But first she’d try a different tack—one she prayed would work. “The only reason I’m here, the only reason I came back here, is so nothing would fuck up your happy life. And before you give me more attitude, before you decide to spit a little more venom in my eye, I know you care. I know you still care about me. You wouldn’t be so pissed off with me if you didn’t.”
“Well, of course I care. I care. You’re … you’re…” Dominic crossed his arms. “Well, shit, you’re the only significant woman I’ve had in my life until Lesley. Okay?”
“I love you too.”
“So, do we hug it out now or what?”
“Unclench your jaw, fists and ass first.”
”All right. There is something else.” Dominic rolled his head on his neck and dropped his hands to his sides. “What are you doing with John? Are you using him to get back in my good graces?”
Anger flashed in Willa. She got to her feet and glared up at Dominic. “I told you. John just … happened.” She stabbed a finger in the air. “I met him without knowing he had any connection to you, without any prior planning. He simply appeared.”
Dominic swiped a hand through his hair. He exhaled hard. “He likes you. John likes you. A lot. He may not realize just how much. So I’m telling you. He’s a good guy and a good friend, a close friend. He’s my wife’s best friend. All right? I’m happy to hear you’re not using him, but please don’t fuck with him, Willa. If this is just you finding your feet after Miles, please, it’s best you break it off now and find someone else. Like Don Farley for instance.”
Willa barked out a laugh.
“Seriously, I’ve never seen a man salivate over a woman the way Farley was drooling over you.”
“Shut up.”
Dominic opened his arms. “Well, come on.”
Willa stepped into his embrace, her ear against his big chest. She squeezed him, hands around his waist. “You know, Astro?” she said, “I never meant any of it.”
“Yeah. I knew it then and I know it now.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that to you.”
“You don’t need to apologize for anything.”
“Bullshit. I do so.”
“Yeah, okay, it’s bullshit. I did want an apology. I missed you.”
“Aw, you do care.”
Dominic let her go. His big hand ruffled through her hair, pushing it into her eyes. “Do you have to rub it in?”
She blew hair out of her mouth. “I care too. Dominic. I’m here because I care. I’m here because life matters, your life and my life matter. John was wholly unexpected. If anything could ever be so much the wrong place and time it’s him. I’m dying to sleep with him. Oh, God, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know how to do it.”
“You want me to draw you some pictures? I know a guy who has a pretty extensive collection of educational DVDs.”
“Again, shut up.” Willa fixed her hair. “And you might not want to get comfortable quite yet.”
“Now what?”
“Now we talk about why I made you ask me over for dinner, without playing idiotic spy games.”
Dominic leaned against the deck railing. “You tell me you’ve got some dirt on Chandra and that’s supposed to be a good thing, but I still don’t get how this shit includes me just because I went out with Jackie Grafton.”
“Because so far it’s the most obvious connection. The fact that you all have high security clearance and worked with and dated Jacqueline Grafton is what put you on the list of potential suspects. You all dated Jackie, but there’s an idea I’m working on, and it involves her brother, Rory.”
“Her brother?”
”We’ll get back to him later. Now, when you examined the documents, did anything seem familiar? Did you pick up on any pattern, a repeated formula, or notation, equations or reference, anything at all?”
“No. No pattern to anything. It seems pretty random to me, but we’re talking about stuff from years ago. Four hundred pages of shit. How can anyone be expected to remember something they read in a different century, let alone what they read last week? Not all of us are blessed with a photographic memory like you.”
“I don’t have an eidetic memory.”
“You and your big synesthetic words. What color is the word synesthetic anyhow? It’s eleven letters long, what color are the e’s?”
“Listen to me. If this tax stuff with Chandra doesn’t hold water, if I can’t find a connection to Rory Grafton and his meth lab—”
“You think a meth lab is involved?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s an avenue that bears examination. The point is, if we can’t find enough something to put together a case against either one of them, the spotlight will swing back. Quite possibly to you.”
He shook his head and shrugged. “I can’t believe this is happening because I let Jackie Grafton blow me. Jay-zus!”
Willa inhaled slowly and blew out a long breath. Her head throbbed, and she rubbed at the deep-rooted kink in her neck. “When Stefanie left and dropped the bomb about screwing around with your brother and that Kyle might not have been yours, well, the life you knew vaporized. You suddenly had a baby to take care of all on your own, questions about paternity, and issues within your family. It was the first time your son was sick. You were sleep-deprived and scared because he had a fever you were certain was a bad reaction to a vaccine. Anyone in your shoes could be forgiven for a lapse in reason, except you worked in a high-security research laboratory, and that changes things—everything. Kyle was almost four months old when you mishandled classified material. Eventually, it’s going to come out that you took documents home. Copies of the papers you inadvertently took turned up in the raid at Jackie’s. That drug raid started this investigation. I know you weren’t thinking when it happened, but the government can charge you with sedition, espionage, or treason.”
“Treason?” Dominic stumbled sideways and plopped onto the bench where she’d been a couple of minutes ago. “Treason? Treason carries a death sentence, doesn’t it? You can’t be serious. Treason because I accidentally took home TQS simulation results?”
