Absently, Jackie doodled on the glass, making the same shapes over and over. “Oh, come on?” she said. “I’m Jackie? Jackie Grafton? From the lab? I dated Dominic Brennan?”
“I remember you, Jackie.”
“Yeah, Willa, I thought you would, seeing how I went out with your old boyfriend.”
“Dominic wasn’t ever my boyfriend.”
“Uh-huh.” Denying that relationship was something else Jackie found unbelievable and a little freaky, although not as astonishing and freaky as why a woman under eighty wouldn’t dye her white hair another color, or as mind-boggling and freaky as being arrested for cooking crystal meth.
Jackie gave a little shake of her head. “Dr Willa Heston. I’m sort of glad they tossed you in here. It’s nice to see a familiar face, but to be honest, I’m kinda shocked, Willa. What’s it been, ten, eleven years, or more? I wasn’t sure at first you were who I thought you were, but I don’t know anyone else who had a head of hair like yours at thirty. I always wondered why you didn’t dye it. I don’t dye my hair, but you better believe I would if I found more than a few white ones growing.”
“Right now I can feel all my white hair growing.”
Jackie chuckled. “Welcome to your hangover.”
“Oh, my God, my head. What the hell was I thinking?”
“I think you mean, ‘what the hell was I drinking’?”
“That I remember. Vodka. And juice. Juice was involved too. After that it’s a little hazy.”
Jackie considered her, temple against the window, head slightly turned, her breath fogging a patch on the glass. She lifted a finger and began to doodle again in the cloudiness. “Vodka. Now that’s a surprise. You were always so straight. You were Dr Straight-Arrow. I don’t know why I’m so shocked. I know firsthand that people change and some things change you more than others. I heard you got married and then your husband died. That’s one hell of a change.”
“Mm-hm.” Willa heaved woeful half-groan, half-sigh.
“I never got married, but I hope that won’t be the case forever. Jesus loves me,” she said with a smile.
Shifting, Willa moved gingerly to get into a comfortable position where thinking didn’t do battle with paint fumes and glaring lights. Her head throbbed. Her neck ached. She wanted coffee despite the fact the coffee she’d had thirty-five minutes ago hadn’t wanted her. Time was precious. She had to work fast, find a direction, and get Jacqueline Grafton to open up. She had to stop staring at Jackie’s squiggles on the window and quit thinking about throwing up on John.
It was as difficult as moving a bookcase full of old encyclopedias, but Willa shifted her gaze to Jackie’s face.The crease between the woman’s eyebrows had been softened by a cosmetic filler, Botox or both. Jackie had no real crows-feet, and her quick smile didn’t quite reach her blue-green eyes—or the bleariness set behind them. “How long,” Willa said, swallowing, “do they keep you in here?”
Jackie halted her window doodling. “Are you gonna be sick or something?” She jerked her chin toward the corner where a stainless steel toilet was half hidden by a partition. “The toilet’s over there, but please don’t throw up. I’m one of those people that if I see it and smell it I have to join in the fun.”
“You’re safe. I took care of that before I got here.”
Jackie relaxed a little and resumed drawing. “Yeah,” she sighed, “things change. People change. I used to drink. You probably remember me that way. I used drink a lot. I used to get so wasted. It was party, party, party. All I ever thought about was the next good time. Then one day I took Esther, my neighbor, to a wedding at the White Rock Presbyterian church. She introduced me to her friends, to her family, and Sunny Carl. He works with Westerncare, and he’s the best thing that ever happened to me, got me into AA. Sunny, AA, and JC came into my life on the same day.” She tittered, the sound tinged with a brittle edge.
Abandoning her foggy artwork, Jackie sat, cross-legged, on the bench across from Willa. “I wasted so much time, so much time and, Jesus … Jesus.” Jackie laughed again, genuinely this time. “Can you believe that? I’ve repented. I’ve been saved by Sunny, JC, and AA.” She giggled. “I have to tell Sunny that one, but I know how you feel right now. Amen, hallelujah, I’ve been there and I got help. JC showed me the way.” She snorted. “Okay, yeah, so I’m in jail, but my life has never been better. I know this is a test. Alcohol is the devil. Twelve steps. That’s all it takes.”
