“That’s very generous.” Shanker was thinking of Joe Ferris, who had lived for four to six hours according to the autopsy, though for the last hour or two he had been blind, deaf, unable to speak or move, capable only of feeling pain.
Reynolds stood. “I’ll let myself out.” Suddenly he was a charmer again, a neighborhood guy. “Great to see you, Ron. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You too,” Shanker managed. “We gotta get together for dinner sometime.”
“Count on it,” the Man said, knowing as well as Shanker that there would be no dinner, which was just as well, because Shanker never had any appetite in Reynolds’ presence.
The door closed after Reynolds, and Shanker sank back in his chair. He thought about the two women. The second one, especially, the one Reynolds had called Abby. She’d walked out on a business arrangement, he said. Insulted him, too. Insulted the Man.
That hadn’t been smart. Whoever she was, this Abby didn’t have a clue who she was dealing with. She would find out, though.
Just like Joe Ferris did.
12
The air over Los Angeles was a grimy sepia tone, tinting the gridwork of buildings and streets below. Looking out the airplane window, Tess saw the Hollywood sign on a far hillside, the row of giant letters reduced by distance to microscopic text, a footnote to the city. She wondered why people made such a big deal about the sign. It was only the remnant of someone’s advertising promotion-for a housing development called Hollywoodland, as she recalled. Denver boasted the Rocky Mountains, a wilderness of trails and fishing holes and granite peaks running with clear snowmelt. L.A. had a defunct advertisement on a hill.
All right, maybe she was overstating things. But she truly hated Los Angeles. With any luck her stay would be short and uneventful. She would find out what Abby was mixed up in, make sure she wouldn’t come to the Bureau’s attention, then make a graceful exit.
The problem was, she’d found that situations involving Abby rarely proceeded according to plan.
The jet touched down with a skid of tires and made its way to the arrival gate. She’d checked no baggage, choosing to bring only a carry-on case with a few items she kept in her office for overnight stays-a change of clothes, some toiletries, other odds and ends. She had worn her gun in a pancake holster under her jacket throughout the flight, an option that was not only tolerated but required when federal agents traveled by plane. In the world after September 11, a law-enforcement agent with a gun was the next best thing to an air marshal.
Most of the flight had been occupied by her perusal of the MEDEA case report, faxed to her office just before she left. The first thing she’d noticed was that the case was two decades old. It had been reactivated only within the past few weeks, for reasons that fully explained the Bureau’s trepidation. It was hot stuff, all right. She was almost surprised Michaelson had allowed the material to be faxed to her, even over a secure phone line.
And she now knew why the case had been dubbed MEDEA. Apparently the name was not an example of FBI creativity, after all. It had been coined by a tabloid newspaper, and the Bureau had simply picked it up. There had been considerable press coverage. Tess remembered none of it, but she hadn’t been in law enforcement then. She had been a sophomore at the University of Illinois.
Back in the eighties, the Bureau’s involvement in the case had been minimal, limited to a psychological evaluation of the arrestee. Even that contribution was unusual, a testimony to the widespread media interest in the crime.
The description of the current investigation was sketchy, and there was nothing about any developments within the past week. Tess figured she would be brought up to speed on those details when she was briefed at the field office.
Outside the concourse she found a taxi and directed the driver to the federal building in Westwood. The cab headed north to the San Diego Freeway. Traffic was worse than she remembered, and eventually the flow of vehicles came to a standstill. At her urging the cabby exited at Venice Boulevard and took Sepulveda, creeping through the stop-and-go traffic. It was hot outside, the cab’s air conditioning didn’t work, and Tess was rapidly developing an animus toward the City of Angels that was almost pathological. Then she saw the church.
It was on Olympic Boulevard, east of the intersection with Sepulveda. She glimpsed the spire in the sun. She had been to that church on her last visit to L.A., taking confession there, her first confession in many years.
“Turn right,” she said. Obediently the cabby maneuvered through the clogged intersection and turned onto Olympic. She pointed at the church, and he stopped in the empty parking lot. “Just wait here. I’ll be right out.”
In the year and a half since the Rain Man case, she had thought of this church many times. Confession had helped her, though she hadn’t felt so sure of it at the time. She felt an obligation to this place, which she intended to satisfy with a donation to the poor box.
She contributed most of the cash on her person, reminding herself to stop at an ATM and refill her wallet. Having given alms, she was ready to go, but strangely she didn’t want to. Then she understood that she’d had an ulterior motive in coming here. She wanted absolution. She wanted to confess.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I broke the rules. I broke the law. I cut corners. I allowed myself to get away with behavior that I would never tolerate in a subordinate.
Something like that.
She entered the nave and walked down the central aisle. The church was empty. Her only company was a host of plaster saints and the backlit figures in the stained-glass windows, and the suffering Jesus on his cross, lifted behind the altar.
She remembered the location of the confessional. This was not the time when confession would be scheduled, but she’d gotten lucky on her last visit, and she hoped for the same luck again.
But she was disappointed. There was no priest in evidence. She really was alone.
Well, it had been worth a shot. She knelt and prayed before the altar, but it was a perfunctory prayer, and she felt nothing. She was retreating up the aisle when she saw a gray head bent low in one of the pews. An elderly woman, sitting alone. Tess hadn’t noticed her before, and there had been no other vehicle in the parking lot.
The woman felt her gaze. She raised her head and looked at Tess. Her face was wet with tears.
After making eye contact, Tess couldn’t walk away. She sat beside the woman. “Are you all right?”
“I come here every day,” the woman answered. “I’ve come for the last three months.”
Tess didn’t ask what had happened three months ago. “Does it help?”
“I don’t know. It’s supposed to.”
Tess touched the woman’s hand. “I hope things get better.” She rose to leave.
“What I want to know,” the woman said softly, “is why there is so much.”
Tess didn’t understand. “So much…?”
“Pain. How can there be so much pain, everywhere?”
It was the same question, Tess realized, that had kept her out of churches after Paul Voorhees died.
There was nothing she could say in reply. She had never found an answer. Somehow, over time, she had lost the need for one. It was just the way things were. There was no point in trying to understand. There was only the struggle to make things better.
On impulse she leaned down and hugged the woman gently. Neither of them said anything.
“Thank you,” the woman said in the tone of a blessing.
Tess nodded. She left, not looking back.
She arrived at the federal building and received a temporary ID badge from the guards in the lobby. An elevator ride brought her to the seventeenth story, where she was buzzed into the FBI suite that occupied the entire floor. The agent who greeted her was Rick Crandall, probably her only friend in the L.A. office. Though he had put on some muscle in the past year, he still looked impossibly young to be a federal agent.