KIT TURNED TO DAVID TO PROTEST AGAIN. THEN HER CELL PHONE RANG. She looked at the caller ID and felt a rush of surprise. She put the phone to her ear. “Ben!” she said, responding to the voice of her friend from D.C. “How are you?” She saw David’s eyes shift away from her. Then he left the room, headed for the kitchen.
Kit pressed the phone to her ear. “I’m all right. Yes, it was horrible. What a shock.” Kit hesitated. “But how did you know?” She grew silent, listening, and every sentence Ben Heitzler spoke felt like a surgeon’s knife cutting deeper and deeper, lancing some deep boil in her soul, releasing the poison. She felt her head grow tight. A strange mixture of fear and . . . and what . . . hope? . . . churned in her. She sat down on the couch, and pressed her hand to her forehead as she concentrated on her friend’s words. Questions spilled out of her: when? how?
Then she quietly closed her cell phone.
She walked out to the kitchen. David stood with his two hands braced on the table, his head down. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said, softly.
He straightened up and faced her. “I didn’t want you to think I did it for you.” He rubbed his hands on his pants like they were sweaty.
“Ben said you spent hours together. Over several days.” Her heart was drumming.
“That’s what you wanted me to do, right?”
“Will you tell me about it?” When he didn’t respond, she repeated herself. “Please?”
“I had a doctor’s appointment in D.C. I still had that piece of paper you gave me, the one with Ben’s name on it. On impulse I called him. Told him you’d given me his number. Told him I had a lot of questions about God and all. He had tickets to a Redskins preseason game and he invited me to go with him.” David looked down and traced an invisible pattern on the kitchen table with his forefinger.
“And?”
“It was a great game. ’Skins won, 21-18.”
Kit waited, blood pounding in her temples.
“We talked during the game, after the game, in the car, at his house. We were up most of the night, talking about God. What he said made sense to me, Kit. More than sense. It brought everything into focus for me.”
Her heart grew tight. What was he saying? What had happened?
David’s eyes were shining. “It’s like this: when you’re working a homicide, you have bits and pieces of information. Solving it is like putting together a puzzle. That’s what Ben did for me. He put together the puzzle.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been pretty churned up inside. Upset that I shot that kid. That seemed to stir up a lot of other stuff: anger toward my stepfather, anger toward my mother.
“Ben’s a good guy. I started telling him about all this and he just took it all in, you know? I thought he’d be judgmental, but no. He listened. He understood.
“And then he started talking to me about sin and how we all struggle with it. We hurt other people . . . other people hurt us. I could see how this sin nature he talked about was real, and it had been driving me.
“My stepfather,” David tapped his finger on the table, “when he was drunk, he’d beat my mother. The last time he tried to do it, I was seventeen. I nearly killed him.” David looked at Kit, as if gauging her reaction. “The judge gave me a choice: the Navy or juvenile detention. I took the Navy.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, a tremor in her voice.
“I’ve been carrying around hatred for that man all these years. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it, you know? There, at his house, Ben explained the cross to me. I’d never understood that before. He told me God could forgive me for that hatred, if I confessed it. But do you know what else he said? He nailed it. He told me that, at some point, I needed to not only let go of my anger, but forgive my stepfather. For my own sake, if nothing else.
“He said he’d read a quote somewhere.” David closed his eyes, trying to make sure the words came out right. “ ‘Unforgiveness is a poison you drink hoping someone else will die.’ ”
Kit’s stomach tightened.
“My stepfather was an inadequate man desperately trying to control his world through violence and alcohol. I knew enough to stay away from booze, but anger was controlling me. Ben told me how to stop that cycle of destruction. We prayed. Asked God to take care of it. Told him I’d trust him. And then, it was . . . it was amazing. It all just fell away.”
She paced now, agitation rising within her. “It could come back.”
“Ben told me that it might, but that every time I give it to God, it’ll have less power over me.” David cleared his throat. “I was so tired of being angry! For the first time in my life, I tasted something,” he groped for words, “something pure and peaceful. I want more of it, whatever it is. I’ve talked to Ben at least once a day ever since then. I have a thousand questions. I can keep Ben busy for a long, long time.”
“You told him about Bob.”
“I called him at six o’clock this morning.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared out of the window. “I’ve seen a lot of death. Last night was different.”
Kit saw that his eyes were wet with tears.
“Last night, when Bob lay there dying, I prayed for him. Out loud. Everything was slowing down, his breathing, his heart . . . but when I said the name ‘Jesus,’ he squeezed my hand, and he got this look . . . so I kept praying and he squeezed my hand again, and then he was gone.”
Kit’s heart pounded.
“There was a supernatural peace in his death. I was there. I felt it. I saw it.” David faced her. “What happened last night was terrible. But Kit, Jesus showed up on the side of that road. He was there. I knew it, and Bob knew it, too.”
As she drove back to the offsite office, David’s words gripped her. Had he really become a believer? He said he had. What’s more he said now, he felt so different. “All these years, it’s like I’ve been numb,” he’d said. “Now, it’s like someone turned on the lights. I can feel again. It started with you, Kit. Now I know where that was leading.”
The thought gained momentum in her mind, like a stone tumbling downstream.
But you know, she argued with herself, as she negotiated the causeway, it’s one thing to forgive a parent who’s dead. And David’s stepfather wasn’t a believer. But Eric! Good grief . . . how many Bible studies had they been in together? How many worship services? How many service projects had they worked on? He had betrayed all of his promises. Walked away from her . . . and from God, for all she knew.
The worst of it was, all Eric had to do, she knew, was ask for God’s forgiveness and he’d be off the hook. Completely. Where was the justice in that? Didn’t God care about her pain? Her abandonment?
