Last Breath (26 page)

He looked dubious but nodded. Then he looked at Duggan. “Why don't we go down to the cafeteria and have some coffee. Chloe can meet us there.”

“That's a good idea,” Chloe said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Then she stepped into the hospital room, where she was warmly greeted by Margaret. Merv's welcome was weaker, but he was smiling.

“How are you doing?” Chloe asked Merv.

“I’m going to be fine,” he answered. “Tired for a little while, but I’m going to be okay.”

“I’m so glad to hear that.”

“He's going to be quitting as facilities manager, though,” Margaret said firmly. “That's just too much work for someone who ought to be retired.”

Merv raised a brow. “You want to kill me? I need to feel useful.”

“Well, you can cut back your hours then. Get an assistant.”

Merv opened his mouth as if to argue, then looked embarrassed. “Chloe doesn't want to hear this.”

“It's okay. I just wanted to see how you were doing, and let you know I’ll keep you both in my prayers.”

She remained another few minutes chatting with them, but she could see Merv was rapidly tiring, so she excused herself and headed to the cafeteria. Brendan and Sean Duggan were there as promised.

She picked up a coffee and joined them.

Brendan cocked his head and looked at her. “So what's the lecture?”

“No lecture. Just that we've found out there's a deadline tomorrow at eight-thirty
P.M
. Do you think you can behave yourself until then?”

He looked startled. “How did you find that out?”

“There was a message coded in that ugly e-mail. Date and time. And since they used the kind of coding you mentioned, and you know that Tom Humboldt was worried about a conspiracy of some kind, it may just be they want you out of the way because of what you might remember.”

He started to shake his head, then paused. “Okay. It's possible.”

“Father” — she leaned toward him, keeping her voice low — “we suspect there's something really big going on here. Something worse than Steve's murder.”

“It's hard to imagine anything worse than that.” Then he caught himself. “No, it isn't. I just don't want to imagine such things.”

“So will you behave?”

He gave her a rueful look. “I’ll try.”

She sighed, figuring she wasn't going to get any more out of him than that, but knowing it didn't mean much. So she turned to Duggan. “You keep your eye on this guy.”

Duggan grinned. “Believe it. No priest is going to get killed on my watch. My mother would never forgive me.”

Brendan cracked a smile. “With the Irish, it always comes back to Mother.”

Duggan laughed. “It sure does.”

Chloe smiled, too, but laid her hand on Brendan's arm. “Listen to me, Father. Please. Just until tomorrow night.”

“I will. Insofar as I can.”

So she let it go. And decided that he was going to have to be watched like a hawk. But it was so good to see him almost his old self again, happy in his priesthood. Happy to be doing all those things that only a priest could do.

Duggan drove Brendan back to the church. Chloe took a longer route, driving around the edge of the island, taking in the water, passing the private airport.

It was as she was passing Peter O. Knight Airport that something caught her eye. She jammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side, unsure what had brought her to attention. Her gaze ran over the flat acreage, over the runway and the few planes parked near it.

Nothing. She couldn't imagine why she had felt compelled to stop.

Then she saw it: a number painted on the tail of a plane.

And she knew.

“Still no ID on the victim,” Phelan told Matt. “I’ve sent out a description in case he matches any missing person report, but since he died only a couple of days ago, that may not yield anything for a while.”

“Fingerprints?” Matt asked.

“No response yet.”

“You may not get any.”

Phelan arched his brows. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. Let's just say something strange is going on here. Something bigger than a murder by a crack addict.”

Phelan took a swig of coffee from his foam cup. “Well, it's weirder than shit that everything on his laptop was encrypted. Not many people do that.”

“Not unless they have something important to hide. So let me draw some connections for you.”

“Okay. I’m all ears.”

Matt sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Okay. The bloodstain in the trunk of Lance Brucon's car may be the blood of the crucifixion victim, Steve King. The lab listed it as a possible match, and we know King was moved from the place he was murdered, not once but twice. So a car trunk was probably involved.”

