The Professionals (14 page)

The plane bumped and careened to a landing on the rain-slick runway tarmac, but her churning stomach had nothing to do with the turbulence. She was afraid, for herself and for Pender and the gang, and as the plane taxied toward the terminal, she felt sick with the sense that the whole sordid scheme had spiraled out of control.

She knew Pender was right about needing to move on, and she knew she was a hypocrite for taking Beneteau’s death so personally, but Marie couldn’t help it. Every time she blinked, she saw the bastard’s blood spatter against the roof of the van. Every time she heard a noise, she swore it was the gunshot.

The plane arrived at the gate, and Marie stood, stretching, anxious to be free. She stood in line waiting for the doors to be opened, and then she realized that the man across the aisle was staring at her.

She watched him from the corner of her eye, panic welling up inside her. He was an older man, probably sixty, with a thick head of hair
and a bushy white beard. He was smiling at her like he was trying to get her attention.

He recognizes me, Marie realized. He’s probably one of those mobster guys, sent here to kill me. She was starting to hyperventilate. The line shuffled ahead slowly, and the crowd murmured, impatient. The man kept staring at her. Marie felt like she was suffocating. She wanted to scream.

Finally, the aisle cleared. Marie grabbed her bag and hurried ahead, walking quickly through the rows of seats, her head down. She ignored the stewardess at the front of the plane and burst out onto the loading gate, breathing the cool damp kiss of fresh air and then hurrying up the ramp into the terminal.

She was halfway to the baggage claim when he caught her. “Excuse me,” he said, and she pretended she hadn’t heard him. He touched her arm. “Aren’t you Marie McAllister?”

She stopped. The game was up. She turned to find the old man smiling wider now, panting slightly from the chase.

Marie looked around for police. Sooner or later they’d be here, she thought, and she’d be led away in handcuffs. It was no use running anymore. “You got me,” she said. “I’m her.”

The man laughed. “I knew it. I bet you don’t remember me.”

Marie stared at his face. The man smiled back, waiting. He wasn’t a cop, she realized, recalling roast turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie. He wasn’t an assassin, either. “Dr. Tavares,” she said finally.

He laughed again, delighted, and Marie remembered him now, though she’d been much younger the last time she’d seen him. Dr. Vincent Tavares. A friend of her father’s and a guest at Thanksgiving dinner a long time ago. She must have been all of ten.

“My goodness,” said Tavares now. “How you’ve grown, Marie.”

“It’s been so long,” she said, willing herself to act normal. “How have you been?”

“Fine, dear. Just fine. I’m coming back from a surgical conference in Ann Arbor. What about you? What brought you to Detroit?”

“Oh,” said Marie. “You know. Work.”

They had talked about this, she and Pender. They had to tell people
something
. They decided they would be marketing personnel, the kind of people who flew all over the country to open up franchises and network at trade shows. It sounded boring and normal and reasonable, and as she gave Tavares the spiel, she could tell it was working. His eyes glazed over. He didn’t suspect a thing.

“Oh,” he said. “Won’t your parents be excited to see you.”

“Yeah,” she said smiling, ad-libbing. “I’m going to surprise them. It’s Mom’s birthday in a couple days, and I thought I’d just show up at the party.”

“That sounds wonderful.” Tavares winked. “I won’t tell a soul I saw you.”

They chatted on the way to the bag claim, and the doctor offered her a ride home. But she begged off, making up a story about a friend waiting outside, and then she fled the terminal and jumped into a taxi before Tavares’s suitcase could emerge on the carousel.

The taxi wound its way toward the city and through the downtown core, and Marie watched the skyline pass as she’d watched Detroit the night before and Minneapolis before that. Seattle had been home, once, but tonight through rain-streaked windows the city looked as bleak as any other. Though Pender and Marie still kept an apartment in Queen Anne for appearance’s sake, she’d been back only three or four times since they started the kidnappings.

