Last Chance to Die

24



The phone rang. Bursaw picked it up and pushed the Speaker button. “Go ahead, John. We’re all here.”

“My guy went for it. In two months Rellick is being posted to a foreign assignment. He wouldn’t say exactly where, but it sounded like someplace critical. They’re about to start a reinvestigation of him, including a polygraph, which is routine with any sensitive assignment. It may be another reason he’s still worried about Kate. Anyway, they’re going to ambush him with the polygraph first thing tomorrow morning, making some excuse about an upcoming shortage of polygraphers that necessitates it being done now. Once they get him strapped in, it’ll be all ahead full on the video and Gulin. That, along with the usual questions about contacts with foreign nationals, accepting money, et cetera, should blow the needles off the box.”

“Are you going to be there?”

“Yes. I told him I’d like to watch, just out of curiosity, but I think my pal suspects it’s because I want to make sure that they’re pushing it. Otherwise we’d have to take over.”

“We’ll wait to hear from you.”

Vail disconnected the line. “Let’s hope he breaks.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Kate asked.

“I’m turning you in for the reward.”

“In that case you should take me to dinner tonight. You know, the condemned, a hearty meal and all.”

Bursaw said, “There’s a couple of decent restaurants within walking distance.” They both looked at him as if they’d forgotten he was there. “No, no, I’m not inviting myself.”

“Please come, Luke,” Vail said with mock insincerity.

He laughed. “Just for that, I should go along. But I have a life of my own to screw up.” He got up and slipped on his topcoat. “I’ll be by first thing in the morning—unless there’s a tie on the doorknob or U.S. Marshals crime-scene tape across the jamb.”

Dusk added to their anonymity as Kate and Vail strolled down M Street, ignoring the falling temperature. She had ahold of his arm and pulled herself closer with each sharp gust of wind. “Sure it’s not too cold to walk?” he asked.

“After three days in a cell, it feels good.” They were early for their dinner reservation and turned into a brick courtyard that housed several small shops and art galleries to window-gaze. One of them displayed several sculptures and ceramic works. “Anything you like?” she asked idly.

She was wearing Luke’s sister’s navy camel-hair coat. There was something about the color that made her hair and skin luminous. Her long, dark lashes contrasted her flashing blue eyes perfectly. He took a half step back to look her over. “As a matter of fact . . . there is.”

He continued to stare at her until she bumped her hip into his in amused protest. “I was referring to the items on the other side of the glass.”

A series of sculptures were displayed, some metal, some bronze and clay. There was even one in wax of a heavy-bodied figure lying on its side in a catatonic curl. A series of semicollapsed ceramic containers caught his attention. They leaned at different angles and, although the same general shape, were different in size. Vail appraised all of them. “These people are legitimate artists.”

“I don’t get it. Why do you think this stuff is good and yours isn’t? I know I’ve only seen two of your sculptures, but they were at least as good as these.”

He waved his hand across the window respectfully. “This isn’t about technical ability. There’s an instinct involved in creating something like this, an instinct that even they don’t understand. They are real artists because they have to let loose on the world what they create. The belief in themselves to say, ‘This is my art, and if you don’t like it, I don’t really care. Here it is anyway. I’d almost rather that you didn’t buy it. It’s what separates me from people like you.’ ”

“ ‘People like you’? You actually mean you.”

“That’s right, people like me, because I can’t put it out there for anyone to judge.”

“Because they might not like it?”

“Everything I do is carefully orchestrated so people aren’t allowed to examine me. That’s why I sneaked out of that bank robbery, and that’s why no one except you has ever seen my sculptures.”

“So what you’re really saying is that it’s not just your art, but you’re not willing to put any part of your life out there to examine.”

“That’s my choice, yes.”

“Why would you sculpt if you didn’t want anyone to see it?”

“It’s something I want to be good at.”

“And how will you decide when you’re good enough?”

“I guess I’ll know.”

Kate stared back through the window, carefully measuring what she was about to say. “Now I know why you like being a bricklayer.”

