“We don’t have many more years left for this,” she said.
“Left for what?”
She wished he wouldn’t play dumb. “For charades.”
“Do we have to get into that now?”
It scared him when she brought it up because the inevitable was happening—to her, not him. Between fake identities and the makeup, he had almost fallen for the artifice. Once a few years ago she had let the roots of her hair grow out, and he was shocked at all the gray. He had nearly forgotten she was growing old.
“Well, when exactly do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“How about tomorrow night after jumping on each other’s bones?”
“Roger, when are you going to face the obvious? I’m fifty-five years old. In four years I’ll qualify for senior citizen discounts.”
“You’re in great shape.”
“No, I’m not. I’m older and heavier. I don’t have your energy level, nor your sexual hunger. I’ve changed. I’ve slowed down.”
“That’s bull. You’re fine, and you look terrific.”
“Roger, will you please stop it?”
“Stop what?”
“Stop patronizing me. Stop this
pity
sex.”
“It’s not pity sex. I want to make love to you.”
“No, you want to make love to Wendy Bacon.”
He started to protest, but fell flat. He looked away, but she could see the tears in his eyes.
She felt the tears well in her own eyes. She took his hand. “I’m sorry, but it’s not like it was.”
After a long moment’s silence, he said, “You have an option.”
“That’s not an option, and you know it.”
“Don’t you like being alive? Don’t you want to be with me?” For a second, he looked like a little boy begging his mom for understanding.
Laura sighed. Yes, she felt the temptation. More than her sister or any other woman alive, she heard the siren call every day. But she had made herself a promise long ago.
“How about when he’s older?” He was still holding out hope that when Brett matured she would give in. “In seven years he’ll be twenty-one.”
“And I’ll be sixty-three.”
Already their sex was bordering on the bizarre. In seven years it would be sick. She’d feel like a cradle-robbing old hussy, and he’d have to fake it.
“But you’d retrogress to fifty or younger.”
“You mean Laura would be as young as Wendy.”
“If that’s the way you want to look at it.”
“Maybe I won’t want to be.”
“But maybe you will.”
They were silent for a long spell, and Laura felt the old anger burn itself through the sadness. Roger had brought this upon them himself. In a monumentally stupid act he had injected the stuff into his veins thirteen years ago and forever infected the very fabric of their lives. While she understood all the forces that had driven him to that act, she could never forgive him. More than anyone else alive he was able to foresee the consequences but had chosen to disregard them instead. And while she felt pity and compassion for him, there were moments she hated him for what he had done.
“Laura, I need you. I don’t want to go this alone.”
Laura closed her eyes and remained silent. She knew the panic he was beginning to feel. Aside from Wally, who still remained on the sidelines of things, she was the only person in the world who knew who and what Roger was. She was his sole intimate. His life had come to a standstill, and the future appeared some vast and empty stretch. It might take another thirty years for her to die. Toward the end he might even care for her like an aged parent. But after she was gone, could he go on without her? Could he live alone with his secret? Would he take another lover?
With Brett in her life, these considerations were no longer priorities. She didn’t say this, of course. Nor did she mention a third option that had crossed her mind: divorce.
Brett was still too young. He was crazy about his father and splitting up would scar him permanently. Nor could he comprehend the rationale: not for the lack of love, but time.
When he was older, she told herself. After they had explained all the other awful stuff.
“Laura, promise me just one thing,” he pleaded. “That you’ll keep open the option—okay? Maybe after Brett’s off and on his own?”
She sighed. “I’m out of promises,” she said and turned off the light.
And as she lay in the dark, she wondered at the extraordinary muddle of their lives.
God Almighty, how was it going to end?
FBI HEADQUARTERS, CLARKSBURG, WEST VIRGINIA
Eileen Rice was only half-conscious at how the coffee had turned cold in her cup. She was too lost in what she had discovered on her computer monitor.
The image was of partial loops with a count of eleven ridges on a bias from the triradius to the core of the inner terminus. Her best guess was the right index, although that made no difference since the morphologies were identical across the digits.
