Comes a Horseman Read online

  They stepped into a cavernous hall. Straight ahead, a glass wall revealed the organized chaos typical of busy airports—shuttles, cabs, private cars, harried people, all with their own agendas but each determined to leave as quickly as possible.

  “Rental car or taxi?” Brady asked.

  Before she could answer, a small man in need of a haircut and a shave appeared before them.

  “Avete bisogno di un tassì?” He looked eagerly into their faces. “English? You need cab, no?” He reached for the CSD bag slung over Alicia’s shoulder.

  “No,” she said sharply. “We’re fine, thank you.”

  He squinted at her with distaste, then bowed his head in resignation and darted to another couple emerging from the customs lines.

  “Rental it is,” said Brady, taking a step toward a wide corridor lined with rental agency booths. Alicia caught his elbow. She nodded toward the wall of glass.

  “Let’s use taxis until we know how long we’ll be here and where we have to go.”

  “But I thought . . .”

  “Not from him,” she said. They both watched as the cabbie strode by, laden with a grin and three heavy-looking cases. The couple they’d seen him approach happily followed.

  “At the Harrisburg airport, I logged on to some travel Web sites,” she explained. “One of them said unlicensed touts at FCO often rip off or outright rob unsuspecting tourists. And sometimes they do worse. It said to use only the white cabs, and their drivers are required to stay with their cars.”

  He looked impressed. “What’s FCO?”

  She looked around. “This airport. We’re not in Rome yet. We’re eighteen miles southwest, in Fiumicino.” She spotted a clock and adjusted her watch.

  He did the same, moving the hour hand forward six hours to just past noon.

  “Let’s find some lockers and a currency exchange. Then we can go straight to the Vatican, find out what Father Randall has to say.” She spoke his name contemptuously. “Unless you need a rest first? We could find a place to crash . . . ?”

  He opened his mouth to object when he saw the glint in her eyes and realized she was teasing him. She knew he wanted—needed—to pick up the pace as much as she did.

  “I might be able to summon a little more strength,” he said.

  58

  In silence, they watched vehicles go by and buildings grow taller and closer together.

  “Look,” said their cabbie, pointing. “The Coliseum. Real name is Anfiteatro Flavio. Built AD 72. Very old.”

  The words were flat from overuse. Brady suspected they were prompted by the quest for a larger tip rather than by any real pride in the city.

  Alicia put her hand over Brady’s as it rested on the seat between them. “I always thought I’d see Rome under happier circumstances,” she said quietly. “Have you been here before?”

  Brady took his time answering. He thought about his wife and the vacation they never took. When Karen was little, her father had been an air force navigator with the Fifty-seventh ARRS—an air rescue squadron—stationed at Lajes Field in the Azores. Back then, officers and their families could hitch a ride into Europe on any air force plane heading that way. Karen’s mother took advantage of the free shuttle service, and Karen’s most vivid memories were not of the glassblowers of Majorca or the pigeons of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, but of the nauseating trips in the jump seats of dim and drafty fuselages. She told Brady she wanted to “do Europe right” someday: a first-class cabin on the Eurail from Lisbon to Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva.

  “And winding up in the most romantic place of all, Rome,” she’d said, all teeth and sparkling eyes.

  “I thought Paris was the city of lovers,” he’d said.

  “Oh, pooh. Paris doesn’t have the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers.”

  “What about the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame?”

  “Quirinale Palace, the Pantheon, St. Peter’s Basilica.” She had moved close to him, breathed into his mouth.

  “Arc de Triomphe.” He’d searched his memory for Paris attractions. She’d always been smarter than he was, with a memory like a hard drive. If the title of Most Romantic City depended on his naming the most sites, Paris was doomed. Besides, how could he think with those incredible dark eyes locked on his? “The Seine!”

  “Trevi Fountain, Campo dé Fiori.”

  “Uh . . . Disneyland. There’s one in Paris, isn’t there?”

  “Via Veneto.” She had whispered it seductively.

