The important thing to remember was not to treat the mark different from all the others.
“Target practice. That’s all they are.”
The man who’d taught him that—who’d taught him everything he knew that he hadn’t learned from experience—was long dead, by his own protégé’s hand, but the proof of his words was in the way he’d died. In the end, Macklin’s mentor was target practice, nothing more. Anger, anguish, sorrow, pride, all the things that came with betrayal, were unnecessary distractions. Macklin had disposed of him like tissue.
He assembled a file as he had with all the others, from family albums, medical reports, school yearbooks—
Roger’s first tooth.
He peeled it from the adhesive Donna had used all those years ago to add it to the scrapbook, rolled the jagged little thing between thumb and forefinger and stuck it back down. It was just an exercise, repeated many times, and each time it was connected to a dead man. He placed little store in psychic vibrations. Personal contact brought him that much closer to the target.
Seated in the Warren living room with the blinds drawn, he paged through the big three-ring binder, removing those items he considered useful and laying them side by side on the coffee table: Roger’s kindergarten photo, smiling with lips pressed tight in the garish cowboy shirt his mother had picked out for the all-important session; a snap of a somewhat sullen adolescent sorting through a handful of pebbles on the shore of Lake Superior; a graduating high-school senior wearing his first suit and tie, good-looking enough but not as handsome as his smug expression seemed to announce. A grainy telephoto shot, this time in a different suit and dark glasses, hands folded at his waist at his mother’s graveside. A contact had smuggled that one out of the MacNamara Federal Building in Detroit.
The rest—including the medical file, which included only information gathered during the marriage—had come to him in a thick padded envelope ten days after Donna’s funeral, by way of the same legal firm she’d retained to represent her in the divorce. There had been no note included other than a letter typed on the firm’s stationery, explaining their late client had made arrangements to send the material to him upon her death.
There would be no sentimentality involved. It was her way of reminding him of what he’d thrown away, grinding guilt in with her heel. It said a good deal about her, about her inability to let go of a grudge, and of her lack of understanding of the man with whom she’d spent seventeen years of her life. He’d put aside any regrets in the relief of their parting at last, and with so few ramifications; her attorney, in his greed to own a substantial part of the money Macklin had made from fulfilling mortal contracts, had neglected to report what his client had told him to the police. In the end, all it had cost was money. Replacing it had been no challenge. His services were always in demand.
True, he’d still felt some responsibility for Roger, and when he learned that Macklin’s former employers had chosen his son to fill his vacancy (their faith in genetics was almost touching), he’d risked death to turn him from that path. That settled—or so he’d hoped—he’d ignored his own instincts and attended Donna’s burial, exposing himself to police and FBI photographers and expanding his official file. When Roger responded by trying to knock him down, Macklin knew he’d discharged all his responsibilities, with interest.
Not because of anger. He’d learned early to keep uncontrollable emotions in a kind of lock box. And certainly not because of pain. However adept his son was with edged and percussion weapons, his idea of hand-to-hand combat was a John Wayne–style roundhouse right at an obliging chin. Macklin had seen it coming like a slow-moving truck. He could have ducked it entirely, let the young fool stumble and fall on his face in front of an audience of mourners, but out of some lingering sense of—what, paternal debt? More likely it was to avoid a long, drawn-out campaign of unresolved revenge—he’d let the blow glance along his jaw, leaving a colorful bruise but no real discomfort. It gave satisfaction to the boy and closure to the man.
Or so he’d thought.
If Macklin had a professional failing, it was that he assumed everyone who thrived in his occupation avoided human feelings like the flu. When he learned through the grapevine that Roger had resumed doing wet work, he assumed that time and experience had taught him to leave things as they lay beside his mother’s plot and get on with business.
Macklin’s own contacts in law enforcement had been of the same opinion. Their superiors had dared to hope that Roger would now “turn” and inform on his father. Cops on the beat and agents in the field had picked him up and used all their psychology, but were neither disappointed nor surprised when he laughed in their faces. But when the transcripts reached Macklin, he read between the lines and knew nothing had changed.
When Laurie told him that Roger had called asking after Peter, and that she’d said they were separating and seeking a divorce, he’d suspected the worst.
Which was what had happened.
Their decision to end the marriage was mutual, and far from rancorous. Macklin’s courtship intentions of leaving the Life behind him had failed; it would not leave him. He hadn’t expected her to live with that truth. Who would, having the ability to choose? He did not. And he was grateful for the warning, although he wished she’d been more circumspect about their situation.
But it would have been unreasonable to expect otherwise. She hadn’t had his practice in the art of dissembling, or for that matter the need to study. He’d dug this hole and now it was up to him to get her out of it.
After the email came demanding ransom in return for sparing her, he’d wasted time ticking through his list of enemies. Most he’d killed, which was what you did with enemies rather than collect them like autographs. Some were in prison, and would be until they left in boxes or in wheelchairs with oxygen tanks onboard. While that wouldn’t have stopped them from hiring out the work, he rejected that explanation.
