“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
PROSPERO, THE TEMPEST
They arranged to meet Sandy Loeffler Hendrick at six-fifteen in the snack bar at her health club on San Pedro. Bryan Holihan had done the talking on the phone, saying it was an urgent and confidential FBI matter. He suggested they meet someplace other than her home. Before they went into the spa, Holihan called Santa Fe to tell the agent there that they were about to make contact.
Molly spotted her right away, sitting at a table with a lipstick-stained coffee cup in front of her—still blond and lithe at fifty-two in a shiny black Lycra sports bra and tights. She greeted them warily and, when Bryan Holihan flashed his ID, she took it and laid it on the table in front of her. She stared at it for such a long time Molly wondered if she’d gotten stuck. Eventually she stood and asked them if they’d like juice or coffee. Both declined.
“This seems very strange,” Sandy Hendrick said. “The only really private place to talk is one of the personal exercise rooms. We might as well do that.” She picked up her cup and headed toward the door. They followed her upstairs, through a huge room carpeted in purple and filled with shiny chrome-and-black machines and no people. She showed them into a small room. One wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling and the opposite wall had a ballet bar. Sandy Hendrick closed the door, turned on the overhead fan, and unrolled three plastic mats. “Sorry there are no chairs, but you said this required some privacy and this is really the only place.” In one graceful, continuous motion, she lowered herself into the lotus position.
Molly assumed an identical position.
Bryan Holihan looked down and turned around once like a dog looking for the right position. Then he went down to one knee on the mat and stayed like that, looking as if he were going to make a proposal of marriage.
“Does this have anything to do with my latest DWI?” Sandy said, looking at Bryan.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
“Mrs. Hendrick,” Molly said, “this is a most delicate and difficult matter. I believe in a woman’s right to privacy around matters of reproduction, but we have some extraordinary circumstances here. I’m going to tell you something that only a few people in the world know and, except for me, all of them are in law enforcement. Whatever you tell us will be shared only with those few, very discreet people.
“Thirty-three years ago, in the summer of 1962, when you were in summer school at the University of Texas, a newborn baby was abandoned. A male baby. Now a grown man. He needs to know the identity of his mother.” Molly paused and watched the woman’s face. “I have reason to think you might be his mother.”
Sandy Hendrick’s face had lost some color, but her expression remained totally impassive. Not a muscle twitched anywhere. Her skin had suffered the ravages of the years, the Texas sun, and alcohol, but her features had survived intact: her full lips, slanted blue eyes, and her delicately sculpted nose, which rose at the tip and seemed to pull the upper lip along up with it, revealing even white teeth.
“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you came for?”
Molly nodded.
“I’m sorry y’ll have come all the way from Austin for this,” she said. “I could have told you over the phone. This has nothing to do with me.” Under her black jog bra, her breast heaved as if she’d just run a marathon. “I was in summer school in 1962. That’s a matter of record. I failed French III, and”—she had to stop for breath—“I had to take it over. I had nothing to do with any baby. This is all so bizarre.” She picked up her coffee cup, but her hand was shaking so violently she had to bring the other hand up to help hold it steady. Even using both hands, she was unable to get the cup to her lips. She set it down.
“Mrs. Hendrick,” Molly said, feeling a stab of compassion for the devastation these questions were causing, “you and your roommate, Gretchen Staples, moved out of the sorority house even though you’d both paid through the summer and couldn’t get a refund. Why?”
“That’s none of your business. This has nothing to do with me. Let’s finish up here.”
“Mrs. Hendrick, when I was nineteen, I got pregnant. I wasn’t married and my parents were dead. I remember the panic like it happened this morning. It can happen to anyone, and it’s very scary. I still find it difficult to talk about.”
“I’m sorry for your misfortune, Miss …” She shrugged.
“Cates. Molly.”
“As I said, this has nothing to do with me.” She started to get to her feet. “And I’m going to be late for—”
“Wait a minute,” Molly said. “Please sit down for a minute more. I want to tell you about this baby—who he is now.”
The woman remained standing.
“Please sit.”
With a grimace of annoyance that was the first real expression she’d shown, she sank back down to the mat.
“Now I’m going to tell you something that you may find upsetting. The baby that was abandoned that summer is now the cult leader who’s holding a dozen people hostage in Jezreel.”
