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He cracked his knuckles and returned to his work, gradually feeling a settling and an unlocking.Clarity and focus replaced his irritation.He would feel something sublime, sometimes, on these nights when he’d stay here alone, working well into the small hours.A peace that he might have described as holy, if he didn’t know better.This sense that the world had shrunk away to a pinprick, and that he was floating far above it – like an astronaut circling the planet – all its chatter and its nonsense a million miles away.
He was halfway through typing a sentence when a noise startled him.A slammed door, somewhere in the tower, maybe a couple of floors down.
That was odd.The building was locked.Security patrolled the grounds, but they didn’t come inside the buildings.
It could be one of his colleagues, come back to retrieve something.Dr.Denyer was notoriously forgetful.But Dr.Denyer didn’t have a key.As head of department, only he, Professor Whitman, had the key.And the right to come here in the dead of night and work, undisturbed, was one he jealously guarded.
He listened closely for half a minute or so, but heard nothing else.He must have been mistaken.It could have been a car door slamming; townspeople sometimes used the staff car lot in the evenings, while they picked up a pizza or stopped at Marco’s for a drink.That’s what it was.
But he’d no sooner started to reply to the next query on his list, when he heard another sound.Different, this time – the clank of wheels and cables.It was the unmistakable sound of the elevator.
Someone was coming up.
He knew from long experience that each time the car passed a floor, the shaft made a kind of reverberating thud.A sound you felt, rather than heard.
And Professor Whitman counted them.One, two, three.
Four.
CHAPTER TEN
Another thing they never told you in training, Kate thought, as she returned to the car with two cans of Coke and four packets of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.The smells.And the smell of a long stake-out had to be one of the worst.Hot, unwashed bodies, the hint of burnt rubber from the car heater, a tang of engine oil blending with the oniony stink of cheap takeout.It sucked.She wished, sometimes, that the experience could be more like its depiction in the old cop shows.Both cops chain-smoking their way through it, creating one stink you got used to, rather than several that you never did.
“I think we could be in for a long wait,” she said, as she slid into her seat.
“No à la carte tonight?”queried Marcus, taking delivery of his half.
“This was literally everything that was left in the vending machine,” Kate replied.“The receptionist took one look at the photo and confirmed it was Sullivan.But he’s given a false name.He’s in room thirty-three.Checked in at midday, paid for tonight.Went out again about quarter after six.”
“So we still don’t know what he did between Monday afternoon and midday today.”
“Perhaps he found a whorehouse attached to a casino,” Kate suggested.“That would be a way of losing at least 24 hours.”
“But why come back here at all?”It was Marcus’s turn to be serious.“What does he want?”
Following their visit to the rehab facility, they’d issued an APB description and photograph of Ray Sullivan.Kate had a feeling he would show up in a big city, and they’d made sure everywhere as far south as New Jersey had been copied in on the call-out.Subsequently, and to their great surprise, round about tea-time, Arthur, the young local beat cop, had spotted him coming out of a motel on the south side of Douglas Cove, trailed him for a short while on foot, then managed to lose him.The Fulton Inn – an establishment considerably seedier than the one Kate and Marcus were staying in – confirmed Sullivan as a guest, and they were now parked discreetly outside, awaiting his return.
“So he goes to the trouble of using a false name, but nonetheless – this is a small town.What are the chances of him being spotted by someone?If you’ve committed a murder, you’d try and lose yourself in Boston or NYC, wouldn’t you?Or at least Bangor or Portland.”
Marcus tipped the last of the Cheetos down his throat.“I guess he’s not thinking straight.I don’t know.The wife didn’t seem to care if he lived or died.Maybe he doesn’t either.”
They’d called at Ray Sullivan’s home address and spoken to his wife.She’d been the first one to make the quip about the whorehouse with a casino, but she hadn’t meant it in a remotely fond or humorous way.Both agents could tell from her drawn features, and the angry way she sucked on a cigarette, that she’d been worn down to the bone by living with Ray Sullivan.
“What was his false name?”
“Oh you won’t b– “
Kate froze mid-sentence, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror.A tall, heavy-set man was clutching a brown paper bag full of bottles.With him, a considerably smaller and skinnier young woman, in cut-off jeans and a thin zip-up.
Kate and Marcus stepped out of their sedan.
“Mr.Reagan?”she flashed him her ID.“Kate Valentine, FBI.”
The man blinked owlishly.“Huh?”
“Let’s cut the pretense.You’re Raymond Sullivan.We want to talk to you regarding the death of Father Thomas Grayson.”
There was a moment when Kate thought she could almost see the thoughts unsteadily tiptoeing their way through Sullivan’s mind, like a drunk trying to walk in a straight line.
