11

From the doorway Dewey watched Phoebe sorting through their equipment for tonight. She hadn’t heard him come in and the shutters that usually masked the expression in her eyes were not in place. He stepped back outside, feeling like an intruder. Her sadness could have been because the game was bringing back memories of Kerry Anne, but Dewey had a feeling the past was just the icing on her misery cake. Her past was old, and the wounding in her eyes was new, the bleeding fresh and painful to see.

He leaned against the wall, feeling the weight of the responsibility Kerry Anne had left him with when she’d entrusted her little sister to his care. Feeling a sense of failure. Though Phoebe hadn’t known it, her need had saved him, given his grief a channel. Her need had kept him from giving in to his own grief at losing Kerry Anne, his own sense of helplessness at the time.

“I’ve been a poor guardian, Kerry,” he whispered. “I saved her life, but at what cost? She’s not happy. I thought...”

What had he thought? That committing them both to avenging Kerry’s death would make them happy? The truth was, he hadn’t thought. He’d felt. They’d both been lost in their feelings of rage and horror. Not a good place to be making life decisions from. He hadn’t been much more than a kid himself—expert at computers, not life—and still reeling from the things Kerry had just told him about what her stepfather had been making her do. He rubbed his face, feeling the horror of that moment sweep through him again. He’d known that sorrow had a permanent home inside Kerry Anne but not why. He’d hope that his love was the key to driving it out. That whatever her burden was, he could remove it.

If he hadn’t placed that anonymous call to the authorities, would Kerry Anne still be alive? In his innocence, he hadn’t realized how connected Montgomery Justice was. Now Dewey knew just how good Justice was at finding who could help him and who could hurt him. And how effectively he neutralized opposition. Dewey’s report had disappeared or been buried deep in the system, and Kerry Anne’s death had been ruled a suicide before her body was in the ground. A few weeks later, their mama had taken a drunken tumble down the stairs and a “grief stricken” Justice had left the area.

In the end, all Dewey did for Kerry Anne was save Nadine from Justice’s intentions. He’d gotten her a brand new life, then deluded himself into believing that vengeance was the road to healing for them both. He’d healed nothing and cost her a life with her Marshal. Way to go, Dewey. What are you going to do for your next trick? He’d made a royal mess of things, but the game was running. They had to deal with that right now. Maybe after....

He opened and closed the door, noisily this time. When Phoebe looked up, the shutters were firmly in place in her now baby blues.

“Kevin okay?” she asked.

Dewey nodded. “He’s on his way to Idaho. Seems he likes potatoes.”

He knelt down beside her and started stowing the equipment she’d finished checking. They worked without talking, then headed for the kitchen. Phoebe sat at the table with a diet soda while Dewey heated up some soup and made sandwiches. When he was seated across from her, she picked up a sandwich half, then set it down again.

“You okay?” he asked, crumbling crackers into the steaming soup.

“Do you remember when we met?” She looked at him, but he could tell she was seeing the past. That night when he’d found her huddled in a corner of the park where she’d spent the time trying to screw up the courage to slash her wrists with a rusty razor she’d found under a bench. Kerry’s blood was still splattered on her clothes, though there were signs she’d taken the time to wash her hands and face before boarding the bus to the next town. Her eyes were wide and filled with the horror of it. She’d looked up at him, her face and eyes swollen from crying.

“Are you Phagan?” she’d asked, her voice hoarse with unrestrained grief.

The four years he had on her had shrunk to nothing with his own grief and horror and near paralyzing guilt. He’d wanted to sit down beside her and cry with her. Wanted to take the razor and end his own pain of losing Kerry. Her need of him was terrifying but too insistent to walk away from. To this day, he wasn’t sure why he’d shaken his head and offered his real name, not his internet handle. “I’m Dewey. Dewey Hyatt. A friend of Phagan’s.”

“I remember,” he said now.

“Stupid question. Sorry.” She picked up some crackers and crumbled them into her soup, letting them trickle through her fingers in a tiny yellow shower.

“You having second thoughts?”

“I can’t seem to stop remembering. I spent all these years not letting myself remember any of it. Being Phoebe, who didn’t have that past. Living Phoebe’s life completely, the way Phagan said to. But now, I can’t...” She picked up a spoon, stirred the crackers into the broth, then set it down. “If she hadn’t come back for me—”

“Don’t go there, honey.”

“She was free.”

“Not as long as you were still there with him.” Did she know? Did she know the full horror of what Kerry had endured? He saw her lashes lift and knew she did.

“That’s why she came back. Because I was there and he made her...”

“Don’t do this to yourself. What Kerry did was because she loved you. She’d have done anything for you.” He pretended to look out the dirty window. “She didn’t die so you could live your life drowning in guilt. She did it so you could be free of him.”

