Two weeks earlier
WHEN THE AX FELL, SEAN KELLY WAS READY FOR it. He’d known it was coming ever since he woke up in his car yesterday, somewhere in far north Tucson, with a pounding headache and no idea how he got there.
He’d already cleaned most of his things out of his desk, in his cubicle of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Tucson field office. Once upon a time, it had been the plain old Customs Service, back in the days before the Department of Homeland Security, back when the mission had been a lot clearer. He’d put all his stuff in a trash bag and it was lumped at the edge of the cubicle.
Appropriate, he thought, since my career has turned to garbage.
People had been staring at him all day, mostly silent. One of the veteran agents, a big ex-military guy named Dunn, had leaned in, shaken his hand, and said, “Really fucked up big time, didn’t you, Irish?” But most of the others just looked at him. He couldn’t tell what the looks meant, but settled on a mixture of pity and contempt.
His phone rang at one minute after nine a.m., summoning him to the office of the special agent in charge of the Tucson office. Sean walked unsteadily to the corner office of Sonny Weller, who looked nothing like a “Sonny.” Weller was another big guy. Sean was six three, and Weller had a good four inches and sixty pounds on him, none of it fat. His head was shaved bald, but he sported a wheat-colored walrus mustache. His real first name was something like Devon or Emerson or Winslow, but no one in the office dared call him that. No one screwed around with Sonny Weller.
“Sit,” Weller said. Sean could tell he was barely keeping his voice under control.
Sean sat. Weller made no move to close the office door. So he wanted the whole office to know what was about to happen. He had Sean’s file centered on the desk in front of him.
“Six months ago,” Weller said, “you sat right there in that same chair and promised me this shit was through.”
No niceties, Sean thought. It was just as well. It would be over more quickly that way. He nodded.
“You were going to get straightened out. You were going to be back on track, like you were when you first came to this office.”
“Let’s get it over with,” Sean finally said.
Weller barked out something that might have been a laugh. “Over with? Oh, it’s over with, all right.” He opened the file so violently that papers flew around the desk and he had to bend over to retrieve them. “Starts simple, doesn’t it, Irish? Eighteen months ago, falling asleep in a briefing. Helms was sitting next to you and said you smelled like you’d gone swimming in Jack Daniel’s. A few weeks later, you missed the briefing altogether. We had to reschedule an operation just to bring you up to speed. Your paper went steadily downhill. You conveniently forgot to do your paper on the Meléndez operation, and he walked. The SOB had been smuggling tons of illegal assault rifles across the border for two years. We spent a year and a half building the case with ATF. And he fucking walked, Kelly! Because you ‘forgot’ to fill out the proper forms.”
“Sorry,” Sean mumbled.
“Yeah, well. January of this year. You decided to party hearty and go get shit-faced before the op at Naco. Remember that one? The sixty illegals in the back of the cattle truck? We missed them, because you weren’t where you were supposed to be. You were so out of it you drove down the wrong road and were twenty fucking miles away!” His voice continued to rise.
“Sonny-”
“No, don’t ‘Sonny’ me. I gave you more chances than you deserved. As for yesterday, you totally skipped the operation. Arivaca is the middle of a fucking war, Irish. It’s the drug runners versus us versus the locals. Here we were, with this joint task force-us, the Bureau, DEA-doing what we’re supposed to do, namely keeping this country’s borders safe. DEA’s been undercover with Ray Acosta in Arivaca for six months. We’re ready for the raid, but see, our office’s forward observer isn’t there. You were supposed to be on the road to Acosta’s place. You were to keep us aware of his movements. But no, you were drunk off your butt, in your car-nearly a hundred miles away!” Weller took the file folder and threw it across the desk at Sean.
“There’s no need-” Sean began, picking up papers.
Weller crashed his fist down on the desk. Outside the open door, people were staring. “By not providing that support, you endangered the lives of other officers, Kelly. We’re damn lucky no one got killed. Never mind that Acosta got across the border. And you know what? They’re all screaming at me. Everyone from the local U.S. attorney all the way up the line to D.C. War on drugs, war on terror, interagency cooperation…all that shit. They want my head, and I’m handing them yours.”
Weller leaned back and was silent a moment.
“How bad?” Sean finally asked.
“Administrative suspension without pay, pending a termination hearing,” Weller said. “The hearing is in thirty days, but you’re done. There’s no way you won’t be canned at this point.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice. “And you know what’s really shitty about all this? You’re a smart kid, you have good instincts, and you’re good at putting things together with only a little to go on. Most of the guys in this office aren’t half as smart as you are.” He leaned back again, chair squeaking. “We all like a drink now and then, Irish. Most of us have even been rip-roaring drunk a time or three in our lives. But by God, you put people’s lives at stake. You put other officers’ lives in jeopardy because of your…problem. You promised me you’d see the damn counselor, even go to AA.”
“I did,” Sean said.
“What, once?”
“Twice.”
Weller nodded. “Right. Now get going. You’ll get a certified letter with a notice of the personnel action and the hearing date. I can’t support you anymore, not when you put lives at stake.”
Sean nodded. He stood up and numbly offered his hand to Weller. Weller stared at the hand for a moment, then shook it.
“Your weapon and your creds,” Weller said.
Sean nodded again. He didn’t normally wear the gun around the office-in fact, he only carried it during actual operations-but he’d known what was coming, so he’d brought it with him this morning. He handed the SIG Sauer nine-millimeter, holstered, to Weller, then passed him the leather case with his Department of Homeland Security credentials.
Sean walked out of the office into silence. Halfway back to his cubicle, someone said, “Hey, Irish, want to hit happy hour?” He didn’t recognize the voice and didn’t care. He just felt tired.
Sean said nothing. He picked up the black trash bag with the stuff from his desk. He stopped in to say good-bye to Dunn, and to A. J. Helms, who’d become his closest friend in the office. Helms just looked stricken. He’d been the one who arranged for Sean to go to AA, had driven him to the meeting. Sean felt a twinge of guilt-he’d even deceived his best friend. Instead of going to the meeting, Sean had sneaked out the back door, then came out the front when Helms picked him up an hour later, without having ever gone into the actual meeting.
His grandfather Seamus Kelly, who’d been a beat cop in Chicago, was fond of saying, “There’s no good Irish cop worth his salt who didn’t like a good drink now and again.”
Right, Sean thought. Now and again.
He hoisted the garbage bag onto his shoulder and walked out into the high desert air of southern Arizona. He had no idea where he was going.
SEAN DROVE AIMLESSLY AROUND TUCSON BEFORE finally being drawn away from the city, south and west. By midday he was in Arivaca.
Arivaca was a tiny town twenty miles or so northeast of the border. It was a strange combination of cultures. Its heritage was cattle ranching, and there was open rangeland all around it. But he’d been told it had once been an artist’s colony as well, that various hippies and bohemians and artisans made it a home base during the winter. Some of that character still showed through-now and then roadside stands were set up with various arts and crafts for sale. Sean had once bought a tiger’s-eye gem from an old hippie couple that came right out of Central Casting, all the way down to the VW bus. He’d sent the gem to his sister.
Then there were the drug runners, the most notorious of which was Ray Acosta. An American citizen, he’d built a hugely ostentatious ranch-style house-all sleek modern lines, brick and glass-right in the middle of Arivaca, among the trailer homes and wooden frame houses. It stood out like a diamond surrounded by broken glass.
And now he was gone, over the border, leaving his palace behind. After the blown op yesterday, officers from three federal agencies had descended on the house. They found cash and they found guns, but no cocaine. Acosta was too smart for that, and now he was in Mexico.
Thanks to me, Sean thought, rubbing his forehead.
He pulled his Jeep Cherokee back onto the road, then crossed to the other side and parked under a tree. Just driving through, no one would know that Arivaca was the center of a war zone twenty miles from the border. The town’s single business, a little general store, seemed to do a brisk trade. A couple of arts and crafts tables were set up across the road from the store, and each had a few customers. Sean watched as a weary-looking man with a salt and pepper beard explained to the three young boys surrounding him that they could each have only one souvenir.
Sean smiled, then it faded quickly as he was aware of the jackhammers working behind his eyes. He dry-swallowed a couple of extra-strength Tylenol, then started the Jeep again.
“I never liked Arizona anyway,” he muttered, which wasn’t true. He recognized what he was doing, the process of rationalization. Like a child who didn’t get what he wanted, then insisted he’d never wanted it in the first place. He glanced at the man with the three boys again. Same principle.
The truth was, Sean loved the desert Southwest. He’d had a choice of assignments when he joined Customs seven years ago-Detroit, Seattle, or Tucson. Having grown up in the upper Midwest, Detroit held no allure for him. He didn’t care for rain, so Seattle was out. But the Southwest was exoticism and mystery and excitement, so he’d come to Tucson. And the work had been good. Confusing since September 11 and the creation of Homeland Security, but good work. Important. Even his old man, Detective Captain Joe Kelly, who was never pleased with anything, seemed to approve.
“Fuck,” Sean whispered. “Fuck it all.”
He pulled back onto the highway, heading west out of Arivaca. He could go anywhere. The trash bag full of stuff from his desk at ICE was in the backseat. So were his laptop and a small duffel bag with a few clothes and personal items. His career was over-he knew that. Thirty years old in a few weeks and his career was done.
“Fuck,” he said again, without much enthusiasm.
He drove through the rough country, some of it open range, some of it fenced as part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. It was a wild and beautiful terrain, mountains rising in hazy distance from the high desert floor. Sean drove on until the road dead-ended at the junction to State Highway 286, one of the loneliest stretches of two-lane highway he’d ever seen. A right turn would take him north, back toward Tucson. Toward “civilization,” whatever that meant.
A left turn meant Sasabe and the Mexican border. The town of Sasabe-though “town” was a generous description-squatted right on the border and was one of the two most isolated ports of entry along the southern boundary of the United States. One of Sean’s ICE colleagues-former colleagues, he corrected himself-was a woman agent, a fellow midwestern expatriate. She’d once told Sean that if “they” decided to cross the border at Sasabe, the authorities on the U.S. side wouldn’t have a chance. It was that isolated. She didn’t have to say who “they” were-drug runners, arms dealers, terrorists.
Sean’s own take on Sasabe was that it was really a Mexican village. It didn’t matter that it was on the Arizona side of the border. The flat-top houses, the adobe, the strings of peppers and onions hanging beside front doors, the gritty poverty. Sean thought a mistake had been made somewhere along the line, that the border had been moved half a mile or so too far south. It should have been redrawn so that Sasabe would be a Mexican border town, not an Arizona border town.
He turned left. Maybe he could start over in Mexico himself. His Spanish was good after seven years down here. He could live cheap in Mexico. Whiskey was inexpensive and easy to find. Maybe he could pick up Ray Acosta’s trail. Maybe, maybe, maybe…
He slowed the Cherokee to a crawl as he came into Sasabe. A little copper-skinned boy, maybe four or five years old, wearing only a pair of denim shorts, darted across the road as if he were playing chicken with Sean. A woman with three other kids surrounding her and a baby on her hip yelled in rapid-fire Spanish from a front porch. Sean nodded toward her. She stared at Sean unblinking.
Barely crawling at twenty miles an hour, Sean took the Cherokee around a sharp S curve. Ragged laundry hung on clotheslines on both sides of the road. More half-naked kids scampered. Sean wondered where they went to school, if at all. Ahead and to the left, looking like a well-dressed stranger that had wandered into the midst of all this, was the port of entry. A sign unnecessarily read MEXICO, with an arrow pointing the way.
The port of entry was all brick and stone and glass, a modernistic complex that straddled the road. There was no southbound stop sign. It was so simple to drive into another country. You just passed slowly through the port and then were in Mexico. Northbound out of Mexico was only slightly different. All an American citizen had to do was stop at the booth and declare his citizenship.
But Sasabe was different from other crossings along the border, places like El Paso or even Nogales, just a bit east of here. Traffic snarled in both directions in those places, Mexicans and Americans each seeing what the other had to offer. As for Sasabe, Sean had never seen more than one vehicle at a time come through this port.
Without even realizing it, he had pulled the Cherokee to the shoulder of the road, a hundred yards or so from the border. A green-and-white Border Patrol van drove past him, the driver staring out. Sean thought he knew the guy-he knew most of the BP officers and most of those who worked the ports of entry from Nogales to Naco to Sasabe.
He rubbed his head, waiting for the Tylenol to kick in. So far it hadn’t. If he crossed the border he’d have to pass by a booth where someone he knew would see him. Shit. More humiliation. By now every employee of ICE in Arizona would know how Sean “Irish” Kelly had screwed up and let Ray Acosta run. He didn’t know who was working down here today, but he knew them all. He’d even dated one of the women who worked the booth.
Very slowly, his jaw grinding, he wheeled the Cherokee back onto the road and turned it around, back to the north. He maneuvered the S curve again and again the little boy did his dance across the road in front of him. Again the mother screamed ineffectually and glared at Sean.
The only functioning business in Sasabe was a little nameless cantina on the north side. He’d been in it multiple times and had never heard a word of English spoken there. But it was a bar, it was cheap, and Sean didn’t care anymore.
The door was wide open at a little before noon. Another thing Sean appreciated about the desert-bars opened early. He left the Cherokee in the gravel parking lot and went in. It was dark, lit by a few swag lamps here and there. Tables were wooden and chipped, chairs likewise, often mismatched. Two old men sat at the bar smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. One of them wore a greasy Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap. The bartender was a burly guy a little older than Sean, with a wispy black mustache. It was perfectly in character for Sasabe.
Sean sat at the bar at the opposite end from the two old smokers. Blinking in the dim light, he started ordering straight shots of Wild Turkey, with Dos Equis on draft to chase it.
“Leave the bottle,” he said in Spanish to the bartender.
An hour passed, and the only sound in the bar was that of the old men scratching matches as they lit fresh cigarettes-Sean never heard them utter a word-and Sean putting his glasses back down on the bar after each drink. Sean had smelled bread baking from somewhere, and without being asked, the bartender wordlessly put a basket of fresh, hot flour tortillas down in front of Sean.
Another good thing about the Southwest, Sean thought. You sure as hell don’t get tortillas like this in Illinois.
The thought made him laugh a little. I can still laugh, so I must be all right. He poured himself another shot.
A shadow appeared in the doorway. “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Kelly,” said a voice in English.
All heads turned toward the door. Sean, a little woozy but not as drunk as he wanted to be, looked past the shadow. A black Lexus, as out of place in Sasabe as the gleaming port of entry was, sat beside his dusty Cherokee in the parking lot.
“Who are you?” Sean said.
The man came fully into the bar and sat on the stool beside Sean’s. He placed a business card next to Sean’s shot glass.
Tobias Owens, Attorney and Counselor at Law, with an address in Phoenix.
Sean swiveled to look at him. He was in his thirties, a few years older than Sean, overweight but not obese, pale complexion. If he was like any of the other thirty-something lawyers Sean had met, he probably worked a hundred hours a week. No time for exercise, no time for sun, no time for anything but billable hours. Owens wore stylish round glasses and a suit that probably cost as much as the entire yearly income of every single person in Sasabe, Arizona.
“What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you,” Owens said.
“Want a drink?” Sean said. The bartender was hovering warily.
“Oh,” Owens said. “Just some water.”
The bartender looked at Sean.
“Agua,” Sean said.
The bartender made a little snorting sound and disappeared from sight, pausing to whisper to the two old smokers. In a moment he returned and put down a beer mug with water and two ice cubes floating in it.
“Let’s go to a booth, shall we?” Owens said.
Did he just say “shall we,” Sean thought. “Suit yourself.”
Sean picked up his whiskey bottle by the neck, along with the shot glass, and ambled to a table on the far side of the room. Someone had scribbled Spanish obscenities on the wall beside the table in red marker.
“Nice place,” Owens said, settling in across from Sean.
Sean noticed the brown leather briefcase in the man’s hand for the first time. He shrugged. “It serves a purpose,” he said, not rising to the lawyer’s sarcasm.
Owens thumped his water glass onto the table, frowning at the Spanish graffiti on the wall. “You always drink this early in the day?”
“What the fuck do you want?” Sean said, his voice rising.
Owens put up a hand. “We can help each other.”
Sean thought he was going to say more, but Owens just sat there with his hand in the air, looking ridiculous.
“I doubt it,” Sean said, downing another shot. He shuddered as the bourbon went through him. He was vaguely irritated at this stranger’s interruption of his little Sasabe interlude, but not so much so that he was going to quit drinking long enough to show his irritation.
“You’ve had a rough day, haven’t you, Mr. Kelly?”
Sean considered several replies, then just said, “Yep.”
“News travels fast,” Owens said. He glanced toward the bar. The two old men were staring in their direction. He lowered his voice. “Your career as a federal law enforcement officer has taken quite a hit, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, please,” Sean said. “I don’t need a damn lawyer. Get in your car and go back to Phoenix, shyster. I’m not suing anyone.”
Owens shook his head. “No, no, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to represent you. I already have a client. That’s why I’m here.”
Sean wished he had another tortilla, but he’d left the basket on the bar and didn’t feel like expending the energy it would take to go get it. “Start making some sense, if you can.”
