He nodded. It was her nightly routine.
He watched Marybeth pull on her canvas barn coat and slip into her high Bogs boots. Hannah broke from the song and asked her if she needed help with the horses.
Before Marybeth could answer, Joe said, “Thanks for asking, Hannah, but I’ll go out with her tonight. You girls keep practicing.”
“You will?” Marybeth asked him, surprised. Then she got it: Joe wanted to talk to her away from the singers.
• • •
THE SINGLE BARE LIGHTBULB in the small barn threw harsh shadows through the bars of the sliding horse panels, making the inside where the horses shuffled look like a film noir jail. Marybeth measured out thick sections of hay between her hands from fifty-pound bales and pushed each through the hinged feeder panels into black rubber tubs on the other side. The three horses reestablished their nightly pecking order of who ate first: Rojo, Toby, and Poke.
Joe hung back near the barn door and admired his wife. When she was done dropping the feed into the stalls, she closed the panels and said, “How is Sheridan doing? You gave her that coat, right?”
“I did,” he said.
Obviously something in his tone made her pause and look at him with concern.
He told her about Erik Young, and how he’d talked to the university administrators and asked the FBI to run his name through their database. Marybeth listened with worry in her eyes. Joe said he’d told Sheridan he would be there as fast as he could if she called.
“I wish I—we—weren’t five hours away,” she said, lowering her head and hugging herself in an involuntary gesture of mother’s fear. “This is the kind of thing I have nightmares about.”
Joe said, “Sheridan’s smart, and she’s aware of her surroundings. Much more so than I would have thought, to be honest. She’ll do the right thing.”
Marybeth quizzed him on the steps Sheridan had taken so far and who she’d talked with. She agreed the bases had been covered but wondered if Sheridan would consider stepping down from her RA role and possibly moving. As she speculated, she shook her head. “No, she’d never do that. She’s like you,” she said to Joe. “She doesn’t have the sense to get out of the way of trouble.”
Joe shrugged.
“I’m going to call her tomorrow morning,” Marybeth said.
Joe said, “She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you so you’d worry. So this has to be between us.”
She winced. Joe was reminded of the special mother-and-daughter bond, and that by Sheridan reaching out to Joe first it would worry Marybeth even more.
“I guess she figured it was more up my alley,” Joe said, looking at his boots.
“I understand,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to look into this Erik Young myself.”
Marybeth often used library computers to access state and federal criminal databases. She wasn’t supposed to know the passwords, but she did. Her skill at research and investigation had aided Joe countless times.
She said, “If Erik Young fits the profile, he’s probably got a Facebook page or he’s posted some things online. If I can find them and they’re threatening, well, the university might have something to go on. These types don’t operate in complete secrecy, from what I understand. They generally telegraph what’s going on inside their heads.
“I won’t tell Sheridan I’m doing it,” Marybeth said, “but I’ll let you know what I find. And Joe, if I find something, you’ve got to drop whatever you’re doing and follow up that minute.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling wistfully, “life was so much easier when they were all my little chickens and I could keep an eye on them because they were close. Now Sheridan’s in another town, April’s going off the rails because of a cowboy, and Lucy wants to start dating. I feel like they’re all drifting away from me.”
There were tears in her eyes, and Joe pulled her close. He said, “We’ve done all we can. You’re the greatest mother I’ve ever been around—better than both of ours. Especially yours. They’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”
“But I’ve lost control,” she said into his shoulder.
“That’s part of the deal, I think,” he said.
• • •
WHEN SHE STEPPED AWAY and wiped the tears from her cheeks, he outlined the assignment from the governor without going into many specifics and told her he was going away for a while and he didn’t know for how long. He left out names but explained that there was a suspicion that a wealthy rancher in Medicine Wheel County might also be a high-society hit man.
“That’s nuts,” Marybeth said, shaking her head. “In Wyoming?”
“They suspect he uses his ranch as his base. As far as I know, he hasn’t operated in the state. But I agree—it sounds nuts.”
“What if they’re right?”
He said, “Then maybe I can help bring him to justice. But like I told you, I’m under strict orders not to get too close. My job is to serve as eyes and ears only and to get out if the situation gets western.”
Her shoulders dropped and she said, “You’ve never been able to do that, Joe.”
It was cool enough in the barn that their breath puffed out in clouds of condensation. On the other side of the metal gates, the horses ate their hay in a methodic grum-grum-grum chorus.
“This time I will,” he said. “Count on it.”
She looked at him sadly, as if she knew more about him than he did.
Then he told her about the photos.
“It couldn’t be our Nate, could it?” she asked, incredulous.
“Sure looked like him.”
“There has to be an explanation,” she said. “Maybe he was somewhere where he wasn’t supposed to be, or it was someone who just looked like him from a distance.”
“Could be.”
She paused. “When he was here last year, there did seem to be something different about him. He seemed kind of unmoored, don’t you think? Like he was really struggling with his own code?”
Joe nodded. They’d talked about it several times. He tried not to get miffed when Marybeth’s thoughts turned to Nate after she’d had several glasses of wine, but they often did.
