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Authors: John Gilstrap

BOOK: At All Costs
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Her head spun with new possibilities. It had never occurred to her to believe Carolyn’s story. Was it possible the Donovans were telling the truth?
“So how’s Carolyn?” Jake asked, another radical change of subject. Irene looked at him, confused. “I trust you’ve spoken with her?”
Irene nodded. “She’s fine. Frightened, angry, and sad, but otherwise fine.”
He smiled. “Good. Next time you see her, will you tell her I love her? And that I’m doing my best to fix everything?”
She saw a chance. “Why don’t
you
tell her, Jake? Let me take you in, and we’ll get this all straightened out. I promise you, I’ll pursue every lead you give me.”
That one made him laugh. “You’re kidding, right?” She wasn’t, and he knew it. “Well, I appreciate the offer, but forgive me if I decline. I’m not entirely convinced that trusting you this much hasn’t been a huge mistake. Somehow my faith in the criminal justice system just isn’t as strong as it used to be.” As he spoke, he dropped the clip out of Irene’s weapon and started thumbing the bullets into the toilet. He saw her look of disgust and smiled. “I know, it’s kind of gross, but I can’t very well leave you with a loaded gun, can I? I don’t think either of us wants the hassle of a shoot-out at two-thirty in the morning.”
“So what’s next?” she asked cautiously.
He shrugged. “I guess that’s up to you. You need to decide if your job is about justice or simply about following orders.” With the bullets removed, he dropped the clip into the bowl, then drew his own weapon before snapping the last of Irene’s bullets out of the chamber and closing the toilet lid. “I do have one last thing for you to think about, though.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I know you’ve been wondering why we came back here today, and I’ve done my best to explain that. We came for that dog skeleton, and it was a horrible miscalculation. Stupid reason, isn’t it? Made no sense. So how come you were expecting us?”
Without waiting for an answer, he slid down off the vanity and turned the doorknob to let himself out. “By the way,” he said with a grin. “I was hiding in the closet when you came in, and I have to agree. You’re not bad at all for forty-two.”
Sleep now was out of the question. Irene considered trying, anyway, if only in deference to the time of night, but even as her body screamed for a place to lie down, her mind spun like a top.
Donovan’s visit had left her stunned. All day long, she’d tried to think of a sound, logical reason for the couple to return to Arkansas. Clichés notwithstanding, smart criminals never returned to the scene of the crime. And after fourteen years on the Ten Most Wanted list, the Donovans had proved themselves to be very smart indeed.
After fishing the ammunition out of the toilet bowl—thankfully, she’d flushed after using it last—she’d strolled back into the bedroom, where she found her weapon in the middle of the king-size bed. She didn’t bother calling to alert anyone about Jake. He’d be long gone as it was, and the last thing she needed was another documented getaway.
Pulling on the lightweight flannel nightgown she always kept stuffed in her garment bag, she sat heavily in the hardback desk chair in front of the faux-wood desk. The Donovan file lay in her briefcase, just out of reach, but she didn’t want it right now. She wanted to reconstruct the case against them from memory.
What did the Bureau have, really? The note. Sixteen dead bodies. The fact of their survival and escape. What else?
Nothing.
The thought made her gasp. What had seemed so ironclad—so obvious—only an hour ago now seemed pitifully superficial. Fragile almost. There was enough there, she supposed, to win a conviction in the hands of a skillful prosecutor; but suddenly, there seemed to be huge holes in the case. Holes big enough for a skilled defense attorney to drive a Mercedes through.
Maybe that’s what this was all about, she mused, resurrecting her natural cynicism. Maybe their return and the attendant shenanigans were merely stunts, designed to build a case for reasonable doubt in the minds of a future jury. Lord knew that the standard for acquittal was getting lower these days. Maybe this was just a high-stakes roll of the dice. They’d made their stand, and if they won, they’d be able to reenter society as full-fledged citizens. Was such a plan truly out of the question for people as intelligent as the Donovans? Especially if they had Harry Sinclair’s money behind them?
Certainly, it wasn’t as absurd as Jake’s assertion that Peter Frankel was involved in arms trafficking and murder.
So why
did
the Donovans return? Why didn’t they just disappear one more time? They’d made it, for heaven’s sake; they’d dropped completely off the radar screen after they snagged their kid from the school. Certainly, Sinclair would have helped them one more time. Why risk so much just for a jury stunt?
And why the hell would they just give up like that, after all this time on the run?
But they didn’t give up, did they? Their kid got hurt, and they sought medical attention. If that hadn’t happened, would they have disappeared, anyway? Dammit, why weren’t these questions in her head when Jake was in her bathroom?
