Why hadn’t she listened to her brain? Why had she believed her heart instead of her head, which had reminded her on numerous occasions to keep her distance and shut down the feelings she was having. Because the heart had a more powerful voice, and it was impossible to ignore what her heart had wanted. It was dangerous to try to walk the wire between professional and personal, and wrong to think she’d succeed because in trying to protect one man she’d injured another.
She’d been wronged and untrusted, but she’d been untrustworthy as well. She felt dirty, inhuman, utterly soulless.
Willa began to sob. Within a few seconds she was a waterfall of snot and tears. She blubbered and frothed and sputtered. As far as crying jags went, this was a really good one. As far as making a difference to anything, to fixing anything, to changing anything, oh, yeah, crying really helped the situation. Crying was really productive. Crying really got the job done. She’d begun with nothing, and nothing—except fear—was left. A few moments of orgasmic pleasure had been enough to make her imagine fear had disappeared, but fear itched and burned like a foul disease. As much as she wanted to sit and continue to bawl her eyes out, that powerful motivator had her reaching for a paper towel. Later, she could cry and scream and wallow in her soulless existence, but fear compelled her to get up and run and run and run.
Willa wiped her face, blew her nose, and dived back into her work. She shut out everything and shoved on her glasses and returned to Rory Grafton’s file.
She didn’t read for long. On top of the rash of fear, it felt as though sand had been kicked in her eyes. On top of the sand, someone had tossed in hot coals, and her gritty eyes burned as she looked at the report. It could have been a typo, or tears, but her sandy, scalded vision found an inconsistency with a date Rory had given, and the one his sister had indicated. Willa reached for Jackie’s report and spread it open to the section she wanted to re-read. She hadn’t looked at the file since the evening before their initial meeting, the post-throw-up-on-John-Tilbrook meeting.
She groaned and removed her glasses. Did one stupid little thing have to swing the spotlight back to John? It was all over for her now in the romance stakes. She’d had her one last chance and blown it. How nice it was to know her mother was right.
She put her cheek down on the file—right on top of the yellow legal pad page of Jackie’s hand-written statement. Her eyes stared at blue ink printing, at doodles along the right margin of the page, at blurry shapes repeated. Before feeble drooling set in, she sat up and began to read again—or tried to. At that distance, without her glasses, she wasn’t able to focus on anything. She slid the frames back onto her nose and looked at the little drawings Jackie had made. Willa had seen the illustration before. It was the same squiggly sketch Jackie had made on the window in the drunk tank, the nonsensical geometry formula.
Zero equals parallel similarity divided by one.
It appeared across the top of the second page and down both margins of the third. Willa’s brain whirred through formulas she’d seen in the classified documents, a pinwheel of colors spun through her mind’s eye, but nothing paused on an association to a mathematical equation of any sort. She shoved the file to the other side of the counter and pushed away the idea of making sense of, or connecting gibberish to, any of the information stolen from the Lab.
Gibberish. She let her head sink down to the countertop until her forehead touched the cool, laminated surface. With the unexpected regeneration of Alicia, gibberish, is what Willa thought her life had become. Gibberish. Gobbledygook. Rot. Shit. Shit, shit, shit…
Her phone rang. She’d left it beside the microwave. She climbed off the stool and went around into the kitchen side of the counter to answer the call. “Willa Heston.”
Adams said, “You got a cold?”
Willa sniffled. “What is it?”
“Officer Binney can get Rory Grafton up in forty-five minutes. Is that too early?”
“Same room as before?”
“Not unless you want to do another fake drunk interview in a room with real drunks.”
“You and Tom meet me out front then, on the side near the Justice Center entrance.”
“Agent Mitchell might be late. Something didn’t agree with him and he’s…”
Leaning against the side, she rested her palm on the countertop, beside Jackie’s file. She shifted her hand and a sharp edge of paper sliced her little finger. She glanced down at the pages of Jackie’s statement, at the tiny drop of blood that left a dot beside the upside-down nonsense doodles drawn in blue ink on lined, yellow paper.
Adams was speaking, saying something about Mitchell and a doctor, but Willa wasn’t listening. Her brain had shifted back to whir thrconsidered that something arbitrary might haveough formulas she’d seen in the classified documents. Again, a pinwheel of colors spun through her mind’s eye. Again, nothing paused on an association to a mathematical equation of any sort, and yet the doodle, the formula that wasn’t a formula, leapt off the page. Blurry colors, sloppy shapes, it was utter chaos.
Random chaos.
Adams was still talking, “I hope he sorts…”
Willa turned around and rotated the top sheet of paper, to the right, then left. She’d considered that something arbitrary might have been key to the pattern she’d been looking for, and she was staring at the random chaos of a doodle that kept changing colors.
She shoved her glasses on and lifted the file, turning the paper this way and that again. “True colors,” she sang absently, “your true colors are…”
“Uh, beautiful like … a rain … bow?” Adams asked. “That’s Cyndi Lauper, innit?”
Willa shook herself. “Change of plans, Agent Adams,” she said over his laughter. “Make it fifteen minutes. Tell Officer Binney I want her to see Ms Grafton first, before we talk to Rory.”
