The Prophet (40 page)

Kent was silent. Adam spread his hands. “Come on, Kent.”

“I’m thinking,” his brother said, his brother who was on the front page of today’s paper with his arms upraised, signaling victory, “that if Grissom is dead, he takes the Sipes case with him. They’re already assuming he’s responsible for that. If he’s around, they’ll have to investigate it hard, because he won’t admit to doing it. He may know damn well that
you
did it.”

Adam shook his head. “Stop.”

“I can do it,” Kent said. “I’m the right one to do it. In so many ways.”

“Stop talking like me,” Adam said. He’d never meant anything more.

“He’s taking pictures of my family, Adam. Last night I got home and found photographs of a murdered girl beside photographs of my daughter.”

Thirty minutes earlier, Adam had thought his ability to feel righteous fury had been extinguished, probably for good. He’d been sure of it. But it rose now like a rogue wave.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll take him down. I went this far to do it, I might as well finish.”

Kent was shaking his head. “Let me.”

“Hell, no. Kent, look at what you’ve got to lose. Look at what I’ve got—it’s already lost.”

“I could get away with this. You can’t. After the night I’ve spent with the FBI, if I say he approached me and I killed him in self-defense, everybody buys it. Everybody.”

“Stop,” Adam said again.

Kent fell silent. They looked at each other for a long time, and then he said, “At least let me give the address to the police, Adam. Don’t let them get it from you. If it comes from you, everyone is looking at it different. If it comes from me, they’ll believe it.”

“How will you claim you got it?”

“I’ll say he called my cell. They’re hoping that he will. They don’t have it tapped, though, so they can’t record what’s said.”

“They’ll know whether a call came in.”

“Then I’ll call myself from somewhere. A pay phone, someplace in that neighborhood, whatever. What happens after that, they will believe.”

Adam felt sick, listening to him. He’d always hated their differences. He’d hated Kent for the way he approached Marie’s murderer, going into the prison and praying for the son of a bitch. It had seemed, back then, that no response could be worse. There was one, though.

This was worse.

“We’ll give the address to the police,” Adam said, “and let them take it from there.”

“That’ll end with you in prison. Maybe with Grissom there, too, but definitely you.”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But we’ll let them finish it.”

Kent leaned forward and rested his forehead on the edge of the table. He looked exhausted. Worse than that, actually. He looked beaten.

“It’s on me, Adam. The whole damn thing. I brought it all here, and you were right all along. I should have been like you from the start.”

“It’s here despite you. Look at what you’ve done with your life, Kent. Look at what you’ve built for yourself, for other people. You actually wish you’d gone my way? Then you’re a stupid son of a bitch.”

Kent looked up but didn’t say anything. Adam said, “I don’t begrudge you, Kent. What you did with Pearce. It turned out well for you. It was the right thing.”

“Turned out well? Look at where we are now!”

“That’s got nothing to do with it, and the only person who
wants you to think that it does is the sociopath who’s responsible for all of this. Don’t start agreeing with him.”

Kent leaned back in his chair with a weary sigh. Rubbed his eyes, got to his feet, and said, “Can I please have the gun?”

“I thought we were going to the police.”

“We are. Well,
I
am. Let me come up with a way to tell them where you saw Grissom. Maybe they find him there, maybe not, but let it come from me.”

“Fair enough. What do you need the gun for, then?”

“Protection. Just in case. The guy’s a killer, Adam, and he’s here for me.”

“Just in case,” Adam echoed. “Okay. Sure.”

“You’ll give it to me?”

Adam nodded. “It’s still in my car.”

“All right,” Kent said. “You give me the gun and the address where you took this picture. I’ll make a phone call to myself, just to log one so the story holds up. Then I’ll go to the FBI and I’ll give them the address. Say he asked to meet me there. Hopefully, he’s still there. If he’s not, then it’ll still be a clue. It will be a lead. Evidence. Somewhere for them to start.”

Kent had never been much of a liar. Just didn’t have the capacity for it, even when he wanted to. Gave himself away so easily, because he simply could not look you in your eyes and tell you a lie. He wasn’t looking at Adam now.

