Muttering under his breath, he planted a hand on the small of my back and guided me through the door. I really wished he wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t professional, and I was supposed to be the boss—a businesswoman looking to procure some of the independent minority contracts available. Wyatt was posing as my token male employee.
I moved away to a respectable boss/employee distance. Sunshine spilled through the glass lobby. Voices echoed all around us. Following the signs, I strode toward the exhibit hall. “The only way we’re going to prove Sofia’s claim is by getting hold of one of the integration chips. I’m going to send it to a trusted source to reverse-engineer and tell us what Sofia saw during testing.
“Once we have hard evidence, Allied Defense and the military won’t be able to sweep these crashes under the tarmac. They’re going to have to do something about them. They may have grounded some of the fleet while they investigate but the pilots on duty in the Persian Gulf are still in danger.”
I jerked open the exhibit hall door. An explosion of color and noise burst like a carnival in full swing.
Wyatt blocked my way with his arm. “And just how do you plan on getting this chip?”
I reached up and straightened his tie. “That’s where you come in. Once we’ve located the Allied Defense booth, I’m going to distract whoever’s manning it while you pull the chip. Easy.” I cleared my throat. “If anything happens, run.”
He glanced at the rent-a-cops with their guns and their walkie-talkies. “Run?”
“Fast,” I suggested. My fingers lingered on the silk knot at his throat. He looked hot in his cowboy duds, but even hotter in charcoal superfine wool.
I drew close enough to him to catch the warm piney scent of his cologne. “This is phase one. We’re just looking. Then we’ll leave so the security cameras catch us going out. We’ll come back with a different disguise.”
He mumbled something I was sure wasn’t thanks. He’d do what I’d asked of him—for Sofia. He couldn’t help himself.
We showed our passes at the registration table and were given a neck holder for our passes and a map of the booths. Major players like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin manned booths, as well as smaller companies looking to tap into the lucrative government contract pockets.
We hooked a left and started for the northwestern corner where Allied Defense had set up their booth. Before we reached the far aisle, my gaze snagged on a banner that looked oddly familiar. Then it hit me where I’d seen that logo before. The truck that night at the plant. White with a swash of blue. I slowed as I recognized the man in the dark suit.
I elbow-jabbed Wyatt and nudged my chin in Antonio’s direction. “Why would a garbage man participate in a defense industry trade show?”
“All big companies recycle.” Wyatt grabbed my waist and aimed me away from the Castille Disposition Services booth. I resisted his suggestion. A stream of people flowed around us, giving us cover.
“We should go say hello.”
No! A bolt of ice lanced through my heart and Sofia’s fear shivered through me.
“Bad idea,” Wyatt said.
“They’re family.”
“Not anymore.”
At the sight of the display, flashing behind Antonio, one and one collided loudly in my head and added up to a possibility I hadn’t entertained. Antonio recycled for Allied Defense. Rey worked for Antonio, and Wyatt had found a toothpick in his office—the kind that dangled from Rey’s lips. “So the data sheet that disappeared from your office could possibly mean something to Antonio.”
“I doubt it,” Wyatt said. “Not without context.”
“What if he has context?”
“The recycling part of the business is where Antonio made his name. Antonio’s younger brother now runs that. About five years ago, Antonio started an IT disposal division. They can’t afford to steal.”
“IT as in information technology? Computers?” This was worse than I thought. Computers would give Antonio access to a lot more sensitive information. Had he used his own daughter to gain access to that information?
Antonio gestured broadly at some sort of presentation while Inez sat, hands in her lap, back straight, eyes a thousand miles away. What was she even doing there? She looked so out of place in her depressing black dress—as if she were at a funeral instead of a business promotion. How could she help Antonio’s business with her gloomy presence?
