Gideon (31 page)

Fortunately, no one else in line took note of her behavior. Or of her. It helped that she had on a pair of sunglasses and the old rain hat that she’d dug out of the backseat of the Subaru—a “rolling closet” was what Carl had once called it. It also helped that it was still early in the morning and anyone who was here had been driving all night, just as she and Carl had.

The first story to hit all-news radio came over her car radio less than twenty minutes after they’d fled the scene of the fire. That’s how they learned that Agent Shanahoff had been found dead in his car. That Carl was most likely his killer. That she was missing and believed to be part of the ashes. That the police were on the lookout for her car, which had vanished from her garage. They believed that Carl might have killed her for it. A spree killer, they were calling him now.

They were comparing him to famous serial killers throughout history.

“We have to go to the police,” she had said when she’d rediscovered her ability to speak. They were frantically speeding away from her burning house, Carl keeping one eye on the rearview mirror to make sure they weren’t being followed. “We have to tell them what we know.”

“No,” he had said.

“But Carl, they’re wrong! I’m alive. I’m living, breathing proof that you didn’t set fire to the house or shoot Shanahoff. I’ve been with you all night. I’m your alibi.”

“And what about Maggie?” he argued. “What about Toni? What about Harry? They don’t even
know
about Harry yet. When they find him, they’re gonna think I’m Jack the fuckin’ Ripper.”

“If they see they’re wrong about this, then they’ll know that you’re innocent of all the other things. Won’t they?”

He didn’t respond. They were both silent a moment.

“You have to turn yourself in, Carl.”

“No, Amanda. It’s not possible.”

“Why do you have to be so goddamn stubborn?” she cried, her voice rising. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator, as if sudden speed would somehow convince her that he was right. “Where will we go? What will we do? We can’t just stay out here in the street, driving around and around. You are a multiple-murder suspect. If you don’t turn yourself in, they’ll gun you down like an animal, don’t you understand?”

“Believe me, I understand.” He slowed down and reached for her hand in the darkness, gripping it tightly. “And I’m not disagreeing with you. Every word you’ve said is way too true. But the last time I tried calling the police, they did their best to kill me.”

“It’s your only choice, Carl. It’s your
only
choice.”

“When I have proof,” he said quietly.

“Proof?” she said, not so quietly. “What kind of proof?”

“Real, concrete proof of what’s really happening and who’s behind all of it. Otherwise I’m going to prison for the rest of my life. Unless, that is, they decide to just go right ahead and execute me.” He trailed off into bitter silence. It stayed there between them for a moment before he said, “Besides, there’s another reason why we can’t go to them.”

“And what’s that?” she asked curtly.

“You,” he said. “We have to think about you.”

She shook her head at him. “Come on, what’s the worst they can do to me—accuse me of aiding and abetting a fugitive? I’ll say I was reporting your story. My paper will back me up, no problem.”

“
They?
You’re still talking about the law. I’m talking about whoever is doing all this. You don’t understand how powerful they are. Five minutes after I called the cops, they tried to kill me. If they control the police, Amanda, what else do they control? They’ve killed four people so far. As of this moment, they think you’re the fifth. That means you’re safe. But if you surface, they’re going to come after you just like they’re coming after me. You’re dangerous to them. You know too much. I don’t know who
they
are, but I do know that the second we surface, they’ll find a way to kill you. And I just don’t think I can allow that to happen, if you don’t mind.”

She swallowed hard on this. “Of all the times for you to actually be right about something,” she said, “you have to go and pick now.” She tried to say it lightly, she tried to smile, but she just couldn’t manage it. “Well, what are we going to do?”

“Find out what the hell is going on. That’s what we’re going to do.”

He laid it out as they drove. It had all begun with the damned book. That was all they had to go on. They had to find out what had
really
happened down there. First they had to locate where “down there” was. Then they had to find out Danny’s real identity. If they could find him, they could learn who was after them. Who was trying to kill them.

“It’s my only chance,” he said. “It’s
our
only chance.”

