by Dale Mayer
“No,” she said, then stayed quiet, as she watched where they traveled. “Did you hear anything from Wagner?”
“Nope. He hasn’t responded or offered any information yet.”
“Is he likely to?”
“Nope, I don’t think so,” Quinn said. “Why would he? He says what he has to, in order to deal with us, but other than that, it’s a no-go.”
“But he’s the one Uncle Dave always told me to contact,” she protested.
“Yes, with the understanding that everybody here plays their own game,” he said.
She settled back, wishing that weren’t so. At least in America, the justice system was delineated, written down somewhere. But here? It was a whole lot different. She hated that. She understood it gave Bullard and his team more leeway for the work that they had to do, and a pretense of justice was involved along the way, but it wasn’t as clear-cut, and it was a whole lot easier to deviate when they needed to.
“Any reason you’re staying in America for your studies?” Quinn asked.
“It’s where the best opportunities have presented themselves,” she admitted. “Plus, I still need to do some more specialty work, and the bulk of my training opportunities are there.”
He nodded.
“When you’re done,” Fallon asked, “where will you work?”
“Probably in the US,” she said. “I like coming here to visit, but I’m not sure it’s the place I want to stay.”
“They need your help here.”
“A lot of people need my help,” she muttered. “Also that’s an argument Uncle Dave’s used on me many times, so don’t bother.”
“He just wants to have you nearby, so he can see you more, that’s all.”
“That makes sense, but—”
“Did Bullard set you on the path for surgery?”
“He does so much of it already,” she said. “The stuff that I already knew before I ever got to med school put me miles ahead of the others.”
“Except for the drug interactions, correct?”
“And that’s mostly because he hasn’t kept up with some of the more cosmetic drugs,” she said.
“So being here with him hasn’t been all that bad then,” Fallon noted.
She looked at him in surprise. “It’s been great,” she said. “Seriously it’s because of what I saw here, and the people we were helping all the time, that got me interested in med school in the first place.”
“You might want to consider that Bullard, if he’s alive, won’t necessarily be capable of keeping up the same schedule.”
She was silent for a moment. “I know,” she answered, but she didn’t want to discuss it further. That very notion had been in the back of her mind for a long time, but, if she was over in the US—and happy doing what she was doing—it was easier to forget about the people who needed so much more than the Western world had available for its own people. Kindly, as if understanding that this was still a conflict for her, the men fell silent.
As they drove closer and closer to the GPS bubble she saw on their tracker, she asked, “Is this the only reason we’re going? Looking for electronics, I mean?”
“We’re looking for anything important,” Quinn said. “And we won’t really know it until we see it.”
“Right,” she said. “So, for the moment, we’ll assume everything is important?”
“Exactly.”
*
The trio pulled around the corner from the address that they wanted. Fallon looked at her and said, “I suppose there’s no point in asking you to wait here.”
“Will I be safer here than with you?” At his frown, she smiled and said, “No, of course I won’t be. Therefore, I’m coming with you.”
“Why are you all of a sudden worried about your safety?”
“Okay, so I’m coming,” she said cheerfully. “But now I’m not above using it to get what I want.” And, with that, she hopped out with a trill of a laugh that echoed musically in the silence around them. Even Quinn grinned like a fool when he got out.
Fallon frowned at them. “You’re both nuts.”
“Nutty as can be,” she said, with a nod. “Lead the way.”
He shook his head and headed toward the address, checking the area as they approached. But it was as dead as it was quiet, except for rustling sounds and birdsong, so it’s not like there would be any early warning that something awful was going on. He looked at Quinn and said, “Looks clear.”
“It is, yes.” He was on his phone, tracking something though.
“What are you looking at?” Linny asked Quinn.
“It’s not so much that I’m looking at anything,” he said. “I’m just doing a check around to make sure we’re not looking at any problems coming from other vehicles.”
They headed to the main entrance to the apartments, one where you had to ring to get access to.
“So,” Quinn noted, “he had money for something like this.”
“Sure,” she said, “but it’s not like it was much.” They punched in the number for his apartment and, of course, got no answer on the other end. It was also dark outside, and nobody was likely to open up the front door for them, since they didn’t know them.
He looked at her and frowned. “Look away,” Fallon said.
“I’m not watching you,” she answered. “Do what you need to do.”
At that, he glanced at Quinn, then stepped forward and quickly disarmed the door. It was a little more complicated because it was an older system than he was used to. By the time he was done, she was watching over his shoulder with interest. He just rolled his eyes at her.
“Took you longer than I expected.”
He glared at her, but she smiled, patted his cheek, and walked past him into the hallway. And again Quinn was grinning.
“It was an older system,” Fallon said. “I haven’t done one of those in a while.”
“Of course,” she said, as if that was completely normal and acceptable.
