While Galileo Preys (7 page)

But being stubborn would accomplish nothing. Correction: being stubborn would just carve out an abyss between them which would widen and deepen with time. Sophie would notice. Their neighbors would notice. He was a sociology professor. Inflexible societies eventually snapped like twigs. Was he so implacable? Was he willing to risk so much?

“Three days.”

She stopped dialing. Looked over at him. “What?”

“You can have three days. Anything more than that and you’re not just putting in your two cents. Anything more than that and you’re on the task force. And then your responsibilities will be even more divided than they already are. You’re there three days and you’re a consultant. You’re there any longer and they’ll start counting on you. I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

She shook her head. No, he wasn’t wrong.

“But just so we’re clear,” she added, “you don’t get to ever—ever—give me an ultimatum like that. You don’t think I’m torn up over this? You made your point and you’re right. Three days it is. But that’s
my
choice.”

O
n the evening of February 14, whilst young lovers kissed and old lovers spooned, Darcy Parr went looking for drugs. Claritin, Zyrtec—any antihistamine would do. Finding a drugstore still open in Amarillo after 10:00 p.m., however, was proving to be a chore, and so she ended trolling the luminescent tiles of Walmart.

Also, it provided her with an excuse to leave the hotel. Not that she was getting stir-crazy. But Tom Piper was two rooms down, and his vicinity reminded her of this afternoon.

She blamed herself.

The hospital had been her responsibility. Her primary assignment had been to coordinate with the M.E.’s office, and the M.E.’s office was at Baptist St. Anthony’s. That the fire chief was also under her jurisdiction went without saying. No one else from the task force was stationed at the hospital. No one else was even close. The sniper infiltrated the place on her watch. Their witness died on her watch. His blood was on her hands.

And face…and hair…

No. She had gotten all of it off in the shower. Right? Yes.

She found the nearest mirror—glued to an endcap for sunglasses—and double-checked. Yes. No more blood. Pores clean. Blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked like a coed in a sorority, not someone who’d just…

Shake it off, Darcy. Get your allergy medicine. Maybe send an e-mail to Pastor Joe when you return to the hotel. He never slept, and he always knew exactly what to say. Pastor Joe ran her parish church back in Virginia. Much of the congregation consisted of spooks, spies and Bureau instructors. It had been Darcy’s home church growing up. These were the people she knew. A career in the FBI had pretty much been predestined. It was these connections which enabled her to join Tom Piper’s esteemed task force.

She found the pharmacy aisles near the racks of get-well cards. How appropriate. It didn’t take her long to stock her basket with antihistamines. She even tossed a box of Sudafed in there, just in case.

It’s not that Amarillo contained an unusually high pollen count or that February was a particularly bad month for allergens. That’s why she hadn’t brought any medication with her on the trip from Virginia. But her symptoms, as she well knew, had nothing to do with the environment. They were induced by stress, and she’d suffered their effects since early childhood. Nobody said being an overachiever was easy.

And then there was the matter of Esme Stuart.

Darcy pressed down on her swollen sinuses, sniffled and coughed. Esme Stuart had left the Bureau long before Darcy Parr left the Academy, but her legend resounded up and down every wall at Quantico. She had been Tom Piper’s prodigy, and now she was coming back. It’s not that Darcy was jealous. It was silly to be jealous of someone so far out of your league. But Darcy was the newest member of the task force, the youngest, the greenest, and if Esme Stuart were to come back for good, if her return proved permanent…well, it didn’t take a Vegas bookie to foretell whose place on the team was most vulnerable.

Adding what happened today at the hospital to that little fact and Darcy was fortunate her stress hadn’t flared into the full-blown anxiety attack. The irony, of course, was that she could do the job. She had been at the top of her class at the Academy, and not because the instructors had offered a local girl special treatment. The reality had been exactly the opposite, but Darcy had persevered and now she was here in Amarillo, on her first case as a member of the most elite task force in the entire FBI. Her first case. And possibly her last.

She detoured to the Hallmark greetings. A get-well card for Tom wasn’t totally out of line. It was thoughtful. After all, her boss had been shot. And he wouldn’t very well tell her to pack her bags after she gave him a get-well card, would he? Would he?

“Miss, are you all right?”

Darcy glanced to her left. A sandy-haired man in his forties stood there, a kind smile on his face. He wore
ranchers’ gloves, and held out a handkerchief in one of his gloved hands.

