Why the hell was she throwing his words back in his face? Of course he loved being in Cambridge and out of that garret behind the Hanover Mall. He now had a five-room suite on the seventh floor of an office building near the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Memorial Drive and a view of Boston that would make a hermit ache. In addition to the extra floor space and easier commute, he was thrilled to spend most of his day surrounded by MIT, and not just because it was his alma mater. With Harvard at one end and MIT at the other end, Mass Ave was like a giant filament blazing with the greatest concentration of mind power in the world. In those other buildings were people who prepared manned missions to Mars, spliced genes, designed robotic intelligence and nanomachines, and searched for quarks, quasars, and extraterrestrial life. Yes, 02141 glowed with the greatest cerebral wattage anywhere, and SageSearch sat at ground zero. Martin felt smarter just being here. “So, what’s your point?”
“That you’re never around long enough to realize your son’s got serious language problems.”
“But he’s younger than the others, and young for his age,” Martin protested. “Besides, wasn’t the idea to put him in there where he can learn from other kids—something about a mentoring theory?”
“Maybe you should take a few hours off some afternoon and observe them. If that’s mentoring, it’s not working.”
Martin saw that coming, but let it go. “Well, if you think it’s not working, then maybe we should find another day-care place.”
Rachel didn’t respond. She seemed too preoccupied, too on the fringes. He watched her open her night table drawer, pull out the vial of sleeping tablets, and toss a couple into her mouth, washing them down with a glass of water. “There are things we can do for him, tutors, special ed teachers,” he said, trying to make her feel better. “Even special schools if need be. We can deal with it.”
Still Rachel didn’t respond. Instead she slipped her pajamas on and got back into bed. “I wish we were back in Rockville.”
“Are you kidding? We’re living in one of the best towns on the North Shore. You should be counting your blessings. Our blessings.”
Without a word, she flicked off the light.
So that was it! he thought. Christ! He hated when she clammed up like this. “Guess it’s good night.” He hated another night going by without sex. It had been three weeks.
“G’night.” Her voice was barely audible. Then he heard her mutter something else. In a few minutes the sleeping pills would kick in and she’d be out.
As Martin went to the bathroom, he realized what she had said: I’m sorry. But by the time he returned to ask what she meant, she was asleep.
For a long moment, he stood there watching her slip deeper into her Xanax oblivion. While her breathing became more peaceful, it occurred to him that no matter how much you think you know the person you love, even after ten years, there are always those damn little black holes in their makeup from where no light ever escapes. And yet, like the ubiquitous X-ray presence around collapsed stars that astronomers talk about, what Martin detected were the subtle signatures—those microsigns in Rachel’s expression that told him she was holding something back. While she could control her wording and body language, she could not disguise that slightly askew cast of her eyes. It was there again tonight while they spoke. That look that said something was festering just beneath the skin of things.
10
Around eleven, the black Mercedes pulled into an abandoned lot about six miles west of Jacksonville.
Phillip was waiting for him. Oliver had ditched the dark blue Chevy that had doubled as an unmarked police car in the woods, then walked half a mile to the rendezvous site.
They drove another six miles to a dirt road that led to Lake Chino just below the Georgia border where they had left their DeHavilland Beaver floatplane in a black little cove.
Travis was still asleep under his blanket, and he would probably remain so for another couple hours. When he woke up, they would feed him because he probably hadn’t eaten since breakfast. On the floor under the boy sat a large Igloo filled with sandwiches and drinks. They were still cool in spite of the hours the plane had baked in the sun.
Using a self-inflating raft, they floated him to the plane in the dark and loaded him into a seat in the rear, then strapped him in securely and covered him with a blanket. The night air was cool and the plane’s heater was faulty.
Oliver, an experienced pilot, got behind the controls while Phillip took the passenger seat.
A little before midnight, in clear cloudless skies, the Beaver lifted off the black water, then banked to the right, heading northeast which would take them through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and, eventually, all the way up the coast to New England. It was not the kind of long haul Oliver liked to fly, especially at night. At a cruising speed of 110 knots, the flight would take about twelve hours with two stops for refueling. He had preselected small airports where you could roll up to a fuel pump and pay with a credit card like that Amoco station back there. And he had a fake credit card so he wouldn’t be tracked. Because he was flying on visual, he did not have to maintain contact with regional operations as he would were this an instrument flight. Which meant no record or tracking of their plane.
When they leveled off to ninety-two hundred feet someplace over the southern Georgia interior, he looked over his shoulder. The kid was in a deep slumber, but breathing normally.
“He’s got himself a good-looking kid here,” he said to Phillip.
Phillip gave a cursory glance over his shoulder. “Yeah.” He was more interested in the lights of the city in the distance.
“Too bad about the scratches on his face,” Oliver said.
“Like we’re going to have to take him back.”
“Right.”
Phillip checked his watch against the clock on the instrument panel. “Twelve hours. I’m getting tired of these long hauls,” Phillip said.
“Take a third as long in a Lear.”
“Except you can’t land on water and do midnight drops. What did you fly in the service?”
“F-1011s. Quite a comedown, huh? Doing kiddie runs in a Beaver floatplane.”
“But the pay is better.”
“There’s that.”
“But you made good money as a PI,” Phillip said, popping open a can of beer. “How come if you were such a crackerjack bringing in fugitives you stopped doing it?”
“Because it’s against the law for a convicted felon to be a detective, private or otherwise.”
“That’s what’s wrong with this country—they get everything backward. If you wanted to know how bad guys think, hire a crook, right?”
“And pay him good.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Phillip looked over his shoulder at the boy. He was sound asleep. “We got another drop tomorrow night, but the forecast calls for a storm.”
“Uh-uh,” Oliver said. “No more repeats of the last time.”
11
COLD CREEK, TENNESSEE
Vernon and Winifred Dixon lived in a single-level brick structure that could not have been more than thirty feet long and half as wide. If it had wheels, it could have been a trailer home made of brick.
The place sat at the edge of an endless woodland about twenty miles northwest of Chattanooga in an area of Cold Creek called Gad’s Buck Knob, according to the map. Greg had no idea what the name meant; neither did Sergeant Andy Kemmer, the Tennessee State Police detective who had been assigned the Dixon case since the boy’s disappearance sixteen months ago.