Seventeen hundred miles almost exactly due east along the beach in Osterville, Massachusetts, there was a whir and fwump and a crisp pock followed by the squeak of sneakers on hard court.
Dawn Warner’s tennis whites glowed in the sunset dimness as she wiped sweat from her brow. She waited with knees slightly bent as the machine fwumped out another ball, a lob this time. She groaned as she crushed it down the baseline hard enough to make the chain-link edging the beach sand jingle.
That’s it, she thought as she jogged over and checked her steel-and-gold Rolex lady’s Oyster beside her towel. She had to stop now or she’d be late to meet her husband, Neil, at the club for dinner.
Coming around the net to turn off the machine, she stopped for a moment as she heard the soft hum of a motor.
She turned out to look at the water, laughing softly to herself as a large catamaran skimmed past a quarter mile out.
For some people, it was the scent of suntan lotion or maybe the taste of saltwater taffy that flipped the endless summer nostalgia switch.
For her, out here on her father’s old family vacation compound, it was the jolly purr of the Hyannis Port ferry heading out to Martha’s Vineyard.
At least some things didn’t change, she thought to herself as she clicked off the machine.
She heard the thump of bass coming from the pool house as she came across the cobblestone walkway a moment later. It was her brother’s oldest twin boys, she knew. They were going to be seniors in high school now and were as rambunctious as that implied. She wondered if Auntie Dawn should knock on the door and get them to turn it down a tad.
No. She’d let it slide, she thought as she went into the side door of her seven-thousand-square-foot cedar-shingled beach house.
This time.
After her shower upstairs in her sumptuous master suite, she went into her vacation office in her robe and put on some Brahms. As she waited for her iMac to power on, she looked at the photographs on her wall. She and her daughters on a hike in Kenya. She and Neil at an art gallery in Stockholm. Her youngest daughter’s wedding on the beach in the Galápagos the year before.
The email she was waiting on wasn’t there, so she found her phone.
“Control,” said a voice.
“Yes, this is Dawn Warner. Harris was looking into something for me. Is he still there?”
“He left but there’s a note on his desk. Let me see here. Something about flight logs leaving out of some regional airports in... Wyoming, is it?”
“Yes. Flights from there to DC. I’m looking to see if there’s a Kit, I mean, a Katherine Hagen on any of them.”
“Hmm. Let’s see. No. There’s no Hagen.”
“Okay, thank you.”
“You got it,” Control said.
Her new section chief had failed, Dawn Warner thought, shaking her head as she went back into her bathroom.
“Shocker,” she said to herself as she took some skin cream out of a drawer.
They’d covered their tracks pretty well in Casper, she thought as she cracked the lid of moisturizer.
Lotion splattered the base of her makeup mirror as she slammed the bottle onto the counter.
“Shit,” she said.
But maybe not well enough, she thought.
What if Hagen was in Cheyenne right now?
She took a deep breath as she stood and went to find her phone again.
She had to do it. It meant heading back to DC early but that didn’t matter. There was no other choice.
One last grisly push and then they’d be home free.
She dialed the number.
The line picked up.
“Westergaard,” said a voice.