Unforced Error (15 page)

Chapter 23

The sprawling reception room at Jackrabbit Press showed no traces Friday morning of the Civil War setting from Tuesday night. Framed covers of period romances supplemented historical prints and paintings on the walls. A Chesterfield sofa and mate's chairs in matching maroon leather defined a waiting area around a low maple table holding
The New York Times
,
The Kansas City Star
, and a month's worth of
People
.

Lawrence and Pignatano greeted Rep, Melissa, and Linda around nine-thirty at Henderson's desk. Henderson smiled briefly at Rep. If Jackrabbit Press had any other employees on site that day, Rep saw no evidence of them. Lawrence pressed Linda's right hand with paternal warmth.

“I know that our loss is your loss as well,” he said. (It occurred to Rep that this perhaps wasn't the most tactful phraseology under the circumstances.) “Thomas always said that you were the most talented editor he worked with, and I know how highly you thought of him. At the moment, though, you and Peter have things far more important than manuscripts and production schedules to worry about. If you think legal advice would be helpful, Mr. Pignatano is here to assist in any way he can.”

“That's very generous, Mr. Lawrence. I've been wandering around in a daze since Tuesday night. I don't know where to turn.”

“Then let's go to the conference room and talk it through, shall we?”

“This will sound silly, but could we talk in the editorial office instead? That's where I worked with Tommy, and I'd feel more comfortable.”

“I understand perfectly,” Lawrence said, his smile silky and tender at the same time. “Regrettably, however, the police have asked us to stay out of that office for a few more days, in case they want to check it further.”

“Mmm, sure,” Linda said, nodding. “Conference room, then.”

Nice try, but no cigar
, Rep thought.
Time for Plan B
.

His right hand in the side pocket of his sport coat, Rep pressed the SEND button on his cell-phone. He had punched Melissa's number into the phone just before they entered the building. Six seconds later (for the satellite apparently had other things to do that morning), after they had moved several strides past Henderson's desk, Melissa's phone beeped. She answered the phone while Rep pressed the speaker on his phone as hard as he could against the inside lining of his jacket pocket.

“I can't talk now, I'm about to go into a meeting,” Melissa said impatiently. Then a note of urgent alarm crept into her voice. “What, Sheila? Is it about Mom? Just a minute.”

Lowering the phone, she looked at the others with an expression combining anxiety with contrition.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “You all go ahead. I've got to take this.”

Without waiting for reaction, she turned away from them and walked back toward the reception area. She returned the phone to her ear and, head lowered, whispered urgently into it. She continued this pantomime for about two minutes, slumping into one of the mate's chairs, rocking gently back and forth, taking measured breaths as if to calm herself. Then she put the phone down and held it with both hands in her lap as she looked straight ahead.

She resisted the urge to offer Henderson an explanation. She hoped that, left to her own devices, Henderson would work out a better story than Melissa could invent. Doing her best to look worried and then bored, Melissa counted slowly to three-hundred.

At that point she opened her purse. It held three things that wouldn't ordinarily have been there, and she now took two of them out: a pack of Virginia Slims, and a book of matches. Tucking her purse under her left arm and raising the cigarettes and matches in her right hand, she turned sheepishly toward Henderson.

“Excuse me,” she stage-whispered, “is there a place where I can smoke without bothering anyone?”

“Sure,” Henderson said, offering Melissa an I've-been-there smile. “Straight out the back door, on the porch. There's some shade and a place to sit and a butt-can filled with sand. It's not fancy, but it should do.”

“Thanks,” Melissa said. She rose and headed for the hallway that would take her past the conference room and toward the back door. On the way, she stopped near Henderson's desk. “Please don't tell my husband,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I promised him that I'd quit, and I mostly have, but I'm afraid I've relapsed a little this past week.”

“Don't worry,” Henderson said, giving her a thumbs-up.

Melissa walked down thirty feet of hallway, past the stairs and then the conference room door, to a kitchen that Lawrence had converted into an employee lounge and lunch room. Leading from that room to the back porch was a Dutch door, carefully preserved and clearly intended to look as if someone were actually about to set freshly baked apple pie out to cool on the lower half.

