The Homecoming (28 page)

Lemon sat quietly and listened. He knew a bit about this, but Kate had never opened up on the topic. He let her run.

“For starters, there was no record of Rainey’s birth as a Gwinnett in any of the databases, local, county, statewide, adjoining states. Canada, Mexico, Jupiter. Nothing. The foster home, no record of it ever existing. The Palgraves, his foster parents, the only Palgraves I ever found were Zorah and Martin Palgrave. Would you like to know when they were married?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Zorah and Martin Palgrave were married at the Methodist Church in Sallytown on March 15. In 1893. Dad found an old photograph of a family reunion—
The Niceville Families Jubilee, John Mullryne’s Plantation, Savannah, Georgia, 1910
. All four of the Founding Families were there—the Haggards, the Cottons, the Walkers—”

“And the Teagues.”

“Yes. The name of the company that printed the photo was on the card. Zorah and Martin Palgrave.”

“Maybe a coincidence?”

Kate gave him a wry look.

“You don’t believe that yourself. Not after everything that’s happened. I don’t know what to make of it. Or of this. On April 12, 1913, the Palgraves banked a letter of credit drawn on the Memphis Trust Bank. The letter stated that the funds were to cover costs related to ‘the care and confinement of Clara Mercer and the delivery of a healthy male child on March 2, 1913.’ The credit letter was issued on the account of Glynis Ruelle. We have every reason to believe that the man who got her pregnant—and started the whole feud—was Abel Teague. He’s in the shot, and so is Clara. Beside his name somebody wrote the word
shame
.”

“Miles had to know about all this. He was the one who arranged the adoption for Sylvia.”

“Yes. He hired a lawyer named Leah Searle to handle it. I found a letter from her to Miles, at least it had her signature on it, dated May 9, 2002, prior to Rainey’s adoption, and in the letter she provided a copy of Rainey’s birth certificate, which stated that he was born in Sallytown on March 2, 2002. It listed his parents as Lorimar and Prudence Gwinnett.
They were supposed to have died in a barn fire so Rainey went into foster care with the Palgraves. Except none of this was true. Or if it is, there is no way to verify it. To be honest, I think Miles paid Leah Searle to fake the documents.”

“Did Sylvia know anything about this?”

“I think she was looking into it when Rainey was kidnapped.”

“Have you talked to the lawyer, Leah Searle?”

Kate said nothing for a while.

“No. I couldn’t. She died after the adoption.”

“How?”

“She drowned, according to her obituary.”

“So what you’re saying is, nobody knows who Rainey really is?”

Kate shook her head.

“No, I’m not saying that. I sure as hell don’t think that Rainey was born on March 2, 1913, and that he is, in reality, the illegitimate son of Abel Teague and Clara Mercer. On the other hand, there’s no way that Rainey is eleven either. He’s already well into puberty. His voice is changing. He’s filling out. Getting muscle. He’s almost my height now, and probably just as strong. If he’s under fifteen I’ll be … I don’t know. I just don’t know. I mean, if his birth certificate is a fake, then how old is he, really?”

“Kids are doing that earlier and earlier, Kate. Growing up too fast. Every generation does it.”

“It’s more than that. Sometimes, when I’m talking to him, it’s like there’s something inside there, looking out at me through his eyes. And whatever
that
is, it’s not a kid.”

She teared up, fought it down.

“Kate, this is all … it’s just a screwup with the records. Happens everywhere.”

She smiled, her eyes bright and moist. “Yes. It does.”

“Boonie said something at the Pavilion—maybe he had a point. Maybe one of us—you and me, or Reed—he’s a cop and would have more weight to throw—should drive up to Sallytown and look around the place one more time.”

She nodded but could not say anything. Her fears were all on the table, and looking at them was making them worse.

After a tense silence, he changed the subject with an audible clank.

“Okay. We’ll think about Sallytown later. I checked the television. It
was still warm as well. But I think they always are. The channel mode was set to DVD. I found this in the machine. I guess Rainey was watching home movies.”

He held up a homemade DVD with a colorful label on it, a family photograph, Miles and Sylvia and a younger Rainey, taken in front of a brightly decorated Christmas tree.

