Hadley & Grace(35)

“You told her all that?”

“I had to tell her something.”

Grace nods, and again Hadley feels proud. It was pretty quick thinking, considering she’d needed to make it up on the spot.

“So, you’re heading to see family?” Hadley says.

“No family,” Grace says flatly. “Just him.” She thumbs her hand at the baby.

“What about your parents?”

“I never knew my dad, and my mom died when I was two.”

“Oh,” Hadley says, feeling bad for her. Hadley knows what it’s like to be alone. She’s lost both her parents, but at least she had them until she was an adult.

“Who raised you?”

“I’m going to bed,” Grace says, standing and holding out her arms for the baby.

“What about your husband?” Hadley says.

Grace practically wrenches the baby away as she says, “No longer in the picture.” There’s hurt behind the words, and Hadley bristles with anger at the man who caused it. She doesn’t know Grace well, but she knows her well enough to know she deserves a good man.

Grace stops at the edge of the pool. “What were you doing?” she says to Skipper, who’s now sitting on the steps making circles in the water with his fingers. “Earlier, when you were holding your hands up to the sky?” Grace holds the arm that isn’t holding the baby above her, the palm stretched toward the stars in imitation.

Skipper lifts his face to look at her, the moon reflecting off his skin and making it glow. “Reaching out to my friends,” he says. “Coach says, no matter where we are, we all sleep under the same stars, so I figure if I reach out and they reach out, it’s almost like we’re touching.”

“Hmmm?” Grace says thoughtfully; then she tilts her face upward and closes her eyes, and Hadley wonders who she is thinking of.

“Who’s Coach?” Grace says when she stops.

“Frank Torelli,” Skipper says. “He’s not my dad, but he’s always kind of been my dad anyway.”

Hadley startles, the words piercing her heart as she is reminded of what she has left behind and that not all of it was bad.





26





MARK


Mark’s plane lands at two thirty in the morning. He considers driving to the field office, but driving there will take time he’s concerned he doesn’t have. These women have slipped past them twice, and he doesn’t intend for it to happen again.

Fitz called a few minutes ago with good news. The group was spotted at a restaurant in Baker, California, a blip on the map a couple of hours outside Las Vegas.

Fitz might not be cut out to be a field agent, but he’s a hell of a deskman, and when this thing is over, Mark is going to recommend him for a promotion. While Mark was in the air, the kid called every hotel and restaurant from Barstow to Las Vegas, astutely deducing that, with kids in tow, the group would have to stop. And he was right. The manager at the Denny’s in Baker served the group dinner; then she delivered pay dirt when she told him that, after they’d finished, she’d seen them walk to the motel down the street.

This case might be salvageable yet. The money’s been gone just over a day, and the chain of possession is still intact and should hold up in court. It was a good decision to fly out here. No more mistakes. Bring the women in, recover the money, get sworn affidavits from them that the money was taken from the Aztec Parking offices, find out whether they’re involved in any way, and case closed.

As he pulls from the rental car lot, he calls the Las Vegas field office and requests backup. By the time a team is assembled and mobilized, they should be about an hour behind.

He checks his watch. That shouldn’t be a problem. The women are probably asleep. He’ll keep an eye on things until the team arrives, and then they’ll wrap this up. He should be on a plane and headed back to DC by tomorrow afternoon.

He presses the accelerator, feeling a rush in his veins. These days Mark’s position makes him mostly a strategist—an academic who approaches investigations from behind a desk, almost as if solving a puzzle, figuring out the most efficient strategy for extracting justice, then organizing a task force to carry out his game plan. But before he took this job and moved to DC, he’d been a field agent, and he’d been good at it. And there are times when he misses it, his pulse ticking one notch faster as he closes in on his prey.

If they try to make a break for it, he’ll take them in himself. He feels himself almost wishing for it, already hearing the congratulations and feeling the pats on his back as he marches them into the field office. Of course he’ll act like it’s no big deal, like he does this sort of thing all the time.

He could use a morale boost. It’s been a rough couple of months. He thinks of the dog he’s promised Ben. Maybe he’ll even get a promotion out of this, with enough of a raise to afford a house of his own, one with a yard.

He opens the window to let in the cool desert air, the night full of promise and the exhilarating rush of things about to change.





27





HADLEY


Hadley stands in the shadows at the edge of the motel, her arms wrapped around herself to ward off the chill. The smoke of her cigarette drifts into the predawn light, and she watches as it spirals away.