The Lonely Dead

It wasn't that either of us thought it was impossible that Zandt had killed Ferillo. We both knew that, during the initial search for his daughter, when he had still been on the force, he had privately cornered and killed the man he was convinced was responsible. The problem was that a further abduction had taken place after this event. We now had a name for that person — Stephen DeLong — and already knew he had been only one of several people abducting to order for the Straw Men, my brother being chief amongst them. The sudden arrival of a video file nailing John for DeLong's murder — and which had evidently been held in reserve for a long time — proved they were after him, and willing to do a great deal to send bigtime trouble his way. The question was whether the death of Ferillo was an example of this, or part of the cause.

Nina had made two calls from the room's landline. These had established that Ferillo had a restaurant called the Dining Room on Stark Street in Portland. Four years previously he had been arrested as part of a racketeering investigation down in LA, and had been close to going away for a long time. He'd walked, and got himself from there into the position of owning a vaunted eatery patronized by the great and the good of northeast Oregon. From minor mob to wealthy restaurateur was a mighty bound, but said nothing about why Zandt might have decided to explode into his life — or why someone might choose to make it look that way.

After the calls we sat in silence for a while. The coffee got slowly colder, but we kept drinking it anyway, until my stomach felt bitter and curdled. I had the window open wide and was staring out over battered buildings as an angry sky dropped persistent rain. It felt absurd not to be doing something, but I couldn't think what it might be. We had no way of finding John, and no way of getting closer to the Ferillo investigation.

Then suddenly a very dim light went off in my head. It flickered, sputtered out for a second, then came back a little stronger.

'Call Monroe,' I said, slowly.

'No way.'

'See it from his point of view. He's not an idiot. He knows something major happened to you at the end of last year. You get shot, and Sarah Becker is back with her parents. But you tell him nothing, and now someone you're intimately tied to is going around doing very bad things.'

'Or looks like they are.'

'Whatever. Even if Monroe didn't have someone pushing him from behind, you'd be standing at the end of a long plank right now.'

'What are you not saying?'

'What do you mean?'

She looked at me squarely. 'What I mean is that there's something in your voice that I don't understand.'

'Tell me again about what happened when you went to The Knights motel. The day Jessica's body was found.'

'Ward

'Just tell me.'

'I got a call from Charles. On my cell. He said someone had just taken out a cop in a patrol car and then disappeared.'

'And then what?'

'Nothing. He told me where it was and said he wanted me down there.'

'For a cop-killing.'

She hesitated. 'Yes.'

'Which is nothing to do with the FBI, and of no interest to him. Unless…'

She was silent for a full twenty seconds while she thought it through. 'Oh Christ.'

'Yeah. Maybe.'

She blinked, rapidly. 'So why on earth would we talk to him?'

'Because we don't have anyone else. And because then you get to ask him this question and see what he says, and if he has no good answer, then… either we're in worse trouble than we thought, or we have something to work with.'

She'd evidently made the decision before I spoke. She got off the bed and pulled her phone from her bag, turning it on. Within a couple of seconds it chirped several times.

'Messages,' she said. She listened. Then pulled the phone from her ear and stood with a strange expression on her face.

'John?'

She shook her head. 'Monroe. Four times. No message, just 'call me.'

'So call him. Not his office number. Call his cell.'

'But if he does a point-of-origin he'll know where we are.'

'He'll know where we were. Come on, do it.'

She dialled. Listened to it ring, with her eyes on me.

Then: 'Charles, it's Nina.'

From six feet away I could hear the immediate torrent of speech. Nina listened for a moment.

'What are you… Oh Jesus. Charles, I'll call you back.'

She cut the connection. Seemed for a moment actually speechless.

'What? Nina — what?'

'They've found another woman with a hard disk.'

— «» — «» — «»—

At half past five it was getting dark and we were sitting in the car fifty yards back from a place called the Daley Bread. We were there because it was a place I'd noticed on the way in the night before, big and anonymous, and we'd chosen it because it was on a big street, four turns off 99 and the open road north or south. Easy to find, easy to drive quickly away from. We were there early because we wanted to see if anyone was going to be put into position, whether calls might have been made to the local cops or field office, or… anyone else. Whether Monroe could be trusted even a little, in other words.

In half an hour we saw no one except a handful of bedraggled citizens shuffling past with tattered blankets around their shoulders, interspersed with small knots of the young and well-heeled. The two appeared utterly unrelated, and it was hard to understand how they inhabited parts of the same space, as if they were two separate species that just happened to look a little like each other. We watched each group approach and then walk away. Some peered into the car and doubtless wondered why a couple of people might be sitting there on a cold, dark evening. We stared back. We were about as paranoid as we could be. When no one was around we just watched the street in both directions.

At quarter past six, fifteen minutes ahead of the appointed meeting, I opened my door and got out.

'Be careful,' she said.

'I'll be fine. He doesn't know what I look like.'

'No. But other people do.'

I walked up the road at a moderate pace, trying to place myself somewhere between the derelicts and the young and cool. I waited a beat on the opposite side of the road to the diner, saw no one who looked like law enforcement outside, and very few people within.

As I walked across the road I realized that anyone with half a brain would have held the location of the meeting back until Monroe was actually in town, to make it harder for him to mobilize local agents, if he had a mind. More than ever before I wished Bobby was around. Or my mother. Without either, I knew there was some part of my back which was always going to feel uncovered.

I asked a question, quietly and without moving my lips.

'Is this a stupid idea?' There was no reply.

Inside the restaurant it was warmer and a little stuffy. A tired-looking girl in a uniform came straight over with a menu in her hand. 'I'm Britnee,' she said, unnecessarily. She had a badge the size of a plate. 'Will you be dining alone tonight?'

I said I would, and that I had my eye on one of the booths that ran either side of the central partition of the room. As there were only two other couples present in the entire place, she had no real choice but to sit me where I'd asked.

I ordered a chilli without looking at the menu. When she went off to wake up the cook, I got myself into the position Nina and I had agreed upon. I sat close up against the right-hand side of the booth, with my back to the low wall which separated it from its twin on the other side. Neither table could be seen from the other side, but I should be able to hear.