Blind Spot (7 page)

The broomstick stopped moving long enough to push his glasses up on his nose. “What are you looking for from this ring? Prints? DNA?” The pacing resumed.

“We don’t want to say,” said Garcia.

Lab Guy stopped again, planting himself at Garcia’s elbow. “Federal arrogance. That’s what this is.”

“We’re all working together on this,” said Garcia, continuing to write.

“You come in here and pee on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.” He turned and headed for the door. Yanked it open and started to step through it. He said over his shoulder: “I’ll bring out the ring, but the hand stays in the lab.”

Garcia looked at Bernadette. She nodded. “Keep the hand,” Garcia said to him.

He walked out, letting the conference-room door slam behind him.

“You think he’s pissed?” Bernadette asked dryly. She dropped the pen on the table and pushed the paperwork away from her.

“Let him be pissed,” said Garcia. He clicked the pen and looked at it. The side of it carried the address and phone number of the ME’s office. “They got their own pens. We should get our own pens.” He slipped it inside his blazer.

She retrieved her pen. “This one’s from the Ramsey County Public Defender’s Office. ‘A reasonable doubt at a reasonable price.’ Cute.” She slipped it inside her jacket.

He drummed his hands on the table. “Everybody’s got their own pens. We’ve definitely got to order up a box. Address. Phone number. The works.”

“We don’t like people knowing who we are and where we are and what we’re doing.”

“That’s the old FBI,” he said. “This is the new and improved FBI. The open FBI. What’s the slogan for our pens?”

“Famous But…” She quickly stopped herself.

He finished her crack: “…Incompetent. I’ve heard that a million times. Old news. How about Fumbling Bumbling Idiots?”

She smiled. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

“That’s the one I get from the reporters every time we have a high-profile fuckup. Unfortunately, all our fuckups are high-profile.”

“That’s because we’re the fucking FBI,” she said.

“How would that look on a pen? ‘Because we’re the fucking FBI.’ No address or phone number or anything. Just that simple statement of fact. Whenever some perp asks us why we can get away with shit, what gives us the authority to bust his butt, we toss him the pen.”

She laughed just as the ME lab guy walked back into the room. “Sorry to interrupt your good time,” he said. On the table between them, he dropped a plastic bag the size of a sandwich. “Be responsible federal employees and don’t lose it.”

“Thank you,” said Bernadette, reaching for the bag.

“By the way,” said the broomstick, “there’re a couple of initials inside. You might miss them. Pretty small. Cops are checking to see who’s been reported missing. We might have a hit if a name matches up with the initials.”

Bernadette: “AH.”

“Yeah,” said the guy. “How’d you know?”

“Cops won’t find anyone with those initials,” she said.

“How do you know?” snapped the guy.

Garcia looked at Bernadette as she slipped the bag into her jacket. “I just do,” she said.

Bernadette and Garcia both exhaled with relief as they walked out of the building. They didn’t say anything to each other until they were standing in the parking lot. The wind had died down and the drizzle had stopped, but it was getting colder. The sky was the color of dirty dishwater. The air hummed with the sound of traffic on the nearby tangle of freeways.

“You would have thought we asked him to please cut off his own hand and give it to us in a Baggie,” said Bernadette.

“We’re all possessive of our evidence,” said Garcia. “I don’t blame him. Then we give him this obtuse explanation.
Tests.
”

“Yeah. Guess you’re right.” Bernadette slipped her left hand inside her jacket pocket and felt the bag with the ring. In her right pocket was the glove containing the threads; she’d decided to hang on to it as a backup in case the jewelry didn’t pan out. “I’ll keep in touch with the cops and the ME this weekend.”

“I can keep tabs on them.” He fished his keys out of his coat pocket. “I’ll give you the heads-up when all the missing hands and bodies are accounted for.”

“You sure?”

“You finish unpacking and then do your deal.” He jiggled his keys. “Need any help?”

With which task was he offering assistance? Bernadette answered as if he wanted to help with the first chore, even though she suspected he was more fascinated with the second. “Don’t have that much stuff at the office or at home.”

“You’re a minimalist?”

“A slob. The less I have to take care of, the better.”

“I can relate to that,” he said. “Worst thing I ever did was buy a house.”

“I’ll be home. You can catch me on my cell if you need me.” She turned away from him, started for her truck.

He snagged the elbow of her jacket. “Cat?”

She faced him. “Yeah?”

“How do you…” He stopped in mid-sentence and let go of her sleeve. “Give me a call first thing Monday. Earlier if you…uh…come up with something.”

