Dark of Night (53 page)

He gestured with his head, and Tracy followed him out into the hall.

“You really have that much faith that that
Secret
thing works?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, touching his hand down where no one could see them. “But I have that much faith in you.”

He didn't say anything, but he held onto her, linking just one of his fingers with one of hers, so she added, “In case you don't have time to, I don't know, say good-bye or… In case you have to leave quickly? I'm just going to say it now. Be as careful as you can, without getting too inside your head about being careful. I'll be here when you get back.”

She felt tears start to form in her eyes, and she blinked, hard, because getting all weepy would only undermine her message.

“Lew Koehl on line one,” Lindsey shouted from her office. “Jackpot! Am I great, or am I the greatest?”

Deck dropped Tracy's hand and was already moving.

She chased him down the hall. “Sir.”

It felt weird calling him that, and indeed, he shot her a look.

“Chief,” she corrected herself. She lowered her voice. “You really need to fix your shirt.”

He looked down. “Ah, shit.”

“No one noticed,” she said, following him to his office door. “Well, except me and Jo. And Lindsey.”

He laughed as he went inside. “Only everyone in the room.” He picked up his phone, nodding a dismissal. “Commander. I'm sorry to bother you, sir, but our situation's escalated. …”

Tracy closed his office door and headed back to the conference room, where Jo had already gathered up her things.

And okay.
This
was going to be awkward.

Jo knew it, too. It was there in her Mona Lisa therapist smile.

So Tracy went point-blank as she led the way down the hall. “Peter Olivetti. Michael Peterson. Did he call you
my princess,
too?”

“Queen,”
Jo said. “
My Queen,
or
My Liege. My Lady.
In retrospect, it's astonishingly unappealing. Like a renaissance fair gone horribly wrong.”

“He smelled good,” Tracy said. “And he listened.”

“He did do that,” Jo agreed. “All that charisma, all of his focus…” She paused. “And then there was the fact that he looked the way he looked.”

Tracy nodded as she turned on one of the standing lamps in the Trouble-shooters lobby. At the time, Michael
had
seemed unbelievably well put together. Of course, that
was
before she'd seen Decker naked. “I wonder if anything he said was true. I mean, I know he doesn't really teach first grade. Although what does that say about me, that I found that so attractive?”

Jo sat down on the leather sofa where she'd been camped out earlier. “It says that you like the idea of a man who has a strong calling—a connection to his work. Because, let's face it. People, particularly men, don't become teachers for the money. You're also of an age where you're seeking to fulfill your biological imperative, so a man who likes children
would
be particularly attractive to you. There's nothing wrong with that.” She
paused. “In the same way, it makes sense that you'd be drawn to someone older, someone you perceive to be steady. Someone you might think is ready to settle down. Or maybe even just settle.”

She was talking now about Decker. “No,” Tracy said firmly. “No, thank you. I'm definitely not interested in your opinion about—”

“He's an incredibly complicated man.”

“And one who would be understandably upset to find
anyone
indulging in office gossip about him,” Tracy countered, even though she'd done it herself in the past.

“I'm merely offering advice,” Jo said. “Things have changed radically in the past hour. You
do
know it's possible that Dave Malkoff will be recovered, not rescued.”

A living person was rescued, a dead body was recovered. As awful as it seemed, it
was
certainly a possibility. At this point, they didn't even know if Dave was still alive.

“If Dave is dead,” Jo pointed out, “Lawrence Decker's connection to Sophia Ghaffari—”

“Do you honestly think,” Tracy asked emphatically, “that if Dave is dead, I'll be concerned with more than the awful, dreadful,
horrible
fact that
Dave
is
dead?”

“Oh, God, no …”

Tracy looked up to see Sophia, her face totally white, and—dear Lord—her clothes stained with the dark red of drying blood, standing by the main entrance. It was obvious that she'd just come in and had heard only the end of Tracy's sentence, and even though Tracy said, “No!” she crumpled to the floor.

Lopez was there, thank goodness, and he caught Sophia and lowered her to the carpeting. He, too, looked devastated. “Dr. Malkoff is dead?” he asked.

