MIND COMPANY?” Graham asked.
“Were you trying to run me over?” Casey said, frowning and setting off again, as though the intrusion were only a mild annoyance.
Graham laughed, shaking his head and falling in alongside her.
“My ex-wife used to tell me I had to grow up,” he said, “but when you act young, you stay young, and don’t we all want that? Nice pace you’ve got. About a six-minute mile?”
“It used to be six-ten,” Casey said, huffing and wiping the sweat from her eyes with the back of her arm. “When did you get into town?”
“Late,” Graham said, revealing nothing more than the smile on his unshaven face.
Casey nodded and said, “Because this whole thing is feeling like a game that I walked into the middle of.”
“Meaning what?” he asked, casting her a quizzical look.
“Things going on behind the scenes,” Casey said, dodging a cluster of trash cans someone had left near the end of their driveway. “This whole thing has an odor.”
“We’re making people think,” Graham said. “Challenging a mind-set. You think most people really care about a black man from the ghetto who got locked up two decades ago?”
Casey said, “Let’s talk about Jake Carlson.”
“I think that Sunday morning piece is going to come out real nice,” Graham said.
Casey kept up her pace, studying the profile of his face and the look of smug satisfaction she couldn’t decipher.
She let some road go by.
“Look,” Graham said, pointing up ahead at a decaying clapboard building on the corner by the next traffic light, “the place where Hubbard ran into those hillbillies twenty years ago. Maybe Hubbard stops to tie his shoe, or one of those bastards decides to take a leak before he leaves for the night. A million things that could have let him walk right by. Chance is a bitch, isn’t it?”
They passed the old corner bar and its plastic sign, hung crooked above the door and advertising Pepsi and a new name. They crested the hill and the walls and watchtowers of the prison appeared. A tide of human shadows ebbed and flowed in the early morning light, guards changing shift.
“Jake,” Casey finally said.
“It went well.”
“He overheard you talking at your offices,” Casey said, puffing from the effort to speak and run. “Who’s Massimo?”
Graham grabbed her arm and stopped. He gave her a look of shock, finding her eyes with his. In the early light their dark brown looked almost black and beetlelike.
“You’re spying on me?” he said.
Casey set her jaw and shook free from his grip. “I don’t want to dance around with you or anyone. Jake heard you talking about taking care of someone-a her-like you should have before and ending some charade. What charade? Me? The Project?”
“No good deed goes unpunished, right?” Graham said, looking slightly hurt. “All I did was offer to give you a million dollars a year for your clinic to get some help with another good cause.”
“So I work for you and that means I don’t get to think or ask questions?” Casey asked, the words sounding weak and confused.
Graham inhaled and pushed the air out through tight lips. “Do you know how unprofessional this is of Jake Carlson? Does he? You don’t sneak around a man’s office listening to phone conversations when he’s welcomed you and agreed to do an interview.”
“You think I give a shit about Jake Carlson’s manners?” Casey asked.
“Don’t you think, as a lawyer,” Graham said, “that listening through a keyhole or behind a wall or whatever he was doing, you could mix things up?”
“Of course,” Casey said, still keeping her chin high.
“So, he heard me talking with Massimo?” Graham asked.
“Apparently.”
“A ship,” Graham said, nodding.
“What ship?”
“That’s the her I should have taken care of,” Graham said, splaying his fingers and holding up his hands. “Do you see how ridiculous this is, now?”
“I don’t see anything,” Casey said, her voice wavering.
Graham grimaced and shook his head, then turned and began walking away, down the hill. “The Charade is a ship anchored in Lake Erie.”
Casey followed him. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s full of machines from an assembly plant that got shut down in Michigan,” Graham said. “I told the city they can either give me the tax breaks I want and pay for the environmental cleanup of this old mill or the equipment and all the jobs that go with it can keep going to China, where the government has a new facility waiting if I want it. I’ve left the damn thing there for almost a year, thinking they’d be hungry for the deal. It’s a publicity stunt to get the politicians off their asses, but I still don’t have a deal. I should have shipped her off to Shanghai a long time ago, but I thought I’d try to save some American jobs.”
Casey walked with him and asked, “What about this Massimo?”
“Massimo D’Costa runs an environmental cleanup company,” Graham said. “He’s supposed to be making this whole deal happen and if it does, he’s got about ten million in cleanup work. He’s supposed to be using his contacts to make the whole thing happen. You see, now?”
“And you had to meet them yesterday?” Casey asked, her face flushed now from more than just the run.
“That was one of several meetings I had,” Graham said. “Evidently, the only one Carlson could hear about through the door, or however he heard. Maybe he’s tapping my phones. I don’t know.”
Graham stopped again and touched her arm. “Was that-he didn’t follow me to the warehouse, did he?”
Casey felt her throat tighten.
Graham snorted in disgust, shaking his head.
Casey pressed her lips together and kept up with him, dodging the shift change and hustling between cars queued up to get out of the guards’ parking lot. They crossed the bridge over the Owasco River, then the railroad tracks before passing Curly’s Restaurant.
As they turned left onto the sidewalk that ran along Route 20 toward their hotel, Casey said, “I am so sorry. Do you know how stupid I feel?”
Graham reached down and gave her hand a small squeeze. “Forget it. He’s charmed a lot of other people, too. I’m sorry I haven’t been as involved as I’d hoped.”
“I don’t know how much you’ve gotten from Ralph,” she said eagerly. “But I think by the end of the day I’ll have a swab sample from the hospital here in town that will give us the DNA we need to set Dwayne Hubbard free.”
Graham took her hand again and stopped, looking intently at her. “He did tell me, and how good would that be?”
“I still feel stupid.” Casey said, letting her hand linger before removing it from his. “Can we just put that behind us?”
Graham smiled warmly, reached out with his other hand, and touched her shoulder. “For you? It’s already done.”