“Fair enough. I’ll buy that.” He sipped more coffee.

“Now, since the crucifixion, a number of threats have been made against the parish priest, saying that he's next. And someone has been trying to link this priest with a suicide that occurred a couple of years ago in Norfolk.”

Phelan nodded. “Okay.”

“But it got really squirrelly in the last couple of days. First, we found out that both the crucifixion vic and the suicide died from a shot from a twenty-two. And the bullets matched on the ballistics.”

Phelan straightened in his chair. “Shit.”

“Wait, it gets better. An e-mail with a doctored photo was sent to the parish and to the diocese, making it look like this priest was standing over the body of the crucifixion vic.So badly doctored, though, it doesn't really fool you. But” — he raised a finger — “there was an embedded message coded in the photograph.”

Now Phelan was leaning forward, coffee forgotten. “What message?”

“Wait a sec. It seems the guy who killed himself a couple years ago complained to the priest — the same priest who's being threatened now — that he had stumbled onto some kind of conspiracy within the military that involved sending coded messages in e-mail photo files.”

Phelan's jaw dropped open.

“Now, we have this e-mail photo, which Jim was able to trace back to a federal government e-mail address, and he found a coded message in it. Are you beginning to see connections here?”

Phelan nodded slowly. “And the slasher victim can't be identified.”

“But he was almost certainly involved.”

“We gotta crack into that laptop.”

“It's not likely we can do it in time.”

“In time?”

“The embedded message was a time and a date. Tomorrow, eight-thirty in the evening. But we don't know what's going to happen.”

“I don't like this.” Phelan leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “I don't like this at all. Haven't you got
anything?
“

“Yeah, one thing only. The gun involved has been in the hands of the suicide's father since the death. The father is missing, but he's supposed to be here in Tampa, according to his wife. We haven't been able to find out where.”

“Shit, shit, shit. So the suicide's father probably whacked Steve King, and the Brucon guy probably carried the body all over hell and gone, and Brucon used government travel orders to rent a car, and now we got a government e-mail address on a coded message ….”

“You're getting the picture,” Matt agreed.

“Loud and clear, and I don't like it at all. This would have to involve some kind of black ops. You know how dangerous that could be?”

“It's already dangerous, and we have to keep it from becoming more so. And we've only got until tomorrow evening.”

“But we don't even know what we're looking for! How can you stop it when you don't know what it is? And maybe it's nothing important at all.”

“Oh, it's important,” Matt said. “At least two people have been killed to protect it, and one more may die.”

“But the first was a suicide.”

“At this point,” Matt said heavily, “I’d almost bet my badge that it was nothing of the sort.”

“That still doesn't help us stop whatever it is. We need more information.”

Matt's phone rang. He picked it up, spoke briefly, then turned back to Phelan. “Well, we know what to look for now.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was another number embedded in the photo. A friend of mine just figured out what it is.”

“Well?”

“It's the tail number of an airplane.”

Chapter 21

“Everything stays on schedule,” the man with the cigar insisted. “Everything.”

The other man stared him down. “You don't get it, do you? Somebody else knows what's going on. Somebody followed Lance when he dumped that body in an alley, then they put it on the cross at the church. Then Lance turns up dead. I don't like it. We can reschedule.”

“No, we can't. Lance already sent the order.”

“What if somebody followed Lance to
us?
”

The man with the cigar shook his head. “No way. But even if they did, we have a legitimate connection. We can always explain the contact away. Lance was working on his own.”

The other man sighed. “Okay.”

“If you're that worried, I can send you abroad. Attach you to some embassy in intelligence.”

The other man hesitated. “I just don't want this to fail. To send the wrong message. If anyone finds out this wasn't precipitated by a terrorist group …”

The smoker shook his head impatiently. “Believe me, we made sure that the action can't be traced to us. It'll look like foreign terrorism, and there won't be any reason for
anyone
to think otherwise.”

“Maybe.”

