By the time Mason got home again, darkness and exhaustion reigned. The thought of climbing into a scalding shower to scrub off the taint of Schaub’s world sounded incredible, but he couldn’t bring himself to cross the front threshold. He just stood on the porch, staring through the open doorway at a house that was no longer his. The part of him that lived inside had died with his wife.
It struck him that they would never bring a child home to this house. He would never throw a ball with him in the yard or swing with her in his lap. He would never walk through this door to the sound of laughter or the smell of his wife’s spaghetti. He would never hear her breathing in his ear or feel her hands on the muscles in his back.
He stared at the furniture in the living room and the paintings on the walls, and at the dinette in the kitchen, where his investigative files were spread around his wife’s final communication to him. We need to talk tonight. Please. There was nothing he wanted to do more and yet it was the one thing he would never be able to do again.
This was a stranger’s house. Or maybe he had become a stranger to it. The thought of spending another night in it was more than he could bear, but when it came right down to it, he had nowhere else to go.
He was at a crossroads and the time had come to decide which direction his life would take. The decision itself was so monumental that he had to break it down into a series of smaller, less significant decisions. He wasn’t accomplishing anything just standing there, so he made the decision to enter the house and close the door behind him.
Heading upstairs for a change of clothes was an easy decision. Easier still was the decision to get in the shower. The hot water worked its magic and he emerged looking and smelling like a new man. Or at least a clean man. It also helped him formulate his thoughts. He had brought all of this pain upon himself. He had brought evil back with him from Arizona and tracked it through his home. He was responsible for his wife’s death. He had failed to kill the monster who murdered his partner and then his wife. That one moment had changed everything. That one decision.
Take the shot, damn it!
Had he shot the man with the blue eyes first, his partner might still be dead, but his wife would be alive. A split second to think it through. Not even that. He had acted on instinct and made the wrong decision. He needed the next one he made to be the right one, for the answer to the question he was about to pose to himself would set the course of the rest of his life.
What should I do now?
The answer was so simple that even he couldn’t screw it up.
He was going to track down the man who had murdered Angie and Kane. He was going to find the man with the blue eyes. And he was going to kill him.
He changed into clean clothes, holstered his Glock under his left arm, and looked around the bedroom that was no longer his. Angie was in everything he saw. Her scent haunted the room. She was no longer here, though, and she would never be coming back.
Neither would Mason.
He loaded Angie’s personal laptop into its case, took it by the handle, and went down the stairs. He stopped dead in his tracks on the landing. A yellow triangle protruded from the seam around the door. He opened it and a folded piece of paper fell to the floor.
Another page torn from a phone book, covered with scores of fingerprints, none of which would lead him to the person who had left the message. It consisted of only four words this time.
WILL YOU HELP ME?
He took one of his business cards from his wallet, stepped out onto the porch, and wedged it in the door behind him. When whoever left the notes was done playing games, he could pick up a phone and call Mason. He didn’t have any more time to waste. If the man with the blue eyes was still alive, then there was a chance he’d brought the virus with him.
Mason was already formulating a plan when he climbed behind the wheel of his Cherokee. He needed to consider everything he knew about the man with the blue eyes, who obviously knew his identity, which meant he had to assume that the man knew everything there was to know about him. He couldn’t afford not to. Unfortunately, that meant the man with the blue eyes also knew about his father, which opened up a whole new can of worms, but he had to consider every possibility.
What did he know for sure?
The man with the blue eyes favored fire as his means of erasing any sign of his presence, assuming he was also responsible for the string of fatal blazes leading northwest from the Arizona-Mexico border. Perhaps his flair for pyrotechnics stemmed from having been severely burned; maybe his facial disfigurement was as a result of it. If so, there was likely a record of it somewhere.
He was part of a group trafficking pathogens into the country, and Mason’s gut told him the end goal was weaponization, which fit with the fact that even Ramses couldn’t find out what was being sold on the third floor of the building by the old airport. The same group was responsible for the deaths of thirteen law-enforcement agents at the stone quarry, and he fully believed they had known the strike force was coming because someone had tipped them off. Someone within their own ranks.
He’d been shot in the shoulder. Mason had seen that with his own eyes. Maybe the man with the blue eyes wanted to exact his revenge, but if that was all, why not come directly at him?
It wasn’t much, but Mason had worked with less.
The problem was, there was only one person who could potentially lead him to the man with the blue eyes, and he had a hunch that help would come at a fairly painful price.