The landing was smooth.
I walked shakily down a flight of metal steps, and Joe took my arm as, with our heads lowered, we crossed the chilly, breeze-whipped tarmac at Vancouver International.
I liked the feel of his hand enclosing my upper arm. Tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes. They were from the wind and so slight that I didn’t even have to wipe them away.
We waited inside Avis for the paperwork to chug out of the printer. I tapped my fingers on the counter.
Joe said, “Lindsay. I can’t prove it, but I believe that Ali Muller killed those four people in the hotel, and if she did, I have to take her down.
“If you aren’t up for this, tell me now, and I’ll leave you at a hotel. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
“I want to catch her as much as you do,” I said, keeping my expression and my tone neutral. Actually, I was telling the truth. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I’m a cop. Job first.”
CHAPTER 86
JOE TOLD ME that our route from the airport would take us up the Sea to Sky Highway to Brackendale, about an hour-and-twenty-minute drive.
I strapped in and watched as the lighted roadways took us north through Vancouver’s downtown, over the fork of the Fraser River, and north along Granville Street, where the beautifully lit glass skyl
ine unfurled before our car as we crossed the bridge to downtown Vancouver.
We turned left onto Georgia Street and into the tree-lined Stanley Park, and about then, my eyes closed. When I woke up, the dazzling nighttime cityscape was gone and we were driving through the darkest night.
Joe said, “Everything’s OK.”
He used to say that when I bolted awake, startled by a terrible dream.
“How much longer?” I asked him.
“A while yet,” Joe said, and then, as if he’d been bracing himself for whatever would happen next, he inhaled and exhaled loudly. Then he said, “Lindsay, I couldn’t tell you where I was or what I was doing. I shouldn’t tell you now.”
It was a heavy preamble, and although I wanted to know everything, I was afraid of what he was going to say: that he was in love with Alison Muller, that he had never loved me, that his move to San Francisco was an assignment, that our marriage was a cover story and a sham.
I said, “Look. Don’t tell me anything out of obligation.”
“I want you to know because you’re my wife.”
I said, “OK.”
Joe said, “I joined the CIA right out of school.”
“June Freundorfer told me.”
He looked surprised, but after a moment, he said, “I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t talk about that with anyone. It was an omission, Lindsay, but talking about what I did during those wars wouldn’t have done either of us any good.”
And then Joe began to stitch the pieces of his past together. He talked about working at the FBI, touched on the case we had worked across agency lines three years ago, the intensity of that time we’d spent together having thrown us into crazy-hot feelings and falling in love.
He talked about moving to San Francisco so that we could be together for real. And then he said, “The part I didn’t tell you, couldn’t tell you, is that around the time Julie was born, the CIA asked me to come back on an ‘as-needed basis.’ I didn’t know they would need me so soon.”
We were driving north in the pitch bloody dark. Joe was telling me about his life as if we were on a date. Oh, my God. We’d had so many years between us, a full life, or so I thought. I was struck with memories of the night I gave birth to Julie. Joe was away on “business,” a consulting gig, he’d told me.
A ferocious storm had been beating the hell out of San Francisco when major contractions came on in force. From my bedroom windows, I could see trees and electric lines down on the roads. Cars had been wrecked and abandoned; 911 operators told me emergency responders were working without pause, and at last, the fire department answered my call for help. A gang of firefighters in full turnout gear had stood in a semicircle around my bed, telling me to breathe and push. That was the setting for Julie’s entrance into the world.
Where had Joe really been that night?
“Lindsay?”
“I’m listening. And I want to say that hearing about your secret life makes me feel like a complete idiot.”