Michael stares straight at the road as the vehicle slashes through the orange coat of leaves on the ground.
"You're awfully quiet," Kellerman says, but he must sense there's something more to it. Michael's always quiet, and since Kellerman's been working with him these past six months, he ought to know that.
There's no reason not address the issue, so Michael says, "You behaved like a brute earlier."
Kellerman feigns a chuckle of surprise. "Excuse me?"
"With the daughter."
"Enlighten me, Michael, how did I brutalize her?"
"It's the way you put things. The sort of questions you asked, like we suspected her of not telling the truth."
"What tells you I don't?"
"Whatever you suspect, you don't have to let her know about it. It's counterproductive. Not to mention rude."
This time, the laughter Kellerman lets out is genuine. "Well excuse me, I didn't realize you'd become an expert on social skills."
Michael sighed. "We have responsibilities, Paul. That woman just learned her father's missing, she's distraught. It's our job not to upset her further. It's like being at the doctor, in a way. You don't want your doctor to just ask his patients to strip, or for him to thrust a stethoscope down their shirts without explaining what's happening to them. That'd be malpractice."
"Nice analogy," Paul rails him. "I could think of worse things than playing doctor with a woman like Sara Tancredi."
Michael's lips pinch tight and his eyes focus on the road.
"Don't you think she's attractive?" Kellerman asks.
"I don't think that's the least bit relevant to our investigation."
"She didn't cry."
"No."
"No hysterical daughter worried about her dad."
"They're clearly estranged," Michael says.
"Did you notice she kept talking about him in the past tense?"
"Yes, I noticed."
They fall silent.
"What does that tell you?" Kellerman asks.
"That she cut herself free from the past long ago?"
Kellerman shrugs.
"What?" Michael says. "You think she knows her father is dead, and is stupid enough to betray herself by using the past tense?"
"Mind you, I don't think Sara Tancredi is in on her father's kidnapping. I just think she's hiding something."
Michael has to bite back on the words that hang at the threshold of his lips.
Aren't we all?
The words Frank Tancredi wrote for his daughter flash through his mind –
Trust no one.
…
Sara waves off Anita's offer to clean up her room. "I only give it the monthly dusting," Anita adds on a tone of apology, "You understand, no one's slept there in ten years."
"I don't mind," Sara says. To be perfectly honest, she's never liked having Anita – or anyone – clean up for her.
As she enters what was her bedroom for the first eighteen years of her life, no flood of memories assails her. The room looks like any guest room in the house: luxurious, impersonal. No old posters or pictures hang from the walls. Sara's father would never allow it. She kicks off her heels – finally – and drops on the bed, vaguely aware PJs are one more thing she neglected to pack. If she's going to stay here until the FBI finds her father, she better do some shopping tomorrow – why would she stay? She can't explain it, except for the vivid feeling in her chest that cries out she has to.
With a little hope, everything will sort itself out and she can be on a flight back to Chicago tomorrow night…
Sara's eyes blink open as her phone rings – that stupid song again. Dawn floods the bedroom with an orangey light, yet Sara didn't realize she'd fallen asleep. The battery on her phone is running low, and Sara makes a mental note of buying a charger first thing this morning.
"Hello?" she picks up.
"Miss Tancredi, it's Agent Scofield. I'm sorry to call you this early, but you said you'd like us to tell you about any developments –"
"Did you find my father?" Sara cuts in. Now's not the time to worry about good manners.
"No," Michael says. "We went to talk to Nick Savrinn, who we understood to be one of the men closest to your father within his cabinet."
"And?"
A split-second silence settles before Michael answers, "He's dead. Murdered."
Sara rolls out of bed and ignores how her sight spins for a few seconds. "Is the office still on Lincoln Street?"
"Yes."
"I can be there in ten minutes."
…
Kellerman snorts when Michael hangs up the phone. "We keep family members in the loop now?"
"If she's hiding something, I'd like to keep her as close to the investigation as possible."