For a brief moment John wondered if beer goggles on top of three crullers and a cup of bad coffee were making him see things, but half a Heineken and all that sugar and caffeine wasn’t quite enough to make him see the apparition of a woman who’d stomped on his heart less than an hour ago. He would have preferred to be meat-forked again than have his heart stomped. He would have preferred to be kicked in the balls than have his heart stomped. He would have preferred to lick his wounds in private and move on, without rehashing anything, but a funny sort of numbness had overtaken him. He was cold all over, as if he’d bled to death, and Willa stood on his front steps, in her blood red suit, a folder under her arm.
He would have shut the door, except he was frozen, internally and bodily. Icicles, his hands had become useless icicles clinging to the door and knob, but his mouth still functioned. “I don’t want to talk and I don’t want an apology.”
“I’m not making one,” she said and shifted the folder to her hands. “And I’m not asking you for one either.”
“Why should I apologize?”
”I know you’re upset. And you have every right to be. To a point.” She came up the two front steps, as if she was about to say something else, as if she wanted to argue, as if she wanted to kiss him, which was highly unlikely. Before he’d realized her real intention, she’d pushed her way past him and was inside.
“Hey! What are you doing? I said I don’t want to talk!” Bones wintry and muscles stiff, he went down the small staircase near the powder room, four or five steps behind her.
Willa ignored him. She was in his kitchen, at the table where his beer sat, the beer he’d been forcing himself to drink. She moved the chairs, pulling them out, looking on the seats.
“What do you want?” he said, which was a stupid question because it appeared she knew exactly what she wanted, and it wasn’t him. She had never really wanted him. He was skilled at picking women who didn’t want him. He snorted at his accomplished foolhardiness, at his less-than-stellar detective skills, and still wanted her. “Did you lose something, leave something here?”
“Where’s the folder with all the pictures of your man? Where did
you put it?”
Like an idiot, John felt himself point. “On the counter. Why?”
Half a second later, she’d slapped her blue folder beside his folder on the countertop. She’d flipped open hers, yanked out a page of yellow legal-sized paper, and then began rifling through photographs of the body found in Barrancas Canyon. She pulled out one picture, tossed the others aside, and held the photo next to the sheet of yellow paper covered with handwriting. “Zero equals parallel similarity divided by one,” she muttered.
John surged forward. “What the hell?” He tried to snatch the photo from her hands, but his chilly paws missed the red sleeve of her jacket and she ducked under his arm and spun right, away from the counter.
Christ, she smelled good. Why did she have to smell so damned good? Why did she have to look so damned good? He was stuck. There was supposed to be this thin line between love and hate and John kept waiting to trip over it, but the more hurt he felt, the angrier he felt, the wider the goddamned line got, and he was stuck on the wrong side of it. Of course, being steady on his feet only served to piss him off more and want her more.
Slinking backwards, she kept her distance, picture and paper clutched to her chest. She said, “You don’t have to talk. You have to listen.”
He crept towards her like an angry glacier. “I don’t want you to talk, and I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to listen to anything you have to say.” She was warm, heat radiated off her but the chill that had settled into his bones absorbed none of that warmth. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to grab her and kiss the living shit out of her and change her goddamned mind about Dominic, but his kiss-the-shit-out of her iceberg face must have seemed menacing because Willa kept moving backwards.
She said, “I’m not here to try to change your mind about what you think you know about me and Dominic, or what you believe is true. Yeah, your best friend is a woman and you ‘get it’ my ass. Wait for the facts before you get angry my ass, but so what. I have something that might interest you a—”
“I don’t care why you’re here. Right now, I’m not interested in anything you have, and I’d really like it if you would leave. I’d like you to leave. Now.”
She bumped into the powder room door and he leaned down. He got right into her face, his voice soft as falling snow, “Did you not hear me? Did I not just say I’m not interested in anything you have to say to me today? There is no need for a discussion.”
She thrust her chin up and got right into his face. “You’re right. There’s no need for a discussion,” Willa shoved the yellow paper and the photo in front of his nose, “because I think this speaks for itself.”
At that close distance, the images before his eyes were nothing but a blurry mass. His first instinct was to shunt the damn things aside, but he stepped back and it all snapped into focus.
20
John followed her in his Subaru, the window down. He had the idea that sucking in fresh, cold mountain air on a literal two-minute trip would give him some sort of clarity, or a kernel of understanding. When the lights changed on Oppenheimer Drive, he crossed Trinity to continue to the sandy brown stucco Justice Center, and one thing Willa said had made sense, one thing seemed acceptable. He had no issue with her logic. Hell, if he’d seen the doodles and the photos side by side, he would have made the connection. What confounded him was her method. Subterfuge had been part of his police work, he’d done the undercover thing, but he’d never used a woman to get to another woman, sex had never been a part of his professional ruse.
Christ, falling in love with her was his own damn fault. Sentimental moron that he was, he’d gotten caught up in the romance of it, had likened it to a romantic comedy, and now the laughs were on him. He loved her. He still loved her.
