Cover of Night Read online

  “Two weeks seems reasonable, considering how difficult the trip is.”

  Let the negotiations begin. Cate recognized that ploy, too. Sheila probably wanted a week with the boys, and to make sure she got it, she was asking for twice that. It might teach her a lesson if Cate sweetly agreed to the two weeks. Fourteen days of unrelieved supervision of rowdy four-year-old twins could break even the strongest person.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, refusing to be drawn into a discussion about the length of the visit when she hadn’t yet agreed to let the boys go. If she didn’t stay on her toes, Sheila would have her so tied up in the details that the boys would be in Seattle before Cate realized she hadn’t said “yes.”

  “Your dad and I will pay for their plane tickets, of course,” Sheila continued persuasively.

  “I’ll think about it,” Cate repeated.

  “You need a little break, yourself. Taking care of this place and those two little hooligans doesn’t give you much time for yourself. You could get your hair cut, get a manicure, pedicure…”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Sheila huffed out a breath. “We really need to iron out the details.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time for that later…if I decide they can go. You might as well give up, because I’m not committing myself until I think about it for more than the two minutes you’ve given me.” Just for a second, though, she thought longingly of the hair salon in Seattle she had used. It had been so long since she’d had her hair done that she no longer had a recognizable style. Today, her wavy brown hair was simply pulled back and secured by a large tortoiseshell clip at the back of her neck. Her fingernails were short and bare, because that was the most practical way to keep them given how much her hands were in dough, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d painted her toenails. Just about the only extra grooming she had time for these days was keeping her legs and underarms shaved, which she did because—well, just because. Besides, all it took was an an extra three minutes in the shower.

  The boys were so excited about their Mimi visiting that they came thundering downstairs in their pajamas a full half hour before their usual time. Sherry had just arrived, three customers followed her in, and Cate was glad to hand the boys off to her mother to entertain and feed them their breakfast. Her own breakfast was one of the muffins, which she snatched a bite of whenever she could.

  It was a beautiful day, the early September air crisp and clear, and it seemed as if almost every inhabitant of Trail Stop came in that morning. Even Neenah Dase, a former nun who, for reasons of her own, had left her order and now owned and operated the small feed store—which meant she was Mr. Harris’s landlady, since he lived in the tiny apartment over the store—came in for a muffin. Neenah was a quiet, self-possessed woman in her mid-forties and one of Cate’s favorite people in Trail Stop. They didn’t often have a chance to chat, and this morning was no different, because they each had a business to run. With a wave and a cheerful hello, Neenah was out the door and gone.

  What with one thing and another, it was after one o’clock before Cate had a chance to get upstairs. Her mother was still keeping the boys occupied so Cate could get things ready for the guests coming in that afternoon. Mr. Layton still had neither returned nor called, and she was now as much worried as she was annoyed. Had he had an accident? The gravel road could be treacherous if an inexperienced driver took one of the mountain curves too fast. He had been gone for over twenty-four hours without word.

  She made a swift decision and went to her room, where she called the county sheriff’s department and after a brief hold was transferred to an investigator. “This is Cate Nightingale in Trail Stop. I own the bed-and-breakfast here, and one of my guests left yesterday morning and hasn’t returned. All of his things are still here.”

  “Do you know where he was going?” the county investigator asked.

  “No.” She thought back to the morning before, when she’d seen him step back from the dining room door. “He left sometime between eight and ten. I didn’t talk to him. But he hasn’t called and he was supposed to check out yesterday morning. I’m afraid he might have had an accident.”

  The investigator took down Mr. Layton’s name and description, and when he asked for the car’s license plate number, Cate went downstairs to her office to pull the paperwork. The investigator, like her, thought Mr. Layton might have had an accident and said he would first check the local hospital and would get back to her later that afternoon.

  She had to be satisfied with that. Going back upstairs, she went into Mr. Layton’s room and looked around to see if he’d left any clue as to where he might have gone. The top of the dresser in room 3 was bare except for some small change scattered across the polished surface. A change of clothes was hanging in the closet, and the open suitcase on the luggage stand revealed underwear and socks, a small plastic shopping bag from Wal-Mart with the handles tied in a knot, a bottle of aspirin, and a silk tie rolled up. She wanted to look in the shopping bag, but was afraid the county investigator would disapprove. What if Mr. Layton had been the victim of a crime? Cate didn’t want to leave her fingerprints on his things.

  In the small attached bathroom, a disposable razor and a can of shaving cream lay on the edge of the sink, and a can of spray deodorant sat next to the cold-water handle. An open Dopp Kit sat on the back of the toilet, and inside it she could see a hairbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush holder, as well as a few loose Band-Aids.

  There was nothing here of value that she could see, but people tended to cling to their things. If he’d left all this behind, surely he’d intended to return. On the other hand, he had climbed out the window, for all the world as if he’d been escaping instead of simply leaving.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe he wasn’t simply nuts. Maybe he’d escaped.

  The question was: from what? Or whom?

  4

  YUELL FAULKNER CONSIDERED HIMSELF, FIRST AND FOREMOST, a businessman. He was in operation to make money, and since he gained clients by word of mouth, he couldn’t afford screwups. His reputation on the street was that he got the job done…whatever the “job” was, efficiently and without fuss.

  Some jobs he refused outright, for a variety of reasons. Number one on his list was that he didn’t take any job that had a high probability of bringing the Feds swarming down on him. That meant for the most part he stayed away from politics, and he tried never to do anything that would make national news. The real trick was to do a newsworthy job but pull it off so slickly that it was passed off as an accident.

  With that in mind, the first thing he did when receiving a job offer was research it thoroughly. Sometimes clients weren’t entirely truthful when presenting an offer—fancy that. It wasn’t as if he dealt with people of pristine character. So he always double-checked the information he’d been given, and then would decide whether or not to take the job. He tried to never let his ego enter into the decision, never let the adrenaline rush of finessing a difficult situation sway him. Yeah, he could take all the hot jobs and pit his brains and organizing skill against the odds, but the reason the casinos in Vegas didn’t go bust playing the odds was that the long shot usually didn’t win. He wasn’t in business to gratify his ego; he was in business to make money.

  He also wanted to stay alive.

  When he walked into Salazar Bandini’s office, he knew he’d have to take this job, no matter what it was, or he wouldn’t be walking out.

  He knew about Salazar Bandini, or as much as anyone did. Yuell knew that wasn’t the man’s real name, but where he’d come from before arriving on the Chicago street scene and adopting that name was up in the air. Bandini was an Italian name; Salazar wasn’t. And the man sitting behind the desk looked maybe Slavic, maybe German. Hell, maybe even Russian, with those broad cheekbones and prominent brow ridges. Bandini had pale hair, of a thinness that allowed pink scalp to show through, and brown eyes as soulless as a shark’s.

  Bandi