by Mg Gardiner
“Your grasp has grown weak, Eldrick. Nolan escaped from you. Beth wasn’t quick enough, but Nolan—he had some of your caginess. I don’t know where he is, but he’s not with the clan. If he were, his daughter wouldn’t be in Oklahoma City.”
Eldrick’s breathing slowed. Harker smiled.
He said, “Where’s Sarah Keller headed? Who’s helping her?”
Eldrick blinked and shifted his shoulders.
Harker paused, taken aback. “You don’t know.”
He straightened, processing. “It’s worse than I imagined. Your intelligence network has become slipshod. You can’t even keep track of your own progeny. Sarah Keller’s a lowly skip tracer and she probably knows more about the family than you do.” He half-laughed and tapped the photos on the table. “And your Shattering Angel is sidelined. He and your granddaughters may be living on the Mexican Riviera—on your dime—but they’re not keeping control of the clan the way you want. They can’t.”
Eldrick didn’t speak.
“After the courthouse bombing, I know the family sent Grissom and the girls into the wilderness to evade arrest. But they’ve been exiled a long time now. They have to be lonely. And they’re the ones whose lives are on the line. They’ll look out for number one. When they run out of money, or when they can’t stand their banishment one more second, what’s next? They come to us for protection.”
Harker leaned forward. “This is your last chance to help yourself. Your operation isn’t going to last long. So what’ll it be? You want to talk to me?”
Eldrick turned to the guard. “Take me back to my cell.”
16
One phone call a month. Fifteen minutes, that’s what inmates were allowed, but Eldrick Worthe hadn’t taken his allotted call in six months. His family came to the prison on visiting days, one wife at a time until each had seen him, and that was enough. He didn’t waste his energies making phone calls to women. If he needed to contact his brother, he wrote.
But ten seconds after he was escorted from the visitors’ room, he told the guards, “I want my fifteen minutes. Today.”
They led him to the pay phone. He raised his shackled hands and made a collect call to his brother Isom, at the trailer he kept behind a minimart in Winslow, Arizona.
Isom accepted the charges immediately. “Brother, it’s good to hear your voice.”
Isom hated him. Eldrick didn’t care about that either. What counted was that Isom feared him mightily, and would do exactly as he said.
“Is your health holding? You sound like you’re hacking up a hairball,” Eldrick said.
“Can’t complain.”
“And the family? Tell me about each of them, down to the youngest.”
Isom hesitated, but only a second. “The grands and great-grands are thriving. I swear they shine like gold coins under the eyes of heaven.”
“Are they obedient?”
“If any act rebellious, they’re reminded the Lord requires them to walk in his paths.”
“ ‘This shall they have for their pride, because they have reproached and magnified themselves against the people of the Lord of hosts. The Lord will be terrible unto them.’ Chapter and verse, Isom. Read to them from the book of Obadiah. The story of the Exodus. The lessons of Abram and Sarai, how they were given new names and lives because of their submission to the Almighty. And remind them of the gospel of Mark—the Lord at the house of the leper. It’s your responsibility.”
“I won’t let it slide,” Isom said.
“Give the littlest ones my love. I miss them so. The ones I’ve never seen … it pains me.”
“I’m sure it pains them too.”
“That’s the greatest loss I experience. That those babes have been left to grow without my oversight. They should be found, and blessed, and brought into the fold.”
“Amen.”
Eldrick’s shackled hands awkwardly gripped the phone. “You still like the Heat for the NBA title? ’Cause I think it’s finally the Thunder’s year.”
Isom snorted. “Fat chance. Talk to you later, Eldrick.”
Eldrick hung up. Isom would know that when the Thunder rolled, angels flew.
Four hundred miles away, Isom Worthe replaced the handset. He had already decoded Eldrick’s message. It was damn surprising.
Zephaniah, Obadiah, Exodus. Jesus at the leper’s house in Bethany.
Beth’s child, Zoe, was alive. With a woman named Sarah. In Oklahoma City.
