High Crimes

“Freeze!” one of the men shouted at him, pulling out a gun and aiming. He fired a shot, which pockmarked the granite very close to Tom’s head.

She screamed, “Tom!” To the others, she yelled: “Stop it! What the hell are you doing?” She could barely believe what Tom, her husband of three years, the man she loved and knew so intimately, was doing. It was as if another man had taken his place, a man she didn’t know, who could do things her Tom would never have dreamed of.

For an instant Tom actually stopped, and Claire wondered whether he really did intend to halt where he was, almost ten feet off the ground, clinging to the artificial rock face.

Another shot hit the glass wall of the balcony just above him, shattering it, and then Tom continued up the rock face with an awesome agility, and Claire stared in rapt amazement as he reached over to the brass guardrail around the balcony, grabbed hold, and deftly swung himself up into the gawking, frenzied crowd of people who’d been waiting to get into the movie theaters or were streaming out of them, and then at once he was gone.

“Goddamn it!” the leader shouted as he reached the escalators. He swept an index finger around at his men. “You two, to the parking garage! You, up this way, into the theater. Move it!” He whirled around and called to another of his men, “Damn it, we lost the fucker!” Then he pointed directly at Claire and Annie, jerking his thumb to one side. “I want them,” he shouted. “Now!”

2

Claire and Annie were hustled off to a small, windowless room just off the atrium — a mall security station, by the look of it, and judging by the uniformed rent-a-cops standing guard outside in light-blue shirts with dark-blue shoulder patches. Special Agent Howard Massie of the FBI, the man in the blue blazer, was beefy and crewcut, with small gray eyes and a pockmarked face. The other men were U.S. marshals.

As Annie squirmed in her arms, Claire said, “What the hell is this all about?” The knot of anxiety in her stomach had swollen; the underarms of her blouse were damp with perspiration.

Annie wriggled to the floor and held on to Claire’s skirt. She whined, “Where’s Daddy?”

“Mrs. Chapman,” Agent Massie said, “I think it’s better if we speak alone. Perhaps your daughter can wait outside, in the care of one of these fine gentlemen here.” He leaned forward and gave Annie a brief pat on the head. Annie, in reply, frowned, twitched her head, and shrugged away from him.

“You get your hands off my child,” Claire said. “You are not touching her. She’s staying here with me.”

Massie nodded and managed to regain a semblance of a smile. “Ma’am, you’re obviously upset—”

“Upset?” she gasped. “Ten minutes ago we were having dinner. Suddenly everyone in the world is chasing my husband, firing guns! You want to know upset? You’re looking at a multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit for the unnecessary use of force by two government agencies, reckless pursuit, and reckless endangerment of the lives of innocent bystanders. You and your cowboys just stirred up a shitstorm, Agent.”

“Mrs. Chapman, we have a fully authorized warrant for your husband’s arrest. As to the guns, we weren’t authorized to kill, but we were permitted to wound if necessary, and we didn’t even do that.”

Claire shook her head, laughed, and pulled her cell phone out of her purse. She extended the antenna and began punching numbers. “You might want to have a better story prepared for the Herald and the Globe,” she said. “You obviously have the wrong man, and you just screwed up royally.”

“If we have the wrong man,” Massie replied quietly, “why did he run?”

“Obviously because you guys were in hot pursuit....” She faltered, depressed the END button. “All right, what’s your point?”

“You see,” Massie said, “you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to call the media.”

“Oh, I don’t, do I?”

“Once it’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in. You may not want this made public. We’ll have any police report sealed, and we’ll do our best to quash any media coverage. You’d better pray you weren’t recognized.”

“Mommy,” Annie said in a high, frightened voice, “I want to go home.”

“Just a couple of minutes, sweetie,” Claire said, reaching around to give Annie a quick one-armed hug. To Massie, she snapped: “What exactly are you referring to?”

“Your husband, Ronald Kubik, is wanted for murder.”

For a long moment Claire was speechless. “Now I know you have the wrong man,” she said at last. She smiled in relief. “My husband is Tom Chapman.”

“That’s not his real name,” Massie said. He pointed to a cheap-looking white conference table. “Why don’t we sit down?”

Claire took a seat across the table from Massie. Annie at first sat in a chair next to Claire’s, then slid off it onto the floor and began inspecting the underside of the table.

“And even if you do mean my husband, Tom,” Claire said, “who’s he supposed to have murdered?”