The Target (28 page)

“Have I got a surprise for you. I inputted the police sketch, just as if it were a photograph, into what we call the Facial Recognition Algorithm program. The general public doesn't know about this program yet; I got it from a friend who helped develop it for Scotland Yard. I've made modifications and have been working on it for the FBI. We've already uploaded photographs of every convicted child molester in the United States, and several other groups of violent felons too.

“With MAXINE's help, we treated the police sketch like a photograph and ran the program. What this program does is compare the photo, or the sketch in this case, to the photos in the database. It compares, for example, the distance between the eyes, the length of the nose, the exact size of the upper lip, the distance between various facial bones, you get the idea. Since MAXINE and I are pretty flexible, we managed to make the comparisons and came up with a list of a couple of hundred who resembled the sketch. We found Father Sonny in the group in under an hour. He fits all the other characteristics: he's a heavy smoker, has rotten teeth, drinks too much, and he's been out of Folsom for about eight months. His prison records indicate he refused any dental care. He said, and I quote: ‘I won't have any of those drill-wielding assholes in my mouth.' He's a real hard case, Ramsey, real hard. They only let him out because they didn't have a choice.”

“Did he molest both little boys and little girls?”

Savich said, “Evidently he didn't have a particular
preference, at least then. Obviously if Shaker hired him to kidnap Emma, in order to bring Louey into line, he's no longer on Shaker's payroll since Louey's dead, and since Emma managed to get away from him.”

Ramsey said, “I can't imagine that Shaker would ever want to see this guy again, unless it was to have a little talk with him. No way Shaker knew he was a child molester when he hired him to kidnap Emma.”

“So what Father Sonny did in San Francisco was all on his own.” Savich paused a moment, then added, “He took a hell of a risk taking Emma right from under your nose. That's really out of control.”

“Yeah, that's close to obsession. I'd say, bottom line, he's left common sense way behind.”

Savich cursed, something rare for him. “Fixation, obsession, whatever the shrinks want to call it, Father Sonny's there. Our shrinks who deal with child molesters say it's common. A guy can come to believe that a certain child will save him. In this case, since the guy's an ex-priest, he might even believe that Emma can save his soul and cleanse him, heal him, maybe even make him acceptable to God again. Usually, though, after they're done with the child, they'll carefully select another child and believe the same thing all over again. Why does he want Emma back? Was it because she managed to escape him and so he wasn't the one who got to decide? He wants the control, the power? His can be the only voice?”

“Or maybe,” Ramsey said, “he still believes that only Emma can save him, that she wasn't through cleansing him, so he's got to have her back. She said that he needed her more than God needed him, something to that effect. You know what? I want to kill the fucker.”

“Yeah, you and about a zillion other people. We've got everyone countrywide clued into Father Sonny. That's what most of the other prisoners called him. He'll surface sooner or later. Someone will see him, recognize him. We'll get him. Your cop friend in the SFPD, Virginia Trolley, she's
heading things up out there. How is Emma doing? She love Ireland?”

“Oh yeah. She's big into feeding the ducks here at Dromoland Lake and into visiting castles. She hasn't had any nightmares since we've been here. You know, I was getting worried since she was always so quiet, so well behaved. Today she was a real kid, Savich. She finally whined this afternoon, didn't want to do something her mother told her to do. It warmed me to hear that fretful, obnoxious little voice. Molly says it's tough not to spoil her because of all that's happened to her. But we're trying.” He paused, then said, “I saw Molly shooting photos of her this morning. Emma was feeding ducks, laughing, the sun bright, the ducks carrying on madly.”

“And?”

“I don't know,” Ramsey said. “I really don't know why I was telling you that.” He saw Emma's beautiful face in his mind's eye, then, suddenly, saw her lying on her face in the forest, saw the marks on her small body, the blood on her legs. Vicious deep rage nearly overwhelmed him. It drummed all the way into his bones. He was clutching the receiver so tightly his knuckles showed white. “It's not right, Savich. This shouldn't have happened. Not to Emma, not to any little kid.”

“You know how common it is, Ramsey. God knows you saw enough of it in your time in the U.S. Attorney's office, and probably some when you were a trial lawyer. And now as a judge.”