She hit the steering wheel in protest. Then, unexpectedly, tears welled in her eyes.
“Quantico’s going to FedEx it to me in the next couple of days,” Chris told her the next day. “They can modify an iPod. Meanwhile, did you hear? Hector Lopez wants to meet with David.”
Kit’s stomach tightened. “For what?”
“Not sure yet.”
“When?”
“Tonight. David said he’d call you when he knew the details.”
“Not tonight! That’s when I’m meeting with Sam Curtis!” Kit had made arrangements to interview Curtis again, this time at his house. She wanted to get a different view of the man, and get some more questions answered.
“We can handle it.”
But when Kit heard the specifics from David she had her doubts.
“He wants me to meet him at 9:00 tonight at the tomato processing plant.” David’s voice on the phone was tight.
“Why there?” Kit shifted her weight on her feet.
“I don’t know.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants me to meet somebody. My guess is, it’s his boss.”
Kit took a breath. Her knees were shaky. She began to pace. “No good, David. Make it some public place, where we can back you up.” She had already cancelled her meeting with Curtis in her mind.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“He just killed somebody!”
“I know. And I suggested a diner up the road, but Lopez said no. It has to be the plant.”
“Then blow it off.”
“No. I’m not going to do that.”
Kit’s mind raced. This felt too risky, too dangerous. She glanced up to see if Chris or the others were around. Maybe he’d listen to Chris, maybe . . .
“Look, Kit, Lopez isn’t going to hurt me. I’ve given him what he wanted. He has no idea I’m law enforcement. Now, the timing is right. He has a new truck. I think he’s going to ask me to move something illegal. People, maybe. It’s great—a chance to find out who he’s working for. Lopez isn’t the main man.”
“Then who is he?”
“The enforcer. He’s a psychopath, Kit. I can see it in his eyes. He likes it when people get hurt.”
“Great! So you’re going with a psychopath to meet someone else in a place we can’t get to!”
“Yeah, well, our clients aren’t Boy Scouts, Kit. I’ll be all right. Trust me. I’m betting that tonight I’ll meet Carlos—and I’ll be one step closer to finding Maria and nailing Lopez on Bob’s murder.” He hesitated. “Who knows? We may find out who killed your little boy.”
The other team members were talking to Jason, the tech guy, when Kit walked back into the main room. She outlined David’s plan and used the graphics on her computer to show them the tomato processing plant.
“We can’t back him up there,” Chris said.
“I know. I told him. He says it has to be there.”
Roger spoke up. “We can be in the woods. We’ll have to walk in a ways, but the three of us can get within twenty yards or so of the building.”
“Two. Kit’s going to be with Sam Curtis,” Chris said.
“I’ll cancel that,” Kit said.
“No need to. I can get a couple of guys to help out,” Roger suggested.
Chris stretched. “Curtis is leaving for a convention tomorrow morning, Kit. If you don’t go tonight, you won’t have another chance for three or four days.”
“If David has his cell phone in his pocket, he can have a number programmed in. Then all he has to do is push one button if he’s in trouble,” Jason added. “As a backup, he can bust out a window. We hear glass breaking, we move.
Everybody else thought that was good enough. Kit had her doubts.
Kit called David later in the day. “Jason wants to program in a number on your cell so you just have to hit one button if you get in trouble.”
“Right. I talked to him.”
“Did you get some sleep?”
“Not much. You?”
Kit shivered. “No.” She outlined the back-up plan she and the others had concocted and told him she would be at Sam Curtis’s home at the same time he was meeting Lopez.
“He may not know Lopez, but he will know Lopez’s boss.”
Kit chewed her lip. “David, if something looks wrong, get out, OK?”
She heard him take a deep breath. “It’ll be all right, Kit.”
The hours seemed to stretch out as the sun crawled toward the horizon. The rumble of thunder in the west announced that the predicted thunderstorms were going to materialize eventually. Kit hadn’t eaten all day. Her stomach felt knotted. She thought maybe she should eat some yogurt, at least. But even that wouldn’t go down.
Sam Curtis’s house wasn’t far from the tomato processing plant. She’d told Chris to call or text her if anything went wrong. She could leave and be at his location in ten, maybe twelve minutes.
The heavens broke loose at 5:40 p.m. Torrential rains poured down on the thirsty ground as lightning split the sky. Kit stood in the back doorway of the offsite office and watched as rain pelted the little pond in the back, tore leaves from the trees, and sent muddy rivulets racing toward low ground. “God,” she whispered, “you are so powerful. Please help us get through tonight.”
Lately, she’d been talking to him more. What was changing?
David dressed as if he’d been working, in a grubby T-shirt, jeans, and workboots. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. As he looked in the mirror, he saw fatigue and boredom, which was the look he was going for. Low threat.
Carefully putting his real cell phone in a drawer in his room, he clipped the pay-as-you-go phone on his belt and slid his wallet in his back pocket. Then he put a knife in his boot, and picked up a small revolver, and stuck it in his jacket pocket.
The air was still steamy as he stepped out of his room, closing the door behind him and slipping the key in his pocket. The sky was dark. Water from the late afternoon thunderstorm dripped off of the roof. The asphalt in the parking lot remained studded with puddles.
David got into his SUV. The drive to the tomato processing plant was short, just fifteen minutes or so. In his mind’s eye, he could imagine Chris and the others skirting through the woods, headed for the area near the tomato processing plant, having hidden their vehicles some distance away. They’d been waiting. He hoped he didn’t have to call on them. But he had all of his options in mind.
He felt just as glad Kit would be out of the area. His instincts would be to protect her. Now, he could concentrate on his primary goals: meeting Lopez’s boss and not getting killed himself.