“Maybe your brother knew about it,” Lucinda said. “Maybe your brother was going to make a public stink about it. So this guy—”
“Shot him? Over that? I doubt it.”
“Somebody shot him,” Lucinda pointed out. “And you were there. I mean, Annie, think of the timing. You were right there. You must have seen whoever it was go right through the gates in front of your nose.”
“I know.”
“And he went through the gates, before your brother was shot. Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then,” Lucinda said, but she didn’t know what she meant by it. Well, then, you should go to the police and say something about it. Well, then, you should start tracking this guy and see what else you can find. Well, then, you should take care of yourself and butt out. Annie was staring down at the best of the prints, the one with Patsy’s head with the hand on top of it.
“Well, then,” Lucinda said again. “You might just consider covering your ass. Go to the police and get this over with. Because if you don’t, and somebody noticed you there, you’re going to get yourself in a huge amount of trouble.”
Annie sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I’ve got a better idea, better than going to the police. I should have thought of it before. Do you have a volunteer that can cover for you this morning?”
“No,” Lucinda said. “Not until this afternoon. Why?”
“I want you to go with me. We’ll go this afternoon. I should have thought of this before.”
“Thought of what?” Lucinda said, but it was no use. Annie was packing up her prints, bustling around, cleaning up, as if nothing more unusual had happened in the last several days than that one of the johns had actually been arrested. It was impossible to talk to Annie when she was like this. At least, this time, whatever she had on her mind was unlikely to cost a great deal of money.
Annie put the prints in a big manila envelope and the envelope in the locked top drawer of her filing cabinet. Lucinda went out into the hall and thought about calling child protective services to let them know what Patsy Lennon was up to, again. There were some people who never seemed to be doing anything but learning to be dead.
2
Kathi Mittendorf had been holding her breath ever since the night Anthony van Wyck Ross was murdered, and since she’d known about that murder long before most other people in the city, she was beginning to feel light-headed.
“You know what they’re like,” Michael had said when he’d called, his voice sounding muffled as always and surrounded, this time, by wind. “They’re going to look for the first likely candidate to pin it on, and we may be that candidate. We’ve got a lot of literature out there. We’ve been making a lot of noise.”
More to the point, Kathi thought, there was the problem of all the explosives, and of the guns and ammunition in the basement. She had no idea what kind of a gun Anthony van Wyck Ross had been murdered with, but she had some of nearly everything on the premises, each piece bought separately and by seemingly unconnected people over a period of nearly three years. Even with warning, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to get rid of it all on short notice. There was the problem with the licenses too. Everything she had was li-censed—except, of course, for the explosives, which were straightforwardly ille-gal—but none of it was licensed to her, and no two pieces of it were licensed to the same person. It was easy as cake getting around the licensing laws if you knew what you were doing, which Michael did, but it was not so easy explaining where you’d gotten everything if you got caught. There was also the problem that one stockpile led to another. They tried very hard to construct the kind of organization the Illuminati themselves had pioneered, with small cells isolated from other small cells, nobody knowing more than three or four of the others, most hermetically sealed off from the rest, but it hadn’t worked out. They needed each other too much. It was hard being among the very few who knew what was really going on in the world. It was too easy to panic when you realized what you were up against: the assembled forces of the great in the world, the banks, the foundations, the armies. Even now, after all this time, Kathi found herself waking up in the night in a cold sweat, sure as hell that every noise she heard was one of them tapping his way into her house, bugging her phones, filling the air of her living room full of hypnotic gas. The one thing Kathi feared more than any other was that she’d become like those people who drifted into the movement and then drifted out again. Either they saw the truth and didn’t want to believe it, or they were gotten to, nobody knew how or why. Kathi thought it was a little careless of them to hold their meetings in public and to advertise them, even if only in the little local weekly papers. They were everywhere, and They did not take chances. America on Alert was so open, it almost had to be infiltrated. Someone in the membership had to be working for Them.