In the Company of Killers Bryan Christy (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📖

Maggie had cried into the phone. “You promised,” she wept. “You promised me.”

“Wife has no idea,” Barrow had said with a firmness suggesting he had gone to some length to be sure.

“I’m so sorry, Maggie,” Klay said, and recited a version of what he knew she’d already been told. They went after the prosecutor’s task force, and Tenchant was there . . . It happened in seconds . . . He felt no pain . . .

The hearse arrived. The funeral home’s staff opened umbrellas. Klay did not recognize the pallbearers. Three looked to be ex-military. The pallbearers lifted a blue steel casket, and the minister led them across the wet grass to a grave under a canvas tent. He wondered how many plots Maggie had purchased. Neither of them was from the area, he knew. He hoped life would carry Maggie and her unborn child too far away to ever come back to Tenchant’s side. Tenchant’s mother looked frail and older than Klay would have guessed. He found himself trying to imagine what had happened in that home to create Tenchant. What had happened in Krieger’s home, or in Eady’s? He knew what had happened in his.

Fox and Snaps arrived in Fox’s Mazda. They waited for Erin and Grant before approaching the grave site. Erin’s heels stuck in the soft earth as she walked, and she took her fiancé’s arm for balance. Klay’s eyes lingered on the couple. Porfle showed up in an old brown MGB roadster he was restoring. A tear in the soft top had been patched with silver duct tape. He opened a pocket umbrella and joined the staff.

Sharon stepped out of a white Range Rover, popped an umbrella, and waited for her husband. She nodded hello as she passed Porfle and the journalists. She paid her respects to Maggie. Porfle broke off from the journalists and walked toward her. A gust of wind caught his umbrella, and he paused to fix it. Then he appeared unsure which way to go. He looked expectantly from Sharon and her people back to Snaps, Fox, and the others. In the end he stood alone.

“She’ll be taken care of,” a gravelly voice said. Klay stiffened. Eady took Klay’s elbow in his gloved fingers. “It was an Agency assignment, technically,” Eady said, looking down the hill at the mourners. “She and the baby will be taken care of. I will see to it.”

The boy’s family will be taken care of. I will see to it.

“Good,” Klay said. It was all he could manage.

Eady stepped into Klay’s view. He wore an Irish driving cap and a gray trench coat. “I thought I might see you sooner,” Eady said, studying Klay.

“I needed some time,” Klay said.

“It will be difficult,” Barrow had advised. “You’ll need to maintain your self-control. Give him no indication that you know. You’ll have talked to me. He’ll want to confirm that. Be honest. Make him curious.”

“Barrow reached out to you, I presume,” Eady said.

“He did.”

When Klay didn’t say more, Eady said, “We do what we do to protect them, Tom. The people here. This nation of ours. Sometimes we fail. Tenchant respected you. He was grateful to have had a chance to work with you.”

Klay knew if he didn’t access genuine grief he would lose Eady. He forced himself to remember his mother’s casket lying above its grave. He recalled his grandfather standing beside him and his brother, Sean. His father standing alone. It was the only time he would ever see his father cry. Sadness sparked on the flint, then caught. Klay wiped a tear from his eye. “You spoke to him?”

Klay wanted to take Eady’s throat in his hands.

“I did. Just before the attack, I expect,” Eady replied. “He was happy, excited. He said you found something . . . ?”

“I did. Did he tell you?”

“I didn’t want him to use the unsecure line. I told him to have you call me back . . .”

Eady waited, but Klay did not respond. “He told me he was doing good work, Tom. That’s what each of us hopes for in the end, isn’t it? To say, ‘I did a good job with the time God gave me.’”

Klay watched the undertaker hand each of Tenchant’s mourners a carnation. One by one they stepped forward and laid a flower on Tenchant’s casket.

“Come see me. My apartment,” Eady said. “We’ll talk.”

Klay shook his head no.

“We need to talk, Tom.”

“Don’t be eager, but don’t play too hard to get,” Barrow had counseled.

“I don’t want to see anyone, Vance.”

“Come out to the farm then. Ruth is visiting her sister. We’ll catch a trout for supper. Just the two of us. I have something, Tom. Something you need to see.”

“Did you know?” Klay said.

“Did I know?”

Don’t tell him you suspect anything. Too risky.

“Barrow didn’t send me to help Hungry. He sent me to discredit her.”

Eady lowered his umbrella. His eyes narrowed. Raindrops hurried along his face and dripped off his chin. “Why on earth would he do that?”

Klay wiped the rain from his own face. “Barrow’s got something going with Terry Krieger.”

Eady was fully alert now. “Barrow does?”

Klay nodded. “He’s got to be stopped.”

A DEATH IN CAMELOT

Fauquier County, Virginia

Klay drove his Land Cruiser west toward Eady’s Virginia horse farm. The Toyota was more than thirty years old with two hundred thousand miles on it, but it was in good condition. He took the Warrenton exit and headed south on 29, then west again, horse farms of Virginia’s wealthy galloping up beside him. He wound his way through the narrowing country roads, wondering as he always did if he’d missed his turn, when a white three-board fence appeared, the Eadys’ front pasture.

Klay’s most recent visit had been Fourth of July. Eady and his guests had shot skeet from the back hill. Vance, not surprisingly, an excellent shot.

The property had been purchased by Eady’s banker father, a dollar-a-year man under McNamara. “His brothers and sister haven’t set foot here since the funeral,” Eady’s wife Ruth confided once. “Haven’t looked at a bill, either, though they’re