You’ve learned something about killing, haven’t you? she said to herself.
The Transportation Security Administration lists on the desk in front of her included dates of birth. Anyone too young or too old was immediately removed from her consideration. She used a fifteen-year age window, thinking that the man they were hunting could be anywhere in that range. The photo on the driver’s license had an indistinct quality to it; the man had a slippery look, and might be any of several ages. He was certainly older than her and Moth. Older than Susan Terry.
Ed’s age, she realized. Or damn close to it.
The possibilities were narrowed.
Single men. Traveling alone. Aged forty-five to sixty.
She continued to quietly speak to herself: “Were you pretending to be a businessman finishing up some important deal? A tourist tired after catching a bit of illicit South Beach action? Or maybe a dutiful son returning home after visiting elderly relatives in one of the high-rises in North Miami? What did you want to show the world you were, because you weren’t showing us even a little bit of the truth, were you?”
She drew lines through names she eliminated. By the time she was finished her own list was narrowed down to right around two dozen men traveling north alone who fit the modest profile she’d established.
One of those names, she realized, was either a charred body in a trailer in a forgotten little town in Massachusetts, or a killer luxuriating in newly found freedom.
Her money was on luxury.
We were close, but we weren’t really close enough for you to kill yourself, were we? Questions resounded in her head. You were clever enough to plan other people’s deaths. Why couldn’t you plan your own? She imagined murders taking place on a stage in front of her. Like an actor, the killer they sought took a bow and exited to thunderous applause. Stage left.
Moth stirred. She looked up. He was moving stiffly. “Morning,” Andy Candy said brightly. “There’s coffee.”
Moth grunted. He lifted himself to his feet and disappeared into the bathroom. A hot shower and vigorous toothbrushing cleared away some of the fogginess of too much tension, not enough sleep, and growing anxiety. When he emerged, Andy eyed his wet hair.
“I think I’ll do that as well. Is there a dry towel?”
He nodded.
“Look at this while I shower,” she said, pushing her list of names toward him.
Moth sat with his coffee cup, examining Andy’s list but listening to the noise from the bathroom, working hard to not dwell on every memory of her naked form. It was a morning, he believed, like any old married couple might have, with only one small distinction: A little conversation. Clean up. Some hot coffee. A modest pace to get the day going. Start to plan to murder someone.
It had been some time since he’d felt the revenge energy that had dominated him when he’d pulled a semblance of his life together after his uncle’s death. But staring down at the list, it stirred within him again.
“Where are you?” he asked each name on the list. This question was followed by, “Who are you?” and finally, “How do I find you?” Each question was whispered in a lower, rougher tone.
Susan Terry hesitated before knocking on Moth’s door. She recalled that a few days earlier she had stood in the same spot, gun in hand, ready to shoot him because in a coked-up near frenzy of confused thoughts, she believed it was the history student-drunk who had called the police on her and thoroughly screwed up her carefully balanced life.
She shrugged and knocked.
As Moth opened the door, without a greeting she simply said, “I don’t have much time. I have to be on the carpet in my boss’s office at nine. We need to figure out the next step before then, because I think I’m going to be out on my ass at nine-zero-one.”
Moth steered her toward the desk, where piles of papers-everything accumulated over the weeks since his uncle’s death-were haphazardly strewn about. He saw Susan glance at the mess and frown. He pushed Andy’s list to her just as Andy emerged from the shower, running a brush through damp hair.
“One of these, I think,” he said. “It’s what Andy came up with, going through all the stuff you sent. At least, maybe he’s on this.”
Susan eyed the two of them. There had been something utterly chaste about their connection up to that moment and she mentally sniffed the air to see if anything had changed. She couldn’t detect anything, so she ignored it. But a part of her sounded a bell of concern.
Then, as quickly, she dismissed it. Screw it, she thought. Deal with what you can deal with. She looked at the list of names.
“Single men. Traveling alone. All within the right age framework.”
Susan nodded. “You’re thinking like a cop, Andy,” she said.
Andy smiled. “Yeah. But that’s as far as I got. How do we narrow it down further?”
The three fell silent.
Moth stared at the papers, letting his eyes sweep across documents over to Susan, then to Andy Candy, then back to the piles on his desk. What does a historian do? he demanded of himself. How does a historian look at bits and pieces of information and determine how events are influenced?
He breathed in sharply, a sound loud enough to make the two others turn in his direction.
“I know how,” he said.
Shot in the dark, Susan thought as she hurried through the warren of desks toward the state attorney’s corner office. But as far as shots in the dark go, not a bad one at all. Her boss’s secretary usually guarded the entrance with Cerberus-like intensity and rarely smiled, but as Susan approached, she looked up from her computer and shook her head.
“Oh, Susan, that looks painful. Are you okay?”
Susan thought joking was the best approach. Make everything seem like no big deal. “Hey, you should see the other guy.”
The secretary nodded and smiled wanly. She gestured toward the door to the inner office. “He’s waiting to see you. Go right on in.”
Susan nodded, took a step forward, then stopped. This was calculated, part of the performance. It had to be done before she got fired, if that was to be the outcome of the meeting.
“I wonder…” she started, then stopped. “Oh, probably won’t help, but…”
“What is it?” the secretary asked.
Susan pounced.
“I have a list of names from the TSA. I need to pull state driver’s licenses on each of them.” She motioned toward her arm in the sling. “It’s so hard for me to type into the damn computer right now…”
“Oh, I’ll do it,” said the secretary. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Is this part of your investigation?”
“Of course,” Susan said. The boss’s lie about an investigation seemed to be all over the office. Helpful. She smiled. The secretary would have access to all the law enforcement databases around the nation. “Boy, would I ever appreciate it.”
She handed the secretary the list Andy Candy had created. Now all she had to do was avoid being fired in the next few seconds.
She switched back and forth between concoctions and contradictions effectively, rapid-fire.
“I know what you told me, but it was a closed case where questions had cropped up, and with the sort of addiction problems I’ve experienced, lingering job-related issues can really trigger some of the behaviors I’m working my way through,” she told her boss. She let words race through her lips, wanting to be persuasive, which required speed, but not wanting to sound manic, hopped up, or strung out. This required more performance on her part.