The Homecoming (23 page)

“Did you call that number?”

“Yes. Of course. I got her voice mail and left a message.”

“Was it returned?”

“I’m sure it was. Otherwise we wouldn’t be letting the boys have Early Leave, would we? And the note here is signed by Rainey’s mother. It’s her signature, that much I do know.”

“And how would you know that?”

The woman’s mouth got tighter.

“Why, we have her signature on record. Alice is particular about permissions. She insists that every parent has to come in and sign this signature form personally. Otherwise, if we just send the form home, the boys will sign it themselves, the rascals, and then where would we be?”

“Do you have my sister’s signature on file?”

“Not yet. Axel is a new student this term. Your sister—I suppose—has
been too busy to come in and sign the card. I imagine all the trouble her husband is in has something to do with that.”

This was said with an unmistakable air of smug malice. Kate took a closer look at the woman behind the glass. She was one of those Front Office Virgins, a plump whipped-cream sundae of a woman with swirly hair and cherry red lips and small black eyes hidden behind round rimless glasses. She was looking decidedly wary and defensive.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman, with an edge. “I don’t believe we’ve met. May I ask what your interest is in this matter?”

Kate didn’t smack her, but of course there was the glass wall between them.

“I’m Kate Walker—Kate Kavanaugh, I mean. I’m Rainey’s guardian. And Axel and his mother and sister live with us. It’s all in the registry book behind you there, if you cared to look. Are you aware that no one really knows where Rainey’s mother is?”

The woman shook her head, making the twin disks of her glasses glitter in the light from the desk lamp beside her.

“Well, she must be around somewhere,
dear
, because when we asked for a note from his mother so Rainey could have Early Leave, Rainey came right back on the very next day with that note you have in your hands. I checked it with her signature form, just like I said—”

“Forgive me, but I don’t know your name.”

“Oh no,” said the woman, simpering, “how could you? My name is Gert Bloomsberry. I’m only here on a temporary transfer from Sacred Heart.”

“I see. Miss Bloomsberry, is Alice around?”

Gert hesitated, and then leaned forward, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Well, keep this to yourself, but that’s why I’m here. Alice hasn’t been in to school in over two weeks. She sent us an e-mail saying she was going to be away for a while and not to worry. She had some sick days coming.”

“Do you have that e-mail?”

The woman frowned at Kate.

“Of course. But that’s a personal correspondence and I am not at liberty to—”

“Alice lives up in The Glades. Has anyone gone up there to see if she’s okay?”

“Yes. Of course. She has a small house on Virtue Place—isn’t that just so cute? Alice, I mean, living on Virtue? Anyway, Father Bernard dropped
in on his way to the airport. The lights were on and everything looked fine. He knocked but nobody came to the door. Her car was gone. There was a note on the front door.
GONE TO SALLYTOWN. BACK SOON
.”

“Was it signed?”

“Father didn’t say.”

“Has anyone called the police?”

Gert recoiled at the idea.

“
Goodness
no. The
police
? We all figure she’s gone to see a friend.”

“Let me understand this. Alice has been missing for two weeks on the strength of a single e-mail and all you’ve done is send somebody over to read a note on her door? What if she’s lying dead on the other side of that door? Why are you all taking this so calmly?”

“Dear me, Miz Kavanaugh, you
are
an excitable girl, aren’t you?”

Kate managed not to pound on the glass.

The woman rolled on, oblivious, admiring her hands on the desk in front of her.

“No, Alice Bayer is much loved. We all feel she’s entitled to a little fun in life. She works so hard, you know? Everybody around her admires the way she runs Attendance, the interest she takes in the boys. She knows them all by name, and where they like to hang out, places like Patton’s Hard—God knows
that’s
a bad place, what with the river there and the whirlpool and all, but they all go there, the school skippers, Rainey and Axel too, and if they start in to skipping classes, well, Alice has been known to go down there, drive down to Patton’s Hard, and bring them back to school by their ears, and that’s certainly what I call taking the mickey out of those—”

“How do you know that Rainey and Axel go down to Patton’s Hard?”