“That’s what you’re going to do?” Adam said. “Give the address to the police? You’re not going to do anything stupid? Not going out there by yourself?”

“I’ll give it to the police. Meanwhile, though, you need to go find Chelsea. Or someone. Just find someone to be with today, all right?”

“Why?”

“So they can’t blame the phone call on you.”

“The phone call.”

Kent nodded.

“All right,” Adam said. “Sure.”

He went to the door, and Kent followed. They walked across the yard, mud and leaves clinging to their shoes, everything saturated from the previous day’s rains, and out to the Jeep. Adam got the Taurus Judge out of the glove compartment, checked the cylinder, and then passed it to his brother. Kent took it almost eagerly. It seemed as if he’d grown comfortable with the feel of the weapon. Adam had never expected to see that.

Kent said, “I’m sorry, Adam. For all that’s happened, for getting you into this, I’m—”

“That’s not allowed in our family,” Adam said. “If anybody knows that, it’s me.”

“What?”

Adam waved a hand back at their childhood home. “No apologies accepted in the Austin house, Kent. Nobody ever let me say it. Not you, not Dad, not Mom. Nobody. I drove off and left Marie and then nobody would even let me say I was sorry.”

“That’s because it wasn’t your fault.”

“I was supposed to bring her home, and I did not. Of course I didn’t know what was going to happen, but that doesn’t change anything. Instead we all sat around pretending I wasn’t to blame.”

“You weren’t.”

“I was supposed to bring her home,” Adam repeated. He slammed the Jeep door shut. “She’s the only one I’ve ever been able to say it to. The rest of you wouldn’t let me, but I can say it to her.”

Kent was staring at him, the gun in his hand, not saying a word.

“So don’t you apologize for a damn thing,” Adam said. “None of this is your fault, Kent. You didn’t ask this sick bastard to come to town. Stop acting like you did.”

“Okay.” Kent nodded, then looked down at the gun and said, “I’m going to need the address.”

Adam thought of Rachel Bond, the firm set of her jaw when she’d told him she didn’t need advice, she needed an address. He’d given her the address instead of advice, and away she’d gone.

“Adam?” Kent prompted.

“Take it to the police,” Adam said.

“I will.”

“Okay,” Adam said, and then he gave him the address. Kent repeated it, murmuring the numbers like a prayer, and then he said that it was time for him to go, and repeated his request that Adam go find Chelsea and stay close to her.

“We’ll talk soon,” Kent said.

“I hope so.”

“Be safe,” Kent said.

“You, too. Keep your head down, Franchise.”

His brother nodded, and then walked to his car, got behind the wheel with the gun in his hand, and drove off down the street. Adam watched the taillights disappear.

“I love you,” he said aloud, but the car was gone then and the street was empty.

He went inside to say good-bye to Marie and put out the candles.

K
ENT WANTED TO TELL NO LIES
. Never did, but certainly he did not want to now, and certainly not to Adam after all he’d endured. So he’d chosen the forked tongue of honesty again, had told true words and true facts and concealed the reality of his heart.

He would tell the police. He would give them the address.

But first he would go there himself.

He believed in his theory, he believed it would work. If Dan Grissom died at his hand today, Robert Dean and Stan Salter and every other investigator on the case would not be surprised. Kent was, after all, the target of the man’s assaults, and they also knew Kent. The whole town did. They knew him and believed in him, their understanding of his character was firm, and it would help him. Because he had made so many proper decisions for so long, the world would struggle to believe that he was capable of making so terrible a choice now.

The choice had been made, though. He was going to end it, for his family if not for himself. For Beth’s safety, and Lisa’s, and
Andrew’s, he would remove Grissom from this world if he could. For Adam, who had already tried to do the same for Kent.

He kept the gun in his lap as he drove, and he prayed. It was the strangest prayer he’d ever offered. He asked for strength to do the wrong thing, and then forgiveness for doing it.

He knew that he would need both.

He prayed while he drove, and kept only his left hand on the wheel, the right occupied by the pistol. He felt as if letting it go, even for an instant, might derail his determination. He followed the car’s navigation system as he wound through areas of town he hadn’t seen in years, and then the soft instructional voice that guided him to the street announced that he was approaching and that his destination waited on the left.

