“But why haven’t we heard?”
“The same reason why none of the families even know that their loved ones were taken captive,” Dom said. He felt his poker face slipping away. “Because this whole thing was designed to thrust all of the danger onto the innocents.”
“Jesus, Father, do you believe for a moment that I would deliberately endanger children and church volunteers?”
“I believe that you’re a coward,” Dom said. “And I believe that you had enough shadow of doubt that you pulled your own son off of the trip while you allowed other people’s sons and daughters to be slaughtered.”
“How dare you speak to me that way?” Georgen boomed.
Tammy was the first to hear the bullshit bell ringing in the back of her brain. “Why are you here, Father?”
“Are you even a priest at all?” Georgen asked. He took a threatening step forward.
Dom stopped him by pointing a finger at a spot above the other man’s nose. If it had been a gun, it would have been a sure kill shot. “Is that really where you want to draw the line for moral indignation?” Dom asked. “Enjoy your eternity in Hell.”
As he walked back thorough the foyer and out into the night, he heard the Georgens going at it. This would be the fight of fights. And boy, was there a surprise coming their way in a few minutes.
He’d just turned the corner at the end of the walk when he saw Agent Boersky and his driver striding toward him. “Your assistant called from Virginia,” he said. “She told us that you got everything.”
Dom pulled the recorder from his pocket and handed it over. “She’s nobody’s assistant,” he said, “and you’d do well not to be caught calling her that.”
“Give me a heads-up on what I’m going to hear on this,” Boersky said.
“He confessed to arranging the payoff, and he confessed to the fraud.”
“What about the government connection?”
Dom shook his head. “Nothing solid. He alluded to it, but I don’t think he knows those details.”
“But we got enough to give us cause to dig deeper?”
“That’s your call, not mine,” Dom said. “Right now, I just want to go and take a long shower.”
“Thank you, Father,” Boersky said.
“Let’s not do this again anytime soon,” Dom replied. “Do I have a ride back to the airport over there?” He pointed in the direction of Boersky’s vehicle.
“Yes, sir. Just wander that way. Agent Palmer is looking for you.”
Dom tossed off a little wave. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t sure if there was a right thing to say.
“Um, Father?” Boersky’s demeanor had darkened. “You need to give my boss a call. I believe you call her Wolverine?”
Dom’s insides tumbled. “Tonight?”
“She said right away.”
With an ever-growing sense of dread, Dom pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number from memory. He was about to hit Send when the phone buzzed in his hand. The caller ID showed that it Venice calling from the office.
He answered, “Hello?”
“Oh, Dom,” she said. She sounded near tears. “I don’t know what Digger is going to do.”
“What happened?” He asked the question even though he knew the answer.
“I just got a hit on ICIS. The Phoenix police found a woman’s body an hour ago in a Dumpster behind a bar. Evidence shows that she’d been shot several times. No identification, but the general description matches Gail.”
Dom stopped walking and sat on the curb.
Venice continued, “The body had been wrapped in plastic bags, but a homeless woman looking through the Dumpster for food found it and called it in.” Venice snuffled. “Oh, my God, Dom, it’s just so horrible.”
Dom closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. This was beyond horrible, beyond it on a scale that he didn’t know how to measure.
In that instant, Dom realized what he had to do. A woman had been murdered and her body disposed of as garbage. Even if it wasn’t Gail, she deserved better than that. She deserved better than to be left alone on a cold gurney in the morgue.
“Father Dom, are you there?”
“I’m going to her,” he said. “Can you get me the address for the morgue?”
Silence. Then Venice said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. This is an active homicide investigation. If you get involved, the questions are-”
“She was our friend, Venice. That’s really all that matters. Can you give me the address or do I have to look it up on the Internet?”
Consciousness came slowly to Trevor Munro. The phone call came in the deepest phase of his REM sleep.
This particular ringtone-“Ride of the Valkyries”-belonged exclusively to one person.
With the lights still off and his eyes still closed, he slid the phone open and brought it to his head.
“Yes,” he said.
“Jesus, Trev,” the big voice boomed. “Where the hell-”
“Call me back in three minutes,” Munro said. He clicked off.
These were delicate times. He wanted to be one hundred percent sure that he was awake and fully functional, if only as a hedge against saying something stupid. He kicked off the covers, padded to the bathroom to urinate, and then soaked a washcloth with cold water and scrubbed his face with it. Just to be sure that he was completely lucid, he recited the alphabet aloud-backwards.
He’d timed it all perfectly. He was back at his bedside table exactly two minutes and forty-five seconds after he’d hung up. Sjogren was not quite as punctual. It took him three and a half minutes to call back. The time on the clock read 2:37.
“Okay, speak to me,” he answered when the Valkyries started singing again.
“Jesus, Trev,” Sjogren said through the thick Boston brogue. “This is my third call to you. What the hell have you been doin’?”
“It’s called sleep,” Munro said. “Among life’s most important activities.”
“I guess you get to do that if you’re the one paying the bills. Me, I work around the clock.”
“For what you get paid, that’s the least I would expect,” Munro said. “The fact of your call must mean that you have a name for me.”
“I do,” Sjogren said. “And let me tell you, it took some doing to get it, too.”
Munro waited for it.
“It’s a babe,” Sjogren said. “A chick named Maria Elizondo.”
Munro jotted the name onto the pad he kept on his night stand. The name rang a distant bell, though he didn’t know why.
“And listen to me, Trev,” Sjogren went on. “I deeply don’t give a shit what happens to you, but I warn you to be prepared for a really bad reaction to this. Elizondo is this loon’s main squeeze. He thinks they’re in love.”
“I’ll be damned,” Munro said. He remembered now that he’d actually met this treasonous bitch. During one of his meetings with Hernandez, she’d been in the car.
“How certain are you of the identity?” Munro asked. He didn’t care all that much, but passing this news along was tantamount to issuing a death warrant. It seemed reasonable to want to be sure.
“I can’t speak to that personally,” Sjogren said. “But my guy in Justice says it’s a sure thing.”
“And what’s your level of confidence in him?”
Sjogren laughed. “What the hell do you want from me, Trev? You hire me for my sources, and I give you what I’ve got. You want two-hundred-percent certainty, you need to hire somebody else.”
Munro forgave the attitude because the underlying message was spot-on. “Maria Elizondo,” he said, repeating the name aloud to make sure he had it right.
“That’s it,” Sjogren said. “Now it’s my turn to go to sleep.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jonathan hated flying. Airplanes were orders of magnitude better than boats, but given all the years of parachute jumps, fast-roping, and landings-cum-crashes in bullet-riddled aircraft, he worried that he’d made God grow weary of pulling his ass out of trouble.