Travers took a deep breath, trying to contain her anger. “You know, Marlow, I don’t get you.”
“And that’s a news flash?”
“You act like no one should care about the people affected by this case, no one should care about the victims. Like it’s not okay to feel badly about this. To get upset.” Her voice was rising and her cheeks were flushed. People in the restaurant were again glancing at their table. “Like it’s all a big fucking game. We can’t ever talk like we give a shit about anyone, let’s just use them as bait.” She pushed her hair off her forehead. “We have a responsibility to these people, Jade.”
“Responsibility?” Jade said. “You want to talk to me about responsibility?” The veins in his neck were bulging, though he was speaking softly. His upper lip peeled back in a grimace. “You think I don’t care about these people? You don’t think it’s hard for me to make a decision to put people in the line of fire? Well grow up, Travers. I do these things because they have to be done. I make these decisions because no one else will. So don’t you second guess me, and don’t you talk to me about responsibility.”
Travers took a sip of water. “Nice speech.”
Jade looked away for a long time. “It’s like you think I enjoy it. Putting people like Thomas and Darby at risk. And the kids, Christ, the kids …” His voice trailed off again. “I just can’t deal with that if I’m gonna do my job.” He drew a line on the table with his hand. “It’s too much. It’s all too much.”
Travers leaned forward and laid her hand across Jade’s. “Jade. I didn’t … it doesn’t seem … I guess the only thing I’ve seen you give off is anger.”
The tension eased from his face, and he raised his eyes to Travers’s. “Maybe guilt turns to anger if you hold on to it long enough,” he said. For one awful instant, Travers thought he was going to spill tears. Seeing his face now, she realized what it was about Jade that made him so committed, so intense.
He stood suddenly, pulling money from his pocket and tossing it on the table. Then, without speaking, he turned and walked out of the restaurant. Travers closed her eyes for a moment before rising and following him.
It was raining, a thick downpour, but instead of walking to the car, he headed across the field toward the hill behind the restaurant, ignoring Travers when she called after him. She caught up with him behind the cafe.
Grabbing him by the arm, she spun him around, planting him firmly against the back wall. Water dripped off the roof and ran over his face, dripping from his hair to his forehead and down off his lips.
“I’m talking to you,” she said.
“What?”
“I wanted to fucking apologize, all right?”
Jade’s eyes glinted as Travers raised her hand and traced the scar on his cheek down to the thin stream of rainwater dripping off his lips. Grabbing his head with both hands, she banged it against the wall, seizing his lower lip in her mouth and feeling the water run from his mouth into her own. Her hands were at his belt and then he was out and in her hands and her mouth went to his neck.
He lowered her onto the damp field, holding an arm in the small of her back to break her fall. His knees sank in the ooze and mud between her legs, and the water stood out in beads on their bare skin as buttons and material gave way. Travers’s shirt was soaked and torn, her hair matted with mud, her elbows buried in mounds of soil. Thrusting forward, Jade entered her.
He froze. “Holy shit,” he said.
Travers’s nails stopped tracing their red paths up his back. “What?”
“The radio. The disk jockey. He said the symphony fund-raiser dinner was tomorrow night. Darby said they always used to go as a family. Allander will be expecting them to be there.”
Both seemed to have forgotten that Jade was still inside her. Without hesitation, he pulled himself out, quickly stood, and ran for his car. Travers immediately dug herself from the mud and followed, yanking together the ripped remains of her clothing. The car was moving when she got there and she had barely jumped in before Jade sped away.
Once they were on the freeway, he looked over at her mudtangled hair, her tattered garments, her smeared face, and started laughing. She tried not to smile but couldn’t resist, and then they were both laughing, almost uncontrollably. Travers reached over and painted a line of mud on Jade’s cheek with her finger. Her smile faded, her lips pursing ever so slightly, just enough to betray her thoughts.
Jade took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her. “Jennifer, huh?” he said gently.
