name again, I’ll have to put you someplace where you can’t spread it around.”
“All right, all right. Damn.” Arthur released the man, and Phillips smoothed his lapels. “You act like it’s my fault Gray saw that news clipping of some small-town Blackberry Festival with her in the background. Hell, if it were up to me, they wouldn’t have access to television, newspapers or anything else from the outside.”
Arthur unclenched his fists. He was angry with himself, not Phillips. He’d fucked up. Again.
“So will you move her?” Phillips asked, apparently too stupid to know when to let it drop.
“No.” He’d come this far, Arthur thought. He might as well see this through.
“But—”
“But nothing. You’ve been keeping the prisoner under surveillance since you found out what he knew. Haven’t you?”
“Well, yeah. We’ve watched him like a striptease.”
“And he hasn’t tried to get word out to anyone about the woman’s whereabouts, has he?”
“No. But…all due respect, Arthur, that doesn’t mean he won’t run straight to Mordecai Young now that he’s free.”
I’m counting on it, Arthur thought. But aloud, he only said, “How about you do your own job, Phillips, and let me worry about mine?”
“Jesus, Arthur, if Young finds her, he’ll kill her.”
“I’m not going to let that happen.” He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t have the blood of one more innocent staining his hands. He would see to it that Elizabeth Marcum—Beth Slocum, as she was currently known—remained safe. Not by moving her, but by being ready for the madman to strike. And then he could finally catch Mordecai Young and redeem himself. God knew he didn’t have a lot more time to make amends. He was on the far side of sixty, and facing mandatory retirement.
He was using an innocent woman as bait to capture a madman. He knew that. And it was wrong. He knew that, too. He’d had to make a snap decision, and he’d made the wrong one. But it was made. Now he had to follow through. He could make it work out right; he knew he could. The key was in seeing to it that “Beth Slocum” had the best protection he could give her. Someone who would lay down his life before letting any more harm come to the woman.
And he knew there was only one man he could count on to do that.
A man who, like the rest of the world, believed she was dead. A man who had spent the past eighteen years convinced he was the one who had killed her.
Mordecai Young sat in his car with the wipers set on intermittent and the headlights turned off. An observer, had there been one, would have said he was alone in the car, yet Mordecai was never truly alone. He waited right where he had said he would. He could wait all night. But he wouldn’t have to. He had it on pretty good authority that his old friend and former attorney, David Quentin Gray, Jr., would make it here unscathed.
It would be good to see David again. It had been a long time.
He really had picked the perfect spot—or rather, his guides had: a pull-off near a railroad crossing where no trains ran anymore. Back roads, no one around.
Oh, there would be roadblocks, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t know why yet, but he knew they were not going to be a problem. He knew it with a certainty that told him it was “given” knowledge. It came from beyond him.
Mordecai sat a little straighter in his seat when he spotted the man, hunched and shivering, near the edge of the woods. Gray was peering through the rain at the car, as if too wary to come any closer. Smiling to himself, Mordecai flashed his headlights on, then off, then on again. He left them on, because he couldn’t believe his one-time attorney looked the way he did. Prison had apparently forced him to overcome his obsession with Italian suits and flawless grooming. David could have passed for a scrawny, half-drowned alley cat.
When he drew closer, Mordecai reached across the car and opened the passenger door.
David peered in at him, his face drawn and pinched, even when he smiled—a smile that never reached his eyes. “Mordecai. Damn, it’s good to see you.” He started to get in.
“Wait.” Mordecai reached into the back seat for the red flannel blanket that lay folded there, pulled it into the front and draped it as best he could over the upholstery. “You’re a mess, David. What did you do? Crawl out through the prison sewers?”
David scowled at him but got in. As soon as he’d closed the door, he pulled the loose ends of the blanket around him. “I’m frozen half to death.”
“No wonder. You’re skin and bone. You don’t look well, David.”
“Prison will do that to you.” He glanced at Mordecai. “You look good, though. You never change.”
It was true. Mordecai hadn’t changed. His head was still clean shaven, his eyes still his most distinctive feature. He would have to change, though, once he found out where Lizzie was hiding. It wouldn’t do to have her recognize him too soon.
He started the engine and turned up the heat. “I was glad to receive your letter, David. I have to say, it surprised me.”
“It should have,” David said, using a corner of the blanket to wipe the rain water from his face. “They’ve been watching everything I do—listening in on every conversation, every phone call, reading my mail both coming and going. My own fault, blabbing to my cellmate about what I knew. I know the little bastard ratted me out.”
“It wasn’t smart to tell him anything. It’s never smart to give away too much. You taught me that yourself.”
David frowned, but didn’t ask what Mordecai meant by that. Maybe because he knew where the conversation was going. Or maybe the reference to his disloyalty of a year ago had sailed right over his head.
“I had to smuggle your letter out with another prisoner on work release.”
“I didn’t mean I was surprised you could get a letter out. What I meant, David, was that I was surprised your loyalty to me had lasted so long.” He tipped his head slightly.
Bull. He wanted you to get him out of prison, and that’s the only reason he told you a damn thing.
Don’t trust him. He could be trying to trick you, the way she did.
Ask him where she is. Stop wasting time!
Mordecai closed his eyes briefly, slowly. The voices had multiplied. Where there used to be one or two, there were now too many to count. Though it had occurred to him that there were likely twelve. That would make the most sense, wouldn’t it? Twelve.
And perhaps, he thought, one of them might be his Judas.
He didn’t know them all. Some were more accurate than others, and he’d been struggling to learn which ones he should heed and which he would do better to ignore, or whether it was the flaw of his own human condition that twisted their messages so that they were not always quite right—a far more likely possibility. The voices came from Spirit. Spirit couldn’t