“I’m the Arizona counsel for Senator Edward McDermott.”
Owens waited for a response. Sean simply stared at him.
“You are familiar with the senator?” Owens said finally.
Sean sighed. “Senior U.S. senator for Arizona. Multimillionaire corporate lawyer from a long line of multimillionaire corporate lawyers. Guardian of America’s morals and traditional values. Friend of big business. Goes through wives like dirty laundry. Believes government is generally incompetent. You ever wonder, counselor, how silly it is to elect people to government who don’t even like government?”
Owens had stiffened noticeably. “You sound as if you don’t care for the senator.”
Sean thumped his empty shot glass on the wooden table. “I don’t care for politicians in general. My grandfather, who was one of the best cops I ever knew before he retired, used to say that the politician was a lot more dangerous than the street thug. At least with the thug you knew where they stood and what they wanted.”
Owens was silent for a long moment. “Mr. Kelly, do you think your grandfather is proud of you today?”
Even an hour into a bottle of bourbon, Sean’s reflexes hadn’t dimmed much. He was taller than Owens by several inches, with a long reach, and he only had to stand up halfway to grab the lawyer by the hair and slam his face into the surface of the wooden table.
Owens screeched. Sean sat back down. The whiskey bottle had been jarred by the motion, but thankfully it hadn’t tipped over. Sean poured himself another drink. One of the old men at the bar, the one in the Dodgers cap, laughed. The other one growled out a few words in a low voice. Sean heard him say something about “whining like a woman.” Neither of them moved. The bartender folded his arms and watched in silence. Owens howled again.
Sean said nothing.
He drank and listened to Owens trying to breathe through his nose. Sean didn’t think it was broken-he hadn’t slammed the guy that hard. But there was a fair amount of blood, and Sean figured it was the most physical activity Tobias Owens had felt in a long time. He smiled at the thought.
Owens raised his head and saw Sean smiling. “You think…” the lawyer sputtered. “You think that’s funny?”
Sean’s smile faded. “State your business.”
Owens was digging in his pocket. He came out with a white handkerchief-is that silk? Sean wondered-and pressed it to his nose. “Assault,” Owens muttered. “I could file assault charges on you, Kelly. There are three witnesses.”
Sean laughed outright. “Don’t bet on it.” He raised his voice in the direction of the bar and switched to Spanish. “You see anything happen here?”
Both of the old smokers laughed. “Nada,” one said.
The bartender turned his back.
“So much for your witnesses,” Sean said in English. “I’m not feeling patient today. State your business.”
Owens pressed the bloody handkerchief against his nose. With his other hand, he fumbled open his briefcase and took out a thick manila envelope. He tossed it onto the table between them.
“The senator wants to hire you,” Owens said.
“WHAT?” SEAN SAID.
Owens tilted his head back. The blood from his nose had stopped flowing. “Hire you,” Owens said. “Senator McDermott wants you to do some work for him. You have a reputation.” He swiped at his nose again.
“Do I, now?”
“Shit.” Owens tilted his head back again. “Damn, that hurts.”
“Well, you should watch what you say. Don’t worry, it’s not broken. I didn’t hit you that hard, counselor.”
“Feels broken.” Owens felt along the ridge of his nose, wincing.
“It’s not. You wouldn’t be talking so well if it was broken. I have a reputation?”
Owens blinked at him. “For finding things. For finding people with not much of a trail to follow.”
Sean remembered Sonny Weller’s words this morning. It had seemed like a long time ago. You’re good at putting things together with only a little to go on. Most of the guys in this office aren’t half as smart as you are.
“So?” Sean said, but with less vehemence.
“Whether you like him or not, Senator McDermott has kept up with the work law enforcement is doing here on the border.” He breathed through his nose, a wet, rattling sound. He winced again. “Your career has just taken a nosedive. You have a skill that can help the senator, and maybe you’ll get a chance to…what’s the best way to put it?…to redeem yourself.”
“News doesn’t travel that fast. I just got suspended this morning.”
“You have a friend in the office, a Mr. Helms?”
“AJ? What about him?”
“It seems he is currently dating a young woman whose sister works in Senator McDermott’s Tucson office.”
Sean shook his head. “You’d think Tucson was some little town, not a major city, the way things go around.”
“The way of the West, Mr. Kelly. Are you interested?”
“What’s the deal?”
Owens pointed at the envelope. Sean undid the clasp and shook out the contents. Papers, newspaper and magazine articles, long narratives, and several photos, all of which included pictures of a striking young woman with dark hair and eyes.
“Daryn McDermott,” Owens said. “The senator’s daughter, age twenty-four.”
“What about her?”
“She’s missing.”
Sean looked up sharply. “I haven’t seen or heard anything about this.”
Owens sighed. “Senator McDermott has kept it out of the media. Daryn is…well, Daryn is…difficult.”
“Difficult?”
“The girl is…how should I say this?…she’s out of control. She doesn’t feel that the rules of society apply to her. She’s done things and said things that have been politically very…difficult for the senator.”
Sean blinked, thinking through the bourbon. He’d seen something on TV a while back.
“She’s the one,” he said, “that was arrested for public nudity in front of the U.S. Capitol.”
Owens nodded. “Protesting her father’s stand on allowing the government to access records of what people check out of libraries. Her point was that the government had no business knowing if someone read a book or a magazine that, say, had nudity or sexual references in it.”
Sean stared at him.
“You’re in law enforcement. Surely you understand the power of having the right information.”
“Don’t assume anything about me,” Sean said. “She did other things, too, didn’t she? Even more radical things.”
Owens nodded again, touching his nose gingerly. “She went on a cross-country tour, trying to raise support for legalizing and regulating prostitution. She would go into a city and get an army of prostitutes together and they would descend on the city hall or state capitol, generating all kinds of media coverage. She wants drugs legalized and regulated too.”
“So her father,” Sean said, “the keeper of morals and traditional values, is embarrassed, personally and politically.”
Owens’s voice rose slightly. “He’s given her everything! Put her through Georgetown, even allowed her to get a worthless degree in sociology, of all things. He pays for apartments in D.C. and in Phoenix for her, and she repays him by embarrassing him.”
“You think she’s just a spoiled princess acting out, trying to piss off her father, or is it a real issue for her?”
Owens’s voice softened. “A bit of both, I’d say. Daryn actually does believe all these ridiculous things she spouts. But just because she has money and influence and a name, she gets a more public arena to speak out on all this drivel.”
“And now she’s missing.”
“For nearly a month now. It’s not like her to take off and not be heard from. I mean, in the past when she’s taken off, she turns up in the media in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma and South Dakota. But now she’s gone without a trace.”
“And the senator didn’t contact the FBI? I would think they’d pull out all the stops to find a U.S. senator’s daughter.”
Owens shook his head emphatically. “The senator wants this handled discreetly. He first hired private investigators in Washington and in Phoenix. All the traditional methods were dead ends. She hasn’t used her credit cards, hasn’t accessed her bank accounts. Her car is in its garage in D.C. None of her friends know anything. She’s simply…gone.”
“You think she’s just run off again, or something else? Something criminal?”
“We don’t know. There’s been no kind of ransom demand, nothing like that. So the senator’s presumption is that she’s on her own somewhere. And he wants her back.”
“The loving father?”
Owens picked up the sarcasm. “Look, they aren’t close, as you might imagine. Daryn, the ungrateful little brat that she is, calls her father part of ‘the ruling class,’ as if we were living in some kind of aristocracy. It’s one thing for a child to disagree with their parents’ values. We all go through that, to a point. It’s another for her to criticize and vilify everything her father stands for, and to do it as publicly as she can. He just wants her found before she…” Owens looked uncomfortable. He glanced toward the bar, then looked quickly away. The old smokers were still staring.
“Go ahead, say it,” Sean said.
“Before she does something either stupid or embarrassing,” Owens said.
“What makes you think I can find her?” Sean said. “I’m a Customs agent on suspension for screwing up an operation. There are those in this world who believe I have a drinking problem.”
“As I said before-”
“Yeah, I know, I have a reputation.” Sean tossed back another shot. He felt himself giving, bending, like power lines in high wind. And the painful truth was, he had nothing else to do, nowhere to go. If a United States senator wanted to pay him to look for his wayward daughter, who was he to question that?
“How much?” he asked.
Owens looked relieved. He withdrew another envelope from the briefcase. “Here’s twenty thousand dollars cash.”
Sean leaned forward. “I’m sorry. Say that again?”
“Mr. Kelly, the senator is hiring you based on your reputation, but he’s counting on your discretion. It’s a delicate situation. You can’t just track down Daryn, pick her up under your arm, and bring her home to her father. Do that and she’ll go straight to the media as soon as she’s back in Washington, and it’ll be an even worse nightmare. Not only do you have to find her, you have to gain her trust. Make her believe it’s her choice to go with you. All this will take time. Also, the investigation is off the books. The senator wants it all done quietly. No one should ever know Daryn was missing in the first place.”
“And all this because he’s afraid she’ll embarrass him politically?”
“I’m only Senator McDermott’s lawyer, not his conscience, Mr. Kelly. He pays me well.” Owens gestured at the envelope full of money. “Another amount equal to that will be paid when Daryn is safely, discreetly returned. Don’t try to get in touch with me or with the senator before that time. Once she’s home at her apartment in Washington, the senator will know.”
“What, does he have his own daughter’s apartment bugged?”
Owens spread his hands. “I won’t comment on that.”
“Nice guy.” Sean fingered the envelope full of cash. “And if I do this, the senator does what he can to get me reinstated in ICE?”
“The senator will use whatever influence he may have to make sure you’re able to continue in federal law enforcement.”
“Typical lawyer’s response,” Sean said. He rubbed his forehead. He was buzzing right along now, his headache gone. “I’ll look into it.”
“Good,” Owens said, sounding relieved. “Everything you need to know about Daryn is in that first packet. Except for one item.”
Sean looked up at him.
“The girl is, quite frankly, very promiscuous,” Owens said.
Sean folded his hands together on the table.
“Her sexuality is very…open,” Owens said. “Men, women…it doesn’t matter. This has presented problems in the past as well. Maybe she’s taken up the cause of legalizing prostitution as a vicarious sort of thing. Perhaps she secretly wishes she was a prostitute herself, so she could indulge herself and be paid for it.”
“Are you a psychiatrist too?”
“No, but I did fall under her spell myself once,” Owens said. “All I can say to you is to be careful. Remember what your job is.”
“I think I can take care of myself. Even around a politically radical, oversexed sociology major.”
Owens didn’t smile. He snapped his briefcase closed. “This is a nasty place,” he said.
“Yeah, but it serves its purpose,” Sean said.
“So it does.”
“Sorry about your nose.”
Owens shrugged. “The pain’s going away already.”
“Told you it wasn’t broken.”
Owens nodded and left the cantina. Sean sat for a long moment and looked at the two envelopes. Then he downed one more shot, stood a bit unsteadily, and left a wad of cash on the table. He took the envelopes, and before he left the building, pulled another tortilla out of the basket on the bar. He saluted the bartender and the old smokers with it, then headed out into the bright desert sun.
Tobias Owens drove the Lexus steadily north on 286 until it merged with Highway 86, which headed east back toward Tucson. Twenty miles outside the city, Owens pulled onto an unmarked gravel road that snaked north for several miles. He parked in a stand of cactus, right beside another car, a nondescript four-door, the kind typically used by rental agencies.
Another man got out of the rental car and looked at him. The other man was as nondescript as the car, around Owens’s age, with average features. Modestly handsome, but not memorable. His clothes were khaki pants and a blue polo shirt. Unremarkable.
“He took the job,” Owens said, placing his briefcase on the ground between the two cars. “But the drunken SOB nearly broke my nose.”
The other man’s neutral expression didn’t change. “I’m sorry to hear that. You told him everything?”
“Followed the script exactly,” Owens said. “Now about my fee…”
The other man had kept the car between the two of them, his hands shielded from Owens’s view. He quickly raised his right hand, which held a pistol, and shot Owens point-blank three times in the chest. The lawyer lunged backward across the hood of his Lexus, then rolled to the ground.
The other man had no worries about the sound of gunshots. This was the Arizona desert, and gunfire was often heard as ranchers chased off various vermin, both of the two-legged and four-legged varieties. He went through Owens’s pockets, removing the man’s business cards and wallet. After a moment’s consideration, he took the bloody handkerchief as well. He removed the license plates, registration, and insurance cards from the Lexus and placed them all in Owens’s briefcase. He left Owens’s body where it had fallen.
The man got back into his rental car and drove away without looking back. He had much to do, and far to go. The game had only just begun.
FAITH KELLY DOUBTED SHE WOULD EVER HAVE grandchildren, but if she did, she could imagine telling them the story:
Once upon a time, I was a deputy United States Marshal. But then I got caught up in a secret unit of the Justice Department called Department Thirty, and it helped to protect some bad people. See, we thought that these bad people could help us catch other bad people and keep them from doing bad things, so instead of punishing these bad people, we protected them and gave them new names and new jobs and made them promise to stay out of trouble. We did things like protecting the two most notorious assassins in the world. And there was this one time that I was forced to shoot a man. He’d worked for years and years to become very powerful and wanted to topple the president. And how about this one-I found out that the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was actually a murderer.
Oh, grandma, the kids would say, you’re just making all that up.
And she would smile. Of course I am. You caught me. Now go to bed.
Faith had learned a few things in the last year, ever since she’d been given her first Department Thirty recruit. Aside from that first one-where the recruit actually turned out to be innocent, a pawn in a scheme that brought down the chief justice-she’d learned that there were two types of recruits: those who were guilty and had been caught red-handed, yet continued to protest their innocence; and those who cheerfully and arrogantly admitted their guilt, almost proud of their crimes, even proud to a point of getting caught, of being asked to tell their story.
Leon Bankston fell into the latter category. He sat at the kitchen table of the safe house in the Oklahoma City suburb of Yukon, crossing and uncrossing his legs and smiling at Faith. Faith had wanted to smash his face in several times, but she forced herself to keep her mind on the job.
“You know, Leon,” she said, “I understand you. I can see your perspective on this. It’s the whole ‘honor among thieves’ thing. You haven’t disputed for a second that you smuggled those guns onto that truck, or that the truck was headed to Galveston to transfer the load to a ship, or that the ship was bound for Iraq. You know what you did.”
“That’s right,” Bankston said. He was a small man in his forties, bald except for a few tufts around his ears, with quick eyes that darted all around the room at every sound. “I did what I did. That’s my living. I’ll do my couple of years in a federal country club, then I’ll be back in business and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Faith stood up and stretched. At five ten, she was a good four inches taller than Bankston, her body slim and toned. She wasn’t quite in the shape she’d been in when she ran the New York and Boston Marathons, but she still ran. It was her only obsession, other than trying to stay above the mud and muck of her job. She passed a hand through her hair, still not used to its new short cut. Her Irish-red hair had fallen to the middle of her back for most of her life, but she’d finally had it cut into a short shag a couple of months ago, the kind of haircut that magazines liked to describe as “sassy.” Faith had laughed at that-she was sassy enough without a haircut, but she had to admit it was low maintenance.
“There’s just one problem, Leon,” she said, leaning over the table.
“What’s that, beautiful?”
She smiled. “First thing is: if you call me ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘doll’ one more time, I’m liable to kick you in a place where it would really, really hurt.” She leaned in close to him, her face inches from his. “You believe I could do that, don’t you?”
Bankston’s smug look faltered. “Ah…yes. Yes, I believe that. Yes.”
“Very good.” She stood up again to her full height, rolling the kinks out of her back. She badly needed a run. “Second thing is, you really don’t know what you did. I mean, you know you smuggled a bunch of illegal weapons. We agree on that part.”
Bankston nodded.
“But see, the world is a lot more complicated now than it used to be. What used to just be considered smuggling might now be considered aiding and abetting terrorists.”
“Hey, you can’t blame me for whatever someone else does with guns that I just happened to move.”
“Oh, actually I can blame you for that. You may have heard of the Patriot Act.”
“Oh, shit,” the man said.
“Uh-huh. You see, Leon, if the United States government has even an inkling that you’ve done anything that would lead to those weapons getting into the hands of, say, Iraqi insurgents, then that means you can be held under the Patriot Act. That means you don’t get to hire a slick lawyer. You can actually be held without being charged. And it won’t be in a federal country club either, Leon. I can make a phone call and see that you’re escorted to Guantánamo Bay. Trust me, that’s no country club.”
“But-”
“I know, I know, you’re just a smuggler. You’ve been doing business for twenty-five years. You already did one stretch in federal custody in the eighties. This isn’t the eighties, Leon.” She leaned in again. “Frankly, you’re in deep, deep shit. But we already know that you’re not at the top of the food chain, that you’re part of a larger network doing business with these various terror groups.” Faith began to tick items off on her fingers. “You give me names, dates, places, bank accounts. You’re afraid the others involved will come after you. But see, you won’t exist anymore. Your trail goes cold right here, right now. I have a new name for you-Benjamin Williams. Ben Williams can start a new job, and I’ve picked out a nice town for him to live in. Manhattan, Kansas-it’s a pleasant college town, not far from Kansas City. Since you’re so good with supply and demand, Ben Williams will get a job as an inventory control manager for the warehouse operations of a major retailer.”