Kate took it and stared down at it, and the image blurred, and she realized she was crying again. She handed it back to him, and he laid it down on Sylvia’s desk. Kate saw a shelf with Sylvia’s notepaper on it. She took a blank sheet, sat down at Sylvia’s desk, and wrote out a note, but she didn’t use Sylvia’s pen.

She set the pen down, placed a small carved netsuke rabbit on top of the note, and got up.

“Okay. They’re not here. Where to now?”

Lemon glanced out the window, saw the light fading as the evening came on, slowly but surely.

“No call from Eufaula?”

“Nope.”

“Then we have to go to Patton’s Hard.”

“I know,” said Kate. “I just don’t want to.”

By the time Boonie and Nick got to the Galleria, the situation had, as the saying goes, hardened. The mall was locked down and all the staff and civilians had been herded to the outer edges of the mall parking lot, where they were clustering around a harried cop like a squadron of Canada geese, squawking that somebody had better
go get their cars and stuff because well because and because …

The cop was close to losing his temper and they heard it finally go with a loud bang just as Boonie pulled through the cordon of Niceville cruisers—their light racks slowly flashing.

A large female staff sergeant in blue and gold with the name
CROSSFIRE
engraved on a silver plate on her tunic loomed up out of the crowd of cops and brass and leaned down to look in the driver’s window. Mavis beamed down at Boonie, and then noticed Nick in the passenger seat.

“Nick, what in the name of blue devils are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in the hospital. Does Kate know you’re here?”

“Tig Sutter sent me. Is he here?”

“No. Tig’s too smart for that. We got enough chiefs already, now that Boonie’s here. How are you, Boonie?”

“I’m fine, Mavis. What’s the sitrep?”

“
Sitrep
, Boonie?”

“You know what I mean, Mavis. Gimme a break.”

She smiled, blew out her breath.

“Well, it is a cluster—it’s a circus for sure. Deitz and a guy named Andy Chu are holed up inside the Bass Pro Shop—”

“How’d they manage that?” Boonie wanted to know.

“Well, I’m afraid we Niceville cops are going to take the heat for that. We got an anonymous call from this party saying that a Securicom
employee named Andy Chu hadn’t gone in to work and that maybe he was sheltering Byron Deitz at his house. Since Deitz is a multi-jurisdictional problem, well, Chief Keebles decided—”

“Oh jeez,” said Boonie, putting his head down on the steering wheel.

Mavis patted him on the shoulder.

“There, there, Boonie. It’ll be all right. Anyway, Chief Keebles decided to hand the job to our own Emergency Response Team—sorta break them in, they being brand new and all—and by the time they got their pull-ups and onesies on and hit the road on their Big Wheels, it seems that this Chu guy and Deitz were already rolling in Chu’s Lexus. So the chief figured, better not try to take him down until they had an idea of where he was going. Chief Keebles felt that maybe he was going to dig up the money he stole from the bank—”

“And he’d share in the glory of its recovery?”

“That’s our boy.”

“Was there air?” asked Nick.

“Yep. Ours was in the shop, so Chief Keebles asked for help from the Air National Guard, and they sent a Huey over—”

Boonie started bumping his head on the steering wheel. It was distracting. Nick reached over and stopped him. Mavis, paying this no mind, went on in a detached and amused tone.

“Well, of course Hueys tend to attract attention—no mistaking that
thrumpety-thrumpety
sound—one thing led to another and now Deitz has locked himself inside the Bass Pro Shop—”

“Any hostages?” Nick asked.

“Well, maybe. We’re not quite sure of the status of this Andy Chu guy who’s in there with him. Chu is head of IT at Deitz’s company. Chu fired a round at our ERT guys outside the entrance to the Bass store, so maybe he’s more of an accomplice. Or he just panicked. They were shooting at him, after all. And he threw his gun away a second later. Could have gone off by accident. Looked like he had a wound. They found blood all over the gun he was using. Deitz went through the store—even knew how to get the clerks out of their hidey-hole behind the gun racks—and he herded everybody he could find up onto the roof and went back down the stairs and bolted the steel fire door shut. They used the Huey to extract those folks.”

“Praise the Lord,” said Boonie.

“Amen. But it grieves me to tell you that there’s a lady out there in the parking lot, name of Delores Maranzano, says her husband, Frankie, and
his grandson, Ritchie, were using the bathroom in the Pro Shop and now they’re missing and nobody knows where they are.”

