Page 78 of In Too Deep

“What are you doing?”

“Lying in bed, not sleeping.”

“Something bothering you?”

“Aside from our babysitters?”

“Maybe I should hit the fire alarm. We could sneak away in all the confusion.”

“I like how you think.”

“Seriously, though. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. But it has to do with Vidic. I’m asking myself, why is he free?”

“That’s obvious. Because the agents did a crappy job of tailing him.”

“No. That seems like the obvious answer, I know, but something else is going on here.”

“Like what?”

“It’s…I’m thinking it’s a case of fundamental attribution error.”

“The agents made a fundamental error? That’s what I said.”

“No. Step back. Look at the situation from a distance.”

“We were at a distance. We heard the play by play, on speakerphone.”

“That’s not what I mean. Here’s an example. A car ferry leaves port with its cargo doors open. It sinks. The investigation finds that the guy who was supposed to check that the doors were closed was asleep in his bunk when the ship set sail. Whose fault is the accident?”

“The guy who was asleep instead of doing his job.”

“What if you found out that the ship’s owners had fired a bunch of people to save money? The guy who was supposed to check on the doors was doing three people’s jobs. He’d been up for seventy-two hours straight. He was exhausted. He collapsed. He couldn’t have checked on the doors. It was physically impossible. Was that his fault?”

“No. The owners were to blame for being tightwads.”

“Right. So in our case Vidic isn’t free because the agents didn’t tail him effectively. He’s free because he was able to go to St. Louis in the first place.”

“Because someone released him from the van we left him in at the cave.”

“Right.”

“That had to be Kane.”

“But why? Vidic hated Kane. He was about to split. I bet he was planning to kill Kane during that burglary, then lure me there after the fact to take the blame. I bet he was going to kill Fletcher, too. So why would Kane help him?”

“Kane was having some kind of bromance with Fletcher. Maybe he saw Vidic as a rival. Wanted him out of the picture. They couldhave made a deal. Kane let Vidic out of the van if Vidic promised to leave and never come back.”

“Then why release Paris, too? And why leave Fletcher tied up at the house? No. It feels like Kane didn’t set out to rescue anyone. Something happened at the cave to make him change course.”

“It’s obvious what must have happened there. Money. I bet Vidic told Kane about their big cash cow. The Cone Dynamics report. He promised him a piece in return for setting him free.”

“That’s where I keep winding up. But something doesn’t fit.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Yet. But there is one other positive from your point of view.”

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