Murder Under Cover

by Kate Carlisle

  As I hung up my clothes in his closet, I resolved to ignore those neurotic thoughts and dwell instead on the fact that he chose to stay with me at my house.

  But I knew one of his assistants was working with a local real estate broker to find a suitable home for him in the city. Eventually, when he found the perfect residence, he would move out of my place and into his own. And that was probably for the best. Frankly, I was surprised we were still enjoying each other’s company after a full month of living together. It couldn’t last much longer, could it? We were so different from each other. He was traditional upper-crust English; I was laidback California commune. He was dangerous, secretive, and carried a gun. I was peace, love, and free speech. We were completely wrong for each other, and yet we had fun. We loved to eat good food and drink good wine and we argued and laughed and fought-and made up, of course. He liked my family. He laughed at my jokes. But beyond the fun stuff, Derek had more integrity than anyone I knew, and that coincided with my desire for justice and good to prevail. I thought that was a pretty important quality in a guy. And I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was so gorgeous. I wasn’t sure if it was his face or his body or his accent that made him so hot, but…

  “I know it’s late, but I’ve ordered hamburgers from room service,” he said, coming up behind me and slipping his arms around my waist.

  “With French fries?” I asked.

  He kissed my neck. “Of course, darling.”

  “Sweet.” Resting my head against his bare skin, I savored the solid, muscular feel of his chest.

  Okay, in this moment, it was definitely his body. Call me shallow. The guy was hotness personified.

  The following morning, Derek dropped me off at my place and I began cleaning up the mess. I arranged to meet the guy from the door company and a locksmith who’d been recommended by our homeowners association.

  Looking at all the disorder in the light of day, I could see that there wasn’t that much actual destruction. Drawers had been pulled out of my desk and the contents dumped on the floor; materials and supplies had been swept off the countertops. There were a few broken jars, but for the most part, everything could be straightened up easily.

  Much worse would be the job of cleaning fingerprint dust off every flat surface in my house. I’d found out the hard way the last time my place was broken into that this stuff was a pain in the butt to clean up. The powder was made of graphite and seemed lighter than actual dust. The minute the crime guys fluttered those dainty little dusters over anything, particles flew all over. I learned that even water wouldn’t soak up those darn particles, so it was useless using a sponge to clean things up. The black powder had settled into one of my small area rugs and some cloths I used for cleaning books, and they had to be replaced.

  One of the previous crime scene guys had recommended a product, and I was relieved to find a small amount left under my sink. It was a thick gel that broke down the bonds between the graphite ions. Don’t ask me how. That bit of information exhausted my vast knowledge of the science of bonding.

  Three hours later, my studio was back to normal and I had a new door with a stronger dead bolt. The rest of the house took only another hour or so to straighten up, because the intruder hadn’t done as much damage there. Based on little Tyler’s story, Inspector Lee theorized that the rest of the house was barely touched because the guy had run out of time.

  Maybe, as Tyler had suggested, he’d heard the elevator stirring to life and had rushed out while he could. That was one more reason I loved that old creaky elevator. You always knew when someone was coming home.

  As if on cue, I could feel the light vibration that signaled the elevator was being summoned. Two minutes later, Derek walked in. After changing from suit and tie to jeans and a light sweater, he joined me in the kitchen, where he whipped up a pitcher of martinis.

  “This is a treat,” I said, sipping my drink. “Do you want to listen to music while we cook?”

  “No, I had something else in mind for us to do before dinner.”

  I smiled, watching him as he took a quick first sip of his drink, then set his glass down. Extracting a notepad and two pens from the telephone drawer, he led me over to the dining room table and gestured for me to sit.

  Okay, this was not what I thought he meant.

  As Derek took the chair on the other side of the table facing me, he ripped off a few pieces of paper and handed them to me with a pen.

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  His lips twisted into a wry grin. “We’re going to play your favorite game.”

  Puzzled, I shook my head. “I’m no longer sure what you think that might be.”

  “We’ll call it Find the Killer,” he said, setting the pad down and clicking the top of the pen. “You go first. Tell me everything you know about the night Robin first met Alex.”

  Chapter 10

  “You know I love to play the Killer game,” I began, taking a moment to register just how much my life had changed in the last few months. Brooklyn Wainwright, bookbinder-cum-murder solver extraordinaire. “But do you really think it matters how she met him?”

  “I’m beginning to think it matters very much.”

  “She told us what happened that night.”

  “But we’re missing something. I want to start at the beginning and make notes.”

  “Good idea.” I doodled ever-expanding circles on my paper. “But the way I see it, Alex is-or was-a key player, but Robin was just an innocent bystander. So why does it matter how they met?”

  “Why was he killed inside her home?”

  “Because someone was after him and followed them to her place, and found a way inside and… Heck, I don’t know. It was convenient?” But it wasn’t, of course. And there was the whole drugging-of-Robin issue. Nothing made sense about this.

  “I’ve come to the conclusion,” Derek said, “that Robin is connected to the mystery behind Alex’s death.”

