is currently in a meeting. If you leave your name and contact information—”
“David, can you give him a message for me?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Tell him that in thirty seconds Tom Piper is going to tell the Washington Post that the FBI knew about Santa Fe and decided to ignore the warnings. Can you do that for me, David?”
“Uh…one moment, sir…”
As Tom waited for David to scamper down the hall and retrieve the officious assistant director, he suddenly found himself ruminating about Lilly Toro. It must have been his threat to go to the press. It was right up Ms. Toro’s alley. It was almost identical to the threat she had posited to him when they first met back in Texas.
It seemed so very long ago.
The AD came on the line: “Tom? Is that you?”
“I saw the news.”
Trumbull’s cancer-cough was worse, and rattled with shards of glass. Tom walked over to the window and peered out at the street. Two boys were playing stickball with a Rottweiler. The boys avoided the puddles. The dog did not. It just scampered to and fro, not a care in the world.
“Tom…”
“What was in the shoe box?”
Another pause. No coughing this time. Just silence.
“Was it another videotape? Was it a message?”
“It was a message.”
“What did it say?”
“Tom…”
“I think I’ve the right to know, don’t you?”
Trumbull sighed. “The note said, ‘None of this is my fault.’”
“Mmm-hmm. Well, at least he’s correct there. None of this was his fault. Not this time. This time it was the fault of the FBI for fucking up so damn spectacularly.”
“Which part pisses you off the most, Tom? That we ignored you or that we threw you under the bus? The fact of the matter is, your names were still on that hit list and—”
“And you fell right into his hands! Don’t you see? He knew we were on to him so he had to take us off the playing field. He never was going to hunt us down individually. He goes after crowds. He’s had this whole thing planned for months. He only went after Darcy when he ran into her at Walmart, and he didn’t go to Amarillo city hall to kill anyone or Esme would be dead. He just needed us off the playing field. And you obliged him.”
“He hunted down that journalist in San Francisco.”
“But that’s not why he was there. He was there to give a message to Bill Kellerman. Just like Darcy, Lilly Toro’s death was…circumstantial. She was collateral damage.” Tom felt nauseous just speaking the words, despite how truthful they were, but he needed Trumbull to see. So many more lives depended on making this old, dying man see.
Tom could hear Trumbull’s labored breathing. The assistant director wasn’t a bad guy. And he didn’t have blood on his hands any more than Tom had blood on his own. Playing the guilt card was an act of desperation, and Tom was desperate. He wouldn’t call the Post. They both knew that. And despite Esme’s prescience about Santa Fe, Trumbull wasn’t obligated to put Tom’s task force back on the case. There were other agents in the field, good agents, maybe not as experienced, but certainly qualified. And other than Esme’s contributions, what exactly had Tom and his task force done to advance the case anyway? Perhaps the smartest move would be to keep the task force off the radar, just in case Tom was wrong and Galileo did try to track them down.
Finally, the assistant director spoke.
“The next location on the list is Kansas City?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s where we’ll catch the son of a bitch. In the meantime, I would imagine you’ll want to meet up with your team in Santa Fe?”
Tom glanced over at Norm.
Well? gestured Norm.
Yes, smiled Tom.
19
“I need you to pick me up.”
Rafe cupped a hand over his free ear so he could better hear his wife’s voice. “Where are you?”
She told him.
“Okay,” he replied, and hung up.
Melville was a forty-minute drive from the college—but he wasn’t at the college. He was at a bar deliberately located in the middle of nowhere. When Esme phoned, he had been flirting semi-harmlessly with a doe-eyed townie named Gladys. As he bid farewell to doe-eyed Gladys and ambled out the door into the glaring accusation of the sun, he calculated the speed he would need to travel to arrive in Melville without garnering suspicion.
A beer buzz at 2:00 p.m. was bound to make anyone a little paranoid.
Rafe slid behind the wheel of his car, popped an Altoid under