He gets up in my face, eyes flashing. But I see right off that I’ve misread the signs. He’s not confronting me. He’s putting an arm around my shoulder, hunching down, whispering something he doesn’t want anybody to overhear.
“Listen here,” he says. “What’s going on back there, we’re crossing all the lines. We’re doing things we’ve got no business doing, taking risks we’ve got no business taking. She’s sucked you into it. Don’t argue with me now. I can see it. I can read the signs for myself. I know because I’ve been there myself.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“What I’m trying to do is warn you. She’s got her hooks in you good. She calls the tune and you put on your dancing shoes. But this is gonna end bad for everybody involved. I’m telling you right now to walk away.”
“This is sour grapes,” I say. “Bea somehow maneuvered herself into the job you wanted, and now you’re out for revenge. What’s the matter? Can’t handle having a woman for a boss?”
“What I can’t handle is having a snake for a boss. She’s not the victim here, partner. She’s calling the shots.”
“I’m not your partner.” I shrug myself free.
He throws his hands up. “Fine. You’ve been warned. And I won’t feel sorry for you when you take the fall.”
After he’s stalked away, I open my car door and sling the briefcase to the passenger side. It lands on the edge and falls over. The straps that hold down the top flap are buckled loosely, leaving enough play around the opening for some of the smaller items to spill onto the floor mat. Bending over, I retrieve my digital recorder, my beat-up little camera, and Jeff’s dog-eared copy of The Foxhole Atheist, which I’m still carrying around.
By the time everything’s packed away, my forehead’s beaded with sweat. I start the engine and adjust the air vents, pausing a couple of minutes just to cool down. Then I reach into the glove compartment for some pain pills.
I’m not sure what to make of that guy. He doesn’t like Bea, that much is obvious. As for the rest, I may be a fool to trust her, but what choice do I have?
I let the air-conditioner blow as I dial Wilcox.
“Have you made any progress?”
“If I had anything worth sharing, I would’ve already called.” He takes a breath. “Look, if Englewood was an investor in Keller’s business, there’s no paper trail I can find. Maybe that in itself says something. The man does what he wants and never leaves a trace. He knows how to keep invisible.”
“Speaking of invisibility, is it possible that Englewood made Keller disappear when we were hunting him? He’d have the connections, presumably.”
“Anything’s possible,” he says. “Proving it, though, that’s the problem. Can I be honest with you, March? Maybe we’re out of our depth. You’re over on the sideline, I’m coming up with nothing, and the idea that any of this is going to end up in court. .”
“What are we supposed to do? Ignore it?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I’m flailing around here,” I say, “but it’s better than doing nothing. So keep looking, okay?”
Silence on the line, which I interpret as consent. I’m about to say goodbye when he clears his throat. “I shouldn’t say anything,” he says, “but I’ve seen the preliminary report on your shooting.”
“And?”
“They’ve got nothing.”
“That’s good. I mean, I knew there was nothing, but still. . I’m relieved.”
“They’re sitting on it, though. Keeping their options open.”
“Still,” I say. “Thanks.”
When I turn off Justice Park Drive on my way to the Northwest Freeway ramp, the donut shop on W. 43rd calls out to me. I steer into the lot, putting the car in park and bringing my briefcase inside with me. Inside, a couple of sun-weathered old-timers are drinking black coffee across from each other, the morning paper scattered in sections on the table between them. One of them wears a white sleeveless T-shirt over cigar-wrapper skin, a flat cap low over his eyes. The other has one hand tucked into the waistband of his powder-blue stretch jeans. They look me over with indifference before resuming their conversation.
At the counter I line up behind a couple of refill-seeking seniors, then order coffee and a glazed donut, which I take to an empty table up front with a view of the parking lot and the feeder road beyond. The coffee is weak, but the donut tastes pretty good in a soft, sickly sweet sort of way. I have to give my fingertips a good scrub to get the glaze off, and even then, as I unpack my briefcase, spreading the papers out across the Formica tabletop, my touch seems to raise sticky welts on everything.
I sip some coffee and start flipping through The Foxhole Atheist. The marginal note with the safe house address isn’t the only annotation. In fact, many of the pages feature underlining and one- or two-word notes. Sometimes he’s written GOOD or EXACTLY next to a line from the day’s devotional reading. Sometimes he limits himself to an exclamation mark beside a telling passage. Clearly he’s spent some hours with this book, so it’s no surprise that when needing to write the address down, The Foxhole Atheist was at hand.
As I browse the little book, I notice pages where Jeff has underlined just a single letter in the middle of a word. On an entire page, there will be just one or two of these random lines underneath an I or an O or an F, reminding me of the way I used to mark up books as a kid first discovering cryptography, using a simple book cipher to write secret messages. The memory brings a smile to my lips.
The very first entry in the book is the most marked. It’s titled THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES, BUT THERE SHOULD BE. The first line in the second paragraph reads:
In these cases, the very same fear that prompts the theist to doubt his faith perversely motivated the atheist toward an artificial certainty in the existence of a spiritual world.
The letters he’s underlined-the I and N in the word in, the F and E in the word fear, the R in artificial, the N in certainty, and the O in world-they’re not a cipher code, but they do spell a word. Turning the pages with greater urgency, I find the pattern repeated, not all in one sentence as in the first instance, but stretching over the length of paragraphs and pages. Always the same sequence of letters, always spelling the same word.
INFERNO.
Jeff gave the impression that he didn’t know much about the inner workings of Nesbitt’s company, and when Hilda spilled her own version, she never alluded to Jeff by name, only mentioning that in the grip of paranoia Nesbitt had brought new people in from the outside, people she presumably didn’t know well. And yet, over and over in a strangely compulsive way, Jeff was picking out the sequence of letters that spell the code name of Nesbitt’s informer.
Why?
I pull out my phone and dial Jeff’s number. Evidently he knows more than he let on. Maybe giving me the book was his way of revealing this, knowing I would pick up on the underlining eventually. There’s no answer. The voicemail picks up and an electronically generated voice repeats the digits.
“Call me,” I say. “I’ve been reading your book.”
Then I wait. When he doesn’t call back right away, I pop the rings of my Filofax open, removing a couple of fresh sheets of lined notepaper. I make two lists side by side, the first column labeled NESBITT and the second ENGLEWOOD. Underneath the first I put Jeff and Hilda, Brandon Ford and the men in his paramilitary team. Then I relist Ford and his men under Englewood, drawing an arrow from left to right, since at some point they must have switched sides.
At the bottom of the page I write INFERNO, underlining the name.
What column should I put him in? I would write Inferno’s name under Nesbitt’s column, only it seems Ford is the only person in touch with the insider. If he’s switched sides, maybe Inferno belongs to Englewood’s team now. That’s where the power seems to be, after all. The way Wilcox was talking about him, there’s not much the man can’t do. The phony DNA results are proof of that. And if he has the power to manipulate the NCIC database, why maybe it’s not so implausible to think he could have arranged the traffic stop that led to Nesbitt’s death. Maybe Silvestri, the training officer, undid his thumb break for a reason; maybe he really did intend to shoot Nesbitt, just as the conspiracy theorists online insist. The crooked cop angle strikes me as ridiculous, the stuff of Hollywood or bad television dramas, but after my face-to-face meeting with Englewood, when he dropped Reg Keller’s name, anything seems possible.