Everywhere to Hide

by Siri Mitchell

  “Ms. Garrison? I’m an agent with the FBI. James Beyer. I’m taking the lead on the Burdell case. Are you the woman who found the body?”

  “I am.”

  “Once I read Detective Baroni’s report and your statement, I’ll be caught up. And he’ll be working with us until we identify the shooter, so I don’t anticipate having to schedule to meet with you in person.” His voice was low, calm, measured. In spite of my apprehension over the switching of roles, the agent projected authority and confidence. “Since I have you on the phone, can you tell me what you saw?”

  Easily. Because I could see it every time I closed my eyes. I told him everything I remembered.

  “And you knew the victim.”

  “I did. But I didn’t realize it was him. He asked me to meet him in the alley.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I have no idea.” But I hoped to. Just as soon as I could read through my journal. “We worked together on the Hill. He left a voicemail on my phone and I didn’t listen to it until this afternoon. That’s when I found out he was the victim. I have a journal from that time and I’ll read through it tonight.”

  “But you were the one who found him in the alley?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you didn’t recognize him then?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  Chapter 20

  I spent several minutes trying to explain face blindness to him. Leo finally took the phone from me.

  “Hey. Detective Baroni here. It’s like all those police reality shows when they block out the faces of everyone. When she looks at someone’s face, she can’t see it. Her brain doesn’t map facial features. And if it can’t map them, it doesn’t store them. She could be talking to her own father and she might not even recognize him. Get it?” He offered the phone back to me.

  In all the years I’d been gone from home, I’d never, not once, had anyone take on the burden of explaining what face blindness was and how it worked. I raised a brow as I took it from him.

  He shrugged. “I did some research.”

  When I came back on the line, the agent apologized.

  “Is there anything else I can tell you?” I was hoping we were almost done.

  “If you didn’t recognize the victim, then I’m assuming you can’t recognize the shooter?”

  “I never saw him.”

  “At all? Or you can’t remember him?”

  “I saw his silhouette against the sky. I could tell he had a gun; he was wearing a dark suit. Then he disappeared.”

  “Thanks for clarifying. I’d like to take a look at that journal you were talking about. If you can give it to the detective, he can pass it on to me.”

  I handed the phone back to Leo and they arranged to meet the following morning. After he hung up, he put the phone on the arm of the couch.

  I pulled a knee up onto the cushion and pivoted to face him. “Why did the FBI take over the case?”

  “He didn’t tell me much. Just said that they’d been working with your friend on something at the FDIC.”

  I thought through the implications. “The FBI is serious.”

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  “It kind of takes all of this to a new level.”

  “It does.”

  “Does that mean you’re done working on it?”

  “I’ll stay with it. Arlington police will be a cooperating agency. But he’ll be the lead, not me.”

  His phone vibrated. He picked it up. Thumbed something open. “You mind if I stay for a while and answer some emails?”

  I told him that was fine. As he went to work on his emails, I went to the bar and opened my journal. “Leo?”

  “Hmm?” He looked up from his phone.

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For that. For everything. All of it.”

  * * *

  I read through my notes from the Hill, scoured everything I’d written about Cade, looking for something that would make sense of the message he’d left me.

  I couldn’t find anything.

  When I finally admitted defeat, I noted Leo was still on the couch where I’d left him.

  “Hey.” I offered him the journal. “Agent Beyer wants to see it. I couldn’t find anything though. I read through it twice. There’s nothing there.”

  He came over and took it from me. “And you’ve tried to remember conversations outside of those you noted.”

  I nodded. “When you work with someone, when you talk to them every day, it’s not discrete conversations that you have with them. They all blend together. It’s one long conversation.” And in spite of that, I didn’t know much about him. I knew his thoughts on economics and cybersecurity, certain politicians, and my ex, but what was his favorite color? When was his birthday? Did he have any pets? “I knew him narrowly. And you do understand that I live my life not really knowing who anyone is anyway.”

  He sat back down on the couch. “I do.”

  “Until now, I’ve always been able to presume that all the strangers around me—those I should know and those I’ve never met—are benign. That, in spite of my disorder, no one is actually out to get me even if it seems like it sometimes.”

  “Seems like a good way to approach it.”

  “I get out of bed every morning and I paste a smile on my face because chances are I’m going to mix people up. Or not recognize someone, for instance, that I work with all the time. Why? Because maybe she has a hairstyle and the same general form as another coworker. So I do the only thing I can: I smile. And I apologize. And I hope she doesn’t hold it against me.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t have friends, Leo. Not really.” My ex had frozen them out or insulted them enough that they’d melted away. In the end, there’d only been him and me. And Cade. He’d stuck with me. “So the only person I can tell any of this to, the only person who would understand, is my dad. But if I told him, it would break his heart. And it already broke when my mother died.” We’d been in daily contact, but we never talked about how we felt. About anything. I think we probably wanted so badly for the other to be fine that we couldn’t risk knowing that they weren’t. “Do you know what age I was when I figured all of this out? Seven. I was seven years old. I have been going through life smiling ever since, apologizing at every opportunity. But it’s okay. Because, generally, people are forgiving. Most of the time, I can count on them to be nice.”

