Nancy Farasand was another secretary at the Realtor's office where Holly was employed. Mitch himself had spoken to her the previous afternoon.
"Do you know Ms. Farasand, Mitch?"
"Yes."
"She strikes me as a very efficient person. She likes your wife very much, thinks very highly of her."
"Holly likes Nancy, too."
"And Ms. Farasand says it's not at all like your wife to fail to report in when she's going to miss work."
This morning Mitch should have called in sick for Holly. He had forgotten.
He'd also forgotten to phone Iggy to cancel the day's schedule.
Having triumphed over two professional killers, he had been tripped up by inattention to a mundane task or two.
"Yesterday," Detective Taggart said, "you told me that when you saw Jason Osteen shot, you were on the phone with your wife."
The car had gotten stuffy. Mitch wanted to open the window to the wind.
Lieutenant Taggart was approximately Mitch's size, but now he seemed to be larger than Anson. Mitch felt crowded, in a corner.
"Is that still what you remember, Mitch, that you were on the phone with your wife?"
In fact, he had been on the phone with the kidnapper. What had seemed a safe and easy lie at the time might now be a noose into which he was being invited to place his neck, but he could see no way to abandon this falsehood without having a better one to use in its place.
"Yeah. I was on the phone with Holly."
"You said she called to tell you that she was leaving work early because of a migraine."
"That's right."
"So you were on the phone with her when Osteen was shot."
"Yes."
"That was at eleven forty-three a.m. You said it was eleven forty-three."
"I checked my watch right after the shot."
"But Nancy Farasand tells me that Mrs. Rafferty called in sick early yesterday, that she wasn't in the office at all."
Mitch did not reply. He could feel the hammer coming down.
"And Ms. Farasand says that you called her between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty yesterday afternoon."
The interior of the Honda felt like a tighter space than the trunk of the Chrysler Windsor.
Taggart said, "You were still at the crime scene at that time, waiting for me to ask a series of follow-up questions. Your helper, Mr. Barnes, continued planting flowers. Do you remember?"
When the detective waited, Mitch said, "Do I remember what?"
"Being at the crime scene," Taggart said drily.
"Sure. Of course."
"Ms. Farasand says that when you called her between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty, you asked to speak to your wife."
"She's very efficient."
"What I can't understand," Taggart said, "is why you would call the Realtor's office and ask to speak to your wife as much as forty-five minutes after, according to your own testimony, your wife had already called you to say that she was leaving there with a terrible migraine."
Great clear turbulent tides of air drowned the alleyway.
As Mitch lowered his gaze to the dashboard clock, a helpless sinking of the heart overcame him.
"Mitch?"
"Yeah."
"Look at me."
Reluctantly, he met the detective's gaze.
Those hawkshaw eyes didn't pierce Mitch now, didn't drill at him as they had before. Instead, worse, they were sympathetic and invited confidence, encouraged trust.
Taggart said, "Mitch…where is your wife?"
Chapter 54
Mitch remembered the alley as it had been the previous evening, flooded with the crimson light of sunset, and the ginger cat stalking shadow to shadow behind radium-green eyes, and how the cat had seemed to morph into a bird.
He had allowed himself hope then. The hope had been Anson, and the hope had been a lie.
Now the sky was hard and wind-polished and a frigid blue, as if it were a dome of ice that borrowed its color by reflection from the ocean not far to the west of here.
The ginger cat was gone, and the bird, and nothing living moved. The sharp light was a flensing knife that stripped the shadows to the lean.
"Where is your wife?" Taggart asked again.
The money was in the car trunk. The time and place of the swap were set. The clock was ticking down to the moment. He had come so far, endured so much, gotten so close.
He had discovered Evil with an uppercase E, but he had also come to see something better in the world than he had seen
before, something pure and true. He perceived mysterious meaning where he had previously seen only the green machine.
If things happened for a purpose, then perhaps there was a purpose he must not ignore in this encounter with the persistent detective.
For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. To love, honor, and cherish. Until death us do part.
The vows were his. He had made them. Nobody else had made them to Holly. Only he had made them to her. He was the husband.
No one else would be so quick to kill for her, to die for her. To cherish means to hold dear and to treat as dear. To cherish means to do all you can for the welfare and the happiness of the one you cherish, to support and to comfort and to protect her.
Perhaps the purpose of bringing him together here with Taggart was to warn him that he had reached the limits of his ability to protect Holly without backup, to encourage him to realize that he could not go any further alone.
"Mitch, where is your wife?"
"What do you think of me?"
"In what sense?" Taggart asked.
"In every sense. What's your take on me?"
"People seem to think you're a stand-up guy."
"I asked what you think."
"I haven't known you until this. But inside you're all steel springs and ticking clocks."
"I wasn't always."
"No one could be. You'd blow up in a week. And you've changed."
"You've only known me one day."
"And you've changed."
"I'm not a bad man. I guess all bad men say that."
"Not so directly."
In the sky, perhaps high enough to be above the wind, miles too high to cast a shadow on the alley, a sun-silvered jet caught his eye as it sailed north. The world seemed shrunken now to this car, to this moment of peril, but the world was not shrunken, and the possible routes between any place and any other place were nearly infinite.
"Before I tell you where Holly is, I want a promise."
"I'm just a cop. I can't make plea bargains."
"So you think I've hurt her."
"No. I'm just being level with you."
"The thing is…we don't have much time. The promise I want is, when you hear the essence of it, you'll act fast, and not waste time picking at details."
"The devil's in the details, Mitch."
"When you hear this, you'll know where the devil is. But with so little time, I don't want to screw with police bureaucracies."
"I'm one cop. All I can promise is — I'll do my best for you."
Mitch took a deep breath. He blew it out. He said, "Holly has been kidnapped. She's being held for ransom."
Taggart stared at him. "Am I missing something?"
"They want two million dollars or they'll kill her."
"You're a gardener."
"Don't I know."
"Where would you get two million bucks?"
"They said I'd find a way. Then they shot Jason Osteen to impress on me how serious they are. I thought he was just a guy walking a dog, thought they shot some passerby to make a point."
The detective's eyes were too sharp to read. His gaze filleted.
"Jason thought they were going to shoot the dog. So they scared obedience into me and at the same time cut the eventual split from five ways to four."
"Go on," Taggart said.
"Once I got home and saw the scene they staged for me there, once they had me in knots, they sent me to my brother for the money."