Phoebe’s smile was wry and sad. “I let her down again. I’m not free of him.”

Phoebe hadn’t let Kerry down. He had. He’d promised to take care of her and her little sister. He’d taken care of them all right. Kerry Anne was dead and Nadine was condemned to a shadow life without love or joy or—

“Let’s just go. Cut our losses and get out of here—”

Phoebe shook her head. “Don’t you see? It’s not just about me or Kerry Anne anymore. Those two little girls. They’re us all over again. It has to stop. I won’t be free of him until he can’t hurt them or anyone. We can’t just right the wrongs that are easy. We have to right the wrongs we find. We’ve already lost our lives. We can’t go back or pretend this never happened. We’ll know. We’ll always know. And if we don’t finish it, all we’ve lost will be for nothing. He’ll have won the past and the future.”

He pulled some pistachios out of his pocket and cracked them. Instead of eating the meat, he said, “Do you like that marshal?”

“Does it matter?” She shoved back her chair.

“Yeah, it matters.” He stood up and leaned on the table, holding her gaze with his. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.” Her smile was resigned. “You, Phagan, me—we made a choice seven years ago. Choices have consequences. Good and bad consequences. You make the choice, but you don’t get to decide the outcome. That’s the deal. No reason to whine about it now. Let’s just make sure it was worth it.” She stood up. “What say we go kick some butt?” She smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it hadn’t been much of a day.

Dewey grinned. “Sounds like a plan.”

The after-hours office was somewhat quieter than the eight-to-five office, but bad guys punched their fellow man, not the clock, so the office never completely stood down. The lighting had gone from wide area to localized, putting pockets of shadow between the door Jake and Bryn entered and the desk where Matt waited for them.

As Jake followed Bryn in an indirect beeline around desks and other obstacles, he couldn’t help thinking the lighting was like their case. A few spots of light, a lot of dark, with nothing to tell them what mattered and what didn’t but an imprecise blend of experience and instinct.

Matt was looking out the window at the night city but turned at their approach. Tiredness cut deep tracks around his eyes, but he still gave off enough energy to light the city and most of the suburbs. Just looking at him made Jake feel tired. He ought to send Matt’s wife, Dani, some flowers or something for living with his big brother.

When they were in range, Matt gestured for them to follow him. “Got my people waiting in the conference room. Time to bang our heads and ideas together and see what falls out.”

Jake exchanged a look with Bryn but followed her and Matt to a room short on people and long on food debris. Matt’s people were Alice, Riggs, and his computer expert, Sebastian.

Alice Kerne was an attractive black woman in designer jeans and silk blouse. Her crisp intelligence, common sense and ability to see the humor in any situation made her a good foil for Matt. Toby Riggs, on the other hand, was anything but crisp. The guy was always rumpled and always eating. His strength lay in filtering through minutiae to find small, significant leads. Sebastian was the comic relief on the team with his stand-up shock of bright red hair and perpetually surprised expression. Like Hyatt, he’d been a hacker in his younger days. He’d been caught, then recruited by the Feds.

If Bryn felt intimidated by being the only representative of the FBI, it didn’t show. She took a seat next to Alice and helped herself to a doughnut.

Jake got them both coffee, then took a position at one end of the table and sipped the bitter brew, his gaze following Matt as he strode to the other end and looked down his nose at Jake. His look said in no uncertain terms that Jake was on Matt’s turf, even if this was Jake’s case.

Jake considered taking on Matt, then decided he didn’t have the energy for it and sat down. He wasn’t too tired to assume a provocative slouch though. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Bryn and Alice exchange looks, their respective lips twitching. Riggs had his eyes closed, so he missed the testosterone byplay. Sebastian was hunched over the computer next to a printer spitting out pages.

“Had a good day?” Matt asked, crossing his arms and propping a shoulder against the wall behind him.

Bryn said her piece, minus Phagan’s stalking/courtship, then handed off to Jake. He rubbed the back of his neck, then took his turn. His information didn’t seem enough for how many miles he’d traveled and how tired he was.

Matt dropped into a chair about halfway through their report, shoving fast food containers out of the way, so he could beat a tempo on the tabletop that didn’t stop until they did. He nudged Riggs with his foot. “Let’s put out a BOLO, get people watching the airport, trains and buses. Though if they’re as good as you say, it’ll be about as useful as pissing in the wind.”

Riggs yawned and stretched, then shuffled out the door. There was something laid-back about Riggs in motion, something hypnotic. Jake felt his eyes start to close.

“So, what now?” Matt’s barked question brought him back with a jerk.

Judging by the weight of his eyelids, it was going to be a long night. His thoughts spun in a sleep spiral, until...

