Jude Devine Mystery Series (100 page)

“Excuse me a moment.” Griffin Mahanes whipped a buzzing cell phone from the inside pocket of his costly suit and stepped toward the door. He walked Pippa out.

Jude felt light-headed. “Military hardware?”

“That’s what he said.” Delia sighed. “Of course, he had other business interests in real estate and so forth. But the problem with Anton had something to do with one of the military shipments.”

“Did you ever see a photograph of Anton or meet him personally?” Jude asked. She could see Koertig’s eyes glazing over as Calloway maintained a steady drone of golf-speak between his occasional contributions to the interview.

“No, he wasn’t a friend of the family.”

“Can you tell us anything about him?”

“He was too cheap to get his teeth fixed. Fabian mentioned that.” Delia stroked her hair back. Her look was deceptively casual, the expensive common-sense attire of the genteel matron. “I formed the impression that he wasn’t a people person.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“Fabian said he was a liability dealing with the French.”

“The French are jerks,” Calloway said.

“What was Anton’s role?” Jude checked her wristwatch. It would be four soon. Debbie would be meeting Sandy.

“He was some kind of middle man. He flew planes, too. That’s all I know.”

“Did you ever encounter a security guard of your brother’s called Hugo?”

“No, although I recall the name.”

“Your brother employed him after an incident at his home in New Orleans. Do you know anything about that?”

Again, Delia surprised her husband. “Someone broke in and defaced several of his favorite paintings. Appalling.”

“Looters?” Koertig asked.

“They didn’t steal anything,” Delia replied as Pippa slipped back into the room. “But Fabian was very shaken.”

“Did he say anything else about the break-in?” Jude asked.

“You know about that?” Pippa asked her mother.

“Naturally. Fabian called me in case I thought you should come home. He was worried.” Delia adjusted her pearls again. “I don’t know if this is relevant now, but the intruders made a threat against you.”

“Against me?” Pippa sagged down in a chair.

“What type of threat?’ Jude asked.

“I don’t know, but Fabian assured me he would take care of it.”

“He knew the people who made the threat?”

“It had something to do with Anton.” Abashed, Delia said, “I didn’t take it seriously until…now.”

Jude met Koertig’s eyes and signaled that she wanted to end the interview. There was only so much they could cover in one session. When they knew more, they would talk to the Calloways again, Delia especially.

Working her way toward a conclusion, she said, “I just have one other question. The individual who murdered Mr. Maulle seemed to be looking for something. He stole a computer hard drive and a laptop and we think he may have used violence to try to obtain answers from Mr. Maulle.”

“Are you saying my brother was tortured?” Delia lifted a shaking hand to her mouth.

Pippa burst into tears.

Wishing she’d been more tactful, Jude said, “I’m sorry. Please understand this is all just guesswork for us right now. Can you think of anything your brother might have had in his possession…even information?”

Belatedly, Jim Calloway demanded, “Do we have reason to fear for our safety, Detective?”

“Can you think of a reason?” she asked mildly.

“I have no idea.” Delia placed a hand firmly on Pippa’s arm. “And until we know what this is all about, you’re coming home with us.”

Pippa had the wisdom not to argue. Wiping her eyes, she asked, “Is this something to do with me?”

“Not directly, as far as I can tell.” It was too soon to give firm assurances, but the New Orleans incident had occurred two years ago. If there was a threat to Pippa, surely something would have happened in the meantime.

“Should we consider hiring private security ourselves?” Delia asked.

“Hell, no,” Jim Calloway declared, sparing Jude an answer. “There’s a problem when a man can’t take care of his own family.”

Jude pictured him shooting himself in the foot as he tried to come to grips with his .45 ACP. “If you think of anything, please call us,” she said, getting to her feet. “We really appreciate your time.”

“Are you saying we can go?” Calloway bounded up.

“We have your contact details,” Koertig said.

They walked the Calloways out into the entrance foyer where Griffin Mahanes was still on the phone. He ended the call and said, “I take it my clients are free to return back East.”

Pippa murmured under her breath, “The sooner the better.”

Everyone shook hands and Koertig said, “Good luck with your swing.”

As Calloway herded his wife and daughter out the doors into the late-afternoon sun, he yelled back over his shoulder, “Hey, I’ll send you a postcard of me and Tiger.”

“Wonderful.” Koertig waved.

Jude said, “Nice people skills.”

“Just tell me one thing,” her colleague gloomily responded. “Am I like him?”

Straight-faced, Jude nodded. “Talk about charisma.”

“Yeah, I was hoping you’d say that.”

*

Jude couldn’t sleep. The air-conditioning in her hotel room was noisy and Debbie hadn’t called. Jude reasoned that no news was good news. If she was in any trouble she would have sent a text message even if she couldn’t talk.

At least Sandy would be distracted for the next day or so. If she’d invited Debbie to her lair, she must be serious about keeping their relationship alive. Hopefully she would see the potluck as something simple she could do to make Debby happy, and Jude would gain access to her cabin in Rico on Thursday morning.