“No,” Tracy said again, “Well, we don't know. I was just… Shoot!
Decker!”
She forsook the intercom system and went with what was the standard here at Troubleshooters Incorporated—the interoffice bellow. “Lindsey! Deck! We need you in the lobby,
now!”

Jules arrived to find the Troubleshooters office in an uproar.

Decker was channeling his inner caveman as he moved Sophia in a he-man cradle carry from the floor to the lobby sofa.

It was hard to tell with everyone talking at once, but apparently Tracy had told Sophia that Dave was dead, when in fact Dave's status remained only missing.

Tracy looked stricken—it was clear that, whatever she'd told Sophia, her intent had not been even remotely malicious.

But the emotional energy that got consumed was enormous as Sophia finally roused and, finding out the truth, burst into tears of relief. After more noise and apologies all around, Lindsey helped her up and into the locker room, because—just to make everything even more horrible— Sophia was still dressed in the clothes she'd been wearing when Navy SEAL Chief Ken Karmody had been gunned down in that hotel elevator.

Tracy stood, as if to help Lindsey with Sophia, but Decker stopped her. “Don't. You've done enough.”

To Jules's surprise, the receptionist got in his face. “That's
not
fair. She walked in on a
what-if
conversation I was having with Dr. Heissman, and she completely misunderstood. She's my friend, Deck. May I please go and help her find something to change into? She's not going to fit into anything Lindsey has in her locker, and I've got two suitcases full of clothes.”

Decker nodded. “Go,” he said. It was only then that he turned to Jules.

“Hey, Deck,” Jules said. “How's it going?”

“Where the fuck is Alyssa?” Decker was apparently eager to relinquish command.

“She and Sam are outside, doing a perimeter check with Cosmo and Silverman,” Jules reported. They were looking, in particular, at the security cameras that surrounded the building, because Lopez believed the system had been compromised. They'd brought in an expert to look at it—Tess—but Jules wasn't going to mention that here, with all the extra ears in the lobby. “Dr. Heissman, nice to see you, ma'am.” He nodded at the woman, then turned back to Deck. “Do we have a description yet, of the men in the elevator?”

Lopez spoke up. “Chief Karmody's still in surgery, and Sophia didn't see much. From what I understand from her recall of the attack, she was covered in the chief's blood, so Dr. Malkoff starting shouting about how she was shot, too. I think he believed the gunmen were intending to kill her. He actually hit her—knocked her out so she would appear to be dead. They grabbed him, and ran.”

“
Dave
knocked Sophia out?” Decker repeated. “Jesus.”

“It saved her life,” Lopez said somberly. “Oh, and Chief?” He handed Decker a pair of envelopes that looked like they'd been through a war zone. They were crumpled and stained with blood. “Karmody has these in his pocket. Best guess is he was holding on to them for Dr. Malkoff.”

One of them had Decker's name on it. The other had been opened, and it looked as if it were … Yes, it was Dave's will. Crap.

As Decker opened the second one, Jules could see even from several feet away, that like the first, Dave had handwritten it in his nearly illegible scrawl.

As he watched, Decker skimmed it, flipping the page over and …

“Oh, Jesus,” Deck said. He glanced up at both Jules and Lopez as he jammed it back into the envelope, and pocketed it. “It's personal.”

Jules cleared his throat. “I'm going to have to ask you to—”

“Yeah,” Deck said shortly. “I know. I'll let Alyssa see it. If she feels it's necessary to share it with you … That'll be up to her.”

Jules nodded. Worked for him. “I've got some information that falls into the bad-news department,” he said. “Can we go into your office or…”—he glanced again at Dr. Heissman, who was sitting quietly off to the side—“somewhere else we can shut the door?”

“I'll hang here,” Lopez volunteered.

“My office,” Decker said, leading the way.

He was silent as they went down the hall, silent as he led the way into his office.

Jules closed the door behind him. The small room had a lived-in smell—common among law enforcement and counterterrorist specialists, who didn't exactly keep bankers’ hours.

Jules couldn't count how many times in the course of his career he'd slept in his clothes in his office—on the couch or sometimes even on the floor. You'd sleep, you'd eat, you'd sweat, you'd change your shirt, maybe wash up in the sink if you felt you could take a few minutes’ break.

But mostly you just sat there and got more and more ripe.

