A Line in the Sand, page 29
Catherine ran through the layout of the first floor in her mind. Exits relative to the ballroom. Restrooms. A pair of smaller meeting rooms farther down the hallway. She walked to the center of the lobby and casually examined the placement and alignment of security cameras one more time. The hotel had at least one employee watching them in real time. Might be a Decision Tree contractor in there too. There was no way to know.
She went back to the lounge and told the bartender she wanted to sit at one of the tables. He poured a glass of white for her and said, “Sorry about the asshole. On the house.”
“Right?” she said. “Don’t want anything to do with a man who can’t respect .300.” She grabbed the wineglass and glanced in the mirror. That’s when she saw him—sitting in a far corner of the restaurant area, dressed in a blue button-down and khakis. A lanyard hung from his neck. In a hotel like this one, he was a needle in a stack of corporate-travel, business-casual needles. Catherine looked away, not wanting to risk meeting his eyes. She took the picture out of her blazer pocket. There was no doubt—Chief Warrant Officer Christopher Miller. He was too tan and not nearly doughy enough to pass for a salesman or middle management under anything more than cursory scrutiny. She was a professional noticer, and he was a man who had lived his life outside, not in cubicles and members-only airline lounges.
She walked to an armchair closer to the lobby that had a better view of the hall. She could see the door to the ballroom, the alcove where the men’s and women’s bathrooms were hidden, almost all the way to the exit at the far end that led out to the hotel loading dock. She turned slightly away from Miller but kept him in her peripheral vision. Why was he hiding? He was clearly trying to blend in, but she couldn’t figure out why. It was a Decision Tree event, after all. She wondered if he might be looking for her, but she had no reason to think anyone knew what she looked like. He was a variable she could not control, and it made her nervous. Catherine’s leg began to shake ever so slightly. She tapped her foot on the carpet to try to keep it under control. After a minute, she stilled it. The band was playing from the ballroom stage, loud but indistinct, behind the closed doors. Jangling guitars and shuffling drums. It sounded like a Tom Petty cover band.
She sat there for the better part of an hour. Night had fallen outside the hotel lobby’s windows. A dozen times or more, she got halfway out of the chair to leave, but something pulled her back down into the seat to wait. She finished her glass of wine, and the door to the ballroom opened. Music cascaded into the hallway and throughout the first floor of the hotel. Chief Miller got up from his chair and casually walked toward the ballroom. She saw Graves step into the hall. One of the security men followed him, but Graves waved him off. The guard lingered, and Graves gestured for him to go back to the ballroom. The door shut behind the guard, and Graves stood alone in the hall. Cat watched him turn toward the bathroom and disappear into the alcove. She caught sight of Miller again. He was fading into the crowd headed toward the event. She saw his eyes flicker toward a security camera. Catherine was sure he was there for Graves too. She stood up and matched his movement, joining a group crossing the lobby.
She lost sight of Miller. Behind the ballroom’s closed doors, the music pulsed. Drums broke open a simple, driving groove. Again the bright guitar, the bass thumping like a heartbeat. She felt it as much as heard it, a voice not singing but speaking to her from a place much more distant than the stage behind the closed ballroom doors. She hadn’t seen Graves come out. Catherine stood in the middle of the hall between the ballroom and the bathrooms. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. Now the voice started to sing, almost screaming, gathering strength to break into the chorus that the song built toward.
Cat quickly took the four steps to the men’s-room door, paused to reach into her bag and work the pistol’s action, the song nearly reaching a crescendo, then walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The world went quiet for a second while she processed what was in front of her. The music was now only a hum she felt buzzing at the center of her being. Graves stood at the sink, looking at himself in the mirror. The water seemed to run out of the faucet with a deafening roar. He turned to face her. Chief Miller was between them. He spun around and Catherine registered his confusion. She thought Graves was angry but then realized he was looking at her with disgust. He was offended that he’d been interrupted, and he was confused to see a woman there, but he didn’t feel threatened until he registered the pistol in her hand, the barrel and the long suppressor held against the side of her leg. His face contorted with rage. She raised the gun and fired.
The sound of the subsonic rounds was subdued but hardly quiet. She shot Graves three times before he fell. She continued firing as he writhed on the ground. Brass casings were ejected from the chamber as she squeezed the trigger; they bounced off the mirror and off the walls and spun across the marble tiles of the bathroom floor when they landed. Miller wheeled around. She saw the knife in his hand and was mesmerized for an instant by the rippled steel of the handmade blade. Her eyes met his, and she thought she had him on the back foot, but he lunged at her with the knife, knocked her over, and landed on top of her. The force of the impact sent the suppressed pistol clattering across the tiles. He was crushing her with his body. She tried to scream but didn’t have the breath for it. Miller’s eyes tracked the pistol. He stood up and took a step toward it. She gasped for air when he got to his feet—he’d knocked the wind out of her. Instinct guided her. Still lying on the floor, she reached into her bag and pulled her service revolver. Miller bent over to grab the suppressed pistol. Cat lifted her head, found enough air for one word, and called his name. He turned toward its sound reflexively, and for a fraction of a second, he started to smile. She squeezed the trigger. When the bullet struck his forehead, he dropped as if a rug had been pulled out from under him.
