AS SOON AS the guard passed Caitlin through the front entrance of the hospital, Jordan Glass called out her name, then beckoned her toward some chairs in the corner of the darkened lobby. The seats had cracked covers, but they were comfortable enough. The coffee table was strewn with well-thumbed magazines. Jordan sat beneath a poster warning about heart disease in women, then waited while Caitlin took a chair to her right. Caitlin’s skin felt cold, and her ears were ringing. She wondered if she was finally going into shock.
“You saved Henry,” Jordan said, as though they had been discussing the issue for the past twenty minutes.
Henry’s frozen face kept floating behind Caitlin’s eyes, the trickle of blood running down to the pillow, then Sherry whirling from the window, her hands flying to her throat as one eye socket poured blood. Caitlin didn’t want to say anything about it, for fear of sounding like a baby in front of a woman who’d spent years in war zones. Who opened those damned window blinds? she asked herself for the hundredth time.
“And Sherry died doing what she could to save the man she loved,” Jordan added.
“She died doing what I told her to do,” Caitlin corrected.
“If you hadn’t told her to do that, Henry might be dead instead of her. Or both of them. Or you.”
Caitlin stared at a tattered issue of Self on the table.
“In 1992,” Jordan said, “a man I loved got blown apart while standing in line to fill a canteen with water for me. I was hiding twenty yards away. A mortar round took off the top of his head and killed four other people, two of them children. I didn’t even get a bruise. I can’t tell you how many ‘if onlys’ I suffered through over that. He died because of me, no question. But he was also there for himself, just like Henry Sexton. And I almost got myself killed a week later because I was still dwelling on it. I don’t want you to end up like Sherry tomorrow because you’re not paying attention.”
Caitlin said nothing. The story seemed like a magazine article she’d read long ago. Still, the accuracy of Glass’s intuition was unnerving.
“Did Henry tell you anything important before he was shot?” Jordan asked.
Caitlin’s thoughts leaped to Toby Rambin, the poacher Henry had told her about—the man who supposedly knew the location of the Bone Tree. With a stab of guilt she recalled entering Rambin’s name and number into her phone, then altering it in Henry’s so that no one else could discover it there. She hoped the FBI had no way to detect recent editing on a SIM card.
“You don’t trust me,” Jordan said.
A simple statement of fact.
“It’s not that,” Caitlin lied. “This morning you told me that you don’t always share everything with your husband. But I’m sure you share a lot. Where’s the line?”
The photographer smiled with an inward sadness. “That’s not always clear. But I wouldn’t betray anything you’re working on to John.”
“Are you asking me to tell you everything Henry’s confided in me?”
“No. But I figured you wouldn’t have been in that room tonight unless you hoped to learn something more from him.”
Caitlin’s head snapped up, angry words on the tip of her tongue.
“Hey, hey,” Jordan said gently. “No offense, okay? But if there’s one thing I know, it’s reporters.”
“I’m the publisher of my paper, not a reporter.”
Glass gave her a knowing smile. “I’ve read your stories. You’re a reporter.”
Caitlin resented the confidence with which Glass had pigeonholed her, but a little part of her glowed, as well.
Jordan hooked her hands around one knee and leaned back in her chair, her perceptive eyes on Caitlin. “I’m about to tell you something I shouldn’t.”
“What?” Caitlin asked, intrigued by the tone of Glass’s voice.
“Tomorrow John is going to subpoena the files you got from Henry Sexton. He’s going to take them from you legally.”
A jolt of alarm made Caitlin sit upright. “He can’t do that! That’s crazy.”
“John wouldn’t do it if he didn’t think he’d get the files.”
“But Henry gave me those files. Those are a journalist’s records. He was my employee at the time! I can prove that. He still is. His publisher will swear to that.”
Jordan held up her hands to stop Caitlin. “Remember what I told you at the Jericho Hole? How John got things moving so quickly on this case? He’s operating under provisions of the Patriot Act.”
Caitlin felt a cold sweat inside her shirt.
“When a federal judge considers Henry’s files in that light—and his attempted assassination—he’ll probably decide they’re critical evidence in the hunt for an out-of-control domestic terror cell. So—here’s my free advice. Go back to your office and make copies of everything Henry gave you, if you haven’t already. Then give John either the copies or the originals. Because he’s going to get them anyway. Things will go a lot smoother if you do it voluntarily, and I think after you get a little sleep, you’re going to realize what it will mean to have John giving you exclusive information.”
A dozen different emotions swirled through Caitlin’s exhausted brain. “Did your husband tell you to talk me out of those files?”
Jordan smiled sadly, then shook her head. “I’m on your side. I loved it when you got in that trooper’s face out there. I look at you and see my younger self. I want you to own this story. But John’s right: tomorrow an army of print and TV journalists is going to descend on this area. Your window of exclusivity is going to slam shut fast. Hiding those files may feel instinctively right, but it’s not. People are dying. John and his team are the best hope of stopping this violence. He won’t let any other journalist see those files. And if you give him access, he’ll pay you back ten times over. I know him.”