JENNIFER FOUND A POT OF COFFEE ON THE LONG KITCHEN TABLE, ALONG WITH several sweet rolls, so she grabbed a cup and a roll and stepped outside. When Jennifer reached the back end of the garden, Hanna dragged a second chair over, and asked Jennifer to join her.
For a while, they made small talk about the garden—More work than I ever imagined!—how busy the summer months typically are—So many Swedes! It’s really something. I guess they just love to vacation together?—and the state of the world—Well, I thought it was going to be Al-Qaeda, too, but now they’re saying it was an arson? That’s what they said on CNN. You know they didn’t find any whole bodies! Isn’t that gruesome, but I guess there’s labs like that all over the country, it’s how medical science operates now, can you believe it?—Hanna ending every sentence with a question that begged no answers.
“I thought more about your question.”
“Yeah?” Jennifer said. “What did you decide?”
“I do love my job,” Hanna said. “I’m at work right now, and we’re having a nice conversation, and in theory, I’m getting paid for it. I’m outside, and I’m drinking pretty good coffee, and that’s so much better than what I used to do.”
“What was that?”
“Lawyer,” she said.
“I could use a lawyer,” Jennifer said, almost to herself.
“I was a public defender,” she said, “so probably no help for you. What is it? Divorce? I still do business mediation in town because who else can, you know?” She put on a pair of eyeglasses that were in her breast pocket. “Okay. Ready to hear your case.”
Jennifer took a sip of her coffee. “My husband,” Jennifer said, “is a mafia hit man, and my son and I have been living in protective custody for almost a year. Two nights ago, someone murdered the FBI agent watching us, and so we fled in the middle of the night. I think we’re being followed and are in great danger. Later today, we’ll be at my mother-in-law’s house in Sedona, and then after that, I guess I don’t know what happens. I need to keep my child safe, but I have no idea how to do that. I just don’t want us to die a horrible death, so that my husband never learns what happened to us. So. What would you do, counselor?” She took another sip of her coffee.
Hanna smiled at her. “Watch fewer Lifetime movies would be my advice,” she said. She clapped her hands and started laughing. “Can you imagine? I couldn’t handle that level of drama.”
Something moved in Jennifer’s peripheral vision, so she turned and saw William staring out the window. She waved. He pointed out toward the field.
“How old is he?” Hanna asked.
“Eight.”
“That’s a good age,” she said.
“You have children?” Jennifer asked.
“I had a daughter,” Hanna said, except she said it in such a way that invited no follow-ups, which Jennifer understood completely, in light of the ghost girl on the bed. She pointed to the school bus in the field. “She just loved playing on that. It was her favorite place in the world, which is why I’ve never had it hauled away. I like to come out here and imagine she’s playing inside of it and will be coming in soon.” She smiled, not happily. “It is a coping mechanism, because soon is always right around the bend, isn’t it? She’s always right around the bend.”
A flock of red-winged blackbirds took to the sky, lifting up from the field en masse. “Oh,” Jennifer said. “I didn’t even see them in the grass.”
“Something must have spooked them,” Hanna said. She picked up her newspaper, folded it over, stood up, looked south. “Looks like it might rain today.”
William banged on the window, pointed again.
“You think so?” Jennifer stood up. Looked out at the field again. The tall grass waved in the breeze.
“This time of year,” Hanna said, “the weather changes every few minutes.”
Jennifer took a few steps, so that she stood on the edge of the garden. Something moved against the school bus, a shadow, maybe a cat?
“Do you get animals out here?” Jennifer asked.
“Birds mostly,” Hanna said.
Jennifer looked back at the schoolhouse. William was still in the window, but now he was looking north, his face pressed against the glass.
Jennifer walked to the opposite side of the garden, followed William’s gaze. Another field of natural grass, trembling. On the edge of the field, a white van, parked, exhaust coming from its tailpipe, rear doors open, a football field away.
“Who is that?” Jennifer asked.
Hanna stood beside her. “I have no idea,” she said.
William pounding on the window now. Pointing in every direction.
The grass came alive. Ten, fifteen, twenty men, guns out, running toward Jennifer, screaming at her, Jennifer running into the schoolhouse, sprinting for her son, crashing through the door and into the muzzle of an AR-15.
TWENTY-SIX
SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
KALES MORTUARY AND HOME OF PEACE KEPT METICULOUS RECORDS, RUBEN Topaz running a tight ship. Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba appreciated the attention to detail, particularly now as he walked the graveyard, working his way through a multicolored spreadsheet that showed the activity for the week Jeff Hopper disappeared. There were seventeen funerals that week, twelve performed by Rabbi Cohen, five either by rabbis brought in for the occasion or by a “Nonaffiliated Entity,” which Poremba guessed meant a civilian. The funerals were spread across the entire land known as the Home of Peace, three in Zone 1, four in Zone 2, six in Zone 3, etc. Poremba printed out the spreadsheet, picked up a map of the cemetery, and headed out after meeting with Kristy. He didn’t know what he was looking for, only that he wanted to see the plots with his own eyes.
He’d imagined this place so many times, learned to identify the birds in its trees by their songs, viewed photos of it, from the street and from outer space, but he’d never smelled the freshly cut grass, never felt the humidity settle onto his skin, never been surrounded by so many Jews, if he was honest, living or dead.
What faith Lee Poremba had left in this world was focused on one thing: justice. He’d given up God years before. The fact was, Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba—soon to be the head of the joint Organized Crime & Terrorism Task Force in Las Vegas, where he’d be busy every goddamned day of his life, the city filled with visiting strangers being afforded any courtesy money could buy—kept his inner life for himself. He gave the federal government everything else—he was ready to die for his belief in the ideals of the country, a vow he couldn’t believe wasn’t shared by every American alive—and in the process, he’d lost his marriage, lost good friends, and, as it related to Matthew Drew and Jeff Hopper and their pursuit of Sal Cupertine, much of his better judgment. But he’d never wavered in his pursuit of justice. Sal Cupertine murdered three FBI agents and a confidential informant in a hotel room in Chicago in 1998, and if Lee Poremba had to chase him to Mars to arrest him, Lee Poremba would build a spaceship by hand in his garage.
Poremba walked up a low rise—on the internal map, it showed him leaving Zone 2 into Zone 3, though the signage within the cemetery said he was leaving Tranquility and entering Serenity—and found himself on a wide plateau, filled with densely packed graves. Poremba had a sense of why: The view wasn’t that great, since they were essentially in the middle of the cemetery, so that you could hear the water feature in Zone 4 but couldn’t see it, you could smell the massive rose garden on the edge of Zone 2, but it was too far away to be a selling point, and even the massive shade trees and benches littered throughout the cemetery were fewer here in the great inland empire of the dead.
The pre-dead seemed to know this, since families were lumped together in exacting rows, only a few feet apart from one another, whereas in the higher-rent districts, you had a little elbow room.
Poremba unfolded his spreadsheet of the funerals from that week in 1999. This area had seen the most action.