But Fallon also realized that he was thinking about showing off for her, and that just pissed him off all the more. With Quinn still acting like everything was fine—basically they were all having a grand old time—Fallon stormed ahead and up to the apartment. They had to walk up to the fourth floor. He didn’t want to be stuck in an elevator, in case anybody found out that they were where they shouldn’t be. The apartment was at the farthest end.
When they found the door in question, it was ajar. He motioned toward the open door, and both he and Quinn took up positions on either side, pulling their weapons. With Quinn going high and Fallon going low, they entered the apartment looking for anybody or anything. But it was empty. Deserted. And completely tossed. With her stepping in behind them, Fallon quickly closed the door, using his boot to close it completely. He pulled gloves from his pocket and handed two to Quinn, then two more to Linny.
“Don’t touch anything,” he cautioned.
“So why the gloves then?” she asked curiously.
“In case you forget.”
She shrugged. “Well, it’s definitely something I’m used to anyway.” She pulled on the gloves with a snap and wandered around the small space. “It’s hard to imagine the guy I knew living here,” she said.
At that, the two men stopped, looked at her, and asked, “What do you mean?”
“It’s just he looked so neat and tidy.”
“But his place has been trashed—he didn’t do this,” they said.
She nodded. “I thought he would have had a higher-end place.”
“Did he look like he had money?”
“I’m not sure that he did or he didn’t,” she said, “but he gave the impression of being a little more upper class.”
“Well, a white South African isn’t guaranteed a position of wealth,” he said. “But there is more of a chance than not of being one of the wealthier families.”
“I don’t think he necessarily fit into that classification either,” she muttered, and she wandered
the small space.
“Stay here with us, please,” Fallon called out.
She had found the doorway to the bedroom. “What difference does it make?”
He just stared at her, until she shrugged and came back toward him.
“Fine,” she said, then waited for him while he searched through the place. “Like you said, the laptop is what we need. Do we have no sign of that?”
“Once the place was tossed, the odds of finding that became pretty slim,” he said. When a knock came on the door, they froze.
A woman’s voice called out, “Ben, you in there?”
With his finger to his lips, Fallon held the warning signal up for her to be quiet. She just raised an eyebrow, and he glared at her.
“Hey, I just want to say I’m sorry, if you’re in there. I know I wasn’t very nice last time. And, well, when I heard you come in, I just thought it would give me a chance to apologize again. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She said everything in an apologetic tone of voice, and they heard her footsteps going down the hallway.
At that, Fallon whispered, “Did you recognize her voice?”
She shook her head immediately. “I really don’t know anything about his life,” she said apologetically.
He nodded. “Well, that might be a good thing.” As he walked into the bedroom, he stopped and stared. “Unless you’re into all this kind of stuff.”
She stepped up behind him and gasped. “Wow.” The place was full of sex toys of various shapes and sizes. “Why are they out on display like that?”
“Where would you expect them to be?” he asked.
“I’d expect them to be in a drawer or a closet,” she said. “This isn’t normal for me.”
“Good,” he said. “But it does bring up an interesting aspect to his personality.”
“Why would he think I’d be up for all this?”
“Because of that,” Fallon said, as he stepped into the bedroom. She turned to look and behind him, on the back of the bedroom door, were pictures of her: pictures of her walking, getting off the airplane, and driving. A lot of them.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped. “That’s seriously creepy.”
“Well, it does tell us that he’s been watching you a whole lot more than you thought.”
“A whole lot more,” she said, shaking her head. “I had no idea this was going on.”
“Stalkers rarely show their hand, until they get a little bit more active than we like to see them,” he muttered. “It’s an interesting thing though.”
“No, it isn’t,” she snapped. “Nothing’s interesting about it. Interesting is like, something I want to learn more about, something that’s intriguing, something that looks fun. This is creepy and terrifying. Definitely not interesting.”
“Well, it might help explain why he ended up outside the gate though.”
“How the hell does him being a creeper explain how he ended up outside my gate?”
“Maybe somebody thought they were doing you a favor or doing Dave a favor,” Fallon said, turning to look at Quinn.
“We need to talk to Dave again.”
“I know. All kinds of information is here on you, Linny. He’s pulled your DMV records, and he’s even got your New York address.”
“What?” she said, stepping up beside him.
He tapped the photo with his gloved finger. “See? It’s got the school you went to.”
“And yet some of this is pretty old,” she said, staring. “That was my old address. Not my current address.”
“No?”
“No,” she said. “I moved about six weeks ago.”
“Why?”
“I was just trying to get closer to work,” she said. “Nothing is special about any of the places where I live. Basically just beds for me to drop into.”
“So you moved so you could get closer?”
“I don’t like commuting, if I don’t have to,” she said. “So I just chose to move to a smaller apartment.”
“Six weeks you said, so he’s not very far behind you then?”
“Well, I wasn’t in this place in the photo all that long either,” she admitted. “Maybe six months.”
“Still, that’s pretty creepy.”
