“We have to ask the hard questions.”
“I suppose.” She stirred her coffee. “Your guy went missing in Seattle? Doesn’t seem easy for her to have done that from here.”
“She does have a connection to that guy in Seattle. You know about the boyfriend, right?”
“I wouldn’t call Sanders her boyfriend. She hasn’t talked to him in months.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean she didn’t ask him for help.”
“So, who is this agent of yours? How’d he get himself missing?”
Parker frowned. “You know I can’t talk about an active investigation.”
“Aw, c’mon Parker, what’s it gong to hurt? Besides, I’m good at what I do. I might be able to help.”
He looked dubious, but her sad, puppy-dog pout made him laugh. “Okay, you win. What I can tell you is that he was looking into the theft of military secrets. We’re pretty sure he found out who the buyer and seller were before he disappeared.”
“So you can pick up where he left off.”
Parker shook his head. “Not really. The man we think was the seller was killed the same night our agent went missing.”
Janet absorbed this, wondering if she dared probe further. If she pushed, he might grow suspicious. Before she could make up her mind, Parker reached across the table and touched her fingers. She looked up at him.
“You want to get out of here?” he said.
Surprised, she couldn’t answer for a moment, and she felt a flush creep up her neck. She was about to say yes when her phone rang. She pulled her hand away from Parker’s touch and reached into her bag, pulled the phone out and checked the display. Unavailable number. She slid out of the booth. Parker dropped his hand into his lap.
“I’m sorry, I have to take this,” she said.
Taking a walk outside the front door, she answered the phone. “This better be good, commander. You just ruined the first decent date I’ve had in five years.”
“Janet? A date? Oh, my god, I’m so sorry. And here I thought I’d be waking you up. Who’s the lucky guy?”
“The agent who grilled you this morning. Or yesterday morning. Whichever.”
“Torrance? Tell me it’s not Torrance.”
“It’s not Torrance. The other one—Parker. And he just told me the missing agent was investigating a military espionage case.”
“That might tie in with what I’ve found out so far. Janet, I know it’s late, but I need you to do me a favor. A big one.”
Janet sighed. She knew she should hang up, report Reyna to Captain Farley, and go back inside to see where Parker wanted to take her. But the mood had been broken, and Reyna needed her. So, to hell with protocol, and to hell with orders. Suddenly, her priorities and loyalties became crystal clear.
“What do you need?”
“Everything you can find out about Lodestar, Inc., Bothell, Washington. They’ve got some government contracts. I want to know what they’re up to.”
“You want it now, I suppose.”
“As soon as you can get it, please.”
“I take it you are not sitting at home in your living room. Are you with you-know-who?”
“You know I can’t answer that without getting us both in trouble. I owe you enough as it is.”
Tolliver laughed. “If I don’t get thrown in the brig for this, you can take me with you when the CNO pins another medal on your blouse and gives you a promotion.”
“If I still have a job when I get back, I’ll be sure that Admiral Miller knows how indispensable you are. In the meantime, how about I send a note of apology to Parker?”
“He’ll have you arrested for sure,” Janet laughed. “When you get your job back, then you can apologize to Parker.” She glanced over her shoulder through the window. “Right now he looks so forlorn it makes me want to cry. I think he planned on getting lucky tonight, and darned if it didn’t seem like a good idea to me, too.”
“I really am sorry, chief,” Reyna said. “Call me when you’ve got something. It’s going to be a long night.”
“You said it.”
Janet hung up and faced the window. She sucked in a big breath, steeled herself and went back inside to break Parker’s heart.
Chapter 29
July 27—Seattle
The bedraggled evergreen air freshener hanging from the curtain rod above the air conditioning unit did nothing to mask the smell of mildew. Black mold stained the baseboard, likely from the intrusion of several winters’ worth of moisture. By now it was in the walls, making it impossible to get at. The only remedy was to tear it down and rebuild.
A faint voice filtered through the din in my head.
“Blake. Blake!”
I looked up. Reyna gazed at me with knitted brows.
“Welcome back.” She didn’t smile. “Janet is going to pull whatever she can find on Lodestar. She said the missing agent was trying to stop the sale of military secrets. Looks like your dead guy, D’Amato, may have been a mole.”
“A spy?” It fit the lack of anything personal in his life, the anonymity of clothes with no labels. “But what would mobsters want with military stuff? Resell it to the highest bidder?”
“That would be my guess. We need to find out what the Russians are really after so we have something to bargain with. And get to the girl’s mother to see what she knows.”
“We have to find the girl to keep them from killing her,” I corrected her. “But I’ve run out of ideas to track her down.”
“A devout man would say all roads lead back to God.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“No need to get snippy. It means let’s try the pastor at the storefront church again.”
“I don’t think we’ll get anything out of him.”
“A woman’s touch might help.”
“If you—” I managed to stop myself from finishing the thought: If she bitch-slapped the preacher like she had me, she might beat it out of him. “If you’re nice, maybe you’re right.”
I got up, hefted the duffel and looked around the small room. The hour or so I’d spent there had left more of an impression on me than I had on it, a place that had seen more in its existence than I cared to. I’d forget its insipidity and indifference as quickly as the air in the room settled when my presence was gone.
