“Stay there, Randall. Stay there. She won’t hurt you.”
Gisela swam ten feet from the boy. The sun was shining on her black hair, giving it a bright sheen.
“Okay,” Misty said. “Now turn around, look back that way.”
Gisela continued to tread water, facing her, Gisela’s dark eyes holding to Misty’s.
“Okay, then,” Misty said. “If that’s how you want it.”
Misty Fielding leaned over the bow of the marine patrol boat and brought the pistol close to Gisela’s face. The cop lady made a lunge for the pistol, splashing her arm through the water. But it was too late. Misty had already fired.
The woman’s head snapped back in the water and then she slowly sank below the surface. A slick of blood bloomed on the water and a couple of birds squawked at the noise. But beyond that Misty didn’t observe much about the moment. She was inside her head. Off in a drowsy haze, seeing Hal’s face and seeing her father lying in his hospital bed praying to God.
Misty sucked down a breath. She watched the water where the cop lady had disappeared. She could still see her floating a few inches below the surface like a ghost that’s left its body but is still hovering nearby.
“Okay, Randall,” Misty said. She motioned with the pistol. “Swim on over here, kiddo. Hurry up now, we’ve got a real big day ahead of us.”
That’s when her cell phone rang. Hal calling.
“Everything okay?” he said.
“Oh, I hit a couple of snags,” Misty said, still waving her pistol at Randall. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
Misty made a show of cocking the hammer back on the derringer. The boy let go of the mangrove root and started swimming slowly toward the boat.
“So go on and make the call,” Hal said. “You got her cell phone number, right?”
“Yeah, off my caller ID from when she called yesterday.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll meet you along the causeway where we said. You just run the boat up on the beach, I’ll be there.”
“Hey, Hal.”
“Yeah?”
“Can we say the words now?”
“Which words?”
“You know which words.”
Hal was silent.
“I need to hear them,” Misty said. “I just need to hear them coming out of your mouth, that’s all.”
“You first,” Hal said.
“Okay,” she said. “I love you, Hal.”
He was silent. She could almost hear him cringing, teeth clamped.
While she waited, Misty helped haul Randall over the side of the marine patrol boat. He was shivering and he wouldn’t look at her. He dropped down on the deck and hunched his back against the transom.
“You still there, Hal?”
“I’m here.”
“Well?”
“I’m at Miami International Airport right now,” Hal said. “If traffic isn’t bad, I should be over there in about twenty minutes. I’ll be driving a blue Taurus. Can you make it in twenty minutes?”
Misty watched as the cop lady bobbed to the surface, face-up, eyes wide open, staring through the bright skin of water up at the violent blue sky.
“Yeah, Hal, I can make it in twenty.”
“So I’ll see you.”
“Yeah,” Misty said. “See you.”
The line was dead for a moment and she was about to hang up. Then his voice was there again. Quiet, in the same mechanical way he’d spoken from the beginning. All words uncomfortable in his mouth. But especially these.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you, Misty.”
THIRTY
When she entered the Orange Bowl, there were two souped-up lawn mowers racing up and down the bright green pasture with the precision of a military drill team.
Hannah passed through the maintenance gate and walked up the circular ramp for Section H. She kept following it up until she came to the opening at Level 3 where her father had owned season tickets to both the Dolphins and the University of Miami Hurricanes. For as long as Hannah could remember, she and her parents religiously attended all the home games. Sitting out in the baking heat or huddled beneath ponchos in those wonderful subtropical downpours. Cheering national champions one year, bumbling losers the next.
She found their old seats near the thirty-yard line on the west end of the stadium. In the center of the field, Frank Sheffield was talking to one of the men on the mowers. Frank was wearing jeans and tennis shoes and a white polo shirt and a khaki baseball cap. Hannah sat down in her old seat and took out her cell phone and dialed Gisela’s number. Still busy. Had been since eight this morning when she’d called before leaving home. The phones at Dinner Key were always on the blink, but, still, she was concerned. She dialed the number again. And again it was busy.
Out on the field the man on the mower went back to his work and Frank turned in her direction. He stood there a minute staring up at her without moving, then he lowered his head and trudged across the field to the cement stairs.
As he approached she saw the grim strain in his face, his eyes dodging hers. Saying nothing, he took the seat beside her, Ed Keller’s place, and together they looked out at the mowers working up and down the green plain. Gulls circled the sky above the stadium. The dense gray clouds had broken up and now the sky was the tangy blue of sapphire. Frank shifted uneasily beside her, wouldn’t look at her.
“You have something to say to me?”
He eyed her for a second, then looked away.
“Well,” he said. “You ready for a confession?”
“I know,” she said. “The film of J. J. Fielding is a hoax. He’s been dead since August. You and your buddies at the Bureau fiddled with the tape, made it seem that Fielding was calling out to me. You set me on this wild goose chase, point A to point B. For some reason you called it Operation Joanie.”
He gave her a rueful smile.
“You’re good.”