She nodded.
He glanced at the clock and the softness faded from his face. He took 85 to 17 and exited in San Jose, racing over curbs and through red lights.
He berated himself for not thinking of the fund-raiser earlier. Closing his eyes, he remembered the drum roll opening the classical piece he’d heard when he’d interviewed Thomas in the living room. Darby’s story about the fund-raiser dinners. Charity. Our road back to sanity.
The shower had ended by the time the BMW squealed to a halt at the Atlasias’ home. The FBI agents down the block were out of their cars before they recognized Jade.
The door swung open to reveal Darby’s startled face. She looked at Jade’s clothes and the mud shot through his hair, and then at Travers’s ripped shirt.
“Oh. No thank you. We didn’t order a stripper,” she said, and feigned shutting the door.
“Are you going to the symphony dinner tomorrow night?” Jade asked.
“Of course we are.”
Jade put his hand on the door and pushed it open. “Then we have to talk.” He brushed past Darby and into the house. Travers waited outside, a procedure they had discussed.
“Well, Jade Marlow, before you floor me again with your plans and calculations, there’s something you need to see.” Darby pointed to the kitchen.
On the kitchen table was a second envelope. Same block print. Jade reached inside and pulled out a lipstick container.
“We got the mail about a half hour ago,” Darby said from the doorway. “I just left a message on your machine.”
“Speak no evil,” Jade said softly.
Darby raised her hand and let it clap to her thigh. “What’s next?” she said, her voice cracking in a mock laugh.
Jade looked up at her, holding her eyes for a moment. “Probably an earring,” he said.
“How …” Her words trailed off into a silent sob before she regained her composure and continued in a horrified whisper. “How can you stand this? Day in, day out.” Her voice rose angrily. “How can you deal with it all day, every day? When you don’t even have to?”
“Because that’s what I do, all right?” Jade replied sharply. His voice rang around the room. He looked down at the floor sadly, tracing the pattern of the tiles. “That’s what I am,” he said softly.
When he raised his eyes to meet Darby’s, he was surprised by how suddenly pale she was. She staggered to the side as if she were about to faint, leaning on the table for support. Pulling herself erect, she squared her shoulders, her eyes lit with their familiar determination.
“Darby. Are you all right?” Jade asked, genuine concern in his voice.
She nodded, then turned and left the room.
Jade started to follow her, but stopped when he got to the doorway. Although time was of the essence, he could give her a few minutes. He sat down and turned his eyes to the clock on the microwave. Five minutes. He could give her five minutes.
She was standing at the edge of the square lawn with her back to the house. She appeared to be gazing at the neat rows of flowers and plants that constituted her garden. Jade approached her cautiously and halted next to, but slightly behind, her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, still not turning to look at him. Then she laughed her sad laugh, and Jade realized how accustomed to it he had grown. He wondered how often she had laughed like that before she’d met him.
“It feels like I’m doing that all the time now,” she said. “Apologizing
. More than I ever have.” She finally turned to look at Jade. “Believe it or not, I usually have a difficult time with it.”
“I can empathize,” Jade said.
“I can imagine.” She laughed and he joined her.
The garden was small, but extremely well cultivated. Two rosebushes flanked the smaller plants like monoliths, one on each side of the bed of rich soil. Jade slowly became aware of a loud buzzing sound.
“What’s that noise?” he asked.
Darby pointed to a tube hanging from the larger of the two rosebushes. About the size of a tennis-ball can, the tube appeared to have an inverted funnel at its base. Through the clear plastic, Jade noticed at least a dozen bees flying nearly in place, trapped inside the device. The buzz of their wings vibrated inside the tube, giving off an eerie hum.
“Thomas is allergic to bees, and this keeps them out of the backyard. There’s a nectar scent that attracts them,” Darby said. “They fly up through the funnel at the bottom and can’t figure out how to fly down out of it.”
