Speaking in Tongues

taken one after their wedding.
    He looked out over the dark sky, at the spattering of a million stars. Tate laughed to himself. What a kick if they’d run into each other. He wondered how Bett would have reacted to Karen. No, Cathy.
    Probably not well.
    Not a jealousy thing so much as a matter of approval. She’d never liked his taste in women.
    Well, Tate didn’t either, now that he looked back at his lovers over the past ten years.
    Belize . . .
    Was there actually a possibility that he and Bett might take that trip together still—after they found Megan?
    Whatever happened with Brad, the presence of a fiancé didn’t seem as insurmountable as simply the concept of Tate and Bett taking a trip together. At one time their joined names had been a common phrase among their friends. But that was a long, long time ago.
    Yet—this was feelings again, not Cartesian logic—yet somehow he believed that they’d get along just fine. The fight today had been as bad as any they’d had fifteen years ago. And yet there’d been a reconciliation. This astonished him. That never would have happened in the past.
    He sighed, sipped his wine, looked out at the Dalmatian nosing about in the tall grass. Thinking now of Megan.
    But even if husband and wife were to get together again, what would the girl come home to? And more important . . . who was the person coming home?
    Was the girl’s drinking and the water tower incident more than just a onetime fluke? Was that the real Megan McCall, a bitter young woman who slept with men for money? Or was there another person within her? One Tate didn’t know well—or maybe one he hadn’t even yet met?
    Tate Collier felt a sudden desperation to know the girl. To know who she was. What excited her, what she hated, what she feared. What foods she liked. What clothes she’d pick and which she’d shun. What bad TV shows she’d want to watch.
    What made her laugh. And what weep.
    And he was suddenly stung by a terrible thought: that if Megan had died this morning, the victim of a deranged killer or an accident, he’d have been distraught, yes, terribly sad. But now, if that happened or—the most horrifying—if she simply vanished forever, never to be found at all, he’d be destroyed. It would be one of those tragedies that breaks you forever. He remembered something he’d told Bett when they’d been married, a case he was working on—prosecuting an arson murder. The victim had run into a burning building to save her child, who’d survived, though the mother had perished. He’d read the facts, looked up to Bett and said, “You’ll kill for your spouse but you’ll die for your child . . .”
    In rhetoric, lawyers use the trick of personification—picking words to make their own clients seem human and sympathetic and their opponents less so. “Mary Jones” instead of “the witness” or “the victim.” Juries find it far easier to be harsh to abstractions. “The defendant.” “The man sitting at that table there.”
    It’s a very effective trick and a very dangerous one.
    And it’s just how I’ve treated Megan over the years, Tate now thought. He rose, walked into the den and spent a long time looking for another picture of her. He was terribly disappointed he couldn’t find one.He’d given his only snapshot to Konnie and Beauridge that afternoon.
    He sat down in his chair, closed his eyes and tried to create some images now. Images of the girl. Smiling, looking perplexed, exasperated . . . A few came to mind. He tried harder.
    And harder still.
    Which was why he hadn’t heard the man come up behind him.
    The cold finger of a pistol touched his temple. “Don’t move, Mr. Collier. No, no. I really mean that. For your sake. Don’t move.”

Chapter Twenty-one
    Jimmy, Tate recalled.
    His name was Jimmy. And he was the man who’d been far more willing than Tate to engage in some gunplay in Jack Sharpe’s immaculate foyer.
    Tate glanced at the phone.
    Jimmy shook his head. “No.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Mr. Sharpe sent me.”
    Figured that.
    The gun was really very large. The man’s finger wasn’t on the trigger; it was outside of the guard. This didn’t reassure Tate at all.
    “I have something for you to look at.”
    “Look at?”
    “I’m going to give it to you to look at. Then I’m going to take it back. And neither me or Mr. Sharpe’ll ever admit we know what you’re talking about if you ever mention it. You understand?”
    Tate