Mitchell had always been a Leg Man and Agent Heston’s were in very fine form. “I think she’s a runner or something,” he heard himself say, his mouth nearly watering.
Down the hall, Willa set the box on a desk. She read through the police report Mitchell had left in a neat pile of documents. As her eyes scanned the living-color details about former Lab employees, about Jacqueline Grafton, her brother Rory, and his pal Elvin Buck, every word Mitchell and Adams said filtered down the corridor with digital clarity. Cartoons were what she wanted and here they were. She was about to start work with Tom and Jerry.
His cousin was in the middle of singing something twangy that referred to the ‘Genitalia of a fool’. “Now there’s a lullaby every mother should teach her children,” John said as he shuffled into his kitchen.
Lesley kept chopping potato into chunks on a cutting board. She didn’t turn around. Her reddish-blonde hair was in a sloppy ponytail. A streak of pale yellow paint stood out on the back of her neck. She always sported paint, tile grout, or a stain of some kind. It was a hazard of her home renovation business. “Did I wake you?” she asked.
“No. Kathleen calling to screech at me takes that honor.” John yawned. Loudly.
“Need some coffee?”
“Not if Sean’s coming for dinner. I’d like to be able to slip into a coma. Coffee would hinder that.”
”I’m sure my husband would like to join you. I think my brother’s making him tense. He came home in a foul mood.” She set a knife down and slid potato into a large pot on the stove.
John took a seat on a tall stool beside the island-style breakfast bar where the local newspaper was spread open. “Why would a visit from Mr Snob make your husband tense? Did Sean complain the sheets weren’t one hundred percent Egyptian cotton again? Or was it that the margarita salt wasn’t flakey enough? How did you turn out so normal when you grew up with that pompous Warren Buffet-millionaire wannabe as a role model? Why’s he staying with you anyway?”
“My mother suggested it. She said we don’t spend enough time together. It took me ten minutes to remember why.” Lesley began to skin a large yam, letting the refuse fall into the sink. “You’re lucky your sister lives so close. If Kathleen annoys you, you can just ask her to leave.”
“You can ask Sean to leave.”
“Right,” she turned on the faucet, “but then I’d have to drive him to the damn airport and two hours in a car with Sean and his wife? Nooo thank you!” Lesley flipped the switch for the garbage disposal.
John glanced down at The Los Alamos Monitor beneath his elbows on the countertop. His eyes scanned the past week’s Police Beat stories. Thieves had made off with computers and electronic donations from the Casa Mesita Thrift Shop. Seven people had been arrested and charged with DWI. Chile Works had been hit by graffiti. All the usual crimes he expected.
The watery grinding noise stopped. “So how’s the arm?” Lesley asked.
John folded the newspaper and set it aside. “Sore. Annoying. Itchy.”
“Did you have a nice time at your sister’s?”
“She’s a nag and the kids are fun, but it made me glad Maureen and I never had children, although it would have given us something to argue about before and after the divorce. I’d never let Sofia out of the house the way Kathleen does. The girl was wearing eyeliner. Eyeliner.” John flinched at the memory of Egyptian-esque, kohl-rimmed blue eyes. Yeah. He was really glad Sofia wasn’t his to worry about more than he already did. “Do you ever regret not having kids?” he asked Lesley.
“No, but I’m diggin’ on being a stepmother.”
“You’re fortunate. The Mighty Colossus did a great job raising that kid.”
“Yes, I am. Yes, he did.” Lesley rinsed her hands.
Sighing, John yanked a dishtowel from a rail at the end of the island and tossed it on the counter beside his cousin. “So what time should we expect America’s favorite couple for dinner?”
“Seven,” she said, turning around as she patted water from her skin. Her mouth quirked and so did her eyebrows. “I gotta ask. What’s with the beard? You can’t work, so your personal grooming takes a holiday too?”
“I take that to mean you don’t like it?”
She made a face. “Eh. Few women like full facial hair. A goatee, a little stubble … fine, but a man on his way to Grizzly-Adams-backwoodsman, no. You kiss a woman with that fur on your face, and she’ll tell you the same thing.”
