Identical

30

Friday morning, Tim arrived at U Hospital. At the information desk, he asked directions to the office of Dr. Michalis. He knew she’d be here; her voice mail said she booked patient appointments Monday afternoons and all day Friday. The reconstructive surgery group had a little alcove of its own on the surgical floor. Tim took a seat in the sunny reception room. Sooner or later, Sofia would emerge. He was hoping it would be by lunchtime.

About two hours later, she swung out the rear exit in her long white coat, heading a few steps down the corridor to the ladies’ room. He was waiting for her when she reappeared.

Sofia stopped dead and gasped and covered her heart with her hand. She spoke to him slowly, her face averted.

“Mr. Brodie. Tim. You know how fond of you I’ve always been, but if this continues, I’m going to follow my husband’s wishes and get a restraining order.”

“Your husband,” said Tim. “Which one would that be? The one you’re divorcing or the one you’re going to marry? Although, so far as I can tell, the same fella’s playing both parts.”

Sofia, God love her, would never make any kind of liar. Her head whipped up, pretty much as it had when he suggested she’d stitched Lidia’s arm. But this time, she was angry. He could see a hardness in her he’d never witnessed. Not that it was a surprise. Sawing off wrecked limbs required some flint.

“Hon, we don’t mean you any harm,” Tim said. “Or the rest of your family. Hal, he wants to know who killed his sister. Me, too. The rest of this costume party-I don’t care why Cass is sticking a phony bump on his nose every morning, I really don’t. Hal doesn’t know about that. Nor does he need to. Just sit down with me and tell me what happened when Dita was killed. I know you wouldn’t lie to me.”

She seemed to consider the offer for one second, then her small cut-off chin shook minutely.

“Excuse me,” she said, and shoved past him.

“He’ll be moving any second.” Evon saw the text pop up on the screen of her handheld. It was a few minutes before eleven in the morning.

From 345, she had followed Cass, disguised as Paul, as he drove in the blue Chrysler to the parking lot across from LeSueur. She slid into a space a floor above him. After trailing Cass into the office building, she spent two hours in a coffee shop off the lobby, getting some work done. On sight of Tim’s message, she headed back to the garage. While she was still paying for parking at the automatic machines, she saw Cass push out of the LeSueur’s revolving doors, with their brass fleur-de-lis grilles. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear, and a vexed narrow look on his face.

Tim had taken Cass’s measure well. He was in a blue suit, as Tim had predicted. Brodie had discovered that was the only attire the Gianises wore on business occasions. Far more important, Tim had correctly foreseen that as soon as he confronted Sofia, Cass would run. He had to. He couldn’t wait for the police to show up and ask him for fingerprints. Impersonating a lawyer was still a crime that the bar associations, with their influence, insisted be prosecuted.

In her Beemer, Evon was waiting for Cass as he ran to the Chrysler. She let one car get between them on the ramp down and called Tim’s cell to tell him they were on the move. He was six blocks away.

The Chrysler exited onto Marshall Avenue and headed north in the thick Center City traffic, where the buses and double-parked trucks and jaywalkers created an obstacle course. She’d always been great at the follow, in her own humble opinion. At forty miles per hour, she could fit her car between two others with no more than four inches’ leeway, and she’d always relished the occasional need for speed. Stock car racing went on the long list of things she wished she had tried.

Nonetheless, given what Tim had just told Sofia, Cass would realize he’d been shadowed, despite his morning evasions, and he’d respond accordingly. When he’d driven six blocks, he pulled into the valet area at the Hotel Gresham, and stood outside his car for a good ten minutes. As Evon passed him, Cass was chatting with the valet and checking his cell phone. When she looked back in her side view, she realized that Cass was photographing the traffic with his phone. Given that, she did not double back. Instead, she let Tim settle into position around the corner. He called in a few more minutes to say that Cass was under way again.

When she took over the tail, Cass was circling blocks. She and Tim alternated until Cass pulled into another parking structure by the Opera House. While Tim continued driving around, Evon stopped in a loading zone, left her flashers on, and hiked back to the parking lot. She took the elevator to the second floor, then walked down. Crouched on the ramp above, she saw the Chrysler pulled over in a handicapped space, right past the gate where entrants drew tickets. Cass had his cell phone out. She figured he was comparing the incoming cars with the photos he’d taken earlier.

About ten minutes later, a young man came out of the elevator lobby and approached Cass. They spoke for a second, during which she placed him: Paul and Sofia’s older son, Michael, whom she recognized from the happy family scenes in Paul’s campaign ads. The two men hugged quickly, and from the way each of them shuffled his hand in his pocket, she took it there had been some kind of exchange. After another hasty embrace, Cass walked away. When Michael opened the door of the Chrysler, Evon realized Cass had given his nephew the key. Evon panicked because she lost sight of Cass behind a van entering the garage. She was afraid he’d taken off on foot. As she was racing back toward the elevator, she recognized Cass from behind, walking placidly up the ramp. On the third floor, he got into a vehicle.