  He shifted, turning to face me more fully.

  “But someone killed Cade. And he thought he was into something dangerous. Which is probably true if the FBI is involved. And now, apparently, maybe I’m involved too. We have to assume that, don’t we, if he needed information that he thought I have? So I guess we assume that someone might be after me too?”

  “We don’t know for sure that—”

  I held up a hand. “I just need to say this to someone. This is not okay.” My hand began to tremble. I used it to scoop my hair back and push it behind my shoulder. “Because now, I have to assume that everyone is out to get me. And you know what? In that case, I would just rather not get out of bed in the morning.”

  He got up from the couch and came over to the bar. “We know who the victim is; we’re trying our best to figure it all out. And now we have the FBI to help.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. How am I supposed to live?”

  “Just hear me out. You’re the only link we have to the murderer until we can figure something out from your friend’s side—and we’re trying to. The sooner we solve this, the sooner it’s over.”

  The corners of my mouth started to wobble, but I had a lifetime of experience in controlling them. I swallowed. Forced them up and then into a smile. “Then I’m glad I can be of some help.” I forced it wider. “But I still need to get some studying in tonight.”

  He folded his arms on the counter. Leaned into them. “I’d like to stay.”


  “Here?”

  “Yeah.”

  Really? I felt the tension drain from me. He was staying! Maybe I wouldn’t dream about Cade lying in the alley. Or be haunted by the thought of an unknown shooter hunting me down. “Okay.” But how was he going to sleep? I had enough provisions for me and no one else. I had one pillow. One set of sheets. One blanket. One comforter. If I wore sweats to bed, maybe I wouldn’t need the blanket.

  I went into my room and stripped it off the bed. Went back out and handed it to him. “You can have any part of the couch you’d like.” Thankfully, it was still intact. The intruder hadn’t touched it.

  “I’ve slept on worse.”

  How do you thank a man who changed your lock, remembered to buy pots for your plants, and spent his night sleeping on your couch to make sure you were safe?

  You get out of the situation alive.

  Chapter 21

  Detective Leo Baroni snored.

  Not a lot. Just a little. But then, he’d slept on the couch all night. He woke up when I heated an oversize mug of water in the microwave and then poured it into my French press. I hoped that at some point in the future I wouldn’t have a desperate need for coffee first thing in the morning, but that time had not yet arrived. I swallowed a few gulps and then went into the bathroom and got ready for work.

  By the time I came out, Leo had poured himself a mug.

  When he dropped me off at the Blue Dog, he called my name as I got out of his car. I bent so I could see through the passenger window. “Just do me a favor. Be vigilant.”

  As I walked into the shop, a woman was typing away on a laptop at a table in the middle of the floor. A guy was sitting in a booth. He was wearing sneakers and cargo shorts, along with a hoodie in spite of the day’s sky-high heat index. I couldn’t blame him though. The manager kept the shop cool. He had a skateboard on the bench beside him.

  It made me smile.

  My ex had only worn sneakers when he was slumming. That’s what he said once when I was lacing up my own. He’d immediately whisked me to CityCenter and bought me a pair of suitable casual shoes. His phrase, not mine. He’d brushed away my words when I tried to protest. “That’s why I’m here. To take care of you.”

  His taking care of me had been hit and miss. He paid for everything—for extravagant things—week after week, and then suddenly left me to pay the bill for the most expensive of the dinners or charity balls he’d told me to sign us up for. My credit card debt had ballooned when I was with him.

  Eventually, the woman at the table abandoned her laptop for her phone, and the skateboarder in the hoodie left. It was midshift when I realized he was still hanging around, standing just outside the front door. I saw his elbow now and then when he shifted positions. I told the manager.

  “For how long?”

  “At least an hour. I saw him when I came in this morning.”

  “We need to get our customers to come back. We don’t want them scared away by someone loitering in front of the building.” She went out to investigate.

  She came back about five minutes later. “Looked like a student.” George Mason University had a campus a block down the street. Students kept us in business. “Said he was waiting for someone. I asked him to wait somewhere else.”

  “Did you see where he went?”

  She shrugged.

  * * *

  As I rotated off my shift, Leo came in through the door and walked right up to me. He introduced himself, but there wasn’t any need.

  I already knew him.

  I recognized him by his hair. By his cologne. By the way his whole body seemed to be watching and listening all the time to what was going on around him.

  “I’m trying to make myself useful. You already know we don’t have any footage of the shooter. And none of the customers, none of the staff, noticed anything out of the ordinary. So who else can we ask? Who else might have seen something? Who’s a regular around here?”

