Authors: Daniel Palmer
“Delighted,” Emma said. “And yes, I have some useful intel.”
David's reddened face returned to its normal pallor as he reached for a pen on the seat beside him.
“Go on,” he said.
“Steve Abington's mother lives in Bangor, Maine. She has an unlisted phone number, I'm afraid; I checked. But I can text you the address.”
“Oh, Emma, you're a lifesaver.”
“You can thank the DMV and the fact that I know my supervisor's passwords.”
Carrie thought of her own bit of subterfuge with Navarro's pass code, and her opinion of this Emma person spiked.
“Text what you got,” David said. “You're a treasure.”
“That's dear of you to say. But it was easy. You knew her name.”
“How did you know Steve's mother's name?” Carrie asked David.
“I'm a journalist,” David said with a shrug. “It's my business to find stuff out.”
“And he's good at it,” Emma said. “Careful with this one, Carrie. If he gets out of line, you call me.”
Carrie laughed. “I will.”
“Oh, Gabby wants to say hello,” Emma said. “Hang on a moment.”
Seconds later, a small, high-pitched voice squealed through the phone. “Hi, Uncle David!”
David's whole face went supernova. Carrie's heart swelled at seeing his reaction to the little girl's voice. At this point she assumed Emma was David's sister, and oddly, it felt like a relief.
“How are you, sweetheart?” David said.
“Good.”
“Are you being helpful to Mommy?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I'll see you soon.”
“Bye.”
The call went dead.
“All our calls are like that,” David said.
“So Emma is your sister?” Carrie asked.
“My landlord,” David said, and added, “It's a long story.”
“And just who was that cute doctor your landlord was talking about?”
“What say we skip Worcester altogether and take a drive to see Steve's mother in Bangor, Maine? She might know where he's gone.” The redness in his face had come back.
“What time would we get there?” Carrie asked.
“If we leave now, we'd arrive around seven,” David said. “We could swing by her home, get a hotel, and come back in the morning.”
Carrie said, “Sure,” before she realized she'd spoken the word.
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Squatting with his palms on a thin mat in the center of his Spartan living room, Braxton Price pressed his knees into his arms and slipped into a crow pose, getting both feet off the ground. He was nearing the end of what had been an invigorating ninety-minute yoga workout.
Braxton had the build of an elite athlete, though it was difficult to see under his nurse's uniform. Before he became a nurse, Braxton had worn a different uniform, that of a Green Beret in the United States Army. After twenty-one continuous months of combat in Afghanistan, Braxton joined a small combat team tasked with training and arming Afghan fighters who wished to rebel against the Taliban.
It was good work. Honest work. Bloody work.
He was part of a somewhat loosely organized counterinsurgency effort promoted by General David Petraeus to win the locals' hearts and minds. As a weapons sergeant, Braxton served a key role in the Green Berets' twelve-member Alpha Team, the A-team. Before his deployment to the Middle East, Braxton had attended forty-three weeks of Weapons Sergeant School, where he learned how to adapt to any situation and improvise on the field. He could speak Pashto better than Dari, but was conversant in both.
Braxton came to appreciate his interaction with the locals, but it was nothing compared to the high he got as part of a hunter-killer team, smashing down doors and putting bullets into targets. Killing was just a part of the job, and he did it without remorse.
Braxton's time in Afghanistan might have come to an end, but he was not lacking for work. His new role required a dozen weeks of training, during which he learned all about charting, taking vitals, administering drugs intravenously; rudimentary knowledge, at best. He could hardly be considered a registered nurse, but one day, just like that, he had a badge with the name “Lee Taggart” and was on staff at the VA. No questions asked.
Even though he did no real nursing, he knew it was good work. Honest work. Bloody work.
Braxton got into a plank position on his mat. Thirty seconds into the hold, he could feel every muscle fiber start to twitch. Closing his eyes, Braxton let his mind replay Steve Abington's final screams.
Fucking Gantry,
he thought.