She phoned Tim as she watched Cass pull out of the lot.

“They switched cars. You’re looking for a little red Hyundai two-door. Orange New York State plate.”

Tim had picked up the coupe by the time she’d run back to her own car. Not long after she’d exchanged places with Tim on the tail, Cass suddenly gunned the Hyundai and streaked straight down Grand Avenue.

“He thinks he’s clean,” she told Tim on the phone.

She followed Cass over the Nearing Bridge. When the highway divided on 843, he headed north, away from the airport to which she’d suspected he might be heading. She remained about four hundred feet behind, just beyond the focal distance of his rearview mirror, in the lane to the right of him, maintaining his speed.

Cass went about six miles, then branched west on 83. He was zipping along now, well over seventy, and Tim called to say he was falling behind. He respected his age and couldn’t drive much over sixty. After an hour, he was at least fifteen miles behind and worried that he wasn’t going to do her much good.

“Keep me company,” she told him.

“He’s headed to Skageon, I figure,” Tim answered. You could find nice country in any direction from the Tri-Cities, but Skageon to the north was by far the most popular destination. Unlike the prairie to the west and south, the land in Skageon was rolling, with panoramic vistas over the many lakes. Tim said he seemed to recollect a feature story talking about Paul’s family retreat up there. Evon thought she remembered the same thing, once he mentioned it. Maybe Cass had taken over that, too.

The Hyundai exited on 141, a two-lane road.

“He’s going to the Berryton Locks, I bet,” Tim said. These days, most people traveled to Skageon by following the winding course of the Kindle through the Tri-Cities and then heading upstate on the other major highway across town, 831. But from here, you could still reach the eastern shore of the Kindle by a ferry that departed from Berryton, where the Wabash and the Kindle met in a small falls that had been forded by locks erected in the 1930s as a WPA project.

The ferry, a massive white thing, was already docked when Evon arrived there in half an hour. Even on Friday afternoon in late May there was not much of a crowd. That would start changing in a week or two, once the Tri-Cities schools were out. On summer weekends, the cars in line to board could stretch back a mile and the ferry often filled, meaning at least an hour’s wait until the next departure. But now, with about ten minutes to spare before the 4:35 embarkation, there was still plenty of room. Six cars were between the Hyundai and her when she paid her fee. She followed Cass down the gangway into the iron innards of the ferry, which always reminded her of being in the belly of Jonah’s whale. A flagger kept the cars straight within the bright yellow lines. When the lane beside Cass filled, she saw him get out of the Hyundai. The profile was still Paul’s. He took the stairs up to the cafeteria, where he, like most folks, was going to wait out the thirty-minute ride. Cell phones didn’t work inside the iron hull, and even in the cafeteria everyone tended to lose reception for a few minutes out in the middle of the water.

Once Cass was out of sight, Evon stretched her legs. She asked the flagger how long before the ferry departed.

“Three minutes.”

At the rail, she got enough reception to call Tim. There was no way he was going to make it. He’d been on 141 for only a few minutes.

“I’ll wait for the next ferry,” Tim said. The plan to start had been to give Cass no choice: Tell us the truth about Dita’s death, or we have to call the police right now and tell them about the identity switch. They’d planned to let Tim deliver that message, and that still seemed the better course.

“He’s just going to take me as Hal in another body,” she said. “It’s a lot more likely that he’d trust you enough to make a deal.” They knew for certain that Cass wasn’t going anywhere for half an hour. The Hyundai was parked in by now.

A moment later, she could feel the ferry lurch as it unmoored. It would take another ten minutes, while the locks brought the vessel up about thirty feet to the level of the Kindle, before they started across the river.

She hung over the rail to feel the sun. It was a great early spring day, upper sixties, with high clouds plump as doves. When the little breeze kicked up periodically, it carried some of the chill of the water. She took a second in the ladies’ room, then returned to her car and thumbed through her e-mail the rest of the ride.

When the other shore came into sight, heavily wooded between the little shacks that served as marinas and restaurants, drivers began to filter back down to their vehicles, starting their engines once the vessel banged to rest. The iron mouth of the ferry slowly opened, admitting daylight into the dungeon darkness.

The cars on both sides of her slid forward, but there was no motion in her lane. After another minute, horns were blaring, and the PA blasted an announcement asking for the driver of the red Hyundai with New York plates to move his vehicle before it was towed. Evon knew Cass wasn’t going to appear. Eventually, an orange-vested flagger got into the coupe, in which the keys had apparently been left, and drove the car off the ferry.

She had no cell reception until she was onshore.

“He burned us,” she told Tim.