"No, you wouldn't. They obviously knew what they were doing. And you obviously didn't," he added.

"Shit," grumbled Tuck.

"What did you overhear on the phone calls? As detailed as you can."

"There were two calls. I just happened to pick up the same time as Pam did on one of them. I heard a guy's voice. He said something like, 'I want to meet. And soon.' And Pam wanted to do it later. That's all I heard before I got nervous and hung up."

"And the other time?"

I was walking past the bedroom. She must've thought I had already left, but I forgot my briefcase and had come back from the garage. She was talking in a low voice but I heard her say that I was leaving town in two days and they could meet then."

"And what happened?"

"I only pretended to leave town. I changed my flight and followed her. She went to a coffee shop about a half hour away."

"And you saw the guy?"

"Yeah."

"Hair color, build, race, age?"

"Big guy. About your height. I know that because he stood when she walked in. He was white with short dark hair that had some gray. Maybe about fifty. Real professional-looking."

"So what did you do?"

"I sat in my car for about half an hour. Then Pam came out and I took off."

"Why didn't you wait around for the guy to come out and then confront him?"

"I told you, he was a big guy."

"Is that the only reason?"

Silence.

"Tuck, talk to me!"

"Okay, okay. He was dressed in a suit. I could see them looking at papers. They never did anything lovey-dovey. So, I suddenly started thinking…"

"What, that maybe he wasn't her lover boy? That maybe he was a lawyer and Pam was thinking about divorcing your ass?"

"Or that he was a PI like you that she'd hired to check up on me."

That was probably what Pam had wanted to meet with me about.

"Wait a minute, if you thought that, why did you come back from Florida early, the night Pam was killed? You said you wanted to catch them in the act, maybe kick the guy's ass. But now you just admitted you took off before because he was a big guy. And you also admitted that you started thinking he wasn't her lover but maybe a PI. Stop the bullshit. I want the truth."

"This is embarrassing, Sean."

"Tuck, do you want to get Willa back?"

"Of course I do!"

"Then forget your feelings of embarrassment and tell me the truth."

Tuck blurted out, "I thought if I caught the guy coming out of our house, I could intercept him and maybe buy him off."

"Why?"

"The same reason why Dawson obviously did what he did. If Pam found out about the affair and went public the contract was down the crapper. I couldn't let that happen, Sean. I'd worked my tail off. It meant everything."

A big part of Sean wanted to reach across the ephemeral mist of cellular signals and flatten Tuck Dutton.

"Well, obviously it meant more to you than your marriage. And that story you and Jane fed me at the hospital? About your partner trying to force you to sell because you needed the money. That was all BS!"

"It wasn't exactly the truth, no."

"And Jane knew it wasn't the truth?"

"She was just trying to protect me, Sean. She always has. And I keep letting her down."

"Look, do you think Pam had anything written down that would lead us to this guy? Or maybe his business card if he was a lawyer or a PI?"

"Why? He's not connected to Willa and what happened to Pam. It must have to do with my fling with Cassandra."

"Tuck, will you pull your brains out of your crotch and stick them back in your head for just one damn second? This having to do with your fling with Cassandra is only one theory and a pretty implausible one at that. Think about it, okay? Why kill your wife and kidnap Willa over a government contract? Dawson was already set to screw you over with Cassandra, so why would he do it? Are there any other competitors out there willing to risk the death penalty for that contract?"

"Well, no, not really. Government contracting is brutal, but not that brutal."

"Great, thanks for employing some logic. Now, another take is that this guy had something to do with Willa's disappearance and Pam's death and it's totally unrelated to your mess."

"But how could that be? Why would he call Pam and then meet with her if he was going to do something like that?"

"Ever heard of meeting under false pretenses to gain some inside intelligence? You folks in the government contracting arena seem to have made a science out of it."

Tuck said slowly, "Oh, yeah, I guess I see your point."

"Have you told the FBI any of this? About Cassandra and the guy you saw with Pam?"

"Of course not. Wait a minute, do I have to?"

"Don't ask me, I'm not your legal advisor. And when I get back to town you and I are going to straighten some things out with your sister."

"Back in town? Where are you?"

"In Tennessee."

"Why?"

"A funeral."

"Jesus, I just remembered. We're burying Pam on Friday. Jane is taking care of all the arrangements."

"I'm sure she is."

"Will you be back by then?"

"Yes, I will. But guess what, Tuck."

"What?"

"I'll be there for Pam. Not you! Oh, and while we're being so truthful here, tell me this, was Willa the adopted child?"

"What!" Tuck sounded shocked.

"The postmortem confirmed that Pam only had two C-sections and she couldn't deliver the normal way. You've got three kids, so which one was it? Willa?"

Tuck hung up the phone.

"Thanks for the answer," Sean said to himself.

CHAPTER 36

QUARRY SLID his fat key ring out, found the right one, and opened the four-inch-thick door that had been built almost two centuries ago. Atlee was a jumble of dynamics; part southern baronial, part white trash, and part American history. This last part was demonstrated by the room he was now stepping into. It was in the bowels of the main house, dug so far down into the earth that one could never escape the sickly sweet smell of damp, hardened red clay. It was in this room that Quarry's ancestors had sent their most unruly slaves for lengthy stays so as not to incite the rest of the "unfree" population. Quarry had removed the leg and wrist irons from the walls, and also the wooden partitions of cells that had separated slaves from each other lest they gain any strength in numbers. That part of his family history he could live without.

People had died down here. Quarry knew this to be true from the excellent records kept by his slaveholding family. Men, women, and even children. Sometimes when he was down here at night he felt them, thought he heard their moans, the tailings of their final snatches of breath, their barely audible farewells.

He closed the door behind him and locked it. He noted, as he always did, the long and deep scratches on the thick hand-sawn oak; the fingernails of folks trying to gain their freedom. If one looked close enough, one could see the lingering dark traces of old blood on the wood. From the records he'd seen, Quarry also knew that not a single one of them had been successful in escaping from here.

The walls were now covered with painted plywood. He'd studded and framed the walls and then used a sturdy hammer and his own strong arms to nail in the half-inch plywood that came in eight-foot-long sections. It was heavy work, but the sweat had been welcome to him. He'd always embraced projects that made him tired at the end of the day.

And set forth on the painted plywood was work that represented entire years of Quarry's life. There were chalkboards he'd salvaged from torn-down schools and magic-marker boards he'd gotten cheap from a company going out of business. These surfaces were covered with writing, Quarry's precise, homeschool-learned cursive. There were lines connecting to other notes, and still more lines intersecting with other collections of facts. Pushpins colored red, blue, and green were all over the place, each of them connected by string. It was like a mathematician's or a physicist's work of art. Sometimes he felt he was the John Nash of his little corner of Alabama. Except, he hoped, for the paranoid-schizophrenic part. One clear difference between him and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist was that there were no intricate formulas or numbers other than calendar dates on the walls. The bulk was simply words that still managed to tell a complex story.