by Jan Coffey
“You give yourself no credit for good things and you take all the blame on yourself for the bad things,” she told him.
He looked at her curiously.
“You make it sound like your job at the Secret Service is a stroll in the park. But then, you say your brother’s suicide was directly your fault.”
“He used my gun,” Bryan said again, wondering why she couldn’t understand the ramifications of that.
“Yes, but if it wasn’t your gun, don’t you think it would have been something else?” she asked softly. “I’m no psychiatrist, but I know that suicide is a tricky thing. If he couldn’t find a gun, then he would have gone looking for another way to do it. There are a hundred ways that teenagers use to take their lives when they’re bent on destroying themselves. I see it in my own practice. The problem wasn’t that he found that gun, but that something was not working inside him. Something was driving him to take his own life. Sometimes we see it and catch it. Sometimes we don’t.”
“I could have stopped it if I’d paid more attention.”
“How, Bryan? Were you around him all the time?” she asked somewhat sharply. “Could you possibly know all of his friends and his moods and who was giving him a hard time at school?”
There was no holding back with her. He’d opened the gates, and she wasn’t going to give up until every drop of the mess was out.
“I was working with teenagers,” he replied. “I was interviewing and reviewing the files of fourteen and fifteen year olds who saw no value in their lives.”
“And in no one else’s lives, either,” she corrected quickly. “Don’t mix Bobby with kids who acted out of revenge and killed innocent people. He took only his own life.”
“The end result was the same,” he said sharply.
“No, it wasn’t. I know.” She took a deep breath. “I have a son who’s accused of hurting others. My pain this past week has been for those others, too.”
They were both on the edge, raw with emotion. Bryan wanted her to understand. He wasn’t carrying his feelings about Bobby’s death because of one thing. Every way he looked at it, he was involved…or should have been and wasn’t. He could have stopped it.
“The week before Bobby died, I moved back temporarily into my mother’s house. She needed help and, at the time, my wife and I were separating. I was in the middle of the school shooting cases with Hank. I was spending a lot of time on the road, so it worked out for everyone, I thought. That’s how Bobby found my gun.”
She shook her head. “My next door neighbor had his guns in his basement in a locked cabinet, but Juan was able to get in there. Do you see me blaming them for what Juan did? Do you think they blame themselves for what happened?”
“I can only tell you how I feel,” he said.
“I can understand that your brother was important to you. I can see that you feel you didn’t do enough. But I cannot understand why you haven’t forgiven yourself after eight years.”
Bryan held his hand out, palm up. “You see? You admit that there’s something that needs to be forgiven.”
She nodded, her eyes fierce with conviction. “Of course there is. There is always something in us that makes us need to be forgiven. As humans, we are so big on guilt. Our neighbor’s house gets broken in to, and we feel guilty that we didn’t pay closer attention to who comes and goes in the neighborhood. A teenager is involved in a bad accident, and we feel guilty for not telling his parents the week before about seeing him with a six-pack of beer.”
“Bobby was no stranger. He was my brother.”
“And Juan is my son,” she said with the same force.
They were both locked in a battle of wills. Bryan couldn’t take his eyes off her flushed face. She was beautiful, passionate. This was the first time since Bobby’s death that someone was challenging him to let go, to let his life move on. Those sessions he’d gone to hadn’t done it, and yet...
Lexi pushed abruptly to her feet and started for the door. “I’m just going as far as the car. I need to get some fresh air.”
Bryan caught her hand as she went by. She stood there, looking down at him. Her eyes shone with unshed tears.
“I know…Lexi…” He struggled for the words. “Thank you. I know what you’re trying to do.”
She leaned down and kissed his lips. He hadn’t expected it, but he didn’t try to stop it, either. Her lips were even softer than he’d imagined. And her kiss was full of tenderness. She drew back, and it took great control not to pull her on his lap and kiss her deeply. He wanted to make love to her, to lose himself in her.
She must have seen some of what he was thinking in his face. “I think we both could use some fresh air.”
Bryan nodded and released her hand. “Wait a second.”
He stood up and turned off the lights in the room before she opened the door. She moved out onto the cement walk that ran along the building. The air had cooled off considerably.
She took a few steps along the walkway and then leaned her back against the window. She looked up at the sky. He stood in the doorway and studied her profile in the dark for a moment and then looked at the sky, as well. The stars were glittering brightly in a way that you only see in the desert. There was a crispness to how the stars stood out in the deep, blue-black expanse.
“I can’t imagine your brother would have wanted you to suffer like this, so many years later,” she said softly.
“You’re right. Bobby wouldn’t have wanted this.” Bryan had been his idol. They’d spent so much time together when Bobby was little. Later, Bryan had tried to make up for the absence of a father in teenager’s life…except that they could talk. There were no disagreements, no arguments.
“Did you ever find out what was at the root of his problem? Why he did it?”
