“I’d love to tell you that Amandi Oltamu was noble,” Roxanne Donovan says to Tara. “But our early information suggests that he was only looking for a payday.”
This disappoints Tara. Donovan is right; Tara wants him to be noble. She wants to have his death and her own suffering wrapped in righteousness.
She won’t get what she wants.
“He made at least three offers,” Donovan continues. “Two were to people who had stakes in the company. Extortion efforts, basically. When those demands weren’t met, he went in a different direction. He contacted a rival.”
The rival, it seemed, had gotten in touch with a woman named Lisa Boone.
The source of the baby-faced kid in the black hat is less clear. He is the son of a killer, seventeen or eighteen or possibly nineteen years old, and Roxanne Donovan will say only that the Bureau is working on leads, many of them generated by interviews with Abby Kaplan. Lisa Boone is dead, shot on the railroad bridge over the Willow River where Tara had once nearly died herself, but the young killer is missing. The best lead there, Donovan tells them, involves a rural airport in Owls Head. An isolated hangar on the Maine coast, it serves as a touchdown point for the private-jet set. On the morning after the killing on the bridge, a small jet from Germany landed in Owls Head and refueled. Its lone passenger was an attorney from Berlin. The plane took on another passenger at Owls Head, a young man with a limp and one arm in a sling. The aircraft then flew to Halifax, and from Halifax to London, changing flight plans each time. Upon the plane’s arrival in London, the young passenger from America disembarked after informing the pilot that the German attorney was sleeping and wasn’t to be bothered. By the time the pilot discovered the man wasn’t sleeping but dead, the unknown American was gone.
While Tara was a feature story, the death of Dr. Pine received sidebar coverage. She thinks this is a crime, that all the nobility Oltamu lacked, Pine had shown.
She hopes that his family will come to see her. On the day that she lifts her right thumb on command for the first time, she uses Dr. Carlisle’s computer software to compose a short letter to Dr. Pine’s family. It is the first writing she’s done in this condition, and the words don’t come as easily as she’d like, but would they ever for a letter like this?
The Coma Crime Stopper isn’t sure.
What she is sure about is that the task of calling up the words is good for her. When she closes her eyes after that first bit of strained writing, she sees more of the green and gold light, sparklers and starbursts of it illuminating new rivers and tributaries, uncharted waters.
She writes again the next day.
Dr. Carlisle’s prognosis becomes a bit less guarded in the following days. More enthusiasm bleeds through, perhaps more than she’d like to show. Tara exchanges e-mail with a woman who recovered from locked-in syndrome and who has just completed her third marathon since the injury. She is an outlier, of course. But Tara watches videos of her race over and over.
She must become an outlier too. She owes them all this much. She owes Pine, obviously, but also Shannon, Abby Kaplan, and so many more. People she never met. A man named Hank Bauer. A man at a junkyard where her devastated Honda still rests.
She knows the journey ahead is long, and a good outcome is not promised. But she has so much fuel to carry her through it.
Weary but hopeful, she closes her eyes, flexes her thumb, and searches for those green-gold glimmers in the dark.
64
We’ll find him,” the investigator from Scotland Yard promised Abby after three hours of taped interviews and the review of countless photographs taken from surveillance cameras around the city of London, Abby having been asked to search the crowds for a glimpse of Dax.
When she considered Dax’s destination, the city that shared Luke’s last name, she couldn’t help but feel that it was a taunt. His silent response to the raised middle finger she’d offered that black hat. Somehow, she is sure that he saw that.
He was not in any of the photographs.
“How will you find him?” Abby asked the investigator.
“The way it’s always done: Patience and hard work. We’ll follow his patterns, learn who he trusts, and find him through them or when he makes a mistake. It will happen.”
Abby wasn’t so sure. She didn’t think the kid trusted anyone. And while she knew the kid made mistakes, she felt as if he would make fewer of them by the day, by the hour. Each moment was a learning experience.
Abby remembered the salute he’d given her in the dim dawn light across the river, just before the kid got back into Hank Bauer’s Challenger and disappeared. He’d been in three countries since then, and no one had caught him yet.
“He’s adaptive,” Abby said. “And I think he has big goals.”
The man from Scotland Yard didn’t seem interested in Abby’s opinion. “He’s no different from the rest of his family,” he said. “Which means that, sooner or later, he’ll end up dead or in jail. We’ll see to that.”
Abby wondered how long it had taken Scotland Yard to see to that for the rest of the kid’s family, but she didn’t ask. The last question she asked was the one she felt she already knew the answer to.
“What was his father’s name?”
“He had a dozen of them.”
“The most common one, then. What did most people call him?”
The investigator hesitated, then said, “Jack.”
Abby nodded, remembering the bottle of poisoned whiskey that the boy had presented to Abby and Hank on the night they’d met.
“And the last name?”
“Blackwell.”
“Blackwell,” Abby echoed. It seemed right. It suited the family.
“He’s quite dead,” the Scotland Yard man said in a nearly chipper voice.
Abby looked at the photographs of the boy contract killer, and again, she wasn’t sure the investigator was right. The man named Jack Blackwell might be dead, but his legacy was alive and well, moving through Europe like a ghost.
If he was even still in Europe.
“I’ll tell you this,” the Brit continued, “you’re bloody lucky — and so is Shannon Beckley — that you can drive like that. Put anyone else behind the wheel out there, and you’re both in the morgue.”
“You’re right,” Abby said, and for the first time she did not doubt the accuracy of the man’s statement.
Abby had needed the wheel for this one.
“Not making light of it,” the Brit said, “but it seems to have been rather fortunate for your reputation too, based on what I’ve seen.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Luke London thing.”
The Luke London thing. Ah, yes. When she didn’t respond, just stared evenly at him, he shifted awkwardly.
“I just mean in the media. Plenty of kindness from the same folks who crucified you before. Changes the narrative, right?”
“No,” Abby said. “It doesn’t.”
The man looked at her curiously. Abby said, “It all happened. Nothing’s replaced by anything else. They fit together.”