“How did your father earn the fortune he left to you?”
Trahern made a wordless sound not unlike a dog shaking a garden snake to death. Then he said, “Dad was an investment advisor, and a good one. It wasn’t a massive fortune. A few hundred thousand when the estate was settled. I’d just gotten out of the Army, back in 2000, at the turn of the millennium, when you were a snot-nosed kid in pigtails. There were opportunities. I took the three hundred grand and proved to be a much better investor than my father.”
She remained standing. “Yeah? What did you invest in?”
He waved his big hands in the air and rolled his eyes. “Drugs! Guns! Huge scary knives! A company that made Nazi uniforms!” He took another deep breath and snorted it out as before. Still displeased but in as normal a voice as he could muster, he said, “On 9/11, when those creeps took down the World Trade Center, everyone bailed out of stocks in a panic. I bought into the market with everything I had. In 2008, 2009, when the bottom fell out of the economy, I bought stocks and real-estate big-time. See the pattern? It’s always smart to bet on America.”
“You got rich by betting on America?”
“And it still works for me.”
She went to the folding chair and sat down, not entirely at ease with him, but convinced that his indignation was real, not contrived. “I pushed your buttons pretty hard there, but I won’t apologize for asking. It’s my life, my boy’s life. I need to know that you are who you seem to be. It’s a rare thing these days.”
He sat behind the desk once more. “I guess it works both ways. I called someone who might have known your husband. Relax already. Will you relax? Give me a chance here? All right. So this is a guy, if he was starving on a desert island with nothing but a dog, he’d eat his own arm before he’d take a bite out of the mutt. Turns out he did know your Nick, and he talked about him kind of like the Pope might talk about the baby Jesus. This guy never met you, but he was in action with Nick, and he says there’s no way Nick would have married a nutcase or an airhead, no matter how good she looked.”
9
* * *
FROM GOOGLE EARTH, Dougal Trahern had printed satellite views of a few key areas of Shenneck’s seventy-acre Napa Valley ranch at different magnifications. The stack of pages was more than half an inch thick, held together by a binder clip.
Jane was sitting at Trahern’s desk, studying the photos, when the big man returned with a fully loaded duffel bag, which he put on the floor beside the office door.
“You’re right,” she said. “My way in won’t work.”
“But my way will.”
“What’s your way?”
“To save time, I’ll tell you when we’re on the road.”
“Where are we going?”
“Los Angeles. To see a guy.”
“What guy?”
“You trust me or you don’t.”
“I do and I don’t. These days, there’s only eight people in the whole world I trust completely—which is why I’m not dead already.”
“Do and don’t. Maybe that’s good enough for now. But soon you’ll have to make up your mind. Are you carrying?”
She pulled aside her sport coat to reveal the rig and pistol. “Not licensed when on leave from the Bureau. But if I’m going to Hell, it won’t be because I broke the concealed-carry laws.”
Trahern had put on the voluminous black quilted-nylon garment that he had been wearing when she’d first seen him in the library. The zipper was not engaged, and he spread both panels of the jacket, revealing a dual rig with pistols snugged against his left and right sides. “Have good connections and a reputation for philanthropy, you can be licensed to double carry.”
“You really need those at Toys for Tots meetings?”
“I mostly carry just one. I know ministers, teachers, little-old-lady retirees who pack everywhere they go.”
As he spoke, he looked toward the blacked-out windows, first one and then the other.
“Why’d you paint the glass?” Jane asked.
“I don’t like having a window at my back where anyone could be looking in at me.”
“Blinds wouldn’t work? Draperies?”
“Not good enough. Paint it black. That’s the only sure thing.” He picked up the duffel bag. “Better be going.”
As she watched Trahern open the door and leave his office, Jane wondered if, by turning to this man, she had improved her chances of getting to Shenneck or instead had guaranteed failure.
10
* * *
AS JANE STARTED the engine, Trahern dropped his duffel bag in the back of the Ford Escape. He got in the front passenger seat and closed the door, holding the satellite photos on his lap.
In the confines of the car, he seemed not merely bigger than before but also stranger, sitting there in his lace-up boots and camouflage pants and black T-shirt and shiny black nylon jacket. He was forty-eight years old, yet in spite of his size and his age, at times he had a childlike quality. Sometimes when she looked at him, when he didn’t realize that he was being observed, he appeared lost.
“What’re you looking at?” he grumbled.
“Are you sure you know what you’re maybe getting into?”
“Trespass, breaking and entering, false imprisonment, assault, kidnapping, homicide.”
“And you met me just a couple of hours ago.”
“You’re convincing. I saw the Aspasia website. I trust you.”
She didn’t put the car in gear. “That’s really all it takes to plunge like this—that you trust me?”
“It’s more than that. It’s like I’ve been waiting most of my life for this. I’ve got my reasons. And don’t ask what they are, ’cause they’re my reasons. You can’t do this alone, you’ve got nowhere else to go, and you’re damn lucky I said yes. Hit the road.”
11
* * *
SINCE MID-MORNING, clouds had been sailing in from the north, an armada of gray galleons that raised their sails to screen out the high blue vault with which the day had begun. Now, at 2:30, the low lead-colored overcast suggested the possibility of rain but didn’t promise it. The wind that drove the clouds was at high altitude, while here at ground level, the city stood in stillness, its many trees untroubled, its flags and pennants and banners and awnings limp, motionless. This seemed to be a city waiting for something, and not for anything good, poised in tense expectation.
On the freeway, heading north toward Interstate 5, Trahern said, “I’m talked out. Let’s be quiet awhile.”
“All right.”
“I need quiet. To think.”
Jane said nothing.
He closed his eyes and sat there, big and strangely costumed and bristling and perhaps unknowable. As she drove, Jane glanced at him from time to time, and she vacillated between being comforted by his presence and being disturbed by him.
In mutual silence, with only the drumming of the engine and the drone of the tires, they had gone maybe twenty-five miles on I-5 and were passing Oceanside when, eyes still closed, Trahern said with bearish gruffness, “I have absolutely no romantic interest in you.”
“Likewise,” she replied, amazed that he felt it necessary to broach the subject.
He wanted to be sure his point had been taken. “I’m old enough to be your father. And for another thing, I’m beyond all that.”
“I was only recently widowed,” she reminded him. “For the foreseeable future, I’m beyond all that, too.”
“Not that you aren’t attractive. You’re quite attractive.”
“I understand.”
“Good. I’m glad we’ve got that straight. Now let’s can the chatter for a while.”
In spite of the gray sky and the gray sea to the west and the dismal scrub-covered hills to the east and the potential bleakness of events to come, a small smile settled on Jane. She didn’t hold it for long. Somehow, a smile seemed dangerous just now, a challenge to Fate that Fate would not ignore.
12
* * *