At first, her parents had been hurt and confused by their daughter’s sudden absence. She’d created her marketing job, invented little stories about long hours at the office and no free time for anything but sleep, but that only made her parents worry more. Her dad warned her not to burn herself out and her mother worried that she wasn’t eating right, and in the end it was easier to just shut them out entirely. Even now, she’d lied to Dr. Tavares because she couldn’t bear the thought of facing her father’s earnest curiosity and her mother’s concern and her med-school sister’s smug satisfaction.

Pender tried to encourage her to see her family. He hated to think
he was taking her away from the people she loved. He just thought they should remember to be cautious. To be
professional—
God, he loved that word. Anyway, Pender had it easy. His parents barely sent Christmas cards anymore.

And Mouse was like Pender, familywise. He’d told his dad he’d taken a tech support job with Microsoft and that’s why he was gone so much and his dad had grunted his approval over the top of his beer and that had been that. Sawyer’s parents were too busy with their own lives to pay much attention, though the big guy had a younger sister he adored and to whom he sent vague, cheerful—for Sawyer—e-mails every week or so. He told his sister he was an online poker player and he could work whenever and wherever he wanted.

The boys had it easier. They still had each other. She had dropped what few friends she had as soon as they’d decided to hit scores full time. She knew the guys had done the same, sort of, but it was different; they were each other’s best friends. Marie’s best friends were getting master’s degrees or working at Starbucks, struggling to make lives for themselves in the real world. Marie hadn’t seen most of them in years.

She had given up everything, her friends and her family, and for what? Well, for the promise of a decent life, somewhere down the road. For a life outside retail sales, a low hourly wage, the constant threat of unemployment. And for Pender. She did love him, and she did love his coconut-oil dreams. But Marie often felt that she’d given up her own life, a decent life with decent, caring people, in exchange for an endless succession of motel rooms and fast-food joints and a whole lot of lies.

And now they were murderers, too.

The cab dropped her off outside her apartment, the old building looking black and empty in the naked trees and the rain. She dug out her key and hurried upstairs to her door. The place was cold and damp and musty, but Marie hardly noticed. She left her shoes by the door and threw her coat on a chair and crawled into bed fully dressed, listening to the rain beat against the windows as she drifted into an unhappy, uneasy sleep.

A
gent Stevens leaned forward and stared through the window of the Yukon, looking down the highway at a calamitous knot of angry, slow-moving traffic. “So this is what I’m missing,” he said, sighing. “The glamorous life of an FBI agent.”

Windermere laughed. Davis didn’t. Windermere turned to face Stevens from the front seat. “What do we do now?”

The Avenue Tool Company was a dead end. Bob McNulty had led them into his office, where he dug into a filing cabinet and returned with a manila folder bulging with junk mail, credit card solicitations, grocery store flyers, and the like, all addressed to Ryan Carew.

“These things started coming maybe a year and a half ago,” said McNulty. “We couldn’t figure it out. Nobody named Carew works in this place. Nobody named Carew
ever
worked in this place.”

“Maybe he moved,” said Windermere. “Forgot to change his address.”

McNulty shook his head. “Avenue Tool Company’s been on this spot since 1946. He’s been gone a long time if that’s the case.”

Davis chuckled to himself. Windermere and Stevens traded glances.

“Who is this Carew, anyway?” said McNulty. “What does the FBI want with him?”

“He’s a suspect in an ongoing investigation. He listed this place as his home address.”

“Yeah, well, he’s not here.” McNulty paged idly through the stack of mail. “If you happen to find him, tell him go ahead and change his address.”

So Ryan Carew was a dud. The name was never anything but an alias. And if these kids were going to the trouble to make up phony names and addresses, they weren’t wasting their talents on one puny sixty-grand score. These were serial kidnappers. A professional crew.

“I’ll get in touch with someone from the Georgia and Maryland offices,” said Windermere. “Save us the trip. Save you a couple of barf bags.”

“We’re not finding anything in those places, either,” said Stevens. “They’re all of them fake.”

Windermere nodded. “You think?”