He got his cell phone and lit a cigarette and walked out of the trailer and down the steps into the sandy wash behind the minimart. He punched in a number he used infrequently.
It was answered on the tenth ring. “What?”
“I have exciting news for you.”
“Isom,” said Grissom Briggs, maybe in acknowledgment, maybe in acquiescence. News, in Grissom’s world, meant a job.
“One of the lambs we thought was lost forever has been found.”
Grissom waited. Grissom didn’t like to talk.
“A babe,” Isom said. “That you shall return to the flock.”
When he ended the phone call, Grissom Briggs leaned on his shovel at the construction site. He took off the hard hat and wiped his brow. The sun glared in the empty California sky, shining on San Francisco’s blue-glass skyscrapers and rickety Tenderloin hotels and the granite buildings near the Civic Center. This was the badlands—asphalt and junkies and lawyers, a proving ground, an almost biblical wasteland.
The foreman walked past, a walkie-talkie to his mouth. Grissom whistled and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Gotta hit the can.”
The foreman nodded. “Sure”—he paused before the name came back to him—“five minutes, Barry.” He continued toward the far side of the site.
Grissom dropped his shovel. He walked toward the blue Porta-John and straight on past. He shucked off his orange safety vest and tossed it and the hard hat in a Dumpster. The vest and hat might be missed, but he wouldn’t. He was casual labor, chosen from a line of men who waited every morning on a street corner, hoping for a chance to dig the office tower’s sewer trenches. The foreman paid him in cash at the end of the day. Considering that the project was spitting distance from the San Francisco Federal Building and a mess of courthouses, getting paid under the table was the best part of the job, a middle finger to the government.
He walked off the site and down Mission Street. He felt as if he were stepping back into the world of eternity. The local tweakers who relied on him to provide meth from the Worthe family’s fountain of crank, they’d have to survive their holiday weekend some other way. He’d just been given a new assignment—a greater, deeper mission. And it was urgent.
He phoned the crumbling hotel around the corner on Market Street. “Get to the airport.”
“Just me?”
“Cinda can stay put. The room’s paid up through July,” he told her. “I’ll call your sister.”
He pushed through the door into a coffee place called Tank Up. At the cash register, small and pale, Cinda was ringing up a customer. When she saw him, she jumped like a rabbit.
He frowned. She was seventeen—she should have been calmer. He waited until the customer left.
“Gotta hit the road for a spell. Keep the room at the Blue Angel.”
She glanced out the window at the sun-bleached street and the Court of Appeals and the Federal Building. He could practically see her rabbit heart pounding, hear her thinking: Police. FBI. U.S. Marshals.
“You keep watching, just like that. You’re safe at the hotel,” he said. “Nobody knows your real name. And you got the fire escape onto the alley.”
“Okay,” she said, almost whispering. “Fine, Grissom.”
Cinda would stay put. She was easily frightened. She was his wife.
“How long will you be …”
“Hush.”
She closed her mouth.
He nodded at her SAN FRANCISCO: TANK UP T-shirt. “Get me one of them. This shirt’s filthy.”
She scurried to the back room. From the counter he grabbed a couple of TANK UP matchbooks, along with ten bucks from the tip jar. He phoned the storage locker south of town where his right hand was camped.
“The airport?” she said. “What’s up?”
Cinda returned and handed him a white T-shirt. In black letters it said SFTU. He smiled. Close enough to what he wanted to tell the TSA.
He said, “We’re going to Oklahoma City for the family reunion.”
17
Past Shamrock, Sarah pulled off the highway at a rest stop. Thunderheads were piling up to the west, blindingly white anvil tops spread against the stratosphere. The sun glared gold from beneath them.
She killed the engine. “Okay, firefly, let’s stretch our legs.”
Zoe stirred, her face flushed, and looked around with the off-kilter bewilderment of someone roused from a heavy dream. Outside, a hot wind greeted them. Zoe rubbed the heel of her hand against her face.
“Is this Texas?” she said.
“Big, huh?”
Sarah got their groceries and they headed to a picnic table under a grove of low-hanging oaks.