The way Kellerman's eyes twinkle, Michael's pretty sure his protest is not out of genuine professional concern, but rather a way of pushing Michael's buttons. Ever since they started working together, Kellerman's made it a game to try and probe the terrain, see if he could find Michael's limits. Michael can't say why he does this, but then again, he's never been good at guessing why people do anything.
Probably, it comes down to power. If Kellerman knows where he needs to push to get Michael angry, then that gives him power over him in some way.
Suddenly, that slide remark Kellerman made about playing doctor flashes in Michael's mind. Was that also something random he said just to see if he'd react?
Sara Tancredi arrives in a gleaming black Bentley, which for all its shine probably sees few days out of the garage. She parks in the opposite street, so Michael can see her out the window of Nick Savrinn's office as she gets out of the car and heads inside the building.
Michael never noticed that Kellerman crept up behind him until he says, "Seriously, Michael. What's your deal here?"
Michael turns back. Should he tell the truth? If Kellerman had been his old partner, he would have said his gut told him that Sara knew something important – something she wasn't telling them, and that could shine a light on their investigation. Fernando Sucre worked for six years alongside Michael, and he knows all about Michael's 'gut feelings'. But Sucre's first baby was born six months ago, and that was the end of the man's FBI career. "I just want to make sure I'm around to see her grow up," he told Michael. "You know?" What was there to do but wish him luck?
Deep down, though, Michael misses his old partner more than he can say. More than he'll ever say to Kellerman, who no doubt will roll his eyes if Michael ever mentions his gut to him and ever justifies his decisions based on what it tells him.
So he says the one thing he knows Kellerman won't have an answer to. "What is it Paul? Don't you trust me?"
The door of Savrinn's office slides open, and Sara Tancredi steps inside. Some people never look like you'd expect them to, and whatever stress and pain she's going through hasn't begun to take its toll on the young woman. Aside from the fact that she's wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and the same shoes – high heels she knows how to walk with but can't wear all that often, because she's a tall woman who doesn't need her legs to look any longer – Michael could swear she's had eight hours of sleep and a nice breakfast, though he suspects neither is true.
"Agent Kellerman," she greets them. "Agent Scofield."
Michael recognizes his partner's surprised tone, just a notch higher than his usual voice. "They let you get up there?"
"I'm the governor's daughter. Not many people here say no to me."
She says it with a kind of indifference that's got to cover for something deeper. Shame? Disgust?
Michael doesn't have time to figure out the answer. Sara motions to step forward, and Kellerman's palm stops her. Michael was too busy in his own thoughts to react, and he watches his partner's hand meet her shoulder to block her way before he can stop it. Sara's eyes shoot up and she stiffens.
If Kellerman's trying to build some trust with her, he's doing a terrible job.
"I wouldn't," Kellerman says, waving behind his shoulder. "There's a dead body in there."
"I'm a doctor, Agent Kellerman. I've seen dead bodies before."
Kellerman's hand falls back to his side, though he still stands in her way. As much as Michael disagrees with his partner's MO, he shares in his hesitation. When they get missing person cases, they don't usually let the victims' daughters into a crime scene.
Yet again, this is no normal case. And if he was never going to let her near the scene, why didn't he tell her so on the phone?
Michael gives a nod. Sara walks past Kellerman, who shoots a condescending look at Michael. "Are you completely out of your mind?" he leans into Michael's ear to ask.
Michael represses a shudder. Proximity makes him uncomfortable, always has – which is probably why he can't dislodge the sight of Kellerman's hand on Sara's shoulder from his thoughts.
He answers in a whisper, so Sara won't hear them, "Frank Tancredi wrote a note to his daughter before he disappeared. Whatever he got mixed up in, it's possible she's right in the middle of it."
"So you don't believe her when she says they haven't met in ten years?"
Michael doesn't know what to believe, so he says, "How do you get someone to trust you, Paul?"
Kellerman shrugs.
"You let them take control," Michael says.