“What about college? Could I have a degree? I never got to finish mine, you know.”
And in that instant, Faith knew she had him. Once they became a part of the fantasy in any way, the deal was closed. She smiled. “We can give Mr. Williams a degree in business management from the University of Colorado.”
“I like Colorado.”
“There you go. Leon, you have to work with us. You have to come in. You don’t have a choice. You don’t want to be screwing around with the Patriot Act. Your partners or bosses will never know what’s happened to you. And before too long, they’ll be the ones headed to Guantánamo, not you. You’ll be in Kansas, with a rock-solid new identity.”
Leon Bankston looked at her for a moment. For a few seconds he looked pensive, almost repentant. Then the small-time crook was back. “Ah, those bastards,” he finally said. “They never paid me what they should have, anyway.”
“Welcome to Department Thirty,” Faith said.
Bankston talked for four hours. It was nearly six p.m. before Faith packed up her tape recorder and her notes. She summoned her field officer, a big soft-spoken man named Hal Simon, to babysit Bankston. As case officer, Faith’s job was to bring in the recruits, create the identities and manage their placement in the community, then manage the cases while the protectees adjusted to their new lives. But she didn’t do protective duty during the period between. Leon Bankston had already ceased to exist, and Benjamin Williams had yet to be fully brought into existence. Being Irish Catholic, Faith thought of it as limbo, and her job on this case did not extend to sitting with the man.
She left the house, promising Simon and Bankston that she would be in touch during the next step of the process. Now she had to create a report that would be sent up the line to the director of Department Thirty, a man named Richard Conway, but whom Faith thought of as Dean Yorkton, the name he’d been using when she first met him nearly four years ago. From Yorkton the report-Bankston’s statements about his activities and those of his associates-would then go directly to the attorney general of the United States for final approval. When the AG signed off on it, she would complete the paper trail that created Benjamin Williams, and would send him off to Kansas.
She drove away from the suburban safe house, which was on a street with the absurdly suburban name of Hyacinth Hollow Road. In five minutes her gold Mazda Miata was on Interstate 40, headed east toward Oklahoma City proper.
She picked up her cell phone and speed-dialed Scott Hendler’s number. When she heard his drawling “Hello,” Faith smiled. What did that mean, she wondered, when the way the man answered the phone actually made her smile?
“Hey, you,” she said.
“Hey, yourself,” Hendler said. “How goes the…you know?”
Even though Scott Hendler was a special agent in the Oklahoma City field office of the FBI, she couldn’t discuss cases with him. Department Thirty was an open secret in the Justice Department, but the other agencies within DOJ treated it like a relative no one wanted to claim. Outside DOJ, Thirty was completely shrouded in shadows.
“I’m done for today and moving right along,” Faith said. “And now…” She lowered her voice sexily. “I’m up for something…hot.”
Hendler’s voice lowered as well. “Well, you know, you can always count on me for something…hot.”
They both laughed. “Chili at Different Roads?” Faith said in a normal voice. “I think Alex Bridge is playing there tonight.”
“Meet you there,” Hendler said.
There was an awkward moment’s silence, the same as with every phone conversation they had. Dry humor aside, Faith always sensed that Hendler wanted to say something more, something about love, at the end of every phone call. But she hadn’t used the l-word with him so far, and didn’t know if she would. She came from a family that didn’t just throw terms of endearment and public displays of affection around. Hendler evidently wanted such things from her, but then, he was patient with her. They’d gone in the space of two years from being professional acquaintances to friends to outright lovers, but Faith was still conscious of always holding part of herself back. She knew she got the very best part of Scott Hendler, and she treasured it. But she still couldn’t give him everything. There were parts of herself that even she couldn’t find, much less open them up to someone else.
“Down the road,” she said, and clicked the phone off.
Just enjoy it, she reminded herself. Things were good for now. She was finally learning how to do the job, and to keep the moral ambiguities of it at bay. Her own demons, and the parts of herself that she’d walled off, stayed hidden for the most part. Scott Hendler was a good man, and they enjoyed each other’s company.
Why borrow trouble? Faith thought, just as she passed the city limits sign for Oklahoma City.
WHEN SEAN HAD LEFT TUCSON AND POINTED HIS Jeep southwest toward Arivaca and, ultimately, Sasabe, he’d actually thought he would never see his apartment again. He would just drive away from it all-his furniture, his stereo, his hundreds of compact discs, even his own personal gun, a forty-caliber semiautomatic Glock 23.
But here he sat, at the wooden dining room table he’d scavenged from an antique shop in Oro Valley two years ago. He’d refinished it with great care, then worked on the four chairs, one by one, over the course of six months. The apartment was always a surprise to people-they didn’t expect a young single guy to be as neat and tidy as he was. It always amused Sean that his sister, Faith, was such a slob. Because she was female, it was expected that she would be into cleaning, yet he knew Faith could rarely be troubled to even pick up her dirty laundry. So they had both confounded what was expected of them, in more ways than one.
Sean was no longer buzzed by all the whiskey he’d drunk in the Sasabe cantina. He’d left the little bar with a renewed sense of purpose. Even if the purpose was skulking around in the life of Senator McDermott’s promiscuous, politically radical daughter, it was a chance, and it held possibilities.
He made himself a bologna sandwich, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and spread out the papers from the packet Tobias Owens had given him. There was something that looked like a briefing paper, probably prepared by Owens, as it was written in thick legalese-six words when two would suffice. He leafed through it, muddling through the dense prose.
Daryn Anisa McDermott was twenty-four years old and had been born in Washington to Senator Edward McDermott and his first wife, Regina Statham McDermott. The two divorced when Daryn was seven, and thus began the senator’s experiments in finding the perfect political trophy wife. He’d tried three more thus far.
Daryn only spent vacations, the occasional holiday, and most campaign seasons in Arizona, having been raised primarily in Washington. Owens was right-she’d received a sociology degree from Georgetown, and to Sean’s surprise, he saw that she’d graduated third in her class. Impressive. So Daryn McDermott was no bubbleheaded political princess.
She’d first begun moving in radical political directions during college, naturally. With the conservative ascendancy in American politics, Daryn practically ran in the other direction, especially on social, “moral” issues. Sean read a snippet of a paper she’d written her senior year, in which young Daryn called for the “over-throw” of traditional values and “dismantling” of old ways of thinking, to scrap the social order and begin again, to let the “ruling classes” know that the “real” people of America were “in revolt.”
Strong language, Sean thought. The birth of a radical. But then, how much of Daryn McDermott’s radicalism was true conviction, and how much was sticking it to her father, the father who dumped her mother and then had little to do with his daughter except as a campaign prop? The father who was firmly in the “family values” political camp, and who was a part of the ruling class his daughter railed against.
He put aside the bio and started looking through the newspaper and magazine clippings of Daryn’s various demonstrations. There was a copy of the famous picture from the Associated Press, of Daryn marching naked in front of the U.S. Capitol, a black strip superimposed across her breasts and pubic area. There were a couple of photos that seemed like more conventional protests: outside the gates to a coal mine in West Virginia, a factory in Ohio. But most were taken with Daryn standing shoulder to shoulder with groups of other women, sometimes street prostitutes, sometimes call girls or “escorts.”
Sean tried to follow Daryn’s arguments in an article clipped from Newsweek, which included photos from a march she’d led-the “hookers’ march,” a local paper had called it-in downtown St. Louis. Daryn never tried to talk women out of a life of prostitution. She campaigned for them to choose the life, and if they so chose, to do it safely and legally, without fear of either disease or the police.
Sean read her quote: “Some women are forced here because of circumstances. Some women are forced here to feed their children. Some women are forced here to feed their own habits. And some women, regardless of what polite society may think, aren’t forced here at all! They choose to be here! Women should be free to make that choice, right or wrong!”
He sifted through more photos. Another one from the Associated Press caught his eye. Daryn was a small woman, only five two or so, and she may have been all of 110 pounds. But she wore her hair long, often twisted into intricate braids, and her brown eyes blazed with intensity, intelligence, and fury. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but was an arresting physical presence.
I did fall under her spell myself once, Tobias Owens had said.
Sean was beginning to see how that would be the appropriate term. He could understand how a woman like Daryn McDermott would indeed cast a spell.
Sean scrutinized the photo, holding it up under the light. In it, Daryn was wearing a button-down shirt with several buttons undone, showing a great deal of cleavage. That was exactly the point, Sean quickly surmised. She wanted the photographer to see the tattoo at the top of her left breast. In swirling Old English lettering was tattooed the word justice.
“Jesus please us,” Sean muttered.
The photo, of course, mainly captured Daryn. Sean read the caption: Daryn McDermott, 23, daughter of U.S. Senator Edward McDermott of Arizona, at a rally to legalize prostituion, on the steps of the State Capitol, Oklahoma City.
Just off-center from the camera shot, though, was another woman, with dark straight hair and hollowed cheeks. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and white pullover. Large hoop earrings dangled from her ears. One of her eyebrows was pierced as well. She was young, barely into her twenties, Sean guessed. Her face was half-turned, gazing at Daryn with something like awe. The other woman’s arm was linked through Daryn’s.
They didn’t even bother to identify her, Sean thought. Just some anonymous hooker, lost in Daryn McDermott’s wake.
Sean took another pull of Dos Equis, then felt the apartment grow very still.
He saw the way the other woman was looking at Daryn, the way her arm was hooked through Daryn’s, her own fingers curling lightly over Daryn’s wrist.
On the steps of the state capitol, Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sean said.
He traced a finger over the prostitute’s face. “I’ll bet you’ve talked to her,” Sean said to the photo. “I bet you know where she is. Because you love her, don’t you, honey?”
He put the photo down and opened his laptop. In his e-mail program, he found his sister’s address and entered it in the address box. Then he sat for a moment. He didn’t call Faith very often. He sent her an e-mail now and then, usually when he was toasted, and couldn’t remember later what he wrote. Her own e-mails to him consisted mainly of asking what the hell his last e-mail to her had meant.
Sean smiled at the thought of his baby sister, eighteen months younger than he. His best friend, his worst nightmare. She wasn’t in the Marshals Service anymore. She’d told their father that she was doing “special projects” for DOJ. She’d been interested in WITSEC-the Witness Security Program-when she was with the Marshals, so Sean thought he knew what Faith was doing now. He’d never spoken or written the words Department Thirty to her, but that had to be what she was doing. No one in the federal law enforcement community talked about Thirty if they could help it. Even talking casually about Thirty was asking for trouble.
But his sister still lived in Oklahoma City, and she liked it there. That much Sean knew. He believed in fate. The fact that he’d found a lead to Daryn McDermott in the same city where his sister lived meant he was on the right trail. He was doing the right thing. He knew it.
Sean drained the last of his beer and typed a message to his sister:
Here comes trouble, Sister. See you soon.
FAITH AND HENDLER GENERALLY SPENT THE NIGHT at each other’s homes once or twice a week. It was impromptu, rarely planned, and just depended on where they were and what they’d been doing when it began to get late. Sometimes there was sex, sometimes there wasn’t. They’d grown comfortable enough in the last year to just want to be together.
They’d stayed out until after ten at Different Roads, a small folk club on Classen Boulevard, where Faith’s friend Alex Bridge played fiddle and flute with a Celtic band. Though Faith wasn’t much into folk music, preferring contemporary jazz, she always tried to catch Alex when she played locally. They’d lived through a nightmare together a year ago, and the bond between them had grown strong.
When it had approached ten thirty last night, Faith and Hendler decided by an almost silent mutual assent to go to her house. Hendler lived in the northern suburb of Edmond, and Faith’s home in The Village area was a good ten miles or so closer in. So they slept together in her queen-size bed, and both were up shortly after five a.m. to run. Faith knew Hendler preferred to sleep later, and she also knew he preferred more “organized” exercise to running, but when he stayed with her, he rose with her and ran with her with no complaints.
They’d done three-plus miles on an overcast spring morning that promised rain later in the day, when they rounded the corner of Faith’s block. Her modest brick home, built in the fifties as most homes in The Village had been, was in the middle of the block, north side of the street. The garage was full of junk, so she always parked her Miata in the driveway. Hendler’s sensible Toyota was parked behind her. In front of the house, on the street, sat a dirty dark green Jeep Cherokee with a man sitting behind the wheel.
“Hmm,” Faith said, slowing.
Hendler pulled up beside her. “What?”
“In front of my house.”
Hendler frowned, stopping beside her, stretching out his legs. “I don’t have my gun. It’s in the house.”
“I have mine.” Faith had learned the hard way about keeping her weapon with her, even on the run, so she now always wore a large fanny pack in which she kept her gun. The Glock that she’d had for so long had been washed away into the waters of Galveston Bay a year ago, and she’d bought a SIG Sauer nine-millimeter, the “Cadillac of pistols,” not long thereafter.
She unzipped the fanny pack halfway.
“Maybe your paper boy, here to collect?” Hendler said.
“Maybe,” Faith said. But she’d gone to that unreachable place where everything clicked off except instinct.
Her long vision wasn’t that great, but the man in the Jeep had started moving. He was making no attempt to be furtive, movements smooth and natural. Of course, that meant nothing. In the world where Faith lived, people and places and things were often nothing like what they appeared to be.
The man’s head popped out of the Jeep. “Holy shit,” Faith said.
“Hey, that’s my line,” Hendler said.
“It’s my brother.”
“Your what?”
“My brother.”
They were two houses away from hers now, from the Jeep and Sean. In a movie, Faith supposed they would have run toward each other and embraced madly. Brother and sister hadn’t seen each other in nearly three years, not since the last time they were both at the famous Kelly Memorial Day picnic in Chicago. But this was no movie, and they weren’t hugging people.
The sight of Sean did elicit a smile, though. Aside from the red hair of the Kellys, she and her brother had inherited the height and slender build of their mother’s family, the O’Connells. Their father’s people were all short and round, but she and Sean were five ten and six three, respectively, big boned and well built. Faith realized with a pleasant rush how happy she was to see him.
She jogged the last few feet, Hendler trailing discreetly behind, and leaned over the hood of the Jeep. “I hadn’t seen your new wheels,” Faith said. “I was ready to shoot on sight. Can’t be too careful with all the riffraff about.”
Sean smiled through a day’s growth of beard. “Well, I’m the riffraff of the family, that’s for sure. Still obsessively running while normal people are in bed, I see. And now you’re dragging innocent bystanders along with you.”
Faith smiled. “This is my friend Scott Hendler.”
Hendler extended a hand and Sean shook it.
“Sean Kelly,” Sean said. “I think Faith mentioned you in an e-mail at one time or other. Aren’t you with the Bureau?”
“That’s the one,” Hendler said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Sean.” Hendler did a few stretches. “You two have a lot of catching up to do.” He squeezed Faith’s shoulder. “I’ll get my stuff. I’ll go shower at my place, then I’ve got to get to work.”
He jogged up the driveway and let himself in the house. Sean watched with interest, then looked back at Faith.
“Don’t start,” Faith warned. “He’s a good guy.”
Sean shrugged. “A little on the geeky side. Bald spot the size of Rhode Island up there. Kind of short. You never went for that type before.”
Faith shrugged to mimic him. “What can I say? When it’s there, it’s there.”
They walked up the front steps together. “I never thought I’d see the day when Faith Siobhan Kelly would cut off all her hair, though.”
“It’s comfortable.”
Sean laughed. “I guess if the Bureau likes it-”
“Sean Micheal Kelly.” She gave the middle name the Gaelic pronunciation of MEE-hall. “I’ve never changed any aspect of myself for a man, and I’m not about to start. I did it for me. And yes, he does like it, incidentally. Where the hell did you come from?”
“Tucson, remember?”
“I remember Tucson. What are you doing here?”
“Don’t you read your e-mail anymore?”
“I’ve had a very busy couple of days this week. I had a…” She swallowed back the words. She couldn’t talk about Department Thirty and Leon Bankston to her brother. “…project to work on,” she finished.
“Ah.” Sean made quotation marks with his fingers. “ ‘Special projects’ for DOJ.”
“Yes, sir. That’s me. I’m all about special projects.” She mimicked his finger quotes.
“Smart-ass.”
“Learned from the best.” She elbowed him in the ribs. That was as good as a hug for the two of them.
“Well, anyway, I e-mailed you yesterday and told you I was coming to town.”
“What brings you this way?” Faith asked. “Homeland Security in the heartland?”
They reached the front door, and as Faith opened it, Hendler came out, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, carrying his briefcase. “See you two later,” he said, pecked Faith quickly on the cheek, and jogged to the Toyota. A minute later he was gone.
Faith and Sean walked into the house. Sean took a look at the newspapers on the floor, a few stray items of clothing here and there, cups and glasses still on the table. The place smelled musty.
“Man, sister, you never learn,” Sean said. “Still can’t pick up after yourself.”
“Don’t start, you. I have a lot more interesting things to do than worry about whether there’s a place for everything and everything in its place.”