What set off the alarm in her head was the nearly full loop found on the latent print coded “Mark (4)-137-left II.”
On the split screen, she enlarged the image and clicked on the base print. With the pivot ball, she rotated the axes until they were in alignment. Then she tapped a few keys and brought the two images into superimposition.
A perfect match.
The image on the left was the print lifted from the Carleton, Massachusetts premises in 1988. It was the same print found on household objects including a coffee mug at the same premises. The image on the right had been lifted seven weeks ago from a flower pot in a shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
It had taken that long because it was an old case and no prints were on file in the database. That meant Eileen had to conduct a hand search of all the latent prints from door handles, clothing, and household items included in the evidence files. And because of their recent move to new headquarters, boxes of old cases had been misplaced. Eventually she found dozens of different prints, scanned and entered them into the database, then classified and compared them to the nine different latents found on the Eau Claire fern pot, wrapping paper, receipt, and business card which also had to be scanned and classified.
That meant running over three hundred comparisons, carefully tabulating each elimination. Also, of the 43 million individuals in the National Fingerprint File/Interstate Identification Index, none matched any prints in the case.
But identifying the prints was not Eileen Rice’s problem. With the mouse, she clicked the terminal to print out the matching prints—one for her own files, and one to the terminal of the field office in Madison, Wisconsin. She then picked up the phone and dialed the number of Agent Eric Brown.
Wally didn’t quite know how to ask her.
It had been so many years since he had last dated-twenty-five, counting two years of cohabitation, nineteen of marriage, and four of celibate
divorce—he wasn’t quite sure how it was done. This was their sixth formal date and they had not yet been sexual. How exactly did you word such a request to the Now Generation?
“Say, are you feeling romantic?”
Or: “Gee, Sheila, you know it’s been a hundred and four days since we met, and we’ve exchanged six hello-and-good-night kisses. It’s all been nice and innocent, but isn’t it time we moved to Phase Two?”
Or: “So far this has cost me twelve hundred and thirty-nine dollars, and I still haven’t scored yet. What about it?”
Or simply:
“Want to fuck?”
They were driving back from a movie in Wally’s Porsche with the top up because it was unseasonably cold. But the stars were out, the traffic was light, and the cotton was high.
And Wally Olafsson felt as happy as Tinkerbell.
It was especially momentous since that morning he had dropped below the 185-pound mark into territory he hadn’t known since college. He was also down to a thirty-four-inch waist and 15½ shirt. Even more remarkable, his hair had started growing back. Somehow the tabulone stuff had restimulated the follicles, producing a new golden growth that had covered a once-vast dead zone. It looked like fine silk, like that of a newborn’s hair. Already an inch long, he had actually fashioned a part. He told Sheila that he was taking hair-growth stimulants.
“You look like a different person.”
“The same Wonderful Wally, just less of him.”
“You should patent that diet you’re on. You could make millions.”
“You can’t put willpower in a bottle, lady,” he said in his best John Wayne. In the mirror he patted his new hair, still in disbelief.
God, it felt good to be alive!
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were getting younger.”
Gulp!
he thought.
“I mean it. It’s amazing.”
“It’s you, my dear. You bring out the boy in me.” Then he broke into a few bars of “You Make Me Feel So Young.”
“Bull! It’s ninety minutes a day on the StairMaster and old Menudo tapes you’ve been hiding.”
He laughed happily. “Aw, she saw through my cover.”
“So, how old did you say you were?”
It had become a game: He, the coy older companion; she, the insistent young inquisitor.
“Why is knowing my age so important?”
“Just curious. Besides, it’s women who don’t tell how old they are, not guys.”
“I’m liberated.”
“I’d say forty-four.”
“Forty-four!
” He slapped his chest in mock horror.
She laughed. “Okay, forty … maybe thirty-nine.”
“That’s better,” he sniffed.
“You’re going to hate me, but when you first joined the club I thought you were about sixty.”
