"Damn it!" Laura slammed the wheel with her fist. "I knew we'd lose her if we couldn't keep her in sight! Now what the hell are we going to do?"
"I don't know. You're driving."
Laura kept going. There was a long curve ahead. Maybe on the other side of it they'd catch sight of the van. The speed was creeping up again, and she forced herself to ease off. "I didn't say thank you, did I?"
"For what?"
"You know for what. For coming back with my purse."
"No, I don't guess you did." Didi picked at one of her short, square fingernails, her fingers as sturdy as tools.
"I'm saying it. Thank you." She glanced quickly at Didi and then fixed her attention on the highway once more. Behind them, the sun glowed orange through chinks in interlocked clouds the color of bruises, and ahead the sky was a dark mask. "And thank you for helping me with this, too. You didn't have to call me when Mary was on the way."
"I almost didn't." She looked at her hands. They had never been pretty, like Laura's hands were. They had never been soft, never unworked. "Maybe I got tired of being loyal to a dead cause. Maybe there never was a cause to be loyal to. The Storm Front." She grunted, a note of sarcasm. "We were children with guns, smoking dope and getting high and thinking we could change the world. No, not even that, really. Maybe we just liked the power of setting off bombs and pulling triggers. Damn." She shook her head, her eyes hazed with memory. "That was a crazy world, back then."
"It's still crazy," Laura said.
"No, now it's insane. There's a difference. But we helped it get from there to here. We grew up to be the people we said we hated. Talk-talk-talkin' 'bout our generation," Didi said in a soft, singsong voice.
They rounded the bend. No van in sight. Maybe on the next stretch of road they'd see her. "What are you going to do now?" Laura asked. "You can't go back to Ann Arbor."
"Nope. Damn, I had a good setup, too. A good house, a great workshop. I was doing all right. Listen, don't get me started or I might curse you out for this." She checked her wristwatch, an old Timex. It was a little after seven. "Somebody'll find Edward. I hope it's not Mr. Brewer. He always wanted to set me up with his grandson." She sighed heavily. "Edward. The past caught up with him, didn't it? And it caught up with me, too. You know, you had a hell of a nerve tracking me down like you did. I can't believe you talked Mark into helping you. Mark's a rock." Didi put her hand against the piece of plastic tarp and felt it flutter. The heater was keeping the car's interior toasty now that the wind was blocked off. "Thanks for not bringing Mark to the house," she said. "That wasn't the place for him."
"I didn't want him getting hurt."
Didi turned her head to stare at Laura. "You've got balls, don't you? Walking in there with Mary like you did. I swear to God, I thought we were both finished."
"I wasn't thinking about anything but getting my son back. That's all I care about."
"What happens if you can't get him back? Would you have another baby?"
Laura didn't answer for a moment. The car's tires sang on the pavement, and a truck hauling lumber moved into her lane. "My husband… and I are through. I know that for sure. I don't know if I'd want to live in Atlanta anymore. I just don't know about a lot of things. I guess I'll cross those bridges when I -"
"Slow down," Didi interrupted, leaning forward in her seat. She was looking at something ahead, revealed when the lumber truck had changed lanes. "There! See it?"
There was no van. Laura said, "See what?"
"The car there. The Buick."
Laura did see it, then. A dark blue Buick, its right side scraped to the metal and its rear fender bashed in. Earl Van Diver's car.
"Slow down," Didi cautioned. "Don't let him see us. Bastard might try to run us off the road."
"He's after Mary. He doesn't want us." Even so, Laura cut her speed and lagged a hundred yards behind the Buick and off to the right.
"I don't trust anybody who fires a bullet close enough for me to hear. Some FBI agent, huh? He didn't care if he hit David or not."
And that was the terrible truth of it, Laura thought. Earl Van Diver was hunting Mary, not to arrest her for her crimes, but to execute her. Whether he killed David or not made no difference to him. His bullets were meant for Mary, but as long as Mary had David, one of those bullets might rip through him just as easily as through her. Laura stayed far behind the Buick, and after a couple of miles she watched it pull over toward an exit ramp on the right.
"Getting off," Didi said. "Good riddance."
Laura eased the BMW over, following Van Diver toward the ramp. "What the hell are you doing?" Didi demanded. "You're not getting off, are you?"
"That's just what I'm doing."
"Why? We could still catch up with Mary!"
"And we still can," Laura said. "But I don't want that bastard catching up with her first. If he stops at a gas station, we're going to take his keys."
"Yeah, right! You take his keys! Damn it, you're asking to get shot!"
"We'll see," Laura said, and she turned onto the ramp in the wake of Van Diver's car.
In the Buick, Earl Van Diver was watching the monitor under his dashboard. A little red light was flashing, indicating a magnetic fix. The liquid crystal display read SSW 208 2.3: compass heading, bearing, miles between the main unit and the homer. As he came off the ramp's curve, he saw the display change to SW 196 2.2. He followed the road that led south from I-94, passing a sign that said LAWTON, 3 MI.
"He's not stopping for gas," Didi said. Van Diver had gone straight past a Shell station on one side of the road and an Exxon on the other. "He's taking the scenic route."
"Why'd he get off, then? If he's so hell-bent on catching Mary, why'd he get off?" She kept a car and a pickup truck between them as she followed. They'd gone maybe two miles when Laura saw a blue building with a garish orange roof off to the left. INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PANCAKES, its sign announced. The Buick's brake lights flashed, the turn indicator went on, and Van Diver made the turn into the IHOP's parking lot.
Van Diver's savage grin twitched. The olive-green van, its left side battered and scraped, was sitting in the parking lot between a junker Olds and a Michigan Power panel truck. Van Diver swung the Buick into a parking space up close to the building, where he could watch the exit. He cut the engine and unplugged the monitor, which read NNE 017 0.01.
Close enough, he thought.
Van Diver put on his black gloves, his fingers long and spidery. Then he slid the Browning automatic from beneath his seat, clicked the safety off, and held it against his right thigh. He waited, his dark eyes on the IHOP's door. It opened in a few seconds, and two men in blue parkas and caps came out, their breath frosty in the morning air. They walked toward the Michigan Power panel truck. Come on, come on! he thought. He'd figured he could be patient after all these years. But his patience had run out, and that was why he'd hurried the first shot that had hit Edward Fordyce instead of Mary Terror's skull.
The skin prickled on the back of his neck. Van Diver sensed movement behind him and to his left. His head swiveled in that direction, his hand coming up with the Browning in it and his heart hammering.
He looked into the snout of a pistol pressed against the window's glass, and behind it stood the woman he'd first seen on the newscasts from Atlanta and later had met in Bedelia Morse's kitchen.
She wasn't a killer. She was a social columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, and she was married to a stockbroker. She had, up until the kidnapping of her baby, never felt the agony of heartrending pain. She had never suffered. All these things Earl Van Diver knew, and weighed in the balance as he prepared to bring his gun up and fire through the window at her. His shot would be faster and more deadly because she didn't have the courage to kill a man in cold blood.