Flash Point (11 page)

‘So, that online banking thing is looking better than ever,' Grey said, staring down at one of the crime scene photos that, technically, she shouldn't even be in the room with. Sure, Jenna wanted to consult her, but she'd always planned to carefully control everything in reference to the case that Grey saw, handled, heard …

Metallic copper flashed in, the same shade that had popped in when she and Charley had taken A to the zoo the week Dad had the flu. They'd watched in awe from behind the metal bars as the two cheetahs playfully tackled each other, rolling on the grass. She'd explained to Ayana that day, as the copper flashed in, how the cheetahs were friends, but it was only safe for humans to watch them from a distance. If the cheetahs tackled a person, it would probably be more forceful and not as friendly.
Hard to control
.

‘Look, chiquita,' Porter said, taking a step toward Grey and snatching the folder Grey had been looking at off the table, ‘you may have been invited here, but that doesn't mean you can tour the place like—'

‘Wait a second.
Was
she invited here?' Teva cut in.

Grey turned her head toward Teva, her expression flat. ‘Well, no, but …'

‘I
had
called her several times,' Irv said. ‘She
did
know we were looking for her.'

Jenna shook her head and stepped toward Irv, bit her bottom lip to stifle a humorless laugh. She closed her lips but kept wearing the sarcastic smile. ‘She knew
someone
was looking for her. She didn't know who, or from where …' Jenna turned slowly to face Grey. ‘She most definitely wasn't invited to Quantico …'

God help me, I thought I was done with this sort of interrogation. Ayana's three, but at least she gives straight answers.

Grey's face remained unchanged, as Jenna knew it would. The woman blinked three times, stared. ‘Well, I listened to the talk message on my squawk box from a private investigator … PI he said. Said he got my name from someone at the college. Said he had a stalking case he was working on. Client hired him because she has a guess who the Snoopy watching her is, but the police guys don't have enough evidence to put handcuffs on him. But the PI guy got hold of a letter the stalker left for the object of his desire and wants it compared to the writing on some postcards the guessed-Snoopy wrote his sister. Said the guy at the college thought I could help determine if the stalker letter and the guessed-Snoopy's postcards were written by the same hand,' Grey said. Then she shook her head, laughed. ‘Man, if
my
sister handed across some postcards to someone trying to prove me a Snoopy, I'd be pissed.' She paused, cocked her head. ‘But then again, I guess if my brother was a Snoopy, I'd want him locked away for it, too. Huh.'

Jenna's face seared as she saw the disapproving, uncertain looks being exchanged in the room around her. It wasn't that Grey's peculiar speech patterns and way of structuring her sentences embarrassed her. Her fellow teammates were smart enough to discern that the weird little idiosyncrasies peppering her words and even the bizarre getup Gray wore had to be manifestations of a personality disorder.

The rusty, brown-tinged color of primer red flashed in. She'd associated it with embarrassment at least since high school, a connection that might or might not have something to do with how mortified she'd been when her Dad had dropped her off at the school dance and all the kids who'd seen her exit the '55 Chevy had told her she must be confused, that the farm equipment had to be parked out past the softball field.

Nope, she felt like a fool because of what the team had to think of
her
for seeking out the woman in the room with them. For claiming that the awkward, rambling person using a shiny black coffee mug on their conference table to check that none of her breakfast was stuck in her teeth was the most qualified expert on the planet to assist them as they worked to crack the worst case of domestic terrorism since 9/11.

Finally, Porter broke the hush in the otherwise silent room. ‘So, a private investigator called you for a linguistics consult. What does that have to do with us?'

Seeming like she hadn't even heard the question, Grey continued her own train of thought right where she'd left off. ‘Only, my brother wasn't. A Snoopy. Wasn't a PI, either. Neither was this guy on my squawk box,' she said, looking down at where she was moving two coffee cups around the table like they were racecars.

‘How do you know that, Grey?' Jenna pressed.

Go on, Grey, give them a little taste of why they shouldn't write you off just yet.

