Sanjay threw open the driver’s door and got out. He took a few steps forward to stand by the front bumper, listening to a stillness disturbed only by the arrhythmic ticking of the cooling engine, the dripping rainwater from saturated trees, and the occasional haunting question of an owl.
As his sister exited the passenger door, Sanjay looked up at the sky, wondering. If someone knew the registration number of this vehicle and therefore was able to obtain the unique signal that its locater broadcast as part of its navigation system, could that someone find them? Did the vehicle’s transponder continue to transmit even when the engine was off? Could a satellite serving their navigation system “see” them by that transmission, and could their GPS be switched on remotely to taunt them? He didn’t know the answers. But the glowing screen in the dashboard seemed to say, You can’t hide.
He heard an engine in the distance. More than one.
Tanuja looked at him across the hood of the SUV. “Sanjay?”
As the engine noise grew louder, he hurried around the front of the Hyundai and grabbed his sister’s hand. “Run!”
15
The cool air carried on it an astringent chemical odor, and under that a fainter and less pleasant organic smell on which Jane chose not to dwell.
The slightly tilted stainless-steel table with blood gutters had been used and methodically scrubbed clean. It stood empty now, as was the clear-plastic collection reservoir under it.
The decedent had been transferred to a second steel slab, this one without gutters, where he lay naked under a white shroud that exposed only his neck and head, and one arm that had slipped out from under the sheet and hung off the table. The hard, pitiless light rendered every enlarged pore as a crater, every wrinkle as a crevasse, so that his pale face had the texture and contours of a track of desert tortured by heat, eroding wind, and tectonic forces. He would look much better in the morning, after the esthetician had painted a semblance of life and an illusion of sleep over his grim features.
Attached to the foot of the table was a file holder. She found a photograph of the deceased as he had been when alive and healthy, a guide for the esthetician. His name was on the back of the photo: Kenneth Eugene Conklin.
She returned the file to the holder and placed a call with her disposable phone.
In a viewing room upstairs in the funeral home, the proprietor answered. “Gilberto Mendez.”
“You once said you’d die for my husband if it came to that. No need to die, he beat you to it, but I could use a little help.”
“My God, where are you?”
“Keeping company with Kenneth Conklin.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“I’d put him on the line to vouch for me, but Ken’s in a funk.”
“I’ll be right there.”
When Gilberto came through the door a minute later, dressed in a black suit and white shirt and black tie, he looked twenty pounds heavier than he’d been two years earlier, but still in good shape. He had a round, brown, pleasant face. His wife, Carmella, called it a gingerbread man’s face. At thirty-six, with receding hair, he’d begun to resemble the father from whom he’d inherited the business.
Closing the door behind him, referring to Jane’s jet-black hair and dark eyes, he said, “You aren’t you at all.”
“It’s just a wig, colored contacts, and attitude.”
“Well, you’ve always had attitude.”
He came to the farther side of the table, the dead man between them, and Jane said, “How’re you doing, Gilberto?”
“Happier than I deserve to be.”
“Makes me feel good just to hear that.”
“We’re having our fourth baby in June.”
“Another girl?”
“A boy. God help him, with three older sisters.”
“Like having three guardian angels.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Jane indicated the graven face of the man on the table. “At your dad’s funeral two years ago, you said you were going to sell the business.”
When Gilberto smiled, he looked boyish, sweet. Even then, his eyes were the saddest Jane had ever seen.
“I joined the Marines to escape this,” Gilberto said. “But the way it turned out, this work is a calling, not just a business. My dad said what it’s about, above all else, is preserving the dignity of the dead, about not letting death rob them of it. That didn’t make sense to me then. After I’d been to war, it did.”
With tenderness, as if he were a nurse and the decedent a sick friend, he lifted the uncovered arm onto the table and pulled the shroud over it.
He said, “Nick never would’ve killed himself.”
“He didn’t.”
“So this mess you’re in, it’s because you want the truth.”
“I’ve learned the truth about Nick. It’s way beyond that now.”
“The things they say about you on the news—murder, selling national secrets, treason—no one who knows you would believe it.”
“There’s not much news in the news anymore. The lies they tell don’t leave a lot of time for the facts about anything.”
“Whose rocks did you overturn?”
She said, “Some of them are in government, some in private industry. They play a lot of the media like so many harmonicas.”
From the moment Gilberto had mentioned Carmella’s pregnancy, Jane had not been able to stop thinking about the wife, the three young daughters, and the boy waiting to be born.
She said, “You’ve got so many responsibilities. I never should have come here. I better go.”
In a quiet voice, almost a murmur, suited to conversation with grieving loved ones in the viewing rooms on the main floor, he said, “How’s your boy, how’s Travis?”
After a silence, she said, “He’s struggling with the loss of Nick. But he’s safe, hidden away with people who care about him.”
“It’s necessary to hide him, is it?”
“To stop me from investigating all this, they threatened to kill him. But they’ll never get their hands on him. Never.”
When Jane picked up her tote bag to leave, Gilberto said, “Why do you think semper fi doesn’t mean anything to me anymore?”
“That’s not what I think, Gilberto.”
“Always faithful means always faithful, not just when it’s convenient.”
“Family first,” she said. “Be faithful to your family.”
“Nick was family. Like a brother. I wouldn’t be here today if not for him. Makes you family, too. Put down the tote. Respect me enough to tell me what you need from me. If it’s too damn crazy, if it’s jumping off a cliff, I’ll say no.”
She did not put down the tote bag. “I was going to ask you to pose as a chauffeur and drive a car.”
“What else?”
“We’d be kidnapping this creep who works in the Department of Justice. My only remaining lead. He surfaced in the attack that killed the governor of Minnesota last week. I learned he’s coming here when I back-doored the computer of his brother’s limo company. He has information I’m going to have to break him to get, but I don’t need you for that. You pick him up as if you’re his assigned chauffeur, you drive him to me, you leave. That’s it—if all goes well. Which maybe it won’t.”
He said, “I’m a good driver. Never had a ticket.”
“Kidnapping, Gilberto. They put you away for a long time.”
“I’ll just be driving. Playing a chauffeur—a piece of cake. Part of what I already do is be a chauffeur. I drive the hearse.”
16
The California live oaks didn’t grow close enough together to constitute a forest, but their crowns were of such immense diameter that across the vale and up a long slope, the figuration of their massive limbs arched over Tanuja and Sanjay like the vaulted ceiling of some elaborate nature-built cathedral in which the god Pan might come upon them, goat-legged and horned, playing his panpipes.
But as they hurried away from Honeydale Stables, the closest thing to music was the singing of countless tree frogs that, in Tanuja’s estimation, was ominous as never before. Such frogs always celebrated following a rainstorm, but they were acutely aware of intruders in their realm and fell silent during the passage of any human being. This chorus, an almost frenzied jubilation and not once interrupted, seemed to suggest that nature and her creatures knew that the Shukla twins were so soon to be dead that they were already hardly more than spirits and of no concern.