Sandy Hendrick kept her expression frozen, but her face paled, making the black eye shadow and liner around her eyes stand out like soot smudges on parchment. She looked like a woman who’d just had all her blood sucked out.
Molly moved in for the kill. “Have you been following that situation in Jezreel, Mrs. Hendrick?”
The woman spoke, barely opening her mouth. “Yes. Of course.” Her breath was coming raggedly. Molly was fascinated by the contrast between her attempt at impassiveness and the upheaval her body was caught in. We think we have our bodies in check, but our breath and blood, our tears and tics—those involuntary functions have a life and will of their own, Molly thought. They betray us every time. All the exercise in the world will not bring our bodies under control.
Sandy Hendrick was saying, “Everybody knows about that. I think about those children all the time.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, of course. It’s terrible, just terrible.”
“He’s planning to kill them. The negotiators have not gotten anywhere. If they knew the identity of his birth mother, they might be able to use that information to bargain with him. When Samuel Mordecai was twenty-one he searched for his real mother, desperately, but he never found her. It’s very, very important to him.”
“I’m sure it is, but there’s no reason to be telling me this. You’re wasting your time, and mine. I’m not the woman you think I am.” She turned her head and looked at herself in the big mirror.
Molly studied the woman’s profile, giving special attention to the finely molded uptilted nose and the upper lip that pulled up slightly to reveal her teeth. Molly had spent two hours watching Samuel Mordecai, and she’d had ample opportunity to admire his profile. She had always found it astounding when a genetic code imprinted itself on an offspring in some exact reproduction of a parental feature: mother and daughter with identical tufts of hair between their eyebrows, father and son with indistinguishable chin clefts. What bad luck for this woman that she had produced and abandoned a child whose upper lip was the mirror of her own, an undeniable link between them.
The resemblance took your breath away.
“Have you seen photographs of Samuel Mordecai?” Molly asked.
“Yes. I suppose. In the paper.”
“I wish I had a good, clear photo to show you, Mrs. Hendrick. No one could miss the resemblance. I believe you could tell us the date you gave birth that summer and where you left your baby and what he was wrapped in. Mrs. Hendrick, have you listened to what he said on the radio? He talked about being wrapped in the mantle of the Beast. I think you could explain that.”
Sandy Hendrick leapt to her feet, her slender body vibrating. “This is ridiculous!” Her voice shook with rage. “I don’t have to stay here! I’m leaving.”
“There’s a grandchild,” Molly continued. “A boy. His mother was murdered today. His father will not come out of this alive. That baby will be an orphan. You wouldn’t have to get involved, but you could if you—”
“No! I never had a baby until my Sarah was born in 1967, and I’d been married for two years. I was a virgin when I got married! I never—”
Bryan Holihan spoke up. “We could do this privately, Mrs. Hendrick. No one would have to know.”
“Listen!” she cried out. “I’m not the woman you think I am.”
Molly studied the taut, high-strung body, the tense, self-preoccupied, ravaged, humorless face. The woman was about to break. Sandy Hendrick was right—she was not the woman Molly thought she was. She was certainly Samuel Mordecai’s biological mother and a DNA test would prove it, but she was not the right woman. It would do no good to continue tormenting her, or to try to coerce her to speak to her son. And, anyway, it didn’t matter. She had come to the end of the strand. She had found what mattered.
Molly stood. “Sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Hendrick. You’re right. This is a misunderstanding and I apologize.”
Bryan Holihan reached up and grabbed her arm. “But—”
“Agent Holihan, it’s clear Mrs. Hendrick is not the woman we thought she was. We need to let her get on with her evening.”
He struggled to his feet.
Sandy Hendrick looked incredulous, as if she’d received a last-second reprieve from certain disaster.
Molly handed her a card, her usual practice. “If you want to talk to me, later on,” she said, “give me a call. Thanks for your time. We’d appreciate your not talking about this matter to anyone.” No danger of that, Molly thought.
They returned to the car in silence. As they pulled out of the lot, Holihan demanded, “Have you lost your mind? That’s her. Even I could see the resemblance to Mordecai. And she was just starting to break down. All the signs were there. You had her where you wanted her. In two more minutes she would have admitted it.”
“Probably,” Molly said. Copper was leaning into the front seat resting his head on Molly’s shoulder and she was scratching behind his good ear.
“Then why—”
“Because I saw that it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter! Then why have we wasted all this time?”
