Standalone

CUT AND RUN
PROLOGUE

SIX YEARS EARLIER

The forty-first day was their last together.

Roland Larson was holed up in a truck stop's pay phone, half-mad from guarding her round-the-clock while denied any privacy with her whatsoever. He resorted to calling her on the phone. He'd slipped her his cell phone, and now dialed his own number to find her breathless as she whispered from her hardened bedroom, the aft cabin of the bus, not thirty yards away.

"I can't stand this," she said.

He found himself aroused by the hoarse, coarse sound of her. Forty-one days, under every conceivable pressure, and this the first complaint he'd heard from her.

"Us, or the situation?" he asked.

Hope Stevens had been moved on three separate occasions: first, to a wilderness cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the kind of place Larson could see himself retiring to someday, a lethargic life so different from the one he lived; then she'd been moved to a nearly abandoned Air Force base in Montana, the desolation reminding him of a penitentiary, a place he knew well; and finally, into a private coach, a customized diesel bus that Treasury had confiscated from a forgotten rock band, its interior complete with neon-trim lighting and mirrored tables. Painted on three sides as a purple and black sunrise, the coach comfortably slept six and converted to club seating by day. Three deputies, including Larson, two drivers, and the witness traveled together—one of only a handful of times in the U.S. Marshals Service's long history of witness protection that a "moving target" policy had been adopted. The last had been aboard a sleeper train in the mid-'70s.

Ironically, the more attempts made upon her life, the more importance and significance Hope Stevens gained in the eyes of her government. It wasn't for her keen understanding of computers that they guarded her, nor for her fine looks or sharp tongue (when she did bother to speak); it was instead for a few cells and chemicals inside her skull and the memory trapped there, living now like a dog under the front porch, cowering with a bone of truth in its jaws.

The problem for Roland Larson was that the longer he guarded her, the more he cared for her—cared intensely—a situation unforgivable and intolerable in the eyes of his superiors and one that, if discovered, could have him transferred to some far outpost of government service, like North Dakota or Buffalo. But the few private moments shared with her overwhelmed any sensibility in Larson.

After just seventeen days of protection, the Michigan cabin had gone up in flames—arson; in the resulting firefight, a shadowy ballet in the flashes of orange light from the mighty blaze, two deputy marshals had been injured.

When, at the Montana Air Force base, mention of "persons unknown" had been intercepted by some geek in an NSA cubicle, the marshals had been instructed to move Hope yet again. Larson wasn't much for running away from a faceless enemy, but he knew well enough to follow orders and so he did.

As a former technical consultant to an industry probe of fraudulent insurance practices, Hope had connected a string of assisted-care facilities to millions of dollars in wrongful charges. The names she'd eventually given Justice—Donny and Pop Romero and, by inference, the young scion of the crime family, Ricardo Romero—were well known to federal law enforcement's Organized Crime Unit. The Romeros, notorious for inventive white collar crime on an enormous scale, also played rough and dirty when required, the arson and the shoot-out at the lake a case in point. Hope's value to Justice was not only her initial discovery of insurance fraud—a scheme involving billing Medicare long after the patient was dead—but, more important, her interception of a series of e-mails sent to and from the Romeros that proved to be murder-for-hire contracts. Five executives of the same health care consortium that had called for the probe, all referred to in the correspondence as whistle-blowers whose actions threatened the Romeros, had later been found brutally murdered, the victims of so-called Serbian Spas—laundry bleach enemas that burned the victim from the inside out over a period of several hours, their families tied up and forced to watch their prolonged deaths.

Intended perhaps to implicate the Russian mob, these horrific tactics did nothing of the sort. The FBI had immediately placed the Romeros onto their Most Wanted list and their two remaining witnesses, Hope Stevens and an unnamed accountant, had been placed in protective custody.

The e-mails had been electronically destroyed; they existed now only in Hope's memory. Government prosecutors believed a jury would convict based primarily on her testimony. And so they sequestered her on the garish bus, never allowing her off, never risking her being seen in public, and never stopping the bus for more than fuel or supplies. The strategy had kept her alive for the past ten days and left everyone on board with a bad case of cabin fever. Discussions had begun to once again relocate her, this time to a "static," or fixed, location, probably a federal facility, quite possibly a short stint inside an unused wing at a federal penitentiary, or in an ICU at a city hospital. They had myriad tricks up their sleeves if left to their own devices. They seldom were.

"Isn't there something you can do?" Hope asked. "Order us to stop at a motel, and arrange for you to guard my room? There has to be something."

"I'm only guessing here," Larson answered, "but I think a few of the guys might see through that tactic." He caught his reflection in the polished metal surrounding the pay phone's keypad. No one was going to call him pretty, although they had as a child. He'd grown into something too big for pretty, too hard for handsome, like a puppy growing into its feet. Pedigree be damned.

She sputtered on the other end, not quite her trademark laugh but a valiant effort.

He said, "You could make like a heart attack, and I could give you mouth-to-mouth."

A little more authentic this time.

At the cabin, and then again at the Air Force base, they'd managed to find moments together, though not the moment both of them longed for, one he repeatedly daydreamed about. But once onto the bus, they'd barely shared a glance. A phone call was as much as they were going to get.

"It's probably better this way," she said. "Right?"

"No. It's decidedly worse."

"As soon as I testify . . . as soon as that's over with . . . they'll put me into the program and that will be that. Right? We should have never started this, Lars."

Her testimony against Donny Romero—the fraud case—would come first. The capital murder charges were likely still a long way from prosecution—a year or two—but he knew better than to mention it. One didn't talk about the future with a protected witness, the reality far harsher, the adjustment far more difficult than they understood. In practice, breaking off all contact with one's former life proved traumatic, invariably more difficult than the witness imagined.

"Seriously?" he asked. "Because I don't see it that way at all. I wouldn't trade one minute with you for something else."

"You're hopeless."

"I'm hopeful," he said, an intentional play on her name that he immediately congratulated himself for, though no doubt one she'd heard before.

His feeling for her had come on like a force of nature, as unavoidable and inexplicable. Together, they communicated well; she accepted teasing in the face of all the madness; they fit. And when you found that, you held on to it.

Nearly ten minutes had passed since he'd left the bus. Members of his small squad would be wondering why the delay. Ostensibly, he'd left the bus to settle the bill—with cash, always cash—but ten minutes was pushing it.

"My gut tells me we'll work this out somehow," he lied. He couldn't see them ending this now—not before they tested the boundaries. He'd attended the seminars on avoiding emotional attachment with the witness. Brother bonding with the male witnesses was as dangerous as what he and Hope had stumbled into. It screwed up everything, risked everything, and he well knew it. It could not possibly have a happy ending. Still, he encouraged her to stay with him while he looked for some way around it all, a way that he suspected wasn't there. At this moment, after what they'd been through together, letting her go was not an option.

"Lars," she spoke, yet again in a hushed whisper, the crisp sibilance rolling off the s and causing a ripple of gooseflesh down his left side. It snaked into his groin and lodged there. But rerouted by a synapse, it suddenly sparked across a gate in his brain that translated it differently, albeit a beat too late: This was nothing short of the sound of panic.

"Hope?"

"Oh, my God."

The line went dead.

The bus.

Larson dropped the receiver and ran, losing his balance as he took a corner too quickly on wet tile, ignoring the yellow sandwich board written in Spanish and English with an icon of a pail and mop and a splash of water. He went down hard. He scrambled to his feet, knocked over a corn chip display, and hurried out the truck stop's main door, the cashier's cry of complaint consumed by the high-pitched whine of highway traffic.

"Rolo?" This came from Trill Hampton, a member of his squad, a fellow deputy marshal. Approaching footfalls of shoes slapping blacktop came on fast. Larson's running had sent a signal. Hampton was in full stride, already reaching for his piece.

Larson's arrival into sunlight temporarily blinded him. They'd stopped at far too many truck stops over the past ten days for him to immediately recall the layout of this one. They'd parked out here somewhere. A spike of fear insinuated itself as he considered the possibility that the entire bus had been hijacked, for he didn't see it anywhere.

But then, as Hampton caught up to him and edged left, and the two of them moved around the building, Larson spotted the rows of diesel pumps and the bus where they'd parked it, wedged amid a long line of eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers.

Hampton walked gracefully, even at double time.

Leading at a slight jog, Larson assessed the bus from a distance, seeing no indication of trouble and wondering if he'd misinterpreted Hope's distress.

"What's up?" Hampton asked, not a sheen of sweat on his black skin.

He wasn't about to confess to phoning the witness from the truck stop. "A bad feeling is all."

"A bad feeling?" Hampton questioned. "Since when?" He had a flat, wide nose, too big for his face, and a square, cleft chin that reminded Larson of a black Kirk Douglas.

Larson wasn't exactly the touchy-feely type; Hampton saw through that.

Larson sought some plausible explanation for Hope hanging up on him. He seized upon the first thing he saw. "Why isn't Benny stretching his legs?" The older of their two drivers had been complaining to anyone who would listen about a bad case of hemorrhoids. Larson saw Benny through the windshield, sitting behind the wheel.

"Yeah, so?"

They drew closer. Benny not only still occupied his driver's seat, but his head was angled and tilted somewhat awkwardly toward his shoulder, as if dozing. This, too, seemed incongruous, as Benny rarely slept, much less napped.

"Rolo?" Hampton said cautiously. Now he, too, had sensed a problem with Benny. Hampton and Larson went back several years. Hampton had come out of one of New Haven's worst neighborhoods, had won an academic scholarship to a blue blazer prep school, and had gone on to graduate from Howard University. He'd wanted to be a professional sports agent, but had become a U.S. marshal as an interim job, at the urging of an uncle. He'd never left the service.

"Radio Stubby," Larson instructed.

Hampton attempted to raise Stubblefield, the third marshal, who remained inside the bus, but won only silence.

"Shit!" Hampton said, increasing his stride. The man could cover ground when he wanted to.

The two were twenty feet away from the bus now, Larson adjusting his approach in order to come from more of an angle to avoid being seen, his handgun, a Glock, carefully screened.

He instructed Hampton: "Hang back. Take cover. Lethal force if required."

"Got it." Hampton broke away from Larson, hurrying toward the adjacent tractor-trailer and taking a position that allowed him to use it as cover.

Larson found the bus door closed—standard procedure. Benny would typically open it for him as he approached, but that didn't happen, sounding a secondary alarm in Larson's head. He slipped his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, searching amid a wad of cash receipts for the cool, metallic feel of keys—the duplicate set to the bus that, as supervising deputy, Larson kept on his person.

