Driving north through a snowstorm from New York toward Albany, Gage felt the uncertainty of Faith’s situation, but resisted calling again for fear of turning his worry into interference.
At the same time, he felt as though Milton Abrams had sent him walking on a trampoline.
“Are you asking me to find out whether Hennessy was murdered,” Gage had asked as he rose from the living room couch, “or whether Ibrahim was framed?”
“Neither, exactly. I want you to find out why the possible framing of Ibrahim became a matter of life or death for Hennessy.”
“It didn’t seem all that important to Ibrahim. He’s had nine years to proclaim his innocence, but he’s remained silent and out of sight.”
“Then maybe that’s the answer I’m looking for—assuming that he’s still alive. But I don’t think it’s the one we’ll discover.”
Gage found it hard to make out the Hudson River to his right as he looped over the thruway and headed west toward downtown. The Dunn Memorial Bridge reached into the gray nothingness, looking more like a pier than a span. Only the creeping headlights emerging from the swirling fog confirmed that it was attached to the opposite bank. From there on he let the rental car’s GPS guide him through the blurred intersections to the Adirondack Plaza Hotel along State Street, a few blocks from the capitol.
After checking in, he called his assistant, Alex Z, at the firm’s office in San Francisco. He smiled to himself as he pictured the wild-haired, multitattooed Alex Z perched at his cockpit of a desk, surrounded by computers and monitors, trolling cyberspace for information that allowed Gage and the twenty other investigators in his firm to triangulate their position inside the cases they worked.
“Court records in Albany show that Elaine divorced Hennessy five years ago,” Alex Z said. “She got the house and half his retirement. He got joint custody of the kids, but I don’t think that meant that much in the long run because they were already in their mid-teens.”
“Was it contested?”
“At the start, but he caved in before they got into the juicy details of exactly what their differences were and what made them irreconcilable.”
“How about making a pretext call to the house to see if she’s there. Pretend to be a pollster. Run it through a New York number so she’ll think it’s local.”
“No problem and I’ll hit you with an e-mail of everything I’ve found out about them.”
During the following hour, Gage tried to construct a living human out of the papier-mâché of Alex Z’s research, then drove west and walked up the concrete steps to a century-old brick Craftsman two blocks from the frozen Washington Park Lake in the center of town. He was wearing a suit, but left his overcoat in the car, playing the odds that she might let him into the house if only to get him out of the cold—but first he’d have to get past a young woman peeking out from the near edge of the living room drapes as he raised his hand to knock on the door.
She swung it open, but before Gage had a chance to identify himself, she said, “My mother doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
Her features were too soft for the hard look she tried to use to wall Gage off, but he didn’t try to break through it with a smile, for it seemed to be part of an honest attempt to protect her mother.
Reaching out with his business card, Gage said, “I’m a private investigator—”
“For who?” Her voice went from protective to demanding. “Who sent you?”
“Someone who was worried about your father before he died.”
She didn’t accept the card. He lowered it. Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the door.
“You mean, before he was murdered.”
Gage didn’t yet know whether that was true, but he neither wanted to challenge her nor agree with her and thereby set up a future betrayal if it wasn’t.
“That’s what the man who hired me suspected,” Gage said, “and asked me to find out.”
An older female voice called out from the interior: “Who’s at the door?”
The young woman glanced behind her and said, “A man.”
The voice rose, the tone of an exasperated mother. “What man?”
Footsteps thumped on the hardwood floor, becoming louder as they approached.
The woman who appeared at the door matched the school librarian that Alex Z had described in his e-mail. Slim. Short. Red hair tied back. She looked at Gage, then at her daughter.
“You’re right, Vicky. It’s a man.”
Vicky reddened. “I was just trying to—”
“And she did it very well,” Gage said. He smiled and handed her his card. “I may want to hire her to protect me.”
Elaine examined it as her daughter backed away. “You came all the way out here from California to talk to me?”
“Actually, I came all the way out here to talk to someone who wanted me to talk to you.”
“Who was that?”
“I’d rather not say right away.”
Reaching out to return the card, she said, “I’ve had enough mysteries already.”
Gage held up his hands. “How about this? I’ll explain to you why I’m here, and then you decide whether it makes any difference who hired me.”
Elaine stared up at him for a few moments, and then turned away from the door and said, “Come on in.”
As Gage stamped his feet to knock off the snow that had collected on his shoes as he walked from his car, she looked back and smiled and said, “Nice try with shivering-in-the-cold gimmick. My husband used to use that one, too. He knew all of the tricks.” Her smiled died. “A lot of good it did him in the end.”