“I believe you.” Sean sat down on Faith’s paisley-patterned couch. “I drove straight through. I’m sort of on leave from ICE, and I picked up a little freelance job.”
Faith pulled off her green headband and tossed it onto the dining room table. She wiped her sweaty face with a towel. “On leave? What, you mean on vacation?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s twice you’ve said ‘sort of.’ ”
“Don’t worry about it.” He looked at her, his blue-green eyes finding her darker green ones. “It’s good to see you, Faith.”
Faith nodded. “Yeah.” She wiped her face again. “Look at us. One or two-line e-mails now and then, a call on Thanksgiving, not seeing each other for three years. Once upon a time, neither of us could get rid of the other.”
Sean looked surprised. “Boy, that’s deep. I guess hanging out with the Bureau has made you sensitive or something.”
Faith threw the towel at him. “You are so full of shit.”
“Always have been.” Sean kicked off his shoes.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Faith said. “You want some breakfast?”
“No, I still don’t like to eat in the mornings.”
“Good, because neither do I.”
“You got anything to drink around here, though?”
“I made coffee already,” Faith said, her voice trailing down the hall. “If you want juice, I think there’s some in the fridge. Check the expiration date on the bottle before you drink it.”
Sean was already on his feet, working his way to the kitchen. “Not quite what I had in mind,” he muttered. He heard the bathroom door close and the shower start as he opened the refrigerator.
“Here we go,” he said, and pulled out a bottle of Harp ale. “Good Irish beer. Way to go, baby sister.”
Half an hour later, Faith came back into the living room, fully dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and tennis shoes. Since she no longer had a supervisor to report to locally, she dressed how she wanted for each workday. Today was mainly going to be a day spent in front of her computer working on Leon Bankston’s details, so she’d dressed down.
She found Sean fast asleep on the couch. She smiled. He did say he’d driven straight through from Tucson, after all. The smile faltered a bit when she saw the three empty bottles of Harp on the coffee table.
She looked pensively at him for a moment. Don’t jump to conclusions, she thought. He’d just come off a long, long drive, and his body’s clock was probably mixed up.
She scribbled him a note, tucked it under the edge of one of the Harp bottles, and headed for the door. She stopped with her hand on the knob and looked back at her brother.
She remembered that line her grandfather had always used, the one about any Irish cop worth his salt liking a good drink now and again. Faith looked at the empty beer bottles. Even her grandfather and father had never drunk three bottles of beer in less than half an hour, before seven o’clock in the morning, to her knowledge.
Faith never drank hard liquor herself, only beer or wine, and never more than three drinks at one sitting. She hadn’t been what she considered drunk since her junior year in college, when she woke up in a strange bed with a strange guy beside her. Given her family history, Faith became a “lightweight” in a profession where social drinking was common and expected.
She’d never thought of Sean as having a problem with it. But then, she and Sean hadn’t been around each other much as adults.
Benefit of the doubt, Faith, she told herself. He’s your brother. Talk about it later.
She closed the door quietly behind her and headed out into a light mist.
SEAN SLEPT UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, while a plains thunderstorm raged outside, thunder cracking like a whip and rain pounding the house like a demon begging to be let inside. Getting up, he read Faith’s note, blinking at the three Harp bottles. He very carefully took them to the kitchen trash and put them in, taking care not to shatter them.
He retrieved his duffel and laptop from the Jeep, getting soaked in the process. Then he showered, shaved, and put on clean clothes. His sister didn’t seem to have a laundry basket or hamper, just a large pile in the corner of her bedroom. Grimacing at the mess, he took his clothes and some of hers, dark colors mostly, to the washing machine and started a load. Then he went to the wooden kitchen table-not as nice as his, but a good piece of work nonetheless-and powered up his laptop.
He was still online when Faith came home at a little after five. He saw her eyes fall on the coffee table first, then on him. “Hey,” Faith said.
“Hey,” Sean said. “Busy day?”
“Special projects,” she reminded him.
“Aha. Do you have plans for tonight? Are you seeing the Bureau?”
“He has a name, Sean.”
“What is it again?”
“Scott. His name is Scott.”
“Right. So are you?”
Faith dropped her purse and briefcase on the couch. “Hadn’t planned on it. What would you like to do while you’re here?”
“I need to find a hooker.”
Faith stopped in her tracks, staring at him. He wasn’t smiling.
“A hooker,” Faith said.
“You know what that means?” Sean said.
“I know what it means. They don’t have hookers in Arizona? Besides, you were always the guy who got all the dates.”
“Very funny. Not for me, thank you. The freelance job I mentioned? I need to talk to this woman, who I believe is a hooker in Oklahoma City.”
“You must be kidding.”
“Nope.” He turned back to his laptop. “You know where Shields Boulevard is?”
“Southeast part of the city. Why?”
“That’s where I’ll start. That seems to be a starting point for a lot of the working girls.”
“How did you find that out? You’re in this town less than twelve hours and you know where to find a prostitute?”
Sean tapped the computer. “The Internet, sister. If you’re patient, you could find almost anything.” Almost, he thought.
“You want me to go with you?” Faith said.
“No,” Sean said. “This is a low-profile job. I looked it up on Mapquest, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. It’s sort of a ‘special project.’ ”
Faith, heading down the hall, flipped him off without turning around. Sean grinned.
Sean waited until after dark to set out. He stopped by a copy shop and made an enlarged copy of the photo of Daryn and the taller woman with the stringy hair. Then he carefully cropped Daryn out of the picture as much as he could, until all that could be seen of her was her arm where the other woman’s was linked through it.
Following Mapquest, he made his way to Interstate 44, then to Interstate 40 just south of downtown Oklahoma City. He took the downtown exit, but instead of turning north toward the skyline, he went south. He crossed a long bridge, then slowed as the street became Shields Boulevard.
Sean had read online that Oklahoma City’s prostitution district had once been along Lincoln Boulevard, just north of the state capitol. Then it was cleaned up in the eighties, most of the ratty pay-by-the-hour motels being bulldozed, replaced by new state government buildings and legitimate businesses, parks, and landscaping. A great triumph of urban renewal, especially since the location in the shadow of the state capitol had been a major civic embarrassment for years.
But, as with any city of size, the scene searched for a new location and was reborn on the south side, along a strip of motels on Shields Boulevard, with additional street corners being worked a mile or so away on South Robinson Avenue.
It was still raining lightly, the streets slick, as Sean drove the Jeep slowly south on Shields. He’d never seen the area during the day, but at night it looked dreary: the cheap motels, the liquor stores, convenience stores with bars on the doors and windows, even the chain fast-food places looked depressed. Sean could almost smell the despair. Every city had its own answer to this, Sean knew, but it didn’t make him feel better about it.
And this leads me to the wealthy, educated daughter of a powerful U.S. senator?
Stranger things had happened. Sean swallowed. He hadn’t had a drink since the beer this morning at Faith’s house, and he was feeling a bit shaky. Just need to settle my nerves a bit, he thought. He pulled into a liquor store, grabbed his wallet and the photocopied Associated Press picture, and bought a pint of Jack Black.
The liquor store clerk was a young Latino man who looked barely old enough to legally work in such a place. Sean paid for his bourbon, then put the picture on the counter.
“You know this girl?” he said in Spanish.
The clerk looked at him, surprised at hearing the bolillo speak perfect Spanish. “Don’t know her,” he responded in kind.
“Look again. Maybe you’ve seen her around the neighborhood. I think she works around here.”
The clerk gave him a long look. “Dinero, señor.”
Sean was prepared for this. He’d already transferred some of Owens’s cash to his wallet. He peeled off three twenties and gave them to the clerk.
“Britt,” the clerk said. “She works the other side of Shields. Check the parking lots of the three motels. She’s usually in one of them.”
“Gracias.”
“De nada.”
Sean pulled out of the parking lot as the rain increased. He heard thunder cracking in the distance. Was this Oklahoma City or Seattle? He made a mental note to ask Faith if the weather was always like this here. He pulled the Jeep back onto Shields, crossed Southeast Forty-fourth Street, and drove a few blocks. Then he pulled a U-turn on the wide boulevard and headed back toward the strip of three motels.
Each of the motels was laid out in the same way, shaped like a rectangle with one open end facing the street. He couldn’t find a name anywhere for the first one. Its sign only read Vacancy HBO Free calls.
I wonder how many people who rent rooms here watch HBO, Sean thought wryly. None of the motel’s doors was open, but he knew that by itself didn’t mean anything. ICE had busted a huge ring two years ago, in which young Mexican girls-many of them underage and all of them illegal-were brought across the border to Nogales and Tucson and basically sold into indentured servitude. Since the I in ICE now stood for Immigration, Sean had been on the team that raided several motels much like this one. It had been a good operation, and Sean liked to think the lives of several of those girls had been saved by what the team had done.
He blinked. That was back when his career still mattered, when he could still make things work.
“Cut that shit out,” he said aloud, watching the doors to the motel rooms.
After a few minutes, one of them opened. A skinny young white guy with fuzzy stubble on his face came out, red-faced, still tucking in his shirt. He got into a rusty Ford pickup and drove away. A black woman, older than Sean, in leather shorts and a black halter top, came to the doorway, scanning the parking lot. Sean inched the Jeep toward her.
He rolled down the window. Before he could speak, she leaned down and said, “I’m Monica. Fifty for BJ in the car, one-twenty for half-and-half inside. I’m bad and I’m good, baby.”
Sean held up the photo and turned on his dome light. “You know this girl?”
“Turn that light off! Are you crazy? Shit! Turn that off!” The woman backed away from the Jeep.
Sean shook his head. Must be slipping. He’d bought the Jack Black to settle his nerves, but hadn’t opened it yet. “Sorry,” he said, and flicked the light off.
Monica snatched the picture from his hand and took it back to the light of the motel room. She was back in only a few seconds. “Where’d you get this?”
“Does it matter?”
“You a preacher?”
“No.”
“You a cop?”
He hesitated slightly. “No.”
“Yes, you are. Shit, what are you, federal? OKC cops don’t get Jeeps with Arizona plates.”
So she was more observant than Sean had thought. That was good. “It’s complicated.”
“Good-bye, Arizona. I gotta earn a living.”
Sean kept his voice even. “Come here, Monica. It’ll be worth your while.”
She turned expertly on her spike heels. “Show me.”
He peeled off ten twenties. “This is as much as you’ll get from your next three tricks put together, and just to talk.”
“You’re a dumb fuck if you pay me that much just to talk. Give it here.” He passed her the money. “Okay, so you ain’t a cop. That picture was taken at that stupid little march we had here last year.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“Stupid shit. Some big-shot governor’s daughter comes in here with a megaphone, wantin’ all the girls to ‘organize,’ like she’s the United Fucking Mine Workers or some shit like that. Talkin’ ’bout choice. I told her, ‘Honey, I didn’t choose shit. This body’s all I got to earn my pay. I got three kids and I got expenses and this is what I do.’ ”
The rain had slacked off, but Monica had seemed oblivious to it anyway. Sean decided not to correct her on who Daryn’s father was. “So what happened?”
“Some of the girls went with her. Like Britt, the one in that picture. She was so proud of gettin’ her picture took like that. She fell hard for all those lines, ’bout making a political statement.” She drew out the word political.
“Where is Britt now?”
“She mainly works the Oasis. I used to, but the rooms are cleaner here. Don’t smell as bad.”
“Thanks, Monica. Why don’t you take a break? Go get some coffee or something, get out of the rain.”
“Shit, Arizona, if I ain’t on my back or my knees, I ain’t making a living. I got no time for coffee.”
Sean nodded to her and pulled out of the parking lot. The third motel in the strip was the Oasis, or at least Sean assumed it was. The sign had an O and an s, but the rest of the letters were gone. He parked in a corner and waited.
A door opened. A heavyset Latina came to the Jeep. “You want to party?” she said in heavily accented English.
“Waiting for Britt,” Sean said.
“Well, piss on you, then,” she said, and wobbled around the parking lot on absurdly high heels.
Ten minutes passed. Another door opened. Another man got into another pickup truck and drove off. Sean recognized Britt’s hair before anything else-long, dark, and straight, almost stringy. She was taller than he’d thought, probably almost as tall as his sister. Her body was well proportioned, and she looked strong. He made eye contact with her, and she started toward him.
She leaned in the window-they all leaned in the window, Sean thought. “What’s your pleasure, honey?” Her accent sounded upper midwestern.
He took a wild leap. “You from Chicago?” he said.
“Rockford,” Britt said. “You?”
“Evanston.”
“Oh well, Evanston. Do Evanston boys pay to fuck girls from Rockford in Oklahoma City?”
“Not tonight, Britt.”
He watched her reaction to his knowing her name. “Do I know you?” she said.
“No.” He showed her the photo.
“Hey, you cut-” Britt stopped herself. “Who are you?”
“I want to talk to you, Britt. About Daryn.”
“What about-” Britt backed a step away from the Jeep. “I don’t want to talk to you. Who told you where I was?” She straightened up and looked out into the street. “I bet it was that goddamn Monica.” She raised her voice into the rain. “Fuck you, Monica, you bitch!”
“Britt, I want to help Daryn.” Sean took a deep breath. “I know you care about her. When I saw this picture, the whole picture, I knew. I knew you cared about Daryn.”
Britt’s posture softened. “What’s it to you one way or the other?”
“You’ve seen her, haven’t you? Haven’t you talked to her in the last month?”
Britt shook her head very slowly. “She was here last year. We did the march.”
“I know. But since then. She came here, didn’t she? She came back to Oklahoma City. Not for the march. For something else. For some one else.” Sean ached for a pull of the bourbon, but he couldn’t look away from Britt. Not now.
Britt waited a long moment. “Why should I talk to you? I don’t know who you are.”
Sean breathed out very carefully. On the road last night, he’d come to the conclusion that he might need a new set of ID to complete this project. As an ICE agent for seven years, he’d learned a few tricks outside the book, as most law enforcement officers did. The country’s best ID forger was in El Paso, and Sean had taken a detour and stopped there late last night. For two thousand of Tobias Owens’s dollars, he had a new ID showing that he lived in Oklahoma City and that his name was Michael Sullivan.
“I’m Michael,” he said. “I just want to make sure she’s all right. I’m not here to tie her up and take her back to her father, if that’s what you’re wondering. You can trust me, Britt. Do you want to get in?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” Britt said. “Anyone except-” She wiped a hand across her face and pulled the strings of her hair back. Rain dripped off her chin, but she made no move to get in the Jeep. “She wanted to get off the road. She wanted to be someone else, something else. She didn’t want to be the senator’s daughter anymore. And me and her, we kind of hit it off when she was here. She liked the city, not too big, not too small.”
“So where is she now?”
“It’s not that easy. She’s-you have to get it, you know? Dar-she’s not like other people. She’s, like, brilliant. I mean, she has this vision, she calls it. Justice for all. Not like that stupid shit that kids say in the flag salute. No, real justice for all people. She’s so smart and she’s so good. And she wants to know what other people are like. I mean, look at her. She’s this rich senator’s daughter, but she doesn’t touch her trust fund and she cut up all her credit cards and she left behind her car. The girl’s got a Porsche and she left it. She wants to feel what we feel.” Britt dropped her voice down. “She wants to feel what I feel.”
Sean remembered what Owens had said: Perhaps she secretly wishes she was a prostitute herself, so she could indulge herself and be paid for it.
Well, I’ll be damned, he thought.
“Britt,” he said slowly, “is Daryn working the streets herself? Right here in Oklahoma City?”
Britt gazed out toward the street. “Not the streets.” She swept an arm back toward the Oasis Motel. “Not this scene. She wanted to, but I thought-you know, no one would believe it. You meet her, and she’s just different, you know? The guys, the tricks, wouldn’t believe it. They’d think she was a female cop or something, trying to trap them. I mean, you know her, right? Could you see her in a place like this?”
“No,” Sean said. “No, I couldn’t.”
“So I told her she should-”
Much to Sean’s surprise, the girl started to cry.
Sean opened the car door and started to get out. Britt scrambled away from him with sudden vehemence. “Stay away! Don’t fucking touch me! Just don’t!”
Sean held up both hands and backed away. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” Britt whispered, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “You fucking men. You’re all sorry. You say you’re sorry and think you’ve got to take care of us. I’ve been taking care of myself since I was fourteen.” She sniffled again. “Shit, I told her she should set herself up as a, you know, a high-dollar call girl. Like an escort service.”
Sean drew in a breath.
“That sounds more like her, doesn’t it? Those escorts…they make big money, and the guys they see expect a woman to talk to them, to give them massages and stuff. They want to talk about…I don’t know what…like Shakespeare and stuff. Because they want it to be like they’re not paying a whore for sex. They have, like, two-hour minimums and some of them make a thousand bucks for the two hours. And they get to go in really nice hotel rooms, not dumps like this.”
“So you told Daryn McDermott to set herself up as an escort. Here in Oklahoma City.”
Britt nodded, sniffling again. “Yeah.”
“And did she?”
Britt nodded again.
“How do I find her?”
