Chapter 4 - The Eleven-Month Lie
For five seconds after Luke finished speaking, the grandfather clock ticking in the front hall sounded like a bomb counting down in the silence of my childhood home.
I stared at the glowing screen of Luke's phone, where a hotel security frame taken twenty minutes earlier at the West End Motor Lodge showed Mark—the mild-mannered Chicago accountant who used to complain when his toast was burned—walking through a side entrance alongside Denise.
Except the woman in that surveillance frame did not look like the timid suburban insurance clerk with frizzy hair and cardigan sweaters whom I had cried over for three humiliating years.
She was wearing a fitted black leather jacket, her posture razor-sharp as she checked the street behind Mark with the cold, practiced sweep of a professional operative.
"Mark told me he loved her for eleven months before he left me," I whispered, the memory of me begging him in our kitchen while he stared at the refrigerator door suddenly twisting from heartbreak into something far darker and more terrifying.
"He wasn't having an affair, Claire—he was being placed under twenty-four-hour handler custody after your mother's death made the syndicate nervous that he might confess to you," Luke said quietly, closing the lid of the scorched walnut box and latching the brass hooks.
Across the room, my brother Michael went pale as a sheet, backing toward the kitchen swinging door with his hands raised nervously.
"You have to get that box out of this house right now," Michael stammered, his voice pitching high with panic as he looked out toward the rain-swept front lawn.
"If Victor Vance's people tracked Luke from Denver and know Mark is in town, they aren't going to wait until morning to clean up the witnesses!" Michael shouted.
I looked sharply at my older brother—the dependable brother who had taken over our family's commercial hardware supply company ten years ago—and noticed for the first time that his hands were shaking even harder than our seventy-nine-year-old father's.
"How do you know the name Victor Vance, Michael?" I asked slowly, taking a step toward him across the dining room rug.
"Dad never mentioned the name of the man behind Vane Development just now—so how do you know who Victor Vance is?" I pressed.
Michael swallowed hard, sweat beading on his forehead despite the autumn chill in the room, and before he could invent a lie, Luke stepped over to the front bay window and parted the heavy lace curtains by half an inch.
Parked across the wet asphalt of Hawthorne Road, directly beneath the stump of the old maple tree by the corner church that had been cut down earlier that week, sat a matte-black Cadillac sedan with tinted windows and its headlights turned off.
"Get away from the glass and get down on the floor right now!" Luke roared, lunging backward across the carpet and catching me around the waist with one powerful arm just as the passenger window of the black sedan rolled down two inches in the dark.
Four muffled, rapid pops echoed over the hiss of the rain outside, and a heartbeat later the leaded glass of my father's front bay window exploded inward in a blinding shower of crystal shards and splintered wood.
High-velocity subsonic rounds tore across the dining room, shattering the porcelain gravy boat on the table, blowing the crystal chandelier's lower tier into dust right above my father's white hair, and burying themselves deep in the plaster wall behind the birthday cake as Luke shielding my body on the oak floorboards.
In the same instant, the exterior transformer box mounted on the utility pole at the end of the driveway sparked violently in a flash of blue flame, plunging the entire house into pitch darkness as the shooters cut both our electrical grid and the street's landline fiber cable.
Down on the dark floor covered in broken glass and buttercream frosting, my father groaned in pain as he clutched at his left arm where a flying shard of window glass had sliced through his cardigan sleeve.
Luke kept one heavy hand pressed between my shoulder blades to keep me below the windowsill level while he reached beneath his charcoal wool coat and drew a compact, matte-black nine-millimeter pistol that no ordinary structural engineer from Denver had any business carrying through an airport.
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"Who the hell are you really, Luke, and how did you get a loaded firearm onto a commercial flight from Chicago?" I hissed against his shoulder in the dark as glass crunched under the boots of men advancing across our front lawn.
"I didn't fly it in—your mother buried it inside the false bottom of a planter at the airport parking garage six years ago along with the key to that box, because before I was a structural engineer, I spent twelve years as a federal air marshal and bomb investigator," Luke whispered back, right as we heard the terrifying metallic click of the kitchen back door unlocking from the inside—and when Luke swung his flashlight beam toward the kitchen hallway, we saw my brother Michael holding the back door wide open for two masked gunmen with a gun pressed to his own temple.