Except the gym locker fragrance in here had a soupçon of something lovely mixed in. Perfume.

And sure enough, as Jules looked around, he could see that the somewhat Neanderthalish Decker had been sharing his cave, so to speak.

A sweater was on the floor along with some notepads filled with loopy handwriting, a blanket was on the sofa, and a pair of high-heeled sandals had been kicked under one of the chairs.

Huh. And Deck's desk was curiously, absolutely clear.

And—oh, ding—something small and white and silky and just the right size to be a style of underwear that absolutely would never fit Decker peeked out from behind a throw pillow that had landed on the floor in the far corner of the room.

Well, you go, D-Dawg.

Jules worked to keep his expression neutral, instead of wide-eyed and openmouthed in amazement. Tracy—and it had to be Tracy. Those shoes did
not
belong to Jo Heissman or Jay Lopez. And, yes, Tracy was pretty dang cute, but probably the dead-last person in San Diego Jules would have ever imagined hooking up with someone as grim and perpetually, quietly angry as Decker.

Except, this fiasco with Dave aside, Decker currently didn't seem to be quite as angry. Way to go, Tracy.

“What have you got?” Deck asked as he sat behind his clutter-free desk. “An address from the plate numbers on Tracy's picture of Michael Peterson would be nice.”

Jules sat in one of the chairs instead of on the sofa, where, despite the clear desk, the aura of a recent happy-fun-time lingered. “Yeah, a friend of a friend in San Diego PD. I pulled some favors and she ran the plates, completely on the lowdown. We got a name—Karen Michaelson—and an address. An empty apartment in Spring Valley. I got Yashi and Deb out here—both on their own time—seeing if they can't track her down.”

“Michaelson, huh?” Decker shook his head. “Girlfriend? Wife?”

Jules shrugged. “No idea. But in the event that she is? I'm going to want to show her those photos of our man Peter-slash-Michael doing the naked thang with the doc.”

Decker nodded. He clearly understood that jealousy was often right up there among the possibilities when it came to making a family member of a suspect spill the proverbial beans. “Dr. Heissman's been cooperative, so let's be careful not to let those pictures get distributed too widely.”

“Of course,” Jules said.

“What else?” Decker, perceptive as always, asked. “You said
bad
news.”

“Yeah.” Jules sighed. “When the lab report on the knife Liam Smith used to stab Dave came back, it sat on CIA Special Agent Bill Connell's desk. He was supposed to notify both Dave and the hospital, but he says it allegedly slipped through the cracks. Guy's a total dick, by the way, and if Dave dies, I'm going to make sure he's looked at for negligent homicide. I may do it anyway—throw an
attempted
in there. Motherfucker.”

“Bill Connell,” Decker repeated.

Jules nodded as he watched Deck store the name in his permanent memory banks. Bill didn't know it yet, but should anything happen to Dave? The man was totally fucked. “Bottom line, the weapon was a biological nightmare. The amount of bacteria was… Well, knives are rarely antiseptic, but this one?” He shook his head.

“It was intentional,” Decker said. It wasn't quite a question, but Jules answered it anyway.

“Had to be,” Jules agreed. “The other knife on the scene contained normal trace amounts of ick and germs. Alyssa has a copy of both lab reports, if you want to see them.”

“I do,” Deck said.

“It's a hard copy. Don't spill your coffee on it. We're not sending anything via e-mail that's not completely scrambled,” Jules said, “and there wasn't time to fix this document. Speaking of there wasn't time, we brought Tess back with us, to check out Tracy's computer.”

Decker was not pleased. “What the fuck?”

It was clearly a rhetorical question, but Jules tried to answer it anyway. “There was no way we could risk bringing that computer to the safe house, and it may hold some answers.”

“And you think Nash is just gonna sit still while—”

“Yes,” Jules said. “He is. He's walking, but not without a cane. He's in no condition to jump onto the roof of a speeding train, or whatever it is you former Agency operatives do to catch your suspects. And he knows it.”

As an agent with the FBI, Jules usually did a lot of math in the course of an investigation. And then he drove to the address of the suspect in a really nice car, put on a bulletproof vest, and followed the SWAT team inside. It wasn't every day that he was actually the one to kick in the door. Of course, having done it more than once, he
could
understand the appeal.