The Patrick Bowers Files - 05 - The Queen (36 page)

Maybe he was testing them.

I stepped away from Jake and caught up with the troopers in the hall, pulled aside Burlman, whose insignia told me he was a trooper first class, in this case the senior officer. “You need to really watch him.”

“We got him.” He didn't even look at me, and I could tell he was not attending to my words like he needed to.

I snapped my fingers in front of his face, directed his eyes toward me. “Listen to me. This man is dangerous like you've never seen. If you turn your back on him, he will not think twice about killing you.”

“We got him,” he said again.

“I'm not sure you're hearing what I'm saying.”

“Like I said,” Burlman replied, spittle hanging from his lip, “we got him.”

The troopers waited impatiently for me to wave them on, and finally I did. They headed toward the elevator.

But almost immediately I began to have second thoughts.

Right now Alexei was our only link to finding Kayla Tatum and our best bet for tracking down the Pickron family killers.

She's safe; he told you she was safe.

Angela confirmed that Alexei doesn't kill women or children.

According to what he'd said, Alexei had been planning to search for the Pickron family killers with me, so if he was telling the truth that Kayla was safe and that he'd been willing to let her go, it seemed likely that he would've left her in a secure location where she could safely remain until he returned to free her or lead me to her.

But I also had to consider the grim possibility that he might've been lying—and that Kayla might already be dead. In that case, he would simply want to escape.

But then why would he have shown up here?

Why ask for your help?

I didn't care that Alexei was cuffed and without his bone gun. In the last eight months he'd killed and then eluded capture in countries all over the world, and, handcuffed though he was, if he wanted to take out these two men on the way to the station I doubted they would be able to stop him.

They were twenty meters from the elevator.

Don't leave him alone with them, Pat.

Jake had joined me in the hall. “I'm going with them,” I told him.

“We'll both go.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I need you to initiate the search for Kayla Tatum. I'll send one of the troopers back to help you.” I took out Lien-hua's cell and emailed him Kayla's DMV photo. “Her car isn't here, so I'm wondering if Alexei stole someone else's vehicle, maybe left hers at that person's house. Follow up on every vehicle in the parking lot. Check all the trunks. Also, search this hospital room by room. Talk with Tait and get as many other officers as you can on this. Go to every house, every business within walking distance of the hospital. Work your way out from there.”

“Okay.”

“Fill in Natasha and Lien-hua. You know everything I do now.”

The officers had made it to the elevator. “Hang on,” I called to them. “I'll be right there.” Then I said to Jake, “By the way, how'd you find me?”

“I tracked your location with the GPS from Lien-hua's phone.”

Not bad.

“I didn't know there was a woman who was . . .” He sounded defeated. “I should've trusted you, Pat.”

“It doesn't matter.”

He was quiet.

“Shake it off. I need you on your A game. Are you good?”

A small nod. “Yeah.”

“All right.” I left for the elevator. “Get started looking for Kayla. I'm going to see what I can find out from Chekov.”

After sending the lower-ranking trooper inside to assist Jake, I joined Burlman and Alexei beside his cruiser.

The rental car that Jake and I were using this week sat near Amber's snowmobile. I was surprised Jake had been able to navigate the drifted road in front of the motel, but if a snowplow had arrived with food, the timing would've just barely worked out for him to arrive when he did.

Burlman opened the door to the backseat, but as he grabbed Alexei's collar to shove him in, I noticed something and said, “Wait!”

I felt my left pocket.

Empty.

Unbelievable.

Going to Alexei, I patted him down again and found the bone gun concealed along the back waistline of his jeans, a narrow, barely noticeable bulge hidden by his belt.

I retrieved it. “It was when I cuffed you, wasn't it? I leaned a little too close?”

“You really are good, Agent Bowers.”

So was he.

“Get in.”

After starting the cruiser, Burlman said to Alexei, “Bryan Ellory was a friend of mine.”

“I'm sorry for your loss.”