“Antonio’s service disposes of any piece of technology—computers, PDAs, cell phones—safely.” Wyatt’s grip on my waist tightened as he tried to get me back on track toward the Allied Defense booth. “They sanitize the memory so that no one can recover any sensitive information. They refurbish the equipment and distribute it to charity organizations or resell it. That’s important when companies upgrade their equipment and can’t just dump old equipment away.”
I faced Wyatt, my peripheral vision scoping out Inez who looked pale and much too subdued. She was a far cry from the screaming harpy I’d met. What was wrong with her? “So Antonio could steal information?”
Wyatt shook his head. “The disks are wiped before they leave Allied Defense. Then they’re run through with disk sanitizers and declassifiers at Castille Disposition before the devices are repurposed.”
Inez pressed two fingers against her sinuses as if something smelled bad. She searched through her purse, came out with a lace handkerchief and dabbed it at her dry eyes.
“But before the hard drives are erased,” I said, “he could look at what’s on the hard drive.”
“Antonio runs the business. He doesn’t do the dirty work.”
“Right. He has somebody else do it. Like Rey.”
Wyatt blew out a long breath, and exasperation laced his voice. “There are DOD standards involved in IT asset recycling. If he didn’t follow the standards for disposal, he wouldn’t last in the business. There’s too much at stake.”
“Yeah, well, there are laws but not everybody follows them.” I’d certainly bent a few over the years.
“If you want to survive in this business, you do. Reputation is everything, and reputation drives Antonio.”
Why was reputation so important to a man whose appearance pretty much shouted he didn’t care what others thought?
Both hands crimped around her purse, Inez stood up in a robotic fashion, and while Antonio had his back turned to her, she sidled out of the booth and quick-stepped away.
Something wasn’t right. I needed to lose Wyatt and corner Inez. “How do you know so much about the business?”
“Yet another way I disappointed my in-laws.” A somber intensity darkened his eyes. “Antonio wanted me to join the family business—just like he’d done when he’d married Inez and took her name.”
What? Why hadn’t my background check revealed this? “Why would a proud man like Antonio take a woman’s name?”
“To show that the son of a garbageman was good enough for Inez.”
“Funny that Inez would be so hard on you for being unacceptable if she also married beneath her station.”
“I’m not Catholic.” He shrugged. “I could’ve joined the firm. I could’ve written cryptographic code. But my dad had just died and the ranch needed me.”
“If your heart wasn’t in it…”
Palming both my elbows, he turned me away from the Castille booth. “Let’s find the Allied Defense booth and get out of here.”
I nodded, distracted. Something fired in my brain but I couldn’t get the synapses to make the right connections. “I have to use the ladies’ room. Scope out the location of the Allied Defense booth. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”
His gaze narrowed with suspicion. “If you’re not back in five minutes, I’m coming to get you.”
“You’re not big on trust, are you?”
“I’m huge on trust. There’s just something about your thought process that gives me the willies.”
I showed him some teeth. Did he really think so little of me? “That�
�s what gets people ahead, you know—thinking differently. It’s how we’re going to solve this case.”
“Yeah, if we’re alive to enjoy it.” He hooked a hand around my nape and rubbed his thumb up and down my neck. “Stay out of trouble. We have unfinished business.”
“I’m just going to the ladies’ room,” I told Wyatt. “How much trouble can I get into?”
He exaggerated a shudder. “I’m afraid to answer that.”
I smiled at him and he smiled back, and the smile so changed his face that the sight of it broadsided me.
“Five minutes,” he warned, serious again.
I nodded and headed toward the last place I’d seen Inez, my legs not quite as steady as I’d like. The macho stuff I could handle. The nice stuff unraveled me. What did that say about me?
The sight of Inez pushing through the bathroom door sobered me. I entered behind her and followed her to the sinks.
Inez’s eyes rounded as our gazes collided in the mirror, then creased to acerbic slits. “What are you doing here?”
“Looks like I’m washing my hands.” I squirted soap into my palms and rubbed away whatever germs I’d picked up on the entrance doors.
