Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (66 page)

Somewhere out there, under that same moon, Aroostine had received the video by now.

Will she catch my message?

He traced a finger along a groove in the worn, scratched floorboards. He had been as subtle as he could so that the man wouldn’t notice and had ad libbed the line about Mrs. Chang mainly to distract the man from his movements. But had he been
too
discreet? Would Aroostine notice what he’d done?

He forced down the tide of icy panic that threatened to grip him. He’d tried. There was nothing more he could do.

As he turned onto his stomach, he consoled himself with one good thought. He knew Aroostine wouldn’t turn against him simply because of the divorce papers, despite what he’d suggested to the man. She wouldn’t let even justifiable anger or hurt stand in the way of helping him. It wasn’t her way.

He remembered their first fight, during sophomore year of college. The details had faded with time but he remembered the accusations and anger that had flown around her tiny apartment, both of them inexperienced at working through relationship stuff. He’d stormed out.

After he’d had a chance to cool down, he’d shown up at her door with gas station roses and a greeting card, well trained by his high school girlfriends. She’d shaken her head in wonder and laughed, tossing aside the already wilted hothouse flowers. She led him outside to the rickety deck tacked on to the back of the apartment she was renting.

“You don’t need to bring me cut flowers,” she’d said, throwing her arms wide to encompass the sky full of stars. “There’s a world full of flowers, trees, and stars.”

“I just wanted to apologize,” he’d explained, feeling faintly embarrassed and uncertain. Her equanimity had thrown him off balance.

“Then apologize, Joe. All I want is the truth that’s inside you, not Hallmark’s truth. Show me your truth.”

He smiled at the memory, at the way he’d gathered her up in his arms. She’d wrapped her arms around his neck, and he he’d carried her inside to show her the passion he felt in leisurely detail.

That was a long time ago.
A small voice prickled in his head, dragging him out of his blissful past and back to his miserable present.

She’d left him, left their life together, to pursue her dream. She wasn’t a twenty-year-old coed anymore. She was a high-powered federal prosecutor. Would she throw that away for him now?

He grabbed the thin pillow that Mrs. Chang had insisted on giving him and pressed it over his ears, as if that would drown out his own doubting voice.

All he could do now was wait. And pray. The rest was up to Aroostine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Aroostine headed straight for the Buchanan Memorial, skirting the fountains, all turned off for the winter. She raced past the bronze statue of Joan of Arc, down the wide concrete aggregate steps, and through the corner of the park devoted to sculptures of poets. Guided as much by the bright moon and the faint stars as by the amber light filtering in from the street, she didn’t slow her pace until she was directly in front of the statue of Law flanking the memorial to President Buchanan.

A lump of blankets stirred on a nearby bench.

“Park’s closed, Lady,” a man said, peeking his head out from his warm cocoon to look at her.

“I won’t be long,” she assured him.

She turned to the classical sculpture. Its twin, depicting Diplomacy, stood sentinel on the other side of the memorial. She had no use for diplomacy at the moment.

She stared up at the statue.

The law.

It had meant so much to her for so long. It was an anchor that kept her from sinking into a well of uncertainty when she was learning to navigate the world away from her native community. She loved the absolutes of the law.

But it couldn’t supplant love.

She could live without being a lawyer; she couldn’t live with Joe’s death on her hands.

She exhaled. Her breath hung in a visible puff on the chilled air.

Her resolve strengthened, she pulled up the video of Joe’s message to watch it one more time before returning to the warmth of the cab.

She stood perfectly still and stared at the screen. Joe’s words burned themselves into her brain. And then she squinted. As he went off-script with his words for Franklin, he gestured oddly. In her dread and fear, she hadn’t noticed the movements the first time.

What was he doing?
He pointed, two-handed, first toward the floor and then out to the log walls.

She paused the video and her heart thumped in her chest, so loudly she thought it might wake the homeless man on the bench, who’d already forgotten about her and was snoring softly in his nest of blankets.

He’s trying to tell me something? What? What is it, Joe?

She slowed her breathing in an effort to calm her racing pulse so she could think.

What would Joe want her to know? Where he was, so she could find him.

How could a wood floor and log walls help her find him? He was in a cabin. That didn’t help.

And then she laughed and took off running toward the idling cab.

She hurried into the backseat and smiled at Reggie, who looked up from his Sudoku puzzle in surprise at her noisy entrance.

“I’m so glad you waited! Can you take me to Hyattsville? You won’t have to wait there.” She was about to make herself an uninvited houseguest.

She pulled out the receipt from the cafe, where Franklin had scribbled his address and the number for his landline, practically begging her not to contact him any way but in person going forward. He was reasonably convinced that the man couldn’t use his own program to monitor him, but why take the chance?

Reggie shook his head slowly as if to let her know he thought she was some kind of fool, but he tossed the puzzle book on the passenger seat and pulled out.

