Mountain Time. In Providence it was noon, and he had been afraid the secretary would be gone for lunch.
She didn’t answer right away. Her voice was careful. “I’m terribly sorry. Mr. Kess isn’t with us anymore.”
“He’s in hiding, but you know how to get in touch with him all right.” The phone was warm and sweaty in his hand.
“No, sir, I don’t. I don’t know what you mean at all.”
“But you remember me. Eight, nine months ago we talked a lot. Now you get in touch with him. Tell him I called to say I’ve been punished enough. Tell him I know I made a mistake, but my baby is dead now and that’s enough. I’m angry and scared and this sounds like I’m ordering him, but I’m not. I’m begging him. Please. Tell him please leave the rest of us alone.”
“I really am sorry, sir. I have no idea what it is you’re saying, and there’s nothing I can—”
“No. Please. Don’t hang up.”
“Good morning. Thank you for calling Chemelec.”
“ No. Wait. ”
The click again, and this time the static of the long-distance line. The whole conversation could not have taken more than a minute. He had been hoping so desperately that this would save them all, and he hadn’t even been able to say everything right, and all of a sudden it was over. He felt there was no bottom to his stomach.
What else did you expect? he told himself. Did you really believe all you needed to do was phone and ask for mercy?
Christ, mercy isn’t Kess’s way.
11
“It’s obvious why I can’t search every house on the street,” Webster said. “The judge would wake up from reading the Constitution, and right off he’d want to know what I was searching for. So what could I tell him? That I was looking for a guy with a rasp in his voice that was plainly a disguise in the first place?”
They were in the living room. He was slumped in a chair while Webster leaned forward on the sofa opposite him and explained.
“Even if the judge was crazy enough to allow a blanket search, the warrants would take too long to get processed,” Webster said. “By then, whoever phoned would be clear off, he probably is by now anyway and whatever might be strange in any of those houses—guns, say, or poison—would be long gone with him. Besides, there’s no need to assume he called from a house. It’s my guess he was in a car that had a phone. He knew about your son being dead because he drove by when the attendant was carrying the body out to the ambulance. And he knew when Ford and I left because he was in a car parked close by, watching.”
He listened hopelessly, lighting another cigarette from Webster’s pack. It had been three weeks since he had determined to quit smoking, but that didn’t really matter anymore, and he sucked the smoke full-throated into his lungs, waiting for his brain to stop spinning.
“The other business,” Webster said. “About your planning to call me and him phoning to say don’t bother, that was just theatrics. He knew you’d want to get in touch with me about his first call, so he just waited until you thought I’d had time to get back to the station, and then he made his second call to tell you not to. That way it looked as if he was reading your mind. There was always the chance he would have been too late, that you would already have phoned me, in which case his second call would have seemed like he had a tap on your phone.”
“At least my way we had a direction to hunt for him,” he answered weakly.
“Listen to me. I could have said this when you called. I didn’t need to come back out here to say it, but I wanted to see your face and make sure you understood. Finding him isn’t your worry—it’s mine. All you need to worry about is keeping control.”
“What the hell good will that do? You see what I’m like. Supposing I do manage to get myself together, that won’t stop them from coming for us.”
“Them? We don’t know it’s more than one.”
“It’s anywhere
Heidi Hunter, Bad Boy Team