The Body of David Hayes (39 page)

“No. But I am ready for a change. Consulting, maybe. More time at home afternoons.” She added philosophically, “You never fully undo something like this. If there’s one
overriding lesson, for me anyway, it’s about the repercussions of our actions. Maybe there’s some closure now. I’ve carried this—we’ve
both
carried this—for a long time. It would be nice to get it behind us.”

Boldt glanced into the rearview mirror, the road receding behind them, and he nearly mentioned the symbolism to her but thought better of it. He kept it to himself. He hoped Svengrad would be jailed over tax evasion, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever stop looking over his shoulder. Svengrad had a long reach. He kept this to himself as well.

Liz was quiet for a few minutes, looking out her window as if the sights there were new to her. Then she reached down and unfolded the newspaper and opened it, fingering through to the business section. “Did you read this morning’s paper?”

He had, but he claimed not to have. Nothing got past her.

She turned it over to below the fold. “Tell me about this.”

Boldt kept driving, eyes on the road.

“An adoption agency, an inner-city soccer program. Was I supposed to miss this?”

He adjusted the rearview mirror, still saying nothing.

“Six million dollars in anonymous donations between the two. How much longer until another eleven in similar donations makes the news?” She said, “You must have forced David to do it, because this isn’t like him.”

“We negotiated certain conditions to his receiving protection, it’s true. Testimony on Danny’s behalf is part of it. Danny wasn’t trying to make himself rich; he was trying to clear a case that no one else cared about. He went about it the wrong way, but Hayes overheard some important
statements that Danny made—some, while beating him. Geiser will roll on Svengrad. It’ll come down like a house of cards.”

“You didn’t rescue him to save him,” she said, figuring some of it out on the fly. “You needed him to intercept the wire for you.”

“You make adjustments as you go.”

“All seventeen to nonprofits?”

“Let’s just say that KPLU will be playing jazz for a long, long time.” He switched on the radio. Oscar Peterson. He felt Liz staring at him, could hear her mind churning as she debated what to say, what to ask. Finally, she just sighed, opened the paper, and began reading. “The adoption agency was a nice touch,” she said. “It’s the one Beth and Tony used.”

“Yeah,” Boldt allowed. “I thought that sounded familiar.”

“You’re never going to admit this,” she said, “even to

me?”

“When the statute of limitations has run out, we’ll talk.”

“Seven more years together,” she said. “I like the sound of that.”

“Me too,” Boldt admitted, taking the wheel firmly in hand and changing lanes.

BOLDT HAD NOT FELT THIS
nervous since the birth of their first child, who now sat inside the room behind them. They’d flown down as a family. Liz’s sister’s kid, in her last year of graduate work at UC Berkeley, had offered to take Sarah to the Exploratorium, leaving Boldt and his wife on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a hallway that reminded the lieutenant of waiting outside a courtroom.

Liz had busied herself with projects since leaving the bank. The garage was spanking clean. When she offered to index his jazz albums he knew it was time she found work again. For his part, he was back at work, though staying behind his desk. He’d even booked himself back into the Joke’s on You, playing jazz piano during Happy Hour. He felt at peace each evening from five until seven.

From the room behind them they heard Miles’s inspired piano playing. Boldt recognized the song: a Monk ballad the boy had picked up from Boldt by ear.

It had been difficult, the past month. They had not made love yet, and he wondered if that was going to happen, or
if they were doomed to one of those marriages of living together but not fully loving together. He didn’t want that.

She asked, “Do you think—”

“Yes,” he interrupted, knowing as only a husband can know, that this question had to do with the child on the other side of the wall. The kids were the sinew that bound the muscle of the marriage. That muscle kept growing stronger with exercise. “They’re going to tell us he’s unusually gifted, and it’s going to be left to us to accelerate that talent or let him develop like any kid his age.” She nodded. “He knows it all intuitively, Liz. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Our little Mozart.”

“It’s going to mean tough choices,” he said. “Financially. Sending him away.”

“They don’t have to be tough,” she said. “We’ll just listen for what’s right.”

He wanted badly to reach down and take her hand just then, but something stopped him. It struck him as too sentimental, or maybe an act of forgiveness that he couldn’t yet afford.

They heard singing from the other side of that wall. A pure, golden voice right on pitch. “Amazing,” he said.

“We’ll work it out,” she said. “You trust that, don’t you?”

This was a much larger question than she let on.

“I do,” he said, the words indelibly reminding him of the original vows they had made to each other.

“I’d like to hold your hand,” he admitted.

“Then why don’t you?” She offered him hers.

“I don’t know,” he said, still unable to take hers up.

“Well, we’ll start there,” she said, placing her hand back into her lap.

The music grew behind them, the clear voice penetrating through the wall, and they both turned to face each other at the same instant. The song pushing through the wall was “Edelweiss” from
The Sound of Music
, his son’s voice so pure and simple.

Boldt caught himself humming along.

Ridley Pearson
is the co-author of the bestselling
Peter and the Starcatchers
. His novels have sold over six million copies and have been translated into twenty languages. The bestselling author of fourteen novels, including
The Body of David Hayes
and
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
, he is the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in detective fiction at Oxford University. He divides his time between Sun Valley, Idaho, and St. Louis, Missouri.

The forty-first day was their last together
.

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

“I can’t stand this,” she said.

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

“Us, or the situation?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little more authentic this time.

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

going to get.

“It’s probably better this way,” she said. “Right?”

“No. It’s decidedly worse.”

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

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

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

“You’re hopeless.”

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

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

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