“He would get down.” As Bryan stared upward, a star cut a swath across the night sky and disappeared. “I don’t know if it was clinical depression. He just had mood swings that I thought were normal for a teenager. But what made him flip finally was a problem with a girl.”
“She hurt him?”
“No. She was his first real girlfriend. She was killed in a car accident six days before.”
“How did it happen?”
Bryan frowned. “She was a passenger in her sister’s car.”
“How very hard that would be for anyone,” she said, looking at him. “But one thing I’ve learned from being a doctor is that dying is part of life.”
“I know that.”
“And you surely also know that you couldn’t have followed him around every minute of that week. You had a job that had to be done. There were others who relied on you. Who can tell just how many teenage lives you’ve saved over the past few years through the work you were doing then.”
He leaned a shoulder against the side of the doorway. “Juan must be an amazing kid, and not because of whatever those strands are in his brain, because of the way you must have raised him. Because of the kind of person you are.”
Even in the dark, he could see she was smiling at him. “We seem to have a little mutual admiration society going here, don’t we?”
Bryan nodded slowly, his eyes taking in every inch of her face.
“We’re in the back lot of a desert motel. We have a room with a queen bed…and how many agents watching us?”
He grinned.
“So maybe we shouldn’t go there.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t…not tonight, anyway.”
She laughed, looking away.
The two of them stood in silence for some time.
“What time is it, anyway?” she asked finally.
Bryan checked his watch. “Quarter to twelve.”
“There’s only fifteen minutes before today becomes tomorrow,” she said. “He asked me to meet him today. Do you think we came too late?”
“I think if the time mattered, he would have said it.” Bryan had talked to the other agents on surveillance at the motel an hour ago. They’d set u
p a phone tap for the main line going out of the motel. They were monitoring cell phone use, as well. No one had come in or gone out. Nothing was going on. The night was dead.
He thought about the robbery and shooting at the copy place near here last night. There was a strong possibility that their man was taken out of there. He could have been abducted or murdered. As time wore on, Bryan was becoming more convinced that their would-be contact might be dead.
“It doesn’t look like he’s coming, does it?”
“Maybe he was planning to, but something held him up,” Bryan told her. “We’ll wait the night.”
The eyewitnesses near the scene last night hadn’t offered anything tangible. The Reno Police were on the watch and would notify the feds in the event that any John Doe turned up.
“It still doesn’t make sense for him not to have specified a time,” she said.
“He could have planned to call you,” Bryan suggested.
“He hasn’t done that yet, either.”
Bryan glanced at his watch again.
“He knew my name. Why did it matter which room I stayed in?” she mused. “If he called, they would connect him to my room anyway.”
“Good point,” he responded, straightening up. “You’re thinking that maybe he wanted you in this room for a reason.”
“Exactly,” Lexi said. There was excitement in her voice. “Maybe whatever it was he wanted me to know, he left in this room.”
Bryan had searched the room quickly when they’d first arrived, but he’d been worrying more about intruders and anything that might pose a danger to Lexi.
“Let’s take a look,” he told her.
They went back inside. Bryan locked the door before turning the lights back on.
“I’ll start right here by the window. You look anywhere you think is a logical place for him to hide something.”
“What do you think we should look for?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. He was trying to fax you some documents, so maybe he…or she…left you some kind of file.”
Bryan eyed the climate control unit. That was a good possibility, but it would take some work to get into it. He looked at the control panel and shined his pen light into the vents and under the unit.
Lexi immediately started with the closer of the two bedside tables, pulling out the drawers, looking under them, checking the thin space between the bottom shelf and carpeted flooring. She pulled it away from the wall to see behind it.
Bryan searched the chair he’d been sitting on, then moved to the straight chair next to a small table. Next, he stood on the chair and looked on top of the ceiling fan. Other than grimes of dozen years on the blades and more than a few dead flies, there was nothing else to see.
“Hold on a minute,” he warned. Climbing down, he opened his bag and took two pairs of plastic gloves out of a compartment. He gave her a pair and put the other on himself.
“Good thinking. It’s gross,” she said.
“It’s not just the dirt,” he replied. “We’ll want to preserve anything that might be used for identification later.”
She nodded and pulled the cover off the bed. She took off the sheets, shaking each layer. An old crumpled tissue fell on the floor from between the sheets. She shook her head with disgust.
“Put anything that you find, anything that even stands a remote chance of being a clue, here on the floor.” He pointed to a spot next to the door.
Bryan watched her pick up the tissue and put it where he was pointing. He pulled the chair over to the open armoire that housed the TV and looked on top of it. The flora and fauna he found there matched the top of the fan blades. An old TV channel directory was covered with the grime. The filth around it had not been touched in God knows how long. He picked up the directory and paged through it, looking for any possible writing on it.
Bryan climbed down and put the directory on the carpet.
