Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [62]
“She’s already said she believes he’s trying to get the attention of someone connected to the investigation.”
“I wonder why he didn’t do something sooner, like with the other victims. There weren’t any similarities with any of them, were there?”
“None that were readily noticeable, but Miranda is already checking on that. And think about this: Maybe it’s someone who was caught and convicted because of a composite that you did in the past. Or someone who loved someone you sketched.”
“Adam, I don’t know the whereabouts of every convicted criminal I’ve drawn since the beginning of my career.”
“No, but that would be easy enough to check. Can you give me a list of names?”
“Actually, I can do better than that. I can give you their names and copies of their composites. I’ve kept every one. But I can tell you that if I’d ever sketched this man before, I’d remember the face. It’s an intimate thing, drawing someone’s face. And I know I’ve never done this man before.”
“All the same, I’d like you to fax those sketches down to Mancini first thing in the morning.”
“Sure.”
“Kendra, what are your plans for the weekend?” he asked abruptly.
“Don’t really have any. Why?”
“Come with me to my dad’s wedding.”
“Wait a minute, I thought you said earlier that you wouldn’t be able to go.”
“I spoke with John after I left Newkirk, gave him an update. He thought I could spare a few hours.”
There was silence on the phone.
“Adam, John would never tell you, or any other agent, to leave a major investigation, even for a few hours. There has to be more to this than you’re telling me.” She bit her bottom lip, then said, “You don’t think he’s going to come after me, do you?”
“You may well be the party whose attention he’s trying to get. Someone has to keep an eye on you until we figure out why, and who. It might as well be me.”
Another silence.
Finally, she sighed heavily.
“What time will you be here?”
Chapter
Thirteen
“Look down in that valley,” Kendra said as she stared out the car window at the blurred scenery whizzing by the Audi’s window. “There’s another one of those pretty little towns, with the white-spired churches and all the pretty houses.”
“I don’t know that, up close, they’re all that pretty,” Adam replied.
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
“A lot of those towns were coal mining towns,” he told her, never taking his eyes off the road. “And when the mines closed up, so did a lot of the towns.”
“You mean the towns are abandoned?”
“Not entirely, but many of them have very little going on these days. No industry moved in to replace coal.”
“How do you suppose they make a living, then?” She turned back to him. “The people in those towns?”
“Any way they can.”
“When did the mines close up?”
“Most of the anthracite mines were closed by the 1920s. After that, there was a lot of strip mining, but this country was weaning itself off coal and turning to oil and gas.” He pointed off to the right. “If you look up that hill, you can see the scars the strip mines left behind.”
Her gaze followed upward, where a deep gash, like a ravine, seemed to cut the hill in two.
“There wasn’t a kid that I knew growing up in Hopewell who hadn’t been touched by coal, shaped by it, one way or another,” Adam added.
“How were you shaped by it?”
“Oh, I come from a bit of a mixed bag.” His mouth turned up at one side in a sort of half-smile. “On my father’s side I had a great-great-uncle who was in the Molly Maguires, and on my mother’s a great-grandfather who was one of the Pinkerton agents hired to infiltrate the group and bring them down.”
“Your family gatherings back then must have been interesting,” she noted, leaning back against the headrest.
“So they tell me.” He smiled, recalling the stories his grandfather used to tell.
“I guess you take after the Pinkerton side.”
“I admit to having been inspired by an old photo of my great-great-grandfather. I never really wanted to be anything except an FBI agent.”
“But you played professional football for all those