John rubbed at his three-week old beard and laughed through his nose, sniff-sniff-sniff. “Do you know any women I can kiss? It’s been a while. I’m getting out of practice.” He went quiet for a moment and watched her.
”You know what you need?”
“To get laid. Know what you need?”
“Curry paste.”
John rose and opened a cupboard beside the fridge. He grabbed the two glass jars of tikka masala curry paste he’d picked up and plunked them on the stove. He’d remembered to get the paste at the World Market in Santa Fe before he’d driven up The Hill, but his mind had wandered back to Queenie and he’d forgotten to buy himself milk, which had led to stopping at Smith’s in town, and another chance encounter with the woman who still hadn’t left his thoughts. Running into her again was beyond chance. He wouldn’t go so far as to say it was fate, but something was happening. Not that he believed in planets-aligned-in-harmony crap; he simply had a gut feeling. Then again, since the stabbing and being unable to work—correction—being prohibited from work for so long, it was hard to tell what was his gut and what was plain hunger.
God, he missed his job.
“Know what you need besides curry paste?” His head disappeared behind the door of another cabinet. When he reappeared, a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka was in his hand. “Tonight, you need, Sean needs, we all need, Tilbrook’s Tropical Fruit Double Punch.”
“Why is it double punch?”
“You’ll find out.” He crossed the tiles and grabbed his quilted jacket from the back of the dining room chair where he’d left it when he’d come home earlier in the day. “You create a culinary Indian masterpiece. I’ll run out and grab some juice from Smith’s. Then I’ll be back to set the table with my finest Burger King crystal.”
Lesley called out as he headed past the powder room and up the steps to the front door, “Be careful. It’s slippery out there.”
He pulled on his jacket, took his keys from a brass rack that was shaped like a row of curly pigs tails, and hit the inside switch to open the garage door. A moment later, he climbed into his Subaru and backed out of the garage.
It was an odd thing for him, planning on getting drunk, and he wondered for a moment if he was feeling sorry for himself, or if he merely wanted to feel a little rowdy. Rowdy wasn’t a word he’d ever use to describe himself. He had his moments, but for the most part he lived quietly. So he didn’t have a bustling social life. He had friends, family, and people he cared about—like Lesley and her giant of a husband—and he was thankful for that. Family was what life was all about. All right, fine. If one got technical, he and Lesley weren’t really true cousins. There was no blood relation, since his great aunt had married her grandfather, but she felt like family; she and the Mighty Colossus were his best friends. They were a wonderful couple, and they deserved to be happy.
So did he, for that matter. Right?
The little voice, the one that lived far down at the bottom of his mind, the one that seldom ever piped up, whispered the question, ‘Are you lonely?’
Well, was he?
He’d been married a long time ago in a galaxy known as the ‘90s. While his marriage hadn’t worked out, he’d never been bitter about his divorce, although he hadn’t quite pictured himself being alone with fifty looming on his horizon. That fact had made him a little itchy at times, but life always settled down and got back to the normal, comfortable reality that he’d live out his days as a bachelor.
All right then, was he lonely? No. He wasn’t lonely. He was restl
ess. Not working made him feel fidgety. Bored. Useless. Unproductive. He could have gone on listing how not working made him feel, but sex sort of got in the way. He was a man packing as much hot-blooded lust as the next guy, maybe even more, since he’d been going through a rather lengthy dry spell. The empty stretch was exacerbated by living in a small town without a large population of eligible females. As a cop, the women he met were married, twenty years older, under eighteen, or under arrest.
Or, in the case of Queenie, just passing through town.
John laughed to himself.
When he’d stretched out for the nap Kathleen had interrupted, he’d started fantasizing about the woman he’d met on the side of the road outside Madrid. Warm, wintry hair caressed his jaw as he’d kissed the hollow of her throat. His fingers slid over the smooth, swelling arch of her breasts and moved to the buttons of her blood red blouse. Before he got too far undressing the fair Queen Willa, he’d nodded off and she turned into the Snow Queen from The Chronicles of Narnia. To his dismay, that particular monarch stayed dressed and had a fondness for belting out Avril Lavigne.