“I’m fine. It’s just allergies.” She chuckled a bit to herself. “I know that’s what people say when…but, really, I’m fine.”

He pocketed the handkerchief in his weather-beaten jean jacket and added, with a chuckle of his own, “Valentine’s Day takes its toll on us all.”

Darcy nodded. With all that had happened, she’d completely forgotten today was a holiday. Not that she had a sweetheart back in Virginia. A social life was, well, low on her list of priorities. If she got lonely, she had relatives she could visit in almost every county in Virginia. She wouldn’t be like Esme Stuart. Her commitment to the FBI would be permanent. Surely Tom recognized that about her.

“But I see you’re not even looking for Valentine’s Day cards, are you? How foolish of me to jump to that conclusion. But that’s what I do. Look before I leap. That’s me. But someone you know is ill.” He offered a look of sympathy. “That’s why I’m here too, actually.”

“Oh?”

The sandy-haired man shrugged humbly. “It’s unfortunate, really. The ways things happen in this life. We do what we do and meanwhile people get hurt, every day, and that’s just the way the universe works.”

“I don’t know if it’s as bleak as all that,” replied Darcy. She noticed the man wore a shoulder-holster. What was that tucked inside, a Beretta? Normally she’d be concerned, but this was Texas. The Second Amend
ment was as beloved here as any of the Ten Commandments. “God only gives us what we can handle.”

He mumbled something in response, probably in agreement, then looked around the aisle. He suddenly seemed weighed down with despair.

“Who are you getting your card for?” she asked him.

“It’s not someone I know very well. But sometimes the message is really more important to the messenger than to anyone else. You know?”

Darcy reflected on her own semi-selfish reasons for card-shopping. “Yeah,” she said, and felt a bit ashamed.

“The unfortunate part of it is—her condition’s terminal and she doesn’t even know it. I mean, all of us are dying in increments, but…”

“That’s terrible.”

He nodded sadly. “It is.”

He picked out one of his cards and, with impressive dexterity considering the thickness of his gloves, was able to take a pen out of one of his jacket’s many inside pockets and scrawl a message on its inside. All the while his eyes appeared moist. Not from allergies. Darcy wanted to give the man a hug.

“Ah, well,” he sighed.

He returned the pen to its pocket, took out his silenced Beretta, and with it shot Darcy twice in the forehead. He placed the get-well card (a Shoebox Greeting) on her chest and strolled away.

It was Lilly Toro who picked the parking garage for the clandestine meet, not out of any affection for
Woodward and Bernstein but because it was, at this late hour, so reliably vacant. She perched on the hood of her VW Beetle and smoked her fifteenth Marlboro of the day.

Spending Valentine’s Day outside of her hometown blew.

Her informant showed up an hour late, but he was a cop, so his tardiness was not entirely unexpected. As soon as his metallic gold Crown Victoria whipped into view, she flicked the nub of her cigarette into outer space and took out her notebook. The guy didn’t like to be tape-recorded. Few snitches did.

He parked across the painted lines. He didn’t leave his car. He motioned for her to join him inside.

With a sigh, Lilly hopped off her VW and wandered to the passenger side of his Crown Vic. So this was how it was going to be.

The cop’s name was Ray Milton. He’d served on the Amarillo Police Department for eleven years. He worked in Property/Evidence and had known two of the slain firefighters personally. He bummed a Marlboro off her an hour before the memorial service.

Five minutes into the conversation, he was bitching about how the feds had stolen the case. Ten minutes into their conversation, they’d agreed to a quid pro quo: Ray would supply her with the leverage she needed to infiltrate the task force (namely, the bit about the shoe boxes). In return, once on the inside, she would funnel back to him updates on the case’s status. If the Amarillo P.D. was going to be benched, it at least was going to get to watch the game.

And so, upon learning from a very gabby receptionist in city hall about Esme Stuart’s impending arrival (11:45 a.m. tomorrow morning), Lilly phoned Ray. She zipped her VW to the meeting spot she designated, the abandoned parking garage, and so, here they were, at 11:45 p.m., in Ray’s twenty-year-old metallic gold Crown Victoria.

Which smelled like cinnamon.

This confused Lilly to no end. She’d expected the familiar tang of slow sweet death she inhaled every time she lit up, but no. Cinnamon. Then she noticed the red cardboard leaf dangling from Ray’s rearview mirror. Ah. Cinnamon. The man probably had kids and didn’t want to reek up the car pool on the way to Little League. Had he mentioned kids? After the memorial service, Lilly had done a background check on her informant just to verify his details, badge number, etc. One could never be too careful. But the data she’d accumulated had made no mention of kids. Whatever.

