Fallon looked at her. “Were you and Bernice good friends?”
“Played bridge every Wednesday and Friday night,” Mrs. Ragsdale declared. “Bernice was a fine player.”
Isabella tightened her grip on the key. “Were you here when my grandmother died, Mrs. Ragsdale?”
“Yep. Watching the late-night talk show. She must have called the ambulance, herself.” Mrs. Ragsdale sighed. “We all saw it pull up. They took her away. She never came out of the hospital. Heard later it was a heart attack. Everyone here at the Court is going to miss her, that’s for sure.”
“So will I,” Isabella said. “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Ragsdale, I need to get started on organizing her things.”
“She said you’d probably give everything to charity except for the pictures, of course.”
“Probably.”
Mrs. Ragsdale cleared her throat. “I could take that old microwave of hers off your hands, if you like.”
“I won’t be able to make any final decisions today,” Isabella said. “I just came to pick up her personal papers.”
“And the pictures,” Mrs. Ragsdale said. “She said that’s all she had that would be important to you. She really wanted you to have the pictures. Told me to remind you when you turned up.”
“I’ll be sure to take them,” Isabella said.
“I cleaned out her refrigerator and emptied her garbage,” Mrs. Ragsdale said. “Didn’t want things to spoil and stink up the place.”
“That was very thoughtful of you,” Isabella said.
Fallon looked at her with veiled interest. “You have a key?”
“Oh, yes, Bernice gave it to me a couple of weeks before she passed. She said she was having some chest pains and was getting concerned. I told her to go to the doctor, but she refused. Said it was just a bad stomach.”
“Did anyone else stop by after she died?” Fallon asked.
“Nope.” Mrs. Ragsdale paused. “Well, except the manager, of course. He comes by occasionally to check on things. Told me the only reason he hadn’t sold Bernice’s trailer and her things was because she had promised him that if anything happened to her, Elly, here, would pay him whatever was owed.”
“Was the manager the only person who went inside the trailer besides you?” Fallon asked.
Mrs. Ragsdale snorted disapprovingly. “Nosy, aren’t you, young man?”
To Isabella’s amusement, Fallon gave the elderly woman his rare, wickedly charming smile, the one that should have been registered as a dangerous weapon.
“Been a while since anyone called me a young man,” he said.
Mrs. Ragsdale responded right on cue. Her faded eyes sparkled, and she suddenly glowed.
“It’s all a matter of perspective,” she said gruffly. “Trust me, at my age, you look young. In your prime, as they say.” She gave Fallon a head-to-toe perusal. “Yep, in your prime and a mighty fine prime it is, too.”
Isabella coughed discreetly.
Mrs. Ragsdale seemed to realize that she had gone off topic. She smiled warmly at Fallon. “To answer your question, the only other person I’ve seen go inside was the new man on the maintenance crew. He checked Bernice’s trailer after it rained. Said he wanted to make sure there wasn’t any water damage. Old trailers leak like sieves, you know.”
“So, to the best of your knowledge, no one except you, the manager and the guy from maintenance has entered the trailer,” Fallon concluded.
“Nope.” Mrs. Ragsdale snorted. “Trust me, someone would have noticed straight off if an outsider got within fifty yards of that trailer. Everyone in the Court pays attention to everyone else’s business. It’s about all the entertainment we get. Some days it’s more interesting around here than one of those reality TV shows.”
“Thank you for looking after things,” Isabella said.
“No trouble at all, dear. And I’m real sorry your grandmother is gone. She was a live wire. Kept up with all the latest news on her computer. Always seemed to know what was going on behind the scenes. Bridge won’t be nearly as interesting without her. Let me know if you need anything. And don’t forget about that microwave.”
“I won’t,” Isabella promised.
She got the door of the trailer open. Stale, musty air spilled out. She took a breath and stepped inside. Fallon moved in behind her and shut the door.
Isabella looked around. The interior of the trailer lay in shadow, but it looked very much as it had the last time she had visited three months earlier. The small space was neat and carefully organized.
“Grandma always says that living in a trailer is like living on a boat,” she said. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
“She was the methodical, organized type?”
“Oh, yes. To a fault.”
“That makes it easy then. We just look for whatever seems wrong or out of place.”
“Easy for you to say. Grandma may have been organized but she had a lot of stuff.”
Fallon took in the tiny kitchen, the dining nook, the bed and the miniature bathroom in a single sweeping glance.
“Where’s her computer?” he said.
Startled, Isabella turned toward the dining nook. It took her a second or two to register what was wrong.
“It’s gone,” she said. “Grandma had a new laptop. I gave it to her. She kept it on the dining table. If she was going underground, that is the one thing she would have taken with her. But if someone did murder her, that is the one thing the killer would have grabbed.”
“It is also the one thing that a thief looking for electronics to sell in order to support a drug habit would have stolen,” Fallon said patiently.
“True.” Isabella pulled herself together. “But you heard Mrs. Ragsdale. No one has been inside the trailer since the night Grandma was taken away.”