Agent Heston yawned. Arms overhead, she leaned back in her chair, mouth open wide as she stretched and grunted softly. The sound drew Mitchell’s attention. Amused, he grinned at her for a moment then brushed that smile away with his fingertips and cleared his throat. “Agent Heston?” he said.
She nodded through her next yawn, and he watched her glance at the men around the conference table in the base of operations, which was a front, situated behind the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce and Dawn’s Delights, a bakery that infused the office space with the delicious scent of vanilla and baking cookies. The conference room had taken on an even sweeter smell when Kinsale and Dokowski had arrived with a sheet cake from Dawn’s and a take-out tray of coffee from the Starbucks across the street.
Stocky, dark-eyed and bearded, Kinsale had hat-hair from the Chicago White Sox cap he took off and stuffed into the pocket of his blue windbreaker. There were yellow and blue stains on his fingertips. How he got them was plain once he set the cake on the small table. Cross-country style fingerprints skied across the brightly colored icing.
“Sorry,” Agent Heston said finally. “You want to know what restaurants I’d recommend for lunch. Besides Dawn’s Delights, Central Park Square, where we are, has a pretty good Japanese place. If you want good New Mexican, El Parasol’s across the street from the post office, just past Ruby K’s Bagels. The Blue Window is over by Smith’s. You can’t miss Smith’s; it’s the only grocery store in town. Anyway, they’re all good and they all do take-out. There’s not much nightlife here, I’m afraid. I hope you boys have cable.”
“You lived here before, right?” Adams sank a plastic knife into the cake.
“Mm-hm.” This time Agent Heston put a hand over her mouth as she yawned.
Adams licked his thumb. “And you worked with some of these people?”
“Mm-hm.”
“That puts Agent Heston in a unique position.” Mitchell looked at her for emphasis and birds suddenly appeared. Stars fell down right out of the sky. Angels got together and, damn, Mitchell wanted to be close to Willa.
She looked tired, but the feathery little lines at the outside edges of her greenish-gray eyes were so appealing, so natural, so honest. The senior agent was exactly his type, the kind of unaffected woman he could develop quite a crush on. He was much too professional for that to happen, yet honesty like hers was an enormous turn-on and Mitchell felt a little stab down low, in what his ex-wife called his cocktails.
The reasoning part of his brain scrambled to re-engage with the primitive side so he reached for an overly large slice of cake. Focus. Focus. “Being familiar with projects and the individuals who’ve worked on them, she knows what to look for,” he said, before shoving the end into his mouth, chewing swiftly to cover his ass. When he spoke again, his tongue was gummy with frosting. “Her past relationships give her an advantage.”
Willa took the lid off her coffee cup. What Agent Mitchell said was true. Seeing Dominic socially would be viewed as part of the investigation. Still, she had to be careful how she went about things. “I can talk to these people and they’ll let their guard down with me. It’ll all seem nice and sociable.” She gulped down half her coffee, and four men ate ragged pieces of cake while they scanned the report she’d given them a few minutes before.
“The USB thumb drives found at the scene contain how much classified information?” Kinsale asked, coffee cup at his lips as he squinted at the report.
“Six hundred twenty-one pages in total; some classified, some declassified.” Willa said and yawned again. This was turning into one hell of a long day.
Dokowski swabbed chocolate crumbs from his generous mouth. He adjusted his rectangular-framed glasses. The lenses were a little on the thick side, but they didn’t detract from his pretty, Brad Pitt looks in any way. “Jesus, Adams, save some of that cake for Farley.”
There was a smear of yellow cream on Adams’ upper lip when he raised his eyebrows. “Dude, my piece is just as big as yours,” he said with a mouthful of cake. “So really, a meth lab bust in a trailer park turns up government secrets? If you ask me,” he paused to burp, “this whole thing is simply drug-related.”
“SAC Oscar doesn’t seem to think so,” Kinsale said, his bright, icing-tinged fingers picking at the fraying threads across the knee of his torn jeans.