“So they might still be in there with Deitz?”

“Possibility, Nick. Definite possibility.”

“Did they have cells?”

“She says they’re shut off.”

“How old’s the grandkid?”

“Fourteen.”

“Has this Frankie guy called out yet?”

“Not a peep. Probably laying low. There’s a wrinkle, however.”

Boonie lifted his eyes to heaven and said, “Of course there is.”

“What is it?” Nick asked.

“Seems Frankie has a concealed carry permit.”

Nick sighed.

“And of course he has his piece with him?”

Mavis nodded.

“Delores says he’s never without it. He worries about being kidnapped, she says. Apparently he’s filthy rich. He sleeps with it under his pillow.”

“What’s he got?”

“Oh, you’ll love this part. Checked the registry. He has a Dan Wesson .44 Magnum—”

Boonie moaned.

“Don’t tell me,” said Nick. “With the eight-inch barrel.”

Mavis nodded.

“She says he has a custom-made shoulder rig with a couple of slots for auto-loaders.”

“So he’s a shooter?”

“The wife says he goes to those combat simulation ranges. Takes Little Ritchie along with him. Ritchie’s a shooter too. A keener, like his granddad.”

“How old is this guy?”

“Forty-eight. From his driver’s license shot, he looks a bit like a thug. Got a mean mouth and little eyes. He’s six one, runs one-ninety. Wife says he’s a lifter. He looks it.”

“What does he do for a living?”

Mavis shrugged.

“Nobody knows. But Delores fits the trophy wife pattern. They’re
driving a Bentley. She says Frankie has commercial real estate down in Destin, Florida, but he made his big money in contracting out in Nevada.”

“Nevada? Anything against him?”

Mavis shook her head.

“Negative on NCIC and MAGLOCEN and the rest of the databases. Boonie, he ring any bells?”

Boonie wiped his face with both hands.

“There’s a Frankie Maranzano lives right across Fountain Square from my office. Top floor of the Memphis. We check out anybody has a clear line of fire into our space, so we looked at him. But his lawyer, fucking Julian Porter, started squealing about how Italian Americans were being targeted by the Feds. There was really nothing solid against him. Like J. Edgar said, ‘Not every dago is a don.’ ”

Boonie pulled himself together.

“Anyway, what counts here is we got an aggressive guy and he has a hand cannon and a grandson he’s gonna want to impress and he’s prancing around inside that store somewhere.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Anybody killed yet?”

“Not yet. Securicom guard named Jermichael Foley got himself shot in the right knee—”

“
Securicom
?”

Mavis nodded, knowing where this was going to go. “That’s right. Securicom as in BD Securicom. We checked the records and guess who personally oversaw the design and installation of the security systems for the entire Galleria Mall? Including the Bass Pro Shop?”

Boonie lifted his head from the wheel. There was a bright red bar, slightly curved, marking the pale pink skin of his forehead.

“That place is a fortress,” said Boonie.

“That it is,” said Mavis. “And Deitz knows it better than any of us.”

“We can’t leave him in there,” said Boonie. “He’s got enough supplies to last a month. And there are two civilians in the line of fire. Has anybody tried to reach Deitz?”

“Yep. Our platoon boss got him on his cell phone.”

“Deitz want anything?”

“Yep. He wants the Live Eye crew, and his lawyer—”

Boonie put his head back down on the wheel.

“Warren Smoles,” he said.

“That’s the man,” said Mavis. “He’s here now. Pulled up in that big white Benz over there. He’s been on the Live Eye feed twice already, saying we were about to assassinate an innocent man, demanding immediate access to his client.”

“Boonie,” said Nick, “you let Warren Smoles in on this—with the Live Eye people along—and he’ll turn it into a six-week reality show starring Warren Smoles. He’ll deal out the film rights for a half mil. Deitz will have a book deal by Friday. And in the meantime Deitz will have that whole store trip-wired and booby-trapped so tight that it would take a platoon to pry him out of there. The longer you wait, the better prepared his defensive position will be. And Frankie will eventually make a dipshit move and get himself killed. Little Ritchie too. I’ve seen this all before. You have to take this on the fly, before Deitz gets dug in.”