"No, thanks," he lied. Actually, he'd have sold his arm for anything cold to drink.
Mitsy wasn't gone thirty seconds before she returned to her seat on the sofa. She stripped the cap from the bottle with an effortless twist and tossed it into the pile at her feet. She stared at the bottle for a moment as though reading the label, but she never took a sip. Her mind had traveled off again. As Jed watched silently, her mouth took an angry set, and she squeezed the bottle with both hands. It trembled in her grasp.
When she made eye contact again, she was angry. "I think he was planning something for a long time," she said. Her tone was one of discovery, her words carefully measured. "I never put it together until right now."
"I don't understand?'
"Of course you don't. You couldn't possibly. Beginning a couple of weeks ago, I noticed things missing from the house Ricky's things. When I'd do laundry, there'd be a few less underwear to fold. He'd take clothes out of the house, saying he was taking them to the laundry, but then he'd never bring them back. When I'd offer to pick them up at the cleaners, he'd say no. It was kind of like he was moving out of the apartment a little at a time. At first, I figured it was another woman, but then he always came home at night and he was always at the JDC when I called him. Finally, I just stopped worrying about it."
"Didn't you ever say anything?"
Mitsy smiled. "Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes the mystery is less painful than the answer. No, I never said anything. And neither did he, but he started drinking again. Over the past few weeks, it got really bad. He was coming home drunk. I'd like to think he was doing his boozing after work with some of his supervisor buddies, but I'm not sure. I think he was getting drunk on the job. That's what worried me most. I just didn't want to go down that road again."
Jed was confused. As he scowled, his eyebrows nearly touched. "So you think that his drinking had something to do with a plan to kill Nathan Bailey?"
Mitsy scowled back at him. "No. Well, maybe. I don't know. He stopped talking to me is the thing. No conversation at all. Nothing. Looking back, putting it all together with the disappearing clothes and the plane ticket, I guess now I think he was trying to deal with something… "
"Whoa, whoa," Jed cut her off, making a waving motion with his hand. "What plane ticket?"
"Well, that's the biggest mystery of all. About a week ago, I found a plane ticket hidden in one of his shoes in the closet. One-way to Argentina, paid for in cash. Nine hundred dollars! I can't imagine where he came up with that kind of money. He must have been saving up, the son of a bitch. Here we go, month-to-month, barely able to pay the light bill, and he's saving for a trip! I never said anything about that either, because I kept telling myself that maybe he was planning some kind of surprise getaway for the two of us."
"Was there a second ticket for you, as well?"
Mitsy answered by looking away again.
"Where's the ticket now?" Jed pressed.
"No clue. The shoes and the ticket both joined the list of missing stuff."
Jed leaned back in the hollow chair and crossed his legs. His knees were nearly level with his shoulders. "Argentina," he thought aloud. "When was he supposed to leave?"
Mitsy shrugged. Her day was getting longer by the minute. "Best I could tell, it was an open ticket, no date on it. I didn't even know he had a passport."
"Do you remember the airline?"
She shook her head. "Not really," she said, her voice thickening. She finally took a pull on the beer. "It was an airline I've never heard of-something Spanish, I think."
Jed took a full minute to jot notes into his little book. The whole time, Mitsy faded further and further away. When he finally looked up, it was as though she had left completely. She just stared out the sliding glass doors into the blistering afternoon sky. Her eyes were so intense that Jed found himself looking to see what was so interesting.
A feeling of desperate frustration gripped his belly. Here he had all this new information, yet he didn't know what to do with it. Clearly, Ricky Harris was not the model employee that Johnstone had portrayed him to be, but so what? What did the Bailey kid have to do with any of this?
"So, Mitsy?" Jed spoke softly as he interrupted her thoughts. Her gaze returned to him and she smiled her humorless grin. "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?"
"I just need to clarify one last point, and then I'm done. You said you realize now that Ricky had been planning something for a long time. What, exactly, do you think he was planning?"
She shook her head and shifted her eyes back to the sky. "Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it was to kill that boy. Maybe it was to do something else. Whatever it was, I guess it was bad enough to make him leave the country. And me." In the end, her voice was only a whisper.
The Reischmann proposal had been flawless. Todd Briscow was 99 percent certain that they'd be awarded the contract within the month. He and his sales manager had spent the afternoon at the golf course, celebrating their impending victory. After the eighth hole, though, the heat had become too much, and they took their celebration into the clubhouse, where his boss was buying. As he navigated the winding turns approaching his home, Todd wondered if maybe he hadn't had a few too many. It wasn't that he felt drunk; he just had to work harder than usual to keep the Chevy between the lines on the pavement.
Todd hadn't so much as thought about the boy he'd seen until he heard the news on the radio on his way home from the party. Could it be that the kid they were looking for was the same one he had seen? The age was about right, and that would explain what he was doing wandering around so early in the morning, but Todd had trouble believing that the kid he had seen was a murderer. When he spoke to his wife from his car phone about his suspicions, she told him that the police had left a picture of the boy at the house. Once he saw the picture, he'd know for sure.
After pulling the car into the garage, he took a few minutes to set up the sprinkler in the front yard before going inside. It was getting dark, and he was convinced that the secret to their green lawn was nightly waterings. Patty handed him the flier with Nathan's picture on it before he had a chance to put down his briefcase.
"Is this him?" she asked anxiously. "I can't believe you haven't seen his picture on the news. It's all they talk about."
Like I have the time to watch the news, Todd didn't say. The flier displayed two pictures of Nathan Bailey. One looked like a school picture, a smile and combed hair. The other one looked like it had been lifted off a videotape. Feature for feature, there was little resemblance between the boys in the pictures, and nothing in either reminded him of the kid from this morning. Until he noticed the eyes in the grainy picture. Those eyes bore the same deer-in-the headlights look as the kid he had seen. And the hair was the same.
"This is him," Todd said. "We've got to call the police."
"Are you sure?" Patty pressed. Todd couldn't tell from her tone what she wanted the answer to be.
"No, I'm not positive," he answered honestly. "But I think we ought to call."
Chapter 24
At last it was dark, and time for Nathan to continue his journey. Finding the keys this time had been a much more difficult task. It took him nearly an hour of frantic hunting before he finally found a single Honda key among a clutter of loose change in an ashtray stashed in the back of a dresser drawer.
In a flash of inspiration, Nathan had killed the last thirty minutes in the steamy garage, using electrical tape to change the ones on the Honda's license plates to fours.