Britt smiled crookedly. She pulled her hair back from her face again, shaking the rain out of it. “Those girls that do escort gigs: They put up websites and everything. That’s how they get their tricks. She told me www.katpurrs.com. That’s Kat with a K. That’s her name now. She wanted to be totally new, so she’s Katherine-Kat.” Britt looked at the ground, almost shyly. “I helped her pick out the name.”
“It’s a good name.”
They looked at each other. After a long moment, Sean said, “Here, let me pay you for your time.”
Britt shook her head. “I only get paid for fucking, not for talking.” She spun around and walked toward a wine-colored minivan that had just pulled into the parking lot.
“So you do,” Sean said, dropped the Jeep into gear, and drove north.
Britt had two more tricks right in a row before she got a break. The guy in the minivan paid her for half-and-half, but he couldn’t finish inside her, kept losing his hard-on. She wound up wasting nearly half an hour and three condoms on him. Then, right after that, a big black guy named Elvin, a semiregular customer, wanted a BJ in his car before he headed home to his wife.
After Elvin was gone, she went into her motel room, closed the door, and went to the bathroom. She took a quick shower, then gargled with Listerine. Feeling better, a little cleaner, she made the call.
The other woman’s voice was soft and low on the phone. “Hello, this is Kat.”
“Hi, it’s me. I mean, Britt. It’s me.”
“Hey, sweetie. I know your voice by now. What’s up?”
“There was a guy here,” Britt said.
There was a short silence. “Go on.”
“Tall, red hair, driving a Jeep, Arizona plates. Who is he? He acted like he knew you.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It was bound to happen. It just happened sooner rather than later.”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“Don’t worry. It’s fine. It’s just as well that he came now.”
Britt thought for a moment. “Have you been okay?”
“Fine, sweetie. A little tired tonight. I had a bad headache yesterday, but it went away. I’m doing just great.”
“Daryn? Daryn, when can I see you?”
There was a slight clucking noise. “Remember, I’m Kat now. I’m always Kat.”
“I know. I just…I like the sound of your name. Your real name.”
“I know you do. Soon, Britt. We’ll see each other soon.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, honey.”
“I love you,” Britt said, but the line was already dead.
FAITH WAS SITTING ON THE COUCH READING, WITH Joe Sample’s new solo piano CD on the stereo, when Sean returned to the house at a little after nine o’clock. She looked up from her paperback copy of Blood Will Tell, about the famous Cullen Davis murder trials in Texas in the seventies, to see her brother, dripping wet, standing there with a mostly empty Jack Daniel’s bottle clutched in one hand.
“Hey, baby sister,” he said, shaking the rain off himself. “Is the weather always like this here?”
Faith put down her book. “Just in the spring, mainly. That’s the stormy season. Looks like you’ve been out in it.”
“Yep.” He sat beside her, placing the whiskey bottle very carefully on the table. Her eyes followed the bottle. “You and your books and your jazz,” Sean said. “Don’t you ever watch TV or anything?”
“Most TV is crap,” Faith said. “I catch C-SPAN sometimes.”
“Oh, that’s exciting.”
Faith shrugged. “Find your hooker?”
“I did.”
“Get what you wanted?”
“She pointed me in the right direction.”
Sean pulled the bottle to him and swigged from it. “Want a drink?” he offered.
“No, thanks.”
“More for me.”
“I could get you a glass,” Faith said, looking at him.
“I don’t want to dirty any of your glasses. I put in a load of laundry this morning, by the way.”
“So I saw. Thanks.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds.
“Have you told Mom and Dad that you’re here?” Faith said after a while.
“Nope. None of their business. If I did, you know how it would go. Dad would just try to find out what the two of us talked about. Always being the captain, trying to control us the way he controls his department.”
Faith said nothing.
“Come on, admit it. I bet you five thousand dollars that every time you talk to the old man on the phone and mention that you’ve talked to me or e-mailed me he wants to know what it was about. We live in three separate states, and he still wants to control the way you and I talk to each other.”
“No bet,” Faith said.
Sean nodded. “I knew I was right.” He leaned back against the couch and closed his eyes. The bourbon had taken the edge off, and he was in the gray in-between area. He’d been a bit shaky through the whole encounter on Shields Boulevard with Monica and Britt, but he’d started on the bottle as he drove back here, feeling flushed with knowing how he’d unearthed Daryn McDermott. Now he wasn’t quite totally shit-faced either. He might get shaky again if he had any more, but for now he was somewhere between the two. Having a little more might be nice, but he’d drunk all of Faith’s beer this morning and he didn’t think she had anything else in the house.
Faith was looking at him again. She tucked one of her long legs up under her-the same way she’d also sat on the couch at home when they were kids-and turned to face him fully. Her eyes, solid green and just as angry at times as their father’s, locked onto him. “You drank those three bottles of Harp I had in the fridge this morning.”
Sean twirled the whiskey bottle in his hand. “Yeah. It was a long drive in from Tucson.”
“You finish off that whole bottle right there, straight, by yourself?”
Sean thumped the bottle on the coffee table, then checked to make sure he hadn’t scratched it. It was good wood, and he didn’t want to nick it. “You got something to say, sister, say it.”
“How did you get to be ‘on leave’ from ICE? How could you just pick up and leave and come to Oklahoma to do a freelance job?”
Sean blinked. So his sister had shifted into full interrogation mode. “Hey, two can play that game. What’s your job? ‘Special projects’? Come on, you can do better than that.”
They stared at each other for a long moment.
“So we both have our little secrets,” Sean finally said. “Big deal.”
Faith leaned over and tapped the whiskey bottle with a fingernail. “Your secrets have anything to do with this?”
“What?”
“You having any trouble with this, Sean?”
Sean made a snorting sound. “ ‘Any good Irish cop worth his salt likes a good drink now and again,’ ” he quoted.
“Yeah, and you see where it got Seamus, too.”
Sean shifted on the couch. “He was due to retire anyway.”
“Bullshit,” Faith said. “He could have worked another ten years. They let him retire so he could keep his pension and it wouldn’t tarnish all the commendations he got while he was on the force.”
“What’s your point, Faith?”
Faith folded her hands together and squeezed. Sean saw her knuckles turn white. This was what she had done since she was a teenager when she was talking about something intense. She’d stopped biting her fingernails at sixteen, but then started doing this trick of squeezing her hands together so hard that they hurt.
“Say it,” Sean said.
“We have a family history,” Faith said. “And you’ve been in a really stressful job situation, with the switch to DHS these last couple of years. I guess…I guess I just want to know you’re not losing control.”
Shit, Sean thought. Shit, shit, shit. We don’t see each other for three years, but still she reads me like a cheap paperback, just like when we were kids. Faith could always close herself up, but me…I’m an open book to her.
Sean flexed his own hands, just to make sure they weren’t shaking. Then he very carefully took Faith’s smaller hands in his, and pried her fingers apart. “You should quit doing that,” he said. “One of these days you’ll break your own fingers.”
Faith didn’t smile.
Sean cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about me. Yeah, I’ve been through a lot. Yeah, I like a good drink now and again. It helps smooth out the hard edges. I’ve seen some stuff down along the border…”
Faith nodded. “I know. I’ve seen some stuff these last couple of years myself.”
Sean let go of her hands. Suddenly it felt awkward, the old Kelly family reluctance toward physical affection. “I bet you have.”
Faith stood up. “What next? You want to do some sightseeing tomorrow, or what?”
“Maybe,” Sean said. “You set your own hours or what?”
“More or less. Right now I’m just finishing up paperwork on this latest project. Sometimes I have to pick up and go at a moment’s notice, so when I’m just hanging out in town doing office work, I’m pretty laid-back on the hours.”
“And your boss likes this?”
“My boss is in another time zone. As long as things go the way they’re supposed to, and as long as he can reach me at any time, he doesn’t care if I’m not in the office nine-to-five.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” Sean said with a smile.
“Sometimes,” Faith said, not smiling.
Sean’s smile faded. He thought of something that had happened when he and Faith were nine and eight, respectively. Sean had wanted a new bicycle desperately, but their father was still just making a patrol officer’s salary and they couldn’t afford it. So Sean-who never believed anything his father said about money-put his old bicycle under the wheels of his dad’s car, and the next morning his father backed over it, destroying the bike and the tire of the car as well. Sean blamed it on one of the neighborhood kids. Joe Kelly, in his wrath-he never believed anything Sean said either-had turned to Faith, as he often did. Sean had teased Faith mercilessly in those days, daring her to tell even the tiniest of white lies, saying she was physically incapable of lying. He had begged her with his eyes not to tell the old man, but she looked straight at Sean and said, “He did it, Dad. I saw him. Sean did it.”
Joe Kelly had beaten Sean’s butt so hard that Sean was sore for ten days. Faith had watched the beating in silence, tears streaming down her face. And Sean never got another bicycle, ever. Sean hated Faith for a long time, with the kind of hate only adolescents are capable of managing. But then some things happened with Faith and she was away from the rest of the family for a while, and when she came back, Sean didn’t hate her so much anymore. The incident haunted him for years, and when they were both in college, he’d called her one night and brought it up again.
“I never should have put that bike there, Faith. I put you in the position of wanting you to lie to protect me, and the old man put you in the position of having to rat on me. We were both wrong, Dad and I. You held on to the truth, as much as it hurt.”
Sean looked at his sister now, framed in the lamplight of the messy living room. They were both a long way from what they used to be. Looking at her, thinking of how she evaded any specifics about her job, Sean thought that Faith had probably finally learned how to lie, and that it was tearing her up inside. The thought saddened him.
He nodded at her. “Yeah, we’ll sightsee tomorrow,” he finally said. “I’ve got some more work to do on this thing, but it’ll be tomorrow night.”
“Okay,” Faith said. “I’m going to go to bed, I think. There’s a bunch of junk in the spare bedroom, but that couch folds out. There are pillows and sheets and stuff in the hall closet.”
“I’ll find it,” Sean said.
She looked at him again. Her eyes flickered over the empty whiskey bottle. “Good night,” she said.
Sean puttered around the living room for an hour or so after Faith went to bed. He straightened a few things, then stopped himself, realizing Faith would probably be annoyed with him for doing it. He stopped at her bookshelf, reading spines. Mostly nonfiction volumes on unsolved crimes-same old Faith. But there was one hardcover, something called The Secret Six. Curious, Sean pulled it out. It seemed to be about John Brown and the Civil War. When did Faith get interested in Civil War history?
Sean thumbed a few pages. The book was by a man named Edward J. Renehan Jr., and appeared to be about wealthy Northern abolitionists who helped John Brown, who went so far as to bankroll his operation leading up to the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Boring, Sean thought. He’d never been one for history books. Just before he put it back, his eye caught some handwriting on the title page.
My dear Officer Kelly, Until we meet again, I leave you this reminder of our time together. The note was signed: Isaac Smith. Who the hell was Isaac Smith? Sean shook his head. His baby sister had her secrets, all right. Of course, if she really was in Department Thirty, as he suspected, secrets were her business. The idea depressed him even further. He wished he had another pint of Jack, but didn’t want to go back out in the rain. He put the book back on the shelf.
He went into the kitchen and rummaged in the refrigerator, finding several takeout containers and microwave dishes.
“Don’t you ever cook?” he muttered.
He inspected half of a leftover chicken burrito with refried beans and Mexican rice, then found a microwave plate and heated it. It turned out to be surprisingly good, and it was the most he’d eaten all day. He ate it in front of the TV, watching the ten o’clock news. News was as depressing in Oklahoma City as it was in Tucson, he decided, despite the anchors’ attempts to be happy-go-lucky. He turned it off after a few minutes.
After eating, he washed his plate and put it carefully back in the cabinet where he’d found it. Then Sean returned to the living room and powered up his laptop on the coffee table. He turned off the lamp so that the only light in the room came from the glow of the computer screen.
He logged onto the Internet, waited a moment, and typed in www.katpurrs.com.
An image in soft pastel colors settled onto the screen. Sean adjusted the computer so he could see the screen better. He leaned forward.
There were several shadowy pictures of a young woman, mostly in profile, the photographs having been taken in subdued lighting. None of the photos showed a full shot of her face-they all were cropped just above her mouth.
In one photo, the woman straddled a chair, wearing a white bra, matching panties, garter belt, and stockings. In another she wore a black version of the same outfit.
Still, Sean couldn’t be sure. This young woman, though she looked to be Daryn McDermott’s size and build, had honey-blond, shoulder-length hair. All of Daryn’s photos had shown a young woman with much longer, braided, dark hair.
But then, Sean thought, if she wanted to become someone else-some thing else, as Britt had said-she could cut and dye her hair, couldn’t she? It even made a sort of sense.
He entered the website. Another shadowy image, this one in black lingerie, was on the left side of the page. He began to read the text that ran beside it:
Hello, and welcome to my personal website. I am Kat Hall, and I am a professionl, independent escort serving gentlemen in the Oklahoma City area. I am very exclusive and selective about my companions, but I am well worth it for those who do spend time with me. I am educated and intelligent, thoughtful and passionate. I can fulfill any fantasies you may entertain. Role playing is welcomed. I will provide the ultimate GFE (Girl Friend Experience) to those who spend time with me.
I appreciate getting to know my companions, so I strongly suggest that you book at least a two-hour appointment. Yes, my rates are higher than most. But I repeat-I am worth it. I am available for incall at my location, or outcall at select downtown Oklahoma City hotels. For those who desire the best and who are willing and able to pay, I await your call.
“Jesus,” Sean muttered.
He clicked over to a page marked “donations.”
My gift is $600 for one hour, $1000 for two hours, $2000 for a four-hour dinner date, $3500 for overnights. My rates are all inclusive, cash only. Please keep in mind that any contribution is for my time and personal services only. Anything else that may transpire is a matter of personal choice between two consenting adults of legal age, and is not contracted for, or compensated for, in any other manner.
A disclaimer, Sean thought. This is how escorts can openly advertise on the Internet and not get busted.
He went to the contact page. A phone number and e-mail link were listed. The photo on this page, still shrouded in subdued lighting and still not showing the woman’s face, did feature a close-up of her cleavage inside a pink bra.
The word justice was tattooed across the woman’s left breast.
“Daryn,” Sean whispered. “It is you. I’ll be damned.”
He sat back. Senator McDermott’s radical activist daughter, living a secret life away from the prying eyes of Washington, as an escort, a high-priced call girl.
He thought for a moment. Daryn had only been missing for a little over a month, according to Tobias Owens. But this website was well done and very elaborate, not something hurriedly thrown together. Plus the domain name was her own, not some free web hosting service. It had taken time, effort, and money to develop this.
How long had Daryn McDermott been planning her new life as Kat Hall? Sean wondered.
Sean realized his heart was beating wildly, and he gradually became aware that he was sexually aroused as well.
“My God,” he whispered.
He slowly pulled out his cell phone and punched in the numbers on the screen.
“Hello, this is Kat,” said the voice a moment later.
Sean was silent a moment, his heart pounding. He felt sweat ringing his forehead. “Hello, Kat,” he finally said. “This is Michael. I’d like to make a date with you.”
FAITH LEFT SEAN SLEEPING ON THE COUCH AND was in her office in Oklahoma City’s U.S. Courthouse downtown by seven thirty in the morning. There wasn’t much to the office. It was small, the door unmarked. Official occupancy records for the building showed that the small second-floor room was vacant and being used as storage for the U.S. Marshals Service, whose main office suite was down the hall.
The desk was standard issue, metal with a faux wood top. There was a single filing cabinet, one phone line, a computer. There were two “guest” chairs that Faith had scavenged from a used office furniture store, paying for them herself so she didn’t have to go through the General Services Administration paperwork. Director Yorkton had appreciated her initiative on that purchase.
She’d added a couple of plants in the last year. Faith was generally no good with plants, but one was an ivy, which was notoriously hard to kill. The other commanding feature of the office continued to be a wooden plaque with a stuffed fish on it. It had belonged to her mentor, the previous occupant of the office, Art Dorian. There was a dent in the fish’s body now, though, since she’d ripped the plaque off the wall and flung it across the room in a fit of frustration last summer.
And that, really, was all. Faith didn’t keep any photographs on her desk, nothing that said anything personal about her. This office is not my life, she reminded herself constantly, so it shouldn’t look like my life. Still, in unguarded moments-sometimes alone, sometimes with Scott Hendler-she wondered if it wasn’t becoming her life after all, her own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
She raised the blinds behind the desk, which looked out on the Oklahoma City National Memorial, across Northwest Fourth Street. She only looked for a moment, though-she had mixed feelings about the place. Even though she hadn’t lived in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, when the Murrah Building was destroyed, she’d felt the sadness and outrage of the rest of the country when watching the news reports. Then she’d wound up living here, assigned to Oklahoma when she joined the Marshals Service. She understood what the memorial meant, but for her, it also stirred up personal feelings. It was there, standing under the Survivor Tree, that she’d been recruited-forced, she often thought-to join Department Thirty by now-director Yorkton.