“What business do you have here?”
“I’m still looking for Sofia’s murderer.” I cocked my head in her direction. Something about her rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe that was Sofia’s doing, too. I don’t know why I’d wasted a second feeling sorry for Inez or worrying about her health. “Want to know how the investigation’s coming?”
Her expression pinched and she refused to look in my direction. “I have nothing to say to you.”
I rinsed my hands. “How about Sofia? Anything you want to tell her? She’s right here. She can hear you.”
Inez backed away from me, crossing herself with one hand and letting her handkerchief fall between us like a shield with the other. “You are a devil!”
A storm of fear erupted inside me, blowing through every one of my muscles like a winter blizzard.
What did she do to you? I asked Sofia.
Sofia was tomb silent with only the rumble of her terror thundering through me.
“What did you do to Sofia?” I asked Inez, curiosity aroused.
Inez bared her teeth at me. “I did nothing to her. I gave her everything.”
My throat burned with the salt of Sofia’s tears. Then something in me popped, and I was out of my body, watching myself with Inez as if I had a front-row seat just off the ceiling. Everything had an edge of gray, as if an inch of dust coated the TV screen. Water dripped from my fingers and plopped onto the floor, but I couldn’t feel it. My limbs shook, but I couldn’t feel their shiver. My heart? Was it failing? What was happening to me?
“Everything? Everything?” Sofia’s voice spewed out of my mouth like venom.
Get out! You can’t do that, Sofia! It’s my body. My life. Get back to where you belong. You’re dead. I’m alive.
It’s my heart.
I fought to leave my ceiling perch but my body didn’t respond—as if someone had shot it full of Novocain. I panted, panicking, fighting the numbness of my being, the crushing of my chest. It was like that night when I’d died. My heart beating out of tune. My breath smokethin. The world blackening. There was nothing I could do, except watch. Helpless. I didn’t want to disappear.
Sofia! Let me go!
She ignored me.
What if I couldn’t get back? I wasn’t done with my life. I had things left to do. Sofia!
Using my body, Sofia advanced on her mother, fists balled hard at her sides, trapping Inez against the tile wall. “You gave me nothing. You smothered me until I couldn’t breathe. Why do you think I was so glad someone wanted to marry me? Take me away from my prison?”
“Sofia?” Then, as if she met up with the ghost of her daughter every day, Inez slapped me/Sofia across the face, leaving a red imprint of her palm on my cheek. “I raised you with every advantage. Gave you everything you needed to make you strong, to turn you into a proper lady.”
“Except the freedom to figure out who I was and what I wanted.”
“If you’d have listened to me, you could have had the world.”
“I didn’t want the world. I wanted your love.”
“Love is an illusion.” Fire burned bright in Inez’s eyes. “It doesn’t protect you from the harsh realities of the world.”
“The world couldn’t be harsher than what I experienced at home. Ask yourself this, Mama? Why do you think it is that I love Lorraine more than you?”
Inez gasped. “Sofia, no. Why do you wound me this way? I sacrificed my life for you.”
“I love Lorraine because she always treats me as if what I want is important. She always asks for my opinion. Don’t you see, Mama, if you’d only given me the chance to choose, I would have turned to you for help. But you never listened. I had to escape.”
Inez crumpled against the sink, keening.
Get out, Sofia. You can’t have my life.
Why not? You’re so willing to take mine.
Sofia resisted my attempt to regain control of my body. But as Inez sobbed her heart out and the heat of Sofia’s emotions cooled, Sofia could not sustain the intensity needed to stay in my body. Her spirit peeled away in a flurry of static that flickered the lights and hurt like a Band-Aid being yanked off raw skin. Never before had I so welcomed pain. I collapsed against the sink beside Sofia’s mother. Inez reached out for me, and I was too weak to push her away.
“Sofia?” Fear and hope both warbled through her voice.