Benny remained motionless, not responding; Stubby not answering a radio call. But who could storm a bus through its only door—a locked door, at that—and overcome two drivers and a deputy marshal?

Larson heard thumping from inside. Banging. Just as he turned the key, out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a state police car parked beyond the diesel pumps and he thought: Benny would open the door for a uniform.

As Larson opened the door and entered, the banging stopped abruptly. Larson both tasted and smelled the bitter air and knew its source from experience: a stun grenade—an explosive device that uses air pressure to blow out eardrums and sinuses and render the suspects temporarily deaf and semiconscious.

The narrow stairs that ascended to the driver prevented him from seeing into the main body of the bus. He saw only Benny, whose shirt held a red waterfall of spilled blood down the front. Larson's first assessment was that the man's nose was bleeding—typical with stun grenades. But then he saw a precise line below his jaw, like a surgical incision. His open eyes and frozen stare cinched it: Benny was dead.

Weapon still in hand, Larson kept low and climbed the bus stairs, ready for contact. The banging he'd heard had been someone attempting to breach the hardened door to Hope's cabin. He saw Stubby, unconscious or dead, on the left side, behind a collapsible table. Clancy, the other driver, sat upright in a padded captain's chair opposite Stubby, his head tilted back. A game of gin rummy between them had ended abruptly. No blood or ligature marks on Clancy.

No sign of a state trooper either, the aisle empty, a sleeping cabin on either side.

One of Stubby's golf clubs lay broken in front of the rear cabin's door, which appeared intact and suggested Hope remained safe, a source of great relief. The intruder had been trying to use a club to pry the door open.

There was only one key to that door, hidden in a Hide A Key in the rear engine bay. Larson edged forward.

He went down hard as a strong hand gripped his ankle and pulled from behind. The gun hit the carpet and bounced loose. The wind knocked out of him, Larson reeled.

The intruder was a stringy guy with frog-tongue reactions. He seized Larson's hair from behind and pulled. But Larson rolled left and the razor blade, intended for his throat, missed and caught the front of his right shoulder instead. Larson broke loose, dived forward, and grabbed for the gun. He spun and squeezed off three rounds. Two went into the mirrored ceiling, raining down cubes of tempered glass, and blinding him in a silver snow.

A crushing force caught Larson in the jaw, snapping his head back. He inadvertently let go of the gun for a second time. The intruder had fallen onto him, and Larson realized he'd hit him with one of the three shots. Larson grabbed for the man and felt fabric rip.

A uniform. Larson fought back, the wounded man keeping him from the gun. Larson bucked him off, but his cut shoulder caused his arm to flap around uselessly, refusing all of Larson's instructions. Tangled up with the man, Larson drove his left elbow back and felt the crunch of soft bone and tissue, like an eggshell breaking.

He then heard a series of quick footfalls and looked in time to see the intruder hurry off the bus.

Landing out on the parking lot's pavement, the uniformed man's voice shouted, "Someone call for help!"

Larson came to his knees. His head swooned. He looked around for his gun through blurry eyes.

Hampton saw the slender state trooper throw his hands in the air as he called for help. He was bleeding. The man sank to his knees in front of the door to the bus.

Hampton held his weapon extended and stepped out from behind the tractor-trailer. "Hands behind your head," he called out, not feeling great holding a gun on a man in uniform.

As the trooper sat up, Hampton saw a yellow-white muzzle flash. He took the first round in the thigh, driven back by the impact and losing his balance. He sprawled back onto the hot blacktop, rocking his head to the right and watching the suspect run off. He fired two rounds from his side.

As Larson dragged himself toward the front of the bus, he tried to lock down anything he remembered about the intruder: thin and wiry; strong; the uniform; a scar. He focused on the scar. The lines of pink, beaded skin crossed, forming a stylized infinity sign on the inside of his forearm. Larson's vision filled with a purple fringe, the dark, throbbing color coming at him from all sides. His shoulder was cut badly. Sticky down to his waist. He felt faint. Sounds echoed. Again he smelled the tangy air, laced with black powder and sulfur. Bitter with blood. His stomach retched. He felt as if he were being pushed and held underwater—dark water—by a strong, determined hand. He resisted, but felt himself going. Deeper.

His last conscious thought was more of a vision: not an infinity sign at all, but two triangles facing inward, touching, point-to-point.

Like a bow tie.

Read the first chapter!

© Ridley Pearson

PARALLEL LIES
CHAPTER ONE

The train charged forward in the shimmering afternoon sunlight, autumn's vibrant colors forming a natural lane for the raised bed of chipped rock and the few hundred tons of steel and wood. The rails stretched out before the locomotive, light glinting off their polished surfaces, tricked by the eye into joining together a half mile in the distance, the illusion always moving forward at the speed of the train, as if those rails spread open just in time to carry her.

For the driver of that freight, it was another day in paradise. Alone with his thoughts, he and his brakeman, pulling lumber and fuel oil, cotton and cedar, sixteen shipping containers, and seven empty flatbeds. Paradise was that sound in your ears and that rumble up your legs. It was the blue sky meeting the silver swipe of tracks far off on the horizon. It was a peaceful job. The best work there was. It was lights and radios and doing something good for people—getting stuff from one place to another. The driver packed another pinch of chewing tobacco deep between his cheeks and gum, his mind partly distracted by a bum air conditioner in the bedroom of a mobile home still miles away, wondering where the hell he'd get the three hundred bucks needed to replace it. He could put it on the credit card, but that amounted to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Maybe some overtime. Maybe he'd put in for an extra run.

The sudden vibration was subtle enough that a passenger would not have felt it. A grinding, like bone rubbing on bone. His first thought was that some brakes had failed, that a compressor had failed, that he had a lockup midtrain. His hand reached to slow the mighty beast. But before he initiated any braking—before he only compounded the problem—he checked a mirror and caught sight of the length of her as the train chugged through a long, graceful turn and down a grade that had her really clipping along. It was then his heart did its first little flutter, then he felt a heat in his lungs and a tension in his neck like someone had pulled on a cable. It wasn't the brakes. A car—number seven or eight—was dancing back there like she'd had too much to drink. Shaking her hips and wiggling her shoulders all at once, kind of swimming right there in the middle of all the others. Not the brakes, but an axle. Not something that could be resolved.

He knew the fate of that train before he touched a single control, before his physical motions caught up to the knowledge that fourteen years on the line brought to such a situation.

In stunned amazement, he watched that car do her dance. What had looked graceful at first, appeared suddenly violent, no longer a dance but now a seizure as the front and the back of that car alternately jumped left to right and right to left, and its boxlike shape disintegrated to something awkwardly bent and awful. It leaned too far, and as it did, the next car began that same cruel jig.

He pulled back the throttle and applied the brakes but knew it was an exercise in futility. The locomotive now roiled with a tremor that shook dials to where he couldn't read them. His teeth rattled in his head as he reached for the radio. "Mayday!" he shouted, having no idea why. There were codes to use, procedure to follow, but only that one word exploded from his mouth.

The cars rolled now, one after another, first toward the back then forward toward the locomotive, the whole thing dragging and screaming, the beauty of its frictionless motion destroyed. The cars tilted right and fell, swiping the trees like the tail of a dragon, splintering and knocking them down like toothpicks, the sky littered with autumn colors. And then a ripple began as that tail lifted briefly toward the sky. The cars, one coupled to the next, floated above the tracks and then fell, like someone shaking a kink out of a lawn hose.

Going for the door handle, he let go of the throttle, the "dead man's switch" taking over and cutting engine power. He lost his footing and fell to the floor of the cab, his brain numb and in shock. He didn't know whether to jump or ride it out.

He would later tell investigators that the noise was like nothing he'd ever heard, like nothing that could be described. Part scream. Part explosion. A deafening, immobilizing dissonance, while the smell of steel sparking on steel rose in his nostrils and sickened his stomach to where he sat puking on the oily cab floor, crying out as loudly as he could in an effort to blot out that sound.

He felt all ten tons of the engine car tip heavily right, waver there, precariously balanced up on the one rail, and then plunge to the earth, the whole string of freights buckling and bending and dying behind him in a massive pileup.

He saw a flatbed fly overhead, only the blue sky behind it. This, his last conscious vision, incongruous and unfathomable. For forty long seconds the cars collided, tumbled, shrieked, and flew as they ripped their way through soil and forest, carried by momentum until an ungainly silence settled over the desecrated track, and the orange, red, and silver leaves fell out of a disturbed sky as if laying a blanket over the face of a corpse.

© Ridley Pearson

CHAIN OF EVIDENCE
CHAPTER ONE

He heard her coming before she reached the top of the stairs. Wild and angry like someone possessed, the rage welling up within her from an addiction so powerful that two weeks earlier he had discovered her passed out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol still clutched in her spotted hand.

She roared at him as she dared to negotiate the stairs, suddenly a two-hundred-pound ballerina, one hand counseling the banister, one eye held shut to stop the dizzies. "You bring it to me, Boy!"

That was her name for him: Boy—the only name she had ever called him. They both knew what "it" was. The Boy got it from the neighborhood liquor store every day—or the days that she had the money to buy it. The old man with the white stubble beard handed him the brown bag out back in the alley, and the Boy carried it home dutifully. To him it was poison. To her, heaven.

She hadn't had the money today, but she would have forgotten that by now, and she would have convinced herself that he was holding out on her, and when she became convinced of that then the world became a frightful place for the Boy. She possessed big, powerful hands, like paddles, and the stern will of a self-appointed tyrant. She knew nothing of forgiveness.

He lied about the bruises in school. Made things up. The school nurse had given up asking questions, hearing his inventive tales. People knew about his mother: This town, nestled in the Connecticut countryside, was a tolerant place.

He heard her swollen feet ticking off the eleven stairs. How many times had he counted down along with her descent? He shuddered. Would his reminders, his arguments, be enough today? And why did his feet always fail to run when she approached? Why did he stand there facing her, awaiting her, as if some magnet drew them together? He knew that his survival depended on her not seeing him, not getting that hold on him. He knew that he had to hide.

He stood frozen in place. He could tell what she was wearing just by the swooshing sound of the fabric: the Hawaiian colored housedress, worn like a giant zippered tent about her puffy white skin with its bright red blotches and unexplained black-and-blue marks. Whoosh, she descended. She cleared the bottom step and, faced with the choice of two directions to go, somehow attached to his scent and headed toward him—she, a person who couldn't smell burnt toast placed before her.

