Nathan fought the restraints. ‘Please… don’t. Don’t.’
‘Don’t? Don’t? Well, sure, Nathan, I won’t. It doesn’t have to be the hard way, not one bit, if you don’t care for math.’ He made his voice soft and intimate, brought the screwdriver close to Nathan’s wide eye. ‘Lots of sick people need Frost, Tin Soldier, you included. Someone I love included. Talk or I work out the word problem on your flesh and bones. Which is it?’
‘I can’t tell you… what I don’t know.’
‘I respect your heroics. Truly.’ Groote gave Nathan an affectionate pat on the cheek. Then he stabbed the screwdriver deep into Nathan’s arm.
THIRTEEN
Wednesday morning at 7:00 A.M., the cell phone rang next to Miles’s head. He came awake instantly, panic settling in his guts, trying to be fully aware before answering the phone and talking to the shooter.
‘Hello?’
‘Where the hell are you?’ DeShawn sounded pissed.
‘I met a woman…’ Miles lied. ‘I spent the night at her place. That allowed, Mommy?’
‘I need you back at your apartment, Miles. Right now, please.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I got bad news. I’ll pick you up. Where are you?’
‘It’s not far. I’ll walk,’ and he hung up before DeShawn could argue. Miles didn’t want to go back to his place, with the shooter likely to be tracking Michael Raymond, but he couldn’t act afraid to be at home; DeShawn would relocate his ass out of Santa Fe in ten seconds flat, and no way he was leaving now.
Miles washed his face, changed into a clean shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He left his duffel in the room and locked up; he’d head back here before the gallery opened and retrieve his stuff. He walked back to the apartment, but no shooters jumped out to blast flesh off his bones. DeShawn’s car wheeled over to him and Miles got in.
‘Doctor Vance is dead,’ DeShawn said.
‘I saw it on the news this morning.’
‘You okay?’
‘I’m upset.’
‘You understand, Miles, this has anything to do with the Barradas, you’re moved in five seconds.’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘You sound very confident.’
‘They wouldn’t kill my shrink. If they found me, they’d kill me. And probably not with a bomb off their own turf – too hard to transport. They’d just put bullets in my head.’
‘You know anything about this tragedy, Miles?’
‘No.’
‘What happened to your face?’
‘Got into a fight last night.’
‘Man, wooing and fighting, you had quite an evening.’ A tone of disbelief tinged his voice.
‘Where are we going?’ Miles started to ask, but then they were there. DeShawn inched the car past Allison’s burned building. Yellow fire-scene tape haloed the lot; a group of firefighters were sifting the ashes toward the rear of the building, a couple of news stations from Albuquerque had parked their satellite wagons down from the wreckage. A spill of people stood along the sidewalk, gawking at the ruin. The lot was empty, Allison’s car towed away.
Miles pointed at the firemen shaking a sifter, ashes tumbling at their feet. ‘They’re searching for the door’s lock, to see if it’s locked or not. A firefighter friend in Miami told me it’s one of the first items of evidence they search for.’ His voice sounded dead to him. ‘I heard on the news they found her. Do you think she suffered?’
‘No, Miles, she didn’t. There was… very little left of Doctor Vance. They’ve only found, um, pieces. I’m sure she died in the force of the blast, she didn’t burn to death.’
Miles put his face in his hands, forced his emotions back under control. He could have stopped it, if he’d found Sorenson’s hidden case. He missed it and she died. ‘Oh, goddamn.’
‘I’ll miss her,’ Andy said from the backseat.
‘I’m sorry, man, I know you said she’d been a great help to you.’ DeShawn put a hand on Miles’s shoulder.
Miles kept his voice neutral. ‘Do they know what happened?’ He was going to catch Sorenson, or whoever was ultimately responsible for Allison’s death, and drag them in front of DeShawn, like a cat dropping a dead mouse at its master’s feet.
‘I talked to the arson investigators. They can’t search the front of the building, where the floors collapsed, until they get heavy moving equipment in from Albuquerque. They got to do chemical tests, see if it was a gas explosion or see if it was a bomb. Don’t know yet.’
They drove away from the burned hulk.
‘I have to ask again, Miles, did she know you were in witness protection?’
‘No. I never told her. I was going to – but I didn’t want her to know. I was ashamed.’
‘So her records, no way they survived the blast and the fire, and even if they did, they couldn’t disclose your witness status. That’s our number-one concern,’ DeShawn said.
‘Not that my doctor’s murdered,’ Miles said. ‘Really, it’s nice y’all care.’
DeShawn pulled the car over, parked, gave Miles a hard stare. ‘Do you know for a fact she was murdered?’
‘I know this has nothing to do with the Barradas.’
‘But it’s got to do with something, doesn’t it, Miles? You tell me another doctor, who I can’t find a record of, wants to help Allison with your therapy and that day she’s dead.’
‘I must have gotten his name wrong. Sorenstam, Sorengard, I only met him for a minute. Allison said she used to work with him.’
‘If the arson team finds this was deliberate, you’re answering their questions.’
‘I understand. How soon before they know?’
‘Well, the investigators got to get deep into the building once it’s safe, run those chemical tests, check with the gas company to see if an undue amount of gas fed into the building. But I think it’s got to be a gas leak. All the renovations going on in that building, a worker damaged a pipe, started a leak. Why would anyone bomb a shrink in Santa Fe?’
‘Be a Boy Scout,’ Andy said from the backseat. ‘Tell him nothing but the truth.’
Instead he wondered what else DeShawn might say, if Miles didn’t make a big deal out of the question: ‘Is her house okay?’
DeShawn raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean, okay?’
‘I assume the police or the arson investigators have gone to her house to look for her.’
‘Yes.’
‘It wasn’t, I don’t know, burglarized or anything?’ He kept his gaze fixed on the window. ‘People rob dead people’s houses all the time.’
‘Miles, what aren’t you telling me?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt her.’
‘Far as I know, her house checked out just fine.’
So. The shooter had cleaned up before he left, didn’t want anyone unduly suspicious about what had happened at Allison’s house. The shooter had talked about paying Miles for research, which he called by the name Frost – a code name, Miles guessed, since it had also been inscribed on Nathan’s medical bracelet. Research could be either big bulky files of paper or computer disks or both. Easily hidden, but also easily found and moved.
Miles said, ‘Let’s cut to the chase. Are you all going to move me?’ He reckoned Washington bureaucrats were at work figuring the calculus of his life’s worth, wondering if moving him was warranted just because his doctor had died in an unusual way. But he couldn’t tread water and stay in the Michael Raymond life; not if the
