AGAIN, RACHEL considered opening up. She might have cornered him here, but they both knew that she didn’t have any kind of authority. He didn’t have to tell her anything. Yet he was telling her a lot. Everything? She couldn’t say, but he was trusting her in a way she was unable to reciprocate. Perhaps his openness was a kind of trap, something to seduce secrets out of her. Who was to say this place wasn’t wired, after all?
“What does all this mean?” she asked finally. “If the Bureau didn’t kill Martin, then who? Ben? A rival faction in the Brigade?”
“Far as I could tell, there were only two factions: Martin and Ben.”
“And Ingrid,” said Rachel, but he didn’t weigh in on that. “So you lean toward her theory, that Ben got rid of him.”
Kevin downed the last of his whiskey. “I live in the middle of nowhere, Rachel. I’ve made a new career of not leaning toward any theory.”
She watched him get up to look in the refrigerator. He took out two bottles of Poland Spring and set one in front of her.
“The tap water up here tastes like sulfur,” he said by way of explanation as he unscrewed his own bottle and drank.
She let hers be. “Tell me what happened when you got to Watertown.”
He did, and as he had in that ambulance he told the story with concision, but this time he told more, explaining how Ingrid discovered what he was. “You just let her go,” she said.
“Like I told you, she’d had enough. That’s why I kept her out of my report.”
She shook her head, stunned by the stupidity of what he’d done. “She could have ruined the whole thing. All she had to do was walk back inside and tell everyone about you.”
“What would you have done, Rachel? Strangle her?”
“You could have tied her up.”
“I didn’t have any rope.”
She hesitated, trying to picture the moment from his perspective. What would she have done? Would she have killed Ingrid?
“Look,” he said, “I did what seemed like my only play. I wasn’t going to murder her—I didn’t have that in me. So I had to commit to something. And it seemed to work. I sent her away and went back inside. They asked where Ingrid was, of course; I said she was taking some time to clear her head. They had no reason to doubt this.”
Kevin drank more water, then wiped his mouth. Rachel noticed that his fingernails were chewed down to the quick, the skin on the fingertips dry and peeling.
“All I had to do was wait for the cavalry. People started going to bed. I imagined how easy it would be, everyone asleep when the SWAT guys showed up. And then the landline rang. Ingrid had found a pay phone.”
“Shit,” Rachel said.
“Yes. Shit.”
He told her about being dragged upstairs, and the few words Mittag said to him in the bedroom before the lights went out and the SWAT team poured in, guns blazing.
Man, you’ve really got it all wrong, don’t you? We’re on the same side … Or, we used to be.
“What did that mean?” Rachel asked, puzzled.
Kevin shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d have some idea.”
There was something in his tone, and the way he stared coolly at her, waiting. Was he trying to turn this interview around on her? “I don’t,” she said. “Was he trying to say he worked for the Bureau? He did put in an application long ago. But he was turned down immediately.”
Kevin rocked his head, but she couldn’t tell if this was news or not.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this when I interviewed you before? When we were in the ambulance. It had only just happened.”
“I didn’t know you, Rachel. A man with a gun tells me we’re on the same side right before being shot, then a woman I’ve never met bangs against my stretcher and starts asking me questions … I didn’t know what to think.”
“And now?”
“I’m testing you, Rachel. Can’t you tell?”
She wasn’t insulted, though she might have been. “And what about the official debrief?”
“I kept Ingrid out of it, but Ben’s last words?” He shrugged. “I told them, and they didn’t like it at all. Told me how the common people would suspect the worst. They wanted my assurance that I would stay quiet. Gave me something to sign, so I signed it. I bet you did, too.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t sign it.”
“Oh?” he said, surprised, and she knew then that this had been her great mistake in Seattle, not signing that nondisclosure agreement. If anything had put a mark on her head, it had been that. Christ, what was her problem? Why couldn’t she just let things go? Hadn’t she learned over the past eight months that what happened outside her little world wasn’t her responsibility?
She tried to focus. “You really don’t know where Ingrid Parker is?”
“I really don’t,” he said. “And I don’t want to know.”
“How much money did she have?”
“She’d been carrying Martin’s stash—twenty, thirty grand. Enough to get her started.”
“So she could be anywhere.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Any thoughts on how Massive got hands on all that money?”
“Money was just there.”
“Did anyone mention a company called Magellan Holdings?”
He shook his head. “No one told me anything about any of that.”
Whether or not she believed him didn’t matter; this was all she was going to get. The problem was that the only way for her to know what to do, and who she could trust, was to get clarity on what had happened last year. Ingrid Parker, it seemed, was the only one who might give her that clarity—why else would Owen come all the way out here with Johnson and Vale, looking for her?
Through his kitchen window the sun was low. She said, “What do you think of Watertown now?”
Kevin sucked on his lip. “Do I agree with all those protesters in the middle of town? Is that what you’re asking? Do I think it was an unnecessary massacre?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m asking.”
He snorted. “Of course it was.”
“And now you’re out here, thinking about leaving the Bureau.”
Kevin leaned back, closing his eyes, as if ready for a nap. He said, “Anyone who tells you there’s a single reason that they’re leaving the only job they’ve ever known is a liar.” He opened his eyes and got up, then grabbed the bottle of Knob Creek. “There’s never a single reason for anything a human does.”
He refilled their cups, and while they talked for another half hour Rachel still did not tell him about Seattle. By then she trusted him well enough, but she read in his laconic behavior a clear message: I do not want to be involved. He was out, and that was where he wanted to stay, communing with nature and sharing recipes with neighbors. It was what you did when you resurfaced after a year undercover: You hooked your wagon to the repetitions of domesticity. You kept things as simple as possible and tried to reconnect with whoever you originally were before you spent a year being someone else.
There was a chance she was misreading his message, but those who take no sides in a fight are pawns for both sides. Tomorrow, Johnson and Vale could show up and ask questions and quickly deduce her next stop—a stop that the bourbon haze had suddenly helped her see with clarity. But she needed a little time, and she didn’t need Kevin Moore giving her away.
As she got up finally and pulled on her jacket, she posed the question that had begun to nag at her above all others. “The Bureau killed Mittag. For the sake of argument, let’s say we killed Bishop, too. The question is: Why? Why risk martyrs? Why open the door to demonstrators shouting conspiracy theories in the street?”
Kevin thought about that. “The same reason I probably should have killed Ingrid. To shut them up.”
“About what?”
He had no answer.
As she drove back down his hill in the Impala, the late-afternoon sun twinkling through branches, she looked out for rental cars, or oversized Suburbans that were the hallmark of unexpected Bureau visits. All she saw was a rust-speckled pickup, not unlike Kevin’s, driven by a pretty brunette wearing a bandana on her head. The neighbor, she guessed, who shared recipes with Kevin. No wonder he didn’t want to leave his mountain. It was the American dream, circa 1880.
That was when she realized that she’d forgotten something in Seattle: her cane. For nearly three days she’d survived without its support and hadn’t even noticed.