That was all she had eaten for the past three months: one slice of toast that he left by her bedside in the morning before he headed to school. She awakened closer to noon, and then drank well past midnight, her television turned up too loudly, her glassy eyes fixed to it like the eyes on some of the Boy's stuffed animals. Dead eyes, even when she was trying to slur through her words at him. Dead for years. But not dead enough, he thought, as she charged through the kitchen door, flinging it open with a bone crunching effort.

He passed through the laundry room door, backing up—always backing up, he couldn't seem to run forward when she pursued him; he allowed her to control him. The cry of the hinges gave him away. A trickle of sweat slid coldly down his ribs and his throat went dry: When he ran from her she hit him harder.

Out through the laundry room window, the sun's fading rays, muted by a stranglehold of clouds, washed the horizon charcoal gray. A pair of geese, their necks stretched like arrows, cut north over the hardwood forest where the Boy had a clumsy fort built high into a tree. In the summer he could hide in the fort, but this was not summer and he was running out of places to hide—she knew them all.

And here he was in the laundry room. A dead end. Worse: a huge pile of dirty clothes erupted from the plastic laundry basket, and despite the fact that he was in the midst of doing the laundry—as if she didn't already have enough to be mad about—sight of this dirty pile was likely to add to the punishment.

He reached for the bleach because it occurred to him he might throw it into her face and blind her, though he didn't have the heart to do so, and besides, he discovered the Clorox bottle was bone dry empty. He stared down the into the neck wishing that by some miracle it would suddenly fill and save him from her wrath.

He glanced around at a room that offered only a back door into the cold. And if he went out there, she would lock him out; and if she locked him out and anyone found out, then they would take her away from him—this had been threatened more than once. And that, in turn, would mean living with his uncle, and if the Boy had it right, the uncle was a drug dealer and small time hood—Italian and proud of it. He went to church twice a week. The Boy wanted none of that.

On the other side of the door, he heard his mother's footsteps crunch across crumbs on the kitchen floor as she drew closer. Sometimes she forgot all about him a few minutes into the pursuit. Not today, he realized.

The bell to the dryer sounded—ding!—and it called magically to him. The dryer! Why not? he wondered. Without a second thought, he popped open the door and, with her footfalls approaching, frantically gathered the clean clothes and stuffed them into the blue plastic basket with the purple four-clovers. He slid one leg inside the machine but burned his hand on touching the tumbler's gray-speckled rim. He debated whatever it was she had in store for him, deciding instantly that any burn was better than that. He pulled himself into a ball, his knees tucked into his chest in a fetal position, his lungs beginning to sear from the dry, metallic heat. He hooked his fingers onto the filter's gray plastic tab mounted into the door and eased it quietly shut. Click. He winced. Even in a fit of rage, she had the ears of a mountain lion.

He had inherited those same ears, or perhaps it was something that he had developed, but whatever the case, he heard her push the laundry room's springed door open, heard it flap shut again behind her like the wing of a huge bird.

He could picture her then, as clearly as if he were standing in the room with her. Her soft, spongy body slouched and immobile, her dazed head swiveling like an owl's, scanning the room dully, attempting to reason but too drunk to do so. His disappearance would confuse her—piss her off. If he was lucky, she would begin to doubt herself. She would forget how it was that she had found her way into the laundry room, like a sleepwalker coming out of a trance. Whoosh: the sound of her as she patrolled past the dryer, her movements heavy and exaggerated. His heart drummed painfully in his chest. His lungs stung from the heat. Whoosh, her dress passed by again. He grabbed hold of the door in an effort to keep it shut should she try to open it. If he frustrated her, she might give up.

A tickle developed in his lungs, stinging and itching at the same time. It grew inside his chest, scratching the insides of his lungs and gnawing a hole into the back of his throat.

"Where are you, Boy?" she called out hoarsely, the phlegm bubbling up from the caldron.

He swallowed the scratching away—attempting to gulp on a throat bare with searing heat—refusing himself to cough and reveal his hiding place. His chest flamed and his nostrils flared, and he thought he might explode his lungs if he didn't cough.

"Boy?" she thundered, only a few precarious feet away from him.

Tears ran down his cheek. He exhaled in a long, controlled effort that denied his body any right to a cough. And when he drew air in again it attacked his throat as if he had swallowed burning oil.

But this pain was so small compared to what she might inflict that he gladly accepted it, even allowing a self-satisfied smile to overcome him in the darkness. He was indeed the "clever devil" that she often accused him of being. And as he heard her storm back out of the room, off to another area of the house where she would threaten her terror until blacking out in a chair, or on the sofa, or even on the floor, he debated where and how he might steal some money in order to placate her, and buy himself another night of survival.

© Ridley Pearson

PROBABLE CAUSE
CHAPTER ONE

"DBF at Scenic and Eighth," announced the warm-toned voice of Virginia Fraizer, who acted as both receptionist and radio dispatcher. Dead body found. Down by the beach. They used telephones where dead bodies were concerned. Too many blood-and-guts freaks monitoring police bands to use the radios for something like this. Thank God for Ginny. She seemed to hold the department together.

"I'm on my way," Detective Sergeant James Dewitt replied, returning the receiver to the cradle of the bedside phone. DBF! Not a one-eighty-seven, thank Cod. That would be a homicide. Not after just two months on the force. Had to hurry. Outdoor crime scenes deteriorated quickly, and to make matters worse, it had been raining when he had awakened at 5:30. He knew the location: a turnout in the blacktop in the otherwise impossibly narrow scenic road that fronted Carmel's beach. Enough room for three parked cars. A hit-and-run, maybe.

Dead body found. One thing was certain: He was wide awake now. He was in his boxer underwear. He was waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, waiting to wake up Emmy and get her ready for school. He looked in the mirror. He was anything but on his way.

The body lay spread out on the pavement, posed inhumanly like a malfunctioning mannequin discarded on the showroom floor. Suicide, by the look of the car. A hose taped from the exhaust to the passenger window. Dewitt approached the body and stopped. Given the remarkable gift of life, he wondered how someone could choose death. Sight of the suicide made him angry and a thought flashed through his mind: If only this man's unwanted life could be traded for Julia's.

It was a chilly January morning. Dewitt wore his brown wool sport coat—his only wool sport coat—a garment that begged for replacement. Its two black buttons drooped like the sad eyes of a basset hound. His identifying trademark remained his bow ties, a holdover from his fifteen years in forensics: In the lab, a bow tie stays out of your way. He wore green paisley today, a gift from Emmy. He removed his glasses, exhaled onto their lenses, and afforded them a long methodical polish. He returned them to the bridge of his nose, seating them in a permanently pink dent there. He stepped over the body and squatted by the man's feet, taking one general all-encompassing look first, then focusing detail by detail, head to toe. James Dewitt still existed in the world of the microscopic particle. His eyes missed very little.

He was unaccustomed to victims—especially dead ones. Having served as a man of evidence for so many years, he tended toward the material evidence first, which justified, at least in his mind, disregarding the body at present, turning away and focusing his attention on the vehicle. Technically, he was Detective Dewitt now. Detective Sergeant. But at a crime scene such as this, he instinctively reverted to his former self, a forensic investigator, a specialist dealing in the invisible world of trace evidence. His colleagues derisively referred to forensic criminalists as "nitpickers." What did they know? Would your standard off-the-shelf detective have already noticed that there was no sand on the bottom of the decedent's shoes, this despite a sugarlike coating covering the entire parking lot? And if no sand on the bottom of the shoes, then how had the decedent placed that hose in the passenger window?

That was the beauty of hard evidence: It could either be explained or it couldn't. Witnesses might offer a dozen different accounts of the same incident, but the hard evidence eventually told one, and only one, story.

The car and the dead body would have to tell this story. Unlikely to have witnesses at this early hour. Dewitt carried surgical gloves and a Swiss Army knife in the right pocket of his sports coat; forceps, Baggies, small magnifying glass, and a Mag-Lite in his other. He snapped the pair of gloves on and called out to Patrolman Anderson, who was stringing the bright plastic POLICE LINE tape around the perimeter of the parking area. DO NOT CROSS, it warned. The wind changed and Dewitt could hear the comforting concussion of nearby surf more clearly, could smell the salt and the sap. The struggling Monterey pines with their wind-torn limbs and awkward weather-sculpted shapes leaned painfully toward shore.

Anderson ashamedly confirmed that he had dragged the body from the car. Dewitt was going to have to call a meeting of Carmel's twenty patrolmen and remind them of the responsibilities of the first officer, the first cop to arrive at a crime scene. The problem was not stupidity as much as unfamiliarity. Carmel saw few dead bodies in any given year. However, procedures were what kept investigations consistent, and the courts required consistency.

Dewitt fished out the dead man's wallet. California driver's license. Name: John Galbraith Osbourne. Sacramento. The detective experienced a short flutter in his heart, like sudden indigestion. Third card down was the organ-donor card. Another flutter, this time more painful. The card contained an entry for the next of kin to be notified upon death: Jessica Joyce Osbourne. Everyone knew Jessie Osbourne, the fiercely outspoken Republican state representative. "Jammin' Jessie" they had called her last year because she had played basketball with the statehouse boys for a charity function and had come out of the game at halftime with two points, two assists, and a bloody nose. At fifty-five, Osbourne still had the spunk of a young woman.

Dewitt slipped the wallet into a Baggie and then removed his glasses again, polishing them slowly and then hooking them back around his ears, establishing them on his nose.

He circled the Tercel once, eyes alert. Osboume had done a neat job of it—but why here? The location of the crime scene itself was as much a piece of evidence as anything. Did he want to die with a nice view? Had there been any view an hour earlier, or had it been too dark? Why here?

Rusty, his shepherd collie mutt, barked from the back of Dewitt's unmarked police car, a Mercury Zephyr. Dewitt shouted a reprimand and the dog went silent.

Dewitt knelt by the body again. Decent-looking guy except for his bluish gray skin. The headlights of the arriving coroner's wagon swept the pavement as it descended the hill of Eighth. Three jewels sparkled in the light, drawing Dewitt's attention. He duck-walked the short distance. Fresh motor oil by the look of it. It had been raining heavily when Dewitt had awakened at S:30, yet this oil had not washed away. Was that possible in that strong a rain? Using his Swiss Army knife, he took a sample of some of the oil, sealed it in a Baggie, and then labeled it.

"Was your radio car parked over here at any time?" he shouted over to Anderson.

"No, sir," Anderson replied as he finished with the crime-scene ribbon by tying it off to the bumper of his radio car.