Curtis Gantry was a thug, prone to violence and lacking professionalism, but he was also Braxton's best friend, former A-team member, and the guy who had saved his life more times than he had fingers. But this part of the operation was Braxton's to run as he saw fit, and not Gantry's. In hindsight, he should have made Gantry put a bullet in Abington's head. The screams did not bother Braxton in the least, but Abington was a brother in arms and he deserved to go quick.
Braxton knew all about the long suffer. Some of his interrogations in Afghanistan had lasted for weeks. The job description was “information extraction,” not torture, but the line was a blurry one at best. Braxton kept his enjoyment of the work a secret, thinking he otherwise might not get it.
A minute and a half holding the plank and Braxton looked like a bronzed statue. His core was on fire, but there was no noticeable shake in his arms or legs. Fitness was always a passion. He could be sent back to war tomorrow and do just fine over there. In a way he was still at war, doing battle of a different sort.
At the two-minute mark one of Braxton's cell phones rang, the important one. Braxton cursed; he had two more minutes to go in his hold. But only one person had that phone number, and the call needed to be answered.
Braxton sprang to his feet and padded across the two-bedroom condo's gleaming hardwood floor. Light spilled in through a bank of bay windows that framed a glorious view of the Charles River. It would be impossible to afford this place on a soldier's salary, but his current employers were more than happy to pay the bill. In return, he was more than happy to answer their phone call.
“Speak,” Braxton said.
“The girl.”
“I figured.”
Braxton recognized the baritone voice with a distinctive rasp. He saw no reason not to speak freely. Besides, these were stealth phones that used a machine-generated international mobile equipment identifier to make calls more secure and virtually untraceable. A warning system would alert Braxton if somebody were trying to intercept the call. In that case, he would turn his phone off and on to reset the IMEI number. Dive back into the shadows.
“She's proving to be a problem.”
“I'm not surprised,” Braxton said. “She's tenacious. Is there an order, sir?”
A pause. Braxton made no inference. He waited for his next instruction as he had been trained.
“Can Gantry be trusted?”
“To not hurt her?”
“We're not there just yet.”
“Yeah, I think Gantry can be trusted.” Braxton's mind flashed on Gantry's twisted grin as he stood at the lip of the pit, lighter in hand, Abington moments from immolation. “He can be trusted, for sure.”
“I'll call back when we know what we want him to do.”
“Very good,” Braxton said. “What about the next one?”
“We still need him.”
Fine with Braxton as well. He got paid regardless.
“You know, I'm scheduled for a shift. But there's no removals pending.”
“We can take care of that. You're sick until further notice.”
“I'm sick, all right,” Braxton said with a laugh.
“Just make sure Gantry does what we want.”
“You know you can count on me, sir,” Braxton said.
Braxton called him “sir” because anybody over him in the food chain was a “sir.” It was not meant as a show of respect.
“Very well. I'll be in touch.”
Braxton ended the call and returned to his mat. He got back into the plank position and began his hold once more.
Thirty seconds into it and Braxton was questioning his endorsement of Gantry. While he considered Gantry a friend, Braxton knew he
would
do something to Carrie Bryant before he killed her, and he doubted it would have anything to do with fire.
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Rita Abington lived on a busy street in a ramshackle ranch home with a sagging roof and paint-chipped front stairs. The yard was just a small square, a bit more brown than green with nothing to spruce it up, no landscaping of any kind. Shrubs grew as they wished and a few of the taller trees might have been bent by ice storms, never straightening.
Carrie followed David up the narrow front walk. She noticed that all of the curtains were drawn. The only indication someone might be home was the Chevy Cobalt parked in the narrow driveway, battered-looking as the house.
David pushed the doorbell, but nothing happened. No rings. No chimes. He knocked. Carrie heard footsteps from within, and a moment later the door came open just a crack to reveal part of a woman's hard-bitten face.
The woman said, “I don't want to buy nothing, save a whale, or go to heaven, so I figure you've got no business being here.”
David laughed.