Patton’s Hard was a mile-long stretch of parkland that ran along the Tulip. The willows there were the oldest trees in Niceville. It was a dank, dark, and dangerous place. Kate and Beth had hated Patton’s Hard since they were children.

“Why, they told the other kids, didn’t they? Bragged about it. Told the Green Jackets. The little kids in Junior School. Said they have a fort down there. They’ve been telling those little boys all about the ghosts that live there, on Patton’s Hard, under the willows, daring the kids to go there with them. Father Casey had to—”

There may have been more, but Kate was already on her way to the Envoy.

She kept the note.

Deitz came out of Andy Chu’s shower wrapped in one of Andy Chu’s bath towels. One of his best bath towels, but if he was still alive after this was over, Chu was going to burn it in his backyard barbecue.

He was waiting for Deitz in the kitchen, picking away at what was left of lunch—kung pao chicken, which he hated, because he hated all Chinese food. He was staring out the window at a tan Toyota that was parked up the street. It had been there for a while now. No one was in the car, but now that he was
harboring a fugitive
he had developed a level of situational awareness that bordered on painful.

Speaking of painful, he was aware of Deitz looming at his shoulder, smelling lemony fresh.

“You get the stuff?” said Deitz, speaking in a more normal voice now that the swelling in his nose had gone down. His black biker goatee was gone.

“Yes, I did. It’s all in my—in your—room—in the master bedroom.”

“What about the wig?”

“That too. I got a large, since all they had was women’s stuff.”

“They have what I was looking for?”

“They did. Exactly what you ordered.”

Deitz grunted, turned, and lumbered out of the kitchen. Chu considered just making a run for it, opening the kitchen door and bolting down the street. There were drawbacks.

The main one was the Blackmailer’s Dilemma.

It had been implicit, although unspoken, in Chu’s deal with Deitz about the shares in Securicom that Chu knew about the scam with the Chinese to copy the Raytheon module. He had followed Deitz around during those two days and he had videotape of Deitz meeting with that Dak guy down in Tin Town. Therefore, the corollary was, Chu Knew Too.

And failed to report it.

As a matter of fact, quite the opposite. He attempted to benefit from the knowledge by blackmailing his boss.

As a person here on an E-1 visa, Chu knew that if any of this came to light, he’d be lucky to get away with ten years in a federal lockup, after which he’d be put on a plane back to Shanghai. What might be waiting for him in China did not bear thinking about, especially since he was involved—however peripherally—in the death of Mr. Dak and his associates, all of whom were sure as hell
guangbo
, which was the Chinese secret police.

Hence, the Blackmailer’s Dilemma, and therefore no headlong dash down the sidewalk crying out for succor.

There was a lot of banging of drawers and slamming of closets—as a roommate Deitz was pretty loud—and a few minutes later Deitz came back into the kitchen. Chu was waiting for him, feeling that whatever the hell Deitz looked like, Chu had to approve. This turned out to be a challenge.

Deitz didn’t walk into the room so much as manifest into it. He was carrying a black leather valise and wearing an off-the-rack Hugo Boss suit in charcoal over a pale gray shirt, no tie. On his feet he had a pair of glossy black Allen Edmonds wing tips over dove gray socks. He had even requested a scarlet pocket square.

In short, from the ground up, he looked pretty damn good, like a designer refrigerator or like one of those retired NFL linebackers who get jobs as halftime commentators on Fox and CBS—hyper-snazzy in a vaguely alarming way.

But all this ended at the neck, or that slightly narrower part of his body where most men would usually have a neck.

Deitz’s connection between his shoulders and his skull was a thick cone of sinew and muscle and bone that tapered upwards just enough to blend into his skull, which narrowed a bit from there on in, although not enough to come to an actual point.

Deitz had addressed the goatee issue by hacking it off with Chu’s Braun waterproof electric razor, a process that the razor did not survive. He dealt with the bruising around his eyes and the disorderly state of his nose by putting on a bit of cosmetic cover-up that Chu had bought at Walgreens.

It was thick and chalky and while it did hide the bruises, it made Deitz look like a French mime. The problem of his blackened eyes—now more
of a yellowish green—was neatly solved by a pair of those bug-eye wraparound sunglasses that all the highway cops were wearing. So far, so good.