“Some people in the San Francisco area think I've been too tough on crimes like this, but I don't agree. There isn't a cure or rehabilitation for child molesters, as the Church finally discovered, so it behooves us to keep them well away from children for the rest of their lives.”

They spoke of Paris, of Sherlock's continuing reaction to the word
pregnant.
Savich was laughing as he said, “I accidentally said the accursed word in a three-star restaurant on the Isle St. Louis. She nearly puked in her fancy French
mushrooms stuffed with something I can't begin to pronounce. I'll bet it means something like ‘greasy tourist innards' but I could be wrong. In any case, our waiter was wild-eyed, flapping his white waiter's towel around, but he got her to the women's room just in the nick of time.”

“The bathroom was very nice. It was too bad that I didn't make it to the toilet.”

It was Sherlock and she was laughing. Ramsey said, “It shouldn't last much longer, should it?”

“The doc says another month. I'm thinking of taping Dillon's mouth shut to keep that word stuck in his throat, but then he couldn't kiss me properly. It's a tough call, downsides everywhere. How's Molly?”

“She's hanging in, taking lots of pictures, even of me. I look up and there she is, turning all these dials on her camera, assuming strange contorted positions, muttering about backlighting and the like. She's spending a fortune on film. You want to speak to her?”

Molly slipped out and came around to Ramsey's bed. Thank God Emma was sound asleep. She listened, then spoke to Sherlock. She laughed, a warm infectious sound that made Ramsey smile. She was humming to herself when she slipped back into her bed beside Emma.

R
AMSEY BRUSHED HIS
teeth, put the cap back on the toothpaste, and rinsed out his toothbrush, standing it bristles-up in a glass on the sink. He was leaning into the small shower stall to turn on the water. He heard something, straightened, and turned back toward the bathroom door.

Molly was standing there in her cotton nightgown, her hair tousled from sleeping, and her eyes were remarkably bright and focused. She was staring right at his cock.

“Molly?”

“Uh? Oh, Ramsey, I'm sorry. I wanted to go to the bathroom, I wasn't listening, I didn't realize you were in here and I—” Her voice fell like a rock off a cliff.

She continued to stare at him. Even when she'd spoken, she hadn't looked at his face. She hadn't even gotten as high as his chest.

She said now, still not looking at his face, “I guess I'd better leave now.”

“I'll be out in just a few minutes.”

“I can hold it.” She was out the door in a flash. He looked down at himself. He was getting erect, fast. Well, damn, he was a man and a man didn't have any say over
that. It was the only completely independent organ of his entire body. Actually, given all the time they'd spent together, it was surprising this hadn't happened before. Actually, he rather wished, as he lathered soap on his chest and belly, that he'd been the one to walk in on Molly. He wondered how she'd have reacted if he'd just stood there staring at her body, his eyes not getting above her neck. He also found himself wondering what she'd thought of his body. She'd seen him with a hard-on before, particularly in the mornings when they'd slept in the same room. But he hadn't been naked.

He hadn't worked out in a month except for that session with Savich in Mason Lord's state-of-the art gym. Sure he'd walked a lot, kept his cardiovascular system going at a fast clip through sheer stress, but it wasn't the same thing. He needed to work out. His body missed it. He flexed and stretched. He wondered if there were any gyms in Ireland. He'd just have to hike more, maybe carry Emma on his shoulders as a free weight.

He was whistling as he thought: So what'd you think, Molly? Did you like what you saw? He was whistling when he came out of the bathroom, completely dressed. “All yours,” he said, and smiled at her.

She forced herself to look him straight in the eye and said, “Thank you.”

 

L
ATE
that afternoon, sitting on the Cliffs of Moher, waiting for that huge brilliant sun to sink down into the Atlantic, Ramsey took Molly's hand, lifted it to his mouth, and kissed her fingers, one at a time. She became instantly as still as a deer in the glare of headlights. He said quietly, still holding her hand, “Emma's not looking right now. I think she wants us to buy her another Celtic ring from that vendor over there. She's looking at every piece of jewelry he has. I've got my left eye on her. Don't worry. So, Molly, I think we should get married. What do you say?”