Willa paced in front of him, two steps left, two steps back. Her fingers flexed and fisted at her sides. “Now do you see why I’m scared shitless?”
Dominic just stared. “Oh, fuck, you’re serious.”
“Why would I not be serious?”
“Because it’s ridiculous!”
“Listen to me.” Willa stood in front of her friend and laid her palm against this cheek. Her voice was barely above a whisper. In fact, their entire conversation had been conducted tones like a hissing pilot light on a gas burner. “This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to have another look at all the documents. Then, tomorrow morning, when John takes his mother to mass, you’ll meet me here, on this deck, and we’ll look at the documents together. You have a key, so let yourself in to retrieve the phone you’re going to leave right where you’re sitting. You got that?”
John knew Kathleen was waiting for an answer to her question. Did he want to come to Sofia’s third-grade choral performance?
Frankly, he preferred to eat glass, some safety pins, and wash it down with a couple of bottles of Dran-o than go to an elementary school Broadway musical night. “Hmm,” he said into the phone, “when did you say it was?”
“Wednesday night.”
“It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“I’m in the middle of an investigation.”
“You can’t come up with a better excuse than that?”
“Kathleen, have you watched the news lately?”
“We don’t watch the news in this house. I don’t want to expose my baby to all that horrible, sick stuff they show on the news. Like she needs to see war and drugs and all that. Let her be a kid for God’s sake. She’s only eight.”
“That’s right. She’s eight, and yet you let her dress like a ‘prosti-tot’.”
“A what?”
/>
John exhaled. “I have to get this off my chest. It’s been bugging me for a while now. Your daughter, whom I love more than you reali—”
“Excuse me! Are you about to lecture me on child-rearing? I get enough of that from Mom, Aunt Eilish and that foul-mouthed old geezer she married. You’ve got no kids, so just shut up and tell me if you’re going to come on Wednesday night. Six-thirty. “
“I told you it depends on t—”
“Great. That’s really nice, Johnny. Sofia loves you and you’re going to break her heart. You can’t suck it up and just come. You think I want to go? You think I like sitting there listening to all those other kids shriek off key? This is about family, and you don’t seem to get that…”
John tuned out his sister. Lesley was downstairs, singing about a boy who looked just like a girl. “Go bay-bee, go-go,” she sang while she scrubbed and cleaned up his kitchen. Kathleen’s droning rant was audible above the soloist on the lower level. John reached for the pen and note pad he kept beside his bed. He scribbled Asian = Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and doodled a little TIE fighter versus X-Wing Star Wars scene. He finished the cartoon with a lopsided Death Star.
His sister still whined on.
M-hmming, he moved to the window that overlooked Queenie and Dominic below. They were having a rather quiet, but clearly heated discussion.
“Hey, we’re right bee-hind ya,” Lesley belted out.
Kathleen grumbled, “What is it with you, anyhow? By now you should have found someone else to…”
His sister’s voice became a flat hum. He had no right to watch, no reason to want to, but he stood there looking out the window, watching the pair on his deck, and all sound fell away because there was something peculiar, tense about the way the Dominic sat, motionless and staring at Queenie, who had a hand on his cheek.
She’d said Dominic was like an older brother to her, but that didn’t preclude the possibility they’d might have been once romantically involved. If John didn’t know better, he would have said he was looking at a lover’s reunion.
And something green and wormy slithered through his stomach.
The sensation made no rational sense and he knew it. He knew if there had been any sort of physical relationship between Dominic and Queenie, it would had taken place long before Dominic and Lesley had fallen in love. Why should he care about the past? Why should it be a big deal if Queenie and Dominic had ‘done stuff ‘to each other? If anything had happened between them it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t an issue because the past didn’t matter at all.
It didn’t matter, but another greenish larva coiled into the pit of John’s stomach anyway.
She had on a black coat now, but John knew the soft cardigan she wore beneath the heavy wool was regal purple. Earlier, he’d noticed how it offset the pure shade of her hair, set her skin aglow, and accentuated the green in her eyes. It was her color and she was magnificent, radiant. Down on the deck, dainty white lights sparkled about royal-clad Queenie like a fairy court, and John was spellbound. Mine, mine, mine.
This was just like him. He had a habit of choosing the most complicated situations. His disappointing experiences with other women never waylaid him. There was the woman who lived in another country, the girl with two kids, and the wife who never really loved him. Even if she hadn’t mentioned it before, a man didn’t need a psych degree to see the ‘steamer trunk’ Queenie hefted around behind her.
All right, so she might have slept with Dominic. That didn’t matter. So she was a widow who carried around unresolved issues for a dead husband and a serious sense of guilt. That didn’t matter either. It could have been jealousy, idiocy or fearlessness, but he preferred to think of it as unflagging resolution. He felt himself grin. If there was one thing he learned from being a cop, it was that life was short and very precious. Happiness came wrapped in all sorts of packages. As a result, he believed in going after what he wanted. Mine, mine, mine.