“This should be good.”

“All brick walls look the same. As long as they’re level and straight, they look like every other wall in the world. No creativity, no individuality, and—apparently most important—no judgment.”

Vail stared at the objects in the window for a while longer, ignoring the icy wind. Kate stood huddled against him. The expression on his face told her she’d stirred something that had been deeply buried. She waited for one of their arguments to begin.

“On my fourteenth birthday, my father announced to me that he was going to start teaching me to lay brick. I had worked the summers and weekends for years as his laborer, probably since I was ten or eleven. Naturally I was excited to finally learn. I’d watched him for years, envious of his skill. Something a boy does no matter what kind of father he has. That day we were building a chimney, and he let me lay the last three feet of it. When I was done, I thought it looked pretty good, at least for a first try. He sent me down to start cleaning up. Fifteen minutes later he came down without saying a word. The next day I was surprised when we went back to the same job. He put up the ladder and told me to go up on the roof. When I got there, the entire top of the chimney I’d built had been torn down, the bricks scattered all around it. He told me that I’d done a lousy job and that this was the only way I’d learn. He then had me go down and mix the mortar, bring it up, and watch him rebuild it.”

“That’s awful. But at least you learned how to do it, right?”

Vail laughed with a tinge of anger, not at her but at what he was about to recall. “This wasn’t some apprenticeship hazing or poor parenting technique, this was him getting even.”

“Even for what?”

“Who knows? For having to raise me by himself. I don’t know. It seemed as if his whole life was about getting even with everyone. That’s who he was.”

“That happened a long time ago.”

Vail laughed again, and this time it had an edge to it that told her she was being naïve. “If that had happened once, it would probably be the kind of story you’d laugh at during a Thanksgiving meal, but every time I finished something after that, he would send me to clean up while he stayed behind. I never knew until the next morning whether he’d torn it down or not. Sometimes I wouldn’t sleep, wondering if I had pleased my father, which is very important to a fourteen-year-old, especially if there was no one else around. He did it the rest of the summer. If we stopped somewhere for lunch and he started drinking whiskey, I didn’t have to wonder—tearing it down would be automatic.”

Kate understood now why Vail’s approach to work was so intense, why it crowded out everything else. She thought about when she’d recruited him on that Chicago rooftop to help with the Pentad case six months earlier. After she made her appeal, he worked almost in a rage. She thought it was because of what she’d said, but now she wondered if it wasn’t because she was invading his privacy, at a time when he held at bay the demons his father had left behind. A feat that became impossible when someone else might be able to detect the tiniest flaw. It had to be why he never stopped working on a case, even after it was solved. “Have you ever thought about confronting him and showing him what you’ve accomplished?”

“Accomplished? I’m a bricklayer.”

“Actually, you choose to be a bricklayer. Maybe you continue to do it because it’s the only way to show your father how wrong he was. You need to go see him and tell him what you’ve done, your education, your work with the FBI.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Why not?”

“All right, I won’t.”

“That’s your father. You can’t put the rest of your life on hold because of one bad summer.”

“You’re right, it was only one summer, because by the time I turned fifteen, I could lay brick as well as he could. And, more important, I was much faster, which translated into more money. Not that I ever saw any of it. But when I was sixteen, he found a new way to ‘parent.’ That entire summer we worked building a hospital, a huge job. There were other contractors on the site—roofers, Sheetrockers, carpenters, everything. I was always big for my age, so he started lining up fights for me. On Fridays he would have me fight grown men for their paychecks. The first time I lost. Three of my ribs were broken. But he was very reassuring. He told me it was all right, because he’d get better odds the next time. Maybe that’s why I’ve never looked forward to paydays. When I turned seventeen, I refused to do it anymore. The next year was—to put it mildly—contentious.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“My eighteenth birthday. I got up in the morning and packed. He was eating breakfast. I stopped and looked at him. I suppose I wanted him to have some remorse, maybe even try to stop me, but I think he actually looked relieved.”

