Page 94 of The Children of Eve

I took out a business card and jammed it into a crack in the porch rail.

“When you’ve had time to reconsider,” I said, “give me a call. You may even be able to spot me in the distance, in which case just holler.”

A drape twitched at one of the windows. Through the gap, I saw Jerusha Nadeau scowling at me. I nodded politely. She raised a middle finger and mouthed,Fuck you. All things considered, it was a miracle that Zetta had turned out as well as she had, but there was much to be said for having something to rebel against, even if it was only ignorance.

I paused at the Subaru. The car was encrusted with dirt but not dusty,which meant it was usually garaged. Now it was sitting outside while the garage remained shuttered. Perhaps there was currently another vehicle inside, or even another person. I thought I’d stick close for a while, long enough to get one or both of the Fulcis up to Anson. That way, if Riggins was in the vicinity, he wouldn’t be able to leave without being seen. I could even try to find a way through the woods at the back of the Nadeau property and take a look in the garage.

The front door of the house was now closed. Ammon Nadeau was gone, and his wife had similarly vanished. Beyond the yard, all was silent. There was no sound of cars, no birdsong, nothing to distract me, so I should have heard the approach from behind. I should have, but I didn’t.

The first blow hit me across the shoulders, sending me to my knees. The second broke my nose, but not before I caught sight of a length of two-by-four heading for my face, with Wyatt Riggins’s features hovering fuzzily behind it like a bad moon. I glimpsed redness lit by white flares, as though I had flown too close to the sun. I tried to reach for my gun—the time for pepper spray and batons was already past—but Riggins was too quick. He stood on my hand while the block of wood took a sharp jab at my ruined nose. The red sun flared alarmingly.

“Quit looking for me,” said Riggins, “you hear? Quit this, period.”

I bowed my head and watched my blood pool on the grass, which meant I didn’t see the fourth blow coming. I felt it, though, felt it good.

Lights out.

Gone.

CHAPTERLXVIII

Seeley was angry at being forced to abandon his life in Tennessee, though it was not the first time he would be required to reinvent himself. Eugene Seeley would cease to exist, but then Eugene Seeley had never really existed, just as Vernon Barnett had not existed, or Howard Lindikoff, or—briefly—Leonard Dolan. The man who called himself Seeley had always been capable of shedding identities like skin, and sometimes he struggled to recall his birth name, so long had it been since he’d had cause to use it.

The rub this time was that he had grown comfortable as Eugene Seeley, so much so that he had become the Seeley persona, the character fitting so snugly that his existence had ceased to count as imposture. Seeley wondered if it was a function of aging, so that building a new self in later years was akin to trying to learn a new tongue, the rules and constructions of the primary language becoming so fixed that they impaired one’s ability to add another idiom. The specters of previous selfhoods haunted Seeley, manifesting as half-remembered tastes or opinions, rusted skill sets that he could still draw on by instinct when required, even flickers in his signature when one name briefly threatened to become another. It was among the curses of a life built on impersonation: behind one, many.

In the case of Eugene Seeley, he had also grown to love working withbooks. Calligraphy and lettering had fascinated him since he was a boy, but the Seeley persona represented the first opportunity to turn that interest into a profession. Then there was Mertie Udine, who had formerly shared his bed and—until recently—his life. Over time, he had revealed much of his past to her. He trusted her, which was as close to love as he had ever felt for another person. Now she was dead, which added to his rage, even as a colder part of him recognized that in dying she had left him compromised.

Mertie lived alone, but she had relatives with whom she was still in contact, and a small circle of friends. Seeley had considered having her body removed from the house in Madison, before deciding that it might cause more problems than it solved. If he left her to be found, the police would access the same Blink footage as Seeley’s expert, which would pin the blame for her murder on Aldo Bern and his associate. The police might investigate the Nashville Codex Corporation, if only to establish the circumstances through which two men known to be involved in organized crime had arrived on its doorstep, but they would delve in vain. Inquiries into the NCC would lead them to Varick Howlett at Shining Stone Senior Living, where the trail would peter out. As far as the NCC was concerned, Eugene Seeley was barely more than a signature in a checkbook. Already, he was melting away, and a new identity would accrete around a man of below-average height who might, as a hobby, engage in the conservation and restoration of books. Three clean passports were immediately available for his use: one Maltese (by investment), one Israeli (by the Law of Return), and one Belgian (by theft from a safe in Tongeren town hall in 1998, during a run on blank Belgian passports). There was also a U.S. document, but he was reluctant to bring it into play until the fuss had died down.

La Señora sat in the back of the car, leading Seeley to feel like her chauffeur. She made sure not to sit directly behind him because she knew it made him nervous. Whoever or whatever she really was, Seeley wasn’t convinced that la Señora was operating under Blas Urrea’sinstructions or control. In fact, Seeley was beginning to fear that, rather than being Urrea’s creature, Urrea might be hers. Regardless, the remaining children had to be recovered, and the last of the thieves punished. That was the deal Seeley had agreed.

According to the now-deceased Aldo Bern, the third child was being kept at Devin Vaughn’s Manassas home. The antiquities dealer Mark Triton had the fourth, but Bern didn’t know where. Triton had galleries and warehouses scattered across the country, and the child could be in any of them. But Triton owned both a house and a gallery in Maine, and Vaughn was in the cannabis business there. Wyatt Riggins, too, had briefly surfaced in Maine. Were Seeley in Triton’s position—holding treasure stolen from Blas Urrea, in the knowledge that Urrea would do all in his power to retrieve it—he might have sought to keep someone like Riggins nearby.

Seeley and the woman were within striking distance of Manassas. Seeley considered it mildly amusing that Devin Vaughn had built his primary residence barely twenty miles from the FBI Academy near Quantico. Had they chosen to do so, the feds could have organized field trips for trainees with Vaughn as their subject.

Later, when the shooting was over, Seeley would reflect on how a man could inadvertently and simultaneously be so right about something—and also so wrong.

CHAPTERLXIX

I regained consciousness shortly before the ambulance arrived, but only because Ammon Nadeau was trying to put something under my head to cushion it, which wasn’t helping at all.

“Get away from me,” I said, or something like it. I didn’t want Ammon causing any more damage than had already been done, but I also didn’t care to have his hands on me.

Ammon looked hurt by the rejection.

“I called nine-one-one,” he said, as I heard a siren in the distance, even as it struggled to make itself heard over the ringing in my head. I threw up on what passed for the Nadeau lawn and my blurred vision picked out blood. I wasn’t surprised. My mouth tasted of it, and I could feel it leaking from whatever was left of my nose.

“I didn’t think he’d beat up on you,” said Ammon.

That wasn’t worthy of a response so I didn’t offer one. I felt like I wanted to die and the only thing stopping me was wanting Wyatt Riggins to die more. Plus, the ambulance pulled up, accompanied by a patrol car from the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office, and both the medics and the deputy were reluctant to let me expire peacefully. I was taken to Redington-Fairview General, where the emergency room doctor asked about next of kin and I gave her Angel’s number before immediately throwing up again. I was X-rayed, scanned, and sedated—or maybe it was the other way around—before the blood was cleaned from my face and head, a scalp wound was stitched, my nose was reset, and I was told I’d be kept overnight for observation. I spotted Angel in the distance, but by then I was very woozy and wished everything would stop hurting.

Finally, I was wheeled into a private room by a pair of male nurses.

“Why couldn’t the last faces I see have been female?”

“I guess it just hasn’t been your day,” one of them replied.

“When is it ever?” I asked, and closed my eyes.

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