Reyna gestured at the duffel. “Is that it?”
“I travel light.”
I followed her out to a nondescript rental sedan parked three slots away, in front of the next room down. I tossed the duffel in the back seat before getting in the passenger side. Reyna slid behind the wheel and had us pointed nose out before I finished latching my seat belt. A King Country Sheriff’s cruiser sat parked steps away from the office door, its interior dark. A shiver ran up my spine, and my breath hitched.
Reyna glanced over. “What’s wrong?”
My lungs refused to pull in oxygen. I looked away so she wouldn’t see me struggling for air, fighting to keep the panic at bay.
“The cop? Is that it? He’s inside. Don’t worry. We’ll be long gone before he gets to the room … if he’s even looking for you. Could be something else entirely.”
She pulled out onto the main drag and the farther we put the motel behind us the more the agita receded. Silence ballooned between us, pushing us farther apart as we drove out of town. She finally pricked it when the car merged onto the freeway back toward the city.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” I muttered.
“What happened back there? What’s wrong with you?”
I looked away without answering. When I glanced at her a few minutes later, her mouth was set in a grim line. She gripped the steering wheel so tightly her arms were rigid, and she wore an expression that could have come from a quarry.
A shroud of twilight settled over the hills stripping them of color and definition. But as we topped the ridge in Bellevue overlooking Lake Washington, a swath of blue still hung in the northwestern sky as
if the sun had left a light on in the next room.
Ten minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall that housed the makeshift church. I’d been sure we’d find it locked and dark, but the front window was brightly lit, a buzz of activity clearly illuminated behind it. Reyna refused to give me an I-told-you-so look as we walked up to the door.
Inside, chairs had been rearranged from theater seating into tight circles of about a dozen chairs each. Fifty or sixty kids, mostly teenagers with a few tweeners and a few older ones thrown in, chattered excitedly in their groups. Every so often, a member of one group would get up, race to another group and whisper in the ear of someone in the new group. A few of the kids turned and glanced at us as we entered, but most ignored our presence. Pavel stood in a corner at the front of the room watching the proceedings with a smile on his face. I pointed him out to Reyna and found a quiet corner of my own. Reyna picked her way through the maze of chairs.
Pavel noted her approach and called out, “One more round and we’ll see where we are.”
He met her partway and bent his head to hear her over the din. She gestured in my direction. He glanced up and nodded, then turned his concentration back to her. Their conversation grew heated judging from their expressions, but they kept their voices low. Pavel shrugged a shoulder, apparently signaling he had nothing more to say. Reyna spun away from him and stomped back through the knots of kids, exasperation twisting her pretty face into a grimace.
“Let’s go,” she muttered when she reached me.
I fell in behind her as she angled for the door. “What’d he say?”
“Just what you thought, so don’t say it. Don’t you dare say I told you so.”
“Never considered it,” I murmured. Now we were even. “He values her privacy, yada, yada, yada. Pastor-congregant privilege.”
“Something like that.”
Night had cooled the air considerably, making the hair on my arms stand up. Rubbing my forearms didn’t stop the shiver running up my spine as the sight of Masha’s bloodied body flashed in my head. I shook it loose.
“What next?” I said.
“I want to see D’Amato’s apartment. You still have the keys?”
“There’s nothing there. I’m telling you, it’s clean.”
She opened her car door and paused, looking at me over the roof. “I want to see it.”
I got in and gave her directions. “Did he tell you why all those kids were there?”
“Youth group, obviously. Why?”
“Some of them seemed a little young to be out this late.”
“Better there than on the streets. He said a lot of those kids don’t want to go home—abusive parents or bad family situation—so he gives them an alternative place to go.”
“He cares, apparently. Wish he cared more about this girl, whoever she is.”
She drove in silence for a long minute before saying, “We’ll find another way.”
I wished I shared her confidence.
Reyna was pulling into an iffy spot at the curb a block from D’Amato’s apartment building when my burner rang, startling me. I answered it.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Charlie said. “Good news is that the same gun killed NCIS’s guy and the other vic.”
“That’s great news,” I said. “They already know it wasn’t the gun I gave them.”
“The bad news,” he went on, ignoring me, “is that you’re not off the hook. Word I hear is that NCIS still thinks you’re good for the shootings.”
“But the GSR test—”
“Is inconclusive. You could’ve been wearing gloves.”
“It’s bullshit, Charlie! You know me.”
“Yeah, yeah, and I’ve seen you handle a weapon. You shoot better than me when you actually pay attention to what you’re doing.”
I broke into a sweat. “Damn it, Charlie, the only time I ever shot anyone was to save your miserable ass. I don’t go around killing government agents for fun.”
“There is one thing in your favor.” He said it almost grudgingly. “Ballistics says the gun used is an odd one. Slugs they pulled from both vics were twenty-five calibers. Not an everyday round.”
“And if they can’t find the gun?”
“Get a lawyer and turn yourself in,” he said wearily. “That’s my best advice.”
He hung up before I could reply. Reyna looked at me with a question in her eyes. I had no answers for her.