“Nothing is ever wasted, Bryan. Haven’t you learned that? How old are you?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Well, see, you’re too young.” Molly leaned back and closed her eyes. “I need five minutes of silence to think some things through before we call in. Okay?”
The dark landscape whizzed by. One good thing about Bryan Holihan was that he drove like a bat out of hell. Another was that he didn’t feel he had to make conversation. That made for perfect thinking conditions. Molly sat cross-legged in the passenger seat and contemplated deceit and homicide. Or, more accurately, she decided, ingenuity and assassination.
The dog slept on the back seat, occasionally making little whines and twitches in his sleep. Molly glanced back at him and wondered if police dogs had worse dreams than other dogs. According to Grady, this one had had his fair share of nightmare experiences during his career. But this morning, when he’d gone after the attackers in the garage, he had seemed joyful in his ferocity, totally alive, an animal doing what he was born to do. Bred and trained for such action, he would kill easily and without remorse if the occasion required it.
Molly had never had the slightest problem understanding why people killed one another. There were times in her life when she had been angry enough or scared enough to commit murder; if the conditions had been right, she probably would have. On the Patriot police beat, she had seen the results of countless murders—murders for money, revenge, love, drugs, and in one memorable case, murder for bottle caps. Her reaction had never been surprise or outrage, but a grim acknowledgment that it happens because that is the kind of animal we are.
Now she was going to do something she’d never done before: try to persuade others to commit a homicide. “Bryan, I’m ready. Let’s call the command post. I need to talk to Lattimore and Stein.”
He glanced over at her and grunted an assent. When he got Andrew Stein on the radio, he handed the mike to Molly. She asked, “Who else is present, Mr. Stein?”
“Curtis, and Borthwick.”
“Would you get Lattimore in and Traynor, too, and ask Borthwick to wait outside? I want to tell you what happened, and I have an idea I’d like to talk about.”
“Traynor’s still at the Grimes scene and Lattimore’s on his way to the airport in Austin.”
“He’s not leaving?”
“No. Just picking someone up. Jules, could you wait outside. Go ahead, Miss Cates, it’s Curtis and me.”
“Is this frequency secure?”
“It’s supposed to be. Go ahead. Have you found Mom?”
“Oh, yes. Sandy Hendrick is the mother all right. She didn’t admit that she was, but she looks so much like him you could pick her out from a hundred other women. Also she was so stressed by our questions, she was ready to explode. She’s really tried to repress the event. If we’d stuck with it, we could have broken her down, but I could see that it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Stein sounded impatient.
“I needed to complete the line of inquiry to see what the point really was. This is probably immoral and unethical, but I’ve got to tell you what I’m thinking now, while we still have time.”
“We’re all cynical adults here,” Stein said.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. Mr. Stein, I’ve heard the FBI has agents who are trained as assassins.”
“Miss Cates, I—”
“No. Don’t respond to that. I know that you do, but you probably call it by some other term, like rearrangement specialists or mortality adjusters. Here’s my real question: Have you got any middle-aged women, around fifty, who have that kind of experience? Who can go into dangerous situations and take someone out? That’s the way you say it, isn’t it? Take them out?”
There was silence at the other end.
“Do we all agree that launching an assault on the Jezreelites without taking Samuel Mordecai out is likely to give us dead hostages?”
“Miss Cates, where are you going with this?”
“First answer me. Do we agree?”
“We could get dead hostages even if we did figure out how to take him out,” Stein said evenly.
“I know, but we would have a better chance with him out.”
“We’re all nodding,” Stein said curtly.
“Okay. You said Mordecai always watches the Channel 33 news at six, right? And you’ve used that to feed him information.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Suppose they carried a news item tomorrow that Samuel Mordecai’s birth mother had been located and that she wanted to talk to him before the end.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And suppose he bit on it and contacted you and said he wanted to talk to her, too. And suppose she said it had to be face to face and private, and she wasn’t afraid to come in where he was. And suppose she went in there, into the compound.”
“Yeah.”
“And suppose she gets him alone, away from where the kids are, sort of diverts him. And suppose she kills him. And right then you start the maneuver, take the barn, and swoop down to protect the agent.”
“That’s a lot of supposing.”
“I know.”
“We’re a civilian agency, Miss Cates. We don’t kill people.”
“Bullshit.”
“Maybe you watch too many movies.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Where are you now?” Stein asked.