Grey looked up at Jenna, her face flat. ‘Because in the message he left on my squawk box, he asked if I would compare the writing on the postcards to the letters from the UNSUB,' she said evenly. She looked down, resumed urging her cup-cars forward on the table as though racing them. ‘PIs don't say UNSUB.'

Jenna caught the impressed glance Saleda shot her way, but Grey kept talking.

‘No clue what an UNSUB is, honestly. Google told me that. Term federal agents use to refer to an Unidentified Subject, it said. Didn't worry about it much, though. Maybe the PI guy retired from the FBI so he could PI. I decided I'd reply to him on the squawk box in a few days.'

‘What changed the plan?' Dodd asked.

‘The fact that my old roommate Keely called me to tell me someone had talked on
her
squawk box about needing to find me to return some book he borrowed. She played me the message on her squawk box, and it sure sounded like Mr PI Guy.'

Saleda glared at Irv. ‘Why would you not use the same story with the roommate?'

Irv's eyes got wider. ‘I don't know. I guess in the time I spend doing my job cross-referencing and data hacking for you guys that it's been years since I was a member of the A-Team?'

Grey paid them no attention. ‘Well, I didn't have to be the brightest light in the candelabra to calculate that a federal agent was looking for me. I could also compute that, for some reason, he didn't want to clarify himself. All I could decide was if it was so secret, I might better find out who he was and what he found necessary of me before he came to me so that if it was bad, I could figure out what to do.'

Bothering to point out that Grey could've simply returned Irv's call would've been pointless to someone with a tendency toward paranoia, so instead, Jenna asked the only real question that mattered now. ‘But how did you know to come
here?
There are FBI field offices all over the place.
Surely
he didn't call from his office phone,' she said, slowly turning to stare down Irv.

‘Easy,' Grey said. ‘Message he left on my squawker mentioned he couldn't pay much for the letter looking since the client was a pro bono, but if I'd do the favor, he'd treat me to lunch. Went on to postulate he knew the best barbecue place on earth,' Grey said, having abandoned the cup-cars in favor of folding a napkin as though it was origami.

Saleda rubbed her temples. ‘Which brought you here
because?'

Grey blinked again. ‘Monty's. He knew Monty's. In Quantico. The only people who know about Monty's are local.'

‘So you knew to come to Quantico. But how did you know to ask the guys at the gate for Irv by name?' Teva asked.

‘I didn't,' Grey said, reaching into her pocket and holding up her phone. ‘My squawk box handed his voice to them.'

‘Right,' Irv said, shifting his weight on to the foot closest to the door. ‘Well, I'll just leave you all to it and get … um … back to … um …'

‘Yes, Irv, go. I can figure out how to deal with my expert FBI data analyst not knowing to buy a burner phone or come up with a convincing backstory later,' Saleda said.

Irv shrugged, palms up. ‘What can I say? If anybody needs me, I'll be in my computer cave, searching for government dissenters, ideological zealots, and all that general hate sort of stuff … and listening to some self-help tapes on reclaiming my underappreciated, in-office balls.'

Saleda turned to Jenna. ‘I need a word with you.'

Saleda's heels clicked on the tile as she walked out the door behind Irv.

Jenna glanced back at Grey, who was now pushing only one mug across the table and making a vroom sound with her lips.

‘Right behind you,' Jenna said.

Saleda nodded to Jenna to close the conference room door behind her. Jenna's supervisor crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. The way her high, sable-colored ponytail stretched her eyebrows up ever-so-slightly at their corners gave Saleda's already stern face a menacing kick.

‘We have twenty-one dead people whose families are being told right now their loved ones aren't coming home. For the tiny amount we have to go on to profile these terrorists, we haven't even come
close
to finishing the grainy, video-related guesswork on our plates, and another attack could be imminent. If Grey is kooky but can help us put these profiles together faster, then I'll bring her every coffee mug in my kitchen cabinets at home to play with while she does it. But if her quirks are going to be just one more chaotic, moving part of this circus I'm trying to make sense of—'

The wild metallic copper flashed in again. ‘Saleda, I understand your concerns. And believe me, I know this is more than unorthodox. If you'd rather I kick Grey out of here and we just work with one of the other departments' consulting forensic linguists on this, I wouldn't fault you,' Jenna said. She'd half-hoped that Saleda would meet Grey and immediately veto the idea of bringing her in as a consult.