Molly jumped to her feet and took three quick steps
back. Ramsey didn't move, just twisted around and looked up at her. Then he looked at Emma, who was now strolling not ten feet away from them, hovering near a man and a woman and their two young girl children.

Molly wrapped her arms around herself. She was shaking her head, her red hair a wild halo, corking out in all directions, simply beautiful. The sun, stark against her, turned her hair molten. She didn't look at him as she said, her voice low and strained, “Just because I saw you naked this morning and just stood there and stared at you, my little heart filled with lust, you think you've got to marry me? That doesn't make any sense, Ramsey. I know what men look like. I'll admit that you look the best of all the men I've ever seen—”

“And how many does that make exactly?”

“Two.”

“You've made my day.”

“Two, counting you.”

“I take it back.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I've seen lots of pictures, movies with men very nearly nude. You're as good-looking as the best of them, and you surely know it, you're not blind.” She stopped suddenly, as if aware in that instant of what was coming unbidden out of her mouth. She pursed her lips, like a pissed-off grade-school teacher. “Just because I can still see you clearly in my head, it won't do to speak about you at any more length. No, I didn't mean to use that exact word. It was just a slip of the tongue. Yes, enough about your body.”

That was probably a good thing since he was getting hard and they were in public, and he wanted to laugh. “Okay, that's fine, at least for now. Incidentally, I didn't ask you to marry me just because you happened to walk in on me. I was thinking it's kind of surprising that it hadn't happened before. Do you think if the shoe had been on the other foot, so to speak, you would have felt compelled to propose to me?”

“Oh, goodness. I would have sunk into the floor. I'm not beautiful like you, Ramsey. I'm so skinny.”

He looked at her face, at her glorious hair, and said, “Don't you ever speak ill of yourself again. It really pisses me off.”

She swallowed, looked down at her feet. “It's just the truth.”

“Bullshit.” He looked back at the sun, getting lower now. He said, not looking at her, “Sit down. I don't want you to miss this.”

“Then you shouldn't have said what you said at such a precious moment. It beat out the setting sun for sheer drama.”

“I thought putting the two precious moments together was a bang-up idea.”

Molly looked at Emma, who was playing now with the two children, the parents looking on. Molly waved to them. The woman waved back.

She sat back down, slowly, carefully, as if she were wearing a dress that he could look up if she wasn't careful. She sat Indian style, her palms flattened on her thighs. Her fingernails were short, blunt, like his. She was wearing black jeans and black half-boots. Her vivid yellow windbreaker was billowing out behind her as the stiff offshore early-evening winds swept in.

She didn't look at him, just stared at that bright red sun that was close enough to the water now to turn it a gleaming golden red. “Have you ever been married before, Ramsey?”

Getting down to it now, he thought. “Yes, when I was twenty-two and just starting law school.”

Her voice cynical, she said, “You knocked her up?”

“Nope. She was a marine, had just finished her basic training and was going to be shipped out to some god-awful place in Africa. We wanted to be married just before she left.”

“What happened?”

“We did well together. She was the one always on the
road, off to someplace I'd never heard of, but it worked out okay. She wanted to wait on kids and I was agreeable. Then it was all over.” He found his body tensing, becoming clammy, just as it had that day he'd walked out of the courtroom, elated because he'd just won an important case, only to have one man and one woman, both in uniform, waiting for him. He'd known, oh yes, he'd known in that instant that Susan was dead.

“She was killed when her helicopter crashed in the Kuwaiti desert at the end of the Gulf War in ninety-one. She would have shipped home the very next week.”

“I'm sorry,” Molly said, “I'm so very sorry.”

“Shit happens.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “No, don't act like a man about it.”

There was clean anger in his voice as he turned to her. “Why not? At least now I can sound all flippant and macho, but for a very long time I couldn't even say her name without stuttering or bawling. And you, of all people, Molly, know that shit does happen.”

She didn't understand how he'd felt, given her own experience with marriage. She said, “You must have loved her very much.”