“His email mentioned molecular sensors. Maybe what he left us here is not even big enough to be seen with naked eye.”
“We won’t give up the room right away. Whatever happens tonight, I’ll have a group of forensics technicians go through it very carefully.”
Lexi had pulled up the mattress and was looking under it.
“I can take care of heavier things like that.”
“I can handle it,” she said confidently. “But I can only imagine what house keeping would think.”
Bryan looked over his shoulder at her. Lexi was on all fours, checking underneath the bed.
“I can’t see anything down here. Maybe you can help me tip the bed frame up later, and we can see if anything is under it.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Standing on top of the chair, Bryan looked down at the patterns on the rug. The lines from the vacuum cleaner were visible throughout the room, but there were also the traces of rectangular impressions in the carpet between the bed and the far wall. Whatever was there must have been fairly heavy. Possibly file boxes, he thought.
“Don’t walk over there,” he said to Lexi and pointing. “I’ll have some of our people check those impressions. There might be something we can use there. There may even be shoe impressions that we can’t see.”
“I think after medicine, forensic science would have been my second choice for a career,” she told him, coming and crouching before the three drawers of the armoire beneath the television.
“You and the rest of the television watching public,” he joked.
“I mean it. It has always fascinated me.”
“Well, both save lives.” He stepped down from the chair and looked behind the television.
Lexi pulled a phone book and a Gideon Bible out of the top drawer. She leafed through the thick phone book. “Is this worth adding to the pile?”
“Absolutely. Anything marked in there or any pages that are ripped out could provide information.”
She put it next to the TV directory. “I feel sorry for whoever has to go through it. Talk about grunt work.”
Bryan found a takeout menu from a local restaurant behind the television. He quickly glanced at it and added it to the pile.
“What is this?”
Bryan turned around to see what Lexi was looking at. She was holding a white plastic card with a strip of magnetic tape on the back.
“I found it right here in the middle of the Bible.”
“Is there anything else with it?” He crouched down next to her.
They both looked. There was nothing. He took the card out of her hand and studied it, front and back. It appeared to be a key card for accessing something.
“It looks like someone scratched off the name,” she said.
It wasn’t regular wear and tear. Lexi was right. On one side of the key, someone had used a sharp object to scratch off the name and most of the logo.
“It’s not as flimsy as a hotel room key card,” he said.
“It looks old, too,” Lexi commented.
Bryan held the card up to the light. Two lines of text had been crossed off. The bottom portion of the second line was still partially visible.
“Storage,” he said. “I’m sure this word is ‘storage.’ I think this must be an access key to a storage facility.”
“Do you think this is it?” she asked excitedly. “I mean, what he wanted me to have?”
“I don’t know. We’ll find out.”
“How are we going to figure out what storage place this belongs to?” Lexi asked.
Bryan tapped the card. “Someone in the FBI office in Reno will be able to track it down for us.”
~~~~
Chapter 35
Friday January 18, 6:30 a.m.
Manhattan, New York
Curtis took longer in the shower than usual. He’d barely slept a wink all night.
Nothing was going as it should. His people in California hadn’t been able to get inside Mitch and Elsa’s house during the night. His man had plenty of excuses, of course. They were going
to try it again tonight. As far as the storage places, they’d only been able to go through the client base of one of the facilities because the others didn’t have centralized computer records. Naturally, Mitch’s name wasn’t listed on that one.
He had time, Curtis told himself as he dressed. He needed to keep himself in a mind-set where he was in control. He was the one to set the pace in his world.
His time. His pace. His world.
As he knotted his Stefano Ricci necktie, he thought over the two phone calls he’d received around 6:00 a.m. from people that they’d worked with years ago. Naturally, they were still on the payroll, in a limited way. The time of their calls in itself indicated the panic. It was clearly time to disconnect with them.
The first call came from Curtis’s top insider in the social services program that they used illegally years back. She didn’t mention her name, but Curtis knew who she was immediately. She just wanted Curtis to know that in the past couple of days, there’d been a deluge of government agents in the state and private offices going over the welfare and adoption records.
The second caller wanted to let Curtis know that he was running for a political office in Arizona this coming fall, and while he couldn’t accept any donations from citizens that might be considered illegal or unethical, he wanted to inform him of his plans. The caller rambled on for a while, but the subtext of the message was clear: something was happening in Arizona.
He considered the phone calls. Because of the news conference and all the press releases that had gone out over the past few weeks, NanoCure and Curtis’s name and picture were appearing in the business pages of papers all over the country. Those people who’d helped him in the early days…for a price…were surely seeing his name. And with the activity in Arizona, he was also sure that he’d probably be fielding a few more nervous messages from others who’d been involved.
In the kitchen, Curtis found Ann waiting for waffles to pop up out of the toaster. Little David was already awake and at the breakfast table.
“Where’s the rest of your family?” Curtis asked the young boy after planting a kiss on top of his head.
