Maude shrugged. “I guess.” As much of a young woman as she was turning into, she reverted to the surly teenager act when it suited her. “Are you going back to work for those people?” She had on jeans with no knees and a homemade T-shirt that stated Eric Clapton Sucks!
By the way she said those people, Lucas knew that she had been talking to Erin. “Not right now. I’m only useful for a very narrow bandwidth of problems, and what happened yesterday—”
“The explosion at the museum?”
“Yeah, the explosion at the museum. That isn’t my field at all. I can’t see being of much use to them. At least not like last time.”
“Did terrorists do this?”
Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know. No one does.”
“The people on the television seem pretty convinced.”
“There’s misinformed and there’s uninformed, and the problem is that most people don’t let either of those things get in their way when they have an audience—just look at the internet.”
Lucas loved all the kids, but he and Maude had some kind of a special bond that he wasn’t able to understand. Maybe it was because he’d had to work so hard to gain her trust, or maybe it was because she reminded him most of Erin (which had no basis in genetics, since all their children were adopted), but he had an easier time talking to her than the other kids, as if maybe he understood her a little better.
Maude stopped and picked up a stone that looked as if it might be perfectly round. She handed it to Lucas and said, “So?”
He glanced at it and shook his head. “Elliptical.”
Maude took it back and examined it skeptically for a few seconds.
“It’s three inches, twenty-three thirty-seconds on the longest axis—three inches, eleven-sixteenths on the shortest.”
Maude scrunched up her nose. “If you say so.”
“You can measure it if you want,” he offered, smiling. But he was never wrong. Not with numbers. And certainly not with measurements.
Maude pitched it out at the water. “How do you do that?”
“It’s just a stupid human trick. Like being able to turn your eyelids inside out.”
She made her gross-out face. “No it’s not; you don’t have to be smart to flip your eyelids.”
Lucas shrugged again; he had met plenty of what he thought of as stupid smart people, especially in academia. “Maybe.” He stopped walking. “Have you figured out what you’d like to do about school?” The school she was at now had succumbed to the classic trade-off between arts and commerce and there was very little in the way of right-brain stimulation—which was where her true interests lay. Everyone concerned knew she’d be better served attending another institution. They had interviewed at a school with an advanced arts program, and they were waiting for her to decide if she wanted to make the switch.
“Am I allowed to have an opinion?”
“Have we ever asked your opinion and not taken it?”
She thought about that for a moment. “I guess not.”
“So?”
They had gone through the interview process, and after seeing her portfolio, the school had agreed to enroll her. But time was no longer an abstract concept—they had to decide before Friday morning. The decision was causing her a lot of stress, and Lucas suspected that she was looking at it as an ending instead of a beginning. “You’ll probably have to work much harder than you are now, but it’s less likely you’ll get tired as fast.” And he stopped—she knew all of this and it was time to stop selling her. She had to make up her own mind. “But you know all this.”
“You said I had until Friday.”
“You do.”
“But you’re probably going away and—”
“We don’t know that.”
She squinted as she smiled up at him. “We don’t?”
“No. We don’t.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Well, a few more days won’t change anything. So okay. I’ll do it. I’ll go to LaGuardia.”
Lucas turned around and waved at Erin with his prosthetic. “Maude’s transferring to LaGuardia,” he yelled.
The whole family cheered.
Their voices were still hanging in the air when Hector yelled, “Hey, a helicopter’s landing in front of our place!”
Lucas looked down the beach, and the breakers flipped on in his head as a navy blue Jet Ranger touched down, three big yellow letters on the side. It conjured up a cloud of dust and sent subsonic shock waves out over the water.
Lucas swung around to catch Erin in his line of sight. She gave him a soft smile filled with a million sad little meanings.
He turned back to the helicopter. The doors opened and two standard-issue FBI copies emerged, one large, one an XXXL. When they had taken up positions on either side of the bird, the unmistakable form of Brett Kehoe came down the steps.
He was sure the clown car routine was finished, but a fourth figure emerged from the aircraft, a tall black woman who even from two hundred yards out exuded the appropriate mix of pheromones denoting her as a force of nature—Special Agent Alice Whitaker. She was no doubt here as a prop for Kehoe’s attempt at emotional leverage.
Beside him, Maude said, “Our day is F-U-K-T.”
“Hey, kiddo, what have I told you about that?” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be lazy—use the correct spelling.”
5
By the time they got back to the house, Kehoe and Whitaker were on the patio. Three decades slumming with the FBI hadn’t smoothed out any of the old-money DNA that was as much a part of Kehoe as the charm, manners, and menace. He had updated his haircut since last time they had been in a room together, but he still looked like a spokesperson for some expensive lifestyle product. He wore one of his tailored suits with the pick-stitched lapels he favored, and even out here on the beach he appeared comfortable.
Whitaker’s white linen shirt contrasted with her dark skin and darker eyes, and even in the Ralph Lauren duds, she looked like she could kill a pack of wolves with her bare hands. Like Kehoe, she had changed her hair, and she sported a tight ponytail of Predator braids that could have been designed by a satellite engineer. She wasn’t quite smiling, but Lucas could see that she was happy to see him and he grudgingly realized that he felt the same—old war buddies were like that.
Lucas and Whitaker had been paired up last winter during his first stint back at the bureau in almost a decade. She was a field agent, and even though Lucas liked to think that he had chosen her to help him, he knew the truth was Kehoe had set him up—he had intentionally put them in the same general vicinity and let physics pull them together. They had begrudgingly liked each other from the beginning, and quickly developed a weird kind of chemistry that brought out the best in both of them. She was smart and not given to pain-in-the-assery—and she didn’t suffer his bullshit, which was a rare trait. They had gone the distance together and she had been added to the very short list of people he trusted with his life—which in a way made her family.
Kehoe’s two other men went out front to deal with the twin Southampton police SUVs that arrived with the chopper. The entire performance was dramatic, especially for Kehoe, who was not generally given to theatrics. Or an unnecessary demonstration of force.