“Yes, but Susan died a long time ago, Molly. Fact of the matter was that we didn't really know each other all that well. She was gone too much of the time. When she was home, it was nonstop sex until it was time for her to leave again. We talked, sure, but for the life of me, I can't remember many conversations. And, as I said, I know more about you than I did her. For example, I don't remember how she squeezed a tube of toothpaste, whereas I know that you flatten the tube in the middle. I don't know what kind of nightwear Susan really preferred. You love floaty silk nightgowns. I saw you rubbing the one you couldn't help but pack, you loved it so much. But with me around you wear only those cotton jobs that start at your throat and end at your toes. I never knew what her favorite breakfast
was. You like to eat Grape-Nuts unless you're on the run —and I do mean that literally. She liked my body, she told me that whenever we were together, but I can't remember that she ever looked at me the way you did this morning. You licked your chops, Molly. I don't think you once got up to my face. I felt like a sex god. It was great.

“Isn't that strange? To be married for nearly three years and not really know your mate very well?”

He stared at the sun again, then over at Emma. He saw her laugh at something one of the kids said. After the man had taken her off the beach nearly right under his nose, he automatically checked on her every fifteen seconds, or less. Usually it was less, especially after San Francisco.

“Maybe, but I never knew Louey all that well either. Like Susan, he was gone most of the time. Unlike Susan, when he was home, he was usually a jerk.” She sighed. “Louey's dead. It's just over a week. It seems much longer. Goodness, it feels as if I've known you forever.”

“That's because we got thrown together in the same pot with the lid plunked down and lots of heat. No time-outs.”

“I guess so.” She studied his face in that special way she had, as if she were going to photograph him. “You're really meticulous with the toothpaste. You roll it up carefully from the bottom. When you're alone, do you sleep nude?”

“Most of the time.”

“Listen, Ramsey, my father's a big-time crook and you're a federal judge.”

“I deal all right with your father. I prefer dealing with your stepmama, but hey, I can make do.”

She grinned at him. “Eve's something else, isn't she?”

“Yeah. Most of the time when I was around her, I would have sworn that she married your dad for his big bucks and power. Then, at other times, I'd be willing to swear that it was something else entirely.” He shrugged. “Maybe we'll find out someday just what she's all about.”

“My father treats her like dirt.”

“He does have that problem with women. But again, I
have this gut feeling things are going to change.” He looked over at Emma. She had started rigging up a kite with the other kids, the father showing them what to do. He smiled. Emma knew exactly what to do. Molly had taught her and done a really good job of it. He saw her then, flying her dragon kite in the meadow by the cabin. And then those men had come with their guns. It seemed an eon ago, another Ramsey Hunt. He shook himself. “Let's get back to us, Molly. There's nothing either of us can do about our families. We'll cope.”

“Tell me about yours.”

“My father's a dentist. First thing he'll do when he meets you is check your mouth, just the way they do with horses. Because you've got great teeth, he'll probably fall in love with you on the spot. My old man's easy that way. Give him a beautiful tooth and he's in ecstasy.

“As for my mom, she's a retired schoolteacher, highschool history. I remember she cried when I announced I was going to law school. She believes all lawyers are pond scum. She only forgave me when I told her I wanted to be one of the good guys. She approved of the U.S. Attorney's office. She still tells me all the lawyer jokes though.”

“What about when you went back out to be a trial lawyer.”

He ducked his head. “It was only for a year and a half. I hated it.”

“So?”

“I didn't tell her. Since I'm a judge now, she treats me like I'm on the Supreme Court and asks me all sorts of questions about Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of whom I've met only once, but that's about all. A neat woman, my mom. Uh, she doesn't look a thing like Eve. I also have two older brothers. One's career army, a two-star general, three kids. The other brother, Tony, is a political speechwriter. Tony's an okay guy, lives in Washington, D.C., nice wife, two kids, neither of whom takes drugs or is in jail.”

He looked over at Emma at exactly the same time Molly did. Their eyes met. They smiled at each other.

“It will probably be a habit of a lifetime,” Molly said, “checking on Emma. I'll probably have my antennae up when she's a little old lady.”

“Do you want more kids, Molly?”

“Maybe. Two would be nice, maybe three. I like kids.”

He realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out and laughed. “Just the number I had in mind. I'm thirty-four. That's really young to be appointed to a judgeship, but as for my biological clock, it's running out fast. I heard it isn't good for a guy to father kids after he's forty. The risks are too great.”