Faith turned to her computer and booted it up, then waited a moment. She took a few minutes, as she did every day, to mentally review the cases under her jurisdiction as a regional Department Thirty case officer. She now had seven in her region, which encompassed New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. She currently had two cases living in Texas, one in Oklahoma, one in Kansas, three in Missouri, and none in Arkansas. She’d inherited all but two from her predecessor. She’d processed two new ones in the past year, one of them going to St. Charles, Missouri, one to Enid, Oklahoma. Leon Bankston would make eight, which was a pretty good case load. Case officers weren’t privy to the cases of other regional officers-Yorkton often trumpeted the virtues of compartmentalization-but she thought one of the other regions had a dozen cases, and one of the others had only three. It was a strange and surreal program, and some aspect confounded her nearly every day.
But then, she thought, maybe the very fact that she hadn’t figured out all the angles yet kept her alert. Yorkton seemed to be pleased with her. Her field assistant, Simon, gave her wary respect, though Faith was still leery of him.
All of her cases were fairly self-sustaining right now, and there was no major administrative work to be done. She’d have to begin annual reviews in another couple of months, but for now, her little corner of the shadow world was running smoothly.
Back to Leon Bankston, gun runner extraordinaire. Faith smiled. Actually, Bankston was an idiot, which explained why he wasn’t further along in the underworld. The truck into which he’d smuggled the weaponry had an expired license plate, just waiting for an alert Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper to pull it over.
First she called the safe house and talked to Simon. Bankston, soon to be Benjamin Williams, was doing fine. He was obsessing about various details of the house and getting on Simon’s nerves, but was otherwise all right.
“Just get him out of here soon,” Simon said, “or I may have to kill him.”
She had a couple of steps left in completing the Williams identity. The attorney general still had to give his go-ahead, but the AG always followed the department’s recommendation without fail. She had the documents creating his background-birth certificate, Social Security card, school records, college degree, work history, references. She just had to make the final arrangements for someplace for him to live, and iron out the details of his employment. Employers of Department Thirty protectees never knew their employees’ real identities or what they had done, only that they were being guaranteed a job through a federal placement program. Sometimes Faith used a Department of Labor cover, sometimes Department of Education, when dealing with the employers.
She spent two hours on the phone working out the details, still awaiting the official go-ahead. Then she sat back, having caught up everything she needed to do today. She was about to call Sean and tell him to meet her downtown for lunch, when Hendler called on her cell.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Hendler said.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Faith repeated, and smiled.
“Lunch?”
She thought for a moment. “What about a three-some?”
Hendler started laughing.
“You know what I mean,” Faith said. “For lunch.”
“Ah, dammit,” Hendler said. “Just when I thought-”
“Watch it, pal. You never know who’s listening.”
“Right, right. Your brother joining us for lunch?”
“And smart too,” Faith said. “Yep. I was just getting ready to call him.”
“I’ll meet you in front of the courthouse at eleven thirty.”
“It’s a date,” Faith said, and clicked off before the awkward end-of-call silence could come.
She started to call Sean, then put the phone down again. It would only take a quick e-mail, and she could find out about Sean being “on leave” from ICE. Department Thirty had access to every database the United States Government possessed, through The Basement, which was the entity that did the actual creation of the new identities for protectees. Faith had no idea how many people worked in The Basement, or its physical location. It was alleged to literally be in the basement of one of Washington’s myriad government buildings. The Basement had access to everything, and Faith had access to The Basement.
“Sean,” she said aloud, without even realizing it.
Her big brother. Something wasn’t right about him now. She didn’t know if it was booze or the stress of the job. He’d been married briefly-less than a year-right after he moved to Arizona, and he never talked about it. He’d never mentioned his wife’s name to Faith in the five-plus years since the divorce. Neither of their lives, brother’s or sister’s, had quite turned out the way they’d always envisioned.
“Sean,” she said again.
She typed a message to The Basement.
The Basement returned her e-mail in less than half an hour. She skipped over the details of Sean’s background-she knew that well enough.
She quickly learned that his career with the Customs Service, later ICE, had been a twisting carnival ride. In the first couple of years, before Customs was absorbed into Homeland Security and reorganized into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he had no fewer than six commendations. Most were garden-variety bureaucratic notes, but one talked about his outstanding service in helping to break up a ring that was importing young Mexican girls into Arizona and selling them as sex slaves. Things had deteriorated quickly thereafter. She began to read vaguely worded reprimands, just the sort of thing a supervisor would write when an underling had screwed up but the supervisor still thought highly of him overall.
The reprimands became more specific as time went by, and they began to reference a growing problem with alcohol. At one point, an ICE-appointed counselor had referred Sean to undergo outpatient alcohol treatment and to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The final entry in the file, dated two days ago, written by Special Agent in Charge Weller, noted that Special Agent Sean M. Kelly had been placed on administrative suspension without pay, pending a termination hearing. The reason: severe dereliction of duty, related to uncontrolled consumption of alcohol.
“Oh, shit, Sean,” Faith said. “Why couldn’t you-” She choked off the words.
Her big brother. Her only sibling. No wonder he didn’t want their father to know he was here. All the talk about Joe Kelly trying to control their relationship aside, Faith knew that the old man would see right through any talk about Sean being “on leave,” and would demand to know why.
A long time ago, Faith would have called her father and told him everything she knew about what was going on with Sean.
But Faith was a different person now. She’d learned how to walk in the shadows, and she saw things outside the shades of black and white and right and wrong that had been so clear to her a long time ago.
There were other ways.
She picked up her cell phone and called Cara Dunaway. Dunaway was an FBI agent in the local field office, a colleague of Hendler’s. She was one of Faith’s few female friends in Oklahoma, a petite blonde of around forty, with two teenage kids. She was also a recovering alcoholic and had been sober for twelve years.
“Hi, Cara,” Faith said. “It’s Faith Kelly.”
“Well hello, Faith Kelly,” her friend said. “What’s up in your world? Don’t answer that, I’m being rhetorical.”
Faith forced a chuckle. “Hey, Cara, I need your help.”
“What do you need?” Dunaway said.
Faith told her.
SEAN ENDURED THE LUNCH WITH HIS SISTER AND her geeky boyfriend the FBI agent. He quickly surmised that Scott Hendler was far further along in the relationship than Faith was, but he kept silent about it. He wasn’t one to lecture his sister on her personal life.
They’d done the tour of the memorial, which Sean found to be powerful beyond words. They visited the nearby Oklahoma City Museum of Art, which turned out to be a world-class facility. Sean had always been more interested in visual arts than Faith was, and he’d become quite fond of art museums over the last few years.
By midafternoon, Sean begged off, saying he wanted a nap before going to “work” tonight. He went to a little bar he’d passed earlier on Pennsylvania Avenue, spent an hour with Jack Daniel, then proceeded to Faith’s house. She’d given him a key, and he slept for three hours.
Just after eight o’clock, using the directions that “Kat” had given him on the phone last night, he drove up Northwest Fiftieth Street, west of Interstate 44, west of Portland Avenue. Her “incall” location was actually a small gated apartment complex. It was a single building of two-story apartments, one row facing east, one row facing west. There were probably no more than a dozen units altogether. It was a relatively quiet, middle-class neighborhood. Unobtrusive.
Hide in plain sight, Sean thought.
“The gate code is 218,” she had told him. “Go in the east gate. It’s unit number five. Ring the bell. When I answer, you will initiate a hug. Anything you have to give me should be in a plain white envelope and you’ll give it to me then without any comment about what’s in it. After that’s out of the way, it’s just the two of us.”
Fascinating, Sean thought. The business of escorting has its own culture, its own language and lingo. He’d done some more research online after setting the appointment. There were entire websites devoted to “reviews” of escorts, who were referred to as “providers.” There was all kinds of shorthand about various sexual activities, and the customers-what Britt or Monica would have called “tricks”-were referred to as “hobbyists,” with prostitution known as “The Hobby.”
Fascinating, he thought again. Sean himself had never paid for sex in his life. He’d never had to, he thought with a touch of…what? Arrogance? Pride? He had a feeling he was about to descend into a very strange netherworld.
He’d talked Faith into swapping cars for the evening, as he’d been afraid that if Daryn saw the Arizona plates, she might get spooked. He was supposed to be Michael Sullivan of Oklahoma City, after all. So he’d driven Faith’s little two-seater Miata instead.
Sean rang the bell at apartment number five. He heard movement inside, and the door opened.
Daryn McDermott was simply a breathtaking woman. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but Sean couldn’t take his eyes from her. She was petite, almost fragile in appearance, but the woman radiated sensuality and intelligence and passion. Her hair was indeed dyed blond-Sean caught sight of a few dark roots, as well as her dark eyebrows-and cut shorter than in the photos Owens had given him. But it framed her face beautifully, with its high cheekbones, gently upturned nose, and sensuous lips. She wasn’t wearing much makeup-a touch of eye shadow, very light blush, a subtle shade of lipstick. She didn’t need much else.
She was wearing a short skirt that came midthigh, and it fit her as if it had been tailored. Women like Monica and Britt could only dream of looking so good in such a skirt, Sean decided. Her blouse was white and simple and showing just enough cleavage to tantalize. He couldn’t quite see the tattoo on her left breast.
“Hello, Michael,” she said.
“Hello, Kat.”
Remembering her instructions, he opened his arms and they embraced. He had to bend down, his six three to her five one. Her touch was electric. Simply putting her arms around him and rubbing his back for a moment had made him more aroused than he would have thought possible.
Easy, he told himself. Just take it easy.
He handed her the white envelope without speaking. She took it without looking at it and put it on a wooden stand beside the door.
“Come in,” she said. “Please, come in.”
She led the way down a short hall. The apartment was clean and tidy. Sean suspected it had come furnished, as the furniture was all strictly middle of the line, neutral colors, nothing personal about it.
“You’ll have to forgive the décor,” Daryn said.
Or should I think of her as Kat? Sean wondered. I have to gain her trust, to develop a relationship with her. Can’t just take her to her father at gunpoint.
“I’m new to the city and haven’t had time to settle in yet,” she said.
Who are you? Sean felt like shouting. Daryn or Kat? Or someone else altogether?
“So am I,” he said slowly. “Just moved here.”
“Oh?” she said. “Where are you from?”
“Chicago, originally. You?”
“I’ve lived lots of places. Come, have a seat.”
They sat near to each other, but not too near, on a couch upholstered in soft earth tones. Sean heard music from somewhere, a solo acoustic guitar with a new age feel to it. He could feel the heat from Daryn. She positively radiated passion. He inhaled a bit of her scent, something musky and understated, but powerful, like the woman herself.
“What do you do, Michael?” Daryn draped her arm along the back of the couch. It reached far enough that she could almost touch his shoulder with her fingertips. He wished she would.
Sean had already decided on his cover story, and it wasn’t even a total lie. “I work with wood,” he said. “I design and build furniture.”
“With your own hands?”
Sean nodded.
“Let me see,” Daryn said.
The senator’s daughter took both his hands and turned them over, palms up. She traced the lines on his hands with her fingers. Sean shivered.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
She touched his fingertips with her own. “They’re good hands. I love men’s hands.”
She put one of his hands on top of one of hers, then reached up with her thumb and began kneading his palm, then worked her way up, massaging each of his fingers.
“That’s wonderful,” Sean whispered. “You have such a…”
“Yes?”
“An amazing touch. Firm and gentle at the same time.”
Daryn laughed lightly. “That’s a good description of me.”
Sean closed his eyes. On one level, he was aware that he’d accomplished at least part of what he had been hired to do-find Senator McDermott’s daughter. But in a more visceral place, he felt only the things she was stirring in him, right here, right now. And she’d barely even touched him.
“You like?” Daryn said softly.
“Very much. You have pretty good hands yourself.”
“Thank you. Shall we explore further? Come upstairs with me.”
Would he do it? Sean thought dimly. Would he actually have sex with this girl as part of this job?
Without breaking the hand contact, Daryn rose from the couch, lightly pulling Sean with her. She led him to the stairs, which opened just off the front door.
The lighting upstairs was more subdued, one bedside lamp and three votive candles. Sean smelled a hint of vanilla from one of them. Daryn sat on the edge of the full-size bed, but made no move to undress.
“You want to talk?” Daryn said. “My instinct tells me, Michael, that you haven’t been with a woman in a while and you’d just like to talk, for now.”
Jesus Christ, she could read him as easily as Faith could. Was he that transparent to all women?
Sean nodded. “Like I said, I’m new in town.” He cleared his throat.
They talked. More accurately, Sean talked and Daryn-as Kat-listened. He embellished his cover story, made up a fictional family on the fly, talked about how much he loved designing classic American furniture and building it with his own hands. That much, at least, was true.
Daryn listened, asking a question here and there, never giving up anything of herself. Sean let it go and didn’t pry. This was about him gaining her trust, and he had to dance very carefully with her or he might lose sight of who was leading and who was following.
Three-quarters of an hour passed. They gradually became a bit more physical. Daryn opened her shirt all the way. He felt her breasts. She rubbed his crotch through his pants. She kissed his neck a couple of times. Sean thought he would explode, but he kept it under control.
He was fondling her left breast-the one with the justice tattoo-and was moving his head toward it, as if being guided by an unseen hand. Daryn’s head was back, her arms gripping the headboard of the bed, her legs parted ever so slightly. The tension was almost unbearable, cracking in the air like prairie thunder. The world of street hookers like Monica and Britt was light-years away from the sensuality of this moment, of this woman.
His lips were inches from her breast when Sean heard a faint sound. He couldn’t quite place it-he thought it came from downstairs. Something familiar, an ordinary sound, but somehow out of place right here, right now.
A second later, the apartment door exploded inward.
Daryn screamed, pulling her shirt closed around her breasts. Sean rolled off the bed and came up in a crouch.
“Where the fuck is she?” a male voice growled from downstairs.
“Search the back,” said a second voice.
So there were at least two of them. Sean crawled toward the chair at the foot of the bed. He’d carefully draped his windbreaker over it when they came upstairs. His Glock was in it-he hadn’t anticipated trouble, at least not this kind, but he knew better than to walk into any kind of volatile situation unarmed. Seven years on the border had taught him that.
He raised his eyebrows at Daryn. She shook her head violently. I don’t know!
Shit!
They’d certainly heard Daryn’s scream, and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that the sound had come from upstairs. The apartment wasn’t that large.
“Upstairs,” said the first voice.
Sean mimed blowing out the candles, which Daryn did, and she also turned off the lamp. The room went black.
Sean silently took his Glock from the pocket of the windbreaker. He looked over his shoulder. He could barely see Daryn, just the outline of the white shirt she wore. She was beside the bed, squatting on the balls of her feet. At least she hadn’t screamed again.
A host of possibilities ran through Sean’s mind. Who were they?
Maybe Tobias Owens and Senator McDermott had covered their bases in a different way. Maybe they’d had Sean followed, and all the talk about gaining her trust and convincing her to come home of her own accord was just that-talk. Let Sean find the girl, then send in the commandos.
Maybe they were political enemies, someone else who had been searching for Daryn McDermott because of her radical ideas. Maybe Sean had led them to her.
Maybe they were psycho former customers of the escort they knew as Kat Hall. Maybe they were common thieves.
Maybe, maybe…
Sean heard a heavy step turn toward the stairs. The other set of footsteps was still farther back in the apartment, perhaps in the living room or kitchen.
“It’s fuckin’ dark,” said the voice at the foot of the stairs. Then, louder: “You up there, girl? Come on now, you can’t hide.”
Daryn expelled a breath. Sean saw her move slightly in the darkness, and willed her to be still. He very carefully angled his body around so that he was facing the place where the stairs reached the bedroom.
The heavy steps started up the stairs. One stair, two, three…
Who were they?
Sean tried to remember how many steps there were. He’d been so consumed by Daryn’s touch that he hadn’t really noticed. Were there eleven, was that right? Or was it twelve?
Four steps up, five…
Weren’t all stairways built with an odd number of steps? Hadn’t he read that somewhere? Maybe it was eleven. Eleven steps up to the bedroom.
Six, seven, eight.
He couldn’t shoot up here, not in the dark. No one in their right mind got into a gun battle in the dark. Did they even have guns? He couldn’t tell, but they sure as hell weren’t friendly.
He put the Glock down, looking wildly around the darkened room. On some level it registered with him that there was still music playing, that flowing, soft acoustic guitar, and that the source of it was very near. An arm’s length from him was a wooden stand, just like the one downstairs by the door. On it sat a small portable CD player. Its tiny digital readout, the only light in the room, told him it was playing track number ten.
The intruder on the stairs took two more steps.
Sean moved. He swiveled and grabbed the little stereo, the cord ripping out of the wall socket. He angled back around as the man hit the eleventh step. Holding the stereo in one hand, like a baseball pitcher going into his windup, Sean drew back with all his strength and flung it around the corner.
“What the-” muttered the man on the stairs.
Sean really didn’t think the little stereo would hurt the man, but if he was lucky, it would make him lose his balance. Sean leaped to his feet and rounded the corner. The man, who was shorter and older than Sean, though with a muscular build, had taken the blow right in his knee. A perfect shot. He was teetering on the top step. Sean reached out with his long arms. He could smell the man’s breath, stale with cigarettes. He shoved him in the chest and the man tumbled backward down the stairs.
He watched as the man’s head thumped against the wood floor. “Let’s go!” he yelled at Daryn.