Once she’d ascertained Sandy’s status, she would turn the problem over to Arbiter. Her masters were paid to deal with interagency politics. She didn’t want to find herself tangled up in a turf war, or worse, in the middle of an incident everyone would officially deny. A disturbing thought crossed her mind. When she found out who Sandy was and what she was doing, and fed back the data, Arbiter would go up the chain of command and word would reach Sandy’s brass that she was blown. What then? Would they simply extract her and continue with their plans? Would she become a zombie, an agent who “dies” and is set up with a whole new identity? Or would she be seen as disposable?

Jude considered the ramifications. If Sandy was a deniable person in a covert military unit involved in a black op on U.S. soil, she would be looking at a 9mm pension plan, not a transfer. Did Jude want that on her conscience? Sweating suddenly, she shoved her covers aside and reached for the lamp. She could see why Arbiter hadn’t pushed her for results sooner. He obviously hadn’t wanted her to stumble into a sensitive situation when he was in the dark himself.

No wonder the Bureau couldn’t get a fix on her. The Pentagon would have made most of her records vanish, and Sandy had done the rest herself, making sure she cast no shadow. Her secrecy about Canada suddenly made sense. Maybe she knew exactly how this could play out and had arranged her own disappearance in advance. If Arbiter’s worst suspicions were a reality, the government wouldn’t want anyone left alive to tell the story. Sandy had probably covered every base. New identity and legend. Offshore back account. The works.

Her one weak spot was Debbie. She had not expected to fall in love, Jude concluded, and doing so had driven her out in the open more than she’d intended. Now that her lover was suspicious, what would Sandy do—cash in her chips and disappear before completing her mission?

Jude got out of bed and pulled on a T-shirt. Several options took shape in her mind. She could tip Sandy off. Let her know she was about to be blown. Or she could delay her search, find some reason why she couldn’t gain access to Sandy’s house. Or she could carry out the search and tell Arbiter they were wrong and Sandy was just another veteran with mental health issues. Maybe that’s exactly what she would discover, anyway. It seemed like a leap to assume Sandy was involved in this NORTHCOM scenario, even if they were recruiting commandos for a domestic operation. Jude had already concluded Arbiter had to have a basis for his suspicions. He just wasn’t sharing it with her, especially not over the phone. But still, he could be wrong.

She splashed some water on her face. She had to switch her train of thought or her mind would circle endlessly around the maddening unknowns. Without knowing who Sandy really was, she could make no decisions, so there was no point in futile speculation. Jude rested her face in a towel, unable to shake a strange feeling that there was something missing from her mental calculations, something she wasn’t seeing. She supposed a part of her just didn’t buy that Sandy would sign up for a crazy operation like the one Arbiter was hinting at.

If there was one thing she’d noticed about her taciturn subject over the past year, it was her mistrust of the government. She didn’t mouth off, and she avoided political discussions, but Jude had picked up on the little things. Sandy was deeply patriotic. She despised politicians. She thought everything on the news media was propaganda. Once, at Debbie’s place, Jude had overheard her call the White House and the Pentagon “evil.” Would she really work for them?

Jude made herself a cup of herb tea because it was crazy to drink coffee at 2:00 a.m. and she needed to get some sleep tonight. She and Koertig were meeting early tomorrow to search Fabian Maulle’s house again. She sat on the sofa and opened her laptop. Her e-mail included one from Mercy. As usual, Jude selected it and hit Delete. She scanned the others. None deserved an intelligent reply at this time of night.

For want of anything better to do, she picked up her cassette recorder and wound it back to the Oscar interview. She hadn’t found the time to listen to it again since she wrote up the transcript, and she wondered if she’d missed any other clues about the Russian suspects. She played the parrot’s Russian chatter and Pippa’s comments a few times, then let the tape run. At the quotation from Browning’s poem she rewound and played the passage again.

Oscar, when asked where “the box” was, had answered unhelpfully, “God’s in his heaven. All’s right with the world.”

Pippa said her uncle used to recite that verse to her as a child.

Jude entered the text in Google and up came the title:
Pippa Passes.
The coincidence of the name was too stark and too obvious to be unintentional. Jude jumped up and located the inventory of books Koertig had prepared. The Browning title wasn’t listed. She read down the page more slowly, looking for general poetry collections. Nothing. She paused as another detail struck her. The self-help book she’d seen Maulle’s living room wasn’t there either. Koertig had only listed the titles thrown around Fabian’s ransacked office.

She reached for her cell phone, then changed her mind and plopped back down on the sofa. What was she going to do—wake up the primary in the middle of the night and ask him if he saw a book of poems at the house? Jude sipped the musty-tasting tea and resigned herself to reading the complete verse on her computer. There was no accounting for taste, she thought, as she digested line after line of what appeared to be a play in which a girl called “Pippa” sang awful songs, got dressed, and went for a stroll. Jude doubted this had been a bestseller, even when the author was alive.

Yawning, she persevered and located the line Oscar had quoted. It appeared in the middle of a scene in which a woman and her lover were talking, having murdered the woman’s husband. The language was so murky and confusing, Jude gave up trying to find a clue and skimmed the rest of the story. Thoroughly sedated by the time she reached the unsatisfying conclusion, she closed her computer and stumbled back to bed.