Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  Ridiculous, Huxley thought, not for the first time. Even the tabloids back home had resources to eavesdrop on mobile conversations between gossip targets like Prince Charles and Camilla. But the Director had ruled that ongoing mobile electronic surveillance required more people in the loop than he was prepared to tolerate at this point, given the sensitivity of the investigation. So unless MacNeil was talking to someone at his house—which seemed unlikely, since he’d left his wife a few minutes earlier and she herself should be on the road by now—there was no way of knowing what this present conversation was about. Huxley made a mental note to have Tucker pull the cell-phone records as soon as possible to try to determine who was on the other end of what appeared to be an intense conversation, if MacNeil’s agitated gesticulating was any indication.

  When the call ended and MacNeil set the mobile aside, it soon became clear that his plans had changed. The Jag was in the center lane of traffic, but it veered without warning over to the right and then, a few moments later, peeled down an off-ramp marked for the Potomac Overlook Regional Park. It was all Huxley could do to make the same switch in time to catch the off-ramp. Behind him, brakes squealed and a horn blared angrily as he cut the bike over and careened off the roadway.

  Coming down the ramp, he spotted the Jag with its DRUMR plate a few hundred yards ahead, brake lights flashing as it approached a red traffic light at a T-intersection. MacNeil slowed briefly as a couple of cars passed through the green light at right angles to him at the top of the T. Then, the Jag’s engines roared and its tires kicked up gravel as it crossed the center lane and shot around the two cars ahead of him, careening through the intersection against the light, turning left and disappearing into the underpass beneath the Parkway.

  So there was one possibility eliminated, Huxley thought, calculating rapidly. This wasn’t a dead drop in the park or a contact meeting. It looked like MacNeil was simply making a U-turn.

  Huxley reached the line of cars at the bottom of the ramp just as the light changed to green. Taking the shoulder, he gunned the Harley past the vehicles ahead. The bike skidded on loose gravel, narrowly missing the bumper of a Miata convertible as he took the left turn that dipped beneath the Parkway. The blonde at the wheel of the convertible smacked the horn and the little car bleated in impotent fury. The Harley’s big engine roared back defiance as the bike charged through the echoing underpass.

  The Jag was up ahead, already merging back onto the GW Parkway, northbound now. Huxley was far enough behind that he didn’t think MacNeil had necessarily noticed the motorcycle maneuvering abruptly in the background, but now that he was safely contained on the Parkway once again, Huxley slowed the pace and proceeded a little more sedately up the ramp. At the same time, he activated the microphone in his helmet.

  “Auntie, this is Leapfrog. Come in, over.”

  After a few seconds of static, Tucker came back. “Auntie here. What’s up?”

  “Looks like we’ve got a change in plans. We were en route when our boy suddenly had a phone conversation. Soon as he hung up, he turned himself around. Don’t know if it was his idea or somebody else’s, though.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Northbound on the GW. Could be going back home, but my guess is he’s inbound to Agency.”

  “Nothing going on here. Wife and kid left a few minutes ago. Let me check in with the office see if anyone there called him in. You carry on and I’ll get back to you as soon as I know anything. You’re okay otherwise? Do you want additional support?”

  “No, it’s under control.”

  “Okay, let me know if anything changes. Meantime, I’ll check the cell-phone logs, too, see what I can find out about that call.”

  “Roger that, Auntie. Over and out.”

  It was a missed opportunity, Huxley later realized. Had he taken Tucker up on the offer of additional backup, they might yet have prevented what followed. But he didn’t, and so, the die was cast.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Asbury Park Recreation Center, McLean, Virginia

  8:48 a.m.

  Carrie had helped Jonah carry a week’s worth of old Washington Post newspapers into the craft room at the rec center. There they found Miss Mindy, counselor for the six-year-olds who had named themselves The Sharks, getting materials together for their arts and crafts project for that day.

  “Knock, knock,” Carrie said, her hands too full of newsprint to rap on the door. “Paper delivery!”

