by Kit Frazier
So why the sudden rash of suicide attempts? Was Scooter’s sudden death wish a result of Selena leaving him? Since I was pretty sure the FBI is not routinely called in for marital disputes, it was clear that I was going to have to dig deeper.
“Suicide,” I said, thinking aloud. I got up and pulled a big book of medical research from the library, flipping pages as I drifted back into the living room, with Muse doing her best to trip me by doing figure eights around my calves. I was running my finger across the header Suicide when something banged at the door. Muse shot down the hall and disappeared.
“Mia?” I said, tucking the towel tighter around me. “You’re early.”
I swung open the door and came face to face with what might have been the dark, mysterious man that Mia had predicted in her stars.
I couldn’t move. He was a little taller than me, not quite six feet, I guessed, and looked like he was on his way to a shoot for GQ. I swallowed hard. This guy had the kind of green eyes that could trigger a public orgasm.
He smiled. “Cauley MacKinnon?”
I slammed the door.
“John Fiennes, United States Customs Service,” he said through the stained glass. “I have a few questions. Is this a bad time?”
Customs? Peeking through an opaque piece in the stained glass panel, I noticed that not only was he drop-dead gorgeous, he was wearing a suit and holding a badge.
Well crap. I’d been months without a man and now they were popping out of the woodwork. I took another peek. He wasn’t Pierce Brosnan, but I supposed he was as close as a tough guy was going to get.
“Just a minute!” I yelled through the door.
He wanted to know if this was a bad time. Ha. Lately, every time was a bad time, but a Customs Agent with questions? I had a few questions of my own.
I scooped last night’s damp clothes from the living room floor and raced to the bedroom, yanked on the shirt and shorts I’d laid out and hurried back, slipping and sliding on scraps of research. The house was a wreck, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it, and with all the trouble I was having getting information out of Agent Logan, I wasn’t going to let this Fed get away.
Breathless from months of inertia, I swung open the door. Fiennes stared at me, not quite hiding a grin. I felt a jolt of electricity and took a step backward. Men like him should have warning labels stamped on their foreheads.
“I can come back later,” he said, eyeing the mess in my living room. He had the barest hint of a European accent, and if dark velvet had a sound, it would have been this guy’s voice.
“Um, no, it’s okay, I thought you were someone else. Come in.”
His gaze flicked toward the television, where Rick and Ilsa were romping through Paris as Nazi cannons boomed in the background.
“Casablanca?” he said, and grinned.
“Um, it helps me think,” I said, fumbling for the clicker.
Fiennes raised a brow but didn’t comment. He followed me into the house, carefully stepping over scattered printouts.
“Ignore the mess,” I said. “I’m in the middle of a project.”
He glanced at the papers with interest, and then looked at me, studying the roadmap of bruises on my face. He hadn’t stepped any closer, but I could feel his presence like a physical thing.
He wasn’t as tall as Logan, but he had a nice face, the kind that was handsome without being pretty, and he had tiny lines around his eyes, probably more from enthusiasm than age.
“I don’t mean to be politically incorrect,” I said, “but a U.S. Customs Agent with a European accent?”
“Clever girl.” Fiennes smiled. “My father was in the United States Air Force. I speak five languages, an advantage in my line of business.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a bit like a xenophobe.
“I understand you had a rough night,” he said, his voice warm and low. He moved my hair out of my face for a better look at my bruises and frowned. “Have you seen a doctor?”
Heat rushed to my face and I touched my bruised cheek. “A couple of medics looked me over at the scene. How’d you know about last night?”
“Actually, that’s why I’m here.”
“Hm,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “May I get you a glass of tea?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee, so it’s nothing fancy.”
“Fancy doesn’t suit me,” he said, and I almost thought he was flirting with me.
I set about brewing a pot of the year-old store brand I keep in the freezer, a grim reminder of my days with Mark Ramsey.
