Lost Cargo (13 page)

“I’ll bet she’s something,” Lisa said.

“She is,” he admitted, still on his cloud. “My best friend.”

“Well, that’s nice,” Lisa said in a too-calm voice, the kind of voice people use on somebody they think needs a serious reservation in a rubber room. “Well, I’m meeting Ian downtown, and we’re going to the closing, so don’t worry about anything, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Everything’s going to be fine. Really, Travis. Trust me on this.”

She closed the door, and that was that. He’d blown his chance to warn her about the building. Whatever he’d said didn’t come out right, and now she was gone, pulling out of the driveway. He didn’t say enough. He didn’t tell her about the horrific killing on Newark Street. Thinking about it made him feel rotten, so he did what he usually did when he felt bad. He opened the refrigerator and finished a coconut pie.

Lexie was waiting for him when he sat down in the crowded Hearth & Hook. Political cartoons and autographed photos of famous politicians covered the walls, and soft jazz played in the background. He wore his Scottish Games sweatshirt. Lexie wore a green wool sweater, thin silver earrings, and something smoky on her eyes. It intoxicated him to sit across from her again. Their legs brushed under the little table.

She didn’t touch her salad and seemed full of nervous energy. “You brought it?”

He handed her a nylon backpack. “Be careful.”

She slipped the gun into a large black canvas bag under the table and returned the backpack. “I took your advice,” she said, “and I made some phone calls.”

“Oh, yeah, to who?”

“The police. I reported Burke as a missing person, but as soon as I said he’d been planning to go to the Adirondacks and Montreal, their faces shut down. That was that. They told me to call his hotel and I said I didn’t know it and he didn’t go on the trip and they kept saying are you sure. And Dallas called.”

“Who’s Dallas?”

“My brother’s business partner. Of course Burke didn’t show up at his office and he stood up a client, so Dallas hit the roof. He’s coming by the house tonight to get some files.” She pushed the food around on her plate. “And I called a reporter.”

“A reporter?” he said, surprised.

“The police aren’t going to help me, so I called John Murray at the
Post
. He wrote the article about the missing cop.”

“What did he say?” he asked, taken aback that she’d left him out.

“We’re going to get together.”

“I’ll go with you. I have classes today, though. When are you talking to him?”

She picked at her salad. “Now, after I leave here.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised again. “Well, I’ll skip my classes.”

“No, no, don’t do that. It’s okay, really. I can go by myself.”

He stared at her while she looked away. She was still upset because they’d run yesterday. “You said you wanted to show me something,” he said.

She put a new cell phone on the table, opened the camera, and gave him a triumphant smile. The phone was full of shots of the giant in front of Buchanan House.

“You followed her. Damn it, Lexie.”

“She didn’t see me. I waited at the bus stop across from Buchanan House until she came out, and I got her face this time.” Then she took out a stack of prints. “The back of her in the phone matches the first group of pictures. Everything matches. I got her.”

The images shocked him. The giant in front of the lobby doors, traffic moving by in a blur. More shots of her near the Metro with sunlight on her huge face. A dozen shots that nobody could argue about, and in most of them she was staring at Lexie.

“Yeah, you got her all right,” he said. “She knows it, too. She’s looking at you.”

Lexie shook her head. “She didn’t see me. I was in a crowd waiting for the bus.”

He stared at the pictures, half-listening, deeply worried.

“I need all the pictures in case the reporter wants to see them later on,” she said. “I need the picture card from the camera you found in the woods, the one with the original photos of the black triangle.”

“He’ll laugh you out the door, Lexie.”

“I have shots of body parts on the sidewalk after she murdered that guy.”

“He’ll just say you Photoshopped them. The minute you walk in with a
UFO
—”

“I have to start somewhere. I need the card.”

“It’s at my house,” he said, not because he thought it would do any good, but because he was ready to do anything for her.

“I’ll get it from you tonight,” she said.

So she expected him to stay there again. “When should I come over?” he asked.

She toyed with her silverware. “I’ll call you.”

I’ll call you
. He left, feeling like a lost dog. And the picture card wasn’t in the Nikon after all. He emptied his desk drawers and went through his laundry, tossing jeans and shirts all over the floor. Not there. It had to be in Monroe’s apartment. When he ran downstairs, though, his roommate had locked the door to the basement.

Then his cell phone rang. Maybe it was Lexie. He could hear the murmur of voices in the background.

“Travis,” his mother said, “will you run by my house and take the roast out of the freezer?”

“Yeah, sure. You’re at the Convention Center?”

“Yes, all day, and Neil and Ann are coming over tonight.” Her voice was cold. “And another thing. Gram’s gun is missing from the den. Do you know anything about that?”

“Her gun’s missing? You mean the old World War I gun?”

“Yes, missing. It’s not in the cabinet. If you took it, Travis—”

“What would I want an old gun for?”

She drew an irritated breath. “Well, if we can’t find it, I’m going to have to report it to the police. Somebody might have broken into the house.”

“Gram probably moved it and forgot where she put it.”

“If somebody stole it, they’re in for a nice surprise. The firing pin is missing.”

Blood rushed to his head. “The firing pin is missing?”

“Your grandfather got rid of the firing pin when your father was a child. He didn’t want a shooting accident. Remember the roast.”

Travis hung up. So the gun was useless. They’d spent all that time in the woods like fools, thinking the gun would protect them. They could have died on the bank of the creek.

The four walls, the furniture, the ticking clock pressed in on him. He tried her cell phone, but she’d turned it off, of course, because she was with the reporter. Then he texted and called her house in case she’d gone there first, but the rings went to voicemail.

Feeling like a stalker, he rang the paper and got the reporter’s voicemail. “This is John Murray,” the reporter said in a pleasant, measured voice. “I’m not able to take your call right now. Please leave me a message.”

He started to speak, thought better of it, hung up, and called the city news room.

“Is John Murray there today?” he asked. “I want to drop off something for him.”

“Yeah, somewhere,” a man answered. “I think he’s at lunch.”

Travis ran outside and hailed a cab. They were probably still talking to each other. Maybe he could catch them in front of the building.

The cab driver argued with a talk radio show and kept a reclining Happy Buddha on the dashboard. “He helps me with the traffic,” the cabbie explained good-naturedly, waving at the gridlock. The Happy Buddha needed a bra and wasn’t doing his job because they hit street construction and got stuck behind a Metrobus going ten miles an hour. Every car in the city seemed to be on Connecticut Avenue. Office workers on their lunch hour flooded the crosswalks at Farragut Square.

The cab finally swung into a glass and granite canyon of office buildings and reached the Washington Post. No sight of Lexie. Maybe he was too late. Travis peeled off the fare, ran through the cars, took the steps two at a time, and crossed the lobby to a man who looked like an employee.

“I’m trying to find John Murray,” he began.

“Right behind you.” The man pointed to someone on his way to the elevator. Lexie wasn’t with him. Damn it, but maybe she’d said where she was going.

“John Murray,” Travis called and set across the lobby.

The reporter turned around and lifted an eyebrow. In his thirties, good-looking, shaved head, jeans, steel gray shirt and steel gray tie, dressed like somebody in advertising. Travis hated the guy on sight.

“Travis Maguire,” Travis started, feeling like a stalker again. “My friend Lexie Collins, you know, the one with the missing brother, said she was meeting you today, and I’m trying to catch up with her, and—”

The reporter held up a hand. “Wait, wait, wait a second. Who are you again?”

“Travis Maguire, a friend of Lexie Collins, and she said that she