Dewitt carried what amounted to a portable crime lab in the trunk of the Zephyr. Besides the spare tire, the bulletproof police vest, and

the first-aid kit, he kept two large black salesman bags back there. Between them, they carried every conceivable investigator's tool. He retrieved his camera and photographed the oil and its relationship to the crime scene. Rusty protested from the backseat and had to be silenced again.

"What's up?" Anderson asked, joining him a moment later.

Looking the young patrolman in the eye, Dewitt pointed his gloved finger at the dead man, John Osbourne. "He had a visitor," he said.

Police Chief Clarence Hindeman's office, the biggest in the building, was by no means large. The clock on the wall read 3:30. Dewitt had yet to eat lunch. Gommander Karl Capp and James Dewitt sat in gunmetal gray steel chairs facing their superior, who presided from behind a large but nondescript matching steel desk, the window behind him looking out on Garmel's picturesque storefronts.

Karl Gapp, who had been born perspiring, chewed vigorously on a Mongol number-two pencil. His soft round belly protruded over his tight belt, and he sat with his feet spread to accommodate its sag. He had a pale rubbery face and bright red cheeks. He lived under the conspiracy of angry eyes. Even when smiling, Capp had a bully image to overcome. Flecks of yellow pencil paint clung like canker sores to his lower lip.

Capp was clearly uncomfortable. A veteran Monterey Peninsula cop and a man who ran his own show—with Hindeman more as a figurehead, by his way of thinking—the commander didn't like being on this side of a desk. He made a point of establishing and maintaining the pecking order. Capp had yet to speak business in Dewitt's office. Instead, the detective sergeant was always summoned to the commander's office, where Capp apparently found security in his leather throne of an office chair.

Clarence Hindeman, a physical man, rock solid in his early fifties, sported an ash-gray trimmed beard that hid his lack of chin. He preferred an open-neck shirt and a Western bolo to a conventional tie. He used his hands when he spoke, hard calloused hands that reflected his hobbies of carpentry and river rafting. He spoke in a forced, hoarse voice through a constricted throat. "So what we've got here is the apparent suicide of Jessie Osbourne's boy."

Capp said boldly, "Apparent? We put this sucker to bed just as quickly as we can."

"Apparent suicide," Dewitt reminded. "There are some inconsistencies."

"What the hell does that mean?" Capp complained.

"I'd like to keep this open for a couple of days," Dewitt explained. "Wait for the various reports before we issue any statement. His clothes have been sent to the lab. Jessie Osbourne's people gave us the name of a cousin, Priscilla Laughton, to I.D. him. Wanted to speak with Jessie, but she hasn't returned my call. Autopsy is tentatively scheduled for tomorrow, though Thursday seems more likely. The thing of it is, Commander," he said, addressing Capp, "if we go making a statement that we then have to correct, we're a lot worse off. This'11 take a day or two at the most. A couple of tests and we're a hell of a lot more certain what we have here."

"You have Jessie's permission for the autopsy?" Capp asked. "That surprises me."
"Don't need it," Dewitt said, looking to Clarence for support. "Officially, Karl, we have to go with suspicious causes for the time being. That's why I thought we should talk. You've read Dewitt's notes I take it?"

"Manny Roth's not going to like this, Chief," Capp said. His tongue found a flake of yellow paint he had missed on his lip. He spit it out. "He and Jessie are tight. She's the one sponsoring his fund raiser, don't forget."

"Our distinguished Mayor is a former golf pro, Commander," Dewitt reminded, "not a policeman. There are certain procedures—"

"And our detective's a former nitpicker," Capp interrupted. "If you were a policeman with a little more experience, you might understand the difference in approach between the Salinas lab and a cop shop."

To Hindeman he said, "In my opinion we ought to rethink this assignment, Chief. I realize I'm supposed to be the desk cop, but Dewitt's only been with us two months. You couldn't have foreseen something like this when you brought him on."

For Dewitt, the five months since the death of Steven Miller had been hell. He had been arrested on a charge of voluntary manslaughter for the shooting of Miller, and had endured a three-week trial that carried with it the pain of front-page publicity. His acquittal by jury was covered by CNN's "Prime Time News" and picked up the following day by all three networks.

He had been rescued by his friend of several years, Clarence Hindeman, now Carmel's Chief of Police, who had called with a job offer of Detective Sergeant, a newly created position on the Carmel force, designed specifically for a man of Dewitt's talents and experience. He had hoped, by accepting Hindeman's offer, to settle into a quiet existence of tracing down bad checks and stolen bicycles in a small resort community. With the discovery of Osbourne's body, he sensed they had a major case on their hands. It would be a simple matter to accede to Capp's wishes, and forfeit the case. Instead, however, Dewitt, catching Hindeman's eye, shook his head no. He wouldn't give in that easily.

Hindeman said sharply, "It's Dewitt's case, Karl. He reports to you, same as every investigation. This is why I brought him on: He has fifteen years of forensics behind him. Eight of those as an investigator. We're set up just fine to handle this—"

"He's never handled a one-eighty-seven—"

"One-eighty-seven?" asked Hindeman. "Who said anything about a homicide? We're talking suicide here."

"He's talking one-eighty-seven," Capp contradicted, pointing at Dewitt. "He's implying a one-eighty-seven."

'Tm asking for some reports," Dewitt complained, "nothing more. Besides which, I've handled plenty of one-eighty-sevens as an FI. That's not an issue here."

All three launched into a brief shouting match, which was only silenced by Rusty barking from the corner. Hindeman allowed Dewitt the luxury of having the dog in the station house. Rusty was technically considered a mascot. Hindeman gained control again. Dewitt snapped his fingers twice; Rusty lay down.

"I've handled dozens of one-eighty-sevens," Dewitt resumed. "There's very little difference—"

"There's a fuckin' huge difference," Capp disagreed.

"The point is moot," Hindeman roared. "Have you or haven't you read Dewitt's crime-scene notes?"

"So there's no sand on the bottom of the guy's shoes. So there's some motor oil nearby. It's a parking lot for Christ's sake. That's enough for suspicious causes, Chief? Gimme a break! We're talking about Jessie Osbourne's son, unless I missed something."

"Dewitt? You want to respond to that?" By nature of his rank and position, Hindeman tried to remain as neutral as possible, this despite their friendship, despite the fact their daughters were best friends. Although he slipped from time to time, Clarence Hindeman made a point of calling Dewitt by his last name when around the station house. He couldn't afford to play favorites.

"I'm simply pursuing a variety of possibilities," Dewitt explained. "One thing you learn as a 'nitpicker,' "he said with a glance at Capp, "the evidence will tell one and only one story. Anderson compromised the site. That's an added headache. If you read my report, then you're familiar with the fact that Osbourne's luggage was jammed into the back of the trunk. Why? Can you explain that easily?"

"Who cares?"

"I care! I have evidence that isn't adding up."

"Completely circumstantial," Capp sneered.

"Agreed. I won't argue that. The evidence is circumstantial, and it may be nothing. But we won't know that until all the evidence is in, right? Why are we making such a big deal out of this?" he asked Hindeman. "All I'm asking is we run a few tests and eliminate any surprises."

"You're asking to delay a statement to the press. This is Jessie Osbourne's son, Dewitt. This is an election year. You need it spelled out?"

"Since there are those in this department who do not hold my opinion in very high regard," he said, directing his comment at his commander, "I thought it only appropriate to solicit outside help. You will accept an opinion from the Salinas lab, I take it?" "Don't start with me, Dewitt." "Is that a yes or a no?"

Capp's face turned scarlet and .he adjusted his weight in the chair. "I think this is a mistake. My vote is to clean it up, make a statement to the press, and get this behind us as quickly as we can. Drawing it out with a bunch of circumstantial evidence isn't going to help anyone, least of all Jessie Osbourne. And if Jessie's unhappy, then Manny's unhappy, and that's bad for business."

"Karl," Hindeman said, disappointed. "I'm not looking for votes, I'm looking for input. Are you saying that the John Osbourne death is clearly a suicide? This in light of what Dewitt has turned up?"

"I'm saying he hasn't turned up squat." He considered this for a moment. "You talk to Bill Saffeleti about some oil drops and the way this guy packed his trunk. You tell me how the DA's office feels about it. Save ya the trouble. They'll laugh you outta town."

Dewitt told Hindeman, "I think I'm being misunderstood here. We're a small outfit. We don't want to look like one by making a statement prematurely. A suicide note would help. A despondent phone call made to a close friend. Something along those lines. There again: We have to do the legwork if we're going to explain this thing. I want to know where Osboume was coming from, where he was headed, what he was up to. I want to be able to sit Jessie Osbourne down and tell her exactly what her son did from say six last night to six this morning. The media, if no one else, will put his last twenty-four hours together. Do we risk playing catch-up with the media?" "Karl?"

"I don't like it. The guy sucked fumes, Chief. Let's bury him, not slice him open."

Rusty growled and rolled onto his back, awaiting affection. "We'll wait for all the evidence to come in," declared Hindeman, eyeing the dog. "For now, it's an apparent suicide, investigation pending."

Capp pushed himself up from the uncomfortable chair and stormed out of the office.

"There goes trouble," said Dewitt.

"If that dog farts in my office, you'll know the meaning of trouble." Dewitt and Rusty were gone in seconds.

The strip was held in a gloomy darkness, refreshed only by the occasional colorful glow of street signs and window advertisements. An eighteen-wheeler streamed past, its grinding whir caught in the Doppler effect, subsiding in the distance with a painful scream. The man paced in front of the pay telephone, toying with the quarters in his pants pocket. The air smelled of diesel. Across the way, through the dirty window of a bar, a pink neon palm tree pulsed intermittently, advertising a wine cooler. When the door to the bar was in use, the impatient man at the phone could hear the cheers from the Lakers game on the TV. He stopped his pacing and stared at the phone, his profile a craggy silhouette in the limited light. Would Lumbrowski even answer? They had to talk.

He slipped the quarter into the slot and listened as it descended, clanking into the guts of the phone. By now, the number was memorized.

One ring... He tapped his foot anxiously. "Come on," he said. Two rings... "Bastard, answer the phone!" "Yeah?" spoke the wet husky voice.

The sound of a voice took him so totally by surprise that he hesitated momentarily.
"Yeah?" Lumbrowski repeated.

"I've been trying to reach you all day," he said. "Been busy. Real busy. Who the hell is this?" "You should stay closer to your phone."

"You should mind your own fuckin' business." The phone went dead.

The man squinted, attempting to control his temper. He reeled his head back and exhaled indignantly. Calling to help, and he dares to hang up. "Mind your own business," indeed.