Zoe looked around. “Where are we going, Mom?”
“We’re camping,” Sarah said. “We’re going to stay here tonight.”
Zoe still looked half-gone in the netherworld of sleep. The wind lifted her hair. “What are you scared of?”
Sarah froze. “Nothing, honey.”
Zoe held her gaze. Her little mouth drew into a line. Busted.
Sarah sat down beside her on the picnic bench. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. It’s grown-up stuff.”
“Am I going to miss school next week?”
Sarah felt a pang. “Afraid so.”
“But it’s my turn to feed the gecko. I’m supposed to.”
Sarah smiled feebly and stroked a lock of hair from Zoe’s eyes. “Ms. Lark will make sure the gecko gets fed.”
Zoe watched her face. After a second, she stared down at the table. Hmmph.
They ate under the oaks, with the wind gusting and traffic sluicing past. When Zoe finished her sandwich, she climbed off the picnic bench and ran around collecting acorns. Sarah got one of her prepaid throwaway phones, fired it up, and went online.
When disappearing, a common mistake was to Google yourself. Fear and longing made people itch to know if anybody was talking about them. So they searched for their own name to see if friends had posted emotional pleas for their safe return.
It was often a trap. Skip tracers, cops, or stalkers could easily set up websites about missing people, begging for leads. Then they captured incoming IP addresses and traced their location.
So Sarah didn’t search for her own name. She checked the headlines. The bus accident had made the NewsOK site. The story mentioned no names, and she felt a pinch of relief. Then she saw Breaking: Child in bus crash may be baby from fire death case.
“Oh, no.”
The trees shivered and the grass bent flat beneath the wind. Sarah grabbed paper plates before they blew off the picnic table. The thunderheads were swelling into a charcoal mass above the plains. The sky beneath them was a slick of sickly yellow light.
Zoe ran over to her. She was holding the hem of her T-shirt turned up like a basket, full of acorns. “Mommy, hurry.”
Sarah gathered their things. “It’s okay, I don’t see lightning.”
Zoe tipped her head up and eyed the clouds. “It’s waiting.”
Sarah turned. “What?”
“Inside the dark. It’s far away, but it’s coming.”
A coil of fear tightened around Sarah’s chest. She took Zoe’s hand. “Let’s go.”
At the storefront office of DHL Attorney Services, Danisha Helms dropped into her desk chair and rubbed her forehead. She was the last one there. The computer screens that monitored dockets at state and federal courthouses were dark. The evening light slatted through the blinds. She was waiting.
She didn’t know who she’d hear from first. In her secret heart she pleaded that it be Sarah, but she knew that was a fantasy. Girl was gone. Sarah might think she was coming home in a day or two, a little shaken, a little tired, apologizing and handing back the keys to the truck.
She wasn’t coming back.
Whatever Sarah was running from wasn’t a problem that could be solved with a weekend away. Pulling Zoe out of school? Telling Danisha she should speak honestly to the authorities? Heavy trouble was dogging Sarah’s tail.
Across the room, Sarah’s desk looked forlorn. Danisha stood and walked over to it. Sarah’s taste was spare, but now she noticed how it was almost invisible: no photos, not even of Zoe. Instead Sarah had framed Zoe’s kindergarten crayon drawings. The frames covered Zoe’s childish signature.
She thought of Sarah’s gratitude and urgency back at Arcadia Lake. Uneasily, she pondered Sarah keeping a go-bag ready for a five-year-old.
How well did she really know her friend?
Well enough to love her. Not well enough to know what the hell had happened in the woman’s life before she applied for a job at DHL.
Sarah had left a bandanna on the desk. Danisha picked it up. For a second the office seemed to echo with Sarah’s melancholy laugh and the faint strains of music, “In the Arms of the Angel.” Sarah had declared it that damn song because it made them both tear up, and because late one night, as they sat side by side on the floor in Sarah’s living room, it nearly induced Sarah to open up. That line about being pulled from the wreckage. Danisha watched it bring pain to Sarah’s eyes.