She had nodded silently, and so they had driven due south all night on Interstate 95, stopping only once for gas at a twenty-four-hour Mobile station outside of Richmond, Virginia. They paid with cash—he still had over $700 from his late-night stop at the cash machine on Broadway—so that the FBI couldn’t trace them by their credit cards. She had taken over behind the wheel after that while Carl napped, shuddering fitfully in his sleep. Now it was morning and they found themselves approximately twenty miles east of Raleigh, North Carolina, pulling up at one of those alarming new enormous service stops that were cropping up on highways across the country. Each one was a self-contained twenty-four-hour monument to efficiency and bad nutrition erected in the highway’s center divider so as to be accessible by traffic going in both directions. This one contained two gas stations—one for cars, the other for trucks and buses—a TCBY yogurt franchise, a Roy Rogers, a Sbarro pizza, a Bob’s Big Boy, a Nathan’s, a Gourmet Bean coffee shop, ATM machines, fax machines, arcade games, rest rooms, a North Carolina tourist center, and a minimart where Amanda purchased the local newspaper and a copy of the
Herald
, as well as two boxes of animal crackers and a liter of mineral water.

Carl stayed in the car. He couldn’t risk being recognized.

Amanda felt disoriented in this place. Her legs were rubbery after so many hours behind the wheel, and her senses felt positively assaulted by all the bright lights and grease fumes, the arcade noises, the screaming children, the bus-loads of jabbering foreign tourists. After so many hours on the road in the dark of night, she felt a little as though she’d parachuted into the middle of a theme park in hell. Satan World. This would make a good Sunday-magazine story for one of her babies, she reflected. Working behind a Roy’s counter for a few overnight shifts, talking to the people, getting to know their—God, what was she thinking? She had no babies anymore. She had no job anymore.

Dear Diary, today I became an interstate fugitive. Otherwise, nothing new.

In the ladies’ room she splashed some cold water on her face, staring long and hard at her image in the mirror. She appeared tired but otherwise unchanged. Amazingly, there was no discernible difference. She looked like the same person. She did not know how this was possible. She did not know how appearances could be so deceiving.

When she got to the front of the line at Gourmet Bean, she ordered two extra-large lattès and two cranberry muffins. The cashier, who seemed half asleep, barely glanced at her.

Outside, the sun was shining fairly brightly. It was already warm, the air noticeably softer now that they were farther south. She had parked as far away from the other cars in the lot as she could. Carl was hunched low in the front seat with the sun visor down. He rolled down his window so she could hand him her purchases.

“The good news,” she reported, indicating the papers, “is that they think I’m dead. I don’t know how long they’ll think that, we’ve probably got a day, two at most. But when they do figure out I’m not urn material yet—”

“They’ll figure you’re either my prisoner or my accomplice.”

“Either way, it means even more attention and a tighter net. From all concerned.”

“What’s the
bad
news?” he asked.

She looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he didn’t already know the answer to that one. “Everything else,” she said. Then she watched as he started rustling through the paper, urgently flipping page after page. “What are you looking for?” she wanted to know.

“The Mets score. Don t’ they have a sports section in this paper?”

“The
Mets
, Carl? How can you possible think about the Mets at a time like this?”

Carl had no response to this. He just gazed at her.

“It’s in section two,” she said finally. “At the back.”

He turned to the sports section, scanned the column of box scores, and closed the paper backup. “They won,” he said. “Bobby Jones pitched a three-hitter. I figured you really wanted to know.”

“So you feel better now?”

“I do,” he confessed. “I know I shouldn’t, but I do.”

She got into the front seat beside him and they tore into their breakfast right there in the parking lot, grateful for the momentary stillness and quiet. Carl practically inhaled his muffin a he scanned the stories about himself on the front page: old girlfriends who professed to have seen into his dark side many hears earlier, and the guy who ran his local Korean market, two blocks from his apartment, who told the waiting world that he went through a tremendous amount of Tropicana Homestyle orange juice, rarely spoke, was usually unshaven, often shopped in the wee hours of the morning, and had the furtive air of someone who had just done something illegal.

