Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense (22 page)

Jonas smiled into his phone. “I’d love to. So your message sounded urgent. Or are you usually an all-caps texter? Because that could get annoying.”

Anne’s tone changed instantly. “A woman was beaten to death a couple of weeks ago in Cleveland.”

“Sonman?”

“She was killed in her home. But there was security video inside a grocery store where she had just been shopping. Shows her interacting briefly with a man who followed her out of the store. He’s unidentified, but police entered his physical description into the NCIC database.”

“Let me guess. He had a nasty scar on his ear.”

“I’ve had a standing order to flag any ear injuries that come across the database. This is the first hit.”

“It’s not his M.O. Why would he beat a woman to death?”

“Hold on. You think I would call you with this kind of flimsy story? It gets more interesting.”

“Tell me.”

“The video image was shown on the local news. It was picked up by other affiliates in the region. There had been a few tips, but nothing that’s been fruitful. One of the tips came from a woman in Pittsburgh. Name’s Rose Fitzgerald.”

“So?”

“So, she says she thinks she knows the guy. Said he looks like her long lost brother, who ran away from home when he was seventeen. Said he had a horrible wound to his ear.”

“What else did she say?”

Anne paused. “She said his name was Rudiger.”

JONAS LOOKED
at the clock on his computer. Just after ten. Even with the longer days the sun had disappeared hours before he’d last gotten up to get more coffee, and now he found himself alone in the office, the halogens above him humming like a distant swarm of insects. Even the workhorse Senator had gone home. Jonas had work to do, in fact he had so much it didn’t matter how much coffee he drank because he’d never get to it.

But that wasn’t why he was still at work.

His phone chirped the arrival of a text message. Anne.

She’s here.

Okay, Jonas thought. Here we go. He punched the tiny keys on his BlackBerry.

Same address you gave me earlier? Yes.

Be there in 15.

The drive was easy, especially at this time of night. Jonas felt a gnawing anxiousness as he gripped the steering wheel.

Tonight, Jonas thought. Tonight we’re going to have to tell the FBI everything.

They met at a safe house. Jonas had never been to one before.

The safe house was in fact a dilapidated townhouse, one of several in a grouping that extended a city block. Ugly, homogenous, forgettable. Perfectly sensible for the purpose it served.

Jonas checked the address as he walked along a cracked sidewalk toward the unit. He noticed a grey sedan across the street with two silhouettes in the front seat. Jonas tucked the image not far beneath the surface of his most conscious thoughts.

Anne opened the door before he knocked. She kissed him on the cheek as she let him in.

“Why are we meeting here?” he asked.

She nodded to the gray sedan across the street. “They’re doing us a favor because I was the one who saw the significance of her tip. If we went straight with her to the Hoover Building, there’s no way we’d get to talk to her first. I have a friend who’s letting us talk to her here first. We get an hour.”

“That’s a good friend.”

“I told him we’d get more out of her than they will. They still don’t know what they have here.”

Jonas walked in the townhouse and peered into the living room, seeing no one. “Where is she?”

Anne nodded and shut the door. “In the kitchen.”

Jonas turned the corner past the living room and found the woman sitting at a dusty glass kitchen table, a can of Diet Coke nestled inside the loose grip of her right hand.

She was hunched over the table. Skinny. Pale skin and a faded long-sleeve t-shirt. Dirty blond hair sprung from darker roots in uncombed ropes, hanging down, hiding her face. Jonas noticed the tattoo on her left arm, some kind of serpent, the ink faded, the outline washed. Tribute to a decades-old decision.

“Hello,” he said, hoping not to startle her. “I’m Jonas.” She looked up, her bright blue eyes flashing at him.

They were the only features of her face that still held beauty. She wasn’t old, but she had aged hard, as if she crammed a life’s worth of living in a few short years. But he could see that once she was probably the type of woman men fought over. Now, she was a few years and a handful of bad decisions short of beautiful.

“I’m Rose,” she said. “Rose Fitzgerald.”

Anne entered the kitchen and took command. “Rose,” she said, “Jonas is helping me with this investigation. As I explained in the car, we’ll be talking to you for a little bit here and then you’ll be interviewed more thoroughly by the FBI. Between all of us we are desperately trying to find your brother.”

Rose looked at Jonas. “You with the FBI?”

“No, ma’am. I have a personal interest in this case that goes back to my time in the Army. I served with your brother.” Jonas asked, “When was the last time you saw your brother?”

“When he was seventeen. I was fifteen.”

“Where was that?”

She nodded out the window. “Close to here. Virginia, where we grew up.”

Jonas noticed her accent.

Anne took a seat at the table across from Rose. Jonas remained standing.

“Where are your parents now?” Anne asked.

“Mom is dead. Car accident. Dad’s still in Virginia, though a different town. Don’t talk to him much.” Rose took a sip from her soda. Jonas watched her effort to swallow.

“When did you move to Pittsburgh?” Anne asked. “’bout ten years ago.”

Anne’s questioning was slow and casual. Friendly, but cautious. “What do you do for a living, Rose?”

“Worked at Home Depot until about three months ago. Got laid off. Bad economy and all.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Not lookin’ for pity.”

Anne let the silence settle in the kitchen for a few moments. Jonas watched her study Rose, just the way she had studied him the first time they met at Calloway’s funeral. She was scanning for a connection.

“What we’re here to do is understand more about your brother’s background. Anything that might help us find him. Now, we don’t have much time, so do you mind if I go ahead and ask you some questions about him?”

She shook her head. “That’s what I came here for, right?”

“Right.” Anne leaned forward in her chair. “Rose, did you ever marry? I ask because you and your brother don’t share the same last name.”