I let her in the front door of the building and followed her to the elevator. We rode up like strangers, pointedly watching the floor indicator rather than each other. The rumble of the doors opening on D’Amato’s floor sounded too loud in the hush of late evening. Even our soft footsteps down the carpeted hall seemed enough to wake anyone asleep behind the closed apartment doors.
Inside D’Amato’s Reyna did as I had, stopping a few feet beyond the door and slowly assessing the space, hoping to draw something of the man’s essence from cold, inanimate, inarticulate, impersonal possessions. The only thing to be determined from the apartment, from what I could glean, was that D’Amato had been secretive man and a very careful one. Not careful enough, though.
I stood idly by while Reyna worked her way through the nearly empty rooms. She searched quickly but thoroughly, stooping to look at the bottoms of tables and chairs, pulling books out on shelves to check the space behind them, standing on a chair to run her fingers along the top of door frames. When she disappeared into the bedroom, I went to the window and stared out at the cityscape, trying to identify the lighted buildings to crowd out the scenes of violence that kept popping into my head. They played out like a horror film trailer in an endless loop. I shut my eyes and found my drishti, the one I used at the end of a yoga practice in the last pose of shivasana. The loop broke, darkening the theater. Small shuffling sounds of Reyna’s search floated out from the bedroom, and a few moments later, the sound of her footsteps coming up behind me. I turned.
“You’re right. There’s nothing here.” Her gaze didn’t waver from my face. She held it, though, to the point of awkwardness, and dropped her eyes to the floor self-consciously. A moment later, she raised her head, looking as if she wanted to say something when a phone rang. Hers, this time. She answered, all business now.
“Yes? …Hold on, Janet. I’m going to put you on speaker.” She pushed a button. “Okay.”
A woman’s voice came from the tinny speaker. “I wanted to get back to you as soon as I had something. Lodestar has a Navy contract. They’re developing some kind of laser. I don’t have a lot of details yet, but I think I’ve found a way in through the accounting office. If I can take a look at the contract, we might learn more.”
“That’s good work, Chief,” Reyna said. “I’ll take whatever you can find.”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
Reyna slipped the phone in her pocket and turned for the door. “Let’s go.”
“To Lodestar?” I said.
Her head bobbed as she strode toward the elevator. I hustled to catch up. She jabbed the call button with a finger and looked up at the indicator. I wondered what she was thinking, but wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. A soft ding and muffled whirr inside the shaft signaled the elevator’s approach. The doors slid open and Reyna stepped in. As I followed, I heard a door open down the hall. Reyna stabbed the lobby floor button even harder than she had the call button, and the muscles at the corner of her jaw clenched.
“Hold the door, please,” a quavering voice said.
I stuck out my hand and caught the edge of the door. Reyna fixed me briefly with an exasperated stare, corners of her mouth turned down. Sounds of shuffling feet approached, and a wheeled cart full of laundry bumped over the transom followed by a white-haired head.
“Hello, Vera,” I said.
She blenched at the sound of her name, and peered at me as she maneuvered her cart to make room. “Oh, yes, you’re that young man who was here the other day talking to Mark.”
“Blake,” I said. “And this is my friend Reyna. Reyna, Vera Rasmussen.”
“How d’you do, dear?” Vera nodded pleasantly then faced forward and tipped her head up to look at the descending numbers.
“Pretty late to be doing laundry,” I said with a smile.
She glanced at me, worry furrowing her brow. “This seems to be the only time I can find an empty machine. I keep telling Mark I need a washer and dryer in my apartment. I don’t like going up and down at this time of night.”
She spoke rapidly, words bubbling up in a pot of nerves. I glanced at Reyna. Her presence should have offset any perceived threat from me. My smile faded. A hush fell as the car descended. When the doors opened on the lobby floor, Reyna and I stepped around the woman and my eyes dropped to the basket.
“Goodnight,” Reyna said.
I heard a tentative “Goodnight” as the doors slid closed behind us.
“She seemed awfully skittish,” I said.
Reyna shrugged as she pushed the front door open. “Old lady alone late at night…”
“Maybe.” Something didn’t sit right with me, but I didn’t know what.
* * * * *
Half an hour later we pulled into the empty parking lot outside Lodestar’s headquarters. Lampposts cast a yellow wash across the black asphalt. Our shadows danced around us on the way to the front door. The hair on the back of my neck prickled as if someone was watching. I threw a glance over my shoulder; when no one appeared I scanned the front entrance for a video camera.
“Stop acting so suspicious,” Reyna hissed out of the side of her mouth.
“Are you sure a frontal assault is the way to go here?”
“Watch and learn, civvy.”
She walked toward the double glass doors as if she owned the place. She fished in her bag on the way up the steps and pulled out a plastic ID card on a lanyard and pressed it against a black pad next to the door. The lock released with an audible click and she pulled the right-hand door open. I followed her inside and across a marble floor as she consulted a building directory.
“How did you do that?” My voice meandered around the big empty space and bounced back at me off the hard surfaces. Like someone trying to finish my sentence, a trait that used to drive my ex-wife Molly nuts.
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