All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 207

207

Saint landed in the bustle of Miami International Airport, moved through vacationers and climbing humidity.

Her shirt clung as she collected her Ford Crown Victoria and headed seventeen miles along 95 Express, the ocean holding the horizon but not her attention. She’d coordinated with Himes, come close to thanking God himself that the FBI had signed off on fitting surveillance cameras outside the church where Eli Aaron had shown and picked up another set of rosary beads. Sister Cecile told how he had gone into the chapel afterward and lit a dozen candles, told Sister Isabelle he was doing God’s work, that he was heading south, where it was hotter in many ways.

They had license plates.

They had the make and model of the van.

They tracked him back through the city and then lost him, figuring he’d switched either vehicles or plates.

Roadblocks and checkpoints and a dozen agents scrolling a thousand hours of surveillance footage. They’d mapped the likely route through Philadelphia, south through the Carolinas. They had him hugging the coast, Wilmington, Myrtle Beach. They moved him inland to Interstate 81, Virginia, picking up Interstate 77 through Charlotte.

Either way they joined in Jacksonville. Interstate 95 toward Miami.

It was thirteen hundred miles and more than double that in variations.

It took five hours to get a hit at a toll booth fifty miles from Boca Raton.

The guy working the booth noted the plates were different, but the picture of the van that had been circulated was a clear enough match.

Saint opened the window to the sounds of Miami-Dade County, the skyline fractured by gray high-rises that edged off the colors.

“I’m coming for you,” she said.

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