The woman spoke with a notable Downeast accent. She also had a throaty voice, and Carrie suspected an X-ray of her lungs would reveal at least a pack-a-day habit.
“Are you Rita Abington?” David asked.
“Depends if you're looking for money.”
“I'm looking for your son, Steve.”
With that, the door came fully open to reveal a tiny woman, thin up top and below, wearing a sleeveless white blouse that showed off moles like archipelagos dotting her arms. Her skin was brown and wrinkled, but it appeared to be from hard living rather than too much sun. She had sunken cheeks and a neck thin enough to give Carrie a good look at the tendons. Rita's hair came down to her shoulders and was thin like the rest of her, with all the color and luster of what might be found in one of her ashtrays.
Rita said, “You seen Stevie?”
“We were hoping you had,” Carrie said.
Rita stepped aside. Carrie figured this was her way of inviting them in and she went, with David following.
The living room was not much more than a few pieces of Goodwill furniture spread out over a well-worn rug. The stale smell of smoke hovered in the air and taxed Carrie's breathing some, but she managed to ignore it after a few minutes. Plenty of pictures hung on the walls and stood on tables; apparently Steve was not Rita Abington's only child.
Carrie and David waited on the plaid sofa while Rita got a pitcher of iced tea from the kitchen. She poured three glasses and took a seat on an armchair covered by a patchwork quilt. She lit upâBenson and Hedgesâand took a puff. This was her home, and she saw no reason to ask anybody's permission.
“Forgive me,” Rita said. “I haven't had a lot of visitors come around. It's been quiet here since Winston died.”
“Was Winston your husband?” David asked.
“My dog,” Rita said. “I got more love from that little dog than I ever did my ex, rest his soul.”
With that, Rita rose from her chair, the cigarette dangling in a practiced way between two long fingers, went to the hallway, and removed a picture from the wall. She handed the framed photograph to Carrie and used her hand to fan away the smoke.
“He's so cute,” Carrie said of the tiny, silky-haired dog with ears reminiscent of furry satellite dishes. “What kind of dog was Winston?”
“I don't know,” Rita said, as she took a puff. “A good one, that's enough.”
Carrie showed the picture to David, who acknowledged Winston's cuteness with a smile. Carrie hung the picture back on the wall and noticed another framed photographed, long and rectangularâthis one of a group of soldiers, some wearing shirts and others without. Not all the guys had beards, but everyone had guns.
Carrie pointed at this photo. “Is this Steve?” she asked.
Rita came over, squinting, to take a look. She took the rectangular photo off the wall. “Eyes aren't so good these days,” she said, almost apologizing. Her expression brightened. “That's Stevie, right there.” She pointed. “How do you know my Stevie, anyway?”
“I'm his doctor,” Carrie said. “I was treating him and, well, he sort of took off.”
Rita carried the photograph back to her seat. “He's always taking off,” she said.
“Have you heard from him?” Carrie asked.
Rita spit out a laugh. “That's a good one. No. No, I haven't,” she said. “My two other boys haven't, either. Ben lives over to Orono. Comes to visit from time to time with the grandkids. Ian, well, let's just say he likes fishing more than he likes people.”
Tough life, hard living,
Carrie thought of the Abington clan. Rita would have no idea about Steve's DBS operation, or his involvement with the DARPA program, and Carrie was not about to violate his privacy by sharing those details. Her vague answer about being Abington's doctor had seemed to satisfy Rita's equally vague curiosity. Carrie got the sense all Rita really cared about was hearing Steve's voice one more time.
“Would you have any idea where he might have gone?” Carrie asked.
Rita let her gaze travel to the floor. “I haven't seen him in years. I couldn't tell you.”
“So he had no contact with his family?”
“None,” Rita said. “He came back from that war broken. No other way to put it. Stevie used to be my sweetie pie. Light of my life. He was the example for his brothers. But when he came back, it was just a ghost of that boy. Not the kid I raised. He took to the drink and the drugs, for sure, but there was more. He left something back in that desert.”