She shut the bedroom door, facing all the photos there. “I don’t like the thought of him having any of this information on me. Can’t we just rip it off of there?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“But what if somebody else knows about it? What if somebody else thought this was a good idea?”
“Well, that’s possible,” he said, “and something I’ve been wondering.”
“What? So you have another creeper who thinks like this guy? I don’t think it works that way.”
“It may or may not,” he said, opening the bedroom door to take her focus off the photos on the backside. “The problem is, we don’t have enough information.”
She rolled her eyes at that. “You won’t get anything from here either.”
“Not so sure about that,” he said, as he walked to the night table, which was tossed upside down, the contents of the drawers scattered about. “We need some idea of how this guy found you and how he operated. Was he alone? Did he have friends? Was he in a chat room? Did he have a little black book of other women?” At that, he straightened, turned, looked at the front door, and said, “What about his neighbors?”
“I got this one,” Quinn said, and he walked to the door and stepped out of the apartment.
When the door closed quietly behind him, Fallon looked at her and said, “You never saw him with anybody?”
“No,” she said. “I never saw him at all, other than that first time in the airport. I just talked to him a couple times. That’s why his pushiness seemed really off.”
“Well, it was,” he said, “and it’s not your fault. Remember that.”
“He’s still dead,” she snapped. Then she stopped and slowly rotated her neck. “Ugh. I’m letting it get to me,” she muttered. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re entitled. Somebody you know is dead,” he muttered quietly. “That’s upsetting, whether you liked him or not. And, no matter how much you deal with death on a regular basis, it’s still a bit of a shock when it hits this close to home.”
“It is,” she said, “but I didn’t know this guy at all, so I don’t have any way to help you.”
“No.” He bent down and picked up a book. “Kamasutra,” he read out loud. He opened it up and out slipped a folded piece of paper with a phone number. He held it out to Linny. “This is from your school. He’s got your number.”
“But I didn’t give it to him,” she stated, looking at the piece of paper. “They’re not allowed to give out personal information.”
“Maybe not, but all of us, at various times in our lives, have provided information that we’re not supposed to. People will listen to a story and will be susceptible to something that might have been said. So, even though it’s not their policy, it looks like somebody may have crossed a line, and you have no way of knowing who.”
“I suppose if Ben said he was my brother or something.”
“Exactly.”
“So he had my number. So what?” she said. “He had it before. That’s why Uncle Dave changed it. It doesn’t tell us anything.”
“No, and that’s kind of interesting too. Why doesn’t it tell us what we need to know? Because there’s no laptop. Nothing’s here.” He walked back to the pictures of her on the door and carefully lifted one of them. “Huh,” he said. “Look at this. Written on the back of the picture is Sent to Peter, then an email address. Look. This one says, Sent to John. Same thing.”
She stared at him, walked back over, and said, “Are you telling me that he’s emailing these photos out?”
“Looks like it,” he said. “The question is, was he doing it for money, or was he doing it for fun? Were these friends, or were these people part of the same group? And were they all stalking you, or was he stalking you for somebody else?�
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She stared at him and started to shake. “I don’t know,” she said. “Please find out.”
He quickly took out his phone, taking pictures of her photos on that door. He wanted all the details he could possibly get. As they flipped over each photo, each one had a different message, several of them were sent to the same men. “So there’s four of them,” he muttered.
“Yet I don’t know any of them,” she murmured.
“Yep,” he said. “We’ve got emails, so that’s something.”
“But not enough.”
“Take a look around, and see if you can see any notations about websites, forums, or names,” he said. “Scrap pieces of paper seem to be this guy’s thing.”
“And how completely disorganized is that,” she muttered.
“Doesn’t particularly matter,” he said, “because what we’re really after are the details here.”
“Right,” she said and quickly lifted and sorted through various bits and pieces in the living room. “I’m not seeing very much,” she muttered.
“Keep looking.” He then quickly added, “Wait, hang on. Come back here.” She stopped looking and went to the bedroom again and saw that he was still at the door, taking pictures. “Do you know a Talbot? A Keith Talbot?”
“No, I don’t know the name,” she said. “I don’t think I know anybody named Keith.”
“Interesting,” he murmured. “He’s here a couple times.”
“I wonder if he’s local?”
“It’s possible, but, in a digital age, he could be anywhere.”
“So how do we contact this guy?”
“We’ll start a search when we get home,” he muttered. “I finally have a copy of everything. Let’s check the insides of all closets and cabinets and everywhere else to make sure we haven’t missed anything else.”
“The other question is,” she began, “who else would have searched this place?”
“Well, the cops should have been here,” Fallon said. “They have Ben’s dead body, so the authorities should be looking into his life, also his apartment.”
“But they didn’t do this.” She swung her arms wide at all the mess in here.
“Not legally they didn’t do this,” he said, with a shake of his head. “But it does make me wonder who else it could have been.”