Where this all fell apart was the wig. Deitz had been specific.

He wanted a long shiny blond wig, long enough for the hair to come down to his shoulders.

“Like one of those guys on the WWF, okay?”

Chu, asking no questions—every man’s sexuality is his own business—had paid two thousand dollars for the thing that was resting uneasily on the summit of Deitz’s skull right now, a luxurious sweep of golden hair—guaranteed human, all the way from Denmark, he had been assured—cut into an artfully ragged fall across the forehead, the rest hanging down in a long blunt wave that pooled on his shoulders.

There was no way to get around it.

Deitz looked like Anna Wintour.

Or at least like Anna Wintour’s head stuck on the body of a gigantic troll in a Hugo Boss suit.

Please don’t ask me what I think
.

“What do you think?”

Chu was silent for a time.

If he let Deitz go out in that wig they wouldn’t get half a mile before kids on the side of the road would be throwing stones at the car as they drove by. Dogs would chase the car down the street, yapping and snapping. This would attract the attention of the cops, who would not pass up the chance to have a chat with a large ugly guy wearing an Anna Wintour wig, if only just to have something to tell everybody back at the station.

At that point, the jig, as these Americans like to say, would be up, and not just for Byron Deitz.

“Have you looked in a mirror?”

Deitz said nothing for a bit.

“Yeah. I did. I thought I looked pretty good.”

“Do you know who Anna Wintour is?”

“No fucking idea.”

“Well, you look just like her.”

Deitz got much redder than normal.

“Make your fucking point.”

“She’s a famous fashion broad. Gay guys dress like her on Halloween.
If you had a tiny black dress on, and stiletto heels, the look would be complete.”

Deitz calmed down a bit, breathed out.

“Shit. You’re sure?”

“I am.”

“Fuck. I thought I looked sort of like Arnold back when he was playing Conan the Barbarian. Or maybe a football player. They’re all wearing their hair long these days.”

Chu shook his head.

“Not Conan. Not football. Anna.”

Deitz thought about it.

“Lose the wig?”

“Lose the wig.”

Deitz took it off, flipped the lid of Chu’s garbage can, and dropped it in on top of the kung pao chicken.

Two thousand dollars
.

Gone
.

“Fuck it then. We’ll go with what we got.”

“Where are we going to go?”

Deitz opened his suit jacket. He had a large gray steel pistol shoved into his belt.

“We’re gonna go see a guy about my money.”

Endicott was parked a quarter of a mile away, in the black Cadillac, listening to Chu and Deitz talk in Chu’s kitchen. He had his Toshiba open on the passenger seat, the screen showing the sound and video feed from the surveillance gear in the Toyota Corolla he had parked down the street from Chu’s house at 237 Bougainville Terrace.

About the size of a GPS module, and stuck to the Toyota’s windshield as they always are, the device had an attached laser sound detector mounted on the left side mirror that focused on the glass windows of Chu’s living room. By detecting nano-sized variations in the glass, the laser could translate the vibrations into sound. In this case, the sound of Chu and Deitz talking about Anna Wintour. The device also had a camera, so Endicott could track, from a safe distance, who was coming and going at Chu’s house.

Earlier he had watched as Chu drove away, alone, according to the device’s infrared camera, which read body heat signatures inside houses
and vehicles. Since Deitz and not Chu was the focus of Endicott’s attention, he stayed put.

Chu had come back about two hours ago, and now—judging by the conversation—they were about to go see a guy about his money.

Excellent.

“
We’re
going?”

Deitz took off his glasses, giving Chu the full Deitz glower. In his head he could hear a sound like somebody cracking walnuts. It was coming from somewhere very close. Deitz had not yet figured out that the walnut-cracking sound was Deitz grinding his teeth. He ground his teeth when he was angry or frustrated or tense. Since he was hardly ever anything else, the walnut-cracking sound was in his head quite a bit.

“We are. I got a spare piece. You ever fire a gun?”

“Byron,” said Chu, summoning all his persuasive powers, “I cannot go off and get into a gunfight. I’ll just freeze up, like that translator dweeb in
Saving Private Ryan
.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”