  I thought about it and sat forward with my theory. “Maybe Alex stole something from someone else and Robin got in the way.”

  Derek leaned in. “Did Alex steal it? Or did Robin steal it?”

  Frowning, I inched back. “Robin didn’t steal anything. If Robin had stolen something, wouldn’t the killer have killed her instead of Alex?”

  “Very good point,” Derek said, encouraging me along. “So you think Alex stole something? Maybe he stole it from Robin.”

  “Robin doesn’t have anything worth stealing,” I argued. “And who knows if Alex stole anything or not? None of it makes sense.”

  “You’re right,” he said firmly. “None of it makes sense until we fill in the blanks.”

  “How do we do that?” I sipped my drink and stared at him. “Wait. You have information.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, spill it.”

  With a smile, Derek pulled out his smart phone and slid his finger across the surface until he found what he was looking for. He showed me a picture of a tiny metal box held in someone’s hand.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a photograph of a mini flash drive. The smallest one they make, currently. It plugs into a plastic port and fits into the USB slot of any computer. It’s an effective and innocuous way to transport information from one computer to another.”

  “Okay. Is that what Alex stole?”

  “We think that was his intention.” Derek leaned forward again and spoke softly. “What we know for sure is that a highly placed Ukrainian operative working in deep cover in Toronto was activated recently.”

  “Activated?”

  “Yes,” he said, making me nervous as he watched my reactions closely. “He was sent to San Francisco to retrieve an item of crucial importance to the government.”

  “The Ukrainian government?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m assuming that you got this information from your people at Interpol?”

  He said nothing, just continued to look at me with the barest
hint of a smile. I suppose he thought it best not to say out loud exactly where he’d obtained this information, but Interpol was a safe bet. Still, a part of me was irked. Was he trying to keep me safe from culpability? Or did he simply not trust me? Or did he not trust Robin? Wait. Did he think my house was bugged? Okay, that was ridiculous. I took a deep breath and tried to reel in my overactive imagination.

  “So I’ll assume the highly placed guy is Alex, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the crucial item?” I waved my hand at his phone and the picture of the flash drive.

  “Exactly,” he said, holding the phone up again to show the photo. “A flash drive. A tiny one.” He put the phone down and held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate how small the metal flash drive was. “This big.”

  “Tiny. I get it.” What I was really getting was a bad feeling in my stomach. “And who was he retrieving it from?”

  “A soft target.”

  “Okay.” Apparently, we were playing Twenty Questions. That was fine; I liked to play games. “What’s a soft target?”

  “Robin is a soft target.”

  I sat back in my chair and stared at him. I wasn’t so crazy about this game anymore. “You know that makes no sense, right? But let’s continue for the sake of argument. How long ago was this guy sent from Toronto?”

  “Six days ago.”

  With a heavy sigh, I got up and pulled the small calendar from the wall above the kitchen telephone and counted off the days. “So he came to San Francisco almost a week ago and found the flash drive or whatever he was looking for. Then he just happened to stop at Kasa for dinner and met Robin there.” I pointed at last Thursday, the night Robin returned from India.

  “Did he find the flash drive, then meet Robin?” Derek asked. “Or did he meet Robin in order to find the flash drive?”

  “Are you trying to make me mad?”

  “No, darling,” he said in a soothing voice, and reached out to touch my hand. “I’m trying to find a killer.”

  I clutched his hand in mine. He was being objective and I was getting emotional, and that wouldn’t help solve anything. I took a moment to breathe and realign my thoughts. “Okay, we both know Robin is innocent, right?”

  “Of course, but she’s also at the center of something thorny. We need to unravel each individual thread in order to help her out of it.”

  “Agreed.” I looked at the calendar again. “So, I’ll go with the theory that Alex found the flash drive Thursday, then met Robin that night. So maybe someone else was after the flash drive, too, and they tracked down Alex Saturday night at Robin’s place. Where they killed him late that night, or rather, early Sunday morning.”

  “Perhaps. Continue.”

  “Okay. I’m thinking of that perfect bullet hole in Alex’s forehead.” I gulped back a shiver of dread and continued. “So whoever killed him was probably another so-called professional operative, right?”

  Derek nodded, but said nothing.

  “So how professional is it,” I continued, “to kill another operative in the home of some innocent civilian who has no connection to anything? Wouldn’t they wait and whack him on his own turf?”

  He smiled at my use of the lingo. “That’s a good point, and there are two different ways to proceed from there. The first is to assume that the killer wasn’t a professional, but the expert bullet placement belies that theory.”

  “Right. What’s the second?”

  “The second is to assume that Robin was not the innocent civilian we thought she was.”

  “And that’s impossible,” I insisted, “so we’ve hit a dead end.”

  “No, we’ll just continue to work through it until we arrive at our original theory.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, sounding crabby.

  “That Robin is innocent, naturally.”

  “Oh.” Somewhat mollified, I nodded. “Okay, let’s keep talking.”