“What kind of a name is Cauley?” he said as coffee plopped noisily into the old pot.
“Actually, it’s my mother’s maiden name,” I said, feeling oddly flattered at his interest.
When I handed him the cup, he took it in his hands, and something about those hands sent a warm chill straight through me. They were large, his fingers long, their movements precise, like those of a physician. Or a musician. Or a sharpshooter.
The kind of hands that could drive a girl crazy.
Jeez, I thought. I’d been lusting after everything in pants. I’d better get a boyfriend. Fast.
“Do you have any idea who abducted you?” he said.
“What?” I said, tearing my gaze away from his hands. “Abducted?” I hadn’t thought of it like that. “Um. No.” I said, and at least I didn’t stutter.
“And you don’t know why you were abducted?” Fiennes took a big slug of my hideous coffee. To his credit, he didn’t flinch.
I fidgeted. Spilling your guts is sticky business for someone trying to make ranks as a reporter protecting your sources and all and at some point, I hoped to get off the obituary beat.
I watched as John Fiennes took another drink of coffee and my eyes narrowed. Why would a Customs Agent be interested in Van Gogh? Which brought me back around to Van Gogh’s interest in Scooter.
“Is this just about the German guy, or are you after Scott Barnes, too?”
“German,” Fiennes muttered, looking like he’d heard a private joke. He extracted a leather-bound notepad that didn’t look anything like Agent Logan’s. “What would make you think there is a connection between the two?”
“Well, let’s see…Scooter’s sudden rash of suicide attempts, a Customs Agent at my front door and an FBI agent lurking around a SWAT suicide standoff. And then there’s the little matter of how I got attacked by Van Gogh, who was grilling me about what Scooter said while we were in the shed, something Scooter was hiding.”
Fiennes’s jaw muscles tightened. “FBI?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at his dark suit and crisply pressed dark shirt. His clothes were tailored and he smelled of some sort of expensive cologne I didn’t recognize. “What, are you some sort of Customs Agency spy?”
He smiled. “What would make you think so?”
“I don’t know. I thought Customs Agents were those geeks at the airport who ask if you have anything to declare. You look sort of like James Bond.”
Fiennes chuckled at that. “We’re on the front line of Homeland Defense,” he said, and I could feel the warmth flooding into my cheeks.
“Do you know this Van Gogh?” he said, steering the conversation back to its source.
“Oh. The earless guy. That’s not his name. That’s just what I call him.”
Fiennes smiled. “What did you tell your, uh, Mr. Van Gogh?”
“I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then we drove into the lake.”
“And your friend. This, Scooter. This would be Mr. Barnes?”
I nodded.
“And he told you nothing?”
I shook my head. “See? That’s what I can’t figure out. The only thing we talked about was his wife. That, and his glory days back in high school.”
“His wife?” Fiennes was scribbling in his notebook, and while I caught a peek, it was some sort of shorthand I couldn’t read.
“Well, yea
h,” I said, “but he didn’t say anything. Just that she was leaving him.”
Fiennes nodded, his eyes narrowed. “He said nothing odd or unusual?”
“This whole thing is odd and unusual.”
Fiennes looked at me for a long moment, and then his gaze drifted around my house.
“You live here alone,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Do you have a gun?”
“I had a gun. It sort of got taken away from me.”
He blew out a breath with the patience reserved for the very young or the very stupid. “You need a security system. And you must think about bringing your dog inside.”
“Dog?” I said, but Fiennes was already moving toward the door.
“If you remember anything more you must call me on my cell phone,” he said. “And if you get in over your head, tag it Urgent. These men are not playing, Miss MacKinnon.”
“Cauley,” I said. Our gazes locked and his eyes were so green I went speechless.
He handed me his card, his gaze still on mine. “In case of emergency.”
Did flashes of pure lust count as an emergency?
He looked down at me intently. “And you must be more careful when opening your door.”
“I thought you were somebody else.”
