detailed, or a text, something. That was always a problem—we never knew how much information to feed you. Too much would have made you suspicious, too little and you wouldn’t find your way to where we were trying to direct you.” She lit another cigarette off the stub of the one she was smoking. “You want to know what the most satisfying thing about causing his death was?”
There was a change in her; she now spoke mechanically, totally devoid of emotion. Confession in this case apparently wasn’t good for the soul. Instead the recounting of her complicity was giving her some kind of awful realization, shutting off the defense of emotion.
“What was that?” Vail asked.
“Watching him go through the process of planning these terrible crimes. I had this perverted fascination about the way he went about it. You have to admit they were brilliant. I got caught up in the creativity of it all, occasionally making suggestions. Probably something like Stockholm syndrome. Whatever it was, he actually taught me how to commit unsolvable crimes—well, almost unsolvable. He handed me the tools to bring about his own death. He allowed me to finally get even.”
“So with him dead and the money returned, no one would have known about you,” Vail said.
“That was the plan. I was leaving the United States attorney’s office and getting out of California, maybe the country. Originally when I announced it a couple of months ago, it was with the intention of getting as far away from Radek as possible. As of yesterday, it was to get away from myself, but that’s never possible. Since Radek died, the fact that I’m the only responsible person still alive has been haunting me. The guilt has been increasing constantly. I can’t sleep. That’s why I’m here so early. I can’t eat. I am tortured.” She nodded at the wall where the morning light was finally shining on the framed quote from Martin Luther. “‘Each lie must have seven lies if it is to resemble the truth and adopt truth’s aura,’” she read. “He certainly knew what he was talking about. Funny, isn’t it? I put that up my first day as a warning against those who would lie to me, and I became its prisoner.”
“Maybe it’s time to take it down.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy?” she said. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could let me turn myself in?” She lit a third cigarette off the one she had exhausted in four long drags.
“I thought you told me you were going to quit smoking.” She sensed something humane in his switch to the trivial observation.
She gave him an exhausted smile. “This is the last one. I promise I’ll quit…forever.”
He searched her eyes. They had suddenly lost the jitteriness that he had seen in them since the day they met. Some resolution had settled in. Vail then realized what she meant.
To her surprise, Vail stood up and turned to go. “Did you forget? I’m no longer an FBI agent.”
As he opened the door, she said, “It seems I’m always trying to thank you.”
He couldn’t look back as he shut the door.
When Vail got off the elevator in the lobby, he walked past the guard, who was speaking on the telephone in a panicked voice: “Send an ambulance to the federal building right away. Someone has fallen from a sixth-story window. Hurry.”
THIRTY-SIX
AS KATE WALKED INTO THE FEDERAL BUILDING SHE COULD HEAR sirens in the distance. She took another sip of her coffee and headed for the elevators, distracted by thoughts of Vail. How was it possible to admire someone and dislike him so much at the same time? As far as him and her, it was probably better that nothing was going to happen. Irreconcilable differences, wasn’t that what her mother had claimed in her divorce suit? “Give a man enough time, and he’ll show you his hand,” she had always said.
The doors started to close and Don Kaulcrick edged through them. They glanced at each other for a couple of uncomfortable seconds before she said, “Morning.”
“Morning. I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to run past you. See if we can”—he looked at the other passengers and didn’t recognize any of them as being from the FBI—“recover those units.”
“My office is nice and quiet.”
“Now a good time?”
She could see he wasn’t trying to patch up their working relationship. She had heard this conciliatory tone before. In all likelihood, he had no ideas, at least