Melissa slipped out of the espadrilles she was wearing. She punched the general number for Jackrabbit Press into her cell phone and rested her right thumb on the SEND button. She pushed the back door open and then pulled it sharply closed, loudly enough for Henderson to hear.

Taking a deep breath, she pushed the SEND button and at the same instant began quietly backtracking. She heard a discreet burr from the reception area, followed by Henderson's polished, professional voice saying, “Jackrabbit Press. How may I direct your call?…. Jackrabbit Press.…Hello? Is anyone there?”

By “hello” Melissa had gotten all the way back to the stairway. She began going up, moving as lightly as she could and praying that Henderson's exasperation with the unresponsive caller would cover any stray creaks Melissa produced. She made it unchallenged to the top and for the second time in her life found herself facing, a scant dozen feet away at the end of the upstairs hallway, a solid looking, thoroughly contemporary mahogany door that announced in raised, pewter letters:

JACKRABBIT PRESS

Editorial Office

R. Thomas Quinlan Imprint

No yellow police tape barred the doorway. Perhaps fifteen feet down the wall from that door was its twin brother, this one marked:

OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER

John Paul Lawrence

Melissa now took the third unwonted item from her purse: the key to the first door, which Linda had given her. She strode to the door, worked the key laboriously into the lock, turned hard, pushed the door open, and went in.

***

He's good
, Rep thought as he listened to the gently but insistently probing questions that Pignatano asked in a serenely reassuring, carefully non-threatening tone.

“The single most helpful thing we could do at this point,” Pignatano was saying now, “is figure out where Peter is. That way, we can get him a lawyer he has confidence in—maybe me, maybe Mr. Pennyworth here, maybe someone else—so he can come in to the police and they'll stop looking for him.”

“Won't they arrest him?” Linda asked.

“They might, and that won't be any picnic,” Pignatano said. “But it's a lot less unpleasant if we're in control of the process. Apart from everything else, if Peter voluntarily appears we have at least an outside shot at getting bail. The very worst thing would be for the cops to find him at a TraveLodge somewhere in western Kansas under an assumed name.”

“I can't believe Peter would run away,” Linda said.

You probably can't believe he'd carve Tommy Quinlan up like a Halloween pumpkin either
, Rep and Pignatano thought simultaneously.

“Well,” Pignatano said, “we need to drill down a little deeper into where he could be, then.”

“I've wracked my brain,” Linda said, “I really have.”

“I know. I know you've tried to think of every conceivable place. But now let's take that process to the next level. If he were in any of the logical places around Kansas City, the police would certainly have found him by now. We have to get outside the box and really use our imaginations, come up with some possibilities that wouldn't occur to anyone the first time around.”

“All right,” Linda said, “I'll try. Let me think.”

***

At the end of her eighth belly-churning minute inside the editorial offices, Melissa perched, baffled, on the edge of Quinlan's desk. Sweat pearled her chin and the back of her light blouse stuck to sodden shoulder blades, for the undersized window air-conditioner on the other side of the room wasn't on.

She hadn't wasted her time up to now. Under Quinlan's desk she had found a Scotsman mini-refrigerator with a tiny freezer and no ice trays. She had come across a bill from Hickman Mills Medical Laboratory that had apparently arrived with that morning's mail. It demanded $154.75 for “Professional Services” that, according to a box checked on the bottom of the invoice, were NOT COVERED BY INSURANCE. Both suggestive, neither conclusive.

What she hadn't found was the thunderbolt. The thing that had crystallized Peter's thinking and galvanized him into action. She knew that it not only had to be here, but had to be in plain sight. But she couldn't spot it.

She stood up and walked over to the desk that Linda used when she worked at the office instead of at home. Linda had said that when she'd talked to Peter Tuesday night she had started by pulling her desk chair out to one side and parking herself directly opposite the visitor's chair where he'd been sitting. She'd wanted to pour her heart out face-to-face, without any barrier in between them. Melissa now pulled the visitor's chair away from the desk a bit, angled it, and sat down in it as if she were Peter facing Linda.