They watched the bees fight against the plastic for a few moments, their buzzing amplified by the container. Though it was not easy for him, Jade raised his hand and placed it on Darby’s shoulder. She swayed a bit toward him, but didn’t turn her head.
“I will protect you,” he said. The words came with such conviction that his uneasiness departed. “On my life, I will protect you.”
His hand rose with her shoulder as she breathed deeply. Darby squeezed his hand briefly before lifting it off. “Well, I’ve had my wounded moment,” she said. “Let the planning commence.”
She walked back to the house without waiting to see if Jade was following. She was not wearing shoes, and Jade found something distressing and wonderful about watching her bare feet on the grass.
Placing one shoe delicately between two rows of pansies, Jade moved closer to the rosebush and looked down into the bee trap. A piece of yellow plastic plugged the tube around the funnel, and Jade noticed the dead bees that it ordinarily hid from view, their shell-like bodies forming a grotesque bottom layer. As he watched, a bumblebee that had been struggling against the clear plastic fell to the pile, exhausted, fanning its wings in ineffective short bursts. Jade watched until the wings no longer blurred, then headed back toward the house.
52
SINGSPIEL’S Restaurant was in a stylish converted brewery located across the street and up the block from the symphony hall on Van Ness. The entrance was narrow, like a hallway, but the building widened into a dining area with about thirty tables in the back, positioned around a large vat left over from the brewery.
An elegant bar where customers bought drinks to take to the tables in the back ran along the corridor of the restaurant. Mirrors covered the wall behind the bottles, reflecting the space’s brass-and-marble design. The bar ended just where the bottleneck of the entrance opened up to the table area. A stack of kegs marked the start of the restaurant proper, lining the edge of the bar, just beside the wooden Dutch door of the coat-check closet.
It was to be a very early dinner, since it was to be followed by a concert at the symphony hall. The Atlasias were to arrive at 5:05.
Jade sat inconspicuously at a table largely blocked from view by the brewing vat. He, however, had excellent visibility of the entire seating area, and he could also lean slightly and look straight down the length of the bar.
Jade felt more keyed up than usual, the increased tension brought on by growing pressure for him to end the terror that had begun to spread through the city. If he couldn’t lure Allander in tonight, he wasn’t sure he ever could. It was doubtful that another opportunity this promising would come along. Jade relaxed in his chair and tried to calm himself. There was a high probability that Allander would show up. After all, the fund-raising dinner was something of a family tradition.
Jade had pulled back all the agents assigned to the Atlasias so that Allander wouldn’t be scared off. The couple would be dropped off by a cab (with an agent disguised as the cabdriver) right at the front door. Jade and Travers would cover the restaurant. He was using only one other agent, the woman he had disguised as the ticket vendor at the movie theater. She would be working the coat check tonight, which placed her in position between the table area and the front door. Jade had instructed her not to involve herself at all unless he signaled. Despite all efforts, undercover agents tended to stand out at high-society affairs, and Jade just didn’t want to run the risk of frightening Allander away. He barely trusted Travers to play her part.
Jade expected Allander to hit early, intent on killing Thomas and either killing or kidnapping Darby. Maybe he’d let Darby go for now so he could catch her in a more intimate setting later.
Since Allander wouldn’t recognize Travers, Jade put her at the bar to keep an eye on the front of the restaurant. Wearing a simple black dress, sitting at the bar with her legs crossed, and sipping a glass of Burgundy, she blended in perfectly with society’s elite. She glanced up from her position between two girls who looked like debutantes and winked at Jade. He nodded seriously and leaned back out of view.
Travers had agreed to back him only after learning that the Atlasias were already planning to attend the event. She tried briefly to talk Jade into ordering them not to come, but she realized early that her protests were falling on deaf ears—Jade’s and the Atlasias’. They were three of the most determined people she’d ever met.
Thomas and Darby were intent on not letting their son dictate how they lived their lives, and they were willing to use themselves to catch him; they had already proved that. They trusted Jade more than Travers had realized. There seemed to be an element of faith between them, something unspoken yet understood.