Maybe hurting the kid was part of the plan. Certainly, that would garner more sympathy from the jury. Wouldn’t it be harder to send grieving parents up the river than it would a pair of hardened killers?
Perhaps. But she’d seen the pain on Carolyn’s face. And on Jake’s. As a sometimes-negligent parent herself, Irene easily recognized parental guilt in others, and the emotions she saw in the Donovans today were as genuine as any she’d ever seen. There was no faking that kind of pain.
What was Jake’s challenge to her?
Is your job about justice or merely about following orders?
She wondered bitterly if salvaging a career might be a noble third option.
So if the day finally came to testify against the Donovans in open court, could she sell a jury on the idea that all of this conspiracy crap was merely an absurd stunt to deflect attention away from their heinous crimes? Absolutely. And in so doing, did she believe in her heart of hearts that justice would be served? The answer to that one scared her.
But Frankel? Jesus.
Jake’s claims of hard evidence were a bluff, and she knew it. Clearly, lies were not his strong suit, even after so many years of living one. Still, even though she wished with all her heart that she could dismiss his theories as crazy, she had to admit that he made a lot of sense.
What was it he asked on his way out? The question she was supposed to ask herself? Ah, yes. Frankel was the one who told her that the Donovans were coming to Arkansas. Something about a computer geek at EPA. So what was the big deal there? They put triggers on computer files all the time. If someone tried to access it, then a warning . . .
Then she saw it. “God
damn
it,” she breathed. “He
knew
they’d go back, sooner or later.”
Her face flushed hot as the pieces fell into place.
Oh, God, this is suicide.
Now it was just a matter of proving her case without detonating her career. Fact was, she found herself liking this criminal named Jake Donovan. Much as it sickened her to think it, he seemed far nicer—and far less likely to take another life—than Peter Frankel ever had.
Moving quickly to make the most of the few hours remaining before dawn, she opened her briefcase and slid her laptop out from under the Donovan file. Damn thing took forever to boot up, but once running, the rest was a breeze. The Internet was never busy at this hour.
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-ONE
Despite the sprawling opulence of the mansion-in-the-meadow—Jake had it pegged at about ten thousand square feet—they remained clustered in the tiny parlor. Never much of a brandy connoisseur, Jake had developed a taste for Armagnac in the hour since he returned from the Radford, made even more discerning by Thorne’s observation that the stuff sold for four hundred dollars a bottle.
Nick had crashed shortly after they’d returned, claiming the love seat as his own and leaving the two chairs for Jake and Thorne. Harry Sinclair’s right-hand man looked exhausted, yet he remained awake and attentive while Jake recounted all that went on in Irene’s hotel room. He seemed particularly intrigued by the part about finding the “FBI lady” naked. Under different circumstances, Jake might even have considered this little chat a bonding session, but he never doubted that Thorne’s single purpose was to report everything Jake said back to his boss.
“I think Rivers is pretty sharp,” Jake concluded. “I’m sure she’ll do the legwork we need to get done.”
Did I just say that?
He wondered if he wasn’t trying to convince himself. The fact was, the odds were even that she’d take his information straight to Frankel, at which point Jake was screwed. No, correction—they were
all
screwed. Possibly even the mighty Harry Sinclair, given Irene’s question about his involvement in all this—the one detail he’d omitted from his report to Thorne.
As the big man started to doze, Jake was seized by melancholy, and the image of Travis fixed itself in his thoughts. Was there at least a safety net for his son—a level below which he wouldn’t fall? Jake wanted to believe that even if the fight to prove his and Carolyn’s innocence dragged on, the boy would be cut loose and—
What?
It worried Jake that even if he saw his most fervent wish fulfilled and Travis staged a full recovery, the likelihood was that his son would become a ward of the state.
A thought materialized out of nowhere. It was a wild one—one that was formed more from exhaustion than logic—yet in the space of seconds it grew from merely a seedling notion to a fine compromise to a question in need of speedy resolution. He turned urgently to Thorne and tapped the man’s knee, startling him from a fragile sleep.
“I’ve got a question for you.”
Thorne raised an eyebrow.
“What do you think Harry would say if I asked him to take charge of Travis while all of this business plays itself out?”
“He’d say no,” Thorne replied grumpily. He’d been enjoying his shut-eye.
“Why?” Suddenly, Jake was wide awake. He sat up straight. “I mean, he’s family, right? The courts would surely be inclined to grant temporary custody to family. Christ, Carolyn thinks the sun rises and sets with the old bastard.”
Thorne shook his head. “It’s a question Mr. Sinclair anticipated. The answer is no.”