It took her less than ten minutes to drive through downtown to the loft—not nearly enough time to figure out why Garcia was so fascinated with her abilities. He was unlike any of her previous supervisors, and she couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Her other bosses didn’t want to know the details of what she did or how she did it. Garcia was different; he wanted to watch. Was that because he believed in her sight—or because he doubted its veracity? She suspected it was the latter.

Six

While she alternated between unpacking and swearing, Bernadette did her best to ignore the two bundles. The bag containing the ring and the glove balled up with the threads were both perched on a tipped wooden fruit crate—trash left by the condo’s previous owner. Every so often she gave the bundles a sideways glance, as if she didn’t trust them completely but didn’t want to be caught staring.

She bent over a cardboard box, dug around inside, and pulled out a wad of blouses tangled around plastic bags and wire hangers. She stood up and shook out the mess, walked over to the closet, and hung a pair of shirts over the rod. It was a miracle she’d discovered her stereo system right off the bat. Harry Connick, Jr., crooned “The Very Thought of You” while she fished out another top.

Inside the next box was stuff wrapped in newsprint. She picked up one bundle and unraveled the paper. Dishes, filthy from the ink. She pushed the cube over to the kitchen area. The condo was made up of a series of
areas,
as opposed to
rooms.
Except for around the bathroom, there were no walled-in spaces. Her bed area consisted of an oversized ledge jutting out from the wall, with a spiral staircase providing access from the ground level. All the shelf needed was some hay and it could pass for a barn loft.

The condo was her first home purchase. She and Michael had rented because they’d moved so much. He was a freelance writer and could find work anywhere, but her job took them everywhere. Wherever they landed, they’d somehow made her folks’ country furniture fit. She wondered if the antiques would ever look right in this funky setting—a loft with twelve-foot ceilings, nine-foot windows, exposed interior brick walls, exposed ductwork, and exposed pipes. Plus, what about her bike? She’d had to sneak it up in the freight elevator. She didn’t want to leave it outside, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to pay to keep it in the parking ramp. She should’ve bought a regular house with a real garage. As she set the dirty dishes in the sink, she muttered to herself: “This was a bad call.”

Bernadette’s worst call—made along with her sister—was one she could never face. The two took an ability they were born with and honed it until it was something unnatural.

They’d always been tuned to each other’s thoughts; it was expected that twins operated that way. Their mother had bragged about it to her lady friends: “I’m trying to figure out which dolly one is crying for, and the other girl goes and gets it.”

Developing the ability to see through each other’s eyes seemed the next logical step. They’d concentrate hard on reading each other’s mind while staring at a math problem in school. Soon they’d see each other’s paper, watch each other’s hand writing the answer. The sight was more controllable—turned off and on easier—if the twin doing the viewing held an object belonging to her sister. The possession acted as an antenna.

Once, Maddy was sitting on her bed, scribbling an entry into her journal while her sister was in the barn. Sensing her sister’s glance at her diary, Maddy looked around her room and saw the hairbrush from her dresser was missing. Instead of ending Bernadette’s spy mission by slamming the journal shut, she practiced an insult the twins had been trying out. She willed her sister’s sight out of her eyes.

They coordinated each other’s viewing as well. One fall evening in their junior year of high school, Maddy was in the back seat of a Buick with a football player and Bernadette was in a neighbor boy’s bed. The girls had exchanged class rings with each other and, at a predetermined hour, slipped the rings out of their pockets for a wild night.

Bernadette and Maddy never told anyone how far they’d taken their ability to share.

That ability changed permanently senior year, on a rainy Saturday in the spring. The girls’ father had ordered parts for the John Deere. That afternoon, Maddy took the call from the dealer; the brake pads had arrived.

Maddy banged on the bathroom door. “Where’re Mom and Dad?”

Bernadette on the other side of the door: “Left for four o’clock mass.”

“Tractor junk’s in. Wanna go with to pick it up?”

“Give me a minute to rinse.” Bernadette was in the tub, shaving her legs and ripping the hell out of them. Maddy was better at the female stuff.

“They’re getting ready to close.”

“Wait!” Any excuse to go into town was a good one. Bernadette hopped out of the tub and grabbed a towel, but it was too late. She heard the front door slam and the station wagon skid out of the driveway.

Bernadette stepped back into the tub and turned on the shower. When she reached for the shampoo in one corner, she noticed that Maddy had forgotten her soapy class ring on the ledge. Bernadette picked up the ring, cupped it in her hand, and held it under the stream. The spray in front of her eyes vanished, replaced by a wall of chrome and metal. Bernadette screamed into the water.