“There are dangerous men about, Miss MacKinnon. Be careful,” he said, “And lock your door.”
And then he opened the door and was gone.
I stood, staring at the closed door. Dangerous men indeed.
I hadn’t gotten any more information from John Fiennes than I had from Tom Logan. But when Tom Logan showed up at my door, he’d said it was business. Whatever John Fiennes was up to, he didn’t mention anything about being just business. Things were looking up.
“U.S. Customs. Curiouser and curiouser,” I said to myself, and looked down when I felt Muse winding her furry little body around my bare calves. I tucked the hot Customs guy’s card into my old purse.
“Did you see the butt on that guy?” I said to the cat, but she ignored me, so I headed toward my blow dryer to get ready for the day.
I was dried and dressed and rearranging the printouts when the front door rattled.
“Hey! Todo bien?” Mia yelled through the door. “Your door’s locked!”
“Hold on a minute.” I tossed the book on suicide to the floor, which sent a stack of notes flying like oversized confetti.
I grabbed the old purse and a spare pair of Ray-Bans and swung the door open, looking around for signs of hot Customs guys and big, swampy-looking earless thugs. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m locking my doors now.”
“Ts, ts,” Mia tutted, popping her gum and peering at me over the rims of her little round sunglasses. Standing on the porch, she looked like ninety-eight pounds of pure dynamite packed in a swingy orange skirt and strappy matching sandals. She was holding a paper cup I knew wasn’t from Starbuck’s.
“Smell this,” she said, rising to her tiptoes to shove a sprig of lavender under my nose.
I winced. In my family, when someone asks you to smell something, it’s usually spoiled milk or bad meat.
I locked the door behind me with the spare key and was headed down the porch steps when the white-faced dog flashed in my peripheral vision.
I stopped. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“A white-faced dog,” I said. That dog had to belong to somebody. My neighborhood has a lot of wildlife, partially because it has strict ordinances on stray dogs. If the dog was still hanging around when I got home, maybe I’d print out some Lost & Found flyers.
“You know,” Mia said. “In some cultures, seeing a phantom dog is a harbinger of death.”
“That’s very comforting.”
“But usually those harbinger-dogs are black.”
She handed me the little cup of tea and I took a drink. “Green,” I growled, and Mia ignored me.
“Speaking of seeing things, have you seen the front page of the Journal today?” she said.
“No. Why?”
She shrugged. Opening the door to her yellow Beetle, she tucked the sprig of lavender into the dandy little bud vase attached to the dash. “No reason.”
Mia hit the gas and my head jerked back, which I always think is funny in a Beetle. The air conditioner was broken, so we cranked down the windows and I was windblown and hot when she dropped me off at the police substation. Windblown and hot never bothers me in my Jeep, but riding around with no air-conditioning in Mia’s little Beetle reminded me of being trapped in an Easy Bake Oven.
Luckily, the police substation is only about fifteen minutes from my house. Mia let me out in the parking lot, and I thanked her before she peeled out and tore down the road.
There isn’t a whole lot of crime in west Austin, and the substation shows it. It’s shiny and clean with tract lighting and gleaming floors. The downtown cops call it Club West. Fort Apache, the cop shop east of Austin, is where most of the real action goes down.
I signed in and Cantu walked me back to his office where I made a statement and did the paperwork on my run-in with Van Gogh. The cops who usually flirt and make wildly inappropriate suggestions were grim and attentive as I browsed through pages of mug shots that all seemed to blur together.
It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t find Van Gogh in those books. Not with that weird, pseudo-German accent. Austin may be a melting pot, but you stay here long enough the drawl invades your speech patterns.
Cantu gave me a report to file with my insurance company for my Jeep, and after filling out a pile of perfunctory paperwork, I called a cab.
I asked the cabdriver to wait when we stopped at the FBI field office near the Arboretum to see if I could weasel a couple of questions out of Special Agent Logan. Logan wasn’t there, but the receptionist eyed my bruised face with thinly veiled suspicion. I declined her offer to leave Logan a message. I would look for him later, and I figured he’d be easier to find if he didn’t know I was looking for him.
