by Alex Barclay
What the hell?
At the same time, she tipped over the mug of coffee Gressett had left on her desk.
‘Shit.’ She shouted louder than she wanted to. She jumped to her feet, scooping up a phone charger before it got wet. She found some napkins in Jean’s drawer and slapped them down on the desk. ‘Oops,’ she said, looking over at Gressett’s impassive face. She wrapped the phone charger in a napkin and put it in a dry corner. ‘Did Jean use a Motorola?’
‘Yes,’ said Gressett.
Ren sat quietly staring down at the print-outs, dabbing at pools of coffee where she noticed them. She had been too late to stop the coffee soaking into the edges of most of the files.
‘Gressett, sorry to bother you again, but do you know what Jean was doing with these print-outs on Domenica Val Pando?’
He paused. ‘I have no idea.’
I’m fucking here to go through Jean’s things to help the investigation, you dickhead.
‘I mean,’ said Ren, ‘I don’t even know why –’
‘That is some woman, Domenica Val Pando,’ said Gressett, sitting up. ‘Seven shades of crazy.’ He reached out his hand. ‘Give me a look at those.’
Why don’t you come get them yourself? Ren got up and handed them over to him.
‘Domenica Bin Killin,’ he said.
Not funny.
‘Now, this is where there is no justice in the world,’ said Gressett. ‘You have Domenica Val Pando, an amoral, psychopathic – female! – spends years holed up in New Mexico, killing and maiming and drug-running and all the rest of it, sending other people to kill and maim and … avoids arrest. And now, she’s probably lying on some beach somewhere in Aruba. And then you have Jean Transom, a wonderful person, a helpful person, an excellent agent … and she’s the one who …’ He hit the back of his hand off the pages. ‘It was a damn shame she didn’t get finished off back then.’
For a moment, Ren thought he was talking about Jean. ‘Oh. Val Pando …’
‘For one of the most successful undercover jobs the FBI ever worked on …’ said Gressett. He shook his head. ‘Todd Austerval started Gary Dettling’s Undercover Program, but he didn’t make the grade. He said that on day one Dettling scared the living daylights out of the trainees with the Val Pando case. He held it up as the gold standard of undercover work: one agent, under deep cover with Val Pando for a whole year, absolutely undetected. And still, still, after all that, it was screwed up at the end. So that was the big lesson from Gary Dettling at the start of the course – this is what you should aspire to. And here’s how it can go wrong. Do you know how it went wrong in the end?’
A man would never ask another man a question like that. The I-know-something-you-don’t-know tone.
‘It would be very interesting to hear your take on that,’ said Ren.
‘Agent safety,’ said Gressett. ‘That was it. Pull one agent out instead of bringing a whole organized crime operation down. And that is Bureau policy. That’s what has to be done.’
‘Yup,’ said Ren. ‘It sucks that the Bureau can’t recruit suicide agents.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ said Gressett. ‘It’s just … it all seemed like a waste.’
Don’t even think of criticizing Gary Dettling to me. ‘Agent safety is what it is,’ said Ren. ‘The same reason SAR doesn’t always go back up mountains to recover bodies. You just can’t risk lives like that.’
‘To a point, to a point,’ said Gressett.
‘To what point?’ said Ren. As you sit here in your comfortable out-of-the-firing-line office.
Gressett was obviously not used to having his opinions questioned. Todd was either too dumb or too used to tuning him out.
‘Well, to the point that you achieve your goal,’ said Gressett.
‘Tell that to a dead agent’s wife and family,’ said Ren. ‘Todd is a lucky man he didn’t make the grade.’
Gressett opened his mouth and closed it again. Todd stood in the doorway, sweating, straight from the gym.
Shit.
He pulled headphones out of his ears.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, Ren. I’m just …’ he gestured out the door. ‘Let me go take a shower.’
Gressett was smiling a smile that told Ren she was on her own and that he was glad there was a little black mark against her funny little name.
None of the drawers threw up anything interesting. None of the undersides had anything taped to them, there were no secret compartments, there was no note saying: If you are reading this, then you know I am dead. There was nothing other than what Ren would have expected from the contradiction that was Jean Transom. A private, open book.