  Mindy was pretty and dark-haired, about seventeen, Carrie guessed, because she’d mentioned at their first meeting that she’d be a senior in high school that fall. The girl’s big brown eyes lit up when she spotted them at the door.

  “Hi, there!” she said brightly. “Oh, Jonah, yay! You remembered the newspapers. I’m so glad. I was worried we wouldn’t have enough for everybody. This is such a cool project, and it would be really neat if everyone gets to make their own volcano so you guys can take ’em home to show your moms and dads when they’re done. Here, let me help you with that.”

  She rushed over and relieved Jonah’s failing arms of its load, setting it aside on a table.

  “I’ve got this,” Carrie said, adding her own pile to the stack with a grunt of relief. “Jonah’s really been looking forward to this, haven’t you, sweetie?” She turned to her son, only to find him tongue-tied and blushing as he gazed up, open-mouthed, at his counselor.

  Mindy gave him a hug, then helped him off with his backpack. “They’re going to be great, aren’t they, buddy? Today we’ll mix the papier-mâché and put them together. After they dry, tomorrow or Wednesday, we’ll paint them. Then, on Friday, when they’re really, really dry, we mix up our special, top secret chemicals. And then, when we put them in the volcanoes, what happens?”

  “Ka-boom!” Jonah cried happily, flinging his arms into the air.

  Carrie feigned shock. “Chemicals? Ka-boom? You’re going to blow the place up?”

  Mindy laughed and she leaned forward, hand cupping her mouth conspiratorially. “Vinegar, baking soda and red food coloring. Bubbles over, sort of looks like lava.” Then she straightened and smiled down at Jonah once more. “But it’s going to be really cool, right, bud?”

  “Yeah, really cool,” Jonah sighed, his eyes still locked on this object of obvious adoration.

  Well, Carrie thought, this explained why he was so cooperative about getting out of bed in the morning—and why he seemed to spend so much time in front of the mirror lately, brushing teeth and fussing with hair gel. Buckling him into his booster seat this morning, she’d also caught a distinct whiff of his father’s expensive aftershave.

  “I can hardly wait to see,” she told them. “I leave you to it then. Honey, maybe you should go out in the playground with Zack and your other buddies until Miss Mindy’s ready for you guys?”

  “Or you could help me get supplies out,” Mindy suggested. “It’s up to you. If you’d rather go with the guys…”

  Jonah waved his hand for his mom to bend down, and when she did, he stood on his tiptoes and whispered in her ear, “I wanna help.”

  “No problem,” Carrie told him, “if Miss Mindy’s sure that’s okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, for sure. Jonah rocks.”

  His beaming face was a wonder to behold. Carrie tried not to grin, and only wished she had a camera. “Well, all right, then. Me, I’m off. You guys have a great day.”

  Jonah waved distractedly at her as Mindy reached out a hand. “Come on, Jonah. I’ll show you where the water cups are. Think you could fill them at the sink for me, one for each kid?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered, slipping his hand into the teenager’s as she led him over to one of the craft cupboards.

  “Anyway…bye, then,” Carrie called after them, already forgotten. Lost him to another woman already.

  “Thanks a bunch again for bringing in the papers,” Mindy said over her shoulder.

  “No problem.”

  Back in the parking lot, Carrie fumbled i
n her skirt pocket for the car keys she’d slipped in there after locking the Passat and grabbing up her load of paper. One of the keys had tangled itself in a loose thread inside the pocket, so it took a moment to get it free. As she worked it loose, she watched several parents dropping kids off for day camp. One of the other mothers Carrie recognized. She had a daughter who was also a Shark—Zoë was her name. But although Carrie had seen Zoë’s mom here every day since camp had started, she’d never managed to get more than a couple of words out of the extremely shy woman. She lifted a hand now to wave, but Zoë’s mom climbed into her minivan without ever looking up.

  Carrie glanced at her watch. Eight-fifty-five. She’d be on the GW Parkway by nine—then, maybe thirty minutes to get to Tracy and her partner’s law offices in Old Town Alexandria? Less if the traffic was moving. Summertime, a lot of bureaucrats were on vacation. She and Tracy might even have a few minutes to grab a quick coffee before her appointment with Heather.

