Stone Cold (Camel Club 3)

Caleb led them to a small office down the hall from the reading room.

“Sit,” Bagger ordered Caleb, and he quickly sat in the only chair in the room. “Okay, now, I understand that the guy who used to run this place got whacked.”

“The director of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division was killed, that’s correct.”

“Jonathan DeHaven?”

“That’s right.” Caleb added in a low voice, “He was murdered. Right in this very building.”

“Wow,” Bagger said as he eyed his men. “In a freaking library. I mean, is this world we live in violent or what?” He turned back to Caleb. “Thing is, I got a friend who knew this DeHaven character. She was actually married to him at some point.”

“Really? I never knew Jonathan was married.” Caleb managed to tell this lie quite capably.

“Well he was. Kind of short-lived, though. I mean he was a book geek. No offense. And the woman, well, the woman wasn’t. She was sort of like a, how do you say—”

“A tornado and a hurricane all wrapped into one?” Caleb offered.

Bagger shot him a suspicious glance. “Yeah, what makes you say that?”

Realizing he had come dangerously close to giving Bagger adequate reason to torture him for further information, Caleb said smoothly, “I was married once too, and my wife left me after only four months. She was a hurricane and a tornado and, like you said, I’m a book geek.” It was stunning how easily lying came to him.

“Right, right, you get the picture. Anyway, I haven’t seen the woman in a long time and wanted to catch up with her. So it occurred to me that she might have heard about her ex’s death and come for the funeral.” He looked expectantly at Caleb.

“Well, I went to the service but I didn’t notice anyone I didn’t know. What does this woman look like and what’s her name?”

“Tall, nice curves, a real looker. Little scar under her right eye. Hair color and style depends on the day of the week, you know what I mean? Her name is Annabelle Conroy, but that also depends on the day of the week.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell at all.” The name clearly didn’t, since Caleb only knew Annabelle by the name Susan Hunter, but the physical description was certainly dead-on. “I’m sure I would have noticed someone like that. Most of the people at the funeral were pretty average-looking. You know, like me.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Bagger grumbled. He snapped his fingers and one of his men produced a card that Bagger handed to Caleb. “You remember something useful, call me. I pay well. I mean really well. Five figures.”

Caleb’s eyes widened as he clutched the card. “You must really want to find her.”

“Oh, you got no idea how bad, Mr. Republican.”

CHAPTER 28

HARRY FINN QUIETLY ENTERED the room, sat down in the chair and stared at her. The woman looked back at him, or through him, Finn was never sure. She had once spoken fluent English without a trace of any accent. But the multilingual lady had, perhaps out of growing paranoia, decided to mash four languages into one, creating a confusing amalgam of chaotic communication. He didn’t quite know how, but Finn managed to understand it. She would have accepted nothing less from him.

She muttered in his direction and he answered her blunt greeting in a few words. This seemed to please her, because she nodded appreciatively, a smile edging across her fallen cheeks. Actually she had known that he was here before Finn had even entered the room. She had explained this before as having felt his presence. He had a particular aura, she’d told him; a pleasant one, but distinctive. As a man who did not like to leave any trace of himself anywhere, this bothered Finn greatly. Yet how did one wipe away his aura?

As a child he remembered his mother’s tall, strong body with the hands of a pianist. Now she was shrunken, withered. He studied her face. It had once held a rare, fragile beauty, a loveliness that growing up he had always associated with the most beautiful of daylilies. This was because when he was a child, at night, the beauty receded and she became moody and sometimes violent; never against him, but against herself. And then Finn would have to step in and take charge. As early as age seven he had done this. The experience had made him grow up quickly, faster than he should have. Now the beauty was gone from her face, the body collapsed, the once lovely hands scarred and wrinkled in her lap. She was only in her early seventies and yet looked more than ready for the grave.

But she still could dominate him with her indignation, with her demand that a wrong be righted. Despite her physical disintegration her words had retained the power to make him feel the grief, the injustice she’d endured.

“I have heard the news,” she said in her strange talk. “It is done and it is good. You are good.”

