Lucas sent Erin and the kids inside. The children ran upstairs, but Erin stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the island, arms crossed, intently watching them through the big window. Lucas wondered if lipreading was part of the superhero plan she was was enrolled in.
The sun-bleached joists of the pergola cast weird rectangular shadows, turning Kehoe into a composite of several portraits, none of them happy. The ever-present Mark Cross briefcase sat on the seat beside him, conveying a sense of significance. Everyone wore sunglasses and looked like they would rather be someplace else.
The pilot was on a folding chair down on the beach, grabbing a few bits of vitamin D and reading a paperback. Kehoe’s two extra men were back at either corner of the property, on the edge of the grass overlooking the beach, and the sheriff’s men had taken up positions on the other side of the house, up near the road.
Lucas and Kehoe examined each other for a few silent moments, and it was Whitaker who finally cracked the frost with “Nice hair.”
Maude had talked Lucas into bleaching his hair as a test run for her Halloween costume—she wanted to go out as Sting and the blond hair was a must. It was supposed to wash out, but that had been three days ago and he still looked like a punk-rock Frankenstein in expensive sunglasses.
Lucas tried out a smile, and by the way that Kehoe shifted in his seat, he knew that his face was doing that scar tissue Karloff thing that scared the natives. “Thank you,” he said.
Whitaker shook her head and smiled.
Kehoe filled the empty space by answering a text—the twelfth since sitting down.
The complicated nature of their relationship was no secret. There had been a ten-year span in which they hadn’t spoken. Both of them had used that decade to generate a little forgiveness for what had happened—for the things they had both lost. The Event, as Lucas called it, had recalibrated his life from the molecular level up and, in some lateral way, had no doubt done the same for Kehoe. But it was still there, in the background, like a deep space magnetic wave that was hard to detect but impossible to pretend didn’t exist.
The Event had almost destroyed Lucas physically, and he spent the next few years discovering the new and improved Dr. Lucas Page. When he walked out the other end—with his body cobbled together with all kinds of experimental hardware, his first marriage in the shitter, his job gone, and no friends—he found a man that he didn’t recognize but could be proud of. He met and married Erin. They started putting a family together—with children who could not find a place out in the world. He accepted a job at Columbia. Accidentally wrote a book that put him on bestseller lists. And forgot that he had ever worked for the FBI. Until that night last winter when Kehoe had come calling, dragging all the old monsters along with him.
Erin brought out a wicker tray with two mugs of coffee and a cup of tea. She placed it down on the table and went back inside without saying anything.
After Erin was back inside, Kehoe went into lecture mode with his patented poetic cadence. “We won’t know the final toll for a few more hours, but right now we’re at seven hundred and two victims, including museum personnel, catering employees, and a few unfortunate pedestrians who happened to be walking by when things went south.” Kehoe lifted the porcelain cup of tea from the tray and took a sip.
Lucas leaned forward, meshing the fingers of his left hand with those of his prosthetic; even in the warm autumn air, the aluminum fingers were cold against his skin. “I don’t see how I can give you any added value on this one, Brett.” Kehoe’s one unerring rule of management was that he tasked only the right people to a job. And since he was here, he had no doubt worked out all the aspects of his ask.
Kehoe took another sip and put his cup down. “With seven hundred and two victims, the math on this one is going to be a challenge. And then there are the rest of the unknowns: motive, suspect, ideology, logistics, and end game. Right now we don’t even have a starting point—no one has claimed responsibility.”
That was odd—an exercise this public had to have a purpose, and more than likely it was for PR. “Nothing?”
Kehoe quickly answered a text, then came back with “No one reliable. There were a few tweets from the usual suspects—two from factions of ISIS, one from Al-Qaeda, but it was obvious they had no idea what they were talking about. A few of the predictable nuts tried to get their fifteen minutes—anti-abortion groups, militia types, white supremacists, wrath-of-Godders—the usual dummies. But no official statement from a reliable organization or group.”
Kehoe was executing all the proper tactics of investigative warfare. “And the news? How are the networks treating this?”
Kehoe went back to another text and spoke as he typed out a response with his thumbs. “They were getting in our way ten minutes after the dust settled. I’ve got a good PIO on things, but she can’t tell them how to behave—they’re more concerned with entertainment than delivering facts, and they are going to be a very big pain in the ass on this one. More than usual, I expect.” He finished his text and put the phone back down, continuing without warranting so much as a semicolon in his dialogue stream. “And we have the added nightmare of the online digilantes and conspiracy people. Those hammerheads are making a lot of noise on social media, and they’re shaping public perception more than I am comfortable with. We hired a marketing firm to help us get in front of their static, but they are doing damage. Last night two Amish kids visiting the city from Pennsylvania were beaten into comas down on Bleecker because they were speaking German and someone thought they were Muslims. They had been tagged on Facebook as suspects because someone took a selfie in Central Park an hour before the bombing and they were in the background. Their photo circulated via social media and the message boards and the masses did what they do—misinterpret the data.” Kehoe took another sip of tea. “And there is going to be more of that kind of thing.”
Lucas had nothing to add—he was busy absorbing all the moving parts. “You have your hands full, Brett.”
“Which is why I’m here; very few people can guess the number of jelly beans in a jar like you can.” There was no emotion in his expression when he opened his briefcase and pulled out a brown evidence file that was as thick as a patio stone. He pushed it across the tabletop without opening it. “Just take a look.”
Lucas reached out and put his aluminum hand down on the file. He understood what Kehoe was doing but felt powerless to stop him. When he opened the file, there would be photos of the victims—charred, destroyed corpses that would stir up all the things he had tried so hard to put behind him.
Without meaning to, he opened the cover.
And there it was—a photograph of … of … what, exactly? It had the general dynamics of a human head, but the skin had been burned to a rippled tar and the only contrast against the burned flesh were white teeth that looked like they had been installed after the fact. It could have been a man, a woman, or a Hollywood mock-up of a demon. Lucas closed the cover without looking at any others—he didn’t need to download any more nightmares onto his hard drive. “And?” But Kehoe had him.
Kehoe took another sip of tea. “I need someone who can see patterns where there aren’t any. Or identify the correct ones when there are too many.”