“Except Mrs. Ragsdale,” Fallon said. “And the manager. And some guy from the maintenance crew. I’m sure Mrs. Ragsdale does her best to keep on top of things, but she’s a seriously senior citizen. Probably hard of hearing. And this trailer sits at the far end of the Court. Late at night a thief could have gotten inside without being seen.”
“Not in this trailer park,” Isabella said. “Everyone here is elderly.”
“Your point?”
“Older people don’t sleep well. Grandma said that this place was like a Vegas hotel. Someone is always watching because someone is always awake.”
“I’m not trying to argue with you,” Fallon said. “But the fact is that the computer is gone and there are a number of possible explanations. The one that has the highest probability is the theft scenario. It may have been ripped off by one of the maintenance crew or the manager or a burglar.”
“Okay,” Isabella said. “But there are other possibilities, right?”
“Yes, Isabella, there are other possibilities. They just aren’t very likely.”
“Unless my grandmother is alive.”
Fallon started to methodically open and close the myriad built-in drawers and storage cabinets that lined the interior of the trailer. “If your grandmother is alive, that changes everything.”
She watched him glance into another drawer. “What are you looking for?”
“Something else that looks wrong or out of place. Get busy. You’re the one who knew her best. Take a good look around. Do it first without your talent. You don’t want to miss what your normal senses can tell you. Too many agents rely on their psychic abilities and wind up missing obvious clues.”
“Got it.” Isabella opened the cabinet beneath the sink and peered inside at the half-empty bottle of dishwashing liquid. “You know, what Mrs. Ragsdale said about the pictures was sort of strange.”
Fallon closed a drawer and looked at a calendar that hung on the wall. “Why was it strange?”
“Because in my family we never took photographs.” Isabella felt sudden hot tears in her eyes. “I don’t have a single picture of my parents or of my grandmother.”
Fallon offered no symp
athy. He was still studying the calendar. “I can understand that a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist like the Sentinel would not go in for family photo albums, especially in this day and age when the pictures might wind up online.”
Isabella dashed away the tears with the back of her hand. “That’s what Grandma said.”
“So what pictures was she talking about?”
“I don’t know. If she had any here in the trailer, she never told me about them.” She closed another drawer. “Nothing looks strange or out of place, Fallon. Except for the missing computer, of course.”
“All right, use your finder-vision. Your grandmother was aware of your talent. If she hid something that she wanted you to locate, it should be obvious to your para-senses.”
Isabella opened her other sight carefully. She knew what to expect. Her grandmother’s secretive nature had generated layer upon layer of fog in the trailer. But most of it was in the cool, gray zone.
The exception was the searing mist that swirled around the wall calendar. She took a closer look at it.
“That calendar is locked in hot fog,” she said.
“Wrong month,” Fallon said. “It should be showing the month that your grandmother was taken away in an ambulance.”
Isabella felt her pulse kick up. “Maybe she wrote something important on one of the dates.”
Fallon moved to stand directly in front of the calendar. Isabella joined him. Together they studied the colorful, glossy picture of a stretch of beach complete with crashing waves. The focal point of the shot was a large, oddly shaped rock. Eons of wind and tides had formed the stone into the shape of a roughly hewn arch.
“I don’t understand,” Isabella said. “It’s just a generic calendar landscape. The rock is a little unusual, though.”
“Yes,” Fallon said. “The rock is very unusual.”
“I’ve seen rocks similar to that on the beach in Santa Cruz.”
“That’s not Santa Cruz,” Fallon said.
He reached up to remove the thumbtack that secured the calendar to the wall.
Voices sounded outside. Mrs. Ragsdale was talking to someone.
“She just got here,” Mrs. Ragsdale said. “About time, if you ask me. It’s been a month since Bernice passed.”
“Everyone handles this kind of loss in a different way, ma’am,” was the response.
Isabella went cold.
“Fallon,” she whispered.
He folded the small calendar, stuffed it inside his jacket and took out his gun.
There was a sharp rap on the door followed by a low, chillingly familiar male voice.
“I know you’re in there, Angela, and I know that Jones is with you. I’m unarmed and I’m alone. Open the door. We need to talk.”
“You know that guy?” Fallon asked, keeping his own voice equally low.
“It’s my old boss at Lucan Protection Services, Julian Garrett. When I worked there I used the name Angela Desmond. Julian’s the one who set me up and then sent those two men to kidnap me in Phoenix.”
“About time the guy from the maintenance crew showed up,” Fallon said.
27
Fallon opened the trailer door, making sure to keep the gun out of Mrs. Ragsdale’s line of sight. He made certain the man on the front steps got a clear look at it.
“Ah, shit,” Julian Garrett said, weary and resigned. “Take it easy. I just want to talk to Angela. I swear, she’s got it all wrong. No one is trying to hurt her.”
“That’s good,” Fallon said. “Because anyone who lays a finger on her will wake up dead.”
Julian was dressed in a green work shirt, pants and low boots. The logo for a company named Desert Sun Maintenance was stitched on the pocket of the shirt. Garrett looked to be in his midthirties. His gray eyes, high cheekbones and sharply etched features gave him the air of a lone wolf. There was energy in the atmosphere around him, a lot of it.
“Trust me, the last thing my boss wants me to do is bring Arcane down on his neck,” Julian said.
