waited. It didn't take long.
Kid's name popped up on-screen. So did his date of birth. So did verification that he attended St. John's University in New York City for three years. The program listed the exact dates he was enrolled as well as his official extracurricular activities. In this case it was singular: SJU football team, freshman through junior.
Jack scrolled down. He knew what he was going to find, there was no doubt about it. And find it he did.
Kid had lied to him. He did not receive his degree from Maryland State. He did not attend, at any time, Maryland State or any other school in Maryland.
As he realized what had happened, the thoughts and images came into Jack's head as if driven there by a tornado. They whirled through him, rocking him back in his chair.
Kid's datebook. The one Jack found in the Mortician's apartment. It listed the Destination over and over again. And one name: Charlotte. Not a name, he realized. Not a name of a person. A place. An abbreviation for a place!
Grace: Bad things had happened to people around him. People he loved.
Samsonite: You tried to have a baby but your wife had an abortion.
Grace: He felt responsible for certain things, people getting hurt. Maybe even getting killed.
No, it was impossible. It was fucking impossible!
McCoy: You're the point man. There has to be some connection.
But it's not impossible, Jack realized. It was all too possible. There is a connection. And it's from one horror to another. From one nightmare to the next.
And now he remembered something. Something Caroline had told him several months before the Charlottesville opening. He had thought it was about the restaurant. Now he thought differently. That's the way I feel down in Virginia, she'd said. I have something down there that's beautiful. That's mine.
Jack forced himself to look at the computer screen. He saw the name of the second college that Kid had attended. Saw the location. Saw the dates he was there.
Virginia State University.
Thirty minutes from Charlottesville.
There the entire year Caroline was opening up the restaurant.
Caroline was the one who had told Kid about her abortion. It's the only way he could have known.
He felt responsible for people getting hurt. Maybe even getting killed.
Kid had lied when he stood in Jack's living room that first time. He had known about Caroline's death and Jack's injuries before he'd come back to New York, before he'd gone to see Dom. He had come back to New York specifically to heal him; Jack knew that now. To save him. Because somehow, some way, Kid had been unable to save the woman he loved. His Destination.
Caroline.
– '-'-'JACK KELLER HAD not been back to Charlottesville since the robbery and murder. He had told himself he would never go there again. But now he decided to return. He had to. Everything led back there. Everything seemed to start there. He had to go. And as soon as he'd made the decision, he knew he would have to leave immediately. Well, not quite immediately. He had one other thing to do first.
First, he wept.
FORTY-SIX
It was much easier than expected.
Easier than Charlottesville, which was surprisingly easy.
Easier than that black woman in the park.
Easier than the stripper in her bathtub and even easier than that whacked-out junkie, tripping and helpless and moaning in her bed.
This one was waiting, waiting for her own death. She was smiling, welcoming, reaching out with open arms. How could it be any easier than that?
It couldn't.
Her skin ripped right open and she didn't make a sound. She was supposed to be so ferocious, so strong, but she tore as easily as a piece of cheap paper. Her throat and then her chest, open and exposed, sliced and severed. She crumpled and fell like a rag doll and lay still on the floor of her bedroom.
Easy, easy, easy.
The surprise was the man, when he came charging in. She had said they were alone, so it was confusing when the door opened and that angry roar filled the room. It was a surprise, all right, but it didn't change anything. The man was strong but flabby. Old and out of shape. He was easy, too. He died as quickly as all the others.
That was the thing about death, wasn't it?
For something that lasted forever, it happened so quickly.
Life was long and hard. So, so hard.
But death was quick. And so, so easy.
FORTY-SEVEN
Sergeant Patience McCoy spread the photographs across her desk. She knew this wasn't the only place she was going to see them, either. By tomorrow morning, they'd be plastered all over the tabs, from the Enquirer to the New York Post. She didn't know how the hell those papers got crime-scene photos but they always seemed to manage. And this was definitely worthy of the front page.
Joe and Eva Migliarini stabbed to death in their own home.
In their own bedroom.
Christ. How does the head of one of New York's mob families get suckered in his own suburban bedroom?
She could feel the headache coming on. Double Christ. Just what she needed was a migraine.
McCoy had spent the day trying to find Grace Childress. No luck. The woman had disappeared. She didn't like the fact that, when she and her latest partner went to the woman's apartment, it had turned out to be a sublet. It indicated rootlessness, never a good sign. They'd gotten a judge to immediately give them a warrant to enter the apartment but McCoy's search turned up little except that it appeared that a good deal of Grace's clothes were gone. It looked like Kid's Rookie/Destination had packed up and flown the coop. McCoy had a lot of people out looking for her but they didn't have a hell of a lot to go on. Her neighbors barely knew her. The sublet had been arranged through an agency; the apartment owner had met her for all of thirty seconds. The doormen didn't know her well, she hadn't been there that long.
McCoy picked up the phone, dialed a two-digit extension. 'Lewis,' she said, picturing the pasty-faced nerdy cop at the other end. Lewis looked like he'd never seen fresh air before. Like he lived in the precinct, which he easily could have done because the only things he liked to do were go through files and study statistics. 'I just had an idea for once in my damn life. I want you to look up any records we've got on Jack Keller.'
'That's the one, his wife was killed, right?'
'That's the one,' she said.
'What kind of records you looking for?'
'Break-ins, burglaries, harassment, arrests, anything. Go back as far as you can go. There's a connection here somewhere and I'm gonna find it if it's the last goddamn thing I do.' She hung up, harder than she intended to.
McCoy didn't like what was happening. She didn't like what they'd found in the computer about Grace Childress, either.
What she didn't like the most, however, was that Jack Keller had disappeared, too.
The Entertainer dead. Samsonite dead. Now the Mortician. Dead.
The Murderess – invisible. Nonexistent.
Grace Childress gone. Whether she was the Rookie or the Destination or both, she was gone. And Jack Keller
