Lethal

Chapter 33

Honor and Coburn made it back to the playground parking lot without incident.

The mother and child had left. The teenager had taken a break from his tennis practice and was now lying under a tree, earphones on, doing something on his cell phone. He didn’t notice the couple who got into a stolen car and drove away.

Only then did Honor ask Coburn about his brief exchange with Hamilton. “What did he say?”

“He wants us to turn ourselves over to Tom VanAllen. He gave me his word that VanAllen is solid and that we’ll be safe in his custody.”

“Do you believe him?”

“If VanAllen is that solid, why didn’t Hamilton let him in on my op? Now, all of a sudden, Hamilton trusts him. That makes me nervous. I’d have to be eyeball to eyeball with VanAllen before I could gauge his trustworthiness, and I won’t have that much time before placing our lives in his hands.”

“And the other part? About his ability to protect us.”

“I have even less confidence in that.” He looked over at her. “The hell of it is, I’m running out of options.”

“I would say so. You’ve resorted to puncturing harmless footballs.”

He ignored that, but she hadn’t really expected an apology.

“The thing is, I know I’m right.” He looked over at her as though daring her to contradict him.

“All right, say Eddie did have something, how long can you continue to search for it alone? What I mean is,” she said, rushing to continue before he could interrupt, “with all the technology that the FBI has at its disposal, if you were working with other agents, with a network of personnel, wouldn’t you stand a better chance of discovering what Eddie had stashed?”

“My experience with a network of personnel? Things usually get fubared, and I’m talking on a colossal scale. Even good agents get hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape, and the federal government has miles and miles of it, most of which is wound around the DOJ. That’s why Hamilton had me working alone.”

“And why it’s only your life that’s in jeopardy now.”

He shrugged. “Goes with the job.” Then he tipped his head for emphasis. “My job. Not yours.”

“I’m here because I chose to be.”

“You chose wrong.”

They’d been keeping to the outskirts of town, where there were clusters of houses now and then, but no organized neighborhoods like the one they’d left. Sad-looking strip centers and lone businesses were either run-down or had been closed for good, some abandoned after Katrina and never reopened, others victims of the economic crash caused by the BP oil spill.

Coburn pulled into the parking lot of a strip center that had a Dollar General store, a barber shop, and a small market and liquor store that featured homemade boudin sausage and antitheft bars on all the windows.

He cut the motor, then propped his elbow in the open window and cupped his mouth and chin with his hand. For several minutes he sat still, as though in deep thought, but his eyes remained in constant motion, watching everyone who went into or out of one of the businesses, warily evaluating each car that drove into the parking lot.

Finally he lowered his hand and reached for his cell phone. “I’m going to make this quick, okay?”

She nodded.

“Whatever I say to Hamilton, you go along.”

She nodded, but with less surety.

“You gotta trust me on this.” His blue eyes bore into hers.

She gave him another nod.

“Okay then.” He placed the call.

She heard Hamilton’s brusque voice. “I hope you’re calling to tell me you’ve come to your senses.”

“There’s an old train on an abandoned track.”

He gave Hamilton the location on the outskirts of Tambour. She was acquainted with the general area, but had never noticed the railroad track or the old train parked there.

“VanAllen only,” he said. “And I mean it. I feel one tingle down my spine and we’re outta there. I send Mrs. Gillette to VanAllen. But I’m keeping her kid with me until I’m certain that everything’s—”

“Coburn, that—”

“Is how it’s going to be. Ten o’clock.”

He disconnected and turned off the phone.

When Stan raised his garage door using the remote on his car’s sun visor, Eddie’s basketball rolled out onto the driveway.

That could only mean one thing.

He killed his car’s engine and got out. As he did so, he slid his knife from the scabbard strapped to his ankle. He approached the open maw of his garage with caution, but he could see that no one was inside.

When he spotted Eddie’s deflated football on the work table, he was seized by a cold fury. He hefted his knife, enjoying the familiar balance of it in his hand.

Stan moved swiftly but silently toward the door that led into his kitchen. He turned the knob, then thrust the door open. The warning beep of his alarm didn’t engage. No one sprang out at him. The house was soundless, perfectly still. Honed instinct told him that there was no one inside. Nevertheless, he kept his knife at the ready as he moved from room to room, surveying the damage.

Coburn.

Then and there, Stan resolved that when he came face-to-face with the man, he would tear him apart with the same level of ruthlessness with which Coburn had disemboweled his house, particularly Eddie’s room.