“Runaways.” Jake wasn’t sure he’d said it a loud, until he saw everyone looking at him. The word hung in the silence while he took a drink of coffee. The caffeine partly peeled back the fog inhabiting his head. “Need to look at reported runaways about seven to ten years back.”

Bryn frowned. Alice looked thoughtful. Matt looked blank.

“Runaway reports?”

Jake nodded.

“From where?” Matt asked.

Where? He frowned, then, like a gift, heard in his mind Phoebe’s voice saying, “Mama hailed from Georgia...” He straightened. “Georgia. Let’s focus on Georgia. If that doesn’t work, well, we’ll figure something out.”

“You want a two to three years worth of runaway reports for the state of Georgia?”

“Just the ones for females in the fourteen to sixteen age range,” Jake clarified as his thoughts began to sharpen. “We need a why before we can be sure who their target is. If Teltech is in the bullseye, we need to find out what they’re after.”

“I have a feeling you don’t have enough time before this case goes hot to go through that many files. I’m not sure you’ve got that much life left.” Matt looked at Jake like he’d lost it.

Jake didn’t blame him. He agreed with him, but since he’d said it, he’d stick with it for now. This whole case was a peeling back of layer after layer to find...what? Was it an artichoke with something substantial at its heart? Or an onion with a lot of layers, and nothing at the center but a bad smell?

“We’d need to narrow the search more than by gender and age,” Alice said, giving Jake an apologetic look for coming on Matt’s side. “Can you isolate a year? A city? A town?”

“I wonder if we could find the record of Phoebe’s marriage to Jesse Mentel? That might helps us narrow down the time frame. She said she was sixteen when she married him. And cross match with deaths? See if we can turn up the dead sister?”

“What makes you so sure Georgia is even our state? Bryn asked. “It’s obvious she’s able to put on and take off an accent pretty much at will.”

“My mentioning Georgia made her jumpy as an addict. She was very anxious to turn my attention to Texas. And we’ve got to commit to something. No time to second-guess,” Jake pointed out.

“That’s true. I’ll go see what I can shake out of the system. Probably won’t be a lot tonight.” Alice started to leave, then stopped. “I almost forgot. This came for you.” She handed a manila envelope to Bryn.

Bryn examined it “No postage. No messenger stamp. How did it come?”

Alice shrugged. “No clue. It just showed up in the interoffice mail basket.”

Bryn opened the clasp and flap and pulled out a newspaper clipping. Jake got up and leaned over her shoulder. It was a photograph, obviously taken at a funeral. The mourners hid the coffin but not the hearse parked to one side. The caption, if there had been one, was gone. The clipping was old and grainy, the faces no more than gray blurs against the paler blur of sky.

“Hold on, Alice. I think we just got our break.”

“Can we scan and enhance this?” Bryn tapped the photo. “There’s a plate on that hearse.”

Jake looked across the table at Matt and felt a guilty pang when he saw Matt rubbing his face. He was keeping the old boy up late. He looked at Sebastian. “Can you do it, Sebastian, so Matt can go home to his wife?”

Matt gave Jake his deadly look, the one that promised retribution later. “If our helpful informant is really being helpful. Any idea who sent this?”

Bryn and Jake exchanged quick looks. Jake, not about to tell his brother the lovesick hacker story, shrugged. Bryn did, too. Then they both had to endure a long and pointed examination from Matt before he finally said, “I see.”

Lucky for them, Sebastian was both good and fast. He soon had the photograph on his screen and a few keystrokes later, they had the plate number to the point they could read it. Sebastian hit ‘print.” When it was free of the machine, Bryn snatched it and went off with Alice to track it down.

Jake stayed by Sebastian. “Let’s see if you can clear up the faces a bit. I’d like to see if I recognize any of our mourners.”

Peter Harding paced back and forth in front of Stern, wearing a track in the expensive carpet in his living room. He couldn’t seem to stop himself, even in the face of Stern’s barely concealed contempt.

“They’re digging into my past! I can feel it. What if—”

“There is no ‘what if.’ Peter Harding’s life is squeaky clean all the way to birth and back.”

“His past. What if they find someone who knew him before—” Harding didn’t finish the sentence. Even the walls seemed like his enemy tonight.

“You survived a top-secret military clearance investigation.” Stern sounded bored with the subject. He stalked to the liquor cabinet and poured Harding a stiff drink, shoving it into his hand, forcing him to stop and drink it. “Pull yourself together. We’ll do what we’ve always done. Deal with what happens as it happens. Do what we must to get what we want. Now—” He straightened Harding’s shirt collar, then his tie. “Don’t you have an alibi to take care of?”

Harding stared at him for a long moment before slowly nodding. “I’ll be with Audrey, when, if—”

Stern nodded. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”