“What happened?” she said.

“I had a nosebleed while you were asleep. Nothing to worry about.” I looked away from her. If there’s anything that feels worse than lying, it’s lying to a little girl. We went inside the Cracker Barrel, my legs wooden and awkward as they propelled me across the parking lot. Yeah, I’d been in that damned Contour for too long.

I had scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, and six cups of coffee. The coffee was strong and rich, and it rejuvenated me, giving a sharper edge to my mind and making the morning feel more like the start of a new day instead of the continuation of a long, strange night. Julie had an omelet, and Betsy ate silver-dollar pancakes drenched in an obscene amount of syrup. Kids. I’d chosen the wrong profession, all right. If I’d wanted to make money, I should have been a dentist. She didn’t ask about her father again, which surprised me. Most of the young children I’d known weren’t prone to giving up on a question like that until they’d received a satisfactory answer. Maybe she’d sensed some note of warning in her mother’s voice, or maybe she’d asked the question so many times in the past few days she was giving up on the satisfactory answer. Or maybe she was just distracted by the pancakes.

“Honey, why don’t you go to the bathroom?” Julie said when her daughter was done eating. “We’re going to be in the car for quite a while again.”

“Okay.” Betsy left her plateful of syrup and went to the bathroom, and Julie turned to me.

“So what’s the plan for the day?”

“We’re meeting my partner outside the city,” I said. “Then the three of us will sit down and talk.”

“What about your reporter friend?”

I was surprised she’d brought up Amy. “I can ask her to join us,” I said. “Is that something you want?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, I think that is definitely something I want.”

I sipped my coffee. “I see. Would you mind telling me why?”

“Why I want the reporter involved?” When I nodded, she said, “Insurance, I guess.”

“Insurance?”

“Yes. For example, if anything were to happen to me-if, heaven forbid, the police screwed up, or Hubbard paid them off-my story would still be told. I’d like to know that.”

“You’re more scared of Hubbard than of the Russians, aren’t you?”

She held my eyes for a second and then nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I am. He killed my husband, Lincoln. You don’t have to believe that, but I know it’s true. And I know my husband was scared of him, too. My cocky, brave husband, who always thought he was invincible, was scared of Jeremiah Hubbard. So scared that he preferred to throw his life away-throw our life away-rather than upset the man. You think Wayne avoided the police because he was afraid of the Russians?” She shook her head emphatically. “No way. He was concerned about them, obviously, but the only person who scared him was Jeremiah Hubbard.”

I thought about Cody and his FBI badge, and I thought about Richard Douglass, the top attorney in town, and maybe I was a little bit scared of Jeremiah Hubbard, too. At least the Russians used methods I understood, methods I was familiar with. Hubbard worked through different channels entirely, controlling situations with a checkbook instead of a gun. And there was no doubt his checkbook was far more powerful than any number of guns.

Betsy returned from the bathroom, bringing an abrupt end to my conversation with her mother. I paid the bill, relieved myself of some of the coffee, and then went back to the car. I was approaching twenty-four hours without sleep, but I wasn’t feeling it yet.

We drove out of West Virginia and into Ohio. As we headed north, Julie occupied Betsy by playing silly games like racing to see who could find all the letters of the alphabet on road signs. They were both stuck on X for quite a while, until Betsy spotted a hotel sign boasting of expanded cable. She wrapped the game up by finding a Z in a sign for a radio station called “Rock 93, WZPL.” The victory seemed to take something out of her, though, because she fell asleep again around eleven, as we neared Akron.

“Home sweet home,” Julie said as we drove through Akron and continued north on I-77 toward Cleveland. “Somehow I feel safer now.”

I pulled off the interstate at a rest stop a few minutes later. Julie went to the bathroom, but we let Betsy continue sleeping. I leaned against the trunk of the car and called Joe.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Just south of the city. Where are you?”

“Don Gellino’s lake cottage. You remember it?” Don Gellino was a retired cop who owned a small cottage in Medina County. He called it a lake cottage, but the body of water it stood beside wasn’t much more than a large pond. Good fishing, though, if Don was to be believed.

“I remember it. How the hell did you end up there?”

“Don’s in New Mexico for the winter staying with his kids. He left the key with me and asked me to check in on it from time to time. I thought it was as good a spot as any for our purposes.”

“Can’t argue with that. Is Kinkaid with you?”

“Not yet. I’m supposed to call him soon, though. I just didn’t think it would be a real good idea to drop him on Mrs. Weston on top of everything else she’s got to deal with.”

“Good choice,” I said. I didn’t want Julie to see Kinkaid, either. Whether my reasoning for that decision was based on Julie’s welfare or my own feelings for her was another question, and not one I felt like dealing with at the moment. “Julie wants Amy there, too.”

“Why?”

I explained her reasoning as best I could. “It makes some sense, Joe. If there’s anything usable as leverage with Hubbard, it’s going to be the threat of going public.”

“I don’t see why we need leverage with Hubbard. We’re not negotiating a business deal, you know. This woman needs to talk to the police.”

“Let’s do it her way, Joe.”

“Fine.”

I hung up with him and called Amy at her office. I got the voice mail, so I tried her cell phone, and this time she answered.

“Lincoln, I’ve been waiting to hear from you all day. You have no idea how close I’ve come to going to the police with this.”

“With what?”

“With everything, jackass. When I saw the story come over the wire this morning I about died.”

“Story?”

“Yeah, the story about the shootout at the Golden Breakers hotel. Don’t tell me you weren’t involved with it. I’m not that clueless.”

“I was involved with it,” I said. “Did the story give my name?”

“No, it didn’t give any names except the cop they interviewed and the hotel owner, some guy named Burks.”

“Lamar Burks, yeah. So what did the story say?”

“Just that there was an exchange of gunfire in and around this resort hotel early last night, and no arrests have been made. Apparently a desk clerk was beaten up, but she’s in stable condition.”

“There wasn’t anything about someone being killed in this shootout?”

“No. Should there have been?”

I frowned. “Yeah, there should have been. If there was a body at the scene, would the reporters know about it by now, or could the cops be holding out?”

“Press would have it by now,” she said confidently. “All we got on it was a little briefon the national news wire. I called the South Carolina bureau of the Associated Press for more details, and they told me they didn’t have anything else. No one was injured, and no arrests had been made, they said.”

No one was injured. Had I imagined shooting a man in the face? No, that didn’t seem like the type of thing that was easy to misinterpret. I’d killed him. If his body hadn’t been there, the Russians had taken it with them. Once I thought about it, that move made some sense. Leaving the body behind would have tied them to the shootings, and they were probably even more eager to avoid that than I was.

“What happened?” Amy asked.