Sophie’s pulse rate doubled.
Talbert was the youngest of the trio—early forties if she had to guess. He wore a crisp, pinstripe button-down, open at the collar. Hair pushed back and cemented in place with plenty of product. At least two days’ worth of stubble coming in.
Another text.
talbert just walked in with some other guy
Both Talbert and Rugged-Handsome exuded that same trance-like intensity.
No one spoke.
A minute into the silence, Talbert broke his thousand-yard stare, looked at Seymour, shook his head, and looked away again, as if he’d been offered something and were politely refusing it.
The waitress returned with two coffee mugs and a carafe.
“Anyone interested in dinner?”
Seymour seemed to speak for everyone. “No, we’re fine.”
When the waitress was out of earshot, Talbert said, “We have the van.”
Seymour nodded.
Talbert said, “Any word from him?”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
Silence again.
Seymour looked at Talbert as if he’d spoken. He reached over and grabbed a plastic tub of creamer from a pile that filled a porcelain bowl beside the other condiments. Rolled it across the table to him.
Talbert tore off the seal and dumped the creamer into his coffee.
For a moment, he stared down into the cup, mesmerized, as if the swirls of cream were revealing the mysteries of the universe.
Rugged-Handsome said, “The children are there.”
“Full house,” Seymour said.
“He looks a lot like him.”
“So does she,” Talbert said without looking up.
The other two nodded in agreement.
“Won’t be long now,” Seymour said.
Silence descended on their booth again.
Sophie reeled.
On those rare occasions when she escaped the precinct for lunch hour, she liked to head downtown to Lola on Fourth and Virginia. She’d always take a book, intending to read, but inevitably she’d never even power it on. Instead, she’d sit alone, eating and soaking up fragments of conversation from the pleasant noise of the restaurant, reassembling them as best she could into a picture of the lives and stories of the people all around her. She was good at it too. Easy work for a detective and aspiring novelist.
But that particular aptitude was failing her at the moment.
It was different with Seymour, Talbert, and Rugged-Handsome.
Eavesdropping on their conversation was like trying to make sense of a dream. Like reading a code without the cipher. The words were plain enough, but they were fragments of a larger picture that she couldn’t even begin to guess at.
She dug out her phone and sent another text to Dobbs.
something about to happen ... how far?
Ten seconds later, her screen illuminated.
10 min
She set the phone on the table.
Seymour straightened.
So did Sophie.
His head ticked to the left, as imperceptibly as the twitch of the minute hand, but she caught it.
The other two men watched him, something like wonder and fear exploding in their eyes.
Sophie thumbed off the brass snap that secured her Glock in the holster.
“The fourth?” Talbert said.
Seymour nodded. “He just arrived.”
Chapter 22
Grant had just thrown up for the third time in the last hour, and he was still hunched over the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, gasping for breath while Paige patted his back.
“You’re going to feel better soon,” she said. “I promise.”
Grant wiped his mouth as an intense shiver wracked his body.
“How long until your client—”
“Anytime.”
“You ready?”
“Yes.”
She looked the part at least, having changed back into her kimono.
“Got your phone set up?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to go in there alone. I’ll do it when I take Steve up.”
“You be careful. Guy could flip out he catches you trying to record him.”
“I will be.”
Grant struggled onto his feet and flushed the toilet. The spinning of the water made him queasy all over again. He ran the tap, bent down, rinsed and spit until his mouth no longer burned with bile.
Already, it was dark outside and even darker in the brownstone. By the illumination of the candle on the sink, Grant studied his reflection in the mirror. The soft light should have knocked off ten years, but instead he looked worse—pallid and sweat-glazed and thinner.
Eyes as dark as pits.
The headache raged on—felt like his frontal lobe had been dropped in a food processor.
“What time is it, Paige?”
“Six fifteen.”
Through the pain and the fog, Grant registered the distant, manic anthem of an alarm, although it took him a minute to land upon the crisis that had triggered it.
He staggered out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, steadying himself against the island where his phone waited. There were candles everywhere—in the living room, dining room, at least a half dozen casting a flickering warmth across the kitchen.
“Stu was supposed to call me fifteen minutes ago,” he said, picking it up.
He held the power button down for several seconds.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, pressing harder and longer, his thumbnail blanching from the pressure.
Might as well have been trying to power up a brick.
He finally dropped the phone and put his head on the counter, the chill of the tile providing the briefest flash of relief.
“Grant, what’s wrong?”
“Battery’s dead.”
“So your friend can’t call you?”
“Right.”
“Just use my phone.”
“I don’t know his number off the top of my head, and he’s not on the Internet.”
“So what do we do?”
Grant looked up from the counter.
It felt like someone was prodding around in his head with a screwdriver.
“I don’t know. That was our best chance.”
Paige came over, laid a cool hand on the back of his neck.
“We’re gonna get through this,” she said.
A noise reverberated down the hallway—someone pounding on the front door. It seemed to shake the entire building.
“That would be Steve,” Paige said.
Grant choked down the despair, the exhaustion, the agony.
No time for pain.
He pulled himself up.
“I’ll be in the closet by the bar.”
Chapter 23
Sophie nearly jumped out of the booth when her cell began to vibrate.
She glanced down at the caller ID—Stu Frank.
It took her a moment to place the name—a semi-shady private investigator she and Grant had used once or twice. If she remembered correctly, Stu was ex-law enforcement. Six or seven years ago, he’d been thrown under the bus over a scandal involving several detectives and an ill-advised beat down of an errant CI. Even during their limited contact, she’d hated working with him. The man radiated an intense skin-crawling aura.
What the hell could you possibly want?
She answered quietly with, “Really not a good time, Stu.”
“I’ve got something for Grant, but I can’t get a hold of him.”
“I’m his partner, not his mother.”
“Be that as it may, you’re still the closest thing to a mother he’s got. Now I have some info on this crazy-urgent request he hit me with this afternoon. I’ve been trying to call him, but he’s not picking up.”
She felt her interest prickling.
Said, “When did he say he needed this by?”
“Two minutes ago. Six p.m. He was adamant. I’ve called five times, and it’s been straight to voice mail. This house got something to do with a hot case or what?”
She didn’t know how to answer that, so she just said, “Yeah.”
“Is Grant with you?”
“No, but I’m going to see him later.”