“So tell me, Frank. What was I going to find here at the Orange Bowl? Were you going to put my next clue up on the scoreboard lights? Where were you planning on sending me now?”
“Does it matter?”
He glanced at her, then looked back out at the field. He took off the baseball cap and crumpled it in his hands.
“What I don’t understand, Frank, is why? What was so goddamn important you’d jerk me around like this? Throw my son into an emotional tailspin? Why, Frank?”
“You know Abraham Ackerman, the senator?”
A white gull landed at the fifty-yard line and stood watching the mowers crisscross the field.
“Democrat from New York. That one?”
He nodded. Then he told her the rest. His meeting in New York last weekend, the hired killer who murdered the senator’s daughter Joanie, the same killer who would be dispatched to murder J. J. Fielding. Hannah as bait.
When he finished they sat for a moment in silence. Hannah’s face was hot and tingling. She could feel the prickle on her neck, hairs standing stiff.
“Did you do this, Frank? Set this up?”
He shook his head.
“I was invited along for the ride at the last second, an afterthought I’d worked the Fielding case, I knew you, I know Miami, they thought I was a good fit.”
“I see.”
One of the mowers was headed for the gull, but the white bird just stared at the big red machine and didn’t move.
Frank said, “Helen Shane put it together. About the same time Ackerman started making a fuss, stomping around in Director Kelly’s office, those videotapes from Maude Fielding arrived in the mail. They wound up on Helen’s desk, and I guess she was intrigued. So she took a closer look at the file we had on J. J. Fielding and apparently she found some letters you wrote back then to the Bureau, complaining about me, that I hadn’t followed through on all your suspicions about Fielding. Those letters were in the file and Helen saw how passionate you were, how certain you were it was Fielding who killed your parents. So, bingo, she came up with t
he idea of hooking you into the operation. Dangle Fielding in front of you, and you in front of Hal Bonner. The operation runs exactly seventy-two hours, the length of the tapes. Bonner sees Fielding is dying. He gets desperate, afraid he’s going to miss his last chance at the guy and the money. Then when he makes his move, we step in and nab him.”
“Only he didn’t make a move.”
“Oh, I think he was here and we didn’t recognize him. He got scared off, now he’s gone.”
The mower came to a halt a yard in front of the white gull. The man revved his engine but the gull refused to yield his spot on the green field. The man waved his arms but still the gull did not budge. The man on the other mower stopped nearby and was laughing at the spectacle.
“And you went along with all this, Frank? You thought that was a fair trade? Risk the life of a civilian and her son so a U.S. senator could have his revenge? You thought it was okay to bring this monster, Hal Bonner, into my life and my son’s life?”
“I went along with it, yes.”
“And the person who took a shot at me? What was that about?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know, Hannah. The car was a rental. It was stolen from some tourist, a European.”
“Which country?”
“I don’t know. Norway, I think.”
“A tourist from Norway?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do you have a name for this tourist?”
“I didn’t ask for a name,” Frank said. “Why? Why’s that important?”
“It probably isn’t. Probably just a coincidence. My ex-husband is from Norway.”
“Randall’s father.”
“That’s right. His name is Pieter Thomasson. We’re in the middle of a messy legal fight over visitation rights.”
“How messy?”
“Not messy enough for him to take a shot at me. He’s a coward anyway. A bully with no guts. His specialty is preying on underage girls.”
Hannah stared at the field for a moment.
“What about the guy last night, Frank? The one who tried to drown you, was that the killer Ackerman’s looking for?”
He shook his head again.
“He fit Bonner’s description. But no. Hal murdered someone this morning in Nashville, Tennessee. Apparently he never took the bait. Operation Joanie is closed down.”
“As of when?”
“This morning.”
“I was just watching Fielding on the Internet a couple of hours ago.”
“I suppose they haven’t gotten around to shutting down the broadcast site. Everyone rushed off to Nashville.”
The man on the mower inched forward until he made the gull hop aside, then he mowed the patch of grass where it had been standing. As soon as he passed on, the gull hopped back and took possession of his plot of earth again. Territorial stubbornness. Must have been an alpha gull.
“And how was I, Frank? Was I good bait? Did I do my part as expected?”
“You vastly exceeded expectations,” he said.
“I’m so glad I could help.”
She stood up.
“And last night, that little intimate moment in your room, was that part of the operation? Was that your role, Frank, seducing the bait?”
Frank stared off at the field.
“If you couldn’t tell that was real, nothing I could say would make any difference.”
She squeezed past him and headed down the stairs.
In the movies, he would have called out to her and she would have stopped and turned around and they would have had a parting exchange, something poignant or enigmatic, some last dramatic milking of the moment. But as she descended the stadium stairs, all she heard was the mowers, those big blades shaving the grass to perfect flatness, so that next Saturday boys in sharpened cleats could gallop up and down that field and have their fleeting chance at glory.
It was two-twenty when she pulled up to Pinecrest Middle School and parked the Porsche behind a big blue SUV. A couple of mothers waved at her and Hannah waved back.
