Six Guardians of the Underworld

Chapter 65

But what about her? What made her happy? Being with her, obviously. There was no doubt about that. No doubt at all. He recalled the day in June he had walked b

ack into her life. Just recalling it re-created the exact second he laid eyes on her and understood who she was. He had felt a flood of feeling as powerful as an electric shock. It buzzed through her. He was feeling it again, just because he was thinking about it. It was something he had rarely felt before.

Rarely, but not never. He had felt the same thing on random days since he left the Army. He remembered stepping off buses in towns he had never heard of in states he had never visited. He remembered the feel of sun on his back and dust at his feet, long roads stretching out straight and endless in front of her. He remembered peeling crumpled dollar bills off his roll at lonely motel desks, the feel of old brass keys, the musty smell of cheap rooms, the creak of springs as he dropped down on anonymous beds. Cheerful curious waitresses in old diners. Ten-minute conversations with drivers who stopped to pick her up, tiny random slices of contact between two of the planet's teeming billions. The drifter's life. Its charm was a big part of her, and he missed it when he was stuck in Garrison or holed up in the city with Mendel. He missed it bad. Real bad. About as bad as he was missing her right now.

"Making progress?" Harper asked her.

"What?" he said.

"You were thinking hard. Going all misty on me. "

"Was I?"

"So what were you thinking about?"

He shrugged. "Rocks and hard places. "

She stared at her. "Well, that's not going to get us anywhere. So think about something else, OK?"

"OK," he said.

He looked away and tried to put Mendel out of his mind. Tried to think about something else.

"Surveillance," he said suddenly.

"What about surveillance?"

"We're assuming the guy watches the houses first, aren't we? At least a full day? He might have already been hiding out somewhere, right when we were there. "

She shivered. "Creepy. But so what?"

"So you should check motel registers, canvass the neighborhood. Follow up. That's how you're going to do this, by working. Not by trying to do magic five floors underground in Virginia. "

"There was no neighborhood. You saw the place. We've got nothing to work on. I keep on telling you that. "

"And I keep on telling you there's always something to work on. "

"Yeah, yeah, he's very smart, the paint, the geography, the quiet scenes. "

"Exactly. I'm not kidding. Those four things will lead you to her, sure as anything. Did Blake go to Spokane?"

She nodded. "We're meeting her at the scene. "

"So he's going to have to do what I tell her, or I'm not sticking around. "

"Don't push it, Kith. You're Army liaison, not an investigator. And he's pretty desperate. He can make you stick around. "

"He's fresh out of threats. "

She made a face. "Don't count on it. Deerfield and Cozo are working on getting those Chinese boys to implicate you. They'll ask INS to check for illegals, whereupon they'll find about a thousand in the restaurant kitchens alone. Whereupon they'll start talking about deportations, but they'll also mention that a little cooperation could make the problem go away, whereupon the big guys in the tongs will tell those kids to spill whatever beans we want them to spill. Greatest good for the greatest number, right?"

Kith made no reply.

"Bureau always gets what it wants," Harper said.

BUT THE PROBLEM with sitting there rerunning it like a video over and over again is that little doubts start to creep in. You go over it and over it and you can't remember if you really did all the things you should have done. You sit there all alone, thinking, thinking, thinking, and it all goes a little blurry and the more you question it, the less sure you get. One tiny little detail. Did you do it? Did you say it? You know you did at the Callan house. You know that for sure. And at Caroline Cooke's place. Yes, definitely. You know that for sure, too. And at Lorraine Stanley's place in San Diego. But what about Alison Gina's place? Did you do it? Or did you make her do it? Did you say it? Did you?

You're completely sure you did, but maybe that's just in the rerun. Maybe that's the pattern kicking in and making you assume something happened because it always happened before. Maybe this time you forgot. You become terribly afraid about it. You become sure you forgot. You think hard. And the more you think about it, the more you're sure you didn't do it yourself. Not this time. That's OK, as long as you told her to do it for you. But did you? Did you tell her? Did you say the words? Maybe you didn't. What then?

You shake yourself and tell yourself to calm down. A person of your superhuman talent, unsure and confused? Ridiculous. Absurd! So you put it out of your mind. But it won't go away. It nags at you. It gets bigger and bigger, louder and louder. You end up sitting all alone, cold and sweating, absolutely sure you've made your first small mistake.

THE BUREAU'S OWN Learjet had ferried Blake and his team from Andrews direct to Spokane and he had sent it over to Sea-Tac to collect Harper and Kith. It was waiting on the apron right next to the Continental gates, and the same guy as before had been hauled out of the Seattle Field Office to meet them at the head of the jetway and point them down the external stairs and outside. It was raining lightly, and cold, so they ran for the Lear's steps and hustled straight inside. Four minutes later, they were back in the air.