But she's the best.

‘But you think we need her …' Saleda prompted.

Jenna nodded. ‘Grey's brain is a virtual repository of not just literary facts but of critical literary analysis by her and by others – a nearly limitless vault of author names and historical writing themes and styles. She's a great self-taught linguist, too. No other consulting linguist or literature expert could possibly know and understand as many books as she does
and
be able to approach the situation with quite the same type of critical eye.'

‘And by that you mean she has a way of looking at things differently, sees things others might miss,' Saleda said, uncrossing her arms. ‘The problem is, in this case, what if she is
actually
seeing things other people miss for a reason?'

Jenna shook her head emphatically. ‘She won't. She's schizotypal, falls on the autism spectrum, too. But she isn't schizophrenic or delusional.'

‘Can't schizotypals have schizophrenic episodes?'

‘It's rare. And there are warning signs one might be coming,' Jenna replied.

Saleda looked over Jenna's shoulder at the closed door, seeming to imagine the team and Grey behind it. ‘And you diagnosed her?'

Jenna nodded. ‘She was a patient. Years ago.'

‘Is she reliable? Can we trust her?'

Jenna smirked. ‘Trust her? Probably. Is she reliable? Definitely not. More impulsive than Dodd heading into a crime scene before the rest of us have even heard about it.'

‘Well, shit. What've we got to lose?' Saleda cocked her head toward the conference room. ‘Get in there and tell her welcome aboard.'

Jenna shrugged and turned the knob. Saleda was right. After all, she'd dealt with worse.

Irv mumbled to himself angrily as he logged into the main desktop in his office. Easy for them to say, he should know to use a burner phone and all that other MacGyver bullshit.

Instead of launching right into a search for literature-obsessed websites, the image of Grey Hechinger's rat-like face in his mind made him open the intense firewall program he had set up to monitor his network activity. Weird whim, but that batshit crazy librarian version of Luna Lovegood had him on edge. Watching the scan run always made him feel nice and in control even when everything else didn't.

Never telling Jenna that. She'd diagnose me with OCD, paranoid computer tech disorder, and procrastination by agitation-itis.

Irv pushed the chair back and kicked his feet up to the desk. They wanted him to think like Jason Bourne, they could stash him some burner phones and fake IDs in a locker in Shreveport. He'd done his best to get the job done, and he
had
found Grey Hechinger.

Not a field agent, never pretended to be one.

He took a swig from the open can of Dr Pepper on his L-shaped desk, forced himself to swallow. Of course it was warm and flat. Instead of spending that fifteen minutes of his break with his nice cold soda near the drink machine down the hall while he checked on the battle dragons he raised online from eggs to leviathans, he'd had to run to the front gate and put out fires with guards, then take Grey to the team and take a tongue lashing.

Irv glanced left over the desk at the free superheroes calendar he'd gotten from Comic-Con last year. Only a couple more weeks until vacation, and not a minute too soon. Keeping this obnoxious secret from the team wasn't quite like hiding plans for a surprise birthday party from someone. Time to figure out what to do next would be great, but just the break from making sure things stayed under wraps was needed more than anything.

Too bad vacation is more like prison than Fiji, this go 'round.

The scan results filled in the salmon-colored box on his screen in real-time, and Irv's eyes followed them.

All in a day's wor—

‘What the …' Irv said, yanking his feet down and sitting up with a jolt. He hit the pause button to freeze the log.

Hitting keys fast and scrolling up, his heart thundered. What in the name of the number 42 was this?

Not a single entry on the long list of files before him was flagged by the watchdog software he had set up to monitor all the systems in this headquarters office of the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Amidst all the other mundane traffic logs, a series of entries caught his attention. About thirty files a page, seven pages or so. Every one showing they were viewed under his login credentials.