When Karen’s phone rang, it was late afternoon. Her breath caught as she saw it was Woody Lapham returning her call. This was the call she’d been waiting for.
Hours earlier, Lee had phoned with more shocking news. The FBI had taken Gleason into custody. Lee had decided to delay his departure to camp until the evening. He wanted to stay local, see if Gleason’s arrest had any connection to Susie and Cam.
Karen’s calls to Ellen went unanswered. Much about Karen’s new life troubled her, but being out of the loop was perhaps the most difficult adjustment of all. She no longer had access to the first family’s schedule, had no idea where they were, or what they were doing at all times. It was like losing a limb.
She had made her call to Woody Lapham out of desperation. She could not stand not knowing any longer. It ate at her, made it impossible to think about anything else. Lapham had plenty of pals in the FBI, and she hoped he might be willing to share some privileged information with her. Goodness knew she’d done enough favors for him over the years.
“Are you sitting down?” Lapham said after the greetings and a brief catch-up conversation.
“I am,” said Karen. She was perched on a queen bed in the tiny upstairs bedroom. The room smelled of pine and mothballs. The heavy bedspread on which she sat could probably have shielded her from x-rays.
“I know why the FBI hauled Gleason away, and you’re not going to believe it.”
Her free hand gripped the edge of the bed with force. “Tell me.”
“Guess who invested a huge chunk of his personal wealth in ProNeural?”
“What?” Karen’s entire face screwed up.
“Yup. He was a major investor. For some reason the president had the FBI investigating Gleason and they found all sorts of incriminating evidence. Not sure why Yoshi didn’t rat the guy out. Could have been saving the ammo for a plea bargain, but the CEO sang a different tune. Said it was Gleason who pushed Yoshi into supplying the TPI kids with ProNeural, and it was Gleason’s scheme to fake the data to jack up sales and get more interest in the product. He was trying to make his hefty investment pay off.”
Karen recalled the day she stole the ProNeural smart pills—how oddly Gleason had behaved, how he’d seemed to care a lot more about her snooping around his office computer than what she was doing in his office in the first place. Maybe he’d been corresponding about his scheme and had stepped away at an inopportune moment.
“Cam knew, didn’t he?” Karen asked, even though she knew the answer.
“Someone had been sending Gleason anonymous messages warning him to stop or else kind of thing,” said Lapham. “Why do you think it was Cam?”
“Because when the FBI searched his bedroom they found a picture of Gleason with the words I know what you are, I know what you do scrawled all over it. I’d found something similar days earlier—a piece of paper with those same phrases printed all the way down the page.”
“Guess now you know what he meant by it,” said Lapham.
“No doubt.”
“It goes without saying this conversation never happened.”
“You can trust me,” she said.
Her lips might have been sealed, but her thoughts were spinning. The news did not change anything, not exactly. It was still possible Gleason was being cagey about Cam because he and Yoshi had done something besides peddle harmless pills. Like Lee had said, nothing added up.
Karen checked the time on her phone. Lee had left D.C. a few hours ago, and would be arriving at camp shortly.
She hoped he’d bring some answers with him.
* * *
IN MAUSER’S opinion, following Lee was the easy part. The GPS locator did the lion’s share of the work. Figuring out where Lee was headed was an entirely different matter. Lee had spent much of the day at the White House, which made sense because of Cam. The long wait had allowed Easley to gather supplies and stock up for whatever might be coming next.
It was time for next.
Mauser was dressed for battle, wearing black camo pants and a dark jacket. He was also well armed, with two AR-15 tactical rifles and plenty of ammo stashed in his van. He also had in his possession his beloved Mauser C96 pistol—a special gun he wanted to use for a very special kill.
Drew Easley rode shotgun. His long hair, pulled back into a tight ponytail, swayed across his broad shoulders while he diligently cleaned his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. He wore an outfit similar to Mauser’s.
The landscape had been a desolate highway dotted with farmhouses, but now even those were few and far between. Mauser thought he had a good sense of things, a bit of clairvoyance—a gift from his mother, he supposed. She always knew when he was headed for some sort of trouble. His intuition had helped Mauser peg undercover cops, given him a sense which deals might go sour. He had ignored his gut once and it had cost him five years of hard time. He never ignored it again.
His gut was talking to him now, telling him in no uncertain terms they were going to hit the jackpot.
“You’re sure this is worth it?” Easley asked, gazing at the darkness outside his window.
“You sure you want us to have supply to sell?” Mauser answered.
Easley snorted his displeasure. “You think Rainmaker would cut us off like that?”
“No doubt about it,” said Mauser.
Easley mulled this over and offered a slight nod—his final approval. No going back now.
“You worried about the FBI?” Easley’s voice was like a rumble of thunder.
“What? The shooting, you mean?”
“Yeah. That.”
“They haven’t produced a single useful lead, so no, I’m not worried at all,” Mauser said. “If you ask me, Cam running away is the best thing that’s happened to them. It distracts Joe Public from their incompetence.”
Another nod from Easley. “What if Blackwood takes us to his girlfriend’s house and not to the girl?” he asked.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere, and he’s with his kid. He’s not going to a girlfriend’s house.”
“You know what I mean.”
Easley was a man of few words, and Mauser knew exactly what he meant.
“If we get the chance, we’ll take him at gunpoint and make him bring us to her.”
“The girl is sick, right? She won’t be alone. Someone’s gotta be looking after her.”
Mauser had thought the same. “Yeah, I’m sure other people will be there, wherever there is.”
“What do we do about them?”
Mauser focused on the road. The van’s headlights were like two knives slicing the void.
“I guess we’ll do what we have to do,” he said in a flat voice.