She said, “Who’d you leave behind?”
Sarah paused, beer bottle halfway to her lips. “You’re getting sentimental, Dani.”
“You have a kid. Had to be somebody, honey.”
Sarah’s smile looked both sad and savage. “If I told you the last time a man put his arms around me and whispered in my ear, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Danisha held her gaze.
Sarah’s smile faded. Quietly she said, “There’s nobody.”
The look in Sarah’s eyes, fierce and lonely, lingered even now.
The office door opened and two police detectives came in. Both white, the man with a neat goatee, the woman hefty enough to tackle a refrigerator to the ground. Danisha stood waiting.
The man flashed his badge. Dos Santos. “Is Sarah Keller here?”
“No.”
“Do you expect her back today?”
“No.”
His twang bent so tight he must have learned it from the country music channel. He ran his gaze over her, head to toe. “And you are?”
“Danisha Helms.” She handed him her business card.
“Do you know where we can find Ms. Keller?”
“No.”
“When did you last speak to her?”
If the cops come calling, tell them everything. Be honest. It won’t hurt me, and it’ll help you.
But Danisha balked. Call it contrariness, or her ornery streak. She instinctively resisted people who waved the cudgel of Authority. Then she seemed to see Sarah in the corner, shaking her head and rolling her eyes.
“This morning,” she said. “When she picked her daughter up.”
“The child is not her daughter.”
“An adopted child is still very much a daughter.”
“So you know she’s not the girl’s mother.”
Danisha raised her eyebrows. “Did you hear a word of what I just said?”
The woman, Detective Bukin, put up a hand to stop the conversation. “Do you have Ms. Keller’s home address?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Dos Santos said, “We’re the police. We need to speak to her. And her driver’s license defaults to a ghost street address.”
Bukin said, “She’s suspected of kidnapping and murder.”
“Sarah? That’s Looney Tunes.”
“There’s nothing funny here. Considering you took the little girl from St. Anthony and handed her to Ms
. Keller, you could be considered an accessory to child abduction.”
The office abruptly felt cold. “Sarah asked me to watch Zoe while she spoke to the hospital staff. The ER doctor had signed off on her discharge. I’m listed with Zoe’s school as a designated adult who has permission to pick her up. Zoe even asked me the secret password, which I gave, in front of the nursing staff. So don’t try ‘accessory’ on me.” She crossed her arms. “Sweet Jesus, the child had been in a bus crash and spent an hour alone in the ER. She did not need to endure another minute there while her mom dealt with a family issue.”
Dos Santos said, “Keller killed her sister. That’s one hell of a family issue.”
Danisha slowly, firmly shook her head. “I know about Beth Keller’s death. I know it came at the hands of her boyfriend’s family.”
Bukin raised a hand. “Whoa. What?”
Danisha repeated what Sarah had told her that morning about the Worthes. “Beth asked Sarah to take Zoe, and she’s been keeping her safe ever since. Sarah had no part in her sister’s death.”
The cops watched her for a moment. They glanced at each other. Then Dos Santos took a long, searching look around the office, eyeing the computers and file cabinets.
“Which desk is hers?” he said.
“Get a warrant.”
Dos Santos stroked his goatee. “This is going to be a very big problem, very soon. You don’t want it to be your problem.”
“I play by the rules. I know you will too,” she said.
After a frustrated moment, they turned to go. At the door Dos Santos paused. “It won’t take us long. And when we come back, we’ll remember how this office looked.”
“I’ll see you then. You’ll have to bring your own confetti and party streamers.”
The door eased shut behind them, the blinds clanging against the glass.
Danisha leaned back against her desk. Jesus, tell me I’m doing the right thing. The detectives hadn’t asked about the truck.
Sunset spilled across the prairie, red sky bleeding onto red dirt at Oklahoma City’s Will Rogers World Airport. Grissom Briggs stepped out of the terminal into a humid wind.
He paused to catch the scent of the land. The heat and weight of the air told him this place was infected. A jet powered up and roared down the runway into the deepening sky. Behind him the women approached.