He pulled into the car space beside the red Ford hatchback and watched her get out of the borrowed or rented car that had replaced her damaged Volkswagen. Icebergs floated inside his stomach and she was blank-faced, unaffected, unruffled. His irrationality and ire had coated his skin with ice, and she was all business. “How do you do it?” he said from the open window.
“Do what?”
“How do you disconnect from it all? What is it, the FBI training? Do they train you to use people when you’re at Quantico, teach you to shoot, to drive, to compartmentalize or dissociate yourself, or whatever the hell it is you’re doing so you can get what you want?”
“We don’t have time to do this right now.”
“Yeah, time, you never have time. You’re all about time, aren’t you?”
Willa pressed the remote. Lights flashed on the little Ford. “I hope all this makes one of us feel better. All right. Come on. Yell at me.”
“Haven’t you noticed? I don’t yell.”
“And you don’t get pissed off until you have all the facts, either.”
He opened the driver’s door and exited the Subaru, not yelling. Neither one of them was doing much yelling. He rubbed his cold hands together. “It’s not so much that you slept with Dominic. I can understand that. I can understand how grief can make people crazy, I can understand you seeking solace in a friend. I understand that was something from your past, when he was single and you’d been widowed, but that you’d come here after he was committed to another woman, that you’d come here and try to rekindle whatever the hell it was you thought you’d had, and that you’d use me to get to him … that’s the part that’s plain apeshit-boiling-the-bunny crazy. I fell in love with you, and you took advantage of that, you used me. You lied to me and you used me.”
She halted, turned about and moved forward until she stood beside the left front fender, two feet away. She nodded and spoke very quietly. “Yes. I used you. I used you to get to Dominic, and I used you for the sex we never quite had. That is true. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I’m done,” he said. “I’m done being a nice guy. Look where it’s got me.”
“Ted Bundy was a nice guy too, he hid his evil mind behind his charm, but he probably wasn’t a jealous son of a bitch like you. Is that the real reason why you and Maureen divorced, your ridiculous jealous streak? She was smothered by the lack of trust?”
“Comparing me to a serial killer, name calling, and getting personal about my divorce, you’re really doing that, Willa? And trust … what trust did you give me?” John said softly. He shut the door and rested against it. When he exhaled, his breath came out in a little cloud of moisture. “Jesus, you…”
“I used you, John, and I hurt you. I used you—not because I wanted to, but because…”
“…looked me right in the eye and…”
“…it was the only way I could see Dominic and not be questioned about my motives…”
“…and you lied...”
“…which had nothing to do with fucking him and everything to do with making sure…”
“…to me and broke my heart, just so you could get off.”
“…he isn’t arrested!”
His arms came off the car. “Arrested for what, turning you down?”
Her coolness fell away. In two steps, she thrust her chin up, and got into his face like a man, like when he’d baled her up outside the powder room door at his house, only this time, his back was pressed to the car. If she’d been taller they’d be standing nose-to-nose as she bared her teeth and poked a finger in the chest, her voice low. “You think this is about tying to rekindle something that never caught fire. You and your facts! Did you even stop to ask Lesley why she was so upset? No. You didn’t. Your merely assumed I slept with her husband because in your small jealous, suspicious, mind what other explanation could there be? I told you why I’m here in town. I told you I’m investigating the theft of classified information from the Lab. I told you people you knew might be involved. People you know are involved. Dominic is involved. Dominic is a suspect. How the hell could I tell you that? You’re a detective, he’s your friend, his wife is your cousin and best friend, so that family connection makes for a nice conflict of
interest, doesn’t it?”
“You’re joking.”
Her detachment returned, her face blank again, except for the tip of her nose, which had suddenly turned red.
“You’re not joking.”
Willa backed down and backed up. When she stumbled towards the front of the car, John realized then her dispassion and bravado was nothing more than a very fine poker face and aggressive fear, the sort often displayed by small, cornered animals. “Oh shit. You’re really not joking.”
“He made a mistake,” she said. “It wasn’t something he meant to do.”
Nodding, matter-of-fact, John said, “No. He didn’t mean to do it, but you did. So I get it. I’m a nice guy and you took advantage. I made it easy. Use the nice guy to get to the other guy. The flat tire was really clever. How’d you do it, though? How’d you know I’d be there on the road that day? How’d you know I’d stop? Did you check me out in advance? Don’t try to tell me this was a coincidence, you don’t believe in that.”
”No. Not a coincidence. You happened by accident. There you were and suddenly I was breathing again. Instead of simply seeing the damn light at the end of the tunnel, I was out of the tunnel and standing in the light. It was nothing more than an accident that gave me back life after an accident took life away. You were an accident, John.”
“Right. I was an accident. You were an accident. It’s accidents all around, and you’re telling me that Dominic accidentally stole classified information and what, accidentally sold it, accidentally traded it, accidentally gave it away for free?”
“He didn’t steal anything and he didn’t sell anything. He made a mistake, a silly, absent-minded mistake.”
“With classified documents?”
“He mishandled them. Forgot to return them to secure storage. It’s happened to others before. It could have happened to me after Miles died.”
For Your Eyes Only Page 32