  “Now that sounds romantic.”

  “Nothing but shops. It’s the Rodeo Drive of Rome.” She’d smiled coyly.

  “Great. We can start the bankruptcy paperwork when we get our passports.”

  “I’m not that greedy. A second mortgage will do nicely.”

  Karen had pressed her lips against his, run a hand through his hair, and he’d forgotten about Paris. Later that night he decided that he really would take out a second mortgage to give her that trip. But he never did, and they never went.

  Alicia’s hand felt unnaturally hot on top of his. He wanted to pull his hand away. And he wanted to leave it right where it was.

  “No, this is my first time to Rome,” he said. “Let’s stop.”

  “Stop? Why?”

  “Driver, take us to a restaurant.”

  “Ristorante?” He pointed at an approaching McDonald’s. “Hamburgers?”

  “No,” answered Brady. “A sit-down restaurant.” He glanced at Alicia before adding, “With a bar, a lounge.”

  The cabbie nodded and flicked on his left-turn signal to change lanes.

  Alicia was staring at him, concern etching a line in her brow, crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes.

  “Nerves,” he said weakly. “Aren’t you hungry?” They’d had a full meal on the plane, but that had been hours ago.

  “I’ll wait in the cab,” she said, an edge in her voice betraying her disappointment or impatience, probably both.

  The taxi bumped over a low curb into a half-full parking lot on the side of a stuccoed restaurant with green-and-white- striped awnings. After the taxi stopped, Brady studied the building but did not exit.

  “Signore?”

  Brady didn’t respond. He was there because he and his son and Alicia had been attacked and nearly killed. He wanted to do right by them, but he was tired and fatigued, and remembering Karen’s desire to see Rome had constricted his heart. He was a criminal psychologist who had gone on administrative leave for four months after the death of his wife and was afterward put on light duty, nothing too taxing. He had not asked for it and his superiors had not discussed it, but everyone understood that he wasn’t ready for the 110 percent effort the Bureau expected of its agents. He had been starting to believe he would never be ready for that level of performance again.

  The drinking—he knew, somewhere deep inside he knew—not only dulled the pain of missing Karen but helped him forget that he wasn’t handling her absence very well. Her death had proved to be a double blow: the wound it caused and the revelation of his inability to heal. So now he ached for his dead wife, and he was on foreign soil, hunting a killer he didn’t know, trying to protect the only other people in the world he cared about—a duty he felt incapable of performing.

  On top of all that—because there was always something “on top of all that,” something to further complicate complicated lives—Alicia had been giving him signs that she wanted more from their relationship. And he found his heart responding, hearing her heart’s call and yearning to answer. Of all the times . . .

  He filled his lungs, then tried to expel his tension with the air. He turned to her.

  “I know I . . . uh . . . I think I just . . .” He pushed his lips tight. He eyed the driver, scanned outside. The taxi had stopped not far from a busy sidewalk. Beyond the cab’s windows, the world seemed overbright and harsh and anything but private; not the environment in which Brady wanted to unload his thoug
hts.

  He touched the driver’s shoulder. “Sir, could you give us a minute?”

  “Huh?”

  “Alone, just for a minute? Could you step out?”

  The driver laughed sharply. “You go,” he said with a nod.

  Alicia reached into her blazer pocket, peeled off some bills from the wad of Euros she’d gotten at the airport, and thrust them at the driver.

  “Will you just please step outside?” she snapped. “Keep your hand on the door handle, if you want. Just . . . please?”

  He grabbed the cash, examined it, grunted, and climbed out.

  Alicia faced Brady with patient expectancy. Then she looked away to take the pressure off.

  “I think I just gave him about a hundred bucks,” she said and laughed.

  Brady smiled. The respite was short, but it managed to relax him the way a stiff drink might have.

  “Look,” he said. “I feel like I’m not doing well. I’m out of my element, and even when I was in it, I wasn’t all there. I know I’ve let my wife’s . . . I’ve held on to grief longer than I should have.”