She obeyed him with no hesitation. He grabbed the Glock and they ran down the stairs. Their attacker was still dazed and Sean stepped over him easily, but Daryn, with her shorter legs, had to actually go around him, and his hand reached out and closed over her bare ankle.
“Michael!” she screamed.
Even though the man’s eyes were still closed, he had a firm hold on Daryn’s leg, shaking her, trying to make her lose her own balance, just as Sean had done to him. Her arms flailed.
Sean had the Glock out in an instant, turning it around, butt first, bringing it down with all his force on the man’s wrist. Sean heard a sick cracking sound and the man’s hand went limp, releasing Daryn’s leg.
Sean reached out a hand to Daryn. She stepped past the groaning man and came toward him.
“Hey!” shouted the second man, from the entryway to the living room.
Sean half-turned. He saw the pistol in the man’s hand, saw it being raised, saw the barrel glint.
He whipped up the Glock and was thankful there was no safety on this gun. He hated guns with safeties-he would never have been able to learn to fire the damn things under stress if they had. He squeezed the trigger.
Marksmanship had never been Sean’s strong point, but the shot went right where he wanted it to go, into the shoulder of the second man’s gun arm. The gun flew out of the man’s hand and he stumbled backward, bouncing off the wood cabinet of the television set in the living room.
“Let’s go,” Sean said again.
He took Daryn’s hand and they ducked through what was left of the front door. For a moment Sean was confused when he stepped outside, looking for his Cherokee. Then he had it-Faith’s little Miata. He pointed to it. He and Daryn ran.
In less than five minutes Sean had the Miata on Interstate 44, driving south as it looped around the west side of Oklahoma City.
“Do you know who they were?” he asked.
Daryn sat in the passenger seat, trembling, hugging herself, each hand on the opposite shoulder. She shook her head.
“Do you have someplace you want me to take you?” He decided to do a little gentle probing, to see what, if anything, she might reveal. “Any family here in town?”
“No,” she whispered. “No family.”
“What about friends?” He thought of Britt, standing in the rain outside the Oasis Motel.
Another head shake. “I’m new here. I just got set up in town a little while ago. I haven’t…no, there’s no one. Help me. Please, Michael. Can you help me? You said you’re new here too.”
Christ Almighty, Sean thought. He had to be very careful, to try to remember what was real and what wasn’t. Kat Hall wasn’t real. Daryn McDermott was. Michael Sullivan wasn’t real. Sean Kelly was. And until he could break through Kat and get to Daryn, he would have to remember that everything was a lie. And by the same token, Michael would have to tell lies that Sean would have to deal with later. He shook his head, catching his reflection in the windshield.
What have I gotten into? Sean wondered.
“Let’s get you somewhere safe,” he said. “Then we’ll try to sort all this out.”
Daryn was still hugging herself. “You’ll stay with me?”
“I’ll stay with you.”
“Good,” she said, and Sean saw her face in the windshield as well.
SEAN WOUND UP DRIVING WEST ON INTERSTATE 40 until they reached El Reno, a midsize town half an hour’s drive outside the Oklahoma City metro. He got them a motel room, though for a moment he’d hesitated when the clerk asked if he wanted one bed or two.
We were about to have sex, he thought. But that was business, wasn’t it? And if so, what is it now?
He finally opted for one bed, thinking it would arouse more suspicion if a man and a woman checked into a single room with two beds. He paid cash and steered Daryn to an upstairs room. He sat her down on the bed, then went to the sink and ran cold water onto a white motel washcloth.
“Run this over your face,” he said, handing her the cloth. He noticed that his own hands were shaking ever so slightly.
She looked at his hands, then at the cloth, then into his eyes. She slowly took the cloth and wiped her face and neck.
Sean pulled the hard plastic motel chair near the bed and sat down. “Did you recognize them at all?” he asked.
Daryn shook her head.
Sean waited a moment, choosing his words. “Do you think they might have been former…clients?”
Daryn managed a smile. “I’m a professional escort, not a street hooker, Michael.”
Sean’s eyebrows knitted.
“The girls on the street try hard to forget the men they’re with. For most of the girls, the guys don’t even have faces. Why do you think I recommend my clients book two full hours? It’s not just sex.” She handed the damp cloth back to him. “I remember the men I spend time with. Neither of those guys looked the least bit familiar.”
“Is there any other…” Sean let the sentence hang.
Daryn stared at him. She was calm now, and Sean realized how striking her dark eyes were under the dyed blond hair.
“There is a possibility,” she said.
Sean leaned forward until his knees were almost touching hers.
“I have some…unusual…views,” she said.
“Go on.”
“Political, social views. I’ve had some clients that were powerful men, and it’s in their best interest to keep the status quo. Maybe I mouthed off about my views to the wrong person.”
“And they sent someone around to scare you?” Sean said. “That sounds-”
“Farfetched?” Daryn said. “Have you ever heard the term ‘gun thugs’?”
Sean nodded. “It’s kind of an old term.”
“Read your American history. In the early twentieth century, in the early years of the labor movement in this country, it was pretty common. Especially in the coal fields in Appalachia, where the miners were trying to organize. The coal companies would hire these guys as freelancers to come and shoot up the miners’ camps, to send them warnings. There were several pretty notorious massacres when things got out of hand.”
Sean nodded again. “It’s a pretty bloody history.”
“Maybe these guys were modern-day gun thugs, sending me a warning to be careful about my pillow talk.”
Sean smiled. “Unusual political and social views, huh?”
Daryn met his gaze head-on. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me? I’m just a woodworker, no one with powerful interests in keeping the status quo.” Sean breathed deeply. He was starting to dance along the tightrope.
Gain her trust.
How better to gain her trust? Even as Kat the professional escort, Daryn’s politics would shine through. He was certain of it. When a human being was as passionate about something as Daryn McDermott was about her issues, they wouldn’t ever leave those issues totally behind, even when descending into a different person’s life.
Gain her trust. Make her want to tell you. Make her want to strip Kat away and become Daryn again with you, for you.
“Please,” he said. “Please, I want to know.”
She looked at him squarely. “You saved my life,” she said, almost in a whisper.
Sean shrugged.
“No, don’t shrug it away. You saved my life.” She stood up and began unbuttoning the white blouse.
Sean started to hold out his hands, but he realized they were shaking again.
“This first,” Daryn said. She peeled off the blouse and stood there, braless, before him. “Then talk.”
She came to him, leaned over him, straddled him, her legs on either side of him. Her lips found his.
God help me, Sean thought.
When they were finished, Sean felt as sated as he ever had. She had moved with him as if they’d known each other forever, as if they’d already made intimate explorations of each other’s bodies. She took him places he had scarcely imagined. Her responses to him were raw and passionate and utterly breathtaking.
He lay bathed in perspiration on the motel bed. He stole a glance at the bedside clock, surprised to see that it was after eleven.
Sean had never been with a woman who so reveled in her own nakedness. All of the women he’d been with before had wanted to get dressed immediately, or at least slip under the sheets. But Daryn/Kat was absolutely unself-conscious about her body. She wore her nudity proudly, sitting cross-legged beside him.
“You’re quite a man,” she said softly.
Sean smiled at her.
She stroked his leg. “Let’s talk now,” she said.
Sean propped himself on one elbow.
His cell phone rang. They looked at each other.
“Do you need to get that?” Daryn asked.
Sean waited a long moment before answering. “No,” he said. “Let it go.”
Daryn smiled.
They talked for three hours, and Sean began to see how brilliant Daryn McDermott really was. She laid out all her arguments, the ones he’d already read about in the papers Owens had given him. She was like a lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court-passionate and articulate, with facts and figures to back her up. Her ideas were wild, radical, some would say dangerous. She even envisioned a sort of salary-control socialism, where CEOs of major corporations would have their salaries capped by the federal government. Then what she called the “overage”-the amount the CEOs would have earned above their salary cap-would be put into a federal fund that would then be used to raise the salaries of professions like teachers, nurses, and social workers. Sean could certainly see how politicians like her father and those of like mind would feel threatened.
When the conversation waned, Sean realized that all she’d told him about were her ideas, her opinions…nothing about herself. Not even anything about the fictitious Katherine Hall.
He stretched out on the bed. “How long have you been doing the escort gig?”
“Long enough to know not to answer that question.”
They both laughed.
“And now,” she said, “the next thing you’re going to ask is how a smart girl like me becomes an escort.”
Sean shrugged. “I guess we’ve kind of gone past our original, uh, professional relationship. I’d like to know more about you.”
Daryn was silent for a long moment, studying him. “The obvious answer is that I like sex.”
Sean smiled.
“But that’s not all of it,” Daryn added quickly. “I like people. I like getting to know people. I like touching. I love touching.” She traced a finger along Sean’s forearm. “There’s such power in touch. On some level I’m probably overcompensating.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled, letting it touch her eyes, and Sean thought for a second that he had seen the first glimpse past the veneer of Kat Hall, and into the soul of Daryn McDermott. “My family didn’t touch. Not at all.”
“It’s just who we were,” Daryn said. “My mother…well, I don’t remember much of her anyway. She was gone when I was little.” A little tone of bitterness crept into her voice. “And my father…I remember going to hug him, and he would just go all stiff. He wouldn’t actually push me away, but he wouldn’t return the hug, and after a while I quit trying.”
Sean was silent. Let her talk, he thought.
“None of my stepmothers paid much attention to me either,” Daryn said. “They were there for my father, the ‘great man,’ and I was just part of the scenery.”
Sean sat up. “Your father, the ‘great man’?”
Daryn backed off. “Forget it. It’s just me being bitter, and I recognize it for what it is. You don’t really want to hear a bunch of crazy stuff about me, after all.”
Yes, I do, Sean thought, but said nothing.
Daryn smiled wickedly, and it seemed Kat Hall was back, the invisible mask having been put on again. “Speaking of touching…” She leaned toward him.
They coupled again-briefly, intensely-then drifted off to sleep, naked beside each other, sometime after three a.m. Just before sleep claimed him, Sean wondered, So who were the gun thugs? Really, who were they?
Sean woke to the sound of his phone ringing. He looked at the clock: just past seven a.m.
“Faith,” he muttered, digging the phone out of his pants pocket.
“Where the hell are you?” his sister said.
Sean sat up. Daryn stirred but stayed asleep. “I ran into a little trouble last night,” he said.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Sorry, Dad, just stupid, I guess.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine. At least there aren’t any bullet holes in your car.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I’m kidding.” He glanced at Daryn. The sheet had fallen away from her breasts. The word justice stared up at him. He thought about all the things she’d told him. She’d presented her views with as much passion as she presented her body. But when talking about herself, even as she thought she was carefully preserving the fiction that was Kat Hall, it was like she was another person, one who’d been wounded deeply. One who wasn’t nearly as sure of herself as she was of her politics.
“Faith, I need your help,” Sean said.
Faith recognized the tone. “I’m listening.”
“Not on the phone. Let me meet you.”
“I’m leaving for the office now, driving that god-awful monster truck of yours.”
“Sorry,” Sean said. He began to fumble for his clothes. “I’m in a town called El Reno.”
“El Reno! How did you get way out there?”
“Never mind. I’ll be in front of the building where your office is in one hour.”
There was a long silence. Sean listened to his sister’s breathing. She would be turning over in her mind the reason he hadn’t just said “the courthouse.” “You’re not alone?” she finally said.
“No, I’m not. I will be when I meet you, but I’ll need to…” I’ll need to what? He squeezed his eyes open and closed. God, I need a drink right about now. “I’ll need to come back.”
“Sean-”
“Trust me, sister. I need you to just trust me.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll see you in an hour.”
Sean clicked off. He looked back at Daryn. Her eyes were wide open and staring at him. “Who was that?” she said, her voice husky with sleep.
“Maybe someone who can help keep us safe,” Sean said. “I have to go out for a while.”
“But you’ll be back?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll be back,” Sean said, and started to get dressed.
IT WAS A GORGEOUS SPRING MORNING. THE LATEST round of storms had moved out of Oklahoma City and left moderately cool morning temperatures under blazing clear blue skies. Faith waited for Sean on the sidewalk in front of the federal courthouse. When she saw her Miata turn onto Fourth, she waved Sean to a parking place around the corner and started up the sidewalk.
He parked at a meter on the Harvey Avenue side of the courthouse and they met each other at the corner. “You’re late,” Faith said. “You said an hour. It’s been nearly two.”
“Good morning to you, too,” Sean said.
She looked at him. His clothes were rumpled, his hair sticking up in back. He was unshaven, and she could smell the liquor from three feet away.
Faith clenched a fist, then slowly let it out. “What happened?”
Sean rubbed a finger under his nose. “Let’s take a walk. At least that damn rain’s stopped.”
They walked west, passing the front door of the courthouse. Sean was silent, and Faith suppressed her natural urge to pump him for details. They crossed the street, passing Saint Joseph Old Cathedral, the oldest Catholic church in Oklahoma City, dating from years before statehood.
“You go to mass much?” Sean asked as they walked past the beautifully restored brick cathedral.
“Not too often,” Faith said.
“Me either. I’m sure Mom’s disappointed. Kind of a curse to have the name Faith, huh?”
Faith shrugged. “It’s my name. What can I say?”
“Yeah, I suppose.” Sean stuffed both hands in the pockets of his khakis.
Faith flexed and unflexed her hands. “What happened, Sean?”
“Did you see or hear any news this morning?”
“A little bit on the radio driving in. Why?”
“Anything about shots fired at an apartment complex?”
Faith glanced at him. “Yeah, on the northwest side. Neighbors heard a big ruckus in the apartment next door. By the time the cops got there, the girl who lives there was missing.”
Sean covered his eyes with the back of his hand, as if the sun were too bright.
“Sean?” Faith said. “Hello?”
“What did they say about the girl who lived there?”
“What’s this about? Do you know something about this?” Faith tugged his sleeve, making him stop. “Were you there?”
Sean jerked away from her touch. “The girl who lived there! What did they say about her?”
Faith stared at him for a long moment, then dropped her hand. They continued walking, leaving the cathedral behind. “I don’t remember her name. It was something fairly common-sounding, I think. Just that she was young and hadn’t lived there very long.” They reached the corner at Hudson Avenue. Diagonally across the street was the new Metro Transit bus terminal.
“Shit,” Sean whispered.
“Tell me,” Faith said, as they started to cross Hudson.
Sean gathered in a shaky breath. “It’s part of this job I’m doing. Yes, I was there.” They reached the other side of the street. Faith motioned to a bench outside the main part of the bus terminal, and they sat down. Sean put a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “Faith, I need your help. I need to keep this girl safe and out of sight for a while.”
Faith was silent for a while. Behind them, a bus pulled into the terminal, bringing noise and fumes and only half a dozen passengers. “Who is she?” Faith finally said.
“Sorry, I can’t,” Sean said. “If I start talking about it, then the whole thing’s blown.”
“And you think I have a way to help you keep her safe and out of sight?”
“I need a safe house,” Sean said abruptly.
Faith half-turned on the bench. “You need a what?”
Sean tilted his head back, looked at the sky, then looked at the ground. “Let’s cut the bullshit, sister. If you’re working for Department Thirty, you’ve got access to safe houses.”
At the words Department Thirty coming from her brother’s mouth, Faith leaned back as if she’d been slapped.
“Don’t do that,” Sean said. “Come on, you’re working for Thirty. ‘Special projects’ in DOJ? That only means one thing. Federal law enforcement is like a small town, Faith. Even if we don’t all know each other, we’ve all heard of each other, and we all have an opinion of each other. You were always interested in WITSEC when you joined the Marshals anyway. Thirty is just one step through the looking glass from WITSEC.”
“You’re quite the philosopher.”
Sean slammed a hand down on the metal bus bench. “Goddammit, Faith! I need your help!” He lowered his voice. “You do work for Department Thirty, don’t you?”
Faith was silent.
“Jesus Christ,” Sean said. “What do I have to do? Remember in the eighties? People started to hear rumors about this federal department called the National Security Agency-NSA. The joke was that it really stood for No Such Agency, and you didn’t talk about it. You just didn’t. Now the NSA’s got a website. A website, for Christ’s sake, Faith! Thirty is now what NSA was then. I understand that. I don’t agree with what it does, but I guess that’s not for me to say, either. Maybe all of what I know is myth and rumor. Doesn’t matter. I…need…your…help.”
“You’re putting me in an impossible position,” Faith said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Sean shook his head. “No, I’m not. I’m your brother and I need help. I need access to resources you have. It’ll just be for a while.”
Faith bowed her head. “Dammit,” she muttered. She finally looked up and met her brother’s eyes. She folded her hands together and squeezed hard. “I have two safe locations in the metro area. One’s out in the Yukon-Mustang area, and it’s in use right now.”
“The other?”
“A house in Edmond.”
“Where’s Edmond?”
“Northern suburb. It’s the real white-collar suburb for the city.”
Sean smiled. “Kind of like Evanston is to Chicago.”
“We were going to sell the place, for several reasons, but I convinced my boss that we needed more than one safe facility in the area.”
“My baby sister, working in the deepest, darkest of the shadows. How do you like it?”