She couldn't imagine Peter's eyes anywhere but on Linda as they talked and then clinched and kissed like a couple of teenagers in the back seat of dad's Lexus. She pictured them coming up for air while Peter ecstatically imagined fatherhood and Linda suddenly felt her gorge rising. She mimed Peter stepping back, baffled and anxious, when Linda sputtered her hurried exit line, then Peter turning to watch as Linda hustled out the door.

Then Peter—what? She had no idea. Maybe he'd stood there gaping at the doorway. Maybe he'd wandered randomly around the office, idly fingering paper weights and glancing at the flotsam and jetsam of office life. Maybe he'd picked up a manuscript and scanned a page or two. No matter how systematically Melissa did it, any further reconstruction of his movements would amount to pure conjecture.

She rapped her knuckles on Linda's desk. She had stood in this room herself, Tuesday night, not long after Peter had. Whatever he had seen she must have seen then, without noticing it. She tried to remember the way the room had looked to her that night, how it had seemed different than this morning aside from not being as stiflingly hot and close.

She looked again at the doorway to the hall. Then, quite deliberately, trying now not to reconstruct Peter's movements but to jog her own recollection of the room that night, she racked her head back the other way, five degrees of arc at a time, noting each image that came within her field of vision.

Haphazardly laden bookshelves starting next to the hallway door and following the wall around its inside corner. Remainders, advance-reader-copies, and manuscripts spilling onto the floor. Quinlan's large, L-shaped desk in front of the shelves, dominating that quarter of the office. No melodramatic note from Tuttle spiked to his chair this time, but the difference nagging at her went beyond that. A connecting door to Lawrence's office just beyond the bank of shelves. The wall on the other side of that door, most of it taken up by an enormous calendar on erasable whiteboard showing editorial and production schedules for three titles. The intersecting wall along the rear of the building, with its window and non-functioning air conditioner—no wonder it felt so sticky in here. More shelves, canted a bit under the strain of—

Wait. She remembered Tuesday night as also rather warm, but she hadn't felt herself suffocating in this room. She didn't recall hearing the air conditioner. She shifted her eyes back to it. It wasn't just off. It looked disused, somehow, as if it hadn't been on for quite awhile. A naked bolt peeked through where one of the control knobs was missing. She walked over to the machine and flipped the ON button. Nothing. Not even a fan. She returned to her vantage point at Linda's desk.

So what? So…why hadn't this room seemed like a sweltering precursor of Purgatory Tuesday night? She swept her gaze back the other direction—and she had it. The connecting door to Lawrence's office hadn't been closed, as it was now, but ajar. The resulting draft had cooled the room just enough to take the edge of the heat.

She strode across the room. She pushed the connecting door open. And caught the thunderbolt right between her eyes.

Mounted on an easel in front of Lawrence's desk, the painting had to be four feet high by twelve feet long. It depicted a sparkling warship—a destroyer, Melissa guessed, although she certainly wasn't an expert—cutting proudly through a white-flecked, sunlit sea. Large white letters along the prow read U.S.S. LIBERTY.

Even if Tuttle's note hadn't monopolized her attention Tuesday night and she'd noticed the painting, it probably wouldn't have clicked. With the discoveries of the past two days, though, her epiphany was so complete and at the same time so grotesque that it took her breath away. Understanding snapped into place. Not for nothing was she married to a guy who'd gotten his bachelor's degree in Twentieth Century History. During the Six Day War in 1967 between Israel and four Arab countries, Israeli warplanes had attacked and severely damaged the
U.S.S. Liberty,
killing several crewmen. Israel had pled that the attack was a tragic error, and the United States had accepted that assurance. The
U.S.S. Liberty
had nonetheless become an icon for some of the more ferocious strains of antisemitism lurking in the slimy sub-basement of American life.

The implications appalled her, but a thrill of elation mingled with the disgust. Peter hadn't killed Quinlan. He was innocent. Linda wins, logic loses.