“So what’s your big news?” he asked.

His brown eyes bulged with eagerness.

Down boy, she mused.

“Yeah, I see you hustled right over here,” she replied. Waiting an hour in the middle of February in a nowhere-to-go-nothing-to-do city had been less than fun. “If you got here any faster, we could’ve had breakfast.”

“Sorry. Had an errand to run. Didn’t expect you to call so soon.”

“What can I say, Ray? I missed your sweet Texas charm.”

He scowled, charmingly.

She held up her hands. “Okay, okay. Jeez. So here’s the scoop—your pals at the FBI have got a ringer flying in from New York.”

“A ringer?”

“Her name’s Esmeralda Stuart. And you should’ve seen Special Agent Piper when he told his crew the news. It was like he was talking about the Second Coming. Apparently she’s some kind of savant. I don’t know.”

Lilly was lying. She did know. As soon as Tom Piper had made the announcement, she’d beelined for her Hello Kitty laptop and gleaned as much information on Esme Stuart as was available. But Ray Milton didn’t need to know that. Ray Milton needed to know what she decided he needed to know. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and baby, that boy won’t need you no more.

Ray studied his steering wheel for a moment. Then: “When is she arriving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you.” He smiled at her. His teeth were eggshell white. He must spray them or something—no smoker has teeth like that. “Maybe the FBI knows what they’re doing after all.”

“Nobody knows what they’re doing, Ray. That’s what makes it all so much fun.”

She saluted the middle-aged cop and exited the cinnamon cloud of his vehicle. She felt him watch her go. She couldn’t blame him. When she wore the right outfit, her curves could cause whiplash in the most
modest of spectators. So what if she liked women? That didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate being ogled now and again by the lesser of the species…

Sigh.

Spending Valentine’s Day outside of her hometown really blew.

Lilly meandered her way back to Motel 6. She hoped some of her friends would be online to distract her. She wrote her best journalism when she was distracted, and she didn’t want to squander this opportunity. Her articles on the task force had the potential to be front page, above the fold. The public loved to peek behind the curtain and see the wizard at play, and this time there was the sexy bonus of a serial killer. If she played to her strengths and created the rock-solid re-portage she knew she could produce, these articles would follow her portfolio until the day she died, when some other journalist would mention them at the top of her obit.

Her sixteenth (but not last) Marlboro of the day accompanied her on the short walk from the parking lot to her room. She passed a vending machine on her way, considered buying a bag of pork rinds, but continued on her way. The only thing worse than being stuck in Texas would be getting fat in Texas. It’s not that she was biased against the entire state. Austin, for example, was a wonderfully progressive city, and she had some friends who swore that the arts scene in Houston was thriving. However, most of the folk she had met, at least here in Amarillo, had been of Ray Milton’s ilk: a Bible in one hand and a shotgun in the
other. Her lifestyle—hell, her very appearance (when she wore all her piercings and left her tattoos uncovered)—was diametrically opposed to everything these people held dear. She knew it. To them, she was the demon spawn. Worse yet, she was
California
. Not everyone here felt this way, of course, but the majority did, and in America, the majority ruled.

Whatever.

Back in her motel room, Lilly returned her Hello Kitty laptop from hibernation mode, instant-messaged with some friends for an hour, and wrote 500 words for her piece. Her editor Ben Blackman at the
Chronicle
wanted pages? He was going to get them.

She didn’t include anything which compromised the task force’s capability. She was a responsible journalist…and had only landed her plum source very recently. Still, as an exposé on one of this nation’s top crime-fighting units, her story had the potential to sizzle. It had colorful personalities. It had turf wars among different branches of government. It even had a hateful villain. Forget about Pulitzer—this could be her ticket to network television.

Lilly Toro nodded off around 1:00 a.m.; still in her black boots, stockings, the whole nine yards.

At 4:43 a.m., she awoke. Looked around, befuddled. Why the hell am I awake at—

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Someone was at the door.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Someone not very happy.

Lilly padded over to the peephole.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

“I’m coming.”

She peered through the peephole. Who the fuck would be banging on her door at 4:43 a.m.?

Lo and behold: it was Special Agent Tom Piper.

Even more confused, Lilly took a moment to straighten her hair, and then she pulled open the door.

“Special Agent Piper. What a semi-pleasant surprise.”