The cabdriver hooked a left on Loop 360 and headed for my office, and as we passed the Arboretum, I gazed longingly at Saks, thinking about rows of kicky summer sandals in need of a good home.
In nearly thirty minutes, we slid into the parking lot at the Sentinel’s West Austin satellite office. I paid the driver and over-tipped him for waiting which is one of the reasons I’m always broke. I was aware of every sore muscle in my body when I pushed open the glass door and stalked into the Sentinel’s lobby at noon.
“Wow,” Paul Shiner said. Shiner is a big, blond sports reporter in line for a shot at the City Desk, which put us in direct competition. If I’d had anything to compete with.
He’d been heading out of the lobby with a big stack of sports scores. “Hey!” he said.
“Not now, Shiner.”
Shiner U-turned and fell into step beside me, and we breezed by the security desk where Harold, the heavyset guard was keeping watch over box of donuts. We did the badge flash-thing, and Harold nodded us in with a big, powdered sugar grin.
“What happened to you?” Shiner said, crowding in front of me, staring at my bruised face.
“Hunting accident,” I said, and pushed past his big shoulders to march down the main hall toward the Bull Pen. The Bull Pen is a maze of cubicles divided in the middle by a long aisle, all monitored from the Cage, the glass enclosed office where the Sentinel satellite’s managing editor sits in a swivel chair eating red meat, smoking designer cigars which he swears he’s quitting and ripping our stories to smithereens with his little red pen.
The satellite is located between a bank and a meat market, giving it the unique smell of old money and fresh meat. The walls are pus yellow, the carpet is burgundy, and none of the equipment works the way it’s supposed to. My boss, Mike Tanner, says the satellite is where the main office sends you when you’re on your way up or on your way out. I didn’t care to speculate on my place in that scenario.
The best thing about the remote office is that it’s laid back. We get
all kinds of community drop-ins who report the best, most insane story ideas. My favorite is the Laser Lady. She comes in once a week swearing that aliens abducted her and used lasers to redistribute the fat in her body. A neat trick if you can get them to do it.
I strode past Remie at the front desk, who was chattering warp-speed on the phone, yelling something to one of her juvenile delinquents about not flushing the cat down the toilet.
I made my way down the aisle, which opens up to the Bull Pen, where all of the Sentinel’s second-string reporters and copy editors were busy clattering away at keyboards.
I’d nearly reached my desk when I stopped dead in my tracks.
Selena Obregon gleamed blondly out of ladies room at the back of the office. She moved through the aisle of cubicles with aristocratic grace, even more beautiful than I remembered. A thin man with gold-rimmed glasses fell into step behind her.
As she moved, the heads of every male, not to mention a few females, turned from their monitors to admire the beauty-pageant sway of her behind. Her expensive pink handbag matched her expensive pink shoes and as she walked, she dabbed a starched linen handkerchief to her flawless cheek. I was suddenly aware of every bruise on my face.
Selena stopped in front of me and leveled her big, blue gaze on me.
“Selena,” the accountant-guy said. He gently touched her arm, but Selena shook her head, still staring at me.
She had her own gravitational pull and you’d have to be dead not to notice. Selena stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then she strode past, accountant scrambling to catch up.
The pneumatic door sighed as it closed behind her. Selena had the same effect on a lot of people.
“What was that all about?” I mouthed to Remie, who was watching the whole thing from the front desk.
Shrugging, Remie hung up the phone, reattached her big, silver dollar-sized earring and said, “Tanner’s lookin’ for you,” in that sing-songy voice that means, Girl, are you in trouble.
“What now?” I grumbled. My whole body hurt from the previous night, and I had a lot of research to do. I didn’t feel like being on the business end of one of Tanner’s legendary temper fits.