He made a sharp swerve of the car.
She chuckled again. “Surely, I erred, but you know what I’m saying—the weight and the hair.”
“Yes, I do,” he smiled. Tomorrow he would meet Roger for his next shot—the first of three large dosages spaced a day apart. The high critical period, Roger had said. “I’ll make a deal with you.”
“Try me.”
“I’ll tell you my age if we can let the evening extend beyond a simple
bon soir
at your doorstep.”
“Wally Olafsson, that’s bribery.”
“Or sexual harassment, depending on how badly you want to know my age.”
She smiled and thought about it for a few moments.
In the rearview mirror he fixed his hair again and noticed the same big SUV behind him, its headlights like twin suns bearing down on him. These days every other car on the road was some kind of sports utility vehicle. He felt like an immigrant in his Porsche.
As he flipped the mirror to night mode, he felt Sheila’s hand rest on his leg.
“Your place, or mine?” she asked.
The rush of joy returned Wally from the mirror. The big Jeep Cherokee could have driven over his car and he wouldn’t have noticed. “Which is closer?” he gasped.
She laughed and gave him a great big kiss on his part. “Yours.”
R
oger had just turned down Margaret Street for his next delivery when he spotted a green SUV two cars back.
He couldn’t see the faces of the two men, but it looked like the same Jeep Cherokee. If it was, then this was no casual surveillance. They had come up with evidence and had a warrant to take him in.
His first thought was Laura. She was shopping for food and a present for Brett whose graduation from Pierson middle school was in three weeks. He pulled out his cell phone. It would be a call he dreaded almost as much as getting caught.
The SUV kept a couple cars back. Traffic was light on the main roads so he could hold them in the mirror. If it was the Feds, they had come up with something. Something Wally had nothing to do with. He was far into treatments and having too good a time playing New Age Playboy. Something else.
On the floor sat a cooler containing four dozen ampules of Elixir. Since the day the Feds first dropped by, he had stashed the supply in the Igloo under a layer of ice, some insulin, and a couple cans of Pepsi. Another thirteen dozen ampules were in the freezer of their Minnesota condo. Except for the three year supply in the emergency tube around his neck, the remaining supply was buried miles from here. The Igloo went wherever he did, just in case. Even a man on death row is allowed his medicine.
Roger made two turns through the heart of town. And they stayed on him.
He slammed the wheel with his hand.
This was not supposed to happen
.
He punched Laura’s number on the cellphone. They each had one registered
under aliases. In thirteen years this was the second Red Alert. The first was a false alarm. God, that this was another.
He heard her voice, and muttered a prayer of thanks. “Where are you?”
“In the car. I just finished shopping.”
“Where are you exactly?”
She told him the street. “Why?”
“I’m being followed. I think it’s the Feds.”
“Oh, Jesus, no.”
He tried to keep his voice even, soothing. “Laura, don’t panic. It may not be the real thing. But just in case, pick up Brett.”
The first place the Feds would check was their house. They’d ask around and one of their neighbors would remember that Brett had a game at Pierson. He could hear her fighting the terror. “Laura, do you understand? Get Brett and head for the condo.”
No matter how measured he kept his tone, the mention of their safe house made it more real. Their condo was in Minneapolis, a hundred miles from here.
“Laura, do you understand?”
He heard the catch in her voice. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Yes. I’m okay. I’ll get him.” The thought of Brett being left parentless had steeled her resolve. “What about you?”
“I’ll be there tonight.”
“Tonight? Why tonight?”
He wished she hadn’t forgotten. “I told you, I’m meeting Wally in Black River Falls.”
If it weren’t critical mass, she would blast him. From the start she had resented his treating Wally, even if it meant buying him off. She resented the very sight of the ampules. It was what had gotten them into this nightmare twenty years ago.
Before he hung up, he said, “Laura, we’ll be fine.”
But she clicked off.
For a moment, his mind was lost in the silence of the open line—a silence crackling with frightened disbelief that it was happening again. What they code-named the Awful-Awful. But all he heard was fear and anger.