  Carrie fished her cell phone out of her straw bag and pulled up her friend’s office number from the contact list and hit the phone’s “send” button. When the receptionist answered at the other end, she said Tracy was in.

  “Hey, girlfriend!” Tracy’s cheerful voice said a few moments later. “Don’t you dare say you’re calling to cancel yet another appointment.”

  “No, I think I’m finally ready to take the bull by the horns. I just dropped Jonah off at his day camp and I’m on my way now. I may even be early.”

  “Attagirl! Progress. That’s what we like to see.”

  “Any chance you’re free for coffee if I do get there early?”

  “You betcha. I’ve got a light day today. No court appearances. There’s a Starbucks right downstairs in the building, so just give me a shout when you’re parking and I’ll meet you there. You remember where we are? Across from the Torpedo Factory?”

  It was a renovated nineteenth century armaments manufacturer, a sprawling two-hundred-year-old brick building on the Old Town riverfront. In the 1980s, the building had been converted to artists’ lofts and galleries, and if ever Carrie had a dream to open a gallery of her own, the Torpedo Factory was probably near the top of her list of desirable locations.

  “It’s a plan,” she told Tracy. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “You doing okay this morning?”

  “You know, not bad, as a matter of fact. Just watched my son gushing over his camp counselor, who he’s obviously got a huge crush on. Who knew?”

  Tracy laughed. “It starts already. I can’t say I’m surprised, mind you. That one’s going to be a heartbreaker. You’re going to have to beat off the babes in a few years.”

  “Oh, please, no. Don’t tell me that.”

  “Whoops. Nope, cancel that, maybe not,” Tracy agreed.

  “God forbid he should take after his father,” Carrie said grimly.

  “Not gonna happen, kiddo. You’re raising a fine young man.”

  “That’s the aim, anyway. Okay, Trace. I’m on my way. See you shortly.”

  Carrie was almost to the GW Parkway when, braking for a red light, she heard something roll on the floor under her seat. Fishing around with her hand as she sat at the light, her fingers closed on a small metal canister. Retrieving it, she opened her hand to find Jonah’s asthma inhaler, fallen from his backpack.

  “Damn!”

  The light changed, but instead of heading toward the Parkway on-ramp, Carrie maneuvered the Passat into position for a U-turn and headed back to the rec center.

  Pulling into the parking lot a few minutes later, she saw that the drop-off rush was over. Zoë’s mom was still there, though, sitting in her van in the shade of a leafy oak, seat angled back, apparently dozing. Come to think of it, Carrie thought, that was exactly where she found the woman’s van parked every day when she returned to pick up Jonah. Did Zoë’s mother have no other life?

  Carrie parked the Passat and grabbed the inhaler from the cup holder, then climbed out, locked the car, and started across the parking lot at a sprint. It was only then that she noticed the silver-gray Jaguar parked across the lot—a Jag with Virginia vanity plates that read DRUMR. She hesitated on the roadway, staring in stunned silence at her husband’s empty car. What was he doing here?

  The Sharks were in the craft room inside the building. Carrie peered through the thick glass window in the door at a dozen or so six-year-olds decked out in oversize men’s shirts with rolled up sleeves whose tails hung nearly to their ankles. Their hands were already gluey with the flour and water paste they were mixing, obviously loving the stuff. One kid had a tell-tale streak of white around his lips that suggested he’d given the stuff a taste test. Mindy was distributing newsprint to each table and showing the kids how to tear it into long strips.

  But as Carrie’s eyes roved up and down the rows of tables, she couldn’t see Jonah anywhere. Heart pounding, she opened the door and stepped into the room. And then she spotted them, Drum and Jonah, off in one corner, Jonah with his head down, looking at his shoes, Drum bending low and whispering to him.

  “Mrs. MacNeil, hi, again,” Mindy called, looking both surprised and a little nonplussed as she glanced back at Jonah and his father in the corner.