“Come on,” Adams said as he chewed. “The DOE, the Lab, and the Bureau are trying to cover their asses, just in case. The local PD responded to reports of a domestic and found a cache of drug paraphernalia. If you look at the people in custody, this is just hysteria, paranoia. You’ve got Jacqueline Grafton, a former Lab assistant who drinks, but has no priors. Her younger brother Rory has a juvenile record for possession. The other guy, Buck, was taken in for a parole violation on a petty theft conviction. Half the stuff in that trailer was stolen. Plasma screens and Blu-ray players? These three aren’t terrorists. They’re pothead speed-freaks who took advantage of their alcoholic sister-landlady. They decided to try to go into business for themselves because they were too stoned and too broke to afford to buy their own shit. Then they got into a fight over whose shit was whose. The flash drives were stolen in a robbery or part of a trade.”
“That’s possible. You boys have been here a few hours longer. Has anyone checked with the LAPD to find out about any area robberies in the last, let’s say six months?” Willa rubbed her eyes and glanced at the men around the table.
“I’m on it,” Kinsale raised a finger.
With a sniffle, Willa slid on her reading glasses and stared at the open file beneath her hands. The first sheet of paper was a list of names, alphabetized, on white paper. When Willa read, numbers had their own separate colors; letters did too, when on their own, but entire words were usually one color. In the list before her, the name Dominic Brennan—a deep blood red and plum—came after Dennis Aspinall’s yellow and sepia, and before Chandra’s turquoise and orange, which made Willa think of the Miami Dolphins football team colors. Mitchell and Agent Acne—Agent Adams she reminded herself—had already discovered Aspinall had died in 2006. The black line slashed through the name put Dr Dominic Brennan at the top of the list.
Willa glared at Agent Mitchell for a moment, annoyed again by his efficiency, by his already having interviewed Dominic.
Ignorant of her irritation, the handsome agent bit into his second piece of cake. “Sure it’s possible, but not exactly probable,” he said. “The thumb drives were found between the mattress and headboard in Grafton’s bedroom. Why keep flash drives stuffed behind a mattress unless you’re trying to hide something? The fact remains, someone inside the Lab got careless and Grafton or somebody else removed those things on purpose.”
“I’m with Agent Adams. The FBI and the Lab haven’t always had the easiest relationship. It could be paranoia based on previous investigations going ass-up, or it could be circumstantial,” Kinsale sa
id.
It was all in the report in front of him, and Agent Mitchell shook his head. “Four hundred and eight separate classified documents and two-hundred plus pages of secret restricted weapons and experimental data appearing on three thumb drives is more than circumstantial. The same names come up over and over, besides Grafton, Brennan, Chandra, Dichter, and a handful of Lab techs. They all had access to that stuff. They’re our real suspects.” He turned to Agent Heston when she drummed her fingers on the table.
Glasses off, Willa’s eyes fixed on the pile of files and documents stacked on the table. She hadn’t had a solid stretch of sleep in the last two days. Fatigue began to seep into her bones. She slowed the weary trickle by stretching her arms over head. “I’m looking for a pattern, but I haven’t found one yet. From what I’ve analyzed so far,” she said, “I can tell you some of the material is at least twenty years old. A physicist can work on a range of projects over the course of a few years or work on one project for a decade or more. That alone does not make these individuals suspects. Seeing the same names attached to different documents or the same name over and over is not unusual.” She reached up rubbed both hands over her face.
Again, Mitchell shook his head. “But having that information turn up in a trailer park is,” he said. “Are you all right, Agent Heston?”
Willa pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment and yawned before she refocused. “Sorry. I’m tired. I’ve been looking at this stuff for two days solid,” trying to figure out how to keep Dominic out of it, “and it’s all a big rainbow blur of color.”
“You need some more coffee.” Agent Mitchell took the lid off his cup. “Here, have half of mine.
Could I have mindless cartoons instead? Willa passed her empty cup to Agent Mitchell and watched him fill it. He smiled at her warmly.
“Know what I think?” Dokowski waved his narrow hands over the pile of files on the table, “I think when I check the security logs we’ll see information’s been siphoned out for a while. Wen Ho Lee, the missing disks that weren’t real a few years back, The Bureau taking the fall for it all, my money’s on a traitorous geek inside the Lab who just hasn’t been caught yet. You watch. This is going to turn into another spy-in-the-henhouse, Aldrich Ames thing.”
For Your Eyes Only Page 6
