WE DRIVE NORTH ON THE I-95 IN SILENCE, WITH CHESAPEAKE Bay on our right for most of the journey.
DJ and I sit up front. I can tell that he’s read Hetta the riot act, instructed her to stay with her brother, and that she’s not happy about it. She sits in back, her leg stretched across the seat, radiating contempt.
We’re somewhere past Baltimore when DJ, to break the mood, tells us that the upside of his removal from the Gapes inquiry is that he and his wife-to-be get to spend a proper honeymoon together.
‘First time around?’ I ask.
‘Second.’ He pauses. ‘I was lucky. My first was a real good one. Lena and I shared twenty-five great years before she got sick. Cathy and Bernie were our neighbors. Bernie died five years before Lena. Cathy was her best friend, and helped me nurse her till she had to go into the hospice.’
He pauses again. ‘It took Cathy and me a while to get together. I’m pretty sure, wherever she is, Lena’s OK with it.’
I’m pretty sure too.
‘Josh should take a leaf out of your book,’ Hetta says. It’s the first time she’s spoken since we passed Baltimore’s northern limits, around fifty miles back.
‘How’s that?’ DJ glances into the mirror.
‘You know how many years it is since his wife died?’
‘Sorry for your loss,’ Wharton says, turning to me.
Hetta leans forward. ‘You said it yourself, DJ.’
‘Said what?
‘That Lena wouldn’t have wanted you to stay stuck in the past.’
‘She wouldn’t.’
‘So, why can’t you move on, Josh?’
Wharton’s jaw clenches. ‘You’re out of line, Hart.’
‘Just saying.’
DJ adjusts the mirror so he can look at her directly. ‘So, how many relationships you had that panned out?’
‘I’m nothing to do with it. This is about Josh.’
‘You can be so damned obnoxious at times, you know that?’ DJ says.
‘I’m trying to help.’
I turn and face her. ‘So tell me. How the fuck does this help?’
‘Well, I—’
‘You don’t simply move on.’ Wharton softens his tone, but I can hear him still trying to tamp down his anger. ‘Grief needs to make its own journey.’
‘What does that even mean?’ she says.
‘It means it’s personal. Everybody does what he or she does to get through it. It also means that being with Cathy doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving Lena.’
Hetta sits on this for a mile, maybe two, until the silence becomes deafening.
‘And your new wife is cool with that?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She is completely cool with that.’
We pull up in front of a one-story house with a flagpole out front on a quiet street in Philly’s northeast quarter.
DJ comes round the back and opens Hetta’s door. She swings her leg onto the ground, stops, turns to me and touches my shoulder.
‘Josh, hey, I’m really sorry …’
I look at her and nod. She gets out. Wharton, holding her case, walks her up to the porch where her brother is standing and staring at us. Mikey isn’t what I expected: he is short, wiry, balding and close to fifty. You’d never believe he’d survived a bullet. Just before she reaches him, Hetta turns and gives me a weak smile.
DJ and Mikey exchange a few words and shake hands. Mikey and Hetta then disappear inside.
Fifteen minutes later, DJ and I are heading south on I-95.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, a couple of minutes after we cross the Delaware River.
‘What for?’
‘For what was said back there.’
‘Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Sometimes … Hart, she—’
‘It’s OK, DJ. Really.’
‘I had no idea,’ he says after we’ve driven on a while.
‘About what?’
‘Your wife.’
I know this isn’t true. But I know, too, he’s saying it for all the right reasons.
‘It doesn’t go away, does it?’
‘No,’ I reply.
We drive on.
‘DJ?’
He turns, expecting me to say something about Hope or Lena. Instead, I ask him why he thinks Lefortz was interested in a couple of Ukrainians involved in the illicit trade of nuclear materials and components.
He gives it some thought. ‘I don’t think it was about the nuke stuff. I think it was about money. The real focus of the Bureau’s work with Justice and Treasury was some kind of high-profile, cross-border money-laundering scam.’
‘And that’s what the President was interested in?’
‘I think so. Lefortz implied that this probe was extremely close-held.’
It must have been. Even Reuben didn’t know about it.
‘And you and Lefortz spoke about it the night he died?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Right before he met you out at the airport.’
We drive on.
‘He asked you to throw Bureau protection around a couple of our key witnesses that night, right?’
He nods. ‘Sure. Your shrink pal out west and the lawyer who forgot the two of you ever met.’
‘Would you be able to contact them without anybody knowing?’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘Because I need to disappear for a while.’
‘I thought you … You mean …?’ His eyes narrow. ‘Well, I’ll be dipped.’
We don’t exchange another word till we pull off Delaware Route One and turn into the Community Based Inpatient Clinic, a cluster of low buildings on reclaimed mudflats south of Dover Air Force Base.
A flock of wading birds, startled by our arrival, wheel above our heads. Their shrill cries fill the damp, cold air.
DJ walks me to the entrance where a nurse, in white, is waiting.