“San Marcos just zoomed by. With Bryan driving, we’re forty minutes from you.”
“Come back right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Bryan, do not stop at McDonald’s. We’re all dining here.”
“But what do you think?” Molly persisted.
“I think you need to come here. Grady will be back shortly and Lattimore should be back in an hour or so. We’ll talk about it then.”
——
Grady Traynor, Andrew Stein, and a slender bald man Molly hadn’t met were standing around the computer monitor eating fried chicken and watching George Curtis type words onto the screen. The bald man wore jeans and orange suspenders with palm trees on them over a lavender T-shirt.
Bryan Holihan immediately went to the bucket on top of the fax machine and took out a piece of chicken.
Grady kissed Molly on the cheek. Then he embraced her, holding on longer than usual. She looked up at him. His face seemed grayer than it had a few hours ago and the circles under his eyes looked engraved into the skin. “Bad scene?” she asked.
“One of the worst.”
Andrew Stein said, “Miss Cates, this is Jules Borthwick, just flew in from New York. Molly Cates.”
Molly shook hands with the bald man. His hand was fine-boned and soft. She’d never seen anyone who looked less like an FBI agent. “Are you an agent?” she asked.
“Don’t you just love those dark suits?” he warbled in a falsetto. He lowered his voice to a normal pitch. “I’m a consultant—makeup and special effects.”
“Mr. Borthwick is a celebrity,” Andrew Stein said. “He created the Elephant Man on Broadway, the Mantis Pieta, lots of movie and rock video monsters. He’s said to be a genius.”
Molly studied Borthwick with interest. “Is this true or are they playing with me?”
“Oh, it’s true, especially the genius part. I got an Obie for Methuselah the Dread.”
“What are you doing in Jezreel?”
Andrew Stein said, “It will all come clear. Wait until Lattimore gets back.”
She looked around. “He’s not back yet?”
“Plane was delayed,” Stein said curtly. “Just twenty minutes.”
“Who’s coming in?” Molly asked.
“The woman you were talking about—the fifty-year-old agent—Loraine Conroy.” Stein checked his watch. “They should be back here by eleven.”
Molly was breathless with surprise. “You had already—”
“Great minds,” Stein said. “But your idea of breaking it on the TV news is excellent, original with you. We were planning to call Mordecai with it direct, but this is much better because he’ll see it and call us. That way, it feels like his idea. Go ahead and print that out, Curtis, so she can read it.”
Curtis hit a key; the light on the printer began to blink.
Molly tried to keep her voice even. “When did you decide to do this?”
“Early this morning, right after Lieutenant Traynor told us Samuel Mordecai was adopted and how far you’d gotten in searching for the mother. We’ve been sitting around here for days trying to figure out how to get someone inside there to take Mordecai out, and then you came into our lives and gave us the answer. Hallelujah. Lattimore called Quantico right then to ask if Rain could fly down. We had to get a green light on Mordecai, but the real problem is that we have a policy against risking agents’ lives to get hostages out.” Seeing her expression, he explained bluntly, “Hostages are considered to have one leg in the grave already and you don’t risk a fully alive person for them. But when children are involved, everyone goes all mushy.”
The printer spit out a single sheet.
“So,” Molly said, feeling hot anger building up, “you knew all along it didn’t matter whether we found the mother or not, but you let us make the trip to San Antonio.”
“Oh, no. We hoped you’d come back with a bona fide mom. It would be nice to have her in our pocket, just in case. But you know as well as we do this negotiation’s at a dead end. Mordecai’s just been leading us on, buying time. Any bargaining chip is worthless. He never intended to let any of the kids go.”
Molly looked at Andrew Stein’s plump face in wonder. She’d been considering herself ruthless. But these guys were way beyond her.
Stein picked the paper up from the printer and handed it to her. “Read it out loud.”
Molly read: “MOLLY CATES: I was working on a story about Samuel Mordecai for my magazine when I learned he had been adopted as an infant. I went back and researched it. It was difficult, but I finally located his birth mother yesterday. She lives in Houston now and had no idea that Mordecai was her son until I talked to her yesterday.
“NEWSPERSON: How can you be sure that the woman you found really is his mother?
“CATES: Because I was careful not to give her any of the details I knew about where the infant had been found and when and what was found with him. She was able to tell me all that, every detail. There’s no question—this woman is Samuel Mordecai’s real mother. She wants more than anything in the world to speak with him, explain things to him.
