well-built residence with a soft drumming-rushing sound that was strangely comforting. Perhaps in the amniotic sac, an unborn child heard a susurration alike to this, the sound of his mother’s life-sustaining blood circulating ceaselessly through the body that encompassed and sustained him.
Whenever a thought like that occurred to Verbotski, he wondered about himself, whether something might be a little wrong with him. Had he continued his education with a master’s degree in psychiatry, he would have been required to undergo psychoanalysis to learn how to conduct such sessions, which might have been interesting. But in short order he’d gone from being a highly paid mercenary in foreign hot spots to being an extravagantly paid domestic murder-for-hire specialist, and a career path in psychiatry appeared insufficiently rewarding.
Now, as he followed Ben Hawkins and the boy into the living room, he heard the man say, “Megan, everyone, our prayers have been answered. These gentlemen are from the FBI, and they’re here about Lee Shacket.”
The people in the living room were having coffee, the sideboard was laden with tarts and cookies and finger sandwiches, Hawkins went to the fireplace where he had left his cup and saucer on the mantel, Megan Bookman put her cup aside on a table next to the sofa and rose to her feet to greet her visitors, and John Verbotski was impressed that she could be so fresh and lovely and psychologically together after all that she’d recently been through.
She had about her a regal quality, an air of indomitability. They might need a lot of thiopental and other drugs to break her, but she would be fun to interrogate. And when the interrogation was finished, she’d be fun to use, just to see how much humiliation she could endure without cracking.
A Latina woman was sitting in one armchair, a black man in the other, holding coffee cups, and neither of them rose, which made Verbotski’s work easier. He put away his phony Bureau ID and said, “Mrs. Bookman, I’m Special Agent Lewis Erskine.” As he began to speak, his three associates moved farther into the room, getting in position to act, each within striking distance of one of the adults. They could deal with the kid after everyone else had been Tasered, chloroformed, and restrained. Rodchenko and Speer put down their briefcases. “And these,” Verbotski continued, “are Special Agents—”
He intended to introduce them in this order: Rhodes, Colby, and Daniels. Rodchenko was being Daniels, and when his name was spoken, it would be the signal to pull their Tasers.
Then Verbotski hesitated because he saw the idiot smile slip off the boy’s face, saw intelligence in those blue eyes, saw contempt in the black man’s face, saw Ben Hawkins putting a hand on the mantel clock as though to reach behind it. Suddenly he knew that intuition was not Volkskunde, after all, that he should have shot Hawkins on the doorstep, that he needed to shoot the bastard now, shoot the black dude and shoot the Latina bitch and shoot the kid, shoot them all before they made a move, and take Megan captive. She was the only one they really needed.
119
Deputy Foster Bendix was assigned to a winding rural route where nothing ever happened except DUI arrests, teenagers busting themselves up while back-road drag racing, good old boys blasting away at road signs just for the fun of it, if you called that fun, and vehicle breakdowns to which he could lend a helping hand. At times, Foster thought he was more of a janitor, cleaning up messes, than he was a cop.
In the dismal gray light of the storm, through thick curtains of rain, as he passed the former trailer park, where the planned bird-slaughtering system had failed to be approved, he thought he was seeing a mirage, a fata morgana, except not illusions of cliffs and buildings, but ranks of cars and SUVS.
No one had lived there in years. The mobile homes were gone. There had once been power hookups and connections for gas and septic tanks, but the utilities had been cut off long before the decision was made not to build the windmills. The property wasn’t suitable for any kind of gathering.
In fact, the county owned the land, couldn’t find a buyer for it, and was liable for any injuries that anyone might sustain there. No funds had been provided for a fence, but they had staked some no-trespassing signs at the entrance.