“And they can think what they want anyway. There's no evidence. The point is, if we don't broaden this war on terrorism, to include every radical fundamentalist nation, this country will never be secure. We need to clean out that entire nest of vipers.”

“I know that.”

“So it's a clean operation. When's our flight?”

“We need to leave in an hour for the airport.”

“Good. I’ll be glad to get back to Washington.”

The other man sat thoughtfully for a few minutes. “You know, I always wanted to go to England.”

“Consider it done. I’ll post you to the embassy there.”

The other man nodded and smiled. “Ruth, my wife, will like that.”

“I’m sure she will.”

The seated man never guessed that he'd just signed his own death warrant.

The man with the cigar turned back to the window, puffing thoughtfully. Why was it they all turned weak on him? Sooner or later, every one of them started to screw up. Started to get scared.

And as soon as they got uneasy, they became liabilities. You couldn't trust a man who began to worry about his own hide. It was as simple as that. Lance's death was merely serendipitous, saving him the trouble of staging it. But this man, his closest associate of many years …

Well, a plane accident ought to do it. Or an auto accident. After they got back to Washington. The police were nosing around too much in Tampa.

“The FAA is checking the tail number against their registry,” Matt told Chloe that evening. “Did our wayward priest agree to behave until tomorrow night?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Thank God for small favors.” He shifted uneasily against his car. Once again they were standing in the parking lot at St. Simeon's. It was crowded since religious education classes were meeting and the choir was practicing.

Brendan had waved at them a few minutes ago as he passed on his way to the parish hall. Chloe almost smiled when she saw Officer Duggan glued to his side. “Duggan will keep him in line,” she said to Matt.

“As long as Duggan is on duty here.” He ran a hand impatiently through his hair. “How long can it take for them to trace a tail number?”

“There are a lot of planes registered in this country.”

“There are also computers. It would have been helpful if they hadn't closed their web registry access after nine-eleven.” He threw up a hand. “Of course, I can understand why they don't want just any Tom, Dick, or Harry to be able to look at that stuff.”

She understood his impatience and moved to stand beside him, taking his hand. He started a little, then looked down at her. She squeezed his fingers in what she hoped was a comforting gesture. And she was utterly astonished when she realized that she had also comforted herself.

“Dinner, when this is over,” he said. “We're definitely going out to dinner.”

“Yes, Matt.”

“Why'd you shove me away back then?”

“Because it hurt too much. Everything hurt too much.” She sighed and studied the ground. “It wasn't just my marriage and the things he did to me. It was everybody — friends, colleagues, everybody — thinking I’d killed him. Not one of them gave me the benefit of the doubt.”

“Except me.”

“Except you.”

“You can't live forever without caring,” he said.

“I know. I’m beginning to figure that out. I cared when Steve was killed. I care that Father Brendan's at risk. I might as well start caring about other things, too.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

She lifted her head then and smiled at him. It was a dazzling smile, free of shadows and ice. But only for a moment. Reality could never go away that long.

Matt's phone rang and he answered it. “Yeah. Yeah? How do I contact him?” He pulled out his pad, turning as he did so to set it on the hood of his car. Then he tugged a pen out of his breast pocket. “Give it to me again. Yeah. Yeah … Okay, I got it.”

He disconnected and looked at Chloe. “That tail number belongs to a plane owned by a company in Maryland. Vreeland Aviation.”

He was already punching numbers into his phone. A few seconds later, he swore. “They're closed until tomorrow morning at seven.”

“We could be up there by then.”

“Yeah, but could we get back here in time?”

“In time for what? We don't even know what's supposed to happen, let alone where.”

“True.” He ran his fingers through his hair again. “Okay, let's go.”

They headed straight for the airport.

Tomorrow, Wayne Humboldt promised himself. It was the last day that damn priest would be at the parish. The last day before the church sent him somewhere else.

It had been impossible for him to get anywhere near the man all day, thanks to that damn cop who seemed glued to his side. But at some point that cop was going to leave, and at some point he'd be able to get to Brendan. Some way.