“NEWSPERSON: What are the circumstances of his birth? You said he was found?
“CATES: At this point in time I’m not at liberty to talk about that.” She stopped reading and said, “I’d never say ‘at this point in time.’ I’d—”
“Just read it,” Grady said.
Molly shrugged and continued: “NEWSPERSON: Have you passed all this on to the FBI negotiators?
“CATES: Yes, I have. I gave them copies of my notes and tapes.
“NEWSPERSON: What do they intend to do about it?
“CATES: I don’t know.”
Molly finished reading and looked up. “Why me?”
Grady said, “Have some chicken. We’ve got plenty.”
She shook her head. “Why me?”
Andrew Stein said, “First of all, it has the advantage of being as close to the truth as we can stay. This version is true up until the last step. Makes for less lying, more chance of it being believable, less chance of getting caught. But the main reason you’re the one to do it is that he’s talked about you in our conversations.”
“He has?” She looked at Grady; he hadn’t told her this.
Grady shrugged.
“He trusts you,” Stein said.
“Trusts me! Oh, no. You’ve got your wires crossed.” She walked to the fireplace and studied the selection of photographs they had managed to find of the estimated hundred and fifty Hearth Jezreelites believed to be inside the compound. At the top was Samuel Mordecai standing with Annette Grimes outside the compound. He was smiling, golden-haired and radiant, a sun god on top of the world. Next to him, Annette looked tiny, pretty and shy.
“No,” Stein said. “He sees you as ungodly, unfeminine, wrong-headed, and doomed. But he also sees you as ruthlessly honest and struggling to tell the truth as you see it. More honest than the people who call themselves Christians and do nothing about it. He thinks your interest in exploring faith is more religious than most people’s watered-down or fake belief.”
“He said that?”
“Yup. Curtis, find her the transcripts of the relevant phone tapes, please. Mordecai says you didn’t try to misrepresent yourself and you quoted him accurately. He says you tried to get at the truth, but it was impossible because your magazine, your audience, and the world you live in are hopelessly materialistic and corrupted. So you had no chance.”
“Well, that may be true,” Molly said. “There are days I think that myself. But how did my name even come up?”
“At one point we approached him about outside, neutral people to serve as possible go-betweens. Mordecai insisted you are the only one he’d trust. But like everything else we’ve tried with him, that collapsed.”
Molly was flabbergasted. She’d assumed Samuel Mordecai had hated her as much as she hated him. It was pathetic. If he had no one he trusted more than her, then he was truly alone and besieged in this world. “Well, he couldn’t be more wrong, could he? I’m clearly an inveterate liar and now I’m collaborating on fraud and murder.”
Andrew Stein said, “The problem here, Molly—may I? I’m tired of saying Miss Cates.”
“I wish you would.”
“The problem, Molly, is what we in the business call divergent worldviews. Mordecai sees what he’s doing as leading the world to its glorious, millennial rendezvous with God, and you see what he’s doing as butchering innocent children. In divergences this extreme, normal morality doesn’t apply.” He looked at Grady. “Lieutenant, Mr. Borthwick and I have some work to do. We need Bryan, too. Could you take Molly through the script idea?”
“Sure,” Grady said. “Can we use the computer in here?”
“Yes. And it would be nice to have a draft before they get back from the airport. Curtis, you man the phones, please. Come on, Jules.” The three men left. Curtis slipped a pair of earphones on and sat at the hostage phone control panel.
Grady pulled out the chair in front of the computer. “Sit down, Molly. We need to get some notes and tapes put together. We want evidence that will convince Samuel Mordecai that you did in fact track down his mother.”
Molly looked at her watch. “This sounds too much like a term paper, and it’s ten-thirty, Grady. I was planning on taking my dog home to bed.”
He patted the chair. “Sit down here and rest your weary self. Your shoulders look all tense. Let me work on them.”
Molly sat. Grady stood behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. Slowly he began to knead the tight muscles at the base of her neck. She closed her eyes and relaxed into his familiar hands. “Good thing the dog’s outside,” she murmured.
“Yeah, it would be nice if Curtis were, too.”
“Mmmmm,” she said, letting her head fall forward, “that’s good, right behind the bones there. Ooo. Perfect.”