“It’d be better than shuttling the poor kid from stranger to stranger,” Jake countered. “At least Harry could give some stability.”
“Your boy isn’t Mr. Sinclair’s problem,” Thorne said simply. “I mean, as kids go, yours ain’t so bad, but a kid’s a kid. You know of any kids Mr. Sinclair ever had? I don’t. He doesn’t like them.”
Jake wasn’t about to let it go. “But what about Carolyn? His Sunshine? I mean, she’s—”
“She’s
different,”
Thorne interrupted. He thought about saying something else but then stopped himself. “She’s different.”
In that instant, Jake saw a look in Thorne’s face that came as close to tenderness as a man like him could ever generate. “Tell me about her childhood,” he said softly.
Thorne’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want to know? She was a kid. Mr. Sinclair liked her.”
“But she has nightmares. Horrible ones. She wakes up screaming, yet she won’t talk about them. I know nothing of her parents. When I try to probe, she just pulls away.”
Thorne looked away, uncomfortable with the topic. “Then she doesn’t want you to know,” he said. “You should just let it go.”
“So why does she adore Harry the way she does?” Jake pressed. “What is it about that ornery old man that makes her melt at the mention of his name?”
Thorne just shook his head. These questions were not even worth answering.
“Did Harry abuse Carolyn?” Jake asked out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Did Harry abuse my wife when she was a little girl?” Jake said it again firmly, without hesitation. “There are signs, sometimes, that she was molested as a kid. She pulls away occasionally, she frequently doesn’t sleep. And the nightmares. I just thought that maybe . . .” His voice trailed off. He’d never verbalized his concerns to anyone before, and he was shocked by the emotions that welled up within him.
Thorne’s eyes hardened. “So you think Mr. Sinclair raped his niece? And that afterward she decided to
adore
him?” He leaned heavily on Jake’s word.
Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s so much weird psychological bullshit you read about. I thought maybe . . .”
“You really got it bad for Sunshine, don’t you?” Thorne seemed surprised.
Jake looked away, embarrassed. “More than you could know,” he said.
Thorne inhaled deeply through his nose and let it go through puffed cheeks. “Mr. Sinclair’s little sister, Rebecca—she wasn’t very tough . . . very confident about herself,” he said softly. “She was sick a lot as a kid, and as she got older, she started into that whiny teenage shit, where she thought she was ugly and no guys would ever like her. I never knew her back then, you know, but Mr. Sinclair was very bothered by her attitude. Said she was a pretty thing, but how do you make a kid sister listen?”
He shifted again. “So when she’s eighteen, along comes a twenty-five-year-old dickhead named Mike Skepanski. Him I knew, and you could tell just from looking at him what a useless pile of shit he was. Mr. Sinclair hated him. Hell,
everybody
hated him. Everybody but Rebecca, of course, who fell in love with the guy and married him. Just weeks out of high school, knows nothing about anything, and she’s attached to this jerk for the rest of her life.”
As he spoke, Thorne’s story took on a momentum of its own, seeming to propel him more than he was propelling it. “Well, he does a stint as a construction worker for a while, but then the poor baby cuts his hand and doesn’t want to do that anymore. So he sits around the house for a few months until some idiot offers him a job as a security guard. He takes it, because he’s allowed to carry a gun and the gun makes him feel like a big man.
“That doesn’t work out either, of course, because he’s a worthless loser. Seems to me, he got caught sleeping on the job, or some such thing, and he got fired. It’s like this his whole life. He can’t hold a job, Rebecca’s miserable, and in the middle of it all, Carolyn is born.” Thorne allowed himself a smile as he looked back to Jake. “Now, I gotta tell you, I’m not much into kids, but Carolyn was a cutie. Big eyes, always smiling. And for the first time, Rebecca begins to think good thoughts about herself, you know?” The smile went away. “Until the Polack starts knocking her around just for the hell of it. Rebecca never said a word to anybody. Instead, she got heavy into drugs and booze and shit.”
He fell quiet for a moment, clearly girding himself for the rest of the story. “So I get a phone call one day that scares me. Rebecca’s not right, you know? And she wants to talk to her brother. I think that’s the first time I got clued in to the drinking. Well, Mr. Sinclair talks on the phone and comes out breathing fire. He grabs me, and we go driving all the way up to Milwaukee. He wouldn’t say why we were going up there, but I couldn’t drive fast enough to suit him.
“We pull up to their crappy little house about six at night, and as we get outa the car, we hear these screams. Not like angry screams, you know? Like terrified screams. Little-girl screams. We go inside and run upstairs, and there they are, all three of them in little Carolyn’s bedroom. She’s maybe nine, ten years old now.”
