Page 12 of Hero

Mr. Conger chuckled. “I can’t tell you how good this is. I didn’t ask for this, but after it happened, I realized what I got. Ben Spengler was the big fish. This Justine is just some girl who was working for him. What I hired you for was to make sure everybody knew that when somebody messes with one of my crews, I don’t just shrug it off.”

Sealy felt uneasy. Mr. Conger sounded satisfied, but Sealy had yet to earn the second half of the money for killing the girl. That wasn’t small change. He said, “I’m still after the girl. I just had to get some sleep. I was up all night.”

“I understand. What you did last night bought us some time. The three guys who are sitting in cells right now are going to get asked about who they think did this to Spengler. That will tell them that I’m not forgetting about their dead friends, and I won’t forget about them either.”

“I’m glad that getting Spengler will help.”

“It will,” Mr. Conger said. “It already has.” Sealy heard a tightness in Mr. Conger’s voice that meant he was smiling. “When my guys hear about it, they’re going to think if I got Spengler, a guy with seventy bodyguards, I can get anybody. And I still want the girl. Happy hunting.”

“Thank you.”

Mr. Conger hung up, and Sealy wondered if Mr. Conger had heard his last words, but he knew Mr. Conger didn’t care what other people said. He cared what he said.

Sealy swung his legs off the bed, stood up, pulled the covers tight and tucked them in, folded the sheet over the blanket the width of his spread fingers, fluffed up his pillow, and gave the blanket one extra tightening tug so it was perfect and he wouldn’t be tempted to returnto it. He showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, and dressed in clean clothes. He loaded his laundry into the washing machine, made sure it included the clothes he had worn last night, and started the wash. He had handled his revolver and fired his semi-auto pistol several times, so he had probably covered himself with powder residue and heavy metal traces. It occurred to him to add the running shoes he had been wearing, so he paused the machine and tossed them in too.

The next step was to get a look at Justine Poole, but he hadn’t found her yet, so he would have to try other approaches. He was fairly sure that the second name on the condominium and car ownerships had to be her mother. No doubt she had helped her with the down payments, and who else would do that? He opened his laptop and typed in the name Anna Kepka.

There was a long column of entries, each referring to someone with that name. The entries were in the hundreds, but few of them included a picture. Maybe one of them shared a resemblance with Justine Poole, but there was no way to know which one. None of them had the same address as Justine Poole, which seemed to bolster his view that she had just given her some money, and lived somewhere else—maybe with her second husband, Mr. Kepka. He couldn’t find a local address for any of them. By the time he had read each of the entries, he felt frustrated and tired of the search and eager to know if any news of Justine Poole had come up.

He turned on the television and scanned the morning news shows he’d recorded. There was footage of the house where he had killed Benjamin Spengler, now in bright sunlight and crawling with copsand forensics technicians. He watched and listened, but the television reporter knew nothing but the name and the company.

His conversation with Mr. Conger had focused his mind. He felt more eager about killing the woman now than he had before. He wanted to get back into the hunt.

It was just after one o’clock when Ben Spengler’s brother and sister emerged from the elevator and walked into the Spengler-Nash office. Justine had never seen them before, but they looked like Spenglers. The man was tall and straight like Ben, but he had a flat stomach and thin arms, and that was not like his brother. Ben had always carried more weight—a bit of a rounded belly, probably from sitting in the office on the phone or in the car watching over a long succession of clients, all the time drinking coffee and eating snacks that came in shiny bags and turned his fingertips orange. He’d looked as though he had not been in full sunlight in years. The brother had an even tan, which looked good with his slightly overlong graying hair. The sister had hair that was between light blond and white. She was tall too, fashionably thin with ice-blue eyes and a mouth that seemed to have been pouting for decades.

Justine was at her own desk near Ben’s office, going through some of the fragmentary staffing plans Ben had left for this evening’s jobs and acknowledging some of the “Here I am” calls and texts from the people out on the day shift. She had been crying on and off for three hours, and now her throat hurt, but she had forced herself to feign a normal voice when she was talking to colleagues. She knew somebody had to go and greet the siblings, and she happened to be the only one who could see them at the moment. She kept the channel open and the radio hot onthe desk, but took her phone with her as she stood up and walked to the threshold of Ben’s office.

She tried to manage an expression that showed sympathy, but she suspected it was closer to the grief she felt. “Hello,” she said. “Are you—”

The male sibling interrupted her. “I’m Walker Spengler, and this is my sister Evelyn Hawley. We’re Benjamin’s family.”

“I thought you must be. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. Ben was a great friend and teacher to all of us. We miss him so much already. I’m Justine Poole.” She held her right hand out.

Walker Spengler and Evelyn Hawley looked at each other, and then focused on her face. They didn’t seem to see her hand.

Justine extended the movement of her hand to sweep in the direction of the outer office. “Would you like to meet some of the other employees? We all loved and admired Ben so much, and I’m sure they’d like to meet you.”

Walker looked at his sister, then said, “Yes. I suppose this would be the time to start. Assemble the others in the outer office.”

“All right,” Justine said. She walked out across the big common office toward the hall that held the ready room and the communications room. She was thinking about Evelyn Hawley. She apparently preferred to make her brother the barrier between her and the distasteful world. Walker’s tone was imperious, but before he said anything he looked at his sister for—what? Permission, or possibly agreement. Justine guessed that Evelyn Hawley was in her late fifties, but she’d had some work done to the skin around her eyes, chin, and forehead. Justine had spent much of her working life protecting women, and most of the women who could afford to hire Spengler-Nash had endured the same repairs in their early fifties. The doctors must have been the best, but Justine wondered if there might have been accidental damage to some facial nerves oran off-target Botox injection, because Evelyn Hawley’s face was almost without expression.

Justine stuck her head into the ready room, where the dozen men and women who were about to leave for afternoon assignments had been making last-minute preparations and checking for updates on clients’ plans. She said, “Ben’s brother and sister are here, and they want to meet everyone in the main office.”

The group got up and headed for the glass-enclosed office that had always been Ben’s. Justine kept going to the communication room, where Lydia and Stephanie were monitoring the computers and phones and Mick was on the radio. When she gave them the same message, Stephanie stood up, but Lydia said, “I need a minute to forward everything to a front office phone.”

“You can use the extension for the phone on my desk,” Justine said. “It’s close enough to the front of the room so we’ll hear it.”

Mick turned a switch on his console, picked up a handheld radio, and joined the others as they hurried to the open bay, where the first group had gathered. They were all taking their turns shaking hands and saying the usual inadequate formulas of condolence.

When they were assembled, Walker Spengler said, “Thank you all for your kind words about our brother. We wanted to let you know who we are, and not leave everyone in a vacuum, wondering whether there was a future for Spengler-Nash. We’re going to retain the business our family has had since 1922—at least for now. For you that means keeping things on a business-as-usual basis in spite of disruptions. We’ll begin the search for a properly qualified person to replace our brother as soon as we can.” He glanced at the clock on the wall and then surveyed the group. The bodyguards among them were dressed in clothes intended to make them fit into a variety of activities, fromafternoon parties to airline travel. “I can see you all have things to do, so I won’t delay you any longer.”

The group began to disperse and he and his sister exchanged a look. “Oh, Miss Poole. Can we talk for a minute?”

She stood still. “Of course.”

He and his sister went into Ben’s office and Justine followed. Walker paused to close the door behind them while Evelyn sat behind Ben’s desk, her hands folded in front of her. Walker stepped to the end of the desk and remained standing with his arms folded across his chest.

Justine waited.

---