Catherine let her head fall back and stared at the tiled ceiling. She dropped her revolver from her left hand, and pain washed over her, radiating from her stomach and drowning her entire being in it. Ringing deafness accompanied the pain. She put her palm on her chest for a moment, and her hand came away covered in blood. Motion caught her eye, and she turned her head.
Graves tried to lift himself to his elbows, but he slipped back to the floor in the slickness of his own blood. She’d hit him in the head and more than once in his chest. She’d shot one of his fingers off when he flinched into a defensive posture as she’d begun to fire. A bullet fragment had struck him in the upper lip and given him a raggedy cleft palate. He choked on blood and splinters of his own teeth. His eyes flashed crazily around the room. Miller lay dead beside her, the suppressed pistol trapped beneath him.
How much time had passed since she’d entered the bathroom? Ten seconds? Maybe twenty? It might as well have been her whole life. She took out her phone and called a number. Arman picked up on the second ring.
“Hello? Catherine?” he said, but she could not hear him. She couldn’t even lift the phone to her ear. Cat let the phone drop onto her stomach without ending the call. A door opened behind her.
When the Decision Tree security team entered the bathroom, Arman heard their voices, but he did not hear hers. He listened to the staticky chaos for a few seconds. Then the line went dead.
Later that night, two detectives from Violent Crimes arrived on the scene. The guests were sequestered in the ballroom. The detectives ducked under the police tape covering the open door to the men’s room. “Jesus Christ,” the first one said. “How’re we supposed to work with all this blood everywhere? I gotta call my union rep.”
“You’re such a prick,” said the second.
“Yeah. I know. How many shots fired?”
“A shitload. That’s a number, right?”
The detectives got as close as they could without having to kneel in the pool of blood spread across the marble floor. The first took out a notepad and started jotting a few things down in pencil.
“What’s the story?” the first detective asked. “Did Wheel have some connection to these guys?”
“That’s why we get paid the big bucks. Gotta find out.”
“So what’s up with asshole number one?”
“Disgruntled employee, seems like.”
“Why don’t we ever get to deal with gruntled employees, is what I want to know. Fucking disgruntled people are always ruining my plans. You never hear a bad word said about the gruntled.”
“I heard the dead guy in the suit was like twelve hours from becoming a billionaire.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Corporate takeover or something. Wall Street–type shit. Way over my head. That’s what the party was for.”
“You know what my father used to say about those types?”
“What’s that?”
“ ‘Somebody ought to tell these sons of bitches shrouds don’t come with pockets.’”
THIRTY
The two-tone pickup drove west through the newly arrived winter. Breaks in the roadside woods revealed the James River headed in the other direction, toward the Chesapeake and the sea beyond. The river’s surface west of the fall line was as placid as if it had been frozen solid. Rolling hills sloped down toward it. Deer browsed stubble in the harvested fields. Their necks rose, and they watched indifferently as a few cars curved along the back roads toward the mountains, Butch Ewell’s old Ford among that small number.
Sally pulled the truck off at an intersection about an hour later and looked at her map. The day was fading to the west. Beyond the fields and over the treetops, the Blue Ridge’s rounded peaks were backlit by the setting sun. She found the town of Tyro on her map and pulled the truck back onto the hardball. She almost missed it when she drove through. It wasn’t really a town as much as what was left of one after Camille broke over it in 1969. Catherine could have told her that if she’d had the chance, but Sally had no reason to think about the town now except as a reference for the turn she’d need to make five miles farther down the road. She stopped the truck again at the entrance to a gravel drive and referred to the map one last time. There was nothing on it but a mark someone had made for her with a red pen. She got out of the truck, rubbed her hands together against the cold, and opened the cattle gate. She pulled the truck ten yards past the gate, got out again, and closed it behind her. Snow was falling now, the sky so heavy and white with it that it kept back the darkness. Sally put the truck in four-wheel high, turned the wipers on, and went about a mile through the woods down the gravel drive until it opened up onto winter pasture.
A plain white house stood on a slight rise above the fields. A creek divided the pasture and ran off into the trees and up the low mountainside that held the little farmstead in something like an embrace. Smoke swirled up from the chimney and disappeared into the snowfall. Sally parked the truck and got out. Before she went up to the house, she turned and watched three horses stamp and circle each other in a nearby field. One broke from the trio and ran off on its own. The other two followed it at a trot and watched as it bucked and snorted smoke and ran lively through the swirling flakes.
Sally turned back to the house. Catherine stood at the top of the porch steps looking down at her. “I wasn’t sure you’d find it,” she said.
“Seems like that’s the idea, huh?”
“No,” Catherine said, “not really. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t put it in the plus column when I was looking to buy the place.”
Sally walked up the steps. Catherine gave her hand a gentle squeeze and said, “It’s been a long time. Come on in the house, girl. It’s cold.”
