Kathleen Creighton - One Summer’s Knight

So, needless to say, he wasn’t in the best humor when he walked into his office later that morning. For one thing, his sore foot was giving him trouble, it being the first occasion he’d had to put on a pair of dress shoes since stabbing himself in the instep with a pair of hedge clippers. And naturally, it was the first thing his secretary took notice of when he stopped by her desk for his messages. She glanced up at him, covered the telephone receiver with her hand and sang out, “Hey, what’d you do to your foot?”

“What happened to ‘Good morning, Mr. Grogan, how was your weekend?’ ” he said sourly.

“Good morning, Mr. Grogan, how was your weekend? What did you do to your foot?”

“I kicked a door. Who’s that on the phone?”

“It’s your old buddy-Jake Redfield. Want me to take a message?”

In spite of himself, his heart gave a lurch. Please, Lord, let this be good news. Maybe, he thought, while he was spending his weekend cutting hedges, rescuing tots from trees and groping his client on the beach, the FBI had managed to find Hal Robey, bring down the syndicate and lock up all the bad guys so everybody could go home. Uh-uh. “No,” he said, frowning, “I’ll take it Put it through to my office.”

“Tom Denby’s waitin’ for you in there.”

“That’s okay. Anything else of interest?”

“Couple things…” Hands busy with the phone, Danell jerked her head toward the tray on the corner of her desk. So, since Riley had to look down in order to gather up the message slips that had collected there, naturally the next thing he heard was “Hey, what’d you do to your head?”

“None of your business,” he growled as he shuffled through the pile. He picked up his briefcase and started down the hallway.

“Bumped into a door, I bet…”

In his office, Riley closed the door behind him and said “Mornin’ ” to Tom, who was sitting in the client’s chair with one ankle propped on the opposite knee reading a Stephen King paperback. The investigator dog-eared the page and closed the book, even though Riley checked him with a hand gesture while he went to pick up his phone.

“Agent Redfield,” he said crisply, making eye contact with Tom Denby as he hitched his backside onto a corner of his desk, “what can I do for you?”

The FBI agent gave a mirthless snort. “I think you know the answer to that. Mrs. Robey ready to talk to us yet?”

“Depends,” Riley drawled. “You arrested the people responsible for burnin’ down her house yet?”

There was a pause, during which he could almost hear the FBI man counting to ten. Then, in that patented bureau monotone, Redfield said, “As a matter of fact, we may have gotten a little bit of a break in that regard.”

“You have?” Riley glanced at his investigator, who had lifted his briefcase onto his knees and was snapping it open.

There was a long pause; clearly, sharing information with an attorney-the enemy-wasn’t something the FBI enjoyed doing. Finally Redfield said, “We have reason to believe he may have been in contact with his wife’s parents.”

Riley’s eyebrows shot up. “Hal Robey? What reason? Did he or didn’t he?”

Another pause. Then, on a resigned exhalation, Redfield explained, “This past weekend, Mrs. Robey’s mother received a call from someone claiming to be from her daughters’ high school class reunion committee, requesting information as to how they might be reached. Mrs. Robey’s mother didn’t recognize the voice-said it may even have been a woman-but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s possible Robey could have disguised his voice or had someone else make the call for him.”

“What makes you think it was Robey?” Riley held up a finger to forestall Tom Denby, who ignored it and leaned over to hand him several sheets of paper with what looked to be photocopied credit card receipts on them. He took them, stared at them.

In his ear, Redfield’s voice was saying, “We’ve been monitoring credit card activity on Robey’s known aliases. Over the weekend we had a hit-a Motel 6 on Interstate 10 in Pensacola, Florida.”

Riley swore, dragged a hand through his hair. Winced. He frowned, his mind in high gear, chewing it all over. “Mrs. Robey’s parents live in Pensacola Beach.”

“Uh-huh…”

“All right, so he’s looking for her.” Riley was silent for a moment, listening to the sound of his own breathing. “You’re thinking when he doesn’t find his wife at the address and phone number he’s got, he’ll get in touch with the sisters next.”

“If he hasn’t already. From what I understand, the only one reachable is the one here in Georgia. He’s gonna be careful about it-he knows he’s a target.” Redfield paused, then said very quietly, “What we’re thinking is, when and if he does, if we’re not already too late, we’d like to make his next move a little easier for him.”

Riley sat still for about three beats, then came up off the desk as if somebody’d shot him in the butt with a BB gun. “No. Lure him in, you mean-using Summer as bait. Are you out of your mind? No. Absolutely not. I can’t allow it.”

“You can’t allow it?” Redfield’s voice had gone soft. “You mean, advise, don’t you? In the final analysis, isn’t the decision up to Mrs. Robey?”

“Dammit, Redfield, the woman’s got two kids!”

“I know she does-and you can’t keep them locked away forever, now, can you?”

Riley said nothing. His skin felt itchy and hot, but there was a cold, sick feeling in his stomach. If I’m not in jail, I might as well be…

“Look-” Redfield exhaled gustily in his ear “-you know as well as I do, if the bad guys want her badly enough, sooner or later they’re going to find a way to get to her. You want to live with that? You want her and those kids to live with that?” Riley said nothing; his eyes were following Tom Denby as the investigator paced at a polite distance, fidgeting with things in his pockets. The FBI man continued, almost gently, “They might be on Robey’s trail right now. He could be leading ’em right to her. If they get the chance to use the wife and kids to leverage Robey, they won’t hesitate for one minute, and you and I both know it. Robey’s gonna find her, the bad guys are gonna find Robey, and who knows who’s gonna find who first? Isn’t it better to have us be the ones writing the script? And if it gives us a chance to clear this thing up, once and for all…” The agent’s voice had taken on a curious vibration, and Riley remembered suddenly what Summer had said about Captain Ahab and Moby Dick.

Then Redfield paused, and Riley could almost hear him fighting down his demons. Finally, once more back in the classic feds monotone, he murmured, “At least let us talk to her. That’s all we ask.”

Sometimes, you know, I think I’d rather confront the fear. Go out there and face those…those bastards! Like-I don’t know, set myself up as bait for an FBI sting, or something. Anything to get those people caught.

“I’ll talk to her,” Riley said heavily. But he already knew what her answer would be. “I’ll get back to you.”

He cradled the phone and sat for a moment, staring at it. Then he straightened and looked at Tom Denby, who had turned from the window and was regarding him with a small, waiting smile. Denby was a stocky, nondescript man with thinning hair and nondescript glasses, the kind of man who would be easy to overlook in a crowd. But a man whose eyes and ears missed nothing, and the one man Riley wanted at his back in a brawl.

“Tom,” he said on an exhalation, “I’m gonna have to ask you to be on standby for a while.”

“I gathered.” The investigator nodded toward the phone. “That was the feds?”