“You must be joking.”

“I assure you, I am not.”

“You sound like you think you’re infallible, Miss Nantz. Let me assure you of something. You’re not. You’re very much mistaken. I had nothing to do with the murder of Joseph Keener, and I have absolute proof that would stand up in any court of law.”

“If you’re referring to the items planted in Randall Shane’s motel room, those are easily refuted.”

Gatling puts the cup down and leans forward, and for the first time radiates a kind of physical menace, without so much as lifting a finger. It’s just there, palpable. This is a man who knows how to kill. “You think you know something but you don’t.”

“Please enlighten me,” Naomi says.

He twitches in his seat and for a moment I think she’s gotten to him. Then he reaches into a trouser pocket and retrieves a vibrating cell phone. Text message, apparently. Whatever he sees on the screen displeases him. He stands up and jerks his chin at the manicured pathway that leads to the exit.

“Get out,” he says, cold as the berg that sank the Titanic. “Now. Or you’ll be taken into custody.”

He lifts the cell phone to his ear, turns away and gestures to the bruiser in the blazer, who has been lurking in the rhododendrons.

We dames know how to scurry when the scurry time is here.

Chapter Forty-Seven

All the Way Home

For the first ten miles or so, Naomi doesn’t say a word. She’s in the back, brooding, while I ride shotgun, peeking at the side mirror to see if we’re being followed. Yes, there are many vehicles behind us, including a convoy of freight trucks, but nothing jumps out. We’ve cleared the tollbooths on 95, heading south, when I finally decide to break the silence. “That went well. We really left him shaking in his penny loafers.”

Naomi stares out the window, ignoring me. Which totally gets on my nerves.

“It was amazing, Jack,” I say. “You should have seen us. We strapped him to an antique ironing board, stuffed his mouth with an authentic seventeenth-century dish-rag and applied water. Two cups and he was begging for mercy. Confessed he had Joey locked in the servant’s cupboard. That’s why we’re heading back to Boston, to get a locksmith.”

“Hush,” Naomi says quietly. “I’m thinking.”

Nuts. Those happen to be the only two words that will stop me. When Naomi Nantz says she’s thinking she’s not kidding. Her brain is working the problem, running the possibilities, looking for a way in.

So I shut up for thirty miles.

“I believe him,” she finally says.

“Bernie Madoff? O. J. Simpson? Glenn Beck?”

She ignores me, and directs her comments to Jack. “He said he had nothing to do with the murder of Joseph Keener, and that he has absolute proof to that effect.”

“Okay,” says Jack. “But what makes you believe him? Gut reaction or facts on the ground?”

“That’s what I’m trying to determine,” she says. “We know the following about Taylor Gatling, Jr. He was pushing to have Professor Keener investigated by a legitimate agency, and when that failed he took it upon himself to put Keener under surveillance. Because he has reason to want revenge on Randall Shane, we assume that he was complicit in planting evidence that made Shane the prime suspect in the professor’s murder. That’s an assumption not yet established as fact. On the other hand, it’s a virtual certainty that Gatling’s men took Shane and subjected him to enhanced interrogation. But why? If they knew Shane to be innocent, what could they possibly learn from him? And if the purpose is to frame him, why not leave him to be arrested, why complicate the situation with an airborne abduction in broad daylight?”

“So you’re saying you don’t think Gatling had Joey abducted?”

Let her try and ignore that one. She can’t, and she doesn’t.

“No, I’m not saying that” she says, leveling her eyes at me. “Gatling is a seeker of power. It’s highly probable that he had the boy kidnapped in Hong Kong and brought here, to give him some sort of leverage. I just don’t know for what purpose, precisely.”

“Maybe it started out as a plot to implicate the great Randall Shane in a kidnapping,” I suggest. “Turn the hero into a villain, make it look like his whole life was a lie. And then the professor gets killed and framing Shane for the murder is an extra.”

“I’ll buy that,” Jack offers.

“Then you are both ignoring facts in contravention of the premise,” Naomi says. “Evidence was planted in Shane’s motel room in advance of him discovering Keener’s body. That can only have occurred if the plot to frame him was under way before Keener was executed.”

“Maybe the facts are wrong.”

“Facts are facts, Alice,” she reminds me. “Inconvenient as they may sometimes be.”

“Well, somebody famous said facts are the hobgoblin of little minds,” I retort.

“Ralph Waldo Emerson. And what he said referred to a foolish consistency, not facts.”

“Okay. So maybe we’re being foolishly consistent.”

“Emerson’s idea was that we should all avoid conformity and find our own way. He was urging us to be self-reliant.”

“Know-it-all,” I say.

“I wish I did know it all,” Naomi says, sounding plaintive. “If I knew it all, we wouldn’t have been trying to shake the suspect’s cage, and Joey Keener would already be safe and sound.”

Not another word from her, all the way home.

Chapter Forty-Eight

God Who Made the Stars

By the time Gatling arrives in Prides Crossing he’s in a full-blown rage. His anger is directed not only at the man called Kidder, but at himself for hiring the screwup in the first place. He’d known Kidder since they’d both served in special ops, and he’d been an oddball even then, but it was a useful kind of strange. The man simply had no compunction about breaking the law when ordered to do so, which had come in handy on more than one occasion. But Gatling sees that it had been a mistake to take him on as a civilian freelancer. Whatever competence Kidder had in the military has diminished over the past few years, along with any sense of discipline. He no longer follows orders, has no respect for the chain of command. He thinks he knows better, he makes threats, and now, finally, a screwup so huge that it’s beyond mind-boggling, and might actually put Gatling and his entire organization at risk, despite all his connections, all his precautions.

Gatling screeches the van to a halt, jams it in Park and turns off the motor. Kidder meets him in the driveway, shambling out of the open bay of the garage like some oversize garden gnome wearing, absurdly, a black wool watch cap pulled down over his ears. Plus his eyes look wrong.

“Woo!” Kidder huffs, clapping his hands together. “That didn’t take long. When was it I called you? Last week?”

Gatling speaks through clenched teeth. “Less than an hour ago, you moron. What the hell happened?”

“Ha! Wish I knew!” Kidder grins. There are flecks of blood on his teeth. “There was beautiful music and then I saw God.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Kidder sidles up close. His breath is putrid, powerfully bad. “You know who God looks like? He looks like you in a bad mood. Are you in a bad mood, Junior? Huh?”

Gatling grabs Kidder’s right arm and squeezes. Sees the pain light up the man’s eyes. “What did you do? Speak, or so help me God.”