Identical (36 page)

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.

Tim was on 141, about five minutes from the ferry launch at Berryton Locks, when he saw Sofia’s gold Lexus coming toward him. It was the mid-size model, close to ten years old, which was what clicked first, even before he recognized the vanity plate, RECNSTRCT. He saw two figures in the car as it surged past, Sofia in a headscarf and dark glasses, and someone in back. Tim pulled onto the shoulder and waited for a break in the traffic before crossing the road and taking off behind her. Something had to be up. He tried Evon’s cell, but she was out of coverage on the ferry.

On the two-lane road, he could keep pace. The land began to roll here and every time he hit a rise he could see the Lexus several hundred yards ahead of him. Outside Decca, a hay wagon pulled by a pickup swung on in front him, doing no more than twenty-five. At his age, it froze his heart solid when he pulled into the oncoming lane to pass, but he needed to get closer. He fell in with two cars between Sofia and him.

When Evon called, he didn’t even let her talk.

“I think I got him,” Tim told her. “Never saw a surveillance the damn Feebies didn’t muck up.” He just wanted to make her laugh, and she did. The Feds, in fact, were usually better at the cloak-and-dagger. Talking it over now, she and Tim decided Evon should get on the highway on the other side and meet him at the Indian Falls Bridge about fifty miles north, the next point to cross the Kindle.

Near Bailey, the two vehicles that filled the gap between Sofia and Tim exited, and a few miles on, the speed limit lowered to thirty, as the road passed through Harrington Ridge. Tim now recognized the second figure in the back of the car. It was the dog.

“They could have had a second car up there at the ferry,” Evon said, when he told her he still didn’t see Cass.

“But Sofia’s headed away from home,” Tim said. “And she ran out on a reception room full of patients. Odds are she’s running somewhere we wanna go.”

Here, the footprint of the glacier had left undulant farmland, a picture from the
Saturday Evening Post
, with red barns and white farmhouses rearing up against the broken black soil, some stubbled by soybean sprouts. Occasionally the long vistas were interrupted by stretches of the old-growth forest of hickory and oak. The Indians had burned down much of it centuries ago so they could drive their prey into the open and see enemies across a distance. The white settlers had leveled more woods to farm.

As he expected, when 141 intersected with the highway, Sofia got back on 83. She took off north on the interstate, driving faster than Tim was willing to go, doing at least seventy-five. Before she disappeared, Tim thought he could make out another head beside her in the passenger seat. If it was Cass, he must have been reclined before, sleeping or hiding.

“If they don’t take the bridge at Indian Falls, we’re probably going to lose them,” Tim told Evon over the phone.

There was nothing to do about that. Tim put his audiobook back on. The narrator, with a plummy, Anglicized voice, recited several versions of the story of the Gemini, the identical twins Castor and Pollux, born to Leda after she was raped by the swan. Driving along, Tim found his mind drifting from the book to the imponderable details of Dita’s case. When things suddenly clicked, he nearly swerved off the road.

“I’m an idiot,” he told Evon, when he reached her. “It’s right in front of our faces.” He reminded her about Father Nik telling Georgia that he’d seen Cass on TV, or Dickerman saying Paul’s prints matched those of the man who’d entered Hillcrest. Eloise, the attendant at St. Basil’s, said that when Lidia’s son visited her, sometimes she called him Cass and sometimes Paul. “This little masquerade we’ve been watching. What says it hasn’t been going on for twenty-five years?”

Tim had driven past the entrance to the roadside rest area, which was slightly elevated from the highway, when he caught sight of the gold Lexus parked there. He braked and pulled to the shoulder. Looking back, he saw Sofia rushing toward the one-story brick square that housed the restrooms. A plume of air shimmered behind each exhaust pipe, meaning her need was too urgent even to bother cutting the engine.

The ramp exiting the rest area was ahead of him. Tim inched his way along the gravel shoulder. The egress was posted on both sides with the red circle of the DO NOT ENTER signs. Tim waited for two campers to depart, then swung a hard right and drove in. A guy in an SUV with his family had seen the stunt and waited, but he hung his head out the window as Tim passed. “If you’re too old to read, you shouldn’t drive.”

Tim nodded humbly and continued. In the meantime, he finally saw Cass, who alighted from the passenger’s side, circling to the driver’s door. He’d abandoned the disguise-the prosthetic was gone, and he’d recombed his hair and changed glasses. Sofia was on her way back now, and with one foot in the car, Cass called out to her, probably to say he was ready to drive. But the Lab took the opportunity to squeeze past him and flew out in a blur, charging over to the dog walk, where she tried to frisk around with the other hounds, one of whom reared up on its leash and began barking ferociously. Both Cass and Sofia gave chase.

While they were gone, Tim pulled in beside the Lexus. Its motor remained running. Tim went around to the open door, killed the engine and grabbed the car key. He threw it under the mat in the trunk of his rental car, a blue Chevy Impala, then called Evon for just a second. “I got them,” he told her and hung up, because he could see the two strolling back, with the dog now leashed. Sofia caught sight of Tim first and stopped dead about ten yards away.

“Tim, please,” she said.

“How about the three of us sit down at one of those tables over there and have a conversation? Won’t take long.”

“We don’t owe anyone any explanations,” Cass said. He was a pace ahead of Sofia. “Least of all Hal.”

“Well, I’m not sure about that. My best guess is that you pled guilty to a crime you didn’t commit.”

Cass took that in, then motioned to Sofia to proceed.

“I don’t think you’re going very far,” Tim said. “I have your key.”

Cass charged past and peered through the Lexus’s driver’s side window. When he turned back, his expression was hateful.

Tim said, “You don’t really want to beat up an old man with all these people around.”

“I was thinking more about calling the police.”

“Cass, that would be the wrong move. I’d have to give them the whole story, at least what I know. They’d take your fingerprints, and then they’d go over to Paul’s law office, and his senatorial office, and you’d end up arrested for fraud, and false personation of a public official, impersonating a lawyer-God knows what else. Why don’t we talk first?”

Sofia reached for Cass’s hand, and Tim could see him slump in resignation. The three proceeded to a picnic table near the low brick building that housed the bathrooms and vending machines. The tabletop was a smooth speckled plastic meant to inhibit graffiti, but that still hadn’t hindered the gangs from engraving their signs, probably with cordless Dremel tools. There was also a huge white splash of hardened bird poop, beside which several kids had used permanent markers to draw hearts containing their initials. Youth.

The dog continued to bounce around at the end of her lead, and was soon wound up in the steel legs that bowed under the table. Tim played with her a second. In his house, Maria and he had always owned dogs, mutts, but they’d been some of the best friends of his life. Part of his daughters’ sales pitch for moving to Seattle was that with so many people to help him, Tim would be able to get another pup. Living here, he’d hesitated, unsure how his leg would do with three long walks a day in every kind of weather.

“She’s a good one,” said Tim. “How old?”

“Eighteen months,” said Sofia. “She hasn’t read those books that say she’s supposed to have stopped acting like a puppy.”