He swung the door open wide and invited them inside.

Chapter 101

THE SIXTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MAN led the two boys through the vestibule and living room, into his private library. He switched on some lights: the stained-glass Tiffany lamp on the desk he’d used in the governor’s mansion, the down-lighting above the floor-to-ceiling bookcases of law books.

“Is your wife at home?” the one called Hawk asked him.

“She’s had a very stressful day,” Campion said. “She couldn’t wait up. Can I get you boys something to drink?”

“Actually, we brought you this,” Pidge said, handing over the bottle of Cointreau. Connor thanked the boy, slid down the foil bag, and looked at the label.

“Thanks for this. I’ll open this for you if you like, or maybe you’d like something else. I’m having scotch.”

“We’re good, sir,” said Pidge.

Campion put the bottle next to Michael’s picture on the ornately carved mantelpiece, then bent to open the bowed glass doors of the vitrine he used as a liquor cabinet. He took out a bottle of Chivas and a glass. When he turned, he saw the gun in Hawk’s hand.

Campion’s muscles clenched as he stared at the revolver; then he looked up at the smirk on Pidge’s face.

“Are you crazy? You’re holding me up?”

Behind Pidge, Hawk’s eyes were bright, smiling with anticipation, as he took a reel of fishing line out of his back pocket. Horror came over Campion as suspicion bloomed in his mind. He turned his back to the boys, said neutrally, “I guess I won’t be having this.” He made a show of putting the Chivas back inside the cabinet, while feeling around the shelf with the flat of his hand.

“We have to tie you up, sir, make it look like a robbery. It’s for our own protection,” Pidge said.

“And you need to get Mrs. Campion down here,” Hawk added firmly. “She’ll want to hear what we have to say.”

Campion whipped around, pointed his SIG at Hawk’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. Bang.

Hawk’s face registered surprise as he looked down at his pink shirt, saw the blood.

“Hey,” said Hawk.

Didn’t these punks know that a man like him would have guns stashed everywhere? Campion fired at Hawk again, and the boy dropped to his knees. He stared up at the older man and returned fire, his shot shattering the mirror over the fireplace. Then Hawk collapsed onto the rug facedown.

Pidge had frozen at the sound of the shooting. Now he screamed, “You shit! You crazy old shit! Look what you did!”

Pidge backed out of the room, and when he cleared the library’s doorway, he turned and raced for the front door. Campion walked over to Hawk, kicked the gun out of his outstretched hand, lost his footing, and fell, hitting his chin against the edge of the desk. He pulled himself up using the desk leg, then stumbled out to the vestibule and pressed the intercom that connected to the caretaker’s cottage.

“Glen,” he yelled. “Call 911. I shot someone!”

By the time Campion reached the front walk, Pidge was gone. The caretaker came running across the yard with a rifle, and Valentina stood in the front doorway, her eyes huge, asking him what in God’s name had happened.

Lights winked on in neighboring houses, and the wolfhound next door barked.

But there was no sign of Pidge.

Campion clamped his fist around the grip of his gun and shouted into the dark, “You killed my son, you son of a bitch, didn’t you? You killed my son!”

Chapter 102

I ARRIVED AT the Campions’ home within fifteen minutes of getting Jacobi’s call. A herd of patrol cars blocked the street, and paramedics bumped down the stone steps with their loaded gurney, heading out to the ambulance.

I went to the gurney, observed as much of the victim as I could. An oxygen mask half covered his face, and a sheet was pulled up to his chin. I judged that the young man was in his late teens or early twenties, white, with well-cut, dirty-blond hair, maybe five ten.

Most important, he was alive.

“Is he going to make it?” I asked one of the paramedics.

She shrugged, said, “He’s got two slugs in him, Sergeant. Lost a lot of blood.”

Inside the house, Jacobi and Conklin were debriefing the former governor and Valentina Campion, who sat together on a sofa, shoulder to shoulder, their hands entwined. Conklin shot me a look: something he wanted me to understand. It took me a few minutes to get it.

Jacobi filled me in on what had transpired, told me that there was no ID on the kid Campion had shot. Then he said to the former governor, “You say you can identify the second boy, sir? Help our sketch artist?”

Campion nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll never forget that kid’s face.”

Campion looked to be in terrible pain. He’d shot someone only minutes before, and when he asked me to sit down in the chair near the sofa, I thought he wanted to tell me about that. But I was wrong.

Campion said, “Michael wanted to be like his friends. Go out. Have fun. So I was always on his case, you know? When I caught him sneaking out at night, I reprimanded him, took away privileges, and he hated me for it.”

“No he didn’t,” Valentina Campion said sharply. “You did what I didn’t have the courage to do, Connor.”

“Sir?” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

Campion’s face sagged with exhaustion.

“He was being irresponsible,” Campion continued, “and I was trying to keep him safe. I was looking ahead to the future – a new medical procedure, a pharmaceutical breakthrough. Something.

“I told him, straight up, ‘When you decide to act like an adult, let me know.’ I wasn’t angry, I was afraid,” Campion said, his voice cracking. “So I lost him before I lost him.”

His wife tried to calm him, but Connor Campion wouldn’t be soothed. “I was a tyrant,” Campion said. “Mikey and I didn’t speak for the whole last month of his life. If I’d known he had a month to live… Michael told me, ‘Quality of life, Dad. That’s what’s important.’ ”

Campion fixed me with his bloodshot eyes.

“You seem to be a caring person, Sergeant. I’m telling you this so you understand. I let those hooligans into my house because they said they had information about Michael – and I had to know what it was.

“Now I think they killed him, don’t you? And tonight they were going to rob us. But why? Why?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

I told Campion that as soon as we knew anything, we’d let him know. That was all I had for him. But I got it now, why Conklin had given me that look when I’d walked in the door. My mind was running with it.

I signaled to my partner and we went outside.

Chapter 103

CONKLIN AND I leaned against the side of my car, facing the Campion house, staring at the lights glowing softly through a million little windowpanes. Campion and his wife didn’t know what kind of death Hawk and Pidge had planned for them tonight, but we knew – and thinking about that near miss was giving me the horrors.

If Connor Campion hadn’t fired his gun, Hawk and Pidge would have roasted him and his wife alive.

Rich pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one – and this time I took him up on it.

“Might be some prints on that foil around the bottle of booze,” he said.

I nodded, thinking we’d be lucky if those kids had records, if their prints were in AFIS, but I wasn’t counting on it.

“Hawk. Pidge. Crazy names,” Conklin said.

“I got a pretty good look at Hawk,” I said. “He matches Molly Chu’s description of the so-called angel who carried her out of the fire.”

Conklin exhaled a long stream of smoke into the night. He said, “And the governor’s description of Pidge sounds like the kid who pawned Patty Malone’s necklace.”