After glancing up to make sure the trio of judges were still there, Bree selected their private cell numbers, made them a group, pasted her message, then looked up again.
The judges were no longer together. All three were walking to their separate cars parked in the courtyard.
Perfect, Bree thought and thumbed the Send button. She watched anxiously, hoping that it went through before—
Judge Marchant set her attaché cases down by her car and got out her phone to look at it. By his car, Judge Alsace did the same. Only Judge Les Freres opened his car door and got in.
Even from across the boulevard, even looking through the iron-and-gilt fence, Bree saw Judge Alsace lean against his car as if he were suddenly unsteady. Judge Marchant went dead still and then hunched over, one hand across her mouth, looking at her phone and shaking her head.
Then the judge picked up her head and gazed around as if hunting for the sender. Three rows back in the crowded tables outside the café, Bree felt confident but turned in another direction for a full minute.
When she looked back, Judge Alsace and Judge Marchant both stood outside Judge Les Freres’s car and were speaking with him through the window. It was hard to see, but Bree was sure Les Freres also had his phone in his hand.
That got their attention, Bree thought. She got up and went into the café’s restroom. There, she pulled the battery and SIM card from the burn phone, pocketed them, then broke the phone and dumped it in the trash beneath used paper towels. She would dispose of the battery and the SIM elsewhere.
By the time she returned to her table, the judges and their cars were gone. She wasn’t worried. She had a better than decent hunch about where they might all be going.
And it wasn’t home.
Chapter
24
Washington, DC
Early that afternoon on the East Coast, Sampson entered the DC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on E Street and asked at the front counter for Lauren Pickett, an assistant ME he’d known for years.
While he waited, he kept returning to Billie’s church in his mind, kept seeing Hayden Brooker, his arms folded, legs crossed at the ankles, leaning against a tree, and staring at Sampson in amusement until a delivery van rolled to a stop, blocking his view. When it moved, Brooker had vanished.
But it was him. Sampson had no doubt about it. Same facial structure, same shaggy haircut, same I hate the world and want to kill it expression.
Did he want me to see him there at the church? Was he there to watch me and Willow? And why now? Why after all these years?
Before Sampson could further ponder Brooker’s reappearance in his life, Lauren Pickett appeared. “John Sampson, what a pleasant surprise.”
Dr. Pickett was a little older than Sampson, late forties, very attractive, and very smart. They’d worked together on multiple cases and he had always enjoyed her company.
“Sorry to come by without touching base first,” he said. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?”
“Absolutely,” Pickett said. “My office is free.”
She led him back through a warren of cubicles to her office, which had photographs on the wall of her many adventure trips. Sampson saw her on a fishing boat in Panama, on an elephant in India, and carrying a heavy backpack in spectacular mountain terrain.
“That’s the Bob Marshall Wilderness, isn’t it?” he said.
Dr. Pickett smiled. “One of the most awe-inspiring places I have ever been. Really helped me heal.”
“I remember you saying that. Alex Cross and I were supposed to be in the Bob right now. We were going to go in on horses with all our gear and rafts and float out the South Fork of the Flathead River. Six-day trip, mostly self-guided.”
She sighed dreamily. “Sounds amazing. You had to postpone?”
“For a number of reasons,” he said, a little deflated as he sat in a chair across from her. “I’d been hoping to do some of that healing you’ve talked about.”
“How are you, John?” Pickett asked with sincere concern. “What’s it been, a year now?”
“Thirteen months,” Sampson said. “And I’m still working it out.”
“And I expect you will be for a while yet. I know when Don passed, it was a good two years before I could look at anything without the filter of his death. That trip to the Bob Marshall was at month twenty-four. I found peace in that wilderness.”
“If I’m going to find some of that peace, I’ll need your help.”
“Anything, John. You know that,” the assistant ME said and sat forward.