Afternoon slipped by.
The Lab hadn’t been able to come up with any forensic evidence that might lead us to the offender. The straightened shoes in the closet that I’d thought might be significant didn’t appear to be. If Jerome Cole’s killer did tidy up, he left no trace evidence behind—not even in the rumpled clothes in the dresser drawers. We still didn’t know if it was one person working alone or a team of people who had pulled off the attack.
Jerome’s neighbors didn’t remember seeing anyone suspicious in the area. And despite dozens of tips regarding the identity of the person driving the semi, no one had actually seen him exit the truck.
Three false confessions so far. Publicity seekers. Goes with the territory.
Lien-hua left to go to a late-afternoon physical-therapy appointment.
The team worked, I lost track of time, and then it was evening again.
Eventually, at six I headed home. At the house I told Priscilla Woods, the agent who was there, she could take off.
Lien-hua’s physical-therapy appointment must not have gone too well because when she arrived twenty minutes later, she was grimacing and favoring her leg even more than usual.
I had some supper waiting for her, which we ate in silence. Figuring it would be best to give her some space, I left her to take a quick shower. After cleaning up I looked through my files one more time, seeing if our guy had left us any other footprints in time and space.
I was particularly interested in the timeline that we knew about Jerome: when he had come home, where he was last seen, and what that might tell us about the person or group of people who’d attacked and murdered him.
Debra discovered that someone had accessed the security archives on Sunday evening around six. It wasn’t clear who it’d been, but if that was Jerome, why would he have done it, and why then? Did his killer somehow get his federal ID number and log in to find the information? We were still searching for answers.
I recalled the victim’s phone ringing in the NCAVC building. It made me think of who might have been calling, and I decided it might be wise to map out the incoming and outgoing calls of the agents who were on duty that day to see if that led us anywhere.
I was deep in thought when Lien-hua called to me from the bedroom. I found her in her pajamas, getting ready for bed, and realized several hours had passed since I’d sat down to look over the files.
You need to do a better job of keeping track of time, Pat.
Even before Lien-hua and I had gotten married we’d started a tradition of lighting a unity candle, not just to signify our commitment to each other, but to celebrate that unity, to hold on to the moments, the brief, precious moments we had with each other.
Since April we’d gone through three candles.
As I changed for bed, I lit the lavender one on her dresser.
“Brin’s thinking about a new name,” Lien-hua told me. “Tryphena. It means ‘delicate.’”
“I heard.”
“What do you think of it?”
“I like it, but I have to say, just the thought that someone like Ralph would name his daughter ‘delicate’ does strike me as a little incongruous.”
“Nice Tessa word there: incongruous.”
“Thanks.”
“She’s a brave woman.”
“Tessa?”
“Brineesha.”
“For . . . ?” I was a little lost here. “What? Marrying Ralph?”
“For having another baby, Pat.”
I wasn’t sure if she was referring specifically to the difficulties Brin had gone through when Tony was born prematurely and almost died, or if she was just referring to raising a child in general.
A decade ago, long before we met, Lien-hua had been engaged but had broken it off after she found out her fiancé had been lying about the extent of a “friendship” he had with a woman at work. And although Lien-hua had been in two other long-term relationships since then, she’d never had any children.
In the past we’d spoken about the possibility of us having kids of our own. She’d said that it’d never been in her plans, and I hadn’t been sure if that was her way of saying that she didn’t want to have children or her way of saying that she was changing her mind about it. When I’d asked her to elaborate she’d simply said, “It’s a hard world to bring a child up in,” and left it at that.
Yes.
It is a hard world to bring children up in.
And it was also true that Brineesha was a brave woman—both for marrying Ralph and for having another baby.
When Lien-hua and I climbed into bed, we spoke for a few minutes about what had happened over the course of the day and how we’d only managed to find more and more ways to fail our way forward.
Tomorrow morning at ten, we would be attending the funeral service for Jerome Cole and the five other agents who’d been killed in the attack.
So, once again death was on my mind as I closed my eyes to go to sleep.
+ + + +
It had been thirty-two hours since the bard had left Corrine in the old Rudisill Mine tunnel. She was probably still alive, but it was hard to say.
