Hugh spent a long time looking at the photo Bandini had provided, committing Layton's face to memory. Then he read over Layton's background, education, everything Yuell had been able to find above and beyond the dryness of numbers. Watching his face, Yuell saw Hugh come to the same conclusion he himself had reached. "In over his head," Hugh finally said, "but not stupid."
"That's what I think. He charged a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Trail Slop, Idaho; now, you have to figure he knows he can be traced by anything he charges on a credit card, light? So why did he do it?"
Before Hugh could answer, Kennon Goss arrived. There was a cold, unemotional, completely ruthless streak in Goss, though he usually hid it well; he was like a bulldog in accomplishing his assignment. Yuell used Goss when he needed someone to get close to a woman; he was blond and handsome, and something about him caused women to blindly respond to him. Because his looks also made him memorable, Goss had to be doubly alert, doubly agile in eluding suspicion. He made no bones, though, about preferring to have all modern conveniences available for his use. To him, a hotel was a dump if it didn't have Ethernet connections, twenty-four-hour room service, and a chocolate on his pillow every night.
Yuell brought Goss up to speed on Jeffrey Layton. Goss bent forward and buried his head in his hands. "Podunk, Idaho," he groaned. "It'll take us two days to get there. We'll have to take a wagon train from Seattle."
Yuell fought a grin. He'd love to be along tor this one. just to watch Goss handle Mother Nature. "You can get closer than Seattle. There are airstrips all over Idaho. You'll have to take a prop job from Boise, probably, but the drive once you're on the ground shouldn't be too bad. I'll arrange something with four-wheel drive for you."
There was a muffled groan, and Goss pleaded, "Not a pickup truck. I beg you."
"I'll see what I can do."
While he listened to Yuell delineate the situation and possibilities, Kennon Goss felt satisfaction begin to well as other possibilities occurred to him.
He hated Yuell Faulkner with every cell in his body, yet for more than ten years he had worked with and for the man, pushing his hatred aside so he could function while he looked and waited for the perfect opportunity. While he waited, he had in many ways become like the man he so hated, an irony that hadn't escaped him. Over the years his own emotions had withered, and now he was just as cold and unfeeling, capable of snuffing out a human life with no more thought than he would give to stepping on a cockroach.
He'd known it would be like this, known the price he would pay, but his hatred was so strong he'd considered the cost well worth the result. Nothing had mattered except getting close to Yuell, and biding his time.
Sixteen years ago, Yuell Faulkner had killed Goss's father. Goss was under no illusions now about the type of man his father had been; he'd been a hired killer, just like Faulkner, just like Goss himself. But there had been something electric about him, something bigger than life. A complicated man, his father; on the one hand he had been a loving husband, a stern but just parent - while on the other, he killed people. In some way his father had separated that in his mind and life, a way that Goss himself hadn't been able to manage.
His father had worked for Faulkner for a little over three years. All Goss had been able to find out, and that only after he himself had connected with Faulkner and joined his stable of killers, was that Faulkner had decided Goss's father was a weak link, somehow - so he had executed him. What had triggered the action was something Faulkner kept to himself.
To Yuell Faulkner, it had been a business decision. To Goss, it had been the destruction of his life. His mother had been devastated by her husband's murder; on the day Goss returned to his college classes, a week after the funeral, she swallowed a bottle of pills. Goss had found her body when he got home that afternoon.
Something in him, something human, had died when he stood in the kitchen doorway and saw his mother's body on the floor. Coming so brutally close on the heels of his father's murder, losing her, too, had pushed him to the wall.
He'd been nineteen, too old to go into the foster system. He dropped out of college, walked away from the suburban house that he never wanted to reenter, and wandered. He supposed the house had long since been sold for back taxes. He didn't care, had never gone back, had never driven by out of curiosity to see if someone else lived there now or if it had been torn down to make room for a service station or something.
After about a year, the idea of revenge, which had bubbled on the edge of his consciousness since his father's murder, began to firm and take shape. Until then he'd been too numb to plan, to have a direction, but now his life once again had a purpose - and that purpose was death. Yuell Faulkner's death, to be precise - though for a long time he hadn't had a name for his father's killer - and if it meant his own death, too, Goss didn't worry about that.
First, though, he'd had to reinvent himself. The boy he'd been, Ryan Ferris, had to die. Figuring out how to accomplish that was easy. He looked for a street kid, an addict, roughly his height and age, and stalked him; when he saw his chance, he jumped the guy from behind and knocked him out, then beat the hell out of his face before killing him. He put his own identification on the body, dumped it in a neighborhood where the corpse wasn't likely to be robbed, and took off for another part of the country.
He knew, with that first killing, that he'd crossed a line he would never be able to step back over. He was on his way to becoming what he hated.
Send a thief to catch a thief. To deal with death, he had to become death himself.
Building his new identity took time and money. He didn't immediately return to Chicago and try to find his father's killer. He established the new self, Kennon Goss, with multiple layers of certification. He ruthlessly pushed aside his own identity and became Kennon Goss, not only to others but to himself.