And then there was an interview with his father.

Some scuzzball reporter had actually tracked him down in Pompano Beach, Florida, gone to his house, and confronted him. Carl could see him now, standing in the front doorway, the one with the golf bag door knocker, peering suspiciously out at the eager reporter. His old man hated any kind of personal scrutiny, so the interview would have been painful for Alfred Granville, Carl knew. But not as painful as it was for Carl to read. His father said nothing to defend him. He talked about how difficult this whole experience for him.
Him
. Not Carl. He talked as if Carl had changed, gone in another direction after his mother had died.
I did notice he’d become angry, kind of morose. He pushed me further away. no, I don’t think he wanted help. I don’t think he was aware that he needed help
. That was one of the quotes the reporter had elicited from his father.
It pains me to think that he’s guilty of all this
, Alfred Granville had gone on to say,
but I’ll have to deal with it, come to terms with my own culpability
. He was talking about Carl as if he were guilty as charged. As if no more questions needed to be asked. As if …

Carl ripped the page out of the newspaper, crumpled it up into a tight ball, held it against his chest, wished at that moment he could have driven it through his heart, and closed his eyes. Slowly his hand unclenched, and he let the wad of paper fall to the protective rubber mat on the car’s carpeted floor. He was only torturing himself. Reading these stories was doing him no good. There was no information of any importance and even less truth. So, trying to pretend just for a few moments that he was a normal tourist taking a normal break from a normal drive, he began to read about something else. Anything else.

“What’s the story with this priest?” he asked Amanda after reading the article on page three in the
Herald
.

“What do you mean?”

“Why would a priest just up and disappear?”

She shrugged, making it clear that a missing man of the cloth was not her number one concern at the moment. But then, after a brief silence, she said, “I met him once.”

“The priest?”

She nodded. “We were doing a story on dealing with grief. One of my babies interviewed him, liked him a lot. Wound up having dinner with him and they became friends. Father Patrick, right? Patrick Jennings.”

“Yeah. What was he grieving about?”

“His sister was killed in a car accident. A drunk driver. It sent him into a tailspin. What I remember most about him is that even though he was really handsome and he had this amazing voice—you could practically feel him preaching at you when he spoke—what really came through was how deeply depressed he was. He was the saddest guy I ever met. He was telling me all about his days at Marquette; he said they were the happiest days of his life. He was going on about how they were days of reflection and study, how he really
believed
in things then … and he still sounded so deeply sad.”

“So what do you think happened to him?”

“It says they found his car down by the river, gas tank half-full. The papers make it sound like he committed suicide.”

“Sounds like you buy it.”

She nodded. “He was unhappy enough, that’s for sure.” Scanning the paper, she made a face. “Still no mention of Harry’s murder.”

“And still not a thing on the radio. It’s a little weird.”

“Why?”

“Because someone has gone to so much trouble to construct this frame around me, that’s why. Let’s face it, I’m a living, breathing killing machine. And Harry’s a slam-dunk to be one of my victims. I was in the man’s house. My fingerprints are bound to be all over the place. He’s a natural.”

“A natural,” she said softly, remembering the sight of Harry Wagner there in the refrigerator, the blood oozing from his unseeing eye.

“So why not mention of him?” Carl pressed.

“Maybe no one’s found his body yet,” she offered.

“Or maybe somebody’s covering it up,” he countered.

“Why would they do that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe I’m just being paranoid again.”

“Maybe. But if you are, Carl, you have awfully good reason to be.”

With that, Amanda started up the Subaru. Or tried to. It wouldn’t kick over. Carl stiffened noticeably and closed his eyes. But she said a silent prayer and it did fine on the second try, thumping and thudding valiantly.

They were back on the road.

Twenty minutes or so away from the service stop, Amanda reached for her map of the southeastern states and unfolded it. “I think it’s time we get serious,” she said. “We don’t know the name of the town we’re looking for, do we? We don’t even know which state it’s in.”