He stuffed another quarter into the phone and punched out the
seven numbers.

"Yeah?"

"I saw what you did this morning," he told Lumbrowski.

Silence. The man's heavy alcoholic breathing could be heard clearly.

"I thought you might be interested in that." "What do you know about it?" Lumbrowski asked. "I have certain needs." "Money?"

"That would help."

"Have we done business before?"

"No."

"I'm busy right now. I got my own agenda." 'Tm sure you do. But I saw you."
Silence again.

"You want what | have?"

"You want what I have," the man insisted.

"I don't think so." He hung up. Again.

The man pounded his fist against the phone and then tugged ferociously on the receiver. With both hands around the gooseneck sheath that housed the wire, he leaned his weight against the receiver and jerked on it repeatedly until it finally broke loose.

He studied the phone's receiver in his hand, its gooseneck casing and stripped wires dangling like a tail. He slammed it into its cradle and hurried across the street to the bar. He took a seat in a corner booth where the light didn't hurt his eyes.

After the game, a late-night "News Update" came onto the TV. He was on his third beer, and feeling better now. The anchorwoman wore a lot of makeup and smiled falsely, like a nurse. She said in a strident voice, "The body of the son of Sacramento County Representative Jessica Osbourne, John Galbraith Osboume, was found by Carmel authorities in what has been described by a police spokesman as an apparent suicide. No details have been released and an investigation is pending, but sources at 'News One' have been told by persons close to the investigation that murder has not been ruled out. Detective James Dewitt, who is handling the investigation, refused comment. More on the intriguing investigation on tomorrow's 'Wake Up News Hour.'" The man drinking the beer set it down.

"Murder has not been ruled out." The words echoed in his brain. "You want another?" It was the waitress.

"That changes everything," said the man with the beer.

WEDNESDAY

Dewitt showed his badge at the Carmel gate entrance to Pebble Beach in order to avoid paying the five-dollar fee charged tourists to drive the seventeen-mile scenic loop around the peninsula. He knew his way around the labyrinth of twisting roads that wound past the showcase homes. The compound was a mixture of nature preserve and housing development—million-dollar homes hidden in cedar forests, wild grasses and shrubs, green velvet golf courses, the dazzling irregular rocky shoreline at the foot of the ever-restless Pacific Ocean. He couldn't help but wonder where all the money came from. This opulent display of wealth and privilege bordered on embarrassing.

Even with the he]p of the union, he was at his limit. Anna's head injury left her withering away in a fetal position in the Community Hospital and that, in turn, left Dewitt's savings withering, as well.

He had been advised to move her to a less-expensive public institution, and had weighed the decision carefully several times. With the closest available facility a two-hour drive away, however, James Dewitt rejected the idea, considering daily contact with family far more important for his daughter, despite her apparent physical detachment. They could try all they wanted—the doctors, accountants, even clergy—to convince him, but Dewitt would not abandon hope. Hope had proven a potent fuel these last five months.

Just the thought of money played these same tapes inside his head repeatedly—a downward, depressing spiral he did not enjoy. The key to overcoming the loneliness—to survival—was optimism, an attitude of gratitude. A dozen such cliches bounced around inside his head and it seemed appropriate that he should be driving inside a forest yet unable to see it. As if to snap him out of his momentary doldrums, Rusty lurched forward from the backseat and laid his pink tongue from collar to ear. Dewitt reached back and scratched him. Spotting a beagle on a wire run, Rusty leaped to the side window and barked ferociously—always one for a helpless opponent. Dewitt was still shouting through the cacophony as he pulled to a stop in front of Priscilla Laughton's ocean-view home.

The entranceway's redwood overhang was supported by nut-stained square pillars that stood twenty feet tall. Towering glass panels allowed Dewitt an unobstructed view through the house to the churning ocean beyond. Always changing colors—slate blue now. In front of twin doors of carved oak, an enormous tarnished brass bell hung inside an elaborate oriental frame. He rocked the hinged arm and the bell pealed sonorously, its haunting sound lost to the woods. Only then did he spot the lighted doorbell to his left. This bell was some kind of snappy uptown wind chime, he realized too late—probably from Neiman Marcus.

Laughton was in her early thirties, dolled up, as this set tended to do so well. A two-hour face on a Jane Fonda body. A forearm laden with silver bangles. A two-hundred-watt tan, given the recent weather. A lioness hairdo. A small provocative gap between her bleached front teeth. Pink lip gloss, pale gray eyes, cosmetic cheekbones, dangling patinated earrings still swinging as she said, "You must be Detective Dewitt."

"Miss Laughton?"

"Priscilla." She showed him in. He looked around in awe, feeling unsure of himself, as he often did in museums. Where indeed did this kind of money come from? Gray granite foyer leading to a sunken living room with overstuffed furniture in designer fabrics. Fresh flowers everywhere, their pungent perfumes and vibrant colors intoxicating. Split-level and sprawling out toward an enormous lawn, manicured beyond reason, curling down to the doormat of the Pacific. The salmon couch swallowed him. He toyed nervously with a plaid bag tied with a red bow, which smelled like a pine forest in springtime. "I spoke with your aunt's people," he began.

"Yes. I identified John late yesterday." She paused. "I had never been inside a mortuary."

"It's a terrible experience. I'm sorry you had to go through that." He paused until she looked at him. "Ms. Laughton, I hope you can appreciate that an investigation such as this can be extremely frustrating. Having never met the victim personally—"

"Victim?"

"Decedent," Dewitt corrected. She looked at him skeptically. "Any evidence we turn up tells the investigator much more when framed within a personality, within a structure of behavior. Death should be a personal thing. Unfortunately, suicide, untimely death of a suspicious nature, is not. We investigators go around with plastic bags and Magic Markers, digging into people's privacy. I've been through it from both sides, so 1 know how uncomfortable it can be. But we're in the information business: The more information we have, the faster we're through with the case. I mention this to you because Mrs. Osbourne's aides seem very protective. They seem more interested in distancing her from the investigation than anything else. I can tell you from firsthand experience—and I'm hoping you'll pass this along to her—that the more cooperative the family is, the sooner the investigation is wrapped up and put to bed."

"You don't want the runaround." She toyed with the bangles. I’ll help where I can."

Dewitt opened a stenographer's notebook and scanned a list he had prepared. He added, "People are tempted—family especially—to color the past of those who've died. That doesn't help anyone. It's too late to invent John Osbourne's reality."

She crossed her legs, maintaining her excellent posture. "I will do my best, Detective."

"I guess the best place to start is to ask if you know why John Osbourne was in this area."

She considered this, and it disappointed Dewitt, because when people thought too long, they generally edited their comments. "I could say he was passing through, which makes sense, doesn't it? But you asked for honesty, and quite frankly, I have no idea."

"You were close to John?"

"Closer than the rest of the family, which is to say we were on limited speaking terms. He was the black sheep, Detective. He communicated with his mother through me. They were estranged. They haven't spoken directly in... it must be several years now." "No idea at all?" She shook her head. "Any guesses?"

"He loved the area. My guess would be a stopover either on his way to or from Orange County."

"We understand he was a lobbyist. That means someone paid his travel expenses, and yet we found no receipts on him or in his belongings. Does that surprise you?"

"I wouldn't know about his accounting practices. I'm sorry." "But he was a lobbyist? Is that right?"

"Only in the loosest sense of the word. He represented entertainment interests in Sacramento. Composers of rock music mostly. Tax reform, accounting practices, copyright law. He worked extensively with insurance interests because, as I understand it, liability insurance has gotten out of hand for the big concerts and it's hurting the live-music industry."

"But he wasn't too serious about it?"

"That is my opinion. John was a frustrated musician himself. He enjoyed the Los Angeles side of the business, the Hollywood side, better than the Sacramento end. He liked to be seen with the big names in the business, sit in on recording sessions, be backstage at the concerts. A groupie, I guess would be the term. A grown-up groupie." "That can mean drugs, can't it?"

The blush began at her collarbone and crept lusciously up the sides of her neck. A blush is an invaluable investigative tool. Dewitt didn't place much confidence in a lie-detector test, but a blush seldom failed. "I think a lot of that has changed," she said, cleverly avoiding an answer.

"I made a phone call to the LAPD. Would it surprise you that your cousin's name shows up on some Narco lists? Narcotics, Ms. Laughton. No charges filed. No arrests. But he's on their lists. You understand the implication." He waited. The color of the sea changed slowly like the skin of a chameleon; if he blurred his vision, it appeared as if he was looking out across the treetops of an endless forest.

She refused comment, seated firmly like a model posing for her portrait.

"One of Jessie Osboume's campaign planks this year is a strong antidrug bill, isn't it?"

"Jessie's always been a leader against street drugs, yes." She said it as if she was addressing a news conference. "Was John suicidal?"

"No. My first reaction to that is, no, he was not. But who is suicidal? We often don't know until they've done it, isn't that right? He lived in an artificial world. The music business is... different. In some ways, he was manic-depressive. These last few years, no one could get close to him. Not even me, and well, we were close once, brother and sister close."

"Money?"

"His nemesis, I'm afraid. Initially, the source of his estrangement from Jessie."

"A family like the Osbournes... I mean, they're part of California history . . . there's family money, isn't there?" he asked, looking around the room.

She laughed in a contrived, predictable confidence. "There is, certainly. This, however, is the result of the work of a wonderful divorce attorney." The Priscilla Laughtons of this world never called them lawyers. "My husband was in the market." She pronounced it as a woman from Boston would: without the r. "He still is, actually." She grinned, loving every minute of it, every cent.

"Had John been cut off?"

"John was no longer supported by the trust."

She was getting on his nerves. Too much of this seemed prepared text, as if she was reading a TelePrompTer mounted just behind his head.

"We didn't find a suicide note," Dewitt said. "That bothers me. Any idea where he stayed when he was in the area? Did he ever stay here with you?"

"No, not here. He phoned me not long ago. From Seaside. Asked to see me. I drove all the way over there, but you should have seen the place where he wanted to meet! Believe me, I didn't even get out of the car."

"A bar?"

"A dive, is more like it. Just awful! Ick. Motorcycle types."

"Do you remember the name of the place?"

"The name?" she cackled. "You must be kidding?

"And that was?"

"You mean when exactly? Oh, God, a year or so ago." "Friends in the area?" "Not whom I'm aware of."

"But he did stay in the area occasionally?"

"I assume so. And if his choice in motels was anything like his choice of bars, I wouldn't choose to know where." She studied him. "You appear disappointed, Detective."