They follow after Sara, inside the part of the office where they've found Nick Savrinn's body. It's a nice office. When Michael remembers the office he shares with Kellerman in D.C., he thinks he might have gone into politics. The office falls into two separate rooms: a kind of lobby, over-decorated with diplomas, signed autographs and pictures taken with famous people, and the study proper, which looks like a lesser version of Frank's.
The body lies sprawled behind the desk, where a bullet hole carves a third eye in Nick Savrinn's forehead.
Sara keeps a respectable distance from the scene when she asks. "Who found him?"
"We did," Michael says.
Sara checks her watch. Seven thirty a.m. "I take it your team is on its way?"
Kellerman smiles to confirm, before dealing Michael a cold look that makes him bear full blame for this strange situation: sharing a crime scene with someone personally involved in the investigation.
Sara asks, "Who knows about this?"
"We're trying to keep it quiet," Michael admits. "When the press finds out, everything will become much harder to work with."
She doesn't ask if that's unusual – which in fact, it is. When Michael talked to his superior about Frank's disappearance, she said they were to be especially discreet. No whispers about the FBI poking its nose into state politics. By the time the story breaks out on the front page, they should be in full control of the narrative.
"Actually, we're going to work with the local police," Kellerman offers.
"You're trying to blend in," Sara says, and it sounds little enough like a question that Kellerman's smile loses its shine.
"Like my partner said," Kellerman answers. "We're trying to keep quiet."
"Your timing couldn't get any worse if you want to work with the locals," Sara says.
"Because of the, uh – the Halloween celebrations?" Kellerman asks, visibly embarrassed to speak the thought out loud.
Sara nods. "You can forget about quiet. The town will be full to the brim tonight. If the press finds out there's been a murder on Halloween, you'll have a hard time keeping them on a leash. A lot of the locals get so tired of it, we just leave. Book a trip to New York, go sight-seeing."
Michael wonders if she's aware she included herself in the group she calls, the locals. He knows better than to point this out. "What do you think about the crime scene?"
Kellerman gives him that look again. Sara's eyes stay fixed on the body, visibly aware this could have been her father's – and that her father may yet know a worse fate.
If she feels like he's humoring her, like a doting dad taking his daughter at work and letting her play with the computer, Michael can't tell.
"He was shot while sitting at his desk. The shot must have knocked him out of the chair."
Kellerman's eyes turn careful, though the mocking glee hasn't completely left them. Like Michael, he must have picked up the way she said this – the familiarity.
"Is this your first crime scene, Miss Tancredi?" Kellerman asks.
Sara doesn't look back at him. Michael's aware he didn't need to ask her not to touch anything or approach the body.
"My first job in Chicago was as a forensic pathologist."
"You went from a morgue to a male prison," Kellerman states the obvious. Michael wishes he could snatch the smile from his lips, and shame boils in his belly as Kellerman adds, "From dead bodies to deadbeats."
Sara does look at him then, which is probably what Kellerman intended. "If it amuses you to put it like this."
Now, she's the grownup talking to a kid, and Michael can't help but think that Kellerman earned this.
"Do you think this is connected to my father's disappearance?"
"It's too early to speculate," Michael gives the pre-chewed response, but the directness of Sara's eyes tells him she isn't fooled. It'd be one heck of a coincidence if it wasn't connected.
"Can I ask you to speculate on one thing?" she asks, and after a two-beat pause Michael nods. "Is my father dead?"
"If you've seen crime scenes before," Michael says, "then you know your father's office didn't look much like one. Nothing broken. No blood."
"Maybe whoever took him put a gun to his head and asked your father to follow him quietly," Kellerman offers.
"Or maybe he went willingly because he knew his kidnapper," Sara says.
Michael's eyes cross Kellerman's as Sara stares back at the body.
"I suppose you asked Anita if my father had any visitors," Sara resumes.
"We did," Kellerman says. "The answer was no. You know your father's house and its people. Is it possible someone would have entered the house without your maid's knowledge?"
Sara considers. "We keep a spare key in the garden. It's nailed to one of the apple trees in the alley. Not as much of a safe bet as the under-the-doormat variation, but you could find it if you really wanted to. Though I can't imagine a kidnapper would be the kind to get spotted in our garden examining the trees."