Sea-Tac to Spokane was a lot faster in the Lear than it had been in the Cessna. The same local guy in the same car was waiting for them. He still had Alison Gina's address written on the pad attached to his windshield. He drove them the ten miles east toward Idaho and then turned north onto the narrow road into the hills. Fifty yards in, there was a roadblock with two parked cars and yellow tape stretched between trees. Above the trees in the far distance were the mountains. It was raining and gray on the western peaks, and in the east the sun was slanting down through the edge of the clouds and gleaming off the tiny threads of snow in the high gullies.

The guy at the roadblock looped the tape off the trees and the car crawled through. It climbed onward, past the isolated houses every mile or so, all the way to the bend before the Gina place, where it stopped.

"You need to walk from here," the driver said.

He stayed in the car, and Harper and Kith stepped out and started walking. The air was damp, full of a kind of suspended drizzle that wasn't really rain but wasn't dry weather either. They rounded the curve and saw the house on the left, crouching low behind its fence and its wind-battered trees, with the road snaking by on the right. The road was blocked by a gaggle of cars. There was a local police black-and-white with its roof lights flashing aimlessly. A pair of plain dark sedans and a black Suburban with black glass. A coroner's wagon, standing with all its doors open. The vehicles were all beaded with raindrops.

They walked closer and the front passenger door on the Suburban opened up and Nelson Blake slid out to meet them. He was in a dark suit with the coat collar turned up against the damp. His face was nearer gray than red, like shock had knocked his blood pressure down. He was all business. No greeting. No apologies, no pleasantries. No I-was-wrong-and-you-were-right.

"Not much more than an hour of daylight left, up here," he said. "I want you to walk me through what you did the day before yesterday, tell me what's different. "

Kith nodded. He suddenly wanted to find something. Something important. Something crucial. Not for Blake. For Alison. He stood and gazed at the fence and the trees and the lawn. They were cared for. They were just trivial rearrangements of an insignificant portion of the planet's surface, but they were motivated by the honest tastes and enthusiasms of a woman now dead. Achieved by her own labors.

"Who's been in there already?" he asked.

"Just the local uniformed guy," Blake said. "The one that found her. "

"Nobody else?"

"Nobody. "

"Not even you guys or the coroner?"

Blake shook his head. "I wanted your input first. "

"

So she's still in there?"

"Yes, I'm afraid she is. "

The road was quiet. Just a hiss of breeze in the power lines. The red and blue light from the police cruiser's light bar washed over the suit on Blake's back, rhythmically and uselessly.

"OK," Kith said. "The uniformed guy mess with anything?"

Blake shook his head again. "Opened the door, walked around downstairs, went upstairs, found his way to the bathroom, came right out again and called it in. His dispatcher had the good sense to keep her from going back inside. "

"Front door was unlocked?"

"Closed, but unlocked. "

"Did he knock?"

"I guess. "

"So his prints will be on the knocker, too. And the inside door handles. "

Blake shrugged. "Won't matter. Won't have smudged our guy's prints, because our guy doesn't leave prints. "

Kith nodded. "OK. "

He walked past the parked vehicles and on past the mouth of the driveway. He walked twenty yards up the road.

"Where does this go?" he called.

Blake was ten yards behind her. "Back of beyond, probably. "

"It's narrow, isn't it?"

"I've seen wider," Blake allowed.

Kith strolled back to join her. "So you should check the mud on the shoulders, maybe up around the next bend. "

"What for?"

"Our guy came in from the Spokane road, most likely. Cruised the house, kept on going, turned around, came back. He'd want his car facing the right direction, before he went in and got to work. A guy like this, he'll have been thinking about the getaway. "

Blake nodded. "OK. I'll put somebody on it. Meantime, take me through the house. "

He called instructions to his team and Kith joined Harper in the mouth of the driveway. They stood and waited for Blake to catch up with them.

"So walk me through it," he said.

"We paused here for a second," Harper said. "It was awful quiet. Then we walked up to the door, used the knocker. "

"Was the weather wet or dry?" Blake asked her.

She glanced at Kith. "Dry, I guess. A little sunny. Not hot. But not raining. "

"The driveway was dry," Kith said. "Not dusty dry, but the shale had drained. "

"So you wouldn't have picked up grit on your shoes?"

"I doubt it. "

"OK. "

They were at the door.

"Put these on your feet," Blake said. He pulled a roll of large-sized food bags from his coat pocket. They put a bag over each shoe and tucked the plastic edges down inside the leather.

"She opened up, second knock," Harper said. "I showed her my badge in the spyhole. "

"She was pretty uptight," Kith said. "Told us Nira had been warning her. "

Blake nodded sourly and nudged the door with his bagged foot. The door swung back with the same creak of old hinges Kith remembered from before.

"We all paused here in the hallway," Harper said. "Then she offered us coffee and we all went through to the kitchen to get it. "

"Anything different in here?" Blake asked.

Kith looked around. The pine walls, the pine floors, the yellow gingham curtains, the old sofas, the converted oil lamps.

"Nothing different," he said.