“Let’s do it,” Kathy says, obviously eager to be on the move.

Shane touches her uninjured arm. “Hold position,” he says firmly. “Don’t move until we have a visual on Joey. If he’s there. If the jet is for him.”

“He’s there.”

She sounds so certain.

“You see him?”

She shakes her head, the light of a true believer blazing in her haunted eyes. “God led me to this place. Just as he led you.”

And really, what can you say to that? We watch silently, intently, as the jet refuels. At no time does the aircraft open a hatch or lower stairs. Which I find strange. In my limited experience of flying on private jets, the pilots like to get out and kick the tires, go through their checklists and so on. And when, finally, the refueling has been completed, the man in the orange vest returns with a small tractor. He hooks up to the front wheel of the jet and begins the slow process of pulling it toward the hangar.

As the superwide hangar doors begin to lift, yawning open to the dimness within, Kathy Mancero suddenly gets to her feet. “That’s it,” she announces. “They want the plane under cover when they bring Joey out.”

Shane takes issue. “Sorry, hey, but we still don’t know for sure the kid is there.”

“You don’t,” Kathy says adamantly. “I do.”

She breaks free of Shane’s restraining touch and runs. Heading along the edge of the woods, aiming for the hangar, as fast as she can go.

We have no choice but to follow.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Everything She Has Ever Feared

Kathy runs instinctively, choosing an angle that will make her approach unseen to anyone who happens to be inside the hangar. If there are other guards in place they’ve not made themselves known, and she sees the intentional lack of witnesses as yet another signal that something terrible is about to go down. The ground crew had been limited to one. The pilots have yet to exit the plane, as if to make sure they never register on surveillance tapes, or because they suspect their mission is somehow shameful. And now the refueled aircraft is being dragged into the darkness of the hangar, as if complicit in some terrible act best concealed from the world of light.

All signs that the time for bad things has come.

Shane and the other woman may not quite be able to see it, but the meaning is clear to Kathy. It has been revealed. Her belief that she’s being guided, that she has a purpose, a role to play, is absolute. The pain of her wound is as nothing. All that matters is Joey, who, in her desperate foolishness, she helped abduct in the first place. Now she’s being given a chance to put that right, to return balance and love to the world and, in her own mind, to confirm the existence of heaven.

Kathy runs like the wind, feeling light and strong and filled with an exhilarating sense of joy. She has no fear because everything she has ever feared has already come to pass. Her heart is open, her eyes are clear. She knows absolutely that her blessed daughter, Stacy, watches and approves, rooting for her to help the little boy with the music in his hands.

At some point, as if letting her feet find the way, she cuts across the wide expanse of the runway, heading for the north side of the hangar. A high wall of gray corrugated metal. It is there that she believes she will find Joey, there that he will be saved. She believes that in that same miraculous moment she, too, will be saved, and nothing on this earth will stop her from trying.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

When the Music Stops

Randall Shane, doing his best to keep up—his long legs should easily be outrunning my own—seems to have come hard up against the limits of what his damaged body can deliver. We’re barely out of the woods when he doubles over, clutching his left knee, and wobbles to a halt. Through a grimace of pain he says, “Torn ligaments. Sorry. I can walk but apparently I can’t run.”

He reaches into a trouser pocket, retrieves the snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson and places it in my hands. “Fully loaded,” he cautions. “Concealed hammer, double-action. Pull the trigger all the way and it fires.”

I accept the weapon, feeling about as confident as a first-day medical student being dropped into the middle of brain surgery. That one time at the range I had managed to empty a five-shot cylinder without hitting the target.

“I may be the worst shot in Boston,” I warn him.

“Then consider yourself armed and dangerous. Go. I’ll try and catch up.”

“The woman is crazy, you know.”

Shane shakes his head. “She’s not afraid to die. That’s not the same thing as crazy. I’ll be right along. Please, just go, do what you can.”

What the hell. Maybe this is the day I get to be a hero, or to help one out. I slip the little snubby in my waistband and bolt across the wide concrete runway, following the skinny gazelle with the crazy, wonderful light in her eyes.

Probably no more than a few hundred yards, but it feels like miles. Not because the running is hard—I have adrenaline to spare—but because it’s so exposed. I feel like a big fly on a windowpane, waiting for the swatter to splat me. But if there’s anybody watching, they give no sign, no shouts or sirens, and I reach the hangar wall unimpeded.

Pausing for just a moment to catch my breath, aware of the heat radiating from the corrugated steel. Kathy Mancero, poised at the far end of the hangar, beckons me forward. Eyes still so intense I can barely meet her gaze.

“You’ve got the gun?”

I reach to my waist, prepared to hand it over.

“No, no, keep it. I’d be afraid of hitting Joey. Just cover me.”

Great. I’m hoping Shane gets here fast. I’m keenly aware that without the necessary skill, and the willingness to use it, a handgun isn’t much more than a prop. I make a silent vow to sign up for more firing-range lessons, as many as it takes. Hoping that it won’t be too little, too late.

From inside the hangar we hear the creak and moan of the huge doors lifting, steel on steel, bucking and grinding. A noise that will surely cover our footsteps as we edge along and find the outside corner of the massive building.

“Inside,” Kathy whispers, her breath strangely cool as it brushes my ear.

Before I quite understand, she ducks into the shadows just inside the hangar.

There’s nothing for me to do but follow. My heart slams like a two-year-old in full tantrum. I’m aware of a mass of cooler air, the chill of shadows hushed within the hangar. Crouching, I attempt to make myself small as the jet passes into the interior, the end of the wing only yards away, being smoothly pulled by the little tractor. My eyes gradually adjust—the interior illumination does little to pierce the vast dimness of the hangar—and realize, with great relief, that I haven’t been spotted because there’s nobody to see me, or, for that matter, Kathy, who continues to slip along against the wall, finding cover as she goes. There are no security guards, no ground crew or mechanics, no one but the gleaming jet and the man on the tractor, whose back is toward us.

When the jet is fully inside the hangar, the man on the tractor climbs off and removes his noise-muffling headgear, revealing a wool cap pulled down to his ears.

Him. The guy from the closet. The home invader who put a gun to my head.