Eve - Iris Johansen [50]
Eve stood listening for a moment, then turned and went out on the porch. She didn’t know if Joe would be able to get what he wanted from Venable, but she was willing to step back and let him try.
Not that she had any choice. Joe in this mood was not pliable. He would travel his own path through hell or high water.
Was he right about her trying to close him out? Joe knew her so well that he sometimes knew what she was thinking before she was aware of it. From the moment she had heard about John Gallo, she had felt a shock and rejection. If John was the murderer, then Eve had brought him into their lives. She was directly responsible for all the hell and torment Joe had experienced in the past years of searching for Bonnie and her killer. She had no right to expose him to more danger because of a man who was part of her past before Joe had come into her life.
She gazed out at the moonlight on the lake. Beautiful and clean and safe. Just like her life with Joe. But the waters were placid, and her relationship with Joe seldom was. Comfortable at times, but the undercurrents of passion and turbulence were always just under the surface.
So different from what she had known with John Gallo. Joe didn’t know that girl, and she couldn’t explain her to him. By the time she had met Joe, she had experienced childbirth, motherhood, and the most terrible tragedy a woman could survive. It had burned out all traces of that girl she had been.
Burn.
“You burn, Eve.”
She should have forgotten those words John had spoken. Why hadn’t she? She was sure that he had only the most fleeting memories of her.
Unless Catherine was right, and he had twisted their relationship into the beginning of a horror story.
And, if that had happened, she could not let Joe be caught up in that horror story.
* * *
EVE RECEIVED A CALL FROM Catherine an hour later.
“I heard from Venable,” Catherine said. “He’s been able to confirm the story about John Gallo’s being alive. He has a source who says that Gallo’s records were buried so deep that no one could dig them up in the next hundred years.” She paused. “And that at one time there was a contract put out on him.”
“By whom?”
“Military.”
“My God, the same people who sent him into North Korea put out a contract on him because of what he found.”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“What the hell happened to him there?”
“It’s what happened after he got out of that prison that we’ve got to know about. I got my call from Nate Queen at Army Intelligence, and I’m hoping that he’ll prove Venable wrong about how deep we have to dig to find out where Gallo is right now.”
“What did he tell you?”
“The word is that Gallo moves around a lot but that he may be located in Utah.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere in the mountains.”
“That’s damn vague.”
“It’s more than we had an hour ago.”
“What about Paul Black?”
“No mention of him other than that one statement. Not in connection with Gallo.”
“It’s crazy. Paul Black was a suspect himself, and yet it seems as if he’s a witness against John. Then you tell me that Black faded away in the investigation as if he’d never existed?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. I’m still probing.”
“Then I need to be doing some probing myself. I’ll call Luis Montalvo and see what else I can find out about Paul Black. He gave me the name as a possible suspect. He may know more than what was in the original report he gave me.”
“Montalvo?”
“Montalvo used to be an arms dealer in Colombia. I did a forensic reconstruction job for him, and in return he hired investigators to try to find leads to Bonnie’s killer.”
“It sounds like a devil’s bargain. Can you trust him?”
“Sometimes our association is a bit strained, but, yes, I can trust him.”
“Then by all means probe to your heart’s content.” She paused. “How is Joe?”
“How do you think? You’re the one who insisted on talking to—” She wasn’t being fair. Catherine had been trying to take