The guidebook listed fairs, arts-and-crafts shows, hay rides, scenic hikes. He wasn’t interested, but he hoped pretending he was, going through the motions, would help keep him from going crazy.
Lennie Briscoe made one of his pithy wisecracks, and Ham switched to CNN. At least his motel had cable. But nothing was going on, and he lay back on his flat pillow and crossed his feet, running through his mind again what he’d say to Juliet Longstreet. Talk about threading a needle in a sandstorm in the dark. Except, in this case, one wrong move and someone could die. Himself, even. Never mind pissing off the national-security types. He’d come close enough to dying this fall to know he wasn’t in the mood for it.
But what was he supposed to do, leave everything to Ethan? Hope for the best?
He glanced at the old bedside clock-radio. Midnight. He supposed he could wake Mia O’Farrell and ask her advice about what to do. Get another opinion. But he didn’t trust her entirely. And who was he kidding, anyway? It was too late for advice—too late for permission. He’d already made up his mind what to do.
Bobby Tatro thought Deputy Longstreet had his ransom payment.
The emeralds.
That scenario was the only one that made sense. The only explanation for breaking into her apartment. Tatro must have figured that Ham had given them to Brooker—payment, maybe, for freeing him—and Brooker had given them to Longstreet. To silence her about what she knew? Keep her from asking questions? Ham didn’t have that part of Tatro’s twisted thinking figured out yet. But he was pretty sure he was on target about the rest of it.
And Deputy Longstreet deserved to know.
She was in Vermont. Ham had stopped at her building to talk to her. The security guard told him she wasn’t around, refused to tell him where she was. When Ham guessed Vermont, the guard still kept mum, but his expression told Ham what he wanted to know. He rented a car and headed north to Vermont, getting lost twice before he found Longstreet Landscaping. He saw Juliet Longstreet patting a fat dog next to a trailer of pumpkins, but with a state police cruiser in the driveway and people all over the place, he decided to wait until tomorrow to pry her loose.
Ham tried to relax.
Tatro’s in jail.
The bastard couldn’t hurt him or anyone else, not anymore.
Ham could feel the emeralds under his pillow. They were cut and polished—beauties. They weren’t raw crystals freshly dug out of the Andes. Emeralds were portable—a favorite with smugglers—and good ones were valuable. He estimated the worth of the emeralds he’d spirited away from his captors in the vicinity of a half-million dollars.
Beryllium and chromium…two elements that, together, produced an emerald. Yet they were brought together only under rare geological conditions. The Colombian Andes were a geological rarity. And Muzo, Coscuez, Chivor were Colombian mines known all over the world for their unique, high-quality emeralds.
The emerald was the birthstone for May, the gem of Taurus and Gemini. It was associated with kindness and goodness, and rumored to ward off panic attacks.
And there were those who still believed that emeralds could provide their wearer with the ability to see the future.
Ham wished the emeralds under his pillow could empower him just to see what tomorrow would bring. But perhaps because they were tarnished by violence and deceit, their mystical attributes were unavailable, at least to him. He couldn’t put pieces together, make connections that he normally could, connections that had made him valuable to Mia O’Farrell and, in a way, had led him to Vermont.
In any case, Ham had no illusions. He was at the mercy of forces outside of his control, and no one could help him now. Not even Ethan Brooker.
Wendy sat in the window seat in her dark bedroom, wrapped up in a fleece blanket, and tried to work on a college essay. The question she was supposed to answer was straightforward—Why do you want to be a doctor?—and yet she couldn’t think of a single reason why. She pictured herself sitting in a college chemistry class, studying nonstop, dealing with the competition and stress of being a premed student.
And the work itself. She liked the idea of helping people, but she didn’t think she could look at blood and pus or even runny noses every day. She thought about the doctor who’d had to examine Juan after he was murdered. She didn’t want to have to be around death and suffering all the time.
Wendy put the essay aside and glanced at her poem, which was awful. She tore it up and threw the pieces on the floor. How could she ever have thought it was any good?