Stevens lay awake through the night, staring at the ceiling and wrestling with the covers. By three in the morning, Nancy had had enough. “Go away,” she said, groaning, kicking at him under the sheet. “Some of us actually want to be here.”
Stevens rubbed her back until he heard her breathing slow again. Then he slipped out from the covers and crept downstairs to the basement—his man cave, Nancy called it—sat in his favorite chair, and watched basketball highlights on mute. Triceratops followed him down, lay at his feet, and fell promptly asleep. He whimpered and growled, chasing imaginary prey in his dreams.
Hope he’s catching something, Stevens thought. Even if I’m not.
He’d left Windermere and Mathers in the FBI office once it became clear that Drew Harris, SAC of Criminal Investigations, wasn’t about to authorize a flight to Miami, not after Salazar and Kent had come up blanks.
“We’ll get Miami on it,” he told Windermere, winking. “We didn’t poach all of their best agents.”
“Just the Supercop,” said Mathers, and Windermere groaned and swung a fist at him.
“Just the Supercop,” said Harris. “Brief the Miami office and let them know what to look for. You have Miami PD involved also, I expect.”
Windermere nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Should be a piece of cake, then.” Harris gave her a smile. “You can fly down when they catch him. We’ll make sure it’s your picture that gets in the papers.”
“I don’t care about pictures,” said Windermere, but her boss’s decision was final. She and Mathers hung around on the phone to Miami, and Stevens made plans to rejoin them in the morning.
Now, though, Stevens stared unseeing at the TV screen and wished desperately he and Windermere were on scene. It was torture sitting and waiting while someone else worked the case, and what if the guy got away? Defeat would be a lot easier to swallow if he himself screwed up. Not so much if he was forced to watch a failed takedown from thousands of miles away.
But Harris had spoken, and there was probably no way Tim Lesley would have approved Stevens’s flight to Miami anyway. Unless Aunt Margaret really was in danger . . .
The Pyatt angle. Stevens couldn’t figure it. Donna McNaughton had called from Duluth that evening with news about Eli Cody. “Got our geeks into Cody’s old computer,” she said. “What a fossil. Guy was still using Internet Explorer, for Christ’s sake.”
“A dead end, then?”
“Not on your life. They found a bunch of old text files. Get this, Kirk: half-written suicide notes. Blah, blah, blah, my life’s so crummy, the usual. But a lot of ‘Fuck you, Spenser Pyatt’ and ‘I love you, Paige Sinisalo’ in there, too.”
“Jesus. Really?”
“Oh, yeah. You know he dated her once? Nineteen sixty-two. Fifty years ago, Kirk. And still carrying the goddamn torch.”
“Pyatt’s son told me about it,” Stevens said. “I heard it ended badly.”
“Not for Spenser Pyatt.” McNaughton chuckled, grim. “At least not right away.”
Suicide notes. Unrequited love, fifty years strong. Two dead octogenarians and a jet-setting killer on his way to Miami. Stevens shifted his weight. Settled back in his chair and tried to focus on basketball. On sleep. On anything but Richard O’Brien. It was an impossible task. Stevens sat in his basement until dawn, replaying his fears again and again as the sun rose over Saint Paul—and Miami.