He had not been there. His mother was under tight surveillance 24/7, and she’d had no visitors. Period. That ruled out one of his ingenious disguises.
Therefore . . .
There was really only one answer. And it was an answer Delgado hated. Usually, he got a feeling of satisfaction when he came up with a creative answer. This time, he just felt sick.
But it was not certain, not yet. Delgado put the stack of paperwork aside and leaned back in his desk chair. If he was wrong, Riley Wolfe was in jail, injured, or even dead. Jail was out—Delgado would have heard. Injured? He had been limping when last seen, but beyond that? It was possible but seemed unlikely. He had escaped two elite teams, neutralized Stone and Boniface—who was left to injure him? And dead? Of course, accidents happen. But again, it was long odds. Delgado was convinced that Wolfe had escaped, relatively unhurt. And he had not visited his mother.
He was back to his painful conclusion. But how could he prove it was right? Or maybe wrong, although Delgado held little hope of that. He was, sadly, quite sure he had found the answer. But proof?
Delgado got up, walked to the coffee machine, poured a cup, and thought as he walked back to his desk, sipping. By the time he sat down again he had an answer. One simple phone call should do it. But he didn’t make the call. He sat and finished his coffee, delaying as long as he could. When the coffee was gone, he waited a few minutes more. And then, with a sigh, he made the phone call.
One of the agents on the surveillance team was Special Agent Martha Chen, posing as one of the nursing home’s staff. She had nurse’s credentials, which had come in handy for other undercover jobs in the past. Delgado called her and told her what he wanted. She understood immediately and promised to call back quickly.
“Quickly” turned out to be a day and a half. Delgado spent the time taking Tums and trying to concentrate on prisoner interview transcripts. When Chen finally called back, he was ready to bite somebody.
“You were right,” Special Agent Chen told him.
Delgado nodded and reached for the Tums. “There’s no doubt?”
“No doubt at all,” Chen said. “I compared the medical records from the first place, Creedmore? That’s where she was when we initiated surveillance?”
“I remember,” Delgado said.
“So I got the file from Creedmore,” Chen said. “I looked over her charts, bio data, everything. The meds all match. Otherwise we would have known right away. But the rest of it? Height, weight, vitals—they just plain do not match with this woman,” Chen said. “She’s an inch and a half taller. Body weight has increased by more than fifteen pounds. That’s a hell of a lot of weight to gain on an IV diet. Also,” she said, “vital signs are way off, brain wave patterns different— It’s two different women. No doubt at all.”
Delgado thanked her and hung up.
The outside-the-box answer had been right. Riley Wolfe had not changed his pattern. He had changed his mother. Somewhere along the way, when his real mother was being moved, she had been swapped out for some other comatose woman. They had even found the GPS trackers planted on the mother’s body and switched them. Which meant, of course, that Riley Wolfe had been on to them from the very first. He had even used the FBI, just as Delgado had feared, to break him out of his impossible situation. He had sent that woman, “Betty,” with a baited hook he knew Delgado could not ignore.
And Frank Delgado had not ignored it. He had snapped it up eagerly, swallowed the hook, and done exactly what Riley Wolfe wanted him to do. Worse, Delgado had done it knowingly, thinking he was one step ahead this time. He had not been. Just like always, he had been a step behind. Riley Wolfe had played him perfectly. And Frank Delgado had lost again.
For a few minutes he just sat. He really wished he hadn’t asked Chen to check. At least for a few more days. It had been very pleasant to think that for once, finally, he had a handle on Riley Wolfe. He should have known better.
Riley Wolfe had slipped away again.
Delgado allowed himself a couple of moments of quiet misery. Then he swallowed a handful of Tums, reached for the next transcript, and went back to work.
* * *
—
Father Matteo stared upward, to the space above the scaffolding. The airtight plastic sealer installed by Campinelli—or whatever his name really was—was firmly in place. And Father Matteo had been staring up at it for four weeks, for hours at a time, tilting his head up until the pain in his neck from craning it upward became intolerable. There was no conceivable reason for this. It couldn’t help in any way. Father Matteo knew that. He recognized that the behavior was irrational and even foolish. He stared anyway. And when his neck grew too so
re to continue, he would walk away, go back to his other duties. And he would keep wondering, until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Then he would go back and stare again.
What if Captain Koelliker had been right?
What if somehow, impossibly, this thief had found a way to steal The Liberation of St. Peter? The very idea was too fantastic to consider—and yet . . . Koelliker was not a fool. Even after Father Matteo had explained what a fresco was, that it was part of the actual wall—even then, Koelliker apparently believed that this particular thief could find a way to steal it. If so . . . if he had really done the impossible and stolen the fresco . . .
The hole in his heart would be far bigger than the one in the Stanza di Eliodoro.
But what could he do? He prayed, of course. But other than that? There was no possible action that could help in any way. He had to wait, had to follow the urgent instructions to leave the seal in place, because there was no way to know if the thief had told the truth—no way short of removing the seal, and that he could not do, even if Koelliker was correct that this would give the thief time to escape safely. The choice between letting a thief escape and even the smallest chance of damage to the fresco—it was no choice at all. Father Matteo would gladly liberate every thief in Europe to protect such a great work of art.
And so he had waited. And he had stared upward and then walked away with a sore neck, every single day.
Until today.
Today Father Matteo would take off the seal and see for himself if—