There was no percentage in revenge, and in every convict’s heart lurked the hope of parole. The slightest shadow on their record of good behavior would destroy that. The rest were at large and had been for a long time after he’d given them reason to wish him extinct. Too long. If they were ever going to strike they’d have done it by now.
Even that was time squandered. The only person, apart from Leo Dorfman and Laurie, who knew Macklin didn’t “want to live with her” was Roger. He should have seen that right away. It made him furious—but only with himself. He hadn’t the luxury of directing it anywhere else.
He turned again to the medical report. Dorfman, he knew, could use his own contacts to obtain more recent information, but there were things of interest in the old file that might be of advantage. At ten, following a season of fatigue, night sweats, and joint pain during which the boy’s grades had fallen, Donna had taken him to a pediatrician, who’d ordered tests and X-rays and diagnosed rheumatic fever. Bed rest and an aggressive treatment involving antibiotics, cortisone, and related steroids over the summer break had restored him to normal, so that with some remedial education he’d been able to rejoin his class without missing a grade. Regular checkups had failed to note any significant damage to the heart valves.
Now, Macklin’s search online revealed that without daily doses of penicillin, sulfomides, and other antibiotics, recurrent attacks were a possible danger. These could lead to endocarditis, a bacterial infection threatening the health of the aortic valve, the tricuspid valve, and the aorta itself, which if not treated early made the victim susceptible to a coronary attack or, transmitted by blood, to kidney failure, renal shutdown, and probably death.
In the normal course of events, Donna would have done whatever was necessary to prevent the worst; but sometime during Roger’s adolescence, her social drinking had escalated to alcoholism. Macklin didn’t know just when she’d begun to suspect that her husband’s retail camera business was a blind, or when she learned the rest; but not long after their son turned seventeen, she’d entered into divorce proceedings. Macklin couldn’t be sure, because his work—his real work—had taken him away from home for weeks at a time, leaving such things as medical appointments to her, but it was possible that in the whiskey fog she’d lived in, they fell into neglect. Roger might not have received the treatment he needed to recover completely.
At the very least, chronic serious illness put Roger at a disadvantage in any violent confrontation. On the other end of the spectrum, it could be the instrument of his removal.
Macklin put aside the report, removed his reading glasses, and tapped the side bows against his chin. He’d shot many, cut the throats of as many more, garroted some, bludgeoned others, and shed blood in just about all the ways one creature could shed another’s; but in the one-third of his life he’d spent ending other men’s (and some women’s) lives, helping someone toward natural death was something new.
It bore consideration; but not until Dorfman came through with more recent updates on his son’s physical condition.
In the meanwhile, the man himself needed to be located.
The pictures he’d posted of Laurie, carefully laid out in chronological order according to season, suggested that Roger had established himself in a place convenient to her access. Like his father, he’d learned not to leave a paper trail; which in view of the world security condition had made the practice of traveling under false names nearly impossible. He certainly wouldn’t fly commercial airlines with the frequency required if he were living more than a few hundred miles away, the rails were government property and as such their surveillance was an unacceptable hazard, and even the bus companies trained their drivers to take note of regular passengers. For all the lip service their representatives gave public transportation, U.S. residents still traveled mainly by private automobile.
But even that posed a problem to those who sought invisibility. Cars needed service and refueling, and garages and filling stations were under the same camera scrutiny as banks and prisons, trained to take in license plates as well as vehicles and drivers. One could never be sure that some overzealous federal agent wasn’t putting in hundreds of hours of overtime comparing footage and tracking how many times a particular motorist showed his face or his registration number along the same route. No, despite the fact that Macklin had neither encouraged nor trained his son to follow the lethal trade, he’d inherited enough common sense to limit the distance of his commute.
Any tracker knows the best way to pick up a trail is to go to the last place where the game was known to have been. Macklin, who had gone to Laurie’s new house out of curiosity after she’d given his divorce attorney to send papers, had recognized the window where she’d been standing nursing a mug of coffee when Roger took the most recent picture he’d sent. He’d hardly have left anything behind, but the gazebo in the little village park would be the best place to center the spiral of his search.
He drove the TrailBlazer to Milford, parked three blocks away and around the corner from Laurie’s apartment, and was walking along a street on the other side of the park when he spotted the beat-up blue Cutlass parked directly opposite the gazebo. He stopped, looked at the erect figure of the man standing under its roof staring at the apartment window. He reversed directions toward the cover of the SUV.
Driving away, he considered what he’d seen. He’d instructed Walker to seek out Laurie, not Roger. But what else could he be doing, standing on the identical spot where his son had drawn his photographic bead on Macklin’s wife?
And whose idea was it, really, for him to hire the detective, his or Walker’s? And on whose behalf?
In a convenience store–service station near the on-ramp to I-96, he found that rarity, a public telephone, and spent some money. When Leo Dorfman came on, he said, “How soon can you get hold of Amos Walker’s medical file?”