She pulled on Vail’s arm to get him to start walking. He took one last look at the pieces in the window. After a few blocks of silence, she said, “Am I really the only one who’s seen your sculptures?”

“Even though I told you I didn’t want you to look at them, yes.”

“Then I’m glad I didn’t follow orders. That one of me is—”

“I destroyed it.”

“What?”

“A few nights after you left, I sat in front of it, drinking. Finally I got drunk enough to see the truth, so I broke it down.”

“What truth? It looked exactly like me.”

He stopped and faced her, putting his palm on her cheek. “One of the things I like best about you is that you really don’t understand your own beauty. I understand it better than you do, and I don’t understand it at all. I had to do that bust of you, to try to understand exactly what it is about you that haunts me. When I destroyed it, I destroyed my obsession with perfection. You’re right, me being a bricklayer is about not being judged. But destroying that bust of you was the healthiest thing I’ve ever done.”

Tears started down Kate’s face. She buried herself against his chest. “Who are you?”

“Haven’t you been listening? For better or worse, I’m a bricklayer.” Vail took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. “If it’s any consolation, since then—for the first time ever—I’ve kept the things I’ve made, all of them. I think I’m actually starting to like what I make.”

Kate gave him his handkerchief back and took his arm again. “And will I get to see them?”

“You’ll have to come to Chicago.”

“Uh-oh.”

“That’s right, Katie, there is an admission price.”

They started walking again. “I’m hungry.”

“I hope you’re speaking biblically.”

“I’m talking seafood, Vail, and as much of it as you can afford.”

“Well, aren’t you the demanding little fugitive?”

“If I were, I wouldn’t be dating a bricklayer pretending to be an FBI agent pretending to be a sculptor.”

“If I remember my time in the Bureau correctly, everybody was pretending to be an agent.”

“That’s the problem, no one pretends anymore.”

Kate put the key in the lock and turned around to face him, flattening her back against the door. “I had a very nice time tonight, Steven,” she said, her voice feigning a this-is-our-first-and-last-date rejection.

She had been relatively quiet during dinner. His flirting usually elicited playful banter from her, but tonight she’d been largely unresponsive, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. He even threw her a couple of lines she could have used to unload on him, but they didn’t seem to register. Vail guessed that it was the arrest and the charges pending against her. He knew she was grounded enough to understand that with the evidence they’d uncovered so far, she would never be formally charged and that complete freedom was not far away. But maybe being put in such a precarious position and having to be so dependent on him was causing her to finally understand why he had such disdain for the Bureau. The organization she’d given so much to had been unwilling to risk anything to help her.

But now maybe she was trying to tell him that she’d made some sort of decision. He hoped so.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said.

“The truth is, Steven, the last few days I’ve been spending all my time with women. If you know what I mean.”

“If that’s supposed to turn me off, you may want to take it in a different direction.”

“Let me put it another way—no, we can’t see each other again.”

“I think I should at least get a good-night handshake.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”

“Come on, Katherine. How about I come in for a cup of coffee?”

“I don’t know, my roommate is a bit of a psychopath.” She whispered, “He’s in the building trades.”

Vail put his hands against the door on either side of her. “Have you two got something going on?” He leaned in and put his cheek against hers.

She nuzzled against the heat of his neck. “It’s complicated.”

“That sounds like a yes. Is he here now?”

“He’s very close by.”

He kissed her gently on the mouth. “How close?”

“Very, very close.”

“I say we chance it.”

“Well, that was an expensive dinner,” she said.

“I won’t stay any more than four or five hours.”

“You promise?”

“Certainly no later than spring.”

She turned around and opened the door. “Just coffee, right?”

They were inside and quickly dropped their coats where they stood. She threw herself against him and kissed him almost angrily.

He said, “For some reason I have a sudden taste for Girl Scout cookies, too.” He unzipped her dress, and she stepped out of it, then unbuttoned his shirt. “You’re sure there’s no chance of a handshake.”

She pulled at the end of his belt. “Absolutely not.”