“Who did you call just now?” Anna asked. They were back in his car with the door shut.
“An old pal on the Hill. He ran the tags for me.”
“That old job of yours is coming in pretty handy.” An unmistakable note of suspicion.
“Do you want the name or not?”
“Of course I want the fucking name. It’s just…All right. Go ahead.”
“Kurt Delacroix, age fifty-four. With an address on Winding Brook Way in Stafford, Virginia.”
“Spell it,” she said, calling up a search engine on her phone.
He obliged her.
“I’m on it.”
Henry eased into traffic as the first results popped up. She began scrolling.
“There are some property listings. There’s a Facebook account for an Australian surfer dude. There’s a blog in French.” She laughed. “Well, here’s some comic relief. There’s a YouTube, very schlocky, of a German rock band that calls itself the Kurt Delacroix Singers. Good God, the lead singer looks like that John Waters character, the one in drag.”
She went quiet for a few seconds, checking further hits.
“Here we go. There’s a quote from a Kurt Delacroix in a story from The Hill.”
“They cover Congress.”
“Where’s your notebook?”
He handed it to her. She flipped through the pages and checked her phone.
“This has to be him. He testified before that same Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing, the one where The New York Times took the photo with Robert in the background.”
“In May of 2006?”
“Yes.”
“So he’s connected to Robert? The CIA guy who makes people disappear?”
“Unless they both just happened to be at the same hearing, which sounds like a stretch. The story refers to Delacroix as, quote, ‘an expert on policy toward radical Islamist movements in unstable Arab states.’ ”
“What did he say?”
“I’ll read it verbatim: ‘Resorting to military intervention in some of these situations would be like using a chain saw for an appendectomy. You’d end up killing the patient when all you needed was surgery to remove the enflamed tissue. So I would say that the most important byword is precision.’ ”
“As in targeted killings.”
“You think that’s what he’s talking about?”
“Don’t you? Especially if he works for Robert. Does the story give his employer? What’s his job title?”
“Doesn’t say. Just calls him ‘an expert.’ ”
“Pull up the website for the Federal News Service. They transcribe every hearing on Capitol Hill.”
They drove on in silence while she found the site and then searched for the May 2006 subcommittee hearing. There was a subscriber fee, which she avoided by signing up for a seven-day free trial.
“I’m in,” she said, like a safecracker.
“Keep an eye out for those four names from the Newsweek story. They’re in my notebook.”
“Got ’em. Alex Berryhill, Winslow Edinson, Kevin Gilley, John Solloway. Good God. This transcript goes on and on. On my phone it’ll take forever.”
“We’re almost to Poston. We’ll pull it up on my laptop.”
They practically ran into the house. They logged on to the site, found the sixty-four-page transcript, and searched for “Delacroix.” And there he was, on page 19, stating his background and qualifications. He told the subcommittee he had worked for the CIA “in Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem, Beirut, a few other places.” Then they found this exchange:
REPRESENTATIVE HARTNETT: And what is your current employment, Mr. Delacroix?
MR. DELACROIX: I am a field advisor for a Washington consultant who I believe is already known to several members of this committee.
REPRESENTATIVE HARTNETT: I daresay you’re correct, Mr. Delacroix, and while I know your boss prefers to stay out of the limelight, just for the record could you please state his name, and then we’ll move on.
MR. DELACROIX: Yes, sir. Mr. Kevin Gilley.
They looked at each other. Here, at last, was the elusive Robert, and their man Merle was his employee.
“Where’s that picture of Robert?” Henry said.
Anna retrieved the letters from the bread drawer and found the clipped newspaper photo. CDG had circled Gilley’s face on the far left end of the row behind the witness. Henry jabbed his finger at the fellow seated just to Gilley’s right, who was stout, late forties, and even in 2006 had a salt-and-pepper beard.
“There’s Kurt Delacroix. Merle. The chicken catcher and the forger. The UPS man who picked up your brother’s prescription.”
“And the son of a bitch who took him hunting. These fuckers set up the whole damn thing.”
Her face was lit by anger and exhilaration, and both were contagious. Then a new thought sobered him up.
“The Sisterhood,” he said. “What about CDG and IAD? If these guys knew about your mom, wouldn’t they also know about the other two? Shouldn’t we try to warn them? I mean, if he’s really that good, and that ruthless?”
“The parcel,” Anna said. “The one my mom sent away. What was it CDG said when she got it?”
“I’ll guard it with my life.”