  “Let me introduce one more tangle,” Derek said. “Perhaps I should’ve mentioned this before, but another agent was apparently dispatched to do the brush, but once Alex was killed, she was told to track down the drive.”

  “She?” I echoed. “Would that be Galina?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “My source didn’t have a name to give me. I was only told it’s a woman.”

  “But Galina seemed more like a spurned lover than a highly trained operative,” I grumbled.

  “She also worked out of Toronto, so perhaps you’re right. Perhaps they were lovers.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “The fact that they were lovers probably saved our lives.”

  “How so?” he asked.

  “Galina was as strong as a bull. I have no doubt she could’ve killed us both with two well-placed karate chops. But she was emotional. She was on a wild rant, out of control, so Robin and I were able to get some punches in and distract her enough to push her down to the sidewalk.”

  “Excellent theorizing, darling,” he said with a proud smile.

  “Thanks,” I said, grinning, then remembered something else he’d said a moment ago. “I’m afraid to ask, but what’s a brush?”

  “Brush pass. One agent passes off the item to another.”

  “Good to know.” I leaned forward on my elbows. “So Alex was supposed to get the flash drive and pass it on to Galina. But Alex obviously didn’t find it and neither did Galina, because she kept yelling at us to give it to her, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So we’re kind of back to square one.”

  “Not at all. A day later, your home was broken into.”

  I shook my head. “Wow, I almost forgot. Broken into by some big ugly guy, according to Tyler. So who’s that guy? And why break in here?”

  “Because they all think Robin has the flash drive.”

  That shiver of dread grew more pronounced and I rubbed my arms to make it go away. “They broke in to find Robin.”

  “They want the flash drive, not Robin.”

  He said that to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. Alarmed, I stood and flexed my hands nervously. “Do you think someone followed us to Dharma? Is Robin in danger there?”

  He jumped up and grabbed hold of my arms. “It’s all right. She’s with Austin, and I have Gabriel watching the perimeter.”

  “Oh.” I blinked in surprise, then wrapped him in a tight hug. “Thank you for thinking of that.”

  “Shall we call it quits for the night? Are you tired?”

  I stayed tucked close to his solid body for another moment. He was like my own private security blanket, and I savored every inch of him.

  Finally, though, I lifted my head and looked at him. “I’m not tired. I want to keep going. But I’m starving, so let’s cook while we talk.”

  “Perfect.” He kissed me, then let me go, following me into the kitchen to help.

  We whipped up a big salad with chunks of veggies and shredded chicken. I’d forgotten all about my martini, so Derek poured me another very weak one. Back at the dining room table, we resumed our theorizing game.

  “What do you think is on this flash drive?” I asked.

  “I’ve got my people working on that. All we know so far is that it contains information that is critically important to the government.”

  “Why do they think Robin has it? Alex could’ve left it in a safe-deposit box. Or somewhere in his apartment.” I stopped and held up my hand. “Wait. He had an apartment here and he went to college here, supposedly. But he was deep cover in Toronto? How did that work?”

  “He worked in San Francisco for a Toronto-based company and traveled back and forth regularly. It was a good cover.”

  I was still frowning. “Show me again how big this flash drive is.”

  Derek finished a bite of salad, then said, “Give me your hand.”

  I reached out and he took hold of my hand. Wrapping his thumb and finger around the first knuckle of my pinkie, he said, “It’s smaller and thinner than the tip
of your little finger.”

  “Huh.” I tried not to obsess over the feel of his hand touching mine. I ask you, how could scarred knuckles and a callused palm be such a thorough turn-on? “How in the world are we supposed to find something so small?”

  “It’s probably hidden in something bigger. It might even be hidden in plain sight. Affixed to a small makeup mirror in Robin’s purse or slipped inside a checkbook or cigarette case. Or a key ring.”

  “So we’re back to thinking that Robin had it?” I popped a tomato chunk into my mouth.

  “Just theorizing.” He pushed away from the table and disappeared down the hall, then returned with my purse. “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  Reaching into my bag, he first pulled out my small bottle of aspirin. “You could tape the flash drive to the bottom of the inside of this container and fill it with aspirin. Or you could cover it in plastic wrap and shove it into a jar of face cream, then smooth out the surface. Something like that won’t show up on an airport security screen.”

  “You know too much about this stuff.”

  “It’s a job.”

  I put down my fork, feeling defeated. “We’ll never find it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like my daring sleuth.” He grabbed my hand and shook it playfully. “This is why we need to go through Robin’s movements that night, step by step.”

  “You really think Robin was a soft target?”

  “It’s the only way to explain why Alex drugged her.”

  My shoulders slumped. “Another detail I forgot about. So you’re thinking Alex drugged her so that while she was sleeping, he could hide the flash drive somewhere in her house.”

  He waved his fork. “That’s one possibility, of course.”

  “But you clearly don’t think so.” I pondered as I sipped my martini. I’d never been crazy about the taste of martinis, but I did like the feeling of sophistication that drinking them gave me. Sort of like playing dress-up when I was young.