* * *
Jean had lived in a two-bedroom ranch house in Rifle, a town of six thousand, twenty-seven miles west of Glenwood Springs, where the cost of living was not so high. Ren wanted to visit the house alone so she could go through it in silence, without a backing track of shouting, wisecracks or sports scores.
Jean’s was a house of neat rows. In the living room: DVDs, CDs, candles, cushions. In the kitchen: mugs, ceramics, spice jars. In the bedroom: bears, dolls, pillows, books. In the bathroom: soap, supermarket shampoo, conditioner and moisturizer.
Ren stood in Jean’s lavender-and-white bedroom, quaint and warm, even without the lamps and candles that looked as though they burned every night. On the shelf above the bed, there were romance novels, perfectly preserved Care Bears, a Strawberry Shortcake doll and a Cabbage Patch Kid. Ren couldn’t resist taking it down. After all these years, you’re still creepy. Ren had the Garbage Pail Kids – collectible cards with grotesque drawings: interpretations of Cabbage Patch Kids with missing teeth, eyes, limbs and green slime spewing from their noses and mouths.
Ren went to the chest of drawers under the window. She pulled out the top one. It had a handful of pastel cotton multi-pack panties. Ren smiled. One of her friends called them darkroom panties; things would only develop if the lights were out. Every woman had a couple, but they didn’t make up their entire underwear collection. The next drawer down had bras – big, plain and seamless sporties or minimizers. My head would fit in one cup. You go, girl. The rest of the drawers were filled with neatly folded T-shirts and shirts from Gap and J. Crew.
Jean’s office was like a preserved room on a historic tour, but without the human touches of a cup or a pair of folded glasses or a diagonal pen. Everything was laid straight. There was no sense of interruption. Her laptop had already been taken away, so there were no files to go through, except the paper ones, organized perfectly in the cabinets behind the desk. A phone charger was plugged in with the lead wrapped around it.
All over the house, there was sad, unfinished business: leftovers of salad wrapped on a shelf in the refrigerator, sticks of carrots and celery, a hand-washed sweater lying flat on a dryer, a pile of photographs. Ren flicked through them – they were from inside the house. She looked around and could see everything in the photographs, wide shots, macros, with flash, without. Jean Transom was testing a new camera and a new printer. A house and its contents suspended, waiting to strike up again when the right person came through the door.
Ren looked at the family photos on the wall; Jean and Patrick Transom, his wife, their children. And no shadows in the background.
15
‘Hey,’ said Ren, walking toward the next-door garden. An older woman was backing down the path, bent forward, dragging a rug, giving it an emergency shake-out. She was wearing red oversized pajamas and giant silver snow boots. A cigarette was gripped tightly in her mouth at a ninety-degree angle.
She turned to Ren and rolled her eyes. Ren looked down at the rug.
‘Ooh, sick dog,’ said Ren.
The woman nodded, stood up and pulled out the cigarette. ‘Why do you think I’ve got this under my nose. Whooo.’ She batted her hand in front of her face. ‘Stay back,’ she said. ‘This shit is some age-old curse coming back to wreak vengeance on the world.’
Ren laughed. And stayed back,
watching the woman from Jean’s drive. People unde restimated how much neighbors noticed. They had quiet, familiar eyes. Depending on what they thought of you, they could store a massive amount of accurate details about you, or they could process it all through a filter of distorting emotions – dislike, bitterness, jealousy, lust, love, hatred, mistrust. One person’s hot neighbor was another person’s freak. Or to a third person – both. Ren talked to neighbors from the neck up, distracting them from the hand she was shoving through their belly to wrench out their gut for inspection. There was no face value with neighbors.
‘Seriously,’ said the woman, pulling a black garbage bag from the waistband of her pants, ‘let me wrap this up tight and I’m all yours. I presume you’re with the FBI.’
‘Yes, ma’am. My name is Ren Bryce.’
‘Well, I’m Margaret Shaw and I clean up more shit than you ever will.’ She laughed and pushed the cigarette back between her lips. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m done.’ She had washed her hands under an icy outside tap.