“Is jail one of the steps? Because we both seem to have that one covered.”
Jackie snorted. “Yeah. You were always really great with the quips.”
“Great with the quips and bad with the booze.” Willa gave a half-hearted laugh and got to her feet. She shuffled, moving to the thick observation window Jackie had used as a blackboard. The natural oils from Jackie’s fingertips had left phantom remains of what looked like a nonsensical geometry formula.
Zero equals parallel similarity divided by one.
The symbols registered in Willa’s brain as an array of ghostly Crayola colors, and she stared at them, her bursting forehead pressed to a pane of cool, reinforced, unbreakable glass.
Officer Binney stood inside the control room on the other side of the corridor, waiting for the chat with Jackie to conclude, waiting to take the woman to the interview room with the flickering light. Mitchell and Adams would talk to her then, as a former employee of the Lab. Nothing would be said about her being a suspect in a federal crime until clear evidence was found. For now, she was being held on the felony charge of drug trafficking.
Willa pushed away from the window. “When is this going to be over?” she muttered.
“It depends on when and if you can make bail, and if you were driving when they picked you up,” Jackie said. “If you knocked back a few too many brewskis and got in your car, then it’s gonna be a while, but not as long as me or as expensive as me. I’ve had to scrape together money for my little brother, and that took some time, but two hundred and fifty thousand is gonna take a little longer than two hundred.”
Willa turned, faking a cough. “Your bail is a quarter of a million?”
“Yeah.” Jackie shrugged. “When my boyfriend gets back, he’ll bail me out. Before he left to pick up his aunt in Florida—which he didn’t want to do, but she depends on him, and he does it every year—he asked some of my old friends to help out. He’ll hit up his family for money too. So all’s I gotta do is sit tight. That’s what you gotta do too. … Well, except for the tight part. It’s a no-brainer to see you can’t handle liquor. I was never that stupid, or as stupid as you. I was never an idiot drunk like my brother and a lot of you buttoned-up types tend to be. All that restraint you have falls away once you get a little alcohol inside. I can tell you, booze doesn’t help. It’s not gonna help you get your groove back.”
A groove. The woman wasn’t far off the mark about getting a groove back, but there was more than one kind of groove, and Willa knew she and Jackie had finally slipped into an easy little furrow.
Willa bit back a weak little grin of victory and embraced the full misery of her headache. “Can you get Tylenol or aspirin in here? Will they let me have aspirin in here? I get why they took my shoes, my pantyhose and my belt, but it’s not like I can kill myself with two aspirin.”
Jackie’s brows shot up. “Holy Cats! Is that why you’re in here? Is that what you did? You tried to off yourself? Now, that just blows my mind. Suicide’s not the answer, you know, and it’s a sin. No one thinks of sin anymore, do they? No one ever thinks of sin anymore. I think about sin all the time since Sunny and Jesus came into my life. I see what I wasted, how I wasted my youth, but I never thought about killing myself. Not even once.”
“I didn’t try to kill myself.” Willa moved back to the bench and drooped onto it, eyes burning. “I’m hung over and yes, stupid. Very, very stupid.”
“Stupid. Right. Hung over. Right.” Jackie twirled her fountain-style ponytail around her fingers. “I didn’t think it t
hrough, you know. If you had tried to end it all you’d probably be in a padded room or something. If they put you in here it’s for being stupid, and you’ve got to be stupid to drive drunk. Yeah. Stupid is what gets you here.”
Willa sniffled, which wasn’t hard since her nose had started running. “I didn’t mean to get drunk. God’s honest truth. I was trying to—”
“Blot it all out?” Jackie said, a little too brightly, ponytail spinning.
“Something like that. So what kind of stupid brought you here?”
Jackie stopped playing with her hair and harrumphed. “My retarded brother, his moronic buddy, and my big fat stupid heart. You ever do that before, let your big heart get you into trouble, try to do the right thing, try to do someone a favor and wind up in the shit?”
