Lethal (Lee Coburn)

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 Cr

awford 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.