Chapter 16: Gate Twelve

The investigator caught up to us in the hotel lobby with his phone in his hand.

"He's not at his apartment," he said. "I followed his car out the back. He's going to the airport."

"His passport is flagged," Sadie said.

"He has a company ID that gets him through the cargo terminal. VanHorne Freight flies a charter to Lisbon at six."

I called the detective from the revolving door.

He picked up on the first ring.

"The judge signed the warrant at midnight," he said. "She watched the stream. Where is he?"

"Terminal B."

"Stay where you are, Sewall."

We did not stay where we were.

Sadie drove the clinic truck through the dark with both hands on the wheel, and the urn rode on my knees.

I had not let it out of my sight since the hospital.

At five in the morning, the airport was half empty and smelled of floor wax.

We stood behind a pillar across from Gate Twelve, with a glass wall between us and the boarding area.

Dane sat on a plastic seat with a gray hood pulled up and a duffel bag between his feet.

Joanna's cash was in that bag.

A hundred people sat around him with their coffees and their phones.

None of them knew his face, because he had never been famous without a white suit on.

Then a man in a green jacket pointed at him and said something to the woman beside him.

She lifted her phone.

Another woman turned to look, and then a boy.

It spread through the seats from person to person until the whole gate was staring.

"That's him," the boy said, loud enough for the glass to carry it. "That's the lie detector guy."

Dane pulled his hood lower.

Four officers came around the corner at a walk.

The detective was with them, in the same coat he had worn at the hospital.

Dane saw them and stood up.

He did not run this time.

He looked around at the phones, and his face rearranged itself into the bright smile I had hated for nine years.

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