Burlman's jaw tensed. “I'm gonna kill you, you son of a—”

“No, you're not,” I corrected him. Then I faced Alexei, looking at him behind the police cage partition. It bothered me a little that I was about to ask him for his motive, but at the moment I was willing to try anything to get him talking. “I know you don't want to hurt Kayla, that she's your leverage for finding the other people. But why? What's at stake here, Alexei?”

“This isn't the time to talk.”

As Burlman pulled onto the road, he eyed Alexei in the rearview mirror. “You'll have plenty of time to talk soon enough.”

Alexei licked at some of the blood on his swollen lip.

Burlman grinned. “Yeah, I know you felt that one. Give me five minutes alone with you and you'll never forget it.”

“I have no doubt,” Alexei replied, his voice even. Measured.

“No more threats,” I told Burlman unambiguously. I didn't even want to think about what Alexei Chekov could do to this guy if I left them alone for five minutes. “I won't tell you again.”

He clenched the steering wheel. “He resisted back there.”

All three of us knew that wasn't the case, but arguing right now wasn't going to serve any useful purpose. I called Lien-hua to get an update. She told me Jake had already contacted her and brought her up to speed about Alexei and Kayla.

“Windwalker just got here with the trail groomer.” She sounded exasperated at the long wait. “We're on our way out the door now. You wanted me to check on Donnie—he's worked at the sawmill since 2004, when the base closed. He left work on Thursday at lunchtime, no phone calls to him that morning before he did; that's about all we know. I need to go. I'll call you if I find anything at the ELF site.”

“Talk to you soon,” I said.

After she hung up, I tilted the rearview mirror so I could keep an eye on Alexei. And I watched him watch me as Burlman maneuvered us through the storm toward the sheriff's department.

Tessa sighed.

A few minutes ago the sports wrap-up show had ended and a reality show about some people who investigated supposedly haunted libraries had come on.

How thrilling.

As the library program began, Sean had left with Lien-hua and this big Native American guy on a snowmobile-trail-groomer thing.

Amber was the one who'd suggested that Sean go along. “There's nothing for you to do here right now anyway,” she'd told him. “And this'll give me and Tessa a chance to get to know each other. A little girl time. Besides, you know those trails out there better than anyone. It might be a good way for you to help out.”

Lien-hua hadn't seemed too excited about the idea, but when Sean assured her that he did know the area and could help with whatever it was she was looking for, she finally gave in.

Before they left, Lien-hua mentioned to Tessa that she was staying at the motel with this other agent named Farraday. “But”—she handed Tessa a keycard—“if you need some privacy, here's the key to Patrick's room. He's in 106. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if you hung out in there.”

Tessa knew things were pretty serious between the two of them; she even had the impression Patrick might be thinking about proposing. But she was a little surprised Lien-hua had a key to his room. She might need to have a little talk with this stepfather of hers.

Then they left.

Everything was sort of in limbo until they got back, or at least until Patrick did.

But it'd already been nearly two hours since he took off on the snowmobile, right after promising that he was gonna come back as soon as he could. Sure, Tessa knew he had a job to do, but still, she wished he would have at least touched base, sent her a text, something. A bunch of times she'd thought about calling or texting to see where he was, but then decided she didn't want to seem too needy or puerile.

Now she was alone with Amber in the motel room, and despite the time of day, she found herself eyeing the bed. Even after sleeping in until 11:00, for some reason she was already feeling drowsy.

A burst of ominous music interrupted her thoughts, and Tessa went back to staring unemotionally at the group of ghost hunters stalking through the reference section of a small county library in Connecticut.

A couple of minutes later the show cut to commercial, and Amber asked, “Did you ever play Guess the Plot?”

“What's that?”

“Well.” She repositioned herself on the bed so she was sitting cross-legged. “We surf to a random show, give it thirty seconds, and see if we can guess the plot.”

Oh joy.