"Does your father tell a lot of people about that key?"
"Not a lot."
"How many would know?"
"I can't say, really," Sara answers. "Just that I wasn't allowed to tell my friends about it."
"We asked his assistant for a list of the people he trusted," Michael says. "I realize you and your father lost sight of each other. But another perspective really might help."
"She put Nick Savrinn at the top of that list?" Sara says.
"Who would you have put there?"
Sara shakes her head. "Bruce Bennett, though he's probably retired now. He never worked closely with my father, but they were friends. He sat at our dinner table with us more often than not. If you're asking me about people he worked with, though, Gregory Ness is probably your man."
"Ness," Kellerman repeats. "No relation to Jacob Ness?"
Jacob Ness, rising star of the Republican Party, if you trusted The Times. Michael heard the guy a couple of times on TV and didn't take much to his persona. He had been elected to the U.S. Senate last year.
"Jacob is Gregory's son," Sara says.
"You didn't know him personally?" Kellerman asks.
The thin line of Sara's mouth twitches, and she keeps silent so long, Michael thinks she isn't going to answer. "Like I said, Gregory was one of the persons my father was closest to when it came to his work. He was at our house all the time. Jacob wanted to get into politics even then, so he sometimes followed his father and had dinner with us. But all that was a long time ago," she turns to both men. "You're probably better off focusing on the person he worked with recently."
Michael and Kellerman don't answer. They don't say that their superior sent them to Salem two months ago, long before there was a disappearance, let alone murder. They don't say they were sent here to investigate something that happened in 2002 – the year of Sara's senior year of high school.
…
Sara drives for twenty minutes before she buys herself a new charger and a grim-looking sandwich at a convenience store, then makes a U-Turn to her father's mansion. The bakery a couple of streets away from the mansion makes the best food Sara ever remembers eating – or at least, it used to when she was in her teens – but she doesn't want to risk getting recognized. Nor does she want to eat her father's food, so she can taste the ghost of cold family dinners – roasted meat that smelled like iron and left a pool of blood in their plates.
On her way back, a few kids – early rousers – trot through the streets, cloaked in capes, vampire teeth protruding from their mouths. Girls wear witch hats and black dresses. Pumpkin-shaped buckets dangle from their hands. Carved pumpkins smile at Sara from the doorstep of nearly every house.
Bloody Halloween.
To be back in Salem because her father disappeared might be enough to make her hate the day, if she didn't already.
Sara forces herself to down half of the sandwich while driving. Her stomach cramps at the first bite – nerves always make her lose her appetite – but she was so light-headed on her way out of Nick Savrinn's office, she lost her balance. If Agent Scofield's arm hadn't shot for her quick as a snake, she would have landed flat on her face.
Her arm still ached a little where his fingers had locked around it. Such strength as she couldn't make out beneath his suit jacket. She appreciated that he didn't say, "Careful," or some other comment that would have sounded condescending.
Sara discards her half-eaten sandwich on the passenger seat. The food in her mouth tastes like plaster, and her jaw gets tired of chewing – never mind yesterday's bread, this has got to be last Monday's. But she hasn't told anyone she's back in town yet, and hopefully, she'll be gone before she has to.
Sara parks the Bentley in the garage, and gets a half smile when she pictures how white her father's face would turn if he saw her behind the wheel of his darling car. Then the note he left for her flashes into her brain, and she wonders if he didn't rather she was half the world away.
"I fixed breakfast," Anita tells Sara before she's even reached the lobby.
"Please, Annie," Sara says – how quick the old nickname comes back, like she's a little girl again, climbing up Anita's lap for bedtime stories. "While I'm here, let's just not – do that."
Anita frowns. "You don't want me to fix you food?"
"You know how uncomfortable it makes me." She squeezes Anita's palm, because she can't scrape the energy to say that she's missed her – that she's sorry she hasn't missed her as much as she should have. "I'm not a little girl now," she says. "I can do these things for myself."