She said, “I know he’s been through a lot and I can’t even imagine what that would be like. But still, I can’t see him turning into some kind of killer, can you?”
Joe said, “That’s what I hope to clear up.”
“I hope you do,” she said, gathering the thick plastic grain buckets and stacking them together near the hay bales.
While she did, Joe turned and pulled down a thick turnout blanket Marybeth used to cover her horses in cold weather after she rode them. The blanket was wide and covered with canvas on the outside but had soft fleece on the inside. He flipped it inside out and unfurled it with a gentle snap.
The sound made Marybeth turn around.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He spread the blanket over a two-foot-high shelf of hay bales.
She said, “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
When he didn’t respond, she said, “Are you?”
He reached behind him and turned off the light. It was suddenly dark, and the only light was from starlight outside the stall doors. The horses continued with the grum-grum-grum sound.
“Joe,” Marybeth whispered, “this is crazy. What if one of those girls comes out to check on us?”
He said, “Listen.”
From inside the house, he could faintly hear:
Black, yellow, brown, and white
Diversity makes the world seem right
Diversity, Dee-verse-i-teeeeee
Joe said, “Our house is filled with girls and I’m going to be gone for a while. Watching you and listening to you tonight . . . well, you know.??
?
“Oh, Joe,” she said. But she wasn’t angry.
• • •
WHEN THEY WERE THROUGH, Joe buckled his belt in the dark and helped Marybeth find her missing boot. The singing inside still went on.
She said, “I can’t believe we just did that. I think I have hay stuck inside my pants.”
He laughed.
“And my horses probably watched the whole time. They probably thought you were attacking me or something.”
Joe pulled her close and tilted her head up and kissed her.
• • •
THEY HELD HANDS on the way to the house and didn’t let go until they reached the back door. Marybeth took a moment to comb bits of hay out of her hair with her fingers and smooth out her coat. She reached up and brushed several stalks of hay from Joe’s shoulders.
“I think we’re presentable now,” she said. Before going inside, she said, “I hope it’s not Nate.”
Slightly deflated, Joe said, “Me too.”
“And you promise you’ll get out of Medicine Wheel County if it gets dangerous?”
“Of course.”
“By the way,” she said, swatting him gently on his backside, “thanks for the roll in the hay.”
“My pleasure, ma’am.”
“Don’t make it a habit,” she said, with gentle admonishment. “I don’t want you to get the impression I’m easy.”
New York City
The same night, 1,927 miles away, Nate Romanowski sat behind the wheel of a white panel van outside a closed florist’s shop on 74th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Since this was the third night in a row he’d been there, he had begun to recognize a few of the occupants of the brownstone apartment buildings on the street. They couldn’t see him, though, due to the dark tint of the windows. There was the skinny lady with large, round sunglasses who left her building every night at six forty-five p.m. sharp, who would blast out the door as if the block were on fire and charge toward Broadway or Amsterdam to find a restaurant, he guessed, since she didn’t return until after nine. There was the professorial-type man in his mid-fifties who came outside and stood on the stoop and furtively smoked a cigarette in obvious fear of being seen by passersby on the street or his wife inside. There was the balding middle-aged Wall Street type who walked his tiny but manically energetic toy fox terrier and looked as if he’d just hooked into a leaping trout.
Twice he’d seen Jonah Bank, the infamous New York stockbroker, financial adviser, and “wealth-management executive” who had bilked investors—many of whom lived within blocks of where Nate was parked—of over $9 billion in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history. That a banker was named Bank lent the scandal a twirl of irony.
But both times, the operation had been called off at the last minute.
Nate hoped tonight was the night. He was sick of New York and it made him tired. The thick air was filled with smells—taxi fumes, exotic cooking, the Hudson River, steam from the sidewalk grates—and sounds—blaring horns, sidewalk conversations, the throbbing hum of the city itself. It was sensory overload.
He missed thin air, big skies, vast quiet, and his falcons. He also missed his sense of righteous purpose, and yearned for it in the same way he yearned for Alisha Whiteplume and Haley. He wished that instead of being behind the wheel of a panel van in the middle of more than eight million people he was sitting naked in a tree watching the Twelve Sleep River roll by.
It wasn’t the first time in his life he was completely out of his comfort zone. He could do the job. But he couldn’t convince himself that he would take any satisfaction from it.
• • •
NATE HAD BEEN SENT TO ASSIST in the operation, which had been in the planning and reconnaissance phases for weeks. He was not the primary on the job. The primary, code-named Whip, had been in New York for over a month shadowing Bank and casing his habits and movements. Bank was in the midst of his first trial for security fraud and was free for the time being to return to his home in The Dakota on West 72nd each night. Nate had never met Whip, although he’d seen a photo and had been briefed on him.
Whip was a longtime associate in the enterprise, and for most of it the only operator. As far as Nate could discern, Whip knew as little about him as he knew about Whip. They referred to each other by the code names given to them: Whip and The Falcon. Nate wondered if Whip liked the idea of an additional operator in the firm.
So far, Nate’s communications with Whip had been via prepaid throwaway cell phones—a new phone and a new number every day—so neither could be tracked or monitored.
