.
Yuri and Misha entered and stood like waiters waiting to be acknowledged. Plucking a red bra from the mound, Pavlo sliced through one cup, then the other. “What?”
“The police responded to Abara’s barn,” Misha said, “off our tip. They are processing the evidence now.”
“Good.” Pavlo cut the buttons from a sheer blouse, one by one. “And Overbay?”
Yuri said, “We are watching the airports and-”
“We have been spending money to gather addresses,” Yuri said. “Overbay’s buddy pals from the war. His friends. Guesthouses or second homes. The wife’s parents have condo in Arrowhead. His father has cabin in Bouquet Canyon. A doctor friend of wife has Malibu beach house. Those kinds of places. It is how they track criminals.”
Pavlo said, “What of the wife’s old boyfriend?”
“He drove east after crossing us. As of last night, he checked in to a motel in Ohio. No phone calls to or from him. He is useless to them.”
Pavlo snatched the sheaf of papers from Yuri’s hand and flipped through them.
“How much did this cost me?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars.”
Pavlo handed the papers back and turned his attention to a pair of panties on the bed. “There are four of you. Split the list in half and go. Start with nearest places first.” He pushed a strip of black lace across the blade until it frayed, then gave way. Misha had exited, but Yuri remained, his big swollen face the picture of concern.
The door clicked quietly closed. Pavlo cut through more black lace, then shoved the razor savagely through the crotch, tearing, ripping. He was sweating, his arms straining against the fabric, and he realized he was burying a roar in his throat. A spasm of fury seized him. He raked the mound of sliced fabric off the duvet and watched the strips and ribbons scatter across the floor, the remnants of his broken daughter. But it wasn’t until he turned the razor on himself, carving a furrow up his ink-sheathed forearm and releasing the pain that had been scouring his insides, that he finally understood the sweet agony Nastya had found in the blade.
Chapter 56
The 6:00 A.M. cold whipped through the imprecise seal of the not-so-weatherproof Wrangler’s soft top, the stream blowing across Nate’s forehead as steady and loud as cranked-on air-conditioning. Praying that Eddie Yeap would be as usual the first coroner at the morgue, Nate input the number into the cell phone he’d borrowed from Janie and stepped on the gas. Before he risked his next move, he had to know if he was wanted yet for the murder of Agent Abara, and Eddie was, he hoped, the guy with his hands inside the guts of the case. As the line rang, Nate ran through the reasoning he’d constructed as he’d flown down the freeway.
A murder in Chatsworth would fall under the jurisdiction of the Devonshire station, which meant the body and the crime scene should be processed by LAPD. Because Abara was an FBI agent, the case would go federal, but Nate was banking on the fact that no one would want to transport evidence across the country to the lab at Quantico, because of both the delay and the risk of deterioration of the chillingly fresh evidence. Which meant that his best bet for getting information on the case’s status was from-
Eddie Yeap picked up. “Yullo?”
“Hey, Eddie. It’s Nate.”
“Nate Bank-Hero Nate?”
The greeting boded well-not a salutation offered to a cop killer.