‘Margaret, I’m investigating Jean Transom’s death,’ said Ren. ‘And I’d just like to talk to you a little about her.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘What was Jean like?’
Margaret shrugged. ‘That’s a good question.’ She nodded her appreciation.
‘Right … is it a question you’d like to answer?’
‘Ha. Sure. “I don’t know,” is the answer.’
‘OK,’ said Ren. ‘Why is that?’
‘She’s the stereotypical quiet neighbor you hear talked about on the news. I’m wondering should we all be noisy so we won’t get killed?’
‘You could be on to something,’ said Ren.
‘I didn’t even know Jean was an FBI agent ’til I saw it on the news. I thought she was a forest ranger with her clear skin and those tan pants of hers.’ She looked Ren up and down. ‘You don’t look like one either. You could be …’
Don’t say anything that will scar me.
‘… well, you have those eyes, so …’
Don’t say squaw.
‘… one of those Disney on Ice people.’
Original.
‘My son used to be the letter D in Disneyland Paris,’ said Margaret. ‘The ones that dance in the parade. He was dating Y …’ Margaret’s face said she wasn’t impressed with Y.
‘Hmm,’ said Ren. ‘Interesting that Y picked one of the only letters there were two of. And don’t tell me – one day she made the mistake of going with the wrong D.’
‘Or did she? Did she make a mistake – that’s what I said to him.’
‘But the … suit,’ said Ren. ‘Didn’t that … like, didn’t she notice, after the suit came off?’
‘He said they didn’t always take them off … sometimes they worked around them.’
Ren was stilled with mental images.
‘Anyway,’ said Margaret. ‘He’s Pinocchio now.’ She paused. ‘My guess is he’ll need to do a lot of lying to keep that Y bitch happy.’
‘And I thought it was the truth that hurts.’
Margaret slapped Ren’s forearm and let out a dirty, smoky laugh. ‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘I like your style. I’ve decided not to bullshit you about Jean now.’ She laughed more.
‘Well, I appreciate it,’ said Ren. ‘So, back to business …’
‘OK. Lowdown is as follows: Jean was private. Hello, goodbye, good weather, bad. I had no keys to her house. None of the neighbors did. She was quiet and a subdued kind of friendly. She ran in the morning … like she was being chased by the devil. She went to work early, she came home six, seven, seven thirty … I could hear the TV at night. She looked after her cat.’ Margaret paused. ‘I guess she was one of the millions of women in the world who do exactly the same.’
Ren was nodding her head without raising it from her notebook.
‘Now, that’s how come I’m telling you all this,’ said Margaret, ‘so the scene is set.’
Ren looked up, frowning. ‘OK …’
‘Well – and this could be absolutely nothing – in the last few months, she had a visitor, a very attractive woman, must have been in her mid-to-late twenties.’
‘Was she … a friend, a relative?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Did Jean mention her name to you, or did you see them greeting each other, saying goodbye at the door, the car, anything like that?’
‘I saw her arrive, this young woman, with maybe a bag of something from the store. And I would only see her getting back into her car alone. She had flowers once, quite a small bunch; I thought they were kind of measly.’
‘What did she look like?
‘Like I said, attractive, tall, brown hair, healthy looking, dressed normal, nothing too fancy, nothing too sporty.’
‘Did you notice, or did Jean tell you, anything about dating? Was she dating anyone?’
Margaret paused. ‘Oh, I see where you’re going with this …’
Ren paused. ‘I’m not going anywhere … I’m just wondering about other visitors.’
Margaret shook her head. ‘I saw her brother – I’ve met him; nice man – but that was it. I wish I could tell you something to help you find who did this to her. And I’m guessing already that I can’t.’
‘We don’t know that. Can you tell me what car the woman who came to see her was driving?’
‘A red one.’
Ren’s pen hovered.
‘I don’t know the first thing about cars,’ said Margaret.
‘OK. Anything else I need to know about Jean? Anything that might have stood out?’
‘Nothing stood out about her,’ said Margaret. ‘And I really don’t mean that in a bad way.’
‘No, I understand. Would you remember – did you see her on Friday, January 12th?’ said Ren.
Margaret thought about it. She nodded. ‘I saw her when she came back from work, around seven o’clock.’