He stood and looked out the window at the grounds of this place that he thought they still called a sanatorium. Stacked neatly on the windowsill were the four newspapers that she read every day, cover to cover, word for word. When the papers were done she listened to the radio, or watched the TV, until she fell asleep late at night. The morning would bring more news that she would devour. There was nothing in the world that she seemed to miss.

“And now you move on to the next,” she said, in a higher voice as though she feared her words might not reach him from across the room.

He nodded and said, “Yes.”

“You are a good son.”

Harry resumed his seat. “How’s your health?”

“What health?” she said, smiling and swaying her head. She had always done that, he remembered. Always, as though she heard a song no one else did. As a child he had loved that about her, that mysterious quality all children sought out in their parents. Now he didn’t like it as much.

“I have no health. You know what they did to me. You cannot believe this is natural. I am not that old. I sit here and I rot a little more each day.”

They had poisoned her, years ago, she had told him. They had gotten to her somehow, she wasn’t quite sure how. The poison was meant to kill, but she had survived it. Yet it was eating away at her, from the inside out, laying claim to organs one by one until there would be none left. She probably believed that one day she would simply vanish from the earth.

“You can leave. You’re not like the others here.”

“And where would I go, tell me that? Where would I go? I am safe here. So here I will stay until they take me away in the bag and burn me. Those are my wishes.”

Finn held up his hands in mock surrender. They had this same discussion during each of his visits, with the same result. She was rotting and afraid and here she would die. He could have articulated both parts of this conversation, so well did he know them.

“And how is your wife, and those beautiful children?”

“They’re fine. I’m sure they miss seeing you.”

“There’s not much left to see. Your little one, Susie. She still has the bear I gave her?”

“It’s her favorite. She’s never without it.”

“You tell her never to let it go. It represents my love for her. She must never let it go. I have not been a proper grandmother to them. I know this. But it would kill me if she ever let go of the bear. Kill me.”

“I know. And she knows. Like I said, she loves it.”

She rose on shaky legs, went to a drawer and pulled out a photo. In twisted fingers she clutched the item before handing it across to him. “Take it,” she said. “You’ve earned it.”

He slipped the photograph out of her hands and held it up. It was the same picture that Judd Bingham, Bob Cole and Lou Cincetti had seen before they died. Carter Gray, too, had gazed on this image before he was blown to the next world.

Finn traced the delicate line of Rayfield Solomon’s cheek with his index finger. In a flash the past came racing back to him: the separation, the news of his father’s death, the erasing of the past and meticulous creation of a new one, and over the years the devastating revelations of a wife and mother telling her son what had happened.

“And now Roger Simpson,” she said.

“Yes. The last one,” Finn replied, a hint of relief in his voice.

It had taken him years to track down Bingham, Cincetti and Cole. Yet he had finally located all of them, and that’s when the killing had started a few months ago. He had known the whereabouts of Gray and Senator Roger Simpson since they were public figures. But they were also harder targets. He had gone for the points of least resistance first. It made it more likely that Gray and Simpson would be forewarned, but he had built that into his equation. And when Gray had left the government, he had also left most of his protection behind. And even forewarned, Finn had managed to kill him. Simpson was next in line. Senators had protection too, but Finn was confident he would eventually get to the man.

When Finn looked on the life he had now as part of a family of five in a quite ordinary Virginia suburb complete with a lovable dog, music lessons, soccer matches, baseball games and swim meets, and compared it to the life he had as a child, the juxtaposition was close to apocalyptic in its effect on him. That’s why he rarely thought of these things together. That’s why he was Harry Finn, King of Compartmentalization. He could build walls in his mind nothing could pierce.

Then his mother said, “Let me tell you a story, Harry.”

He sat back in his chair and listened, though he had heard it all before—in fact, could have told it as well as she could now. And yet he listened as she spoke in her fractured, discordant collage of words that still managed to radiate a visceral power; her memories carved out an eloquent factual case that only truth could arouse. It was both wonderful and terrifying—her ability to conjure a world from decades ago with such force that it appeared to be occupying the room they were in with the agonized heartbreak surrounding a flaming pyre. And when she was finished and her energy spent, he would kiss her good-bye and continue his journey, a journey he carried on for her. And maybe for him too.