“This job is right up your alley,” he said into her ear. “A bit of writing and a bit of acting.” His thumbs were working their way down her spine. “We want you to write a script, Molly. An interview between you and Samuel Mordecai’s mother. You come in and tell her what’s led you to her and then she tells you—eventually—the details of his birth and abandonment and you get convinced she is the mother. She ends up saying she’s regretted leaving him every day of her life and wants to tell him about it and why she did what she did. Make it convincing and make the mother contrite and loving.” He used the heels of his hands to press into her lower back.
“When Agent Conroy gets here, we’ll want to record the two of you reading your parts into your little recorder.”
He took his hands off her back, picked up a file folder and opened it. “Her name—the mother—is Cynthia Jenkins. She lives in Houston, on Terrace West in the Memorial area. She’s a third-grade teacher, a widow with no kids. She has spent her life mourning the infant child she abandoned. The interview took place last night, around eight, at a restaurant near Hobby Airport. You flew in to talk to her.” He handed her the folder. “We’ve got a driver’s license and a passport for her right here. The photo on them is Loraine Conroy’s.”
Molly picked up the passport and opened it. The woman in the photo had gray eyes with thick, dark eyebrows, short brown hair going gray, a straight nose, wide mouth, and sallow skin.
“What’s her story?” Molly asked.
“Apparently she’s legendary. The best marksman in agency history. She once shot two possibles in a morning.”
“What’s a possible?”
“I guess it’s like shooting off a gnat’s eyelash; it’s theoretically possible, but rarely done, and never twice in a row. Conroy’s a former nun, quit the Church and joined the agency in ’72, when they started taking women. Speaks three languages, has been everywhere in the world—foreign counterintelligence, all kinds of undercover assignments. Now teaches at Quantico. She’s done this sort of thing before, although it never gets any press—very hush-hush. A real stand-up guy, they all say.”
Molly looked at the photo again.
“Can I get you anything to prime the creative process?” Grady asked.
“I lie better with a Coors Light on the desk.”
“It shall be yours.”
Molly raised her hands to the keyboard and started to type:
M.C.: I have something very difficult and very urgent to talk to you about, Mrs. Jenkins. I believe in a woman’s right to privacy about matters of reproduction, but we have some extraordinary circumstances here. It has to do with a baby boy who was abandoned in the summer of 1962.
C.J.: Oh, my God. My God.
M.C.: Mrs. Jenkins, I hate to cause you distress, but I have to ask if you are the mother of that child.
C.J. (with a sob): What happened to him? I have wondered about him every day of my life.
M.C.: I’ll tell you about him, Mrs. Jenkins, but first would you tell me the date and some of the circumstances surrounding the birth? So I can verify it.
Grady was reading over her shoulder. “Don’t you think C.J. should stonewall a little? She collapses awfully quick.”
Molly took her hands off the keyboard. “You promised me a beer, Grady. Go fetch it. You can critique when I’m finished.”
“Okay, but don’t forget to include—”
“Grady!”
The scene flowed out of her fingertips into the keyboard and surfaced as a line of words moving across the screen. Molly moved her lips, saying the words as she typed them. In the scene, the tough but empathic journalist pushes for all the details. The miserable and tender repentant mother tells about the birth, the panic, the need for secrecy, the two bewildered and terrified young girls not knowing what to do, the beer cooler, the robe, the creek—vivid details only the mother could know.
When the journalist is satisfied that this is the woman she seeks, she tells her about Samuel Mordecai’s adoption, his searching for his real, birth mother.
She finished the scene like this:
C.J.: Do you think he might talk to me? You say he searched. That must mean he wants to find me. If the world is coming to an end I want to see him, speak with him first. I want to tell him what happened, how I’ve felt. I want to hear about him, everything about him. Do you think he might talk to me?
M.C.: I don’t know.
C.J.: I’m not afraid. I’d like to go there. As long as I could speak to him privately, without lots of other people around. I need to talk to my son. You understand?
M.C.: Yes. What I’ll do is give all this to the negotiators. They’ll have to decide what to do about it. Thanks for talking to me, Mrs. Jenkins. I need to catch my plane in a half hour. Here’s my card.
Molly glanced at her watch. Eleven. She’d done it in a half hour. This scene was so much more satisfying than the real one in San Antonio. It had the right emotion and it came to closure. It felt wonderful to channel her lying urges into something constructive. You could make things turn out the way you wanted, make people feel the way you thought they ought to feel. You could improve on life.
She told the computer to print and stood up to stretch.