The light at Fenwick turned yellow, and Roger floored the accelerator. The van careened across the intersection and made the first left down a side street. The Jeep must have pulled out of line and run the red light, because it appeared in Roger’s mirror about a hundred meters back.
He took three more turns then crossed the river and headed for the airport. The Jeep stayed with him several cars back.
He cut to an access road, weaving his way through traffic, then pulled into an industrial park consisting of rows of warehouses separated by long driveways where trucks pulled in for deliveries. Because it was Saturday, there was no traffic in the complex.
The streets were potholed from all the trucks, yet the Jeep barreled after him as if on the Interstate.
Ahead, Roger spotted the familiar yellow sign that hung over the narrow alley separating Triple E Sheet Metal from DeLaura Display.
He floored the accelerator until he was maybe a hundred feet short, then slammed the brakes and cut the wheel, sending the van into a screeching slide that flung him into the alley. Luckily it was clear, so he floored it. A couple moments later, the Jeep turned in behind him.
The alley was wide enough for a single truck. Behind it lay a spacious lot with trucks and half a dozen cars including a 1992 dark blue Toyota Camry which he stored for just such a contingency.
At a point near the alley’s end, Roger slammed on the brakes and cut the wheel, sending the van into a sideways rest. Even if the Jeep decided to ram through, the van was too heavy for a single shot to clear. It might also incapacitate itself.
Roger grabbed the cooler and bolted across the lot to the Toyota.
He heard no crash as he sped out the rear exit. But he could see the agents run after him in frustration. The one with a cell phone to his ear he recognized. Number 44 from the Town Day Race.
He was a Fed, after all!
Roger had only a few moments reprieve before every cop car in a twenty-mile radius was alerted, so he raced across town to the municipal lot off Jefferson where he kept the black Blazer registered to Harry Stork. Over the years he had rehearsed these runs, hoping in his heart of hearts not to hear the curtain call. In the glove compartment was a stage makeup kit including mustaches, wig, and glasses.
In less than ten minutes, he was on the ramp to highway 94. Every atom of his physical being urged him to turn north to Minneapolis. Laura would be in a terrible state trying to make things seem perfectly normal to Brett. It was the worst possible time to be separated.
Yet, he knew what he had to do and turned up the south ramp that would take him to the Best Western Motel in Black River Falls to give Wally his stabilizing shot.
Laura was on the way back from the grocery store when she got the call.
As rehearsed, she drove to a city parking garage where they kept a dark blue Subaru Outback registered under an alias. The police would be looking for her in a maroon Volvo. If this was the Awful-Awful, her face would be all over the media which meant she couldn’t walk into a grocery market within hundreds of miles. So she unloaded the groceries from the Volvo, then raced out of town to Pierson.
Years ago she had pledged to stay with Roger all the way. But things were different today. They weren’t the same people. If it weren’t for Brett, she would turn themselves in and dump all the serum but what Roger needed.
She approached the school, frantically hoping not to find the place jammed with flashing blue squad cars. It wasn’t. But if the police were after them, she had small window before they showed.
The parking lot was full of cars for the game. As she pulled in, she felt under her seat for the box containing a loaded .38-caliber Smith and Wesson. Roger had taken her out to the woods to practice shooting until she felt comfortable. It made no sense to have a gun if you didn’t know what to do with it.
She parked at the far end of the lot and slipped the gun into her shoulder bag, praying it wouldn’t see the light of day. She cut through the cluster of small buildings to the playing fields. The good news was that the white Pierson team was at bat. The bad news was that Brett, number 33, was on second base.
A large boisterous crowd filled the grand stands and spilled along the baselines. Laura was active in the Pierson PTA, so she recognized many people. But the game was tied with two outs, so nobody paid her much attention as she cut behind the crowd. Brett spotted her and nodded.
Coach Starsky and his assistants were clustered by the Pierson bench. She didn’t know how long before the sides retired. If there were hits or walks, it could go on for another twenty minutes. She waited with her heart pounding under a tree thinking that she might suffer cardiac arrest if she didn’t get Brett out of here.