Yes, sensible people would say a week wasn’t enough time to know someone. Rational men would caution him and say it was nothing but lust. Hell, his Irish mother would tell him he was thinking with his willy. To some extent that was true: he wanted Queenie. In his bed, in his days, in his life. John wanted Queenie.
And he was a very patient man.
Willa could not recall being simultaneously exhausted and over-stimulated the way she was now. She sagged under the spraying massage head, hoping a hot shower would punch a hole her through hyper and into the black hole of sleep she so desperately needed. After shampooing, she reached for the new, full bottle of toning conditioner and let it work to remove the unwanted yellow tinge from her hair.
The bathroom turned steamy. A misty cloud settled overhead. It hung in the air as she rinsed conditioner from her hair. For a long moment, she closed her eyes and let the water act like a masseur working on her scalp. If she stood there long enough, maybe the heavy water spray would penetrate her skull and turn her frantic brain to mush, and she’d be able to relax.
When that didn’t happen, she shut off the tap and dragged two towels from a rail outside the shower. She wrapped one around her head like a turban and dried off with the other. Facial moisturizer sat on the vanity, just below the fog-frosted mirror. She applied the cream and padded into the bedroom to dress. Her pajamas were pin-striped pink flannel. Not exactly Victoria’s Secret, but they were comfortable and hole-free.
She whipped off the turban and rubbed her head with it, tossing it over the back of a chair when she’d finished. She grabbed a wide toothed-comb from the dresser and dragged it through a damp rat’s nest of hair, knowing there was no way to control how this thing with Dominic went.
This was a real-life example of chaos theory, the mathematical logic clear. It was small and simple, and there was a lack of order as well as an inherent lack of predictability, but it still obeyed laws and rules dependent on time and space and the justice system. Events, no matter how seemingly insignificant, could cause very complex results. Dominic’s absentmindedness was proof a grain of sand could become a whole seashore. The underlying order here—the butterfly effect—said what she did or didn’t do with John could very well influence what happened with Dominic.
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have any effect at all.
It was random or not random. That was chaos. Some of the stolen documents had been declassified. There was no clear form to anything, no repeated formula, or calculation, or any sort of similarity that tied the restricted documents together, or bound them to the declassified information, except that they were all random. And maybe that was the pattern, maybe the arbitrariness was the key, but the key to what? The state of this damned situation would evolve with time, but the point was, everything was highly sensitive to the initial conditions, which in this case were flash drives someone had found behind a mattress and headboard.
She sank onto the edge of her unmade bed and groaned.
She was thinking too much. Maybe what she needed to do was trust John and have faith he would understand. It was possible he was the kind of man—the kind of police officer—who’d turn a blind eye to help a friend, but that wasn’t an assumption she could make. Could she?
Groaning again, Willa tossed the comb onto the bedside table. It clattered and landed beside the clock she’d forgotten to wind again. Her gaze moved about the bedroom. While not exactly chaotic, the apartment remained as John had once described it: Early American Slob. A suitcase full of clean clothes lay open on the floor. Boots, five pairs of conservative pumps, and an extra pair of sneakers were strewn beside the luggage. A white lingerie bag hung off the bathroom doorknob, red panties poking out of the open mouth like the Rolling Stone’s logo.
Far too wound up to have any hope of sleeping, Willa realized there was one thing she could control. She tidied up. She put rumpled clothes on hangers in the walk-in closet, dumped the shoes onto the floor in there too. She folded underwear and put hosiery and t‑shirts in
drawers. With an armload of dirty laundry, she went downstairs. She was on the bottom tread when the doorbell rang its backward dong-ding.
Tossing the soiled garments onto the steps, she opened the door. John was there, decked out in dark gray sweat pants and an olive green t-shirt that made the color of his eyes pop.
She knew it then, without any doubt. She was in love with him. Absolutely. Her heart pirouetted and tap danced and Rockette high-kicked out of her chest. A grin split her face in half.
But John’s expression was one of unmitigated horror. “Queenie,” he said, “what the hell have you done?”
15
Willa had one look at herself in the mirror over the downstairs bathroom vanity. Six seconds later, she was in the upstairs bathroom, where the tiles were still slick with condensation from her steamy shower.
She grabbed the bottle of shampoo from the shelf in the shower and poured some into the sink. When it ran out in a transparent stream of orchid and rinsed away clean she tossed it aside and snatched up the bottle of conditioner. She squeezed the container. Out came a rich stream of creamy emulsion that left an amethyst ring in the white porcelain basin.
Willa and her violet hair sank down onto the closed lid of the toilet.
Thinking of you and your lovely hair.
Alicia.
Thinking of you and your lovely hair.
The lily. Alicia had sent the lily.
Thinking of you and your lovely hair.
There’d been a purpose to the mess her stepdaughter had left in the bathroom back at the house in Cedar Crest earlier in the week, one beyond merely being irritating.
Thinking of you and your lovely hair.
Alicia had switched or a poured color into the brand new bottle of toning conditioner.
Alicia had planned everything so well.
“Queenie?” John said from the open doorway.
Willa looked up at him. “My hair is purple,” she said.
“I can see that.”
For Your Eyes Only Page 25