“It's the opposite of watching a movie trailer from a Nicolas Cage flick,” Amber explained. “You know, when there's no good reason to watch the film.”

Tessa looked at her quizzically.

“With his trailers, you get the whole plot in thirty seconds. Here we guess it.” A smile. “Wanna try?”

Um . . .

C'mon. She's just trying to be nice.

Tessa shrugged. “Sure.”

Amber punched in channel 142, and a news show came on saying that the secretary of state's meetings in Tehran were moving forward despite the “strained diplomatic relations between the two nations.”

She had to click up through three channels of commercials before she finally found a movie.

The scene: a hip, young guy in a suit speaking to a bunch of government officials seated around a large conference table. Within a couple of seconds it was clear that this person was supposed to be from another planet.

“So, okay,” Amber said. “Aliens are testing the human race to see if we can learn to stop going to war with each other, and if we don't pass the test, they'll be forced to blow up our planet.”

“Kill the people off before they can kill off each other,” Tessa observed. “A perfectly natural response from peace-loving aliens.”

“Nice.” Amber handed her the remote. “You try.”

After flipping through a few more channels, Tessa came to a scene of two bishops whispering to each other in a shadow-enshrouded Vatican hallway. Shifty eyes. Foreboding music. The whole nine.

“Okay,” she said. “There's an Ancient Deleterious Manuscript that's been hidden in the Vatican archives For Thousands of Years and there's A Secret Organization That's Sworn To Protect It At All Costs so that the Church Can Retain Its Power.”

“Wow. That's never been done before. How clever.”

Tessa was beginning to like this woman.

Amber eyed her. “By the way, deleterious?”

“It means detrimental, injurious, nocuous.”

“I figured something like that. I was just . . . surprised by your vocabulary. It's impressive.”

Tessa was a little embarrassed. “Sorry, sometimes stuff just slips out.”

Now she thinks you were trying to show off!

“No need to apologize. I like it.”

They did a few more shows—a buddy cop movie, a zombie flick, and a romantic comedy that they actually ended up watching for a few minutes and saw that it really was about a guy who spent too much time at the office and ends up falling for a klutzy cat-owning librarian lady who
astonishingly
becomes a complete babe when she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down. What a plot twist that was.

Groundbreaking cinema this afternoon.

Finally, Amber shut off the TV and said, “So when you're not watching bad movies, what do you like to do?”

“I read. Mostly. Listen to music. Patrick's into all this outdoor stuff, like rock climbing and rafting and everything, but that's not really my thing.”

“Those Bowers boys do like the outdoors.”

“Yeah.”

“So what do you like to read?” Amber sized her up. “I'm thinking fantasy, right?”

“More horror, actually. Gothic stuff. Poe, like that. Some of the French realists: Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola, you know. Poetry sometimes. I never got into fantasy. The authors just aren't creative enough.”

A pause. “Fantasy writers aren't creative enough?”

“Yeah, I'm like, I get it, but could you please come up with a better way of creating your character names? Just add ‘or,' ‘en,' or ‘ick' to any name and you get a fantasy novel name. Choose whichever one you prefer. I'd be probably be Tessaor. You'd be Amberen.”

“Or Amberick. Hmm. Yeah. Or Amberor.”

“See?”

“Patrickick doesn't quite flow,” she said, “but Patricken works. Patrickor's not too bad. Nice.”

“Yeah. And your husband would be Seanor or Seanen.”

“Or Seanick.”

“It doesn't quite work with everyone, though,” Tessa admitted. “Patrick has this guy at the Bureau that he's friends with—Ralph Hawkins.”

“So Ralphor, Ralphen—”

“Or Ralphick.”

Amber grimaced. “Yeah, not as good as Patrick's.”

“Or Sean's.”

“Right.”

For a moment the conversation pooled into silence, but it was more friendly than awkward.

“So, you're a pharmacist?” Tessa asked her, but it was one of those conversational pseudo-questions because she already knew the answer.