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He smiles, too ready of a smile. A smile that isn’t a smile. “Looks like you’re carrying,” he says, nodding to the bulge at the ankle area of her pants.
“I have a permit.”
“Not for a hospital you don’t. You can’t have a firearm in here. Unless you’re law enforcement, like me. And I’m pretty sure you’re no longer law enforcement, Camille.”
Shit. He’s right. She didn’t think of that.
Dammit. He has her, and he knows it.
“One call to Sergeant Janowski and you’re on the hook for — what? What’s the state charge on this? Unlawful use of a weapon? We’ll figure something out. Is that what you want, Camille? Right now, in the middle of all this shit, you have to spend the better part of a day, if not overnight at this point, in a local jail?”
She steels her jaw. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I want the truth,” he says. “The local cops can chase their tails all they want. I prefer it that way for now. But you and I both know you’re no computer technician. So tell me everything I need to know, and do it now.”
SEVENTY-SIX
I LEAVE THE BANK just as it’s closing, at five o’clock. They were nice enough to put my three new safe-deposit keys on a chain with a little plastic tag bearing the bank’s logo.
It is now full-on dark, and, like clockwork, the temperatures have dropped at least ten degrees. I pull my collar up and walk down the street until I reach the spot where my car is parked on the opposite side of the street.
I don’t know if what I just did is the smartest thing I’ve ever done or the dumbest. But I have to settle this problem, and I have to do it on my own terms.
I use the key fob to open the car doors, but I don’t hear the familiar crunch of the doors unlocking simultaneously. I pop inside the car and start it up.
And then I feel cold metal pressed against my neck.
I freeze.
“Hi, Marcie. Remember me?”
I look in the rearview mirror. The man is wearing a black ski mask.Balaclavais apparently the right term. Tome, it’s just a black ski mask. Meaning it covers his entire face, save his mouth and his eyes.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen those eyes. Nor is it the first time I’ve been able to see his eyes andonlyhis eyes.
Still a piercing blue color. Still cold as ice.
Silas Renfrow.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
FOR A MOMENT, I think I’m dead — or will be any second. The barrel of his gun remains pressed against my neck, his eyes still on mine in the rearview mirror.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Silas Renfrow says to me. “Are you starting to figure things out? Or have you known all along?”
I can’t yet speak, my breath whisked away by the rush of adrenaline, the abject terror of seeing those eyes staring into mine.
I figured out enough last night, researching a man and a case I’d put behind me — the prosecution of Michael Cagnina. I figured out David’s identity, and I knew he wasn’t Silas Renfrow, that he couldn’t be a cold-blooded killer.
“Put your hands on the steering wheel, Marcie, so I don’t have to keep this gun pointed at your head.”
I do it quickly, wrapping my trembling fingers around the steering wheel. I’d do anything to get that gunaway from me. The gun that shot David and may have killed him.
Silas removes the gun from my neck but stays close, leaning forward from the back seat.
“I should’ve figured he’d try to find you once he rejoined the world as David Bowers,” he says. “He’d ask me about you after you’d come for our attorney-client visits. His cell was down the way from mine. He couldn’t hear us, but he could see you. He thought you were beautiful, of course. But he said you seemed ‘formidable.’ He was positively smitten with you, Marcie.”
I try to picture it — David in a cell of his own, looking through the eye slit at me while I sat outside Silas’s cell, talking to him.