“I want it to end,” Darby had said to both Jade and Travers earlier in her kitchen. She had looked up at Jade, keeping her eyes steady on his. “Just make it end.”
The Atlasias’ Singspiel entrance was beautifully natural. They walked in and ordered a drink at the bar, standing only about four feet from Travers, never making eye contact.
Thomas looked very sharp in his tuxedo, complementing the sweeping black sequined dress that Darby wore. She carried a small clutch purse, having denied Jade’s request that she put a gun in it for the evening.
Jade smiled to himself as he remembered something Darby had told him. “We’ll do fine,” she had said. “We’re good actors. We’ve had lots of practice.”
She proved that now as they walked to their table, pretending not to notice the hushed silence that fell around them, the hands covering whispers, the curious glances that lingered a beat too long. They smiled and nodded at the people they knew as they threaded their way gracefully through the tables to their own.
They were seated in front of the brewing vat, to Jade’s right. He leaned out from behind the vat and scanned the restaurant, focusing on the Atlasias’ table from time to time. Once in a while, he caught Travers’s eye at the bar and she shrugged, raising her shoulders and eyebrows just slightly. The agent working the coat check was doing well—she wasn’t so much as looking at Jade and Travers. Jade didn’t let down his guard, but he started to relax.
Travers gave him another half shrug and he frowned, bringing his hands up in frustration. What do you want me to do? he thought.
The first part of dinner was over and Jade couldn’t smell any danger in the air. At this point, another fruitless evening out might be devastating for the Atlasias. Glancing over, he checked on Darby and Thomas.
Darby laughed boisterously, raising one hand to cover her mouth. An elegant pearl bracelet hung from her wrist, swaying with the force of her laughter. She sat at a table full of grinning men who looked at her with expressions of delight and amazement.
It had taken some doing, but she had won over the table. She was used to the routine. It started with awkward glances and pointed questions: Well, how are you, Darby? How are you holding up? But she had done it again. She had won another small social victory for herself and her
husband. A moment of normalcy to hold in their memories and cherish.
She smiled and continued with her story. “And so I didn’t know that Thomas had just washed the floor, so here I come, walking in with bare feet and—” She burst into fresh peals of laughter and some of the men began to chuckle prematurely, anticipating the rest of the story.
“—two cartons of eggs (I mean, what are the odds of all the things I could be carrying in—not one, but two cartons of eggs?), and Thomas was at the sink peeling carrots and he said he just heard this enormous THUMP!”
Darby banged the table with a fist to punctuate the thump and all the water glasses jumped. One fell over into the lap of a man with a carefully manicured mustache and Darby burst into laughter all over again.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m a nightmare. See what a nightmare I am?” Her voice was high as she strained to speak through her laughter. “And during my eggs story.”
The mustached man assured her that he was fine and that the water would soon dry.
“But my feet went out, and I swear to God I hit the floor flat on my back. I mean, every part of my back hit the ground at the same time. And the eggs, the eggs …” She covered her mouth, her shoulders heaving again with laughter. “I mean, it was like a cartoon. Up in the air.” She imitated her frantic attempt to locate the eggs above her, and then the exaggerated expression of shock that crossed her face once she did. “All over me. My face, my hair, my neck. All over.”
Everyone at the table laughed.
“And so Thomas turns around to me slowly and says, ‘Darby, honey, if you need more attention from me, all you have to do is ask.’” She laughed and pounded the table again. The men all grabbed their water glasses.
Thomas leaned over, draping his arm across her shoulder. “Dear, why don’t we see if the Lawrences have arrived yet? We told them we’d catch up.”
“Sure, sure.” Darby pushed back from the table and laid her napkin gracefully across her place setting. “Gentlemen, it was a pleasure horrifying you with stories of my ineptitude.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Now you know the truth,” she added to smiles all around.
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