Upon Nate’s arrival in New York, Whip had told him that Bank was literally untouchable during the daytime. He was picked up by federal marshals each morning and delivered to the courthouse of the Southern District of New York, and returned to The Dakota by two private bodyguards. Breaching the security at the building was nearly impossible, Whip said, and the problem with taking down Bank on the street was the proliferation of closed-circuit security cameras in the neighborhood: they were everywhere. Whip said he’d never seen so many cameras anywhere else except London.
Whip’s voice was low and flat, and with a hint of a southern accent that Nate guessed was western Kentucky. Whip didn’t try to get familiar with Nate in any way, and used as few words as possible to convey information. Nate was fine with that, and he guessed Whip had a similar Special Ops background because he used the same jargon.
Whip said he’d discovered a vulnerability in regard to Jonah Bank. Nate knew there was always a vulnerability, if the time and effort was spent to discover it. No human being could be one hundred percent secure. There was always a way to get close enough to a target to do the job.
Every night between seven and seven-thirty, Whip said, Bank left The Dakota alone on foot without minders or bodyguards. He changed out of his $3,000 Dolce & Gabbana three-piece courtroom suit into a baseball cap, a worn leather bomber jacket, baggy jeans, and Nike running shoes. Bank’s destination was Zabar’s, an eclectic specialty food store eight blocks away at Broadway and 80th, where he’d buy the “Nova Scotia”—a bagel with scallion cream cheese—and a single black-and-white cookie. Bank would return to the building before eight. Whip speculated that Bank’s bodyguards weren’t aware of his nightly sojourn, or they’d accompany him or insist on fetching the snack themselves.
Bank didn’t deviate from his established route on the round trip. After leaving The Dakota, he’d walk up West 72nd to Broadway and blend in with the crowded foot traffic for the remaining eight blocks to Zabar’s. But on the way back, while he was eating, he’d return by a different route: 80th to Amsterdam, then 74th to Columbus Avenue, then to 72nd and The Dakota, where he’d enter the same side door from which he’d departed.
Whip had identified one block on the return route that was poorly lit and not bristling with closed-circuit cameras. It was on 74th, between Amsterdam and Columbus. The block was quiet and residential, with only one storefront retail business—Abraham’s Florist Shop, where Abraham’s white panel delivery van was parked out front during business hours. The single CC camera Whip identified was across the street from the florist’s shop.
Many nights, Abraham took his van on final deliveries and never returned it. Whip guessed Abraham took it to his home in Brooklyn. Other nights, Abraham left the van parked and locked and rode the train home. There didn’t seem to be any way to predict whether the vehicle would be left on the street or gone for the night until Whip figured it out: it depended on the location of Abraham’s last delivery. If the delivery was in the direction of Brooklyn or in Brooklyn itself, Abraham kept the van. If it was somewhere else or there were no more deliveries at all, the owner would ride the train home.
So for the past three nights, Whip had placed anonymous orders via the Internet for deliveries after six to three different addresses on the way to Brooklyn, each time spe
cifying that the flowers be left on the stoop if the recipient wasn’t home. He paid for each with a valid but stolen credit card number from a list he’d been provided.
Whip had taken a photo of the florist’s logo on the side of the van with his cell phone, and had a vinyl replica made uptown. Then he’d found a nearly identical 2009 Chevy Express Cargo Van at a location near LaGuardia Airport and reserved it for Nate. Nate’s job was to drive the van and slip it into the empty space after Abraham went home for the night and wait for further instructions. If anyone ever reviewed the video history of the block, they’d notice the lack of a pattern to whether the van was there for the night or gone.
The CC camera could clearly view the van on the street, but it couldn’t see through it to the opposite sidewalk. There was an eighteen-foot length of pavement blocked by the van. Anything that happened within that eighteen feet couldn’t be seen.
• • •
ON BOTH OF THE two previous nights, Nate had heard his throwaway phone chirp and heard Whip say, “I’ve got him. Unlock the doors and get ready.” Nate had responded by punching the electric toggle on his armrest and hearing the locks clunk open. He watched the sidewalk via the passenger-side rearview mirror while poising his hand over the door handle, ready to throw open the sliding door.
On night one, Jonah Bank had been wearing the uniform Whip had described and he’d approached in an amble, as if he wanted the walk back to his home to last as long as possible. In the distance behind Bank was a rapidly approaching figure hidden in shadow. Nate guessed it was Whip.
As Bank neared the rear bumper of the van, Nate heard a cacophony of enthused voices and looked up to see ten or twelve well-dressed people coming down the sidewalk in a writhing knot. They’d engulfed Bank just as he approached the sliding side door of the van.
“Abort,” Whip said softly, and melded back into the darkness.
The group of people were clutching tickets and talking about the last time they’d heard Diana Krall sing at the Beacon Theatre a block away. They unconsciously parted to let Bank pass through them going in the other direction, and re-formed when he was through. By then he was twenty feet away on the sidewalk, strolling toward The Dakota, and two steps away from a pool of overhead streetlights and back in the field of vision of the CC camera.