“Give me the address.”

She read it off the scrap of paper and tried not to burst. The wood. Joe was telling her if she could identify the wood, she could find the cabin.

Up ahead a green light turned yellow.

Hurry, hurry,
she thought silently, willing Reggie to speed up and beat the light. But he slowed and then stopped as the amber glow turned red.

She tried not to groan.

She sat on her hands so that she wouldn’t start surfing websites from her phone in her search for clues. If the man somehow learned that she was getting close, he might move his hostages. She jiggled her leg nervously.

The light turned, and the cab resumed its leisurely crawl up the mostly empty street.

Hurry.

“I’m gonna cut over to Georgia Avenue,” Reggie said.

“Okay, that’s great,” she said, the words coming out fast.

He tilted his head and sought her eyes in the mirror.

“You sure you didn’t score some speed in that park, girl?”

“Speed? No, I told you, I don’t do drugs. I solved a problem. I mean, I think I did.” She took a breath and slowed down to choose her words carefully. She didn’t want to get him mixed up in her mess as his reward for his kindness. “I’m a lawyer. I have a big case coming up and I think I just figured something out,” she explained.

“Ah, inspiration. It strikes where it strikes.” He said sagely and nodded, satisfied that she wasn’t high.

A terrifying thought gripped her suddenly. What if the cab company used SystemSource to track its cabs?

She shook it off. So, what if they did? Only Franklin would be looking for her.

Right?

She distracted herself from unproductive worry by watching the moon through the cab’s window. It wasn’t quite full yet, but it would be soon. January. The Full Wolf Moon.

And a memory she’d long since forgotten came rushing back—a memory of the November night so many years ago when the Higginses came to get her from her grandfather’s ramshackle cabin.

She’d been scared and sad, still mourning his death and anxious about leaving her home. She had answered Mrs. Higgins’ solicitous questions in a meek voice then leaned her head against the window of the station wagon and pretended to sleep.

But she’d peeked out from under her eyelids and had seen the moon—the Full Beaver Moon, as she knew it then—following the wood-paneled car. Her spirits had lifted. The moon, her moon, was coming with her.

And when the car had come to a stop, she’d squeezed her eyes shut, and Mr. Higgins had gently lifted her from the backseat and carried her into the house, where he placed her in a white-canopied bed covered with a pink and purple blankets and smoothed her hair over the pillow.

Her new parents stood over her bed looking down at her for a long moment then crept quietly out of the room. After the door closed softly, she’d turned to look through the lace-curtained windows, and there it was. The Full Beaver Moon hanging low and ripe over a tree in what was now her backyard.

She was smiling to herself when she realized the cab had stopped.

“Are we here?”

“We’re here.”

She checked the numbers on the meter and removed double that amount from her wallet.

“Reggie, it was a pleasure to meet you,” she said as she passed the money through the plastic window.

He counted the bills and sputtered in protest, “I can’t—”

But she’d already pulled the door open and was making her way up Franklin’s cracked sidewalk.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Thursday morning

Franklin groaned. The incessant beeping of his alarm clock cut through the cotton in his brain. He flung his arm out in the general direction of his nightstand and groped around until he silenced the noise.

He felt like crap. His mouth tasted sour and metallic. His dry eyes burned when he opened them and squinted into the daylight.

As he shuffled stiffly toward the kitchen to start the coffee, he cast a withering look toward the living room and the cause of his current sleep-deprived misery. Aroostine Higgins was sleeping in a tangle of blankets on the couch, having declined the offer of his mother’s room, which truth be told, he’d only made reluctantly.

She’d shown up at his door after midnight, just when he’d finally managed to calm down enough to sleep. She jabbered excitedly about native woods then demanded to know if SystemSource could monitor his Internet use. Even half-asleep, he’d managed to explain that it was impossible for anyone at the company to use his own trick to spy on him without his knowing.

Satisfied, she’d commandeered his computer and had kept him up until dawn researching the different types of hardwoods native to the Northeast. By the time the sun was starting to rise, she’d compared several galleries of historic barns and cabins to screenshots of the video of her husband and had determined the walls and floor of the log cabin where her husband and his mother were being held captive were made of old-growth white oak.

Franklin had vacillated between sharing her excitement and tamping down his own annoyance at this apparent academic exercise. Great, they were in a cabin that was at least two hundred years old and that had been constructed of hand-hewn white oak logs. So?

He hadn’t had the nerve to question her though. She’d been pumped full of adrenaline, so he’d just taken his cues from her—and had silently rejoiced when she’d finally crashed into a solid wall of exhaustion right around six thirty in the morning and collapsed in a heap on the couch. She fell asleep within seconds, and he stumbled back to his bedroom. His eyes closed as soon as his head hit his pillow.