“Do you think we’re too late? They had to have heard about my mom by now, don’t you think?”
“Unless Gilley and Delacroix got to them at the same time. But how are we supposed to find them? All we’ve got is postmarks.”
Bewildered silence. Anna reached down to the stack of letters and began going through them slowly, one after another.
“Maybe there’s a way,” she said, plucking out the one postmarked from York the previous August, almost a year ago to the day.
“Here we go. Listen. ‘I will now dare to send you a cornball holiday snapshot in the coming season.’ Mom kept last year’s Christmas cards. I saw them in a box in her closet.”
They walked quickly down the block to the Shoat house. The smell of disinfectant was still strong in her parents’ bedroom. Anna went straight for the closet, avoiding any glance at the headboard or the bloodstained wall, and reached above the thin line of dresses to a box on the overhead shelf. She carried it past Henry, saying, “Let’s do this in the kitchen.” He gently shut the bedroom door behind them.
They found the two Christmas cards easily enough in the stack of a few dozen. The one postmarked from Currituck, North Carolina, was in a plain white envelope, and the card was staid and sober, showing a snowy church with a wreath on the door. There was a signature, “Warmly, Audra,” but there was no return address. The one from York, Pennsylvania, was in a red envelope, with a decidedly secular card featuring a crashed sled and an angry Santa. As CDG had promised, there was a photo enclosed—a spirited-looking woman in a Santa hat, standing with martini in hand in someone’s kitchen, where a party seemed to be in progress. The signature, “Love, Claire.” It, too, had no return address.
Anna’s mouth flew open in surprise. Henry smiled.
“Do those names ring a bell, Miss Anneliese Audra Claire Shoat?”
“How the hell did I not figure that out earlier?”
Then she picked up the two letters and looked again, as if seeking tracings in invisible ink.
“Why did she never tell me?”
“Too dangerous?”
“That’s the charitable explanation.”
“But we’re still stuck. Not even a last name to go on.”
“Maybe not.”
Anna dug deeper into the box. She pulled out a handwritten list of names and addresses, maybe three dozen in all. Some were crossed out, some had been revised. They were in two columns, one labeled Friends, the other Family.
“Of course,” Anna said, finding the names almost instantly. “She listed them under family.”
“The Sisterhood,” Henry said.
Claire Saylor lived on Smallbrook Lane in York. Audra Vollmer’s mailing address was a bit more vague, a post office box in Currituck, but at least now they had her full name.
They walked back to Henry’s and went to work. Audra Vollmer remained maddeningly elusive. A search for her name turned up no phone number, no street address, and no property records. Claire Saylor, on the other hand, was an easy mark, which they grimly realized also made her an easier target for Gilley and Delacroix. Her phone number popped up almost immediately.
“Shall I do the honors?” Anna said.
“Put it on speaker. I just hope she’s okay.”
A man’s voice answered after the third ring.
“Hello?” He sounded tentative, uncertain.
“May I please speak to Claire?”
“Who’s calling?”
Anna paused ever so briefly before saying, “A friend.”
“Just a moment.”
They waited through a few seconds of muffled consultation. It sounded like someone had put a hand over the mouthpiece. Finally, a woman answered.
“Yes, hello?”
“Claire?”
“Who’s calling?” Anna looked at Henry with a puzzled expression. This was a young voice, probably closer to their age.
“My name is Anna, Anna Shoat. My mother was Helen Shoat, or Helen Abell as you probably knew her. Is this Claire?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know you. Can you say why you’re calling?”
Henry shrugged and shook his head, having no idea how to proceed.
“I’m calling because we’re worried that you might be in danger.”
“We?”
“My friend Henry and me. Am I speaking to Claire?”
“Just a moment.” Another muffled interval. What in the hell was happening?
“It would be better to talk face-to-face,” the woman said. “How soon can you be here?”
Henry, who had already checked the mileage, mouthed the words, and Anna repeated them.
“About two hours, if traffic’s okay.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Don’t answer that,” he whispered. “Hang up.”
“We’ll see you in two hours,” Anna said.
She frowned, hesitated, and then hung up just as the woman was saying, “Hello? Hello?”
“Well, that was disturbing,” Anna said. “There were clearly other people in the room, and that definitely wasn’t Claire. She sounded very cagey.”
“So did you. Maybe they’re as wary as we are.”
“Or maybe Claire was with her, and was just being careful.”
“Maybe.”
“Only one way to know for sure.”
They locked up the house and headed for York.