Adding a bit more grubbiness to the state of her blouse Willa rubbed her nose on her shoulder and she nodded. In the shit? I’d say I’m standing knee deep in it now.
“What was I supposed to do? He came to me, and what was I supposed to do? He was all, ‘I need a place to stay for a little while. Can you help me?’ and he’s my brother. I couldn’t say no to my brother. He said he knew it was a huge favor, but he said he’d been working a good construction job down in Española and he gave me money. He actually paid me rent, so I believed him, but I shoulda known something was fishy when he gave me money and a plasma screen TV. I shoulda known.”
Jackie got up, planted her hands on her hips and began to rant like a guest on an episode of the Jerry Springer Show. “Know what his good job was, know what my brother was doing?”
Willa shrugged and a barb of pain shot up the back of her neck.
“Cooking meth in my house and selling it on construction sites in Española. Okay, so I used to smoke weed and I did coke sometimes, but even drunk out of my mind I never touched meth. Ever. Not that I’m proud of my boozing. AA’s great and all, but you know, in some ways, I was smarter when I was drinking, which is the complete opposite of you.”
She gave Willa a wry smile, shook her head and resumed pacing, waving her hands or stabbing at the air with a finger as she moved to and fro. “What do you do, you know? I talked to Sunny about it because he’s very family-oriented, and I wanted to do the right thing by my family. It’s just me and Rory and you’ve got to look after family when one brother is all you’ve got. I wasn’t even at that house. That’s my rental property. I haven’t lived there since September. I’ve been housesitting for Sunny’s aunt while she’s in Florida for the winter. Mrs Park’s gonna be pissed there’s nobody staying in her place, but she’ll be even madder about her cat; it’s won shows, blue ribbons and everything. She trusted me. Me. And they picked me up outside Smith’s in White Rock, took my groceries, and took Truly Scrumptious to the shelter. I had her special cat food and had ice cream. I had ice cream…”
“The cat’s named—”
“Yeah, Truly Scrumptious, after the chick from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Jesus knows I’ve tried. I was done with that life. When you’re given that second chance you take it. You go to the meetings, you pray, ask for help when you need it, and you’re thankful for every good thing that comes your way, no matter how small. So you return the blessing, but this sort of thing happening sure does make you wonder why you wasted your time.” Jackie’s energy dimmed. Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. With a plop, she sat, defeat creeping onto her face as she stared at the floor.
Whatever marginal buoyance Willa had been feeling deflated, and she stared at the floor too. Her head hurt worse than before. The teeny-tiny scrap of hope she’d held onto had been shredded. Yes, Jackie been a Lab assistant, but contrary to the evidence found in her home, Willa knew the woman had nothing to do with the theft of classified information. It was circumstantial, and circumstantial combined with her past and poor judgment made Jackie guilty by association.
Dominic would be damned the same way.
Willa wanted to cry.
“Chumly Mumly,” Jackie mumbled.
Willa glanced at the figure in searing orange, eyes stinging. “Excuse me?”
“The ice cream. It was Chunky Monkey.” Jackie sniffed. “You think the cops ate it?”
Still wearing the same toothpaste-stained skirt, Willa sat in the offices Farley had arranged for her on the seventh floor in the National Security Science Building. The NSSB was home for the Lab director administration suite, research space for theoretical and applied physics, computational sciences, and administration offices for support of the stockpile stewardship mission. It was the perfect place to work and blend in as she always had. Under the guise of starting a research fellowship, she’d meet with former colleagues in a professional setting.
Lou Dokowski had also moved into place at the Lab. He’d begun tracking the movement of the documents found in the drug raid on Jackie Grafton’s trailer. As the IT expert, Dokowski’s task was painstaking, eye-bugging work that consisted of checking computer logs that went back as much as twenty years—logs of deleted items, logs of who opened or checked out a document, logs of who and what was copied to where, and logs of who updated a document. The Lab had 8,500 employees, although the number of those who’d had access to the four hundred-plus documents found on the USB flash drives was significantly smaller. Besides the scientists whose work dealt with the classified materials, twenty-two staff and administrative support members also had potential contact with the documents. In essence, document tracking was like a big game of connect-the-dots.