  The police had already questioned all of the customers who were in the shop the afternoon of the shooting. But I didn’t know how many other people they’d spoken to in the businesses along our street. I texted my student that I was going to be a few minutes late and then I took Leo to a hair salon several doors down. The owner spent the time between appointments standing in front of his shop smoking real, honest-to-goodness cigarettes. He might have seen the killer run by that day.

  He had us come inside. Tried to interest Leo in a trim. Leo demurred.

  I asked him if he’d seen anything unusual the day of the killing.

  “When was it again?” he asked.

  “Monday.”

  “Maybe. I took some breaks outside. But the wind was terrible.”

  Leo took over. “We’re trying to identify the shooter.”

  “Can you tell me what he looked like?”

  “That’s what we’re hoping you can do.”

  “When was it?”

  “Just before two. He shot the victim and then he left the scene. He might have been walking away from the coffee shop in your direction.”

  “There was one man. It would have been about that time. Usually, Americans aren’t walkers, they’re strollers. But this one was. That’s why I noticed him.”

  “What do you mean by a walker?”

  He shrugged. “He had something to do. Someplace to go. Hard to explain. He was just different.”

  “If we were going to look for a walker, what would we look for?”

  “Intensity.” He shrugged again. “Someone determined to get where they’re headed. Walking faster than other people. You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “If there are other people on a sidewalk, a walker will look at them as obstacles. He won’t slow down; he’ll figure out a way around. Walkers aren’t patient. Strollers don’t care.”

  “Can you remember what he was wearing?”

  “A suit. Dark.”

  “Age?”

  “Forty? More or less?”

  We thanked him for the information and left.

  Leo grumbled on the way out the door. “That was completely useless.”

  “Unless he sees the man again. At least he’d know to tell us.” I glanced at my watch. I only had a few minutes left. “We could ask Ruth if she saw anything.”

  “Who’s Ruth?”

  “She sells newspapers by the metro. She’s there every day. She might have noticed something.” As we walked toward the intersection, I pointed her out.

  As we approached, she seemed to look over her shoulder.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Usually she greeted me with enthusiasm. Sometimes even with open arms and a hug. She was friendly, chatty, and helpful. She’d give directions to tourists and rap on the window of the coffee shop when the meter readers were out in force. But that day, she was much more subdued.

  “Ruth?” I motioned for Leo to step closer. “I was hoping you could help us.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “We wanted to ask you about something that happened earlier this week.”

  She clasped her hands in front of her so tightly that her knuckles went white. “I can’t help you. I don’t know anything.”

  “Are you okay, Ruth?”

  She turned her head to look over her shoulder again. Nodded.

  I introduced Leo. “On Monday, around two o’clock, there was a killing. A shooting.”

  “Behind the coffee shop.”

  Leo nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You know? I come out here to sell papers every day because I’m trying to stay out of trouble, do things right. And then this happens. Isn’t anywhere safe anymore?”

  “Did you see anything?” he asked her.

  “No. Didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything. That’s what I told that man.”

  “Which man?”

  “The one who’s doing the investigating.”

  “When was that? Do you remember which day it was?”


  “Day after. I remember because all those reporters were all over the place.”

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t on Monday?”

  “No. It wasn’t. Couldn’t have been. Because I remember thinking if they really wanted to catch who did it, then why didn’t they ask me the day before, right after it happened?”

  “Was he a reporter?”

  “Police. That’s what he said.”

  “Do you remember what he asked you?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell him anything. He just wanted to know what I’d seen. There’d been a shooting. Had I seen anyone suspicious, anyone acting funny? I told him I hadn’t. Only person acting funny was him.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s asking me all these questions and he isn’t taking any notes. Don’t you people write things down?”

  “We usually do.” Leo thanked her for her time and we walked back to the coffee shop.

  “It’s too bad she didn’t see anything.”

  “She did. I think she saw the killer.”

  “But she said she didn’t.”

  “I’ve never talked to her before. Never met her. And I was the only one here asking questions on Tuesday. If it wasn’t me, who else would it have been?”

  Chapter 22

  I tried to shake off the chill that had crept up my spine. “Um . . .” I glanced at my watch. “I need to go. I’m already late.”

  Leo’s phone rang. He held up a finger as he answered.

  My own phone pinged as I waited. I took it out.

  It was another law firm where I had hoped to interview. They were asking if I could come in next Friday. I emailed them back and confirmed the date and time.

  Now there were two possibilities for employment. I crossed my fingers that one of them would work out. At this point, I was no longer picky.

  No one had told me that the key to gainful employment and personal success wasn’t just the school I attended. It was all the thousands of other little things I’d never had the chance to learn before I entered. It was all the inside jokes about cultural touchstones that I didn’t know. It was wearing the right brand of shoes and buying the right kind of clothes. And not even the right labels, but the right styles in the right labels.