“That’s not a…” Faith stopped, tapped her foot, unclenched her fingers. Her knuckles were sore. She tried again. “I don’t think anyone likes Department Thirty, except maybe the director and the attorney general. It’s just…it’s what I do.”
Sean waited, but Faith said no more. Finally he stood up. “Well,” he said.
“I’m not sure what kind of furniture is in the Edmond house,” she said.
“Anything is fine. I just need to keep this girl safe and out of sight until I can…”
Faith raised her eyebrows.
“Complicated,” Sean said. “You understand complicated these days, I suspect.”
“That I do,” Faith said.
They started to walk back toward the corner of Fourth and Hudson. “I have the keys in my office,” Faith said.
“I appreciate this,” Sean said. “I appreciate you trusting me.”
Faith kept walking, not breaking stride. “But in return, you need to do something for me.”
“I already said, I can’t tell you anything about her or the job itself.”
“No, it’s not that.”
Sean looked surprised. “Then what?”
“I’m trusting you, now you trust me.” Faith gave him a long look.
Sean shrugged. He put his hands in his pockets again. Before he did, Faith saw his tremors. She pulled out her cell phone, called a number, and said, “We’re coming.”
Faith pointed the Miata north from downtown, then cut across to Western Avenue and turned north again. Just past the quirky Western Avenue strip of antique shops and bohemian boutiques, she pulled into a large parking lot beside an unmarked office building across the street from the sprawling campus of Bishop McGinnis Catholic High School.
She’d been silent the entire way, fiddling with the radio and ignoring Sean’s questions. “Here we are,” she said after stopping the car.
Sean got out, looking around. A few people were milling around the parking lot, some smoking cigarettes. There were a few older, well-dressed men and women, a few guys who looked like laborers, a couple of twentysomething girls who looked like punk rockers, complete with flaming pink hair and multiple tattoos. They all seemed to be waiting for something.
“What is this?” Sean said.
“Come on,” Faith said.
“Sister, what the hell is this?”
Faith led him through a glass door and into a small waiting room. The décor was neutral, with a couple of outdated but clean office-type chairs, a potted ivy, a couple of neutral pictures on the walls.
A tiny blond woman was walking toward them. “Hi, there you are!” she said.
“Hi, Cara,” Faith said. “Cara Dunaway, this is my brother, Sean Kelly. Sean, my friend Cara.”
Dunaway extended a hand. “Hi, Sean. Glad you’re here.”
Sean shook her hand. “Where exactly is ‘here’?”
Dunaway slid a glance to Faith, who only shrugged.
“Why don’t you come on back?” Dunaway said. “We’re about ready to start.”
Sean made more questioning sounds, but followed the two women down a short hallway, which then opened into a large meeting room. Rows and rows of folding chairs were set up, facing a slightly raised platform and podium. In one back corner of the room was what looked like a bar area, except no liquor bottles were visible. Faith and Sean smelled strong coffee brewing.
At the front of the room, next to the platform, was a series of framed photographs. On each side of the platform was a huge framed plaque. They came a bit closer, and Dunaway motioned them to seats. Others were filing in a few at a time. A couple of people spoke to Dunaway. One older woman hugged her.
As they grew closer, Sean read the first few lines of the plaque that commanded the wall at the front of the room.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Sean said in a stage whisper. He jabbed Faith in the ribs. “You brought me to an Alcoholics Fucking Anonymous meeting.”
Faith glared. “Keep your voice down, Sean.”
“No, I won’t keep my voice down. How could you drag me here? To this?” He swept a hand around the room.
“Because, dammit, you’re an alcoholic.”
“And you’re full of shit, sister.” Sean abruptly stood and worked his way along the row of chairs and toward the exit.
Faith was right behind him. She caught his sleeve just before he turned into the hallway. Behind them, a man in his fifties, in a flannel shirt and jeans, had ascended the podium. He introduced himself-Hello, I’m Ed, and I’m an alcoholic-offered words of welcome, then said something about a prayer.
“You must be kidding,” Sean breathed.
The assembled group, with no prompting, spoke in unison:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
“This is a fucking cult,” Sean said in full voice.
“Shut your damn mouth,” Faith hissed at him. “Sean, you have a problem. You were an hour late to meet me this morning, even for something you say is vitally important, because you had to stop off somewhere and drink. Did you think I wouldn’t know? Do you think I can’t tell?”
Now the meeting progressed around the room, with each person-every single one of them, more than a hundred strong-introducing to the gathering at large, to which the gathering responded in turn.
I’m Jack, and I’m an alcoholic.
Hi, Jack!
I’m Denise, and I’m an alcoholic.
Hi, Denise!
Henry, alcoholic.
Hi, Henry!
Melissa, alcoholic and addict.
Hi, Melissa!
“I’m getting out of here,” Sean said. “This gives me the creeps. I can’t believe you brought me here.”
Faith looked back toward the group. Cara Dunaway was staring back with a concerned look on her face. Faith spread her hands.
“He may not be ready,” Dunaway mouthed.
Faith dropped her hands in exasperation and followed Sean down the hall, out the door, and onto the sidewalk. He spun abruptly, almost losing his balance, and grabbed Faith by both shoulders. “That was a shitty trick, Faith. I come to you for help and you bring me to some preaching, praying, AA group. If I wanted praying in unison, I’d just go to mass. What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s not what’s the matter with me, you fool,” Faith growled. “Don’t you get it? It’s not just recreational anymore. It’s not just getting plastered at a party anymore. It’s not even ‘taking the edge off’ anymore. The bottle’s holding you instead of the other way around. It’s going to destroy your life, piece by piece, until you don’t have anything.”
“I just wanted your help.” Sean turned his back on her and started toward the parking lot.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Faith screamed at the top of her lungs.
Sean stopped. He had never heard Faith shout like that. Never. She was always the one who was tightly controlled, able to wall off the emotions, able to hide behind intellect or ambition.
“My God, but you’ve changed,” Sean said in a low voice.
“And do you think you haven’t?”
“Not really, no. Maybe I drink a little more than I used to. So what? I’m a little older than I used to be.”
Faith’s voice rose again. “What the hell is the matter with you? You’re not a kid, you’re not stupid. Can’t you see it? It’s already destroyed your career. What’s next?” Sean went still. Faith felt a coldness descend between them, as if a freakish winter wind had wandered into this May morning.
“I never said anything to you about my career,” Sean said, in a very soft, dangerous voice.
Faith raised both hands, then dropped them to her sides again.
“Now you’re checking up on me?” Sean said. His own hands balled into fists. “You’re in Department Thirty and you’ve got access to anything and everything, so you thought you’d check up on me?”
“Sean, I just-”
“No! No, you don’t ‘just.’ You’re not any better than Dad, the way he likes to control us. You’re just like him…better check up on ol’ Sean, make sure he doesn’t fuck up again. Is that it? Huh, is that it, Faith? Oh, Jesus, you’re good. You’re really good at that, aren’t you? You have your life of digging around in secrets and rolling around in mud and muck, and look at you now, Faith! You’re covered in it yourself. Jesus Christ, and you have the fucking nerve to talk about trying to help me. Man, that takes real balls, sister.” He threw her a mock salute, and began stalking away from the parking lot toward the street.
Faith’s heart was pounding wildly. “Where are you going? What about the…the house?”
“Forget it. Forget I asked. I’ll handle it myself. Just forget I came to town. Go back to your mud and your muck.”
“Sean…” Faith jogged a few steps toward him. “Sean, you don’t know your way around this city. Here, let me drive you back to your car. Come on, we can-”
“I’ll find a bus, a cab, something. You leave me the hell alone.”
He crossed Western on foot and began working his way south. Faith watched him go, riveted to the ground. In a few minutes he was only a speck in the distance.
Faith felt a hand in the small of her back. “Where’s your brother?” Cara Dunaway said.
“He’s gone,” Faith said.
IT TOOK SEAN OVER HALF AN HOUR, VIA OKLAHOMA City’s convoluted bus system, to reach the Metro Transit terminal downtown. The city was a lot like Tucson, and very un like his hometown of Chicago, in that very few people used public transportation here. The farther west you went, the more people were wedded to their cars, he mused.
He and three others got off the bus, and Sean started across the street toward Saint Joseph Old Cathedral and, beyond it, the federal courthouse. The nerve! he raged to himself. Of all the nerve…I went to her for help, for protection, and she takes me to A-fucking-A!
So I’ve screwed up a few times.
That doesn’t make me an alcoholic.
That doesn’t make me an alcoholic, dammit!
He shook away the conflicting stew of feelings that swirled around him, almost jogging now. If I run faster, will I outrun all this? Sean wanted to shout.
He had no idea where Faith had parked his Jeep. He circled around the block several times before spotting it in a parking lot on the west side of the building. As he dug in his pocket for his keys, his hand brushed something else.
Faith had figured out that he’d stopped and had a few drinks. But he was even later meeting her because he’d also stopped off at a hardware store. His hand closed on the additional key in his pocket-a key to Faith’s car that he’d had copied this morning.
Just in case, Sean told himself. Just in case of emergency.
He needed to go to a bad part of the city. Remembering Monica and Britt, he headed south from downtown. After a couple of wrong turns, he located Shields Boulevard again. He drove up and down a few side streets until he found what he was looking for-a deserted-looking block with a few cars parked on the street.
The houses were generally in poor repair, with peeling paint and sagging foundations. Rent houses, Sean thought. He felt sorry for the people who had to rent places like these just to have a roof over their heads.
Halfway down the block, he found a perfect target, an old pea-green Chevy Monte Carlo. Its back end was parked on the gravel driveway in front of a sad white frame house, and its front end was angled onto the thin grass of the front yard. Both front tires were gone, the proverbial concrete blocks propped under the wheels.
But it had a current Oklahoma license plate. Sean stopped one house down and withdrew a screwdriver from the Jeep’s glove compartment. He got out and moved quickly down the sidewalk, stepping around a broken tricycle and an empty Smirnoff vodka bottle.
It took him less than half a minute to get the Monte Carlo’s plate off. He’d noticed, while driving around this city, that Oklahoma did not require a front license plate, only the rear. That made his job much easier.
He had the plate under his arm and was halfway back to the Jeep when he heard a screen door slam.
“Hey!” a woman shouted.
He didn’t look back, but lengthened his stride back to the Jeep. He slid behind the wheel and started the Cherokee in one smooth motion. From the porch of the house, the woman yelled again.
“Alto!” Stop!
She was young, Hispanic, and tired-looking, with a baby on her hip. She reminded him eerily of the woman back in Sasabe who had glared at him as her little boy darted across the road in front of him.
“Alto!”
He gunned the Cherokee down the street, made a quick turn, and was out of sight. In a few minutes he was back on the interstate, heading west toward El Reno. Toward Daryn.
Forty-five minutes later, Sean exited Interstate 40 and pulled into the parking lot of the Super 8 Motel in El Reno. He circled to the back of the motel, away from the highway, and put the stolen Oklahoma plate on the Cherokee. He tucked his own Arizona plates under the rear seat, then drove around to the front again.
As he got out of the Jeep, with two bags of hastily purchased clothes and supplies in his arms, he looked up at Room 213. He saw a shadowy face in the window, and then the curtains fell back into place.
“Here I am,” he said as he entered the room a moment later. “I bought you some clothes. I sort of guessed at the sizes. Plus some water and sandwich stuff. Kat?”
He realized the room was very dark, none of the lights on, the thick curtains completely covering the window.
“Kat? It’s me, Michael. Are you here?”
I know she’s here. I saw the curtains move. She was watching for me.
“I’m here, Michael,” she said.
Sean’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. Kat’s form took shape in the chair on the far side of the bed, sitting very still.
“Are you all right?” Sean asked.
“Yes. I’m glad you’re back. I was beginning to wonder.”
She’d been just sitting there, in a dark room, no TV on, no radio on, nothing to read…just waiting for him. Sean blinked into the darkness. She was a woman of extremes, he thought, contrasting the unbridled lust she brought to her lovemaking with the incredible stillness of being able to sit in a room for hours, simply waiting. Sean shuddered, and it wasn’t just because he wanted a drink.
“Why don’t you turn on a light?” he said.
“I had a migraine. When I get one of those, it’s better in the dark.”
Sounds like having a bad hangover, Sean thought, but said nothing as he dropped the bags on the floor.
“Did you get the help?”
“What?” Sean said.
“The person who was going to help you. Did it work out?”
Sean sighed. “No. But look, I’ll stay with you and help you keep safe. I bought some food.”
“What about your business?”
Sean cocked his head. “What?”
“Your woodworking business. What will you do about it?”
Sean stuffed his hands in his pockets, suddenly thankful for the dark, that Kat couldn’t see his hands trembling. “I set my own hours. I work for myself, so I can do that. Might get behind on a couple of custom orders, but I’ll get caught up eventually.”
“Good. I hoped you’d want to stay with me, Michael.”
Sean nodded.
“You saved my life,” Daryn said.
“You don’t have to…”
Daryn reached over and flicked on the bedside lamp. It took a moment for Sean to focus in on her face, like watching an old television set warm up before the picture fully settled on the screen. In the harsh lamplight, her forehead was lined. It was quite striking on such a young, beautiful face.
“Migraines can really be painful,” Sean said. “I have a friend who gets them.”
Daryn nodded. “Very painful. But I feel better now. The dark and the quiet helped, and now you’re back. I was worried that you wouldn’t come back. You have your own life…I’m just an escort.”
Sean said nothing. She was leading the conversation, trying to take it somewhere, and he couldn’t tell where yet. He’d learned by now that whether it was in sex or in conversation, it was better to let her lead and see where she was going before committing.
She opened her dark eyes wide and looked straight at him. Into him. Deep into him.
Jesus, Sean thought. He’d stared down drug dealers and arms smugglers and child stealers and professional assassins, people with no regard whatsoever for human life, and he’d never seen a gaze as sharp as the one Daryn McDermott was giving him now. Sean was never one to look away, but he finally dropped his eyes from hers. He couldn’t take that gaze any longer.
“You do want to stay with me?” Daryn said, and her voice was very soft. “Michael,” she added, saying the name as if it were the amen at the end of a prayer.
Sean rubbed the back of his neck. He felt a growing heat there, and in some unfathomable way he felt powerless to control, he felt himself becoming rapidly aroused.
“Yes, Kat,” he whispered. “I do.”
A smile touched her face for a moment; then she stood and came toward him, stepping out of her clothes as she moved. Naked, she put her arms around him and held him very tightly.
“Take me, Michael,” she said. “Please, I want you to take me now.”
He looked down at her. This woman was so strange, he thought. She was equal parts power and yearning, strength and vulnerability, all in the same moment.
He kissed her, and both their mouths opened in hunger. Their tongues met. Sean felt as if his body was one giant nerve ending, and that Daryn knew how to tap into every part of it. Her mouth, her hands, her body…she was everywhere.
She was so petite that he could pick her up in his arms and she felt no heavier than a child. He turned around and sat her on the edge of the bed. She opened her legs for him, and within moments Sean had found her center.
Over the next two hours, Sean spent himself three times, something he’d never done before. Daryn drained him, physically and emotionally, until he felt he could scarcely move. They lay spooned together on the bed, the torn and tangled sheets surrounding them, the scent of their lust all around.
“Michael,” Daryn said softly.
Stroking her back very gently, Sean stirred a bit from his stupor. “Hmm?”
“If you really want to stay with me, I know a place we can go.”
“Oh?”
“Do you remember last night, when we talked about my ideas? The social and political changes I want to see?”
Sean blinked, becoming more alert. “Yes.”
“What did you think of what I said?”
Sean let out a long, slow breath. Tread carefully. Tread very, very carefully. “Your ideas are…”
“Yes?”
Sean stepped off the edge and into nothingness.
“Amazing. They would change the way our whole society functions.”
Daryn rolled over to face him. Her dark eyes were wide. “Yes. Yes, they would.”
“But I don’t see,” Sean said, “how any of those things will get done.”
“Michael…I know some people.”
Sean met her eyes.
“I know people,” she said. “We’re starting a movement. It’s called the Coalition for Social Justice. We’re going to try to make these things happen. Will you join us? Will you go with me, Michael?”
“Where?”
“We have a house. It’s in a little town called Mulhall. Do you know where that is?”
Sean shook his head. “No. I’m too new to the area. I haven’t explored many of the small towns.”
“It’s north of Oklahoma City. I know where it is. It’s out of the way. We can stay there. We’ll be safe.”
“What about those goons who came to your apartment?”
Daryn shook her head for emphasis. “They’ll never find us. Whoever they were, we’ll be safe with the Coalition. Come with me, Michael. We can make things happen. The leader of the Coalition is a man named Franklin Sanborn. He’s a visionary, and he and I agree on these things. We’re gathering more people all the time.”
Sean nodded slowly. He remembered something Faith had said, standing outside the AA building, something about how the bottle was holding him instead of the other way around. Now, he wondered, who was in control? Was he holding Daryn, or was she holding him?
He pushed the thoughts roughly away, as if trying to get away from something dead and rotting, something vile.
“I’ll go,” he said.
Daryn smiled.