He stopped praying then, tightened his hand around the pistol, and slowed. The street sign above him promised that his navigation system was correct: he’d arrived at the address Adam had given him.

The only problem was that 2299 Amherst Road was not the home in the photograph. It was a brick ranch alone on acres of property, a
FOR SALE
sign in the yard, not the least bit like the house Adam had captured in his photograph of Dan Grissom. Kent hadn’t questioned him because Adam hadn’t hesitated. He gave both the street and the numbers as if they were sacred to him.

He’d also given Kent the wrong address.

There had been a tradition, years ago, that steel workers named the blast furnaces that produced their product. Adam wasn’t sure if such a thing remained in those few towns that still manufactured steel, but he remembered that the blast furnace of the Robard Company plant had been named Becky.

He parked beside the abandoned structure, his Jeep alone on
the property, overgrown train tracks snaking away from him and the massive tubing of the blast furnace casting shadows where the sun fought heavy dark clouds scudding in on a western wind. For years he’d taken a strange pride in the smoke that rose from the weathered stacks, because his father had taken pride in working there. For a moment, when he opened the driver’s door, he swore he could still smell the smoke. Funny how the memory could taunt the senses.

He wore his standard jeans and boots and a black jacket that he left unzipped so he could reach the Glock holster easily. There was no drop piece today, no unregistered street weapon, just his own.

Maybe he’s gone,
Adam thought as he walked away from the steel mill and out to Erie Avenue.
Maybe he flushed after I killed Sipes, and we won’t see him again.

He paused when he reached the sidewalk and looked up the road. A white Buick Rendezvous was parked at the curb. The same car Grissom had left in the day Adam took the pictures.

For a time he stood where he was. Then he turned to his right, gazing out to where the lake stretched off toward Canada in an endless expanse of harsh water. He could see the fence that he and Sipes had passed through forty-eight hours earlier. A few gulls circled just above the spot where Sipes had died, scouring for food, dipping down to inspect, then finding nothing to their liking and returning to the sky.

Something buzzed, a warm hum on the silent street. His phone, vibrating in his jacket pocket. He slipped it out. Kent was calling.

He did not need to answer to understand that his little brother was calling from Amherst Road. Adam had known that he would go, and while it disappointed him, it also vindicated his decision. He’d sent Kent to the right place. There was no harm in 2299 Amherst Road. Adam was certain of that. He had stood
in the yard and he had seen the things that were already there and others that could be there in time, and harm was not among them.

He held the phone until the last vibration was gone and the display went dark again, and then he put it back into his pocket and turned left, the lake to his back and 57 Erie Avenue ahead.

“Is my brother with you?” Kent said, phone in one hand and gun in the other, his car still running, the peaceful brick ranch house on Amherst Road still in front of him.

“No,” Chelsea Salinas told him. “Kent, what’s wrong?”

“I think we need to find him,” Kent said. “Fast.”

“What’s wrong?” she repeated.

“If he’s not with you then I think I know where he is, but you’re going to have to help me find the place. It’s a spot where Rodney Bova went in the middle of the night. That would have been Thursday morning. Adam had a tracking device on him.”

“Why is he going there?”

“To keep me from doing the same thing,” Kent said. “Chelsea, I need to know that address. Can you find it?”

“If the tracking device recorded it, then I can find it. Hang on.”

“Hurry,” Kent said. “Please.”

She didn’t question him. Set the phone down and he could hear things shifting in the office and could hear her fingers clicking over keys, and soon she was back, her voice fearful but firm.

“Fifty-seven Erie Avenue,” she said. “What’s happening, Kent?”

“I need to get there,” he said. “Fast.”

But Erie Avenue was all the way back across town, by the old steel mill. He could not make that drive fast. His brother had led him too far afield; he would never make it back in time.

“Call the police, Chelsea,” he said.

“The police.” She was hesitant, and he knew why. She was thinking of Adam and Sipes, of murder charges and prison cells, and as he slammed the car into reverse and began what he knew would be a too-late drive, she said, “I’m close. I’ll go find him.”