Nineteen
Walt drove me south in an eight-year-old Lincoln Town Car with cracked cream leather trim. We didn’t speak much once we were on the road and I was happy enough with that. The mood I was in, I wasn’t looking for polite conversation.
Walt drove down through Daytona Beach and crossed back over the Intracoastal on the same William V Chappell Jr bridge we’d used when Trey and I had gone to meet Henry. There’d been a lot of water under it since then, both physically and metaphorically.
In daylight the buildings looked faded and even a little shabby, the colours washed out without the reinforcement of their night-time neon. It matched my mood – down-at-heel, subdued.
I’d entrusted Trey to Xander and Aimee’s care, much against his will. He’d thrown a controlled tantrum at the prospect of being left behind but I didn’t have the time or the temper myself to stand that kind of bratty behaviour from him. After a few futile attempts at whiny persuasion, he seemed to realise as much and gave up trying. He settled for quiet and sulky instead, barely able to bring himself to say goodbye or good luck to me. Well sod you, then.
“Look after him,” I’d said to Xander and he’d nodded, face serious.
“Don’t sweat it,” he’d said. “He’ll be fine.”
Aimee had grinned at me. “Go kick some ass, girl.”
I’d promised them I’d call Trey on his mobile as soon as I was done. Then I watched them walk away from the little diner together. They stopped by the kerb a little way further down the street and were about to cross when Trey suddenly glanced back at me, frowning.
He knows, I thought. He’s worked it out. I turned my back on it and jogged through the slow-moving traffic to rejoin Walt, who was waiting for me on the other side of the road.
Whatever doubts I may have had about trusting Trey’s safety to anyone else, I dismissed them. The only alternative to Xander and Aimee was leaving him with Walt, which could be the same as handing the kid over to the authorities. I had a sneaking suspicion that the old couple could only hold out against their nephew and the all-consuming government body he represented for so long. Better not to put temptation in Special Agent Till’s way by having the boy dangled under his nose. Much better that he simply didn’t know where either of us were.
The only other alternative to that was to take Trey with me. That idea was out of the question from the start. If I could get Gerri Raybourn to admit the part she’d played in Sean’s death I was planning on doing more than tape-recording her and the kid had already seen too much death in my company. Not quite the kind of thing Keith had been hoping for when he’d made some throwaway comment last week about the fact I was British being good for broadening Trey’s horizons.
Now, as I sat in the faded luxury of Walt’s car listening to something in the rear suspension creaking every time we hit a lump in the road, I found myself wondering coldly where Trey’s father fitted in to all this? How much of the responsibility did he share for Sean’s death?
The answer to that one didn’t so much hit me as rise slowly and uncomfortably into my mind, like sitting in the bath while it fills from a slow-running cold tap. Livingston Brown had told me that he’d seen Keith leaving the house in Fort Lauderdale apparently of his own volition. But he also said the man had seemed nervous and in a hurry.
Supposing that wasn’t because Keith had been running away. Supposing Brown had misinterpreted the reason for Keith’s unease and instead it was because his every move was being watched by people who’d told him they had already kidnapped his son.
As the thought formed, I was half-tempted to let it go but it stuck to my fingers like static cling and I couldn’t shake it loose. Little things kept popping into my mind. Like the fact that Whitmarsh had known instantly from Henry’s e-mails that the one they were missing was Trey, not Keith.
So Keith hadn’t done a runner. He’d been taken.
And Gerri Raybourn was the one pulling all the strings.
My resolve hardened along with my certainty. I turned away from the window and glanced across at Walt in the driving seat.
“How much do you know about Ms Raybourn?” I asked.
“Oh this and that,” Walt said, voice easy and casual as ever. “She’s well-respected in her field. Did ten years with the Bureau, as a matter of fact.”
“Ah,” I said dryly, “so that’s why Special Agent Till doesn’t want to move against her without overwhelming evidence – she’s part of the old boy network.”
“Former agents are treated just the same as everyone else,” Walt said firmly but without showing irritation. “I checked her records and she left more’n three years ago. Went through a messy divorce and her ex got custody of the kids. He got laid off from his job so she’s having to pay him off and put her eldest through college. I guess she found she could make a little more money on the outside than she could working for the government.”
“So she’s short on cash,” I murmured, “and long on motive.”
I remembered our drive from the airport when she’d got the call that told her news of the program had leaked out to the press. Her display of anger then had certainly seemed genuine but I suppose if she was planning on stealing the program along with its inventor, the fewer people who knew about it the better. She’d had me fooled into thinking I could trust her the night I’d called her for help from the motel. And look how that had ended.
Walt glanced wryly at me. “Motive for what?”
“For wanting the program for herself,” I said. “I think she engineered the trouble at the company recently so she could call in Sean and me as back-up. That way, when she took Keith and Trey—”
“Which she’s claiming you’re responsible for,” Walt cut in.
I ducked my head in agreement. “True, she is, but bear with me on this. As I said, that way she already has us in place as fall-guys. She has her boys grab Sean along with Keith and hopes to get Trey and me at the park on the same day. That way she’s got the option of either claiming Keith’s done a runner, or that we’ve taken him.”
Good as his word, Walt didn’t immediately dismiss my suggestion. Instead he nodded slowly, frowning. Ahead of us the lights changed and he braked smoothly to a halt.
“But her man fumbles the ball,” he said then.
“Yeah, he did,” I agreed. “So, next best thing, she puts it out that I’ve got Trey. But, the last thing she can afford to have happen is for the cops to get hold of us. That might blow the whole thing. So when they nearly do, she has her boys step in and kill the cop. By then she’s past caring about getting hold of Trey alive. He was only to secure Keith’s good behaviour anyway. She just wants us dead.”
The lights changed and Walt set the car moving forwards again. His measured driving style reminded me of police drivers in the UK. He negotiated a parked truck in the right-hand lane before he spoke again.
“So it’s not until that guy you mentioned – Henry – offers you to them on a plate that she realises that without Trey the program kinda won’t work.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Because after that Whitmarsh was desperate to take us alive, but the message obviously hadn’t got through to Haines. I have no idea why not. It could simply have been a cock-up in communications. But Whitmarsh was even prepared to shoot Haines’s men to protect us. And to let me go when I threatened Trey myself.”
Walt looked surprised. “You didn’t mention that part.”
“You try living with that kid twenty-four hours a day and you’d want to shoot him, too,” I said, only half joking.
Walt frowned again, but whether it was deep thought, or whether he disapproved of my flippancy in the circumstances, it was difficult to tell.