CHAPTER
20
JESSICA REEL WAS ONCE MORE on the move.
She had never liked to stay in one place for too long.
She had taken a cab and then she had walked. She liked to walk. When you were being driven in a cab you gave up some measure of control. She never liked to do that.
This day was cooler than the day before. The rain had come and gone yet it was overcast and still felt damp. But it wasn’t a humid damp. It was a chilly one.
She was glad of the long trench coat. And the hat.
And the sunglasses, despite the weak light.
The car came down the street. It was a late-model hunter green Jag convertible. A man was driving. He looked to be in his late forties. His hair was short and he sported a small graying goatee.
His name was Jerome Cassidy. He had overcome alcohol addictions and other problems to become a self-made millionaire. There were many lessons to be learned from the man’s personal triumph.
But the person sitting next to Cassidy interested Reel far more.
Fourteen, small for her age, with messy hair.
When the car stopped and she got out, Reel saw that she wore torn jeans, cheap sneakers, and a sweatshirt. A large backpack was over one shoulder. It looked like it weighed as much as she did.
Julie Getty looked like a typical urban teen going to school.
A few words were exchanged between the two and then the Jag drove off.
Reel knew that Jerome Cassidy loved Julie Getty as a father did a daughter, though they had just recently become acquainted.
Now she forgot about Cassidy and focused on Julie.
The first thing she did was scan the area. She doubted they would have thought that far ahead, but one never knew
.
She saw no one watching Julie, and she was confident she would have if they had been there. She slipped her phone from her pocket and took some pictures of Julie and the school she was now heading into.
School was out at three-fifteen.
She knew that Julie did not ride in the Jag for the trip back home. She took the bus.
Reel would be back at three-ten.
She watched Julie disappear through the doorway of the school building and then turned and walked down the street.
Killers sometimes returned to the scene of the crime. That was next on her agenda this morning. She wasn’t interested in the crime scene itself. She was more interested in someone who she knew would be there.
When she arrived at her destination, Reel saw that the barricades had been pulled back until only the two buildings in question were still off-limits.
She stepped inside a shop, bought a coffee and newspaper, and stepped back out. She sat on a bench, read her paper, drank her coffee, and waited.
It took one hour before the woman came out. Reel had long since finished her coffee and the paper. She now just sat there looking idly around. Or so it seemed.
She made no visible reaction to the woman’s appearance on the scene.
Nicole Vance talked to one of her agents and signed off on a document. She stepped back and took a long look at the building from where the shot had been fired that had killed Doug Jacobs. Then she gazed toward the building where Jacobs’s life had ended.
Reel knew that Vance was very good at her job. She knew that the woman had probably gathered all the evidence that was collectible at both sites. She would go over it and then look for the killer. She wouldn’t find the killer. Not because she wasn’t good enough, but because it just wasn’t the sort of crime that the police ever solved.
Reel knew that either the people after her would get to her first, long before the police would be made aware of her presence, or else she would finish her work and disappear forever.
Reel was not afraid of much. She was not afraid of the police. Or the FBI. Or Special Agent Vance.
She was afraid of her former employer.
She was afraid of Will Robie.
But she was most afraid of failing at the one mission that had come to define her perhaps as she truly was.
She took some photos of Vance with her phone while pretending to make a call.
Kent was very foolish for walking alone even in daylight, she thought. With Gelder and Jacobs dead he would have to know.
And if he knew, he should be aware that he was on the list.
And if he didn’t know, he was not nearly as formidable an opponent as she thought.
And I know that’s not the case.
Something was off here.