Shakedown

Chapter Sixty-eight

There is a moment in every case when you can feel the end coming. Momentum builds off a series of breaks, large and small. People pick up their pace, forgetting how tired they are. Phones ring louder. Doors slam. A surge carries everyone to the finish, whatever it turns out to be.

Our computer geeks were dissecting Wendy’s hard drive. Wyandotte County officials were being yanked off the golf course and quizzed about the county’s underground history. Agents in New York and Kansas City were connecting the dots between Tanja Andrija and her late husband’s family while Troy Clark passed out bulletproof vests.

Even with everything coming together, the dull reality was that it might be too late to save Wendy. I may have persuaded Ben and Troy that she was more likely a victim than a perpetrator, but there would be little comfort in saving her reputation if I lost the rest of her to a bullet or a prison cell.

If presented with these facts in any other case, my professional judgment would be that she was most likely dead. Wendy had been missing for two days. She had become a pawn and pawns die unless both sides want them.

Marty Grisnik had promised to call me. I decided to use the time until he did to visit Kate.

It was late afternoon by the time I drove back to the KU Hospital. The day had gotten colder, the pale sky deepening to dirty gray, pressing toward the ground like a?atiron.

Kate’s room was at the end of a long hall, voices echoing through her open door. She was propped up in bed surrounded by people I knew but had never met. They were her family, names she had mentioned more than once. I had no trouble putting names to faces.

Her sister, Patty, had the short, frizzy hair Kate had once described as steel wool on a bad day. She stood on the near side at the head of the bed, her features a rough match of Kate’s, her face lined with worry as she and Kate whispered to one another.

Kate’s son, Brian, leaned on the other side of the mattress, idly playing with a handheld video game, which was a thirteen-year-old boy’s way of dealing with the world. His eyes jumped back and forth from the screen to his mother.

Her father, Henry, who had raised her from micro expression guinea pig to professional partner and who Kate had said was nearly eighty, stood at the foot of the bed. He had a thick body, white hair, and blotchy cheeks, his stubby hands clutching at the memory of cigars he’d been forced to give up. Kate’s ex-husband, Alan, balding, thin, and dressed in a runner’s sweat suit, was next to him, the two men locked in an intense, animated conversation, the few words I caught as I stepped into the room sounding like shoptalk.

It all stopped when they saw me. Kate rolled her eyes and smiled at me, a look that was half happy and half anesthetic hangover.

Her family’s faces widened with recognition and then dismay, eyes and mouths narrowing in collective disapproval. Patty turned her back to Kate as if to shield her. Brian straightened, edging closer to his mother. Henry and Alan slid toward Patty, the three of them forming a human barricade cutting me off from Kate.

It was clear that I wasn’t the hero of whatever story Kate had told them about what had happened. I knew she would have given them a version unadorned by exaggeration, rich with responsibility for her own actions, and gratitude for mine. But they were her family and were having none of it. There was nothing hidden in their micro expressions. I read in their faces their indictment of me, the FBI agent who’d led their loved one into danger and nearly cost them someone they held dear.

I didn’t blame them because it was true, Kate’s likely protest notwithstanding. That’s the way it’s supposed to be with families. Members were to be protected, taken care of. Anyone who threatened one of them threatened all of them. Anyone who failed in their duty to protect one failed all of them.

I couldn’t argue and I didn’t. No one spoke. It wasn’t necessary. I nodded at them, turned around, and left. Kate called my name from behind their backs but I kept on walking.