Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

“Told them I was a lawyer.”

“You cite a case or two?”

“I could have.” She smiled. “I memorized the names of a couple on your desk. I was going to tell the desk sergeant I had to see my client because these new cases had just been put down.”

“It’s ‘handed down,’ “Tate corrected.

“Oh. Glad he didn’t ask.”

“I don’t know if we can get out that way. I came in under my own steam but the desk officer might know I’ve been arrested.” He looked back down the corridor. “Five minutes, tops, till they come looking.”

She rearranged the books she was carrying so the cover showed. A school hornbook, Williston on Contracts.

He laughed. “That’ll fool ‘em.” Then asked, “You got my message?”

She nodded. “I called Konnie and his assistant told me you’d been arrested. I couldn’t decide whether to get a lawyer or the gun. I figured we didn’t have time to wait for public defenders. My car’s outside.”

The old Bett McCall might have meditated for days, hoping for guidance. The new one went right for the Smith & Wesson.

They paused just before they turned the corner beside the guard station. He took a breath. “Ready?”

“I guess.”

“Let’s go.”

Tate started forward, Bett at his side. The guard glanced at them but out they strolled without a hitch, signing the “time departed” line in the logbook scrupulously-one a phony prosecutor and one a phony defense lawyer and both of them now felons.

Aaron Matthews was driving, seventy, then eighty miles an hour.

Anger had given way to sorrow. To the same piercing hollowness he’d felt in the months after Peter had died in prison. Sorrow at plans gone wrong, terribly wrong.

Matthews had been at his rental house, off Route 29, waiting to see if he’d finally stopped Tate Collier. He believed he had. He’d given up on the subtlety, given up on the words, given up on the delicious art of persuasion. Stiff with anger, he’d dragged the Walker girl, screaming, from the trunk of his car. Said nothing, convinced her of nothing-he’d just slashed and slashed and slashed… All of his anger flowing from him as hot and sudden as the blood from her body. He’d called from a pay phone to report seeing a body then had sped home.

There the phone had rung. He hadn’t answered but listened to the message as the officer left it. Some bullshit about traffic tickets. “Give us a call when you get home. Thank you.”

It meant, of course, that they knew about him. Or suspected, at least.

How had it happened? Why hadn’t they just tossed Collier into the lockup and ignored him? Maybe he had actually convinced them that he was innocent and that Matthews had kidnapped the girl. The fucking silver-tongued devil! An angry, sorrowful mood exploded within Matthews like napalm.

It was only a matter of time now before they found Blue Ridge Facility. They knew his name, they’d find out his connection there, and they’d find Megan.

He stared out the window for a moment. Then closed his eyes.

In a perfect world, moods don’t burn you like torches, juries work pure justice and revenge befalls sinners in exact proportion to their crimes. In a perfect world Matthews would have kept Megan McCall as his child forever, a replacement for Peter. And Tate Collier would have lived in despair all his life, never knowing where she was-knowing only that she’d fled from him, propelled by undiluted hate.

But there was no chance for such symmetry now. All his hopes had unraveled. And there was only one answer left. To kill the girl and leave. Flee to the West Coast, New England, maybe overseas.

He’d lost his son, Tate Collier would lose his daughter.

A kind of cure, a kind of justice, a kind of revenge…

He spent a few minutes preparing some things in his house then hurried to his car. He sped out onto the highway, toward the distant humps of mountains, a sensuous dark line above which no stars became stars and the moon showed as a faint, white crescent of frown.

Cleaning the deep wounds was the hardest part.

She’d found a cheap sewing kit in the bedroom and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet.

He took the stitches bravely (even though she cringed every time the needle pierced his skin). But when Megan poured a capful of alcohol on the wounds he shivered frantically at the pain.

“Oh, I’m sorry”

‘No, no,” came his garbled voice, “Keep at it, Ms. Beautiful…

Her eyes teared when she heard the nickname he’d used the night he picked her up.

“Even if you get out, you’ll never get past ‘em. The dogs. He’s got four or five of the big flickers.”

“You’re sure you can’t walk?”

“I don’t think so,” he gurgled. “No.”

“Okay, you stay here. I saw a door going to the basement. I think I can break it open. I’m going to see if there’s a door or window down there. Maybe it’ll lead outside.”

He nodded, breathed, “I love…“ and passed out.

She stacked the cinder blocks around him so that if Matthews glanced this way he wouldn’t see the young man.

She listened for a moment to his low, uneven breathing. Then, knife in one hand, she started down the corridor.

Megan was almost to the intersection of the corridors when she heard the creak of a door opening. Then it slammed.

Aaron Matthews had returned.

They drove in silence through destitute parts of Prince William County. They passed tilled fields, where the taproots of corn were reaching silently down into the dark, red-tinted earth. Barns long ago abandoned. Decaying tract bungalows, where postwar dreams had withered fast-tiny cubes of vinyl-and aluminum-sided homes. Shacks and cars on blocks.

Through Manassas, where the fearsome Rebel yell was first heard, then through the outlying farms and past the Confederate Cemetery

“It was him, Tate,” Bett said, breaking a long silence.

“Who?”

“A man came to see me. He said he was her therapist but he wasn’t.”

“It was Matthews?”

“He called himself Peters.”

“His son’s name was Peter,” Tate mused. “That must be why he picked it.” Glanced at her. “What happened?”

She shook her head. “He seduced me. Nothing really happened but it was enough…Oh, Tate, he looked right into my soul. He knew what I wanted to hear. He said exactly the right things.”

You can talk your way into somebody’s heart and get them to do whatever you want. Judge or jury, you’re got that skill. Words, Tate. Words. You can’t see them but they’re the most dangerous weapons on earth, Remember that. Be careful, son.

She continued, “He’d called Brad. I think he pretended he was a cop and told him to get to my house. We were together on the couch… I was drunk… Oh, Tate.”

Tate put his hand on her knee, squeezed lightly “There was nothing you could’ve done, Bett. He’s too good. Somehow, he’s done all of this. Dr. Hanson, Konnie… probably Eckhard too, the teacher. Just to get even with me.” They drove on in silence. Then Tate realized something. “You got here too quickly”

“What?“

“You couldn’t have been in Baltimore when you got my message.”

“No, I got as far as Takoma Park and turned back.”

“Why?”

A long pause.

“Because I decided it had to stop.” Instinctively she flipped the mirror down and examined her face. Poked at a wrinkle or two. “I was running after Brad and I should have been going after Megan.” She continued, “I realized something, Tate. How mad I’ve been at her.”

“At Megan? Because of what we heard at the Coffee Shop?”

“Oh, Lord, no. That’s my fault, not hers.” She took a deep breath, flipped the mirror back up. “No, Tate. I’ve been mad at her for years. And I shouldn’t’ve been. It wasn’t her fault. She was born at the wrong time and the wrong place.”