Free Deliver Us From Evil by David Baldacci Page A

worth the risk.
    She didn’t wait for him to extend an invitation; she simply sat down across from him. “You look good,” she said. She eyed
     his hair. “A little gray?”
    “A little. You look all the way back. Put on a few needed pounds. Although I kind of liked the dark, spiky hairdo.” He paused.
     “How did you know where I was?” He answered his own question before she could. “Frank. What’s his interest? I’ve never known
     him to care one way or another about my personal life.”
    “I don’t think he did until Anna was killed.”
    “He told me you called him.”
    “I wouldn’t have had to if you’d ever called me back.”
    “I’m sorry I walked out on you.”
    “There were no ties. You’re a big boy, I’m a big girl. My only problem with that was I wasn’t sure you were alive. That’s
     why I called Frank. To make sure you were okay.”
    This made Shaw feel even guiltier. “Well, I’m fine. Back working. Everything’s okay. I told you that on the phone.”
    “I wanted to see for myself.”
    He looked down at the table. “Have you eaten dinner?”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    This surprised him, her turning down his invitation to dine with him, and his face showed it. “Katie.”
    She rose. Their gazes locked for an extended moment. “Good luck, Shaw.”
    She hesitated for another second, long enough for him to say something to keep her there. Yet he remained quiet.
    She turned and left.
    Shaw sat there for several beats, a massive struggle going on inside his mind. Finally, he threw some euros on the table,
     hustled from the restaurant, and looked up and down the crowded street.
    But Katie was already gone.

CHAPTER

    15
    I T WAS after midnight as Reggie crept down to the library at Harrowsfield. The rain was beating against the windows and a cold
     wind was catapulting down the chimney, feeding a burst of oxygen onto a fading fire. She closed the door behind her, sat at
     the long table, and picked up a file. Under the light of a single table lamp she went over the murderous career of Fedir Kuchin
     for probably the hundredth time. The atrocities hadn’t changed, of course, but if anything they had become more firmly embedded
     in her mind. She could recite the statistics from memory; she could see the faces of the victims, pages and pages of them.
     The images of the mass graves, unearthed long after the man had fled the locations of his brutal handiwork, appeared to be
     seared onto her corneas.
    She picked up a grainy picture—they were all grainy pictures, as though violent death could never have any fragment of color—and
     stared down at the face there. Colonel Huber had had his David Rosenbergs and his Frau Koches, photos Reggie had selected
     from countless others to show the man at the moment of his death. Well, Fedir Kuchin had his own testaments to a level of
     insane cruelty that all these men seemed to possess.
    The photo she was looking at now was that of a man with an unpronounceable surname. He’d been neither wealthy nor well connected.
     He’d lived nearly a thousand kilometers from the capital city of Kiev. He was a simple farmer with a large family, one that
     he worked long hours to support. His crime against the state had amounted to his refusal to turn in his friends to the KGB, to Fedir Kuchin specifically. His punishment had been to be doused with
     petrol and set on fire in front of his wife and children. He had been burned to bone and cinder while they were forced to
     watch and listen to his screams.
    She picked up another document. Originally written in Ukrainian, it had been translated for her on another piece of paper.
     It was the order condemning the doomed farmer to death by fire. Fedir Kuchin’s signature appeared large and bold at the bottom
     of the page, as though he wanted no doubt as to who was the instigator of the man’s horrible murder.
    Finally, she gingerly picked up another old photo. It was Fedir Kuchin himself. She held the paper