What she had to do, faster than Lou, was try to connect the dots made of people. If his assignment was to hunt down the electronic trail and ascertain whether there was a security breach, a back door, or a pinprick big enough for one single drop of data to squeeze through, her duty was to find a human black hole that sucked the attention away from Dominic’s tiny lapse in protocol.
She sat up straight and looked out the window instead of at the notes she’d outlined for meeting Harold Dichter. While his specialty was black body radiation, nothing radiated from the charred tree stumps left after the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires. Those blackened bodies ran up and along the lower eastern slope of Pajarito Mountain. The town spread out to the north, the roads snaking around and through the mesas, canyons and residential areas. To the east, past the Omega Bridge, sitting on the edge of the Ponderosa pine-rimmed Los Alamos Canyon, was the Ridge Park complex. Amid a row of smoky-blue structures was John’s house, the color easy to spot against the forest-green boughs.
The events of the morning rushed back. Three cups of coffee, a decent meal, a couple of Advils, and her head hurt all over again. The pain in her neck had never quite vanished and it intensified as she recalled his shirt, his shoes and … carpet. In a spectacular fashion she’d hit all three at once.
Swearing, Willa tore her eyes from John’s place. She shut down ongoing thoughts of him, the smelly, sticky embarrassment she’d have to find a way to make restitution for, and admitted defeat to a libido that had the gall to think it could combine a sex life, a federal crime, and superhero madness at the same time.
She stretched her neck to one side then the other, raised her chin to the ceiling, and let her jaw fall open to release the tension. It did nothing to relieve the muscle strain or twinges of mortification. What she wanted, what she needed were cartoons—a Martian searching for an illudium 36 explosive space modulator, Bugs Bunny square dancing with gun-totin’ hillbillies.
“Now don’t you cuss and don’t you swear,” she muttered. She took a deep breath, reached for the phone, and dialed the number of another former paramour of Jackie’s—Harold Dichter, the gloomiest man Willa had ever known.
Dusty spring wind rattled the windshield of his parked car. John glanced up from the preliminary coroner’s report to watch black rubber rise and quiver and groan as it moved over safety glass. “Suspected cause of death,” he said out loud, “skull fracture or broken neck.”
The wipers groaned again.
So did John. “Well, duh.”
The bad news was, the report was basically a whole bunch of possibilities.
John sat in his Subaru and riffled through pre-autopsy external photographs Cuthbert had taken of the dead man’s body. He surveyed the bruising, abrasions, bite marks, other injuries, and close-up images of the tattoo script that curved under the man’s clavicle. The ME’s comment about the tattoo was in line with Ishimaru’s ‘looks Asian’ remark.
Irritated, John dropped the file on the passenger seat. He hadn’t expected anything different. He had simply wanted the ME’s trained eyes to instantly pinpoint something immediate, something evident to a person with expertise, something conclusive and Sherlock Holmes-ian, like ‘Dear chap, these oddly-hued peanut butter-scented abrasions are evidence that, before he fell, our sad victim suffered a poly-morphic-dual aneurysm of the lower posterior aortic ventricle and amygdala, which resulted in spasms of the proximal phalanges and his immediate, painless death.’ Case closed.
But this remained an open case. The report was preliminary—nothing more than a cursory glance that went either way—accidental death, or murder like his gut still told him it was.
John laughed at himself, at his impatience. As a professional he knew better, but he’d fallen into the same trap as the people who watched CSI and Criminal Minds.
Crimes were never solved in the speedy manner they were on TV. People seldom understood that a medical examiner often had a waiting list. Corpses had to take a number to have their turn to see the doctor, just like living did. In a sparsely populated state like New Mexico, the Office of the Medical Investigator was located in the largest city. Albuquerque’s Medical Examination team was kept busy investigating all reportable deaths occurring in New Mexico. Alllocal and statewide instances of violent, untimely, unexpected deaths, and occasions when the cause of death was unknown, were sent to the Department of Pathology at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
For Your Eyes Only Page 13
