Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

Nonetheless, the local police were conducting a full canvass of the area, both because it was dictated by procedure and because when it came to a child’s abduction, all bets were hedged.

In profile, her nose turned slightly upward, her lips looked a little less full than the lips he remembered kissing. Larson adored the perfect pear shape of her ears and was reminded of the dead woman in Minneapolis. There was so much more to tell her, both personally and professionally, but first was the question of Penny’s whereabouts.

Larson believed Penny’s abductor might call Hope’s cell phone, as Penny was believed to have the number memorized. The call wouldn’t be for ransom, though. All the Romeros wanted was this woman dead.

For the moment Larson was authorized to oversee Hope’s protection (he couldn’t think of her as Alice) while his FATF team continued to pursue Markowitz and Laena . When and if WITSEC stabilized, Hope would be turned over to Justice for more permanent protection.

He said, “We can’t take you to our offices because they’re too public and could be being watched.”

“All I care about is getting Penny,” she said, looking out the windshield now. Searching.

“That’s all I want, too,” he said. He decided to trust her with the truth. “We think we may have a mole, either in WITSEC or FATF. We’ve lost something valuable to us. That’s why the alert went out. While we figure out how to get Penny back, I’m taking you into a safe house to ride this out.”

“Ride what out? Finding Penny, or the return of whatever was taken from you?”

“Both,” he said, speaking only for himself. Rotem and others would see Penny as an unfortunate; her life would not measure well against the lives of thousands of other witnesses and dependents. While trying to ensure her safety, ultimately they would use her, lose her, if necessary. Larson could not go along with that, but neither could he tell Hope this now.

After a few painful moments of silence, during which the only sounds were her occasional sniffing back a runny nose, Larson said, “We should go.”

“We can’t leave. She’ll come back home.”

“Your apartment building will be watched twenty-four/seven. I’m in constant contact.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“They want you , Hope.” He didn’t bother to correct himself-he wasn’t going to get used to her as Alice. “We are leaving. We’re going to get you to safety. Every effort is being made to locate Penny. There’s nothing to be gained by staying here and putting you so out in the open.”

“And if I get out of this car?” she asked, her hand on the car door. “I’m allowed to do that, right? WITSEC, any kind of government protection, is voluntary, right?”

She remembered her orientation materials well. “Technically, but we can hold you as a material witness to a crime.”

“Those crimes happened over six years ago!”

“There’s no statute of limitations on federal capital murder cases. You’re in this now.”

“I’ll get an attorney,” she said, still resisting.

“And it’ll get ugly,” he shot back. “And all that energy, time, will be diverted away from where we need it most: finding Penny.”

Again, she looked at Larson directly. “Do something.”

Larson turned the ignition.

Larson drove his Explorer down a perfectly straight farm road. Less than forty minutes west of St. Louis, the McMansion suburban developments finally stopped sprawling and the flat expanse of generational farms took over, the small white houses and silos surrounded by brown tilled ground, rail fence, and pasture. The almost geometrical landscape looked familiar to both passengers. Six years earlier, Larson had sequestered protected witness Hope Stevens in the same Marshals Service safe house-the Orchard House-that now was his destination.

The closer they drew to the final turn, across a wooden bridge and up the hill, the more those memories weighed on him. It was at the farmhouse where they’d first found each other-and had last seen each other.

For six years he’d avoided reliving such moments, no great fan of nostalgia and unwilling to be one of those people who lived constantly with one foot in the past. But now, with her finally in the seat beside him, something allowed him to revisit another time in this same place, and he gave in to it willingly.

Larson had run the protection squad back then, and the rotation of assignments had conveniently left him inside the farmhouse with her, while Stubblefield and Hampton had perimeter patrol. He later wondered whether he’d been set up, whether Hamp and Stubby had felt the chemistry between them and arranged this one night for them. But he wasn’t thinking such things at the time. He was thanking his stars.

The two-story, hundred-year-old farmhouse had not been restored since the thirties and remained in a state of neglect. It sagged, with wandering cracks, like lightning bolts, in the green-painted plaster walls and white ceilings, gaping chips drawn by gravity out of the dining room’s elaborate ceiling molding, swollen black fingers of cigarette and cigar burns at the edges of much of the furniture, especially the dining room table where witnesses and their deputies had whiled away the hours with games of poker and scotch. The house had been shown little respect since its incorporation into the Marshals Service. The exterior, once a fashionable gray, was now peeling paint, curling away from the western sun and sloughing off like reptilian scales.

What had once been a proper and formal staircase led up to a narrow second-floor hallway off of which were two small bedrooms and a narrow bath wedged between them, probably originally a linen closet or nursery. Another, smaller corridor, added hastily years before and without the care given the original construction, led over a study below and into two oddly shaped bedrooms connected one to the other through an ill-fitted communicating door. A foul-smelling, twisting set of back stairs led from the added bedrooms down to the small kitchen below. Because of these additions the house had a wandering, cut-up, and unpredictable feel to it, seeming larger than it actually was.

She’d called him upstairs. “Lars?”

And he knew before arriving that despite other nights of comforting, of intimacy, that this was their moment of consummation. He knew what she had in mind not from anything said but by the pent-up energy that had been forced to simmer between them while in the company of others. He couldn’t identify the moment between them that accounted for the way he felt, nor had she directly communicated to him her own emotions or desires, and yet he knew. He knew this was wrong, against all regulations, and he knew this was going to happen. Knew they wouldn’t have long.

All windows in the house had been retrofitted with removable blackout cloth that Velcroed into place. The two exterior doors had blackout blankets that tied to the side by day but hung as light barriers by night. The fixtures in the house, and all lamps, burned compact fluorescents, the government’s idea of how to save on energy costs; the resulting light, slightly blue or oddly yellow on the eyes, never looking quite right.

Her bedroom had one jaundiced bedside lamp aglow. The house, closed and shuttered as it was, and without air-conditioning of any kind, sweltered in the late-summer heat, with only ineffective and noisy floor fans left to stir the turgid air. One such beast was at work in the corner, grinding and clapping as its paddles scraped the wire protection meant to defend fingers from accidents. It forced a mechanical rhythm into the room, clippity-clippity-clapping and then whining asthmatically before starting the pattern again.