His voice trailed off. Another deep breath, and he recrossed his legs. “The Polack is drunk off his ass, beating the living shit out of both of them. Little Carolyn was screaming for him to stop, crying and crying while he just beat her with his fists.”
“Oh, my God,” Jake moaned. He felt ill.
“Rebecca was out of it,” Thorne went on, his voice growing thicker. “She’d already been pounded numb. Maybe it was the drugs, but she was never the same.” He paused. “Mr. Sinclair took the girls to the hospital, and I took care of the Polack.”
The tone and the body language told Jake that Thorne was done, but he couldn’t let it end there. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Thorne said, shrugging. “But Mr. Sinclair made sure that Rebecca and Sunshine had everything they needed.” He locked his gaze on Jake and scowled.
“What did you do with her father?”
Thorne’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set. His position sort of uncoiled as he leaned back and placed his palms on the arms of the chair. “You ask a lot of questions, Jake. Are you sure you want to know the answers?”
Jake paused just long enough to convey his uneasiness. “Yes,” he said at length, “I want to know. I think I
ought
to know.”
“Okay,” Thorne said, leaning his elbows on his knees. “This is just between you and me, right? Mikey and I went for a little drive in the country. We talked for a little while, and then I blew his fucking head off.” He smiled, still pleased with himself after all these years. “He’s fertilizer now, and as far as I know, no one even reported the bastard missing.”
The words hung in the air like a bad odor, churning Jake’s stomach. At the same time, they left him feeling oddly fulfilled. “You
murdered
him?”
Thorne responded silently, with one of his humorless smiles.
“Does Harry know? I mean, did he
tell
you to kill him?”
“Of course not,” Thorne scoffed quickly, unequivocally; like it was the most ridiculous question in the world. “Mr. Sinclair doesn’t operate that way. He thinks I put the Polack on a plane to anyplace two thousand miles away, with instructions never to be seen again. He assumed I did what he told me, and I never bothered to correct him.”
Jake didn’t buy it. “Come on, Thorne! Do you expect me to believe—”
Thorne cut him off with a raised hand. “You still don’t get it, do you? My job is to make problems go away. Ninety percent of the time, Mr. Sinclair has no idea what I do. In fact, he pays me a lot of money
not
to keep him informed.”
“But if he knew—”
“He’d be upset—oh, yeah,” Thorne said. “But like I said, Carolyn—she was a cutie. And myself, I’ve always been partial to permanent solutions.”
Travis had been in this tunnel once before, and like last time, he wasn’t alone. Those same faceless voices floated all around him in the dark, saying things he couldn’t quite make out.
The snake was still down his throat, but it seemed to have settled down. It wasn’t biting him anymore. Jesus, though, his mouth was dry. He tried to swallow, but the snake wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t hissing at him anymore, either—at least, not unless he wanted it to. The snake had given him back control of his breathing. That was nice of him.
Something was dragging him toward a light, and as he got closer, he gradually realized that he wasn’t in a tunnel at all. He was asleep. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t get himself all the way awake. The voices kept getting louder and louder. If he wasn’t mistaken, someone was saying his name.
What nightmares he’d had! Chases and chemicals and screaming and fighting. Whatever he’d had to eat before bed last night, he hoped he’d never make that mistake again.
What was last night, anyway?
The light grew brighter still.
But he wasn’t floating anymore. In fact, he felt anchored down, as if glued to the floor. He tried to move, but his chest hurt like hell. Like he’d been beaten with something. Was that what this was all about? Maybe he was still in the dirt recovering from his fight with Terry Lampier, and the rest had all been a wild dream.
The light rushed toward him now, with frightening speed. The voices grew louder and clearer, and sure enough, someone was saying his name.
Travis opened his eyes, yet he still didn’t know where he was. He tried to talk, but something in his mouth wouldn’t let him. His old friend the snake.
A face appeared above him, a lady he didn’t know, with a smile that trimmed the edges off his fear. “Hi there, Travis,” she said. “Welcome back. You had us worried for a while.”
Hours had passed, she was sure, but there was no way for her to know what time it was. Clocks weren’t the only human niceties denied to residents of the isolation wing. So was any view of the outdoors. The only reality residents were allowed was the one provided by their jailers. How easy it was, she’d thought at one point during the night, to manipulate people’s thoughts and fears. Her light had stayed on all night, but she supposed it would have been just as easy to keep it off. Days and days without a restful sleep, followed by days and days of darkness, were pretty much guaranteed to alter a body’s sense of reality. And to what end? Any end they chose, she assumed.

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