“Well, let’s be curious about lunch.” Margaret was nudging her toward the airport restaurant. “We’ll leave them to starve as punishment for being incommunicado.”
Trevor and Caleb didn’t appear for another hour, and she and Margaret were almost finished with their meal when they strode into the restaurant.
“Scoot.” Caleb sat down in the booth beside Jane. “Is that ham sandwich any good? I’m starved.”
“Fair.”
He motioned for the waitress. “Trevor?”
“The same. Anything. Coffee.”
“Not for me. I’m zinging.” He gave the order to the waitress and leaned back. “We had a good morning. How about you, Jane?”
“Not very productive, but I’ll have to decide if—” She stopped, gazing at him. “You are zinging.” She had seen him like that before, and it was usually when he was on the hunt or in battle. The charge of emotion he emitted was electric. Her gaze shifted to Trevor. He didn’t have the same animal intensity as Caleb, but he was also wired. His eyes glittered, and he was smiling. She asked, “What have you been doing? I called you and got voice mail.”
“It would have been inconvenient to answer the phone.” He exchanged a glance with Caleb. “We were busy.”
Jane gazed at them, annoyance mixed with bewilderment. What the hell was happening? They were like two little boys in a neighborhood club who were brimming with secrets and mischief. She had never expected that response from two men who were fully mature, sophisticated, and slightly antagonistic. “Is someone going to explain?”
Caleb smiled. “You left us with nothing to do and twiddling our thumbs. We decided to do our own investigation on Harriet Weber.”
“What?”
“We had her address, so we decided to go to her place and look around while you were conducting your interview.”
“Look around? Are you saying that you burgled her apartment?”
“Burgled sounds as if we were thieves,” Trevor said. “We had no intention of stealing anything … but information. We did, however, break into her apartment to do that, and breaking and entering is a crime.” He grinned. “So I let Caleb pick the lock. He was amazingly good at it.”
Caleb nodded in mocking acceptance of the praise. “I thought that was your plan. But you did the photography, and I’m sure that’s not precisely legal.”
“I couldn’t trust you to do it,” Trevor said. “It requires a steady hand and a certain selectivity. You wanted to whirl through the place like a hurricane.”
“I can see Caleb’s doing that.” Margaret was staring curiously at them both. “But I believe you were both enjoying it, weren’t you? You’re not at all alike, and yet you found common ground. Interesting.”
“In breaking into a woman’s house.” Jane stared at them. “Why did you do it?”
“We both thought whatever Harriet Weber told you should be verified,” Trevor said. “It sounded as if it was going to prove to be an emotional, defensive interview on her part. Was it?”
“Yes. It couldn’t be anything else. She was talking about her son, whom she’d left when he was fifteen, and a husband who had mentally left her years before in favor of Kevin.”
“And never seen or heard from either one after that time?” Caleb asked. “What a tragedy.”
She studied his expression. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that she had communication with her son, Kevin, until at least the year before his death. Mostly letters. I found several from him in a sleek, black cardboard box that contained a lockbox. It was beneath her bed.” He shot a glance at Trevor. “Which I expertly burgled so that you could photograph the contents of those letters. There was no selectivity there. You photographed all of them.”
Jane gazed at them in shock. “You’re telling me that she was writing to him?”
“And he was writing to her. Very affectionate letters.” Caleb paused. “And confiding, very confiding. The ones from Pakistan told her about his link with al-Qaeda. Every now and then, he would tell her about his latest kill.”
Jane felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. “No.”
“Yes,” Trevor said. “And some of the details were worse than the ones in his journal. Oh, he said something about how he knew she wouldn’t approve, that she’d told him how dangerous killing the little girls was for him. But he still told her about them. Let her know that the pleasure he got from the kill was nothing compared to his happiness being with her.”
“Dear God.”
“He loved her, Jane. If a sicko like him could love.”
“And she loved him,” Caleb said. “It didn’t matter what he did. It was clear from his letters that she was giving him support and affection all through those years.”
“But why would she divorce Doane and leave them both?”
“Perhaps she thought she could resist her love for the boy and was fighting it,” Trevor said.
Caleb shook his head. “Except that in one of the letters, Kevin was complaining about the necessity for her living apart from him.” He repeated, “Necessity.”
Jane’s head was whirling. “Okay.” She was trying to get it straight. “Everything she told me today and Venable five years ago were lies. Except that she loved her son and couldn’t bear to turn him over to the authorities. But there was more than that…” She lifted her hand to rub her temple. “Lord, was there more than that. If her supposed new life was all a fraud … Why? And was she also lying about Doane? Was there anything in the letters about Doane?”
Caleb shook his head. “We didn’t run across anything in the letters, but we were practically speed-reading. You’ll have to go over them again. We didn’t find any other letters or documents with his name on them in the apartment.” He grimaced. “Except the divorce decree. She didn’t lie about that.”
“What else did you find?”
Caleb shrugged. “Damn if I know. We were moving so fast that we were pulling and photographing everything in sight. We’ll have to go through the camera roll later and see if we got anything important. Oh, one thing, she told you that she saw none of the media coverage of Doane’s death. Not true. The first thing I did when I arrived at the apartment was to check her TIVO, and she had set that memorial service to record. She knew exactly what had happened to Doane and Eve. She probably knew who you and Joe were, too. That set up red flags that we should go over everything in the apartment very carefully.” He took a bite of the sandwich the waitress had placed before him. “I ran a disk on her computer for current entries to see if anything interesting showed up. That will take some time to scan.”
“You were gone a long time. You just searched her apartment?”
“Just? We did a magnificent job of searching her apartment and putting everything back exactly the way we found it.” He shrugged. “But when we found out that our Harriet was not what Venable thought she was, I took time to run out to the nearest mall and bought a few bugs to keep track of what she was up to.” He gazed at her inquiringly. “Okay?”
“More than okay. You both did everything right. I’m the one who screwed up,” Jane said bitterly. “If she lied about Kevin, she could have lied about Doane. Which means that she might know where he is now.”
“You didn’t let her know that Doane and Eve might still be alive?” Trevor asked.
“Of course not. I admit I felt a little sorry for her. She was faced with a terrible decision, and, in my opinion, she made the wrong one. But there’s no way I’d trust her enough to confide in her.” She added harshly, “Though it appeared that Kevin had no such problem.” Her hands clenched into fists. “She works with children every day of her life. How could she stand to hear what he did to them?”
“Just because she works with them doesn’t mean she holds them in particular affection,” Margaret said. “I’ve heard that some people can only care about one or two people in their entire lifetime. Maybe her one love was her child, Kevin.”
“Well, she married Doane, and they had a child. Evidently, they both loved Kevin above anything else in the world. If they shared that passion, then Doane must mean something to her. She has to know something about him.” She was trying to control her rage. “Let me out of this booth, Caleb.”