  “Hi,” Carrie said distractedly. “Sorry to interrupt, but I found Jonah’s asthma inhaler after I left. It must have fallen out of his bag. I…I’ll just go and put it back in there…in case he needs it. I mean, probably he won’t…but on the other hand, don’t you just know that the day he hasn’t got it will turn out to be the day he has an attack?” She was crossing the room even as she spoke.

  Drum had looked up as soon as Mindy had called out her name. As she approached, Carrie saw his expression shift from surprise to annoyance to bland neutrality in the blink of an eye.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered to him.

  “My meeting downtown was canceled,” he said. Then he looked down at their son. “It’s okay, Jonah, you go work on your project with the other kids.”

  “Yeah?” Jonah said, his glum expression brightening.

  “Yeah, for sure. We’ll do it another time.”

  “Okay!” Jonah said eagerly. “Hi, Mom. Watcha doin’ back here?”

  “Your inhaler,” she said, holding it up. “It was rolling around on the floor of the car. I’ll put it away in the pocket of your backpack, but make sure you keep it zipped in there so it doesn’t fall out again, okay?”

  “Okay. Can I go make my volcano now?”

  “Sure thing. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  “Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad,” he added as an afterthought, glancing at his father before making his escape.

  Drum was already on his feet and making moves to leave. Carrie waved a second goodbye to Mindy, then paused by Jonah’s hook on her own way out the door to slip the inhaler securely inside the backpack and zip the pocket. She followed Drum out the door and they paused on the other side for a moment, watching through the small window as Jonah pulled one of his father’s discarded pinstripe dress shirts out of his cubby and shrugged into it.

  “You’ll do what another time?” Carrie asked quietly.

  Drum had been watching the children, but he turned to her now, his expression puzzled. “What’s that?”

  “You told Jonah ‘we’ll do it another time.’ Do what?”

  He turned and started walking toward the exit. Carrie hurried after him.

  “Oh, that. Nothing,” he said blandly. “My meeting at the Bureau was canceled, as I said, so I thought as long as I was out on the road, anyway, I’d drop by here on my way back to the office and watch Jonah jump off the diving board. You remember, he was telling me all about it this morning at breakfast.”

  “But they don’t have swimming until the afternoon.”

  “No, so I discovered. I guess I’ll have to do it another time.”

  “And that’s what you came here for?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said? Anyway, I’d better be off. What about
you? You’re looking very dressed up.”

  “A skirt’s cooler on a day like this.”

  “You’re going shopping?”

  “Just to pick up a couple of things.” Carrie hesitated then added, “And Tracy called. We’re going for coffee.”

  Drum scowled. “Oh, joy. The legal beagle.”

  “She’s my best friend, Drum, and I don’t get to see her very often. She’s working by the Torpedo Factory over in Alexandria now. I haven’t been in those galleries in a while. I’m curious to see what’s new there.” Not a single lie in the bunch, Carrie thought—well, except for the little one about Tracy calling her, rather than the other way around.

  “Fine. You have fun. Just don’t forget to pick up my dry cleaning, will you?”

  “I won’t.”

  She left him at his car and crossed over to her own blue Passat, frowning as the silver Jag peeled out of the rec center parking lot.

  Across the way, Carrie noticed, Zoë’s mother was still dozing in her minivan, a brown stuffed bear clutched in her arms, waiting for the children to be dismissed so her life could start up again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Asbury Park Recreation Center, McLean, Virginia

  9:08 a.m.

  Huxley and Tengwall had met up across the parking lot from the rec center, the Harley and the Caddy nestled deep in the shadows of a dense clump of willows near the roller hockey rink. Huxley had pulled out his portable radio and they were in touch with Tucker back at the house as they tried to puzzle out the significance of MacNeil and his wife rendezvousing unexpectedly like this.

  “Escape plan?” Tengwall wondered. “MacNeil discovered the bugs at the house, so they decided to meet up and make a run for it?”

  “MacNeil didn’t have luggage when he left,” Huxley pointed out.

  “He could have put it in the trunk of the Passat when it was in the garage.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Me, neither,” Tucker agreed. “My gut tells me that if—when—he runs, he’s not taking her with him.”