"This area is a little long on motels, Miss Laughton. If we knew where he had stayed, we could look for a note. We might turn something up." Dewitt studied his pad, wondering whether there was anything to get out of Priscilla Laughton other than the traces of sweet perfume and alluring sideways glances. "I wouldn't know," she told him. "May I speak openly?" he asked.

"Please." She leaned forward, suddenly more interested.

"Sooner or later, I'm going to have to speak with Jessie Osbourne. The more involved making those arrangements becomes, the longer the case drags out and the more likely the press will stay with it. We would like to wrap this up," he continued, "as I've said. Quite frankly, her avoidance is somewhat curious at this point. As a parent, I would want to speak with whoever was in charge of my child's investigation."

"Avoidance is a strong word, Detective. Jessie and John had gone their separate ways long ago."

"One I chose carefully," he said. Didn't this kind ever offer you something to drink? "Well, I guess that about does it."

"May I ask you something?" she inquired. Dewitt cocked his head as if to say he didn't care.

"A name of a policeman, a detective, came up... last weekend at a party I was at. I'm not sure he's still a policeman . . . actually... but he was once, and he is evidently in consideration for a job to help my friends . . . well kind of a security consultant, really. You know, decide what their place needs in terms of a security system, do a little research for them. Not private detective work, but kind of a consultant. And I wondered, since you're in the same fraternity, if you might know him and be able to give me a reference."

"I might, if he's from around here," he said, sensing in her for the first time an insecurity. She was improvising. "What's his name . . . or her name," he added quickly.

"His name is Howard Lumbrowski."

Dewitt exhaled in disgust and glanced out the windows. Gray green waves undulated in slow motion. A tiny ship of unrecognizable purpose slipped slowly along the horizon.

"You do know him," she stated.

"Someone put you up to this?" he asked, his voice acerbic and clipped.

"No. I take it that means you would not recommend him?"

"I'm the wrong person to ask," he said.

"No. Please. I'm interested. I don't want her, my friend, making a mistake. She seems to think him quite capable."

"It's personal. I'm the wrong guy to ask, that's all."

"Anything you could tell—"

"It's personal!" he repeated harshly, struggling forward to be free of the plush couch, frustrated by the way it seemed to hold on to him. "What do you feed this thing?" he asked her.

"Are you seeing other people yet?" she asked somberly, standing.

"What?" Incredulous. His own words came back to haunt him: Death should be a personal thing. His name—his life's story—had been in the papers for months. Laughton was clearly up on her current events. For a few weeks back in late September, he had probably been the topic of cocktail-party conversation; the thought revolted him.

"Would you call me sometime? I mean for something other than an interview?"

If he had been anywhere but California, Dewitt might have been surprised. He had lived in the state for nearly fifteen years now, and he still wasn't used to this kind of aggressive sexuality, this open-book philosophy of "hang it all out there and go with your feelings." The avocado toothpaste and open-collar crowd still rubbed him wrong. "You know what we cops call Carmel, Miss Laughton?" She stared.

"Disneyland without the rides."

"I see. And Pebble Beach?"

"I can find my own way out," he said, adding after walking a few feet toward the huge front door, "I think."

"Call me if I can be of any help, Detective."

That evening, with Emmy at home attempting to complete her schoolwork during marathon phone conversations, Dewitt reached the Community Hospital after visiting hours. It didn't bother him. He had a system all worked out. He drove around back, following signs for deliveries, and entered through the loading bay by the kitchen, where the door was left unlocked to facilitate the dumping of trash. He hurried down a back hallway, passing storage rooms, an employee lounge—empty at this hour—and the housekeeping department. He allowed himself to believe that none of the nurses, none of the security guards were aware he sneaked in after hours, this despite the fact he had been busted on numerous occasions—found asleep in a chair by his daughter's bedside.

He cracked open the fire door, peered into the patient-room hallway, and made a dash for Room 114, two doors down. Once inside, he was illuminated by the eerie glowing and flashing from the myriad of life-support machinery. He located a towel and blocked the gap at the bottom of the door before switching on the overhead room lights.

The enormous stainless-steel bed resembled a Ferris wheel, rotating clockwise ever so slowly. It's purpose, ostensibly, was to reduce bed sores, though it did much more than that: It dehumanized her entirely. His younger daughter lay strapped in its netted grasp, her body curled like a wilting leaf, bone thin, her skin ash gray. Emmy called the contraption a gerbil cage.

This room, humming with a mechanical dissonance, felt more like a futuristic research laboratory than a place to heal his little girl. Mustn't dwell on it, he reminded himself. Acceptance was his watchword.

Anna's was borrowed time. At first, the advice had been to transfer her. Now it included what to James Dewitt was an unthinkable option: Pull the plug.

Using the controls, he brought the bed around so Anna lay horizontally. He unfastened the restraining net and touched her cool face gently. Sliding open the bedside drawer, he removed the pink plastic hairbrush, lowered the stainless-steel restraining bar, and sat close to his daughter. He brushed what had once been a full head of hair, now a few wispy patches that pulled loose with his efforts. He leaned closely to her and spoke softly to her. He knew for a fact that recovered coma patients reported having been able to hear and understand conversations that had taken place while people presumed them unconscious. He considered these one-way conversations therapy.

"I missed you last night, honey. Sorry about that. There's a case, an investigation that I'm in charge of, and it has got me pretty well booked up. You'd like this one, I think. It's different. I actually feel like a cop. 1 went to a beautiful house in Pebble Beach today. You would have loved it. View of the ocean and everything. Thing was so big, it had its own ZIP code. When you move from one room to the next, you change time zones." He looked for even a twitch to her lips. Nothing. "I didn't see any whales, but I saw a ship and it reminded me of all those times we went whale watching. You wake up and we'll do that again, honey. It's a promise." He brushed her hair some more, his face and throat tight with memories. "Not much news since Monday," he added. "Rusty got a bird, or at least he left part of one on the back door. Your sister misses you, sends you her love. She spends any more time on that phone, it's going to have to be surgically removed." He leaned back and studied her gaunt features, absentmindedly tugging the fine hair from the brush, which he returned to the drawer. He polished his glasses and took the paperwork into his lap.

There would be no tears tonight; he was all but through with tears. He liked doing his paperwork here, enjoyed the company of his daughter, regardless of her condition, her reliance on this machinery. The paperwork seemed endless. This one was for the California Department of Justice—the DOJ. Male, Caucasian: He penciled in the two little boxes. Only 138 questions to go.

© Ridley Pearson

THE SEIZING OF YANKEE GREEN MALL (HIDDEN CHARGES)
CHAPTER ONE

Jim McClatchy climbed the stepladder. One of the ceiling fixtures was not working; he'd been told to fix it. The row of lockers to his left provided temporary storage for the workers. This small concrete room would be a utility area once the construction boys had left, and if everything went according to schedule, that meant Saturday—the day of the new wing's grand opening.

Having already thrown the circuit breaker in the panel room, McClatchy moved an acoustic ceiling tile out of the way and aimed his flashlight at the overhead J-box. There was one good reason the fixture didn't work: It wasn't hooked up.

McClatchy went about his work with annoyance written on his thirty-five-year-old face. It was not the first foul-up he'd seen on this job. The trouble with hiring nonunion labor was that you often got nonunion quality. He knocked the punch hole out of the junction box and attached a piece of flex with a locknut, running the fixture's two wires to the box. Three half-inch conduit pipes entered the J-box, each with one black and one white wire pulled through. The light fixtures were connected in series. The presence of an extra set of wires made him realize that something else, somewhere else, wasn't working either.

Making a mental note to check the plans later, McClatchy cleaned the ends of all the wires, twisted the blacks together and then the whites, and covered them with wire nuts. He worked the stubborn wires inside the J-box, finally capping it with a blank plate.

He replaced the acoustic tile and descended the stepladder. Down the hall he entered the panel room and threw the appropriate breaker. All in a day's work. McClatchy's wife was studying in Hartford for her teaching certificate. As a result, he saw her only on weekends. For the past few months, life without her had become a little too routine, too boring. That woman meant more to him than anyone would ever know.

He ambled back down the long, drab utility hallway and checked his watch. He'd been on the job a total of one hour and ten minutes and was already bored.

He pushed open the door and casually threw the light switch, his eyes on the overhead fixture he had just connected.

A tongue of orange flame uncurled toward him, pinning him helplessly against the doorjamb. The intense pressure of the explosion whipped the steel-edged door on its hinges, cleaving his head open, killing him instantly.

Amid a swirling cloud of charcoal smoke, debris from the lockers settled onto the floor like feathers from a pillow fight. The fire alarm cried out, strangely mechanical and inhuman.

Jim McClatchy's wedding ring rolled twenty feet down the long hallway before tilting to one side and falling over. The ring danced on the smooth concrete surface, a tiny bell chiming, and finally came to a stop only inches from a small drain.

* * *

As the rumble of the explosion rolled through the building, the short stocky man looked up from his work. He eased his finger off the trigger of the star-bit drill and listened to the eerie pulse of the fire alarm, its sound dulled by his earplugs and the wall of cement between this area and the utility room. The explosion had happened nearby. He spent a moment debating what to do. How could he stop now? He made a hasty decision and leaned his weight against the butt of the heavy drill, simultaneously pulling the trigger. The drill screamed into action, its special bit chewing through the hardened cement.

The man wore unusually thick eyeglasses which distorted his eyes and the sides of his face, giving his head an ungainly figure-eight shape. Thin gold-colored wire rims hooked around his oafish ears, holding the heavy glass onto his face. He had a narrow chin with a day's stubble on it. An oddly shaped scar, barely visible, ran from the edge of his left eye into the coarse brown curly hair at his temple. Still drilling, he crooked his neck to mop his brow on his shoulder, the sweat staining his faded cotton shirt like the stroke of a careless paintbrush.

He heard the bit strike the electrical conduit that ran up the center of this column. He withdrew the bit and, with the aid of a small penlight, peered inside the long cylindrical tube he had drilled. It took two more gentle efforts with the drill to shred the conduit without damaging the wires held within.

This was the third of three such drill holes in this column, each uniformly distanced from the other, likes spokes of a wheel. Using a special hook he had fashioned from a garden tool, he had snaked his No. 12 THHN wire from the conduit into the first hole he had drilled. Two spliced wires made connections to the other drilled holes possible. He placed the dynamite inside the drilled tubes, connecting the wires from the blasting caps to the No. 12 THHN with wire nuts. When each of the three sticks was in place, he opened his small Tupperware container filled with wet cement and plugged the drilled holes. In a few short hours the cement seal would cure. By the next day at this same time, after a little work with sandpaper, it would be damn near impossible to spot the plugs.