  “Brady, you don’t have to—”

  “I do. I have too many negative emotions churning inside. I feel overwhelmed, ready to shut down. And that’s the last thing you need from me right now. I think if I can drag some of this out into the light of day, I’ll be able to think more clearly.”

  She nodded.

  “First, yes, I grieve for my wife, for my loss of her. It’s an open wound that won’t heal because I haven’t let it heal. I keep picking at it and reopening it. I don’t know how to leave it alone, to keep it from oozing and bleeding all over the rest of my life. I’m not fixing that right now, okay? It just is.”

  Her eyes softened. There was no pity in them, just acceptance.

  He went on. “I’m scared to death, I mean, paralyzed-scared for my son. I keep seeing his face when he was looking up at me from his hidey-hole and that killer was at the top of the stairs, rattling the door handle. Those dogs. Was he only after me, or both of us? Is he still looking for Zach? Do the people who control him have the resources to track Zach down?” He shook his head. “But here I am, five thousand miles away . . .”

  “Brady . . .”

  “I know. I know. This is where I need to be to help him. But what good am I? I mean, really? Look at you. You’re gung ho about this. You see what needs to be done and you do it. You’re the one who wanted to pursue Pelletier even before the attacks on us, even when our responsibilities on the case were done. I just wanted to go home. You went to talk to McAfee. When the storm hit, you thought to call in Apollo.”

  He caught her grimace and added, “His death wasn’t your fault, and where would we be without the information he extracted from Malik?”

  He paused a brief moment.

  “You confronted Gilbreath. You set our course to here, to Rome. You . . .”

  “Brady!” She shook his shoulder.

  He looked at her, surprised.

  “This might be your turn to vent,” she said, “but I’m not going to let you sit there and flog yourself. Even if this is Rome.” She smiled. “I hear what you’re saying, okay? You think you’re damaged goods and you’re not pulling your weight. You . . .”

  She was angry, unsure what to say. She punched him in the arm.

  “Are you dead? Is Zach dead? You didn’t freeze when a monster—a monster and his hellhounds!—came after you. You protected yourself and your son. Look at your hand. You grabbed an ax! You held on! And you would have fought if he hadn’t run away. He ran away, not you.”

  She shook her head. More quietly, she said, “Am I dead? You didn’t freeze when I went out that window. You saved me.” Her voice cracked on the word saved. She took a deep breath. “All right, I wanted to continue the investigation and you wanted to go home. That’s because you have somebody to go home to. You have someone who loves you and needs you, and you’re determined to live up to your responsibilities to Zach. That’s honorable. That’s noble.

  “I have my work. Brady, this is my life. I’ve dedicated myself to it the way you have to your family. Of course I want to stay on an investigation. Of course I’m a little more decisive about the direction of a case, about a course of action to get to the end. This is all I’ve done for years, while you were pursuing a different field of study and making a home and having a family. Does that make you deadweight now? No, Brady, it doesn’t!”

  She had worked herself up. He thought she might hit him again.

  Slowly, a smile bent his lips.

  “With a little Wite-Out, we can take my name off my degree and write in yours.”

  “If that’s another way of putting yourself down, I won’t have it.”

  “No, I just mean you have an incredible way of cutting through the crap. A shrink would have required a dozen sessions to do what you did in two minutes.”

  “Did I lance your emotional boil?”

  He cringed. “See? And yes, I do feel better. But there is one other thing.” He lowered his eyes. “You and I. I mean, it’s obvious . . .”

  The driver’s door opened. “We go now, yes?” the cabbie said, starting to get in.

  Alicia shot up to the back of his seat and pushed him back out.

  “No! Go count your money!” she yelled, then leaned over the seat, gripped the door, and yanked it shut. She fell back onto the rear cushion with a smile. “What’s obvious?”

  “I think . . .” He gave her a hard look. “Do you have feelings for me? Feelings that maybe go beyond . . . partners . . . I mean . . . ?”