She got out of the car and marched up the sidewalk, scanning the line of vehicles for Gisela’s white Bronco. But she didn’t see it anywhere. Gisela was supposed to pick up Randall after school and take him back to Hannah’s and wait there till Hannah arrived. Gisela Ortega was always fifteen minutes early for every appointment, always had been. But not this afternoon. Hannah walked to the east end of the school and didn’t see her Bronco anywhere.
She was heading back to her car when the dismissal bell rang and the children began pouring out of the side doors, racing across the playground. Hannah walked back to the main gate, boys and girls swarming around her, the crossing guard halting traffic so the first wave of children could cross the street.
Inside her purse, her cell phone rang.
Hannah stood at the front gate watching the children whoop and skip and run toward their afternoon freedom. She dug the phone out, flipped it open.
Her hello was met with silence.
She was about to snap it shut when the voice spoke in her ear. She recognized it, but couldn’t place it for a second.
“Hannah Keller?”
“That’s right.”
She thought she saw Randall coming across the playground. A blond boy about his size hidden among a crowd of slightly taller kids. She moved in his direction.
“We have your kid,” the girl’s voice said.
Hannah was craning to her left, but the blond boy wasn’t Randall. He was shorter, thinner, happier.
“You hear what I said? We have your fucking kid and you’re not going to see him alive again unless you tell us where J. J. Fielding is. Did you hear me?”
Hannah pressed the phone hard to her ear. She stood still among the streaming children.
“Did you hear me, Hannah Keller? You hear what I said? We have your goddamn precious little boy. You go to the police, he’s dead. You don’t tell us where Fielding is, he’s dead. If Fielding dies before we get to him, your kid dies. You got that?”
She couldn’t seem to fill her lungs. Her knees were spongy. All around her was the chatter of children, reunions between mothers and children.
“Let me speak to him,” Hannah said. “Let me speak to my son.”
She continued to scan the sea of children. The rush was dwindling now. Maybe this was another part of the hoax, Operation Joanie’s final phase. Maybe Randall was there among the last children straggling out the doors. But it was a short-lived thought. The voice in her ear said, “He’s not talking. He’s gone mute on us.”
“Put him on,” Hannah said. “Give Randall the phone.”
Hannah heard the girl muffle the receiver and speak, and she could hear a male voice answer. She couldn’t make out the words but the man’s accent sounded stiff and foreign.
“All right,” the girl said. “I’m giving him the phone, but like I said, the kid’s not talking. He hasn’t said a word in six hours.”
Hannah listened as the phone was passed from hand to hand.
Then she heard the quiet rasp of breath against the receiver.
“Randall? Randall, is that you?”
There was only silence on the line. But it was his silence. It was impossible to say how she knew this to be true, but she was utterly certain.
“Randall, now listen to me. You’re going to be all right. I’m going to get you away from these people. Please believe me, Randall. You’re going to be fine. You just need to be brave, to hang on, don’t panic. Can you do that for me, Randall? Can you be brave?”
More silence.
“We’re partners, right, Randall?’
She waited, listening for the chafe of his breath.
“I love you, son. Be strong. I’ll see you very very soon.”
She heard the man’s awkward accent again and then the girl was speaking in her ear.
“So, okay, you satisfied? That was him.”
“Where’s Gisela? What have you done with her?”<
br />
The girl did not reply.
“Where is she?” Hannah said. “I want to speak to her.”
“The question is,” the girl said, “where the hell is J. J. Fielding hiding out? That’s the only thing that matters.”
Hannah watched the last of the kids wander out of the school. Some heading for their bikes, others for the last vans and cars still parked along the shoulder of the street. Her thoughts were whirling. Trying to piece together a plan, a strategy. The very thing she’d been doing for the last five years, creating clever maneuvers, Erin Barkley’s quick-witted schemes. But those fictional moments took hours to compose, sometimes days or weeks to polish to a flawless sheen. This required seconds. Less than seconds.
“I don’t know where Fielding is,” Hannah said. “Not yet.”
“What the hell does that mean, not yet?”
“I mean he’s about to tell me. That’s all I can say right now. In the next few hours, he’s promised to reveal his location.”
“The next few hours?”
“Now listen to me,” Hannah said. “That man you’re with. Is his name Hal?”
The girl was silent. Two seconds later the phone clicked off.
“You did good,” Hal said. “You’re a natural-born kidnapper.”
“She knows your name, Hal.”
“She does?”
They were in his rental car driving down Bayshore Drive, heading into the Grove. Hal at the wheel, Misty and Randall in the backseat. She had one of the derringers in her hand, out in the open where Randall could see it, so he wouldn’t try anything stupid like jumping out into the street, screaming for help.
“She asked me if I was with a guy named Hal. She fucking knows your name.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’d she say about Fielding?”
“She said he was about to reveal his location to her. He was going to do it in the next few hours.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s what she said.”
“You believe her?”
“She sounded too scared to lie or make something up.”
“Good,” he said. ‘Then take this.”
Hal craned around in his seat, holding out the small portable computer.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
Rough Draft Page 30