He had the disconcerting habit of breathing from an open mouth, brought on by two deviated septums, the result of the same accident that had scarred his face. He snorted as he hurried to collect his tools and organize himself.

The fire alarm continued to cry on the other side of the wall. This area war a dead space in the architecture accessed from a crawl space below the utility room. All the pavilions were riddled with such crawl spaces, known to the maintenance crew as utility tunnels and shafts.

The man with the thick glasses slipped through the open space, over a low cement wall and found himself crouching in a dim utility tunnel. Bare bulbs hung at intervals of twenty feet, as far as the eye could see. He pulled his tools over the wall, and then moved slowly in the same low crouch, avoiding banging his head on the overhead pipes. The slightest bump to his head caused him excruciating pain because most of the top of his head was platinum. He'd sometimes laugh to himself about how rich he'd be if he could only melt his own head down.

He didn't much care for darkness. It brought upon him a sensation of choking. Drowning. He was never without his penlight.

He was quite accustomed to traveling around these tunnels. This column was the sixth. Five to go. Four wall charges after that and she was all set. Ready to go. He would have the columns finished by late this afternoon.

What really worried him now was that explosion. He knew without investigating what had happened; if there was one thing this man knew it was the sound of an explosion. He convinced himself it was no big deal. He couldn't let himself worry about it; he couldn't stop now. One charge by itself would do little structural damage. It was the combination that would have the desired effect.

Any explosion would certainly bring the cops, however—and Toby Jacobs; he worried about the Director of Security, a man he had never met and hoped never to meet. Jacobs seemed to have the ability to be in several places at once. It was unnerving.

It wouldn't be long now, he reminded himself. It was almost time.

He reached a door, turned the knob, and pushed it open, quickly shoving his tools into the drab hallway.

He would avoid the site of the explosion at all costs. But he had to appear curious. He left his tools and hurried over to a group of painters. Painters always struck him as a bit short on brains—too long in the fumes.

"What the hell's going on?" he asked as the alarm stopped.

The thinnest of the three replied, "Explosion in the locker room. Maybe gas or something."

"Terrorists," said the one with the potbelly, looking frightened.

The man with the glasses shook his head in disgust. "Terrorists? Here?" He turned and hurried back to his tools, appearing appropriately anxious.

There was much work to do.

* * *

Toby Jacobs paused on Level 3, Pavilion C, Administration Concourse South, overlooking the Atrium, where a group of nearly forty senior citizens walked briskly in unison, headed toward Pavilion B. Ten of them wore the color-coordinated T-shirts of their walking club, the Greyhounds.

It was something of a sociological phenomenon, this walking craze. Seven months earlier, in this hour before the shops opened, the concourses would have been nearly empty. Recently however the "pre-open" hour had swelled in attendance to several hundred. Nearly all were over sixty; all walked energetically for forty minutes to an hour, taking advantage of the empty, environment-controlled space.

Waves of blue hair moved below him. Rotund individuals, alongside bodies deserving the Greyhound logo, pushed themselves to an enviable pace, driving their hearts and lungs.

These elderly walkers gave him a daily sense of purpose: it was like having several hundred grandparents to look after. He had never met his own grandparents, though he'd heard plenty of stories. He appreciated the bright eyes, the pumping arms, the hungry slap of rubber on the polished stone floors. The blue-hairs were a wonderful addition to the mall.

He reached up to massage the base of his neck. He yawned. He'd been up half the night working on the spars and rigging to the Angel, a ship-in-a-bottle project that had consumed his evenings for the past several weeks. He longed for two weeks on the Cape, with the lazy slap of surf and a cooler at his side. No chance of that. No time for it. There never seemed to be time for it.

He studied the Atrium's central chandelier, twenty feet across at its widest spot, boasting some two thousand individual pieces of cut glass. It hung above the computer-controlled fountain that displayed fifty-five separate streams of water in varying heights and combinations, creating a reported 440,000 possible different patterns—a promotional claim Jacobs found difficult to believe. Placed around the fountain were six maturing elms and ten whitebark birch. Below, and in the shade of these trees, several dozen varieties of annuals encircled a small rose garden and were flanked on four sides by hanging baskets of flowering begonias. The combined colors and smells were intoxicating. All of Yankee Green was intoxicating.

Suddenly, the building rocked beneath his feet.

He reached for the small radio handset he kept clipped to the inside of his suit coat. Its two-foot coiled cord ran to the lightweight walkie-talkie hooked to his belt. From the walkie-talkie another tiny wire led up between his jacket and shirt and out between the collars, attached to a clear plastic invisible earpiece. All his guards carried similar equipment.

"Dicky, what was that?" Jacobs spoke in a pleasant tenor. A tall lean man, he wore a light suit. A brimmed hat, like something worn by Elliot Ness, sat cocked at a gentle angle over bushy black brows. The hat provided two functions: it gave him the appearance of a visitor to the shopping center, a customer perhaps, and at the same time made him immediately identifiable to his security staff—easily spotted in a crowd, even at a good distance.

He looked up through the immense overhead skylight and spotted yet another set of steel-wool clouds blowing down from Boston, toward Providence, trapping the city of Hillsdale and the Yankee Green beneath an August umbrella of heat and humidity.

Still looking up, he noticed the small antenna protruding from the wall. Because of interference caused by the tremendous amount of steel in the huge complex, Security's radio signals were bounced to these nearby relay stations. From the relay stations the signals were transmitted by coaxial cable to the roof and then radioed across the street to another set of relays, which deflected them back across the street to the far end of the mall, where again they ran via coaxial cable to the Security Dispatch Control Centermall this accomplished in less than a thousandth of a second.

Considering where Jacobs stood, there was a certain irony in the complexity of this technological feat: the Dispatch Control Center was just across the way, on the other side of Pavilion C's third level.

Installation of the sophisticated radio relay system had been one of his first recommendations. The old system, riddled with dead spots, had been too inefficient and prone to failure. The new system had cost over twenty thousand dollars. One of the early joys of his job had been spending someone else's money.

He pushed up the sleeves on his poplin suit and tugged at the cuffs of his shirt. He jerked his tie. It felt like someone had tied him up. The jacket was often kept hooked over the back of the chair in the office marked DIRECTOR OF SECURITY AND SAFETY, but not during summer, when air conditioning kept the Green's seven pavilions as cool as meat lockers. Out of habit, he dragged his shoes across the backs of his pant legs. His efforts failed to restore the shoes' original luster.

In the instant of time it took to release the call button, he studied the lush, attractive setting below. The Green's architects had specifically designed the complex to direct customers' attention to the inside, to move the foot traffic deeper and deeper into the heart of the multi-pavilioned maze, and to mesmerize shoppers with exotic sensory experiences, diverting them from the problems of everyday life. It was, in essence, a giant trap: inviting, alluring, seductive. For patrons, an hour passed in a matter of minutes, an entire day in what seemed more like an hour. For employees, this same distractive atmosphere, this purposely controlled confusion, the perpetual temptation for the mind to wander, proved to be a miserable environment to work in.

At 3.5 million square feet, Yankee Green was the second largest enclosed shopping complex in the United States, the third largest indoor amusement park in the world. In New England it was already the stuff of legends.

The voice of the dispatcher, Dicky Brock, came through his ear piece. "Fire alarms are activated in the new wing. It felt like an explosion."

"Agreed. Get DeAngelo on the horn and find out what's up. I'm headed over there. Keep me informed." Jacobs was moving toward the escalators as he spoke. This central pavilion, Pavilion C, was immediately adjacent to the newest wing.

At the bottom of the escalator, Jacobs turned right. As he dodged his way through a cluster of Greyhounds, several of the seniors said good morning to him. He waved, his concentration on his earpiece.

A huge banner, blocking the eight doors to the new wing, read: GRAND OPENING—FUNWORLD—AUGUST 23RD. PUBLIC INVITED. Below in slightly smaller letters it continued; DON'T MISS YANKEE GREEN'S FIRST LOTTERY DRAWING—$200,000 C*A*S*H—2 P.M. Jacobs ducked around the banner and pushed through one of the fireproof glass doors. When locked magnetically, these doors could sustain an impact of 6,000 pounds of force—another of his security modifications. All doors were now equipped with similar mag locks, under the control of Dispatch's central computer.

The angry pulsing of the fire alarm drove him on.

The final details of the pavilion's construction were being attended to. On Saturday, ribbon-cutting ceremonies would open this latest amusement wing to an expected crowd of five thousand. The Giant's Tail, the world's largest indoor roller coaster, loomed before him. A twelve-foot-diameter solar-powered clock dominated the far wall, a black rack of photovoltaic cells to its left, fed by sunlight through the pavilion's glass canopy.

Today, FunWorld's concourses were nearly empty as a few dozen workers scurried about, dressing up the storefronts, working on electrical fixtures, planting foliage, and installing awnings. Several retailers were busy inside the stores as well, though clearly in the way of the workers.

Jacobs broke into a run.

The monotone beeping in his ear caught his attention. Its pitch clashed with that of the alarm, causing an ugly dissonance.

"The fire is down in Utility Room Five on Sub-level Two," Brock informed him. Jacobs opened the door to the emergency stairway and leaped two steps at a time. The alarm stopped.

He turned left, the bitter smell of fire enveloping him and raising the hairs on the nape of his neck. His heart banged in his chest. He threaded his way through onlookers, sensing the death before he saw it. A chilling silence hung over the normally boisterous construction workers. He stopped, panting, facing a bloodstained T-shirt that covered McClatchy's crushed head and chest. Inside Room 5, the blackened, smoking remains of what had been a locker room. Several workers finished emptying fire extinguishers on the debris.

"What the hell happened here?" Jacobs inquired of the bare-chested worker to his right.

"Who knows? Whatever it was, it blew McClatchy here to high heaven. I covered what remains of his head with my shirt. His brains is all over the place. Never seen nothing like it."

"Touch anything?"

"No. The boys have been real careful."

"Seen DeAngelo?"

"I hear he's on his way down."

"Okay. Why don't you stick around. See if you can't get somebody to break up the show. We don't need a lot of spectators. And why don't we hold any discussion of this down to a minimum until we know exactly what happened."

Jacobs stared at the charred contents of the room as the worker hollered to the men to get back to work and keep their mouths shut until they knew what they were talking about. The hallway emptied quickly.

