“Where?”
“Remember the lodge at Big Bear Lake where we used to stay when I was a kid?” He waited for his father’s acknowledgment, then said, “I’ll call you there on Friday morning.”
There was a long silence before his father said, “You know, sooner or later we have to go to the police about this.”
“If you don’t hear from me by ten o’clock on Friday morning, that’s exactly what I want you to do. But give me until then.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think the police will believe you, and I don’t want them to get in my way. CHEGAN isn’t even on their radar screen. The cops are chasing a killer, and they think they already know who it is. They’ll look for reasons not to believe you. I have no proof — nothing. The only way I’m going to clear myself is to go to the police with Caleb in tow. I need to get to Fagan before he buries whatever trails lead to him.”
Luke threw two antibiotic tablets into his mouth and swallowed them dry as he walked out of the pharmacy with Frankie. The boy was clutching a brown paper bag filled with HIV medications.
They joined Megan in a waiting cab, and Frankie sat between the two of them for what turned out to be a silent ride across town.
It was almost as if the boy knew what he would find when they arrived at his mother’s hospice.
Luke and Megan stood back with two nuns as Frankie walked up to the empty metal-framed bed. The boy rubbed the bed’s frame with a hand while his eyes traveled back and forth across the bare urine-stained mattress.
Eventually, Frankie looked back at Sister Marta Ann, and the two of them seemed to exchange a private thought. Then he squatted beside the bed and pulled out his green duffel bag. He fished through it, removed a wooden box, and opened it. Inside was a yellowed photograph of a teenage girl holding an infant. Frankie stared at it for a long moment, then rubbed it against a pants leg and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
Megan brought a hand to her mouth. Her wet swallow carried across the room.
The boy zipped up the duffel bag and pushed it back under the bed. Then he stood and walked out the door.
56
Luke tapped Megan’s arm with a water bottle. “Here. Drink some more.”
He stared out over the freshly harvested cornfield north of Mexico City, squinting into the late afternoon sun while Megan drank down half the bottle without stopping to take a breath.
Twenty hours earlier, they had started their journey under a starlit sky on the Usumacinta River, crossing the Mexican border into Chiapas on a boat resembling a gondola. Frankie’s uncle, a truck driver and part-time smuggler with a nervous twitch in his shoulders, had agreed to deliver both of them onto U.S. soil for $2,100—half his usual price — but only after Frankie had worn him down in a hand-waving clash of wills that lasted the better part of an hour.
Luke had realized that Frankie’s feisty negotiations were fueled by the boy’s false belief that he would be traveling with them. When Luke explained otherwise, Frankie retreated into himself and remained there even as they said their final good-byes.
The trip’s first leg ended when their furtive boatman dropped them onto a rocky shoreline just inside Mexico, where Frankie’s uncle was waiting with a large garbage hauler. The pair squeezed into a false compartment on the truck’s underside, joining four other sweat-drenched stowaways whose faces showed a strange mix of both terror and hope.
Megan was still retching from the stench of rotting garbage when they finally stopped at the cornfield after driving all night and most of the next day. Her legs had barely held her upright when she first climbed from their metal cell into the late afternoon sun.
Dehydration was threatening to overtake both of them.
But they had to keep moving. When Luke had called his father a second time from the hospice, Elmer told him that Caleb had sent a memo to the medical staff announcing that he’d be traveling to Beijing, China, on Saturday for a weeklong conference on international healthcare.
Luke figured it was even odds that Fagan would suffer a fate similar to Kaczynski and “die” while on that trip.
He had to intercept Caleb before he left for China.
Megan was finishing the last of the water when Luke squatted on his haunches and started pulling chaff from a severed corn stalk.
She stooped next to him.
“Thanks.” Her voice had a dry rattle.
Luke’s eyes followed a dust funnel in the distance. “For what?”
“For saving my life.”
He turned to her.
Megan stared at the ground while tracing a circle in the dirt with her finger.
When she didn’t return his gaze, he picked up a shriveled corncob and started bouncing it in his hand.
Without warning, she leaned into him and kissed him on the cheek. Then she rose and started walking toward the trash hauler.
He followed her with his eyes, fingering his cheek as he wondered at the mystery of women.
The truck’s passenger-side door swung open and the seat tilted forward. A moment later, Frankie’s head appeared.
“Hi, boss.”
Megan and Luke exchanged a glance as the boy hopped down to the ground.
“I help you get home,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Luke said.
The boy stepped closer. “My uncle say you no pay him enough, so he no will take you to America. But I no think that the problem.” Frankie glimpsed over his shoulder. “I no think he can do it.”
“What?” Megan shouted. “Where’s your uncle? I want to talk to him. He can’t just—”
Frankie held a palm up to her. “My uncle take us to U.S. border. You take me with you, and I help you get across border.”
57
“Look at the time stamp in the upper right-hand corner.” Detective O’Reilly pressed PAUSE and pointed at the LCD screen showing a lanky black man leaning into Luke McKenna’s office door. “He entered McKenna’s office at 5:57, exactly six minutes before the e-mail was erased from both McKenna’s machine and the hospital’s server. He left one minute after the file disappeared from the computers. You’re looking at the man who erased Kate Tartaglia’s e-mail. McKenna didn’t do it.”
O’Reilly had replayed the security videos after getting word from the forensic computer investigators the previous afternoon. He’d been waiting for Groff when the lieutenant arrived at the Police Administration Building that morning.
The investigators had called O’Reilly after finding an entry confirming the deleted e-mail. They couldn’t recover the original e-mail because the hard drive had been written over with newer files. Investigators confirmed that someone used McKenna’s computer to delete the file from the server at 6:03 P.M. on the night of Tartaglia’s murder.
Previously, O’Reilly had viewed only the later portions of the security video because he was trying to reconcile the timeline around McKenna’s departure from the hospital at ten o’clock. It wasn’t until last night, when he had gone back and studied the earlier video segments, that he spotted the black man breaking into McKenna’s office.
Lieutenant Groff shrugged. “So maybe McKenna had an accomplice.”
“I don’t think so.” O’Reilly wound back the recording and played it in slow motion. “Look at the way this guy leans into the door. Someone with a key to the office wouldn’t stand right up to the door like that. This guy’s concealing something. I think that something is a lock pick, and we’re watching him break into McKenna’s office.”
“All I see is the guy’s back. I don’t see a pick.”