"Your father's no little girl," Anita points out. "And he still has me fix every meal he takes."
"Yeah, well."
Anita put the plate in the living room, because Sara's always hated the dining room, so huge and cold that eating alone there feels like eating inside a graveyard. A warm glow floods Sara's chest at that little detail – that Anita would remember such things. The breakfast is toasted bread spread with avocado and salt, same as she used to make Sara when she came home from class depressed.
"Share?" Anita suggests.
There are enough slices to feed three people, and though Sara can still feel the lump of her half-eaten sandwich heavy in her stomach, she drops on one of the armchairs and grabs a slice.
Anita grabs another. She sits on a nearby chair, and Sara stares at her face, can't get used to the traces of age that those ten years have scattered on her.
I should have called more often, Sara thinks, and guilt settles like a hard pebble inside her throat.
"You've been with the FBI men?" Anita asks. "Do they know anything more about your father?"
Sara shakes her head.
"They'll work it out. They're clever people."
"They look like it," Sara admits.
"Both handsome men, too."
Sara chuckles, and tears a bite out of her toast. "If you're trying to work your way around asking if I'm seeing someone, you can just ask."
Anita shrugs. She was always the diplomatic kind, and knew the best way to get someone talking was to keep silent.
"I'm not," Sara adds.
"Maybe it's better like this. Better than the boy you used to see."
The food turns ashy in Sara's mouth. She doesn't ask which boy – doesn't need to. Sara was seventeen when Jacob Ness first took her out on a date, and though he'd turned twenty-five a couple of weeks before that first date, no one batted an eye – least of all Frank. Maybe in today's world, things would have been different.
Sara never questioned the age difference, or really anything about her relationship with Jacob. She accepted it like a law of nature. He was the son of her father's closest associate, after all, almost always around the house. Unlike Frank or Gregory Ness, at the dinner table, he didn't make Sara feel slightly less interesting than the salt shaker. He took an interest in her and, as she grew older, paid her the compliments that made it feel obvious he would start to 'woo her', whenever he felt she was old enough.
Now, as Sara looks back on her younger self, she feels little more than a pawn for a political alliance. Almost the same as when lords of rich estates married off their daughters to some earl, to gain recognition.
"I never liked that Jacob," Anita says.
"You never told me that."
The woman shrugs. "No point. Your father had his mind set on the relationship, and you know as well as I do he can't bear getting contradicted."
"If it makes you feel better, I don't think I liked him much, either."
Anita chuckles. It's easier to talk about this sort of thing, rather than to acknowledge the elephant in the room. This was never Sara's house. It was Frank's, always, and Sara was never more than a guest in it. The tacit agreement between father and daughter stipulated Sara could never be loud, or invite people, or in any way 'disturb the peace' or get in the way of Frank's work.
It's eerie, how even now Frank's presence fills the room like an overblown ghost. A taste of mutiny in the air thick as molasses, as Sara and Anita sit perfectly alone in this house, like triumphant usurpers.
A wild burst of child laughter carries through the window. Sara turns and catches a glimpse of the street beyond the vast garden – a boy with cat whiskers and pointy ears just dropped a pumpkin.
"Do you want me to dress up the house?"
"What?" Sara turns back to Anita in surprise. Surely she's joking, but her gaze meets Sara's seriously enough.
"I know, you're no girl anymore. But given the circumstances. Maybe it'll cheer us both up."
Unease creeps up Sara's collar. "No, Annie – I mean, I can't think of anything that would make this worse than a Halloween party."
"That's too bad. Remember how gorgeous the house looked when we dressed it? One of the rare days in the year your father let you do what you wanted. Maybe that's why you cared about it so deeply."
"What are you talking about?"
"Don't you remember? The apple buckets, the fake cobweb, the candy?"
Sara doesn't, actually.
But part of her must, because the hairs in the back of her neck bristle with chill.
"You used to count the days to October 31 like most kids do for Christmas, sweetie," Anita says. "You used to love Halloween."
…
End Notes: Please share your thoughts in the comment section. Take care!
