The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(97)
The showerhead dripped ten more times before Zack broke the muddled silence.
“Uh, normally I’d write that off as a strange coincidence. But after everything we’ve seen, Theo, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest you might not be entirely weirdness-free.”
Theo felt a hot rush of blood in his face. He stammered for a response.
“I really don’t see how—”
“Oh my God!”
The others followed Mia’s gaze to the lumivision, where the nine o’clock news had just begun.
Contrary to Amanda’s expectations, the broadcast didn’t open with her police sketch. In fact, the standoff on Highway V would merit just forty seconds of airtime. In the absence of any fatalities, and the coordinated silence of all law enforcers on scene, the incident was treated as just another police chase. Another irksome traffic jam.
The top story of the day was much juicier. The star of the tale was Sterling Quint.
—
At 6:34 this morning, operators at Triple-5 Emergency received eleven distress calls of the exact same nature—eleven spouses, lovers, and siblings who’d all succumbed to the same fatal stroke. When record checks revealed that the deceased were all employees at the same organization, authorities suddenly became quite interested in the goings-on at the Pelletier Group.
By sunset, the last of the bodies had been discovered. Four names on the payroll had yet to be accounted for: Erin and Eric Salgado, Beatrice Caudell, and the head honcho himself, Sterling Quint. The world-renowned theorist had left for work at 7 A.M. and was never heard from again.
The story quickly caught fire at newsrooms across the nation. Some broadcasts filled their screens with juxtaposed photos of a dour Quint and a nervous Beatrice—a saucy suggestion that the pair had perpetrated the massacre and were now lovers on the run.
The Silvers watched the lumivision with wide eyes and white faces, processing the deaths of everyone they knew outside the motel room. Hannah thought of poor Charlie Merchant, barely a year older than her. Her eyes welled up with tears.
“I don’t get it. Why would he kill them?”
“I assume you’re not referring to Quint.”
“You know I’m not, David. Come on. I’m talking about Azral.”
“It had to be him,” Amanda said. “Him and Esis.”
The widow couldn’t get her mind off Czerny. His death had seemed so inconsistent with his type of injury. Now she knew why. She bit her trembling lip.
“They threw them away. They didn’t need them anymore, so they just tossed them like garbage.”
David shook his head. “For all we know, this was the work of Rebel’s people.”
“Doubtful,” said Theo. “If Rebel’s people had the ability to kill remotely, they wouldn’t have come at us with guns and swords.”
Mia couldn’t bear the thought of anyone having that power. She pictured Azral standing before some necromantic circuit breaker, shutting off lives from miles away. She could only imagine he had six more buttons, all labeled with the names of people in this room.
“Do you think maybe Beatrice got away?” she asked.
The lack of response was enough to confirm her grim suspicion. She took a moment to mourn the poor woman who’d baked her a cupcake for her birthday.
Zack remained silent from his perch on the bed, stewing over the large new problem this tragedy created for them. The Salgado van and the body of Dr. Czerny were two thick chains that tied the Silvers to the Pelletier slaughter. While the media continued to chase ghosts, the federal agents would have a stronger notion of who to blame.
—
By ten o’clock, Melissa Masaad was angry enough to break the law. It took twenty minutes of research to uncover the location of the nearest tobacco den, hidden away beneath a Terra Vista bowling alley. Six more minutes of digging earned her the passphrase.
“Are your bathrooms clean?” she asked the cashier, just as she was told.
For once, Melissa’s foreign attributes worked in her favor. The greasy old man at the counter would have never suspected she was a Dep. Even if she had been with DP-4, the illicit substances division, she wouldn’t have wasted time on such a piddling sting. The Bureau didn’t care about smoke-easies.
“We have a clean bathroom downstairs,” the cashier replied. “They’re pay toilets.”
“How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“Goodness. Do these exceptionally clean toilets come with Eaglenet access?”
For an extra ten dollars, they did. Melissa carried a handtop under her arm. She was determined to keep working, all through the night if she had to.
Two stairwells and one purchase later, she sat in an overstuffed recliner in the corner of a dim and smoky lounge. She closed her eyes as she savored the taste of the cigarette, her first in twenty-two months. She’d been hoping to enjoy her life in America without the crutch of nicotine, but today was a day of extraordinary frustrations.
“It’s out of my hands,” Cahill told her, five hours ago. “We hunt where they tell us to hunt.”
Melissa had crafted a no-nonsense approach to tracking the fugitives—a strategic sweep of every pawnshop and panhandle park in the ten-mile radius of the abandoned van. From all appearances, these runners were low on resources. Finding them was simply a matter of anticipating their chosen method of fund-raising.