“No. He was always Fitzgerald. Must have changed it.” Her words were heavy and dull, dropping out of her mouth like lead. “I jes know it was him, though. I mean, the image on the video wasn’t that clear. But...it was
him
. At first I didn’t see it, because he looked so different. But the way he stood. The way he
leaned
. And his ear.”

“Tell us about his ear.”

Jonas spoke up. “It was a childhood injury,” he said. “I remember it from the Army. I don’t remember what he said happened, but there’s a scar that ran down the side of his left ear and onto his cheek.”

“Knife,” Rose said. “Happened to him when he was twelve...” Her voice trailed.

“He never made contact after you last saw him?” Anne said. “Not with your parents either?”

“No. Nothing.”

Anne took a moment to study Rose. Then, she said in a low voice, “Did you think your brother was dead?”

“Why would I think that?”

“It’s...” Anne shifted her gaze briefly to Jonas and then back to her subject. “It’s a sense I get from you. You...you connect death with your brother somehow.”

Rose looked uncomfortable. “What do you mean ‘sense?’”

“Anne is very intuitive,” Jonas said. “It’s what makes her a good investigator and why the FBI uses her services.”

Rose looked from Jonas to Anne and finally to the table. “No, I didn’t think he was dead. I guess I never thought about it much. We were never close.”

“Rose, why did Rudy leave home? What happened to his ear?”

Dampened shouts from a domestic argument bled through the walls of the townhome, the man’s voice deep, full of bass and vitriol. Jonas couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t have to. Rose shifted in her seat and tapped a long, painted nail on the side of the sweating soda can.

Anne didn’t repeat her questions. She sat and patiently waited for Rose to speak first.

Jonas focused on the argument in the neighboring townhouse. He made out a garbled
bitch
and a
fucking
. The woman yelled something and then enough silence settled in to make Jonas wait for the sound of a gun firing a single shell. It didn’t come.

Rose began to tell her story.

“I WAS
jes ten,” she said, “when Rudy came back home...” Rose’s voice was slow and controlled; her words soft. Appalachian drawl laced with melancholy. Her gaze remained fixed on the table. “I remember when he opened up the front door. It was night, jes after dinner. The search for him had died down. It’d been two months and all, and, though no one ever said it out loud, I think we all thought Rudy was gone forever.”

Rose tapped on her can again. A short but powerful burst of a yell came from next door, but she didn’t seem to even notice.

“He’d been abducted?” Anne asked.

“Yes. That’s right. Abducted at twelve years old.”

Anne placed a recorder on the table. In her softest voice, she said, “Do you mind if I tape this?”

Rose shrugged.

Anne pressed the record button and nodded at Rose to continue.

“Rudy opened up the front door and looked like little-boy death. Skinny. Dirty. Dried blood all over his face. Eyes wide like a doll’s. Unblinking. No one moved for a moment. We all jes thought he was a ghost, you know? Least that’s what I thought. I was scared to death of the boy at the door. He sure wasn’t my brother—least not the one I remembered. Then finally my mom screamed and ran over to him, falling all over the skin and bones standing in the entryway. She scooped him up and she jes cried. My dad called the police, and I sat there and watched it all, unbelieving. Rudy was back.”

Jonas leaned forward. “What happened to him?”

Rose didn’t look up. She shook her head and kept staring at her soda can. “Rudy didn’t talk for the first three months he was home. Not a word. Took him to all sorts of psychologists and counselors, but he just sat there, dumb. They knew he’d been abused. Had a long nasty cut along his ear.” Rose drew her finger along the left side of her head. “Bruises on his face and body. Damn nearly starved to death. And doctor said he’d been raped. Repeatedly.”

Jonas tried to see the face of a twelve year-old Sonman in his mind and couldn’t. “Jesus Christ.”

“Police found a dead man a few miles away in an old abandoned house. Throat cut and mouth split wide open. Ear missing. Found a basement with locks on the doors and found Rudy’s blood down there on an old mattress. No one knew if Rudy killed the man or someone else did, but his death allowed Rudy to escape.”

“Did they find out who he was?”

“Rudy called him the Preacherman.”

“So Rudy started talking?”

“Never about what happened to anyone but me. And that was jes one time.”

“What did he say happened?”

The world seemed heavy on Rose. “It was five years later, jes before he left home for good. Rudy was different by then, and I was too self-absorbed to really give a shit. My parents had split up and my mom went to go live in Phoenix with some guy she met at a conference. But Rudy was the stain on the family. He was so smart, but he was horrible in school. Failed every class.”

“How do you know he was smart?” Anne asked. Jonas noticed she wasn’t pressing Rose to tell them what Rudy said happened to him.

“Because...because he could do, like, insane math problems in his head. And he was always doing word jumbles.”

“Word jumbles?”

“Yeah. You know, like in the paper. Rearranging letters to form a word. Like ‘rose’ can also be ‘sore.’ But you could jes tell him a word and he could tell you what other words you could make from it. Did it all the time. It was...well, to be honest it was creepy. But impressive, too.” Rose stood and walked to the refrigerator, helping herself to another soda. “Some of the kids called him Rain Man.”

“Was he ever diagnosed with any kind of condition?”

“Condition?”

“Yes, like...well, like autism. Or one of the spectrum conditions of autism, like Asperger’s Syndrome.”

Rose looked confused. “No, not that I know of. Don’t suppose my parents ever gave it much thought. Though my dad always said he was special.”

“Was your family religious?”

She managed a weak laugh. “Hardly. But Rudy...after he came back. He got all religious.” Rose turned to Jonas, her eyes dull with fatigue. “He would quote Christian scripture to you about anything, but mostly about the Rapture. It was really annoying. I never knew what the hell he was talking about. We were all hoping it was a phase but he was that way until he left.”