They went inside. Catherine opened the woodstove latch, put in three pieces of split wood, and closed it up again. Sally took her coat off and hung it up on a hook near the door. The room was warm and sparsely furnished. A small sofa sat near the front door, and there was a big kitchen table that took up much of the rest of the room. Catherine walked past the table to the small kitchen and poured two mugs of tea. She came back to the table, pulled out a chair for Sally and one for herself, and set the mugs down. Sally sat, and Catherine smiled at her in a way that seemed to Sally to emphasize the sadness in her eyes.
“Well,” said Cat. “Welcome to retired life.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine, Sal. It was time.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh, that,” said Catherine, instinctively reaching toward her stomach. “It’s long since healed up.”
“I mean, it must have been terrifying.”
“Believe it or not, it happened too fast to get scared. Didn’t get scared until it was over. By that point, there was nothing left to be scared of.”
Sally slid over the first two of a series of articles one of her colleagues had written about the case. Catherine skimmed the top article and set it to the side. The second was about Lamar’s disappearance, and she lit a cigarette and started to read. She stopped not three graphs into the story, looked up at Sally, and said, “I guess you would have told me if they’d found him.”
“I would have.”
“How’s it going out there?” Catherine asked, gesturing vaguely toward the world beyond the little farmhouse’s walls.
Sally knew what she meant. She shrugged and said, “It never ends, does it?”
“I think it only ends when everything else does,” Catherine said.
“Package deal, huh?” Sally said.
“Far as I can tell,” Catherine said.
“Catherine,” Sally started, “they shouldn’t have made you retire. You were a hero. They should have… I don’t know… you should have been given a choice.”
Cat put her smoke out in the foil ashtray. “Once I lost the laptop, retirement was probably the best I could hope for. But I always had a choice. I knew what I was going there for that night. I knew it was wrong. I did it anyway. Maybe I’d have gotten away with it. Or maybe, if that son of a bitch Miller hadn’t gotten there first, you’d be visiting me at the correctional facility in Fluvanna. So who knows about should haves? Anyway, boy I grew up with just got elected commonwealth’s attorney down in Lovingston. Asked me to come on as an investigator. Might find I’ve got another case or two in me.”
“Do you regret what you did?”
Catherine sat there thinking for a bit. “No. But that doesn’t mean it was right.”
“I don’t care if you got lucky. You wouldn’t deserve to go to prison either way,” Sally said.
“Says you. That’s not what the law says.”
“He was a monster. They both were.”
“I don’t believe in monsters, Sally. And if I did, who’s to say I’m not one too? Christ Almighty. His kids were there. His wife. World’s going to hell in a handcart and that’s how it begins. Folks start making exceptions for themselves—‘Rules for thee but not for me.’ It never stops once you cross that line.”
“You sound like my father.”
“I know. I sound like mine too.”
“I’m sorry, Catherine.”
“For what?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, I forgive you,” said Catherine.
“For what?” Sally asked, smiling.
“Shit, I don’t know,” she said and smiled back.
“I never did tell you I was glad you called. That day. The trooper. She told me,” Sally said. “It meant a lot.” She took out a red poker chip and handed it to Catherine. “Another month, I get a yellow one. So, you know. I guess I’m fixed.” Sally could see Catherine was thinking about something. “What is it?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Catherine said. She turned the red poker chip over in her hand. Let it roll between her fingertips like a set of worry beads. She looked down at it. “I like how they do those chips, though. Marking time like that. I could see how that could come in handy.”
“It’s something to aim for, anyway.”
“Yeah. Something to aim for. No, I was just thinking about my father. A long time ago, he told me that he’d only ever truly known one person in this world.” She lit another cigarette, inhaled, and let the smoke spill out of her mouth before going on. “We were out walking the crest of this mountain called the Priest, not far from here. Aiming to tree a bear. Clear out of the blue, he starts telling me this story from when he was in Korea. How one day he’s just walking and comes over a hill and runs smack into this Chinese soldier. Said they just kind of took each other in for what seemed a good long while but couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds, really. And then he said that he was this close to not getting his rifle up before the fella got his up.” Catherine pinched her fingers together to emphasize how thin the margins were between living and dying. “So then they roll around in the mud until my daddy, being the bigger man, got the best of him. Told me he looked that poor son of a bitch in his eyes as the feller was dying. He swore up and down there was not a secret in this world they could have kept from each other in that moment. Didn’t say nothing more about it. We just kept walking down the ridgeline. I sometimes wonder if he was thinking out loud and just didn’t realize it, the way we just went back to walking down that bear. I wanted to ask him about it many times after but never did. Occurs to me I’m about as old now as he was then. I didn’t think I’d ever understand what he was trying to get at.”
Sally looked at her across the table. “What about now?” she asked.
Catherine got up and fed the woodstove again, then took her mug and cigarette to the front of the house. She looked out the window. “Do I understand now, you mean?” said Catherine.
“Yeah.”
Night had fallen while they’d been catching up. The unblemished snow lay white across the fields, the whole of the hollow lit by the moon with an otherworldly glow. “I guess I do,” Catherine said finally. “I wish I didn’t. But I do.”