Despite himself, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
He wanted to visit her, but he also understood that it would be best to leave her alone, let her die quietly in that mine. However, he might at least stop by, if nothing else to get photos of her body.
Now he was in his fourteenth-floor apartment and, just like so many of the lofts in Uptown Charlotte, it was relatively new.
Charlotte had always been a fast-growing city, with one generation leveling the buildings and then constructing new ones on top of the rubble of what the generation before them had left behind.
Other than the relatively small Fourth Ward historic district, pretty much the only thing that’d survived from the past, the only real markers of history, were the settlers’ cemeteries in the area.
The irony: The gravestones of the dead served as a constant reminder of the fate of the living who were too distracted to notice them while they built high-rise apartments for themselves to live out their brief lives in just down the street.
He knew that Fourth Ward neighborhood. He’d rented another place there just in case this apartment became compromised.
Now he went online and pulled up the maps of the train route. Freight trains don’t run on a precise schedule, so he’d taken pains to make sure he could track its progress as it went through signal territory from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to High Point, North Carolina.
However, he did know that because of its two thirty-five departure time, it would be traveling through Charlotte sometime between three fifteen and four o’clock on Saturday.
He was expecting it at about three thirty, which would be perfect, actually.
A six-thousand-foot train. One hundred cars. Three engines.
When he first started preparing to tell this story, he’d discovered that the railroad line that ran alongside the open-air Bank of America Stadium was a Knoxville Southeast Railway line, mainly used for freight, although a few passenger trains used it.
Now he confirmed the manifest.
Yes, the number of hazmat tankers it was carrying hadn’t changed. And neither had the contents.
It hadn’t been difficult for the bard to find a young man who was skilled enough at hacking to get into the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office and get past the firewalls.
It had been harder, however, trying to decide if he should let the young man live.
In the end he’d decided against it.
Now he had the code that he needed and he was in the system.
When he came to the information regarding M343’s Saturday route, he paused and thought back through the past three months.
So much had changed.
And not just his face, from his plastic surgery. Everything.
A hundred days ago he was in prison.
He’d had his “lawyer” bring him a tube of toothpaste. But it wasn’t just toothpaste inside that tube. There was just enough of it on the end to fool the guards if they squeezed it to make sure it contained toothpaste.
But there was something else in the tube.
Mikrosil.
It’s a paste that hardens and can subsequently be used to lift intricate patterns off solid surfaces. It comes in a tube similar to toothpaste. In his previous career that’s how he’d come across it.
The bard had injected it into the lock of his cell to form a key.
Then he’d removed the elastic waistband from a pair of underwear, slit it down the middle with the handle of a toothbrush that he’d sharpened by rubbing it against the concrete floor of his cell.
He waited until the guard who was his size was stationed outside the door.
After all, he needed a change of clothes.
The bard picked the cuffs they kept him in, used the key to get out of his cell, then looped the elastic band over the man’s head in a clove hitch, yanked it tight around his neck.
And tugged.
The elastic band was narrow enough so the skin on the guard’s neck folded over it and it would have been pretty much impossible to pull loose even if the bard hadn’t been yanking it tight.
There was no sound.
The man died quickly, quietly, with very little fight.
The clothes fit well enough.
* * *
Though the bard had planned as carefully as he could, he had several things to take care of before Saturday afternoon.
(1) Stay in touch with his contact so he could remain informed on how things were progressing in DC.
(2) Check the pressure sensor on the tracks.
(3) Look in on Corrine and see if she had died yet so he could take photos of her body for the website he was going to use. And, perhaps, spend a little time with her while he was there.
Before returning to the mine, however, he had business to attend to back in DC: a funeral he needed to show up for. Needed to take pictures of.
And while he was up there, he could pay a visit to the person he’d left locked in a secluded basement in the city—a guarantee that the final act of his story would be told even if he wasn’t in the area.
Now he pulled up the app that he was using to disguise the origin of his texts. He verified the wording of the message in Latin that he would be sending tomorrow to Agent Bowers.
Then he went to the parking garage beneath his apartment building, found his van, and took off to drive through the night to DC for the joint funeral service of the six people he had killed earlier that week.