Jacobs called Dispatch on his radio. "You better notify downtown. This is one for their people."

"What happened down there?" Dicky Brock's voice was anxious.

"Explosion of some sort. We lost a man." Toby walked down the drab hall, stooping to stab the errant wedding ring with a pen. He held the ring at arm's length, a glint of fluorescent light sparkling off the edge. "You better notify homicide."

© Ridley Pearson
 

NEVER LOOK BACK
CHAPTER ONE

Leonid Borikowski—the man of a hundred faces—flinched as the jet touched him down onto the North American continent for the first time.

A wig of short blond hair sat above brown eyes. Leonid Borikowski's eyes were green; his hair, black. Ten years had been added to his forty: penciled crow's feet flanked short-cut sideburns; discolored blue-black bags sagged beneath his eyes. A large orb of discolored skin stretched from below his left ear into the loose collar of a powder blue French shirt and was also cosmetic. The combined result painted a tragic story. He looked as if a car battery had exploded in his face.

No one, except for the stewardesses, had spoken to him in the last eight hours. He had flown to Montreal alone, despite the hundreds of other passengers. Just as he wished.

Behind him, and across the aisle, Karen Kwang leaned forward to afford herself a view of a man she had first noticed in Venice. The man in 5C. She was convinced he was United States Government.

His name was Minor. He worked for the CIA office in Rome. His partner, John Thompson, was glancing up the aisle at the legs of a stewardess, wondering what to do about Kwang. Kwang was a reporter for Cable Watch News. She was a pain in the ass.

Kwang had made the story public. Now Minor and Thompson were trying to locate two possible assassins who could very well be in Montreal to kill the Pope. It was all a bit sketchy. But Kwang had lit a fire under her cable audience, and something had to be done quickly before every subcommittee on the Hill came crashing down on the CIA. Again.

Leonid Borikowski knew nothing of Kwang or Thompson or Minor. If anyone had told him that two American agents were aboard the flight, he might have laughed at the irony. He was an officer in Bulgaria's DS—the Durzhauna Sigurnost—an intelligence agency closely affiliated with both the KGB and Russian military intelligence, the GRU. He had once been known as an up-and-coming young actor in his native capital, Sofia. Now he was not known at all. He appeared and he disappeared. And his itinerary preceded tomorrow's headlines.

As the wheels of the jetliner spurted small rooster tails of smoke onto the tarmac, the stewardesses continued their whispers about this nightmarish man in 17D who hadn't uttered a word on the entire eight-hour flight. Their inquiries had been answered with nods and gesticulations. They believed him mute.

Borikowski had fluent command of several languages, could skillfully duplicate numerous dialects of each of these languages, yet rarely spoke in public. Orders. He attributed his survival to it.

He finished a cigarette, a non-filter, encouraged by the illuminated sign before him, picking bits of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and depositing them carefully in the ashtray, one by one.

His was the art of patience: he felt no tremendous thrill here, except at the fine detail of his acting skills. A self-pride.

His only fear was failure.

He knew the details of Crown well, having studied the operation for weeks. Anxiety over the fact that Crown was unlike any of his previous assignments hovered in the back of his mind. He pushed it away—a technique all agents were taught—and flicked the last piece of wet, brown tobacco into the ashtray.

A few minutes later the plane jerked to a stop. People jumped to their feet and Borikowski waited for them to work out their impatience as each struggled to be the first to leave.

Eventually the line began to move forward. The French of a tired child, questioning when she might see her puppy again, faded as she was carried by her mother from the plane. Borikowski stood—ducking—and then stepped into line behind Thompson, who in turn followed Karen Kwang, neither aware of the other. Thompson stood close to Borikowski's five-foot-ten and offered a good shield. Borikowski hated crowds.

He gathered his heavy gray wool overcoat from the storage compartment, and was quickly pushed forward by the heaving throng, eventually passing the last stewardess, who offered him a courteous goodbye, hoping finally to hear him speak.

Leonid Borikowski nodded.

He entered the Jetway and funneled into Customs along with the others.

If his forged papers held up under strict scrutiny, if no one recognized him, if the customs officials missed the secret section of his suitcase, then all would be well. He had been through it often enough that it did not frighten him. At times like this he realized how callused he'd become—like a field worker's hands.

He entered Customs and quickly scanned the area, knowing there would be assigned "rovers" here: people who tried to match a face with a memorized photograph.

For Leonid Borikowski this was a place to take all precaution. Here there existed little chance of escape, should anything go wrong.

Passengers moved calmly toward the baggage claim area. A few travelers spotted friends and relatives beyond the cagelike Customs retainer and waved. Borikowski noted the balconied mirror-wall that provided additional Canadian agents the opportunity to screen arrivals. DS knew about this room, as well as other interrogation rooms on both floors. They even claimed to employ several moles in high-level positions here. Even so, Borikowski moved behind one of several textured pillars, awaiting the chaos that he expected to develop around the luggage carousel.

Karen Kwang spotted the waiting video crew from Cable Watch and smiled at a familiar face. Barely five feet tall, Karen possessed a slight, frame, high cheekbones, and captivating cinnamon eyes. She wore silk exclusively, and her lips were a shiny red. Always. The crowd thickened and she could not see anyone. Only shoulders, necks, and breasts.

A beautifully dressed blond woman with scarlet cheekbones stood away from the carousel. Borikowski noticed her and immediately dubbed her a rover because she was reading only people's faces. He wondered how many of his faces she might have memorized.

Then, as if she'd heard him, she glanced in his direction. Skillfully, he bent over to rub supposedly sore feet, keeping his head low. He watched her carefully until a fat man with plaid pants stepped into her line of sight. Then he stood back up.

Luggage began to slide down the chute of the carousel and with it came added confusion. Polite shoves and outright pushes replaced common courtesy. In the roar, faint apologies mixed with quiet cursing as people struggled for their luggage. Movement would be easier now.

Borikowski again singled out the blond woman, and convinced himself he had not been identified. How could they recognize me under this disguise? he asked himself. It's certainly one of the best I've ever had.

No alarm showed in her face, no undue concern. Her pastel blue eyes continued to scan the crowd.

Borikowski's suitcase bounced off the black rubber bumper and came to rest, its handle facing out. He turned to intercept it.

Several yards behind him, the same young French-speaking girl he had seen being carried off the plane nervously clutched her mother's tweed dress. The father was busy collecting their luggage. She and her mother were awaiting Dancer—their pet Doberman—at the Oversized Baggage counter. Somewhat frightened by all the people and tired from the long flight, her only comfort came from the handful of tweed. Her mother assured her their pet would arrive any moment.

Seemingly divined by maternal magic, a door opened and a soft gray fiberglass cage entered the room, followed by the man carrying it, his arms extended in an awkward embrace.

He set the cage down, looked up with an exhausted face, and spilled out an endless list of reasons for his fatigue. Not allowing her a moment to interrupt, he rambled on. The mother was too polite to cut in.

The distraction allowed the daughter a moment of curiosity. Their young Doberman paced nervously inside the cage, the sedative long worn off, anxiously awaiting attention. The girl's tiny fingers deciphered the puzzle of the latch. She swung open the door to hug her friend but her strength proved no match. Dancer rushed from the cage, knocked the child to the floor, and disappeared into the crowd.

Having split his attention between his approaching suitcase and the blonde, Borikowski had no opportunity to see the Doberman as it came dashing across the polished stone floor at a breakneck speed. In a frantic motion, Dancer changed direction too quickly and lost all paws to the waxed stone, careening and tumbling into a flashy brunette resplendent in leather pants and spike heels. The brunette jumped, but fell backwards, driving a spike deeply into Borikowski's foot. Delivered so quickly and with such surprise, the pain triggered the first large mistake Leonid Borikowski had made in years: he cursed in Bulgarian.

His passport listed his citizenship as Norwegian.

The blond woman heard him and looked over. Their eyes met.

At the carousel, Karen Kwang reached out and collared Dancer in an amazing show of fortitude and timing. The Doberman whimpered and sat, cowering under the choke of the collar. A spattering of relieved travelers applauded.

Borikowski waited for his adversary's move. And she made it.

Her strides were sharp and deliberate, but her delicate face reflected utter calm as she angled toward a locked wall-phone box not forty paces away, refusing to look back. Never look back. Her job required she report any incidents, and to her, this qualified.

I will not fail, thought Leonid Borikowski. I must prevent them—her—from detaining me, and I must act quickly. He dropped his bag by a pillar and looked toward the large mirrored pane that overlooked the room.

With his thick jacket folded over his arm, he calculated a route that would intersect her path and set off, his right hand searching blindly for the small bead of plastic embedded in the wool, his movements silent and without effort. Blood pulsed past his ears, muting all other sounds. As he closed the distance, his fingers located the small plastic bead. With the deftness of a magician, he withdrew and cupped the four-inch hatpin. It would have to be now. One more step.

She unlocked and opened the box quickly. Her hand lifted the white wall phone from its cradle.

In synchronized motion he both caught her and ended her life, quickly driving the pin in behind her ear and spinning it. Her hand hung up the phone. Her body slackened and he helped her down into a formed plastic seat. Her stilled face looked surprised, even in death.

With little time for thought he stroked her soft hair, ad-libbing a colloquial French, comforting her and promising to be home soon. Borikowski leaned over and kissed the dead woman on the cheek. Then he smiled thinly. Most of the crowd had formed lines at the Customs counters, the carousel nearly empty of luggage.

Borikowski stood, angry at her now. As he crossed the room, he repeatedly went over the details of the past few minutes—like a bridge player reviewing the last few tricks. Without stopping, he bent over and took hold of his suitcase by the handle. He tried to convince himself that there had been no time. No other way. Realizing the news would devastate his superiors in Sofia, he reluctantly accepted a new blemish on an otherwise exemplary record. Such news might even reach Moscow.

But one cannot dwell on one's reputation. There is still the here and now—the assignment—and the need to leave this airport. Now.

He selected a particular Customs counter and joined its line behind a Norwegian tour group that moved quickly through.

Borikowski stepped forward.

To appear the true tourist, he declared a bottle of bourbon, knowing this was not required. The move seemed to help speed things up. He passed through without incident.

Only seconds later, as Borikowski approached the exit, a blood-curdling scream ripped through the building. He calmly continued through the electronic doors and out into a brisk November air. He assumed that someone had discovered his victim's slack body, or perhaps had seen the thin column of blood below her ear. And that someone had screamed—because that's what everyone did. Leonid Borikowski knew without looking. Never look back.

© Ridley Pearson