  “I do. But that’s okay. I understand you aren’t—”

  “I feel the same,” he said, cutting her off. “I think. I’ve caught myself comparing you to Karen. That’s unfair, I know, but that I was doing it at all made me realize I had some feelings . . . you know?”

  Man, why did he make everything so difficult?

  She gripped his hand and squeezed.

  “It’s good you mentioned this,” she said. “Now we can let it go. Let’s not think about it or worry about it or play games while we take care of this Father-Randall-Pelletier-near- death-experience thing. Whatever happens, happens. Okay?”

  Now that was like Karen, he realized. Decisive but accepting of the world the way it was. Karen’s strength had come from knowing there was a God in control. Conversely, Alicia was one of those people who had a well of strength that came up from somewhere they didn’t examine very closely; it didn’t matter to them where it came from, as long as it was there when they needed it.

  Keeping her eyes on him, she rapped her knuckles against the window glass. When the cabbie opened the door and plopped down on his seat, she said, “Where’ve you been? Let’s go!”

  59

  Forty minutes later, the cab pulled to the curb on Via della Conciliazione. Brady didn’t see much, except what looked to him like ancient apartment buildings, scrupulously maintained. Then he climbed out and looked over the roof of the cab. Across the boulevard and beyond two ornately decorated buildings opened a massive courtyard—the Piazza San Pietro. From its center rose an Egyptian obelisk at least a hundred feet high, originally moved there to commemorate the Circus of Nero. Past it, on the opposite side of the plaza, was St. Peter’s Basilica, fronted by columns, its facade topped by statues of saints and its famous dome, designed by Michelangelo, rising behind them.

  “Signore!”

  The cabbie’s call made him realize he had been standing in the open door, transfixed by the sight. He closed the door, freeing the cab to roar away. Alicia was already jogging across the boulevard, as if responding to a siren’s call. Brady followed.

  The court was elliptical. Colonnades extended from the cathedral steps, then swooped around like arms embracing the souls in the plaza. There were perhaps a few hundred people milling in it now, but it felt vacant, able to accommodate thousands more.

  Alicia tapped him on the arm.

  “There’s an office or some
thing marked L’ufficio informazioni.” She pointed beyond the southern colonnade at what could have been storefronts but whose signage indicated Vatican offices and assistance stations. They entered the information office and waited while a man behind a counter explained details about tours through the Vatican Gardens to a group of elderly and extremely hard-of-hearing American tourists. After the last loud “What?” had been answered and the group shuffled out, Brady approached the man.

  “We’re here to see a priest who works in the Archives.”

  “The Archives or the library?” the man asked, using the volume he had adopted for his previous inquisitors.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Sì.”

  Brady raised his eyebrows at Alicia.

  She said, “Father McAfee said ‘Secret Archives.’”

  Brady returned his attention to the man. “The priest we’re here to see is—”

  “Two doors down,” the man said, turning away from them.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The business office.” He pointed east.

  The business office looked like a low-budget travel agency, with a couple of old desks and chairs for waiting visitors. Only one desk was occupied, by a kid Brady would card if he tried to buy alcohol. He wore a cleric’s collar over a black short-sleeved shirt. There was an LCD monitor and keyboard on his desk, but his head was bent over a ledger. He was scrutinizing columns of tiny numbers, pencil in hand. His hair was black, cut short, and parted on one side. Gelled into place. He looked up with a bright smile.

  “Mi dica?”

  “Do you speak English?” Brady asked.

  “Of course. What may I do for you?” His English was flawless.

  Brady asked to see Father Randall.

  “What is the nature of your business?”

  He and Alicia had already decided to be as honest as possible—up to a point. Mentioning a murder investigation might create more walls than doors. He explained that they were following up on a burglary at a Catholic church in the States and needed to speak with Father Randall about it.

  “You traveled to Italy, investigating a burglary?” The young priest was as baffled as anyone would be at hearing Brady’s ludicrous story.