UNLIKE THE Kevin Moore she’d met in Watertown, this one was matter-of-fact, telling her without embellishment of his departure from San Francisco, his entry into the underground of the Massive Brigade, and the arrival of Benjamin Mittag. The first time she noticed a crack in his serene exterior was when he reached Key Biscayne and looked down the scope of his M-40 and made the decision that, he could admit, he would never be able to defend to himself, much less to a court of law.
“You would’ve lost everything if you hadn’t,” she reassured him. “There was no other choice.”
“There’s always another choice,” he said, then sipped his drink. “You just have to know how to find it.”
He brushed over his brief respite in sultry Louisiana, then focused on the second cross-country drive with Mittag. “It was clear by then that there was tension at the top. Ben wanted to run it his way—that was why he’d collected me and the others, the people who knew how to kill. Martin saw it differently. I didn’t really understand until I saw them arguing in Lebanon, and after.”
“You got in touch with Janet Fordham before Lebanon, right? From a gas station.”
“In Marshall, Texas. Yeah.”
“And then in Lebanon you saw Bishop and a woman named Ingrid Parker.”
He said nothing, just stared, and she realized he was holding back. Why? She thought back over everything she knew about Ingrid, which wasn’t much—the slanted descriptions her husband had given, the suspicious Tor-encrypted conversation from work and subsequent flight, appearing next to Bishop in Kansas before disappearing again. And Johnson and Vale—It would be really helpful if we could find her.
Rachel said, “Tell me about Ingrid.”
He hesitated, then rocked his head. “Not much to tell. She was traveling with Bishop, and she was there when he was killed. It was hard on her. She was pregnant. We drove off together.”
It was starting to come back to her, the interview eight months ago in the back of that ambulance. “But she didn’t make it to Watertown, correct?”
“We dropped her off somewhere in Nebraska. St. Paul. Left her at a gas station. It was too much for her.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms over her stomach. He was very convincing, which must have served him so well, even as he followed through on Mittag’s orders and shot a congresswoman in Florida, carefully shifting his sights in order to maim but not kill. Briefly, she closed her eyes and remembered Agent Young driving her to the airport, and her reading the emails that were flying in the wake of nine deaths. She said, “That night in Watertown, when they were patching you up, I got a preliminary inventory from the house. Know what they found in the upstairs bathroom?”
“I do not.”
“A bottle of prenatal vitamins.” He didn’t answer, so she pushed further. “None of the women in that house were pregnant.”
“Of course not,” Kevin said dryly, “because they were dead.”
She watched as he took another sip of whiskey and placed his cup on the table.
“She’s gone now,” Rachel said. “No one’s going to find her. So, please. Just tell me the real story. Okay? There’s more riding on this than Ingrid Parker’s safety.” He didn’t seem moved, so she said, “I’m not the only one wondering what happened to her.”
He shook his head, then surprised her by saying, “You guys don’t give up, do you?”
“What?”
“I already told him.”
“Told who what?”
“That I don’t know where she is.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed, and from the way he spoke it was clear he wasn’t buying her ignorance. “Ingrid Parker got in over her head. Those others, the kids—they’re young, their time with the Brigade is a blip on their résumés. It’s street cred. Otherwise, it makes no difference. But by now Ingrid’s made a life with her daughter, and the last thing she needs is you or me coming in to fuck it up.”
Rachel took a moment to absorb this, then said, “Who already asked about her?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Why do you care about Ingrid?”
Why, indeed? Because Johnson and Vale cared about her, that was why. “I’d like to speak to her.”
“Why?”
“Because I never talked to anyone who really knew Martin Bishop. You didn’t spend time with him. Ben Mittag is dead. People only talked to Bishop for minutes at a time. They worshipped him, but no one actually knew him.”
“And you think she knew him?”
“Why else would he bring her along to Kansas to meet with you and Mittag?”
Kevin looked into his cup and, seeing that it was empty, pushed it, scratching, to the center of the table.
Again, Rachel said, “Who already asked about her?”
Kevin nodded at the window, to the trees beyond. “A week ago, Owen Jakes comes right up that muddy road with a couple of suits, wanting to know where she is.”
“He came personally?”
Kevin looked at her, not bothering to answer.
“Why does he care about Ingrid Parker?” Rachel asked.
“Same reason you do, I suspect.”
“Is that what he said? That Ingrid knew the most about Bishop?”
Kevin got up and took the Knob Creek from the counter, then turned around, the bottle in both hands, and said, “They were running through the report, prepping it for dissemination. Crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s. He knew there would be questions about her, since her husband’s publishing stories about her. So what could I add? I told him to look at my debrief, because I already told them everything I knew.”
“And that was it?” she asked. “He came out to the middle of nowhere for that?”
Kevin returned to the table with the whiskey bottle and sat down. “We talked a few hours, Jakes and me. Right here. The two suits he’d brought sat in the living room over there, reading magazines. They were cool customers.” Kevin aimed the bottle at her. “We talked about you, too.”
“Me?”
“He told me about your breakdown. I knew what had happened, of course, but he said it was more than just anger. The Bureau shrink worried you were unstable. Maybe bipolar.”
“Well, my therapist never mentioned that to me,” Rachel said, a queasiness growing in her stomach.
“He asked how you were when you interviewed me that night. How you took my words. Did you seem upset by how things had gone down? Suspicious? Did you believe me?” Kevin shrugged. “I told him I didn’t know what was in your head. I told him you were professional.”
“Thanks,” she said, but it came out as a whisper because she didn’t have much air. Bipolar? Christ, whatever was happening to her had been going on for weeks.
Kevin didn’t seem to notice. “He wanted to know if you had spoken to Ingrid Parker. I told him I seriously doubted it.”
Rachel stared for what felt like a long time, and she knew that her gaze was uncomfortable for him, though he showed no sign. He, too, was professional, even now.
She said, “The suits who came with Jakes. You remember their names?”
The question seemed to confuse him. He thought a moment. “The man … Lyle Johnson. And the woman—”
“Sarah Vale,” she said.
Just as she often woke to an anxiety of indeterminate origin, Rachel had fled Seattle plagued by a fear that hadn’t come into focus. Of death, yes, but she hadn’t quite swallowed the idea that her employer was trying to kill her. It was just too much. Now, the chain was undeniable: a contract killer, Vale, Johnson, and Owen Jakes, and she was the through-line connecting them. The terror that she had wrestled with for two days had gotten to its feet, shaken itself off, and raised two sturdy fists.
Her feelings must have been all over her face, for Kevin uncorked the Knob Creek and splashed plenty more in both their cups.