‘And after that?’
‘No, I did not,’ said Margaret. ‘But I was in bed by ten thirty.’
‘And what about Saturday morning?’
‘Her car was gone by the time I got up. So she could have been there all night, or she could have stayed somewhere else.’
‘OK, Margaret. Thank you so much for your time,’ said Ren.
‘A pleasure. And here’s where I get your card in case my memory springs back to life with a vital clue and I save the day.’
Ren smiled and handed her a card. ‘Now, don’t let Pinocchio get his hands on that …’ She walked down the path to her car. ‘Hey,’ she called back, ‘where’s the cat?’
‘McGraw?’ said Margaret. ‘He’s not in the house?’
Ren shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Margaret.
‘What’s he look like?’
‘Evil. Tabby.’
‘Is he Quick Draw? Or Phil?’
‘Tim,’ said Margaret. ‘Tim McGraw. My cat’s called Faith Hill.’
‘Really?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Cats? No way. They don’t give a damn about anyone.’
‘And clearly your dog gives a big shit about you.’
Margaret let out a laugh, almost slipped on an icy patch and let out another laugh. Ren waved goodbye.
Poor McGraw. Please don’t be out in the snow.
16
I-70 was a slow-moving stress-fest. Ren checked her watch. It was four p.m. Shit. Skiers and snowboarders had started to make their way down off Vail Pass. Ren gripped the steering wheel, swapped her old gum for new gum, changed the temperature settings, rubbed moisturizer into her hands. One minute passed. Shit. She punched through her phone contacts until she got to H.
‘Hey, Helen. It’s Ren. Can you talk?’
‘Sure. How are you doing?’
‘I’m OK. Oh, hold on.’ She braked, slamming her hand on the horn. ‘You idiot! Fuck you, too, mister. Asshole. I’m sorry, Helen.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. I am. Ho
w are you?’
‘Well, I’m fine. You under pressure?’
‘Not really, I …’ She leaned out the window. ‘I do not believe this shit. Another rollover. Another idiot lady driver in an SUV without chains. I am going to be so late.’ She closed the window.
‘Ren,’ said Helen.
‘Sorry,’ said Ren. ‘I got this new case – the agent who died in Breck.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’m lead investigator.’
‘Will you be in Breck for the next while?’ said Helen.
‘Yup.’
‘Is there any hope of seeing you?’
‘I …’ Ren rolled down the window again and stuck her head out. ‘This is a nightmare. Why today? When I need to get back for a briefing and I am in charge of –’
‘Ren, what I’m getting is you calling me on your way to and from meetings. I’m on speaker phone, you’re in the mountains, your signal’s going … it’s not great.’
‘I know. I’m sorry –’
‘There’s no need to be sorry. Just, why don’t you come to Denver?’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry. If I drove to Denver, I’d lose half a day.’
‘You might lose half a day, but do you think you might gain something?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I just –’
‘It’s been a while.’
‘I know,’ said Ren. ‘I really want to. But for now, the phone’s the best I can do.’
‘I guess it’s better than nothing.’
‘I gotta go. It’s moving a little. I’ll call you.’
Helen paused. ‘Sure.’
The conference room at the Sheriff’s Office was full. Ren was three-quarters of an hour late by the time she arrived.
‘OK, everyone,’ she said as she stood at the desk, staring out at the assembled team. Get your shit together.
‘You’re lucky we can confirm the MVA on I-70,’ said Bob.
Ren stared at him. Not in front of the children.
‘OK,’ said Ren. ‘The last known sighting of Jean Transom was at the Glenwood RA on Friday, January 12th by her colleagues, Tiny Gressett and Todd Austerval. Our White Collar Squad is going through the financial records. What we got so far are recent transactions. So we know that that evening she went to the nine p.m. showing of a chick flick at Rifle Creek movie theater. We’re waiting for an ID on her there. The movie was over at eleven p.m. If she went straight home, earliest she would have made it was eleven thirty. I’ve just come back from speaking with her neighbor, Margaret Shaw. She saw her walk into her house at seven p.m. and didn’t see her later on that evening. Mrs Shaw herself had gone to bed by ten thirty.’