“These kids are serious,” Stevens told her. “We’re not getting them easy.”

Davis pounded on the steering wheel and leaned on the horn, cursing. “What time is your flight?”

Windermere checked her watch. “An hour or so.”

“You ain’t making it.”

“Come on, Larry.”

“What, come on?” He gestured through the windshield. “It’s like trying to fit a hundred-gauge rail inside a Japanese condom out there.”

Stevens glanced up at Windermere. “Guess we’re catching the late flight.”

“Bad news,” said Windermere. “This is the late flight.”

Goddamn it, thought Stevens. Nancy’s going to kill me. “Maybe there’s something at Midway?”

Davis shrugged. “In this mess? You ain’t getting to Midway, pal.” He grinned at Windermere. “Now’s your chance to see some of the sights.”

Windermere shook her head. “I’ve seen all I need to see,” she said. “Scenic Joliet was enough for one day.”

“Then, how about dinner?” Davis said. “You and me. I know a place—”

“Davis.” Windermere looked across the truck at him. “I get it, okay? And I’m flattered. But it’s been a long day and I’m tired, you know?”

Davis looked at her a moment. Then he shrugged and turned back to the road. “Best I can do is drop you at a hotel by the airport,” he said. “You guys can stay the night.”

It was nearly nine in the evening by the time Davis picked his way through the traffic to O’Hare. The Fed dropped them off in front of the airport Sheraton and looked ready to bolt before Windermere closed her door. “So long,” Stevens told him. “Thanks for the company.”

Davis grunted something and stared straight ahead. Windermere climbed out of the truck and peered back in at him. “You’ll book us on a morning flight, Larry?”

Davis grunted again. “Sure thing,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Have a good night.” Then he stepped on the gas and peeled out of the lot, the big Yukon howling as he made for the highway.

Stevens and Windermere watched him go. “I think I pissed him off,” Windermere said.

Stevens nodded. “I’d say so. He really wanted to show you Chicago.”

“I know what he wanted to show me, Stevens. It wasn’t anywhere as big as Chicago.” She turned and started toward the lobby doors. “I’m starving. You hungry? How about a steak dinner on the Federal dime?”

Stevens begged off dinner for ten minutes to call home. “Just to check in,” he said.

“Good idea,” said Windermere. “I’ll probably need about twenty. Sometimes Mark needs a little sweet talk.”

They checked in together, and then parted at the elevators. Stevens called Nancy from his room. She was angry, though Stevens could tell she was trying not to show it. “I thought you were going to be around this week,” she said.

“I know,” he replied. “I’m really sorry, honey. This just came up.”

“How the hell did you end up in Chicago, anyway?”

“We had to check out a place in Joliet. They told me I’d be back this evening, and then traffic just screwed us over.”

“You’re with that FBI agent? Windsor?”

“Windermere, yeah. We’re holed up by the airport. The Sheraton.”

“Oh, how nice for you both,” said Nancy. “Use protection.”

“Ha-ha. We got separate rooms.”

“I know. Come back soon.”

Stevens promised he would and hung up the phone. He surveyed the room, a bland business traveler’s vacuum, and his stomach growled. The phone rang and he picked it up. Windermere. “You watching the news?”

“Not yet,” said Stevens. “Everything all right back home?”

“Mark was in a mood,” said Windermere. “Sweet talk wasn’t cutting it. Turn on Channel 5.”

Stevens turned on the television. Switched over to Windermere’s channel. The reporter was in some grimy corner of Detroit, of all places, standing out in the rain. She was explaining how the van used in the murder of Birmingham’s Donald Beneteau had been found, gutted by fire, in an industrial neighborhood in River Rouge.

Beneteau, the reporter said, was the husband of the infamous and controversial Patricia Beneteau, a Motown Casino exec with alleged ties to the Bartholdi crime family in New York City. He’d been shot once and then dumped from a red Ford van outside his tony Birmingham mansion late Wednesday evening. The family refused to comment, and the suspects remained at large.