By the time Pat Lattimore finally returned from the airport, Molly and Grady had gone over Molly’s script, refined it, and printed out three copies. To Molly’s delight, Andrew Stein had declared it ready for opening night.
Lattimore, looking even more exhausted than usual, introduced them all to Agent Loraine (Rain) Conroy, a tall, lanky, handsome woman. She wore gray slacks, low heels, and a blue blazer. A heavy-looking canvas duffel hung from one shoulder. Conroy stowed the duffel carefully under a table and gave Jules Borthwick a long hug. Then she stood back and regarded him with a grin. “I know you’ve got a show opening, sweetie, but when they asked me to do this, I said only if you’d do my body. You’re the best, and for this we need perfection.”
“We need to start right away on the body cast, Rain,” Jules told her. “It will take me all bloody night to do it. I’ve got the alginate ready in the kitchen.” He opened his arms wide. “Baby, is your body ready for me?”
“Wide open,” she said.
“I need the weapons now. You brought your own?”
“Of course,” the agent said, pointing to her bulky duffel. “The reason the plane was delayed. I don’t check, ever, and the security guys were new and didn’t know the procedure.”
They went right to work on recording the scene Molly had written. Rain Conroy read it over to herself once, and when they started the tape turning, she gave a perfect, tear-jerking performance. Molly was astonished; the woman should be on Broadway. She brought the words on the page to throbbing life. She could even cry on cue. To simulate the restaurant, Grady and Andrew clattered some plates in the background and turned a radio on low.
By the time Molly and Grady left at 1 A.M., they had assembled a folder containing the tape, the adoption file, the police report, Molly’s genuine notes, plus some fabricated ones, and the Pi Alpha Omega directory—a complete record of the successful search for Donnie Ray Grimes’s mother.
They drove home in Grady’s unmarked car, with the dog hanging out the window, sucking in the smells of the spring night.
As they passed the entrance to the Hearth Jezreelite compound, Molly leaned her head back and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at it. She told Grady once again about the encounter in the garage, about Annette Grimes being lifted screaming into the van. “Grady, she had a new baby and her face was like a flower.”
“I know. And what happened to her was the worst possible way to go. If you have the slightest reservation about your contribution to the plan to take Mordecai out, shake it off.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Molly, I’m grateful you escaped it. I don’t think I could bear it if something happened to you. How are you feeling?”
“Exhausted, but I’ve never felt more alive, more … whatever the opposite of a blood statue is.”
“Escaping death is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Grady put his hand on her leg. “You know that.”
She moved closer to him, hoping the dog wouldn’t notice. “Yes, but don’t you feel it’s inappropriate somehow? A betrayal?”
“Oh, no. I’ve always felt it honors the dead.” His light touch progressed slowly up her thigh.
“Mmmm, I like that. We’ll go home and honor the dead.”
“Home—that sounds good. Have you thought any more about my lease problem?”
“No.” After a silence, she added, “Yes. I have thought about it. I’m worried. It attracts me and repels me at the same time. Grady, I’ve gone feral. Like an animal who would love the warmth and affection that comes from being a house pet but can’t give up its bad habits. I’m not housebroken anymore. I eat when I feel like it. I read all night when I want to. I never cook. I still do vigils. I don’t hang up my clothes. I keep some bad company. I follow my obsessions. I work all the time—it’s what I love.”
“Ditto, ditto, ditto,” Grady said. “We’re a match made in heaven.”
“Maybe, but I live like a man, and in my experience, that works better for men than women. There is something about domestic life that, over time, makes women feel guilty and stressed when there’s no toilet paper.”
“How about a prenuptial agreement whereby I pledge never to ask ‘Where’s the toilet paper?’ ”
Molly laughed. She snuggled into his side and snaked her arm around his neck.
A menacing growl emanated from the back seat.
She pulled her arm back. “Let’s do this, Grady. Let’s hold off on a decision, see if the world ends on Friday. I filed for an extension on my taxes. I don’t want to waste the time and agony if it’s not necessary.”
“Are you equating my moving in with paying taxes?”
“Oh, no. More like an audit where all your vices and faults and sloppy record keeping are laid bare.”
“Molly, Molly,” he said, sliding his hand between her legs, “the only thing I want to lay bare is your body, and the sooner, the better.”
She glanced in the back to see if the dog was sleeping. “That is fine by me,” she whispered.