The batter was walked, and she nearly screamed in frustration. The next batter took two balls then cracked the third high to center field. Thank God, it was caught.
While Brett trotted off the field, she approached Starsky, telling herself it had to be sure and quick.
Starsky, a guy in his late twenties, was barking batter lineup when he saw her. “He’s having a great game.” He nodded toward the scoreboard. “Three of those runs have his name on them.”
She tried to look delighted. “Look, Star, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take him out.”
He looked at her in disbelief. “What?”
“It’s a medical emergency. Roger. He’s in the hospital.” She began to choke up.
Starsky’s face fell. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry. Yeah, sure. Jeez, I hope he’s going to be okay. Christ, he’s so young.”
Brett came over.
She took a deep breath knowing how rotten this was. “It’s Dad. He’s in the hospital. We have to go.”
Instantly Brett’s face darkened. “What’s wrong with him? What happened?”
“I think he’ll be okay, but we have to go.”
Thankfully, Brett didn’t protest. “Sorry,” she said to Starsky.
“Jeez, good luck. Nice game, Brett.”
Laura hustled him toward the parking lot. She could feel the eyes rake her. People were thinking that it had to be pretty bad to pull him out of a game. She hated herself for the sham. She hated depriving him of the glory. This was a high point in his young life. And in a few short hours the television would blare out the story that he had been pulled from the game because his parents were mass murderers disguised as just-plain-folk Laura and Roger Glover.
She led him to the Subaru. Brett was fighting tears and asking her for details. “In the car,” she growled.
They were nearly at her car when a police cruiser pulled into the lot. Laura nearly started screaming. But it turned the other way. She fumbled in her handbag for the keys. Her hand was shaking so badly, she could barely get the key into the lock.
Suddenly the cruiser pulled directly behind the Subaru.
“Mom, whose car is this?” Brett asked loud enough for the cop to hear.
Goddamn you, Brett
.
“Hey!” the cop shouted.
Laura froze. In the next minute their lives would change forever. Laura slipped her hand in the bag and gripped the gun, still not looking at the officer.
The cop called again, and Laura flicked the safety off. She knew she
would shoot him dead if he tried stop her. She knew that as sure as night followed day. It made no sense and somewhere down the road she’d wish she had exercised better judgment, sorry she hadn’t settled on a less brutal alternative. But at the moment she was operating on pure mother-bear adrenaline, thinking only of saving her son from a life of foster homes.
“Mom, it’s Mr. Brezek.”
“You pulling out?”
Gene Brezek was the father of ace pitcher Brian, and Brett’s good friend. Laura gasped a yes.
“I just got off duty,” Brezek said. He still had his uniform on. “Who’s winning?”
“Tie six-all,” Brett said.
Brezek moved the cruiser so she could back out. “How come you’re leaving?”
Laura was still fumbling with the key. “Not feeling well.”
“Get a new car?”
She nearly said a rental, but caught herself. Rental cars all had coded license plates. “A friend’s.”
“Where’s Roger?”
She opened the door without answering and let Brett in. In any second his radio would start squawking an all-points bulletin for their arrest.
“Hope you’re feeling better,” Brezek said, giving up on friendly chat.
She nodded and backed out, concentrating on not hitting anything or squealing away.
“Why did you say I wasn’t feeling well?”
It was like Brett to pick up on a lie. They had made honesty a centerpiece in raising him. Trust is what kept families whole and healthy.
She pulled the car out of the grounds and took off up the road away from town.
“You lied to him, Mom.”
“It was too much to get into. We’ve got to go.”
“Mom, you’re doing sixty. The sign said thirty-five.”
They were on a residential road heading for the highway. She didn’t know how long before the police showed and Brezek learned that she’d gotten away under his nose. Her only hope was that he didn’t notice which way she headed from campus. She cut her speed.
“What’s wrong with Dad?”