Isabella moved up behind Fallon and looked at Garrett. “My name is Isabella Valdez now, and if you don’t want to hurt me, why did you send those two thugs to grab me in Phoenix?”
Julian glanced meaningfully over his shoulder and then lowered his voice another notch. “I admit that was badly handled. My men had instructions to pick you up, that’s all. Look, I can explain everything. Mind if I come inside? I don’t want to get too dramatic here, but there’s a small matter of national security at stake.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Isabella said.
Julian’s mouth tightened. He switched his attention back to Fallon. “Department A has done some jobs for some very black-arts agencies. Just like J&J.”
Isabella rounded on Fallon. “You never told me that we do work for the Feds.”
“We try to avoid those jobs,” he said patiently. “But we have been known to do some consulting for certain agencies.”
“Consulting.” Julian’s mouth twisted in a humorless smile. “Nice turn of phrase. It’s the same kind of consulting work that Department A does at Lucan. And that’s what this is all about.” He looked at Isabella. “Give me five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
Fallon did not take his eyes off Julian. “What do you think, Isabella?”
“Well,” she said. “I guess we can’t just shoot him here in front of Mrs. Ragsdale. The gossip would be all over the Court in about twenty seconds. And then there’s the problem of the body.”
Julian winced.
“You’re right,” Fallon said. He realized he was starting to enjoy himself in a perverse way. “Probably be better to do the actual shooting somewhere else where there aren’t any witnesses.”
“Lot of desert out here,” Isabella observed.
Julian’s jaw tightened. “Very funny. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
Isabella stepped back. “Okay, there’s not much he can do here in the Court. He’s got the same problem that we’ve got, too many witnesses.”
“True,” Fallon said. He moved back but he kept the gun visible. “Five minutes.”
“Thanks.” Julian stepped into the trailer and pulled the door closed behind him. He gave Isabella a wry smile. “Isabella Valdez?”
“That’s my name.”
“Glad to meet you,” Julian said dryly. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”
“Can’t say the same.” She narrowed her eyes. “Did you kill my grandmother?”
“No, I swear it,” Julian said. “I only discovered a few days ago that she even existed. When I finally tracked her down to this trailer park, hoping to find you, she was already dead. Heart attack, according to what I could determine.” His expression softened. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Yeah, right. Explain those two men in Phoenix if you can.”
“As I said, Phoenix was a bungled operation. I apologize.”
“For sending two men to kidnap me?” Isabella said, her voice rising. “You apologize? ”
“You were never in any danger from that team,” Julian said.
“They chased me up to the roof of a department store. They had guns. They were trying to grab me.”
“Like I said, it was clumsy work and that was my fault.” Julian shoved his fingers through his hair. “All I can say is that we were desperate to find you and bring you in before some really bad guys got to you first. I knew that you were running scared. I was afraid that if you got wind that anyone associated with Lucan was in the vicinity, you’d disappear again.”
“Good guess,” she said.
“I told the team to do whatever they had to do to bring you in. Figured I could explain everything once I met with you face-to-face. I made it clear you were not to be hurt. But you ditched my men and we lost you again.”
“You set me up, damn it. You were dealing para-weapons out of Department A. You knew Max Lucan was getting suspicious, so you put that incriminating file on my office computer. As if I’d be dumb enough
to actually use an office computer to keep a file that could get me fired or sent to prison. You don’t think very highly of me, do you, Julian?”
“You were set up, all right,” Julian said. “But not by me. Caitlin Phillips was the one dealing the para-weapons. She’s the person who installed that file on your computer.”
Isabella felt blindsided. “Caitlin?”
“My administrative assistant, remember?”
“Of course,” Isabella said, struggling to process the new information.
“She resigned and then she disappeared. We think one of her connections in the black market killed her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“After we found the file of para-weapons sales on your computer, Max and I tracked it back to Caitlin. But by then she was gone.”
Isabella frowned. “If you know I’m innocent, why are you looking for me?”
“Because you’re in danger. Listen to me, Isabella. Caitlin did one last deal before she was murdered. She arranged an acquisition for one of her clients, a South American drug lord. But the transaction was never completed because the broker got himself shot.”
“That would be Orville Sloan?” Fallon asked, as if he were only remotely interested in the answer.
Julian frowned. “You know about Sloan?”
“J&J is a detective agency, if you will recall,” Fallon said.
Julian sighed. “Right. Sloan was the broker Caitlin used. It looks like he was killed by a disgruntled client. It was bound to happen, sooner or later, given the nature of the profession. But the problem for us is the timing.”
“I’m assuming that means that the broker was shot after he had arranged for the delivery of the artifact but before he told Caitlin Phillips where the package could be found,” Fallon said.
“Yeah, that’s about it.” Julian turned back to Isabella. “Word of the missing artifact has hit the underworld. A lot of people are looking for it, including the drug lord and a certain black-ops agency. The agency wants that para-weapon found before the drug lord gets it.”
Isabella shrugged. “So?”
Julian cleared his throat. “Due to the rumors that circulated after you took off, a lot of people, including, we believe, the drug lord, think that you might be able to find the weapon.”
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