Standing on the threshold of the bedroom that, until today, had remained largely unchanged since Eddie’s youth, Stan tried to determine whether or not anything had been taken from it. However, that was almost beside the point. The room had been desecrated, and that was more untenable than theft.

Searching the rooms this thoroughly would have taken a while. Hours, Stan estimated. A near impossible task for one man working alone.

Honor.

The thought caused Stan’s heart to painfully constrict. Had his daughter-in-law actually participated? Stan tried denying that such was possible. As Eddie’s widow, shouldn’t she, more than anyone, want to preserve his good name, if not for her own sake, then for Emily’s? But the evidence before him indicated that she had assisted the man bent on tarnishing Eddie’s reputation.

Stan felt her betrayal keenly. Before she made a fatal mistake, he had to reach her, talk sense into her.

Toward that end, he’d been beating the bushes all day. He’d come close to making an ass of himself at the FBI office, railing at Tom VanAllen, in whom he had even less confidence than in Deputy Crawford or the agencies the two of them represented. If he wanted Honor and Emily found and brought home, it was up to him.

He’d gone to every place he could think of where she might be. He’d called on some of Honor’s faculty members, other friends and acquaintances, but had met with no success. Even the priest of the church where she worshiped insisted that he hadn’t heard from her, but he was praying for her and Emily’s safe return. Stan had put the verbal thumbscrews on everyone he’d talked to, and he believed he would have known if he was being lied to.

Doral, who had a man watching Tori Shirah’s house, informed him that she hadn’t left it all day except to retrieve her newspaper just after dawn. Her car was still in the driveway.

Stan’s gut instinct said otherwise. He remembered a place out in the countryside that Eddie had once shown him, a place that Honor mistakenly believed was her secret. Eddie had confided to Stan, with a goodly amount of chagrin, that he’d followed Honor from home one night when, following a brief telephone call, she’d abruptly left the house with a flimsy and transparently false explanation.

But her mysterious errand had amounted to nothing more than a meeting with Tori. Eddie had laughed it off, saying their clandestine meeting was probably a holdover from their high school days.

It was just possible that the tradition continued.

When Stan had talked to Tori the day before, she had seemed genuinely shaken and worried about Honor’s so-called kidnapping. He wondered if she’d been playing him. Or if, since then, Honor had sent her a distress signal that she had deliberately withheld from him and the authorities.

So, acting on that hunch, he’d driven out to the remote spot. In the years since Eddie had shown him the place, the old wooden bridge had become more rickety. The live oak tree seemed to have spread even wider, its roots become even more gnarled.

Immediately Stan had noticed tire tracks that looked as if they’d been recently made. But they didn’t particularly excite him. Honor and her friend couldn’t be the only two people to have discovered this picturesque spot. It would be a perfect out of the way place for teenagers looking to park and make out, or smoke pot, or drink purloined booze. Movie companies were constantly scouting out the area looking for scenic spots for location filming.

He was about to leave and resume his search elsewhere when he noticed some characters that had been drawn in the mud. He was looking at them upside down, but when he squatted down to take a closer look right side up, his breath escaped his body in a slow hiss.

Etched in the mud, the letters were irregularly sized and shaped, but readable:

EmiLy.

On the way back to town, he’d called Doral. “Your man needs his ass kicked. Tori Shirah isn’t inside her house. She’s with Honor and Emily.”

They had agreed to meet at Stan’s house to discuss how they would go about tracking down the Shirah woman, believing that if they applied themselves to it, they could get Honor’s whereabouts from her.

Now, hearing a car door close, Stan retraced his steps through his house and into the garage. Doral was standing there, hands on hips, his eyes on the punctured football.

He turned around as Stan approached. “That son of a bitch.”

“That’s the least of it. The inside of my house looks like Honor’s.”

Doral expelled a long breath that carried with it several choice words. “Any sign that Honor and Emily were here, too?”

Stan said a terse no, and just that. He wasn’t going to share with anyone his misgivings about Honor’s loyalty. “But I know where they were at some point recently, and Tori Shirah was probably with them.”

Doral’s cell phone rang. He held up a finger to tell Stan to hold the thought while he took the call. He listened, then said, “Soon as you know.”

When he clicked off, he grinned. “We may not need Tori. That was my guy at the FBI office. Coburn is sending Honor in.”

“When? How?”

“My guy’s standing by for details.”