As I rubbed warmth along my arms, Inez’s swollen, red-rimmed eyes peered up at me beseechingly. “Sofia…”
I found I could not leave Inez with Sofia’s vitriol as the last words she would carry from her daughter.
“In spite of everything, she loved you,” I said. And somehow I knew that was true. Just as I realized I would always love my own mother. She may not have been there for me, but the freedom she’d granted me had molded me into who I was. And frankly I liked that person—when Sofia wasn’t sucking the life out of me—even if I didn’t meet Van’s or anyone else’s standards. And for all her faults my mother had never tried to change my nature.
Inez’s mouth opened and her voice cracked on her sob. “I did not know Sofia felt so caged. I was trying to free her from the bonds that kept me a prisoner.”
“How could you when she never said anything?”
Inez flinched. “I did to her what my own father had done to me.” Her admission was barely a whisper.
“I’m so sorry.”
She straightened and jammed her hands under cold water. She wet her handkerchief and dabbed at her smeared makeup, closing me out. “I don’t need your pity. You never should have come here.”
So much for trying to be the nice guy. I glanced at my watch and saw that Wyatt’s five minutes had elapsed a minute ago. I gave Inez the last piece of advice that would set her free if she chose to hear it. “Let Sofia go, Inez. The shrine you have for her…it’s not healthy. Live your own life. It’s not too late.”
Without giving her a chance to answer, I went back to finding her daughter’s killer.
Chapter 13
I found Wyatt pacing near the Allied Defense booth, scanning the crowd as if he was ready to murder somebody. He stopped when he spotted me.
What surprised me most was that his first glance was one of pleasure—as if he was glad to see me. Then “Are you okay?” flashed through his eyes. Only next did anger flare. He looked pointedly at his watch.
I shrugged as much to toss aside the warm feeling as to show I didn’t care. “What’s the scoop?”
He plunked himself next to me, armor against the river of people trekking through the narrow aisles. I squeezed some space between us but didn’t challenge his he-man tendencies. I was already asking him to put aside too much of his usual nature.
He jerked his chin in the direction of the booth. “The scoop is that you got lucky.”
&
nbsp; “Luck is nothing more than opportunity plus preparation.”
“That and the fact Allied Defense brought a show-and-tell version of the HART. Which means all I have to do is pull the card from the test stand.” His jaw flinched. “If I can get close enough to it.”
“I’ll make sure you do.” Since he was going against all his principles for me—well, for Sofia—the least I could do is make sure he got out safe. I scoped out the booth. Only one man staffed it at the moment. “Come on.”
Back at the truck, I changed into a shapeless dress, granny shoes, a blond wig and added a pregnancy belly. Absently I patted the roundness, and sadness stung me. All the drugs I took to stave off rejection made pregnancy a dangerous proposition. Another reason to get my life back on my own terms. If I couldn’t have a family, what I did for a living had to make me happy.
I helped Wyatt with his disguise. Even the cheap brown suit couldn’t quite hide his fine form. I had him put on a set of yellowed and crooked teeth. With the help of a makeup kit, I added a ragged scar that jagged along his cheek. The high school drama club experience had paid off in spades over the years. This close, the piney musk of his scent seemed to fill the cab of the truck and made me sweat.
He yanked on the rearview mirror to view my handiwork. “I feel like an ass.”
“Even better, you look like one,” I teased, combing his part to the wrong side. “It’s all about impression. People don’t notice details. Later, if they remember us at all, what they’ll recall is your scar and my big belly.”
He grunted an answer.
I unfolded the trade-show map of the booths and went over the exit strategy with him. “The important thing is to not panic. All you have to do is pretend like you belong, like you don’t have a care in the world and get to one of these two exits.”
“The guards have guns,” Wyatt reminded me.
“They aren’t going to use them in a crowd. They can’t afford the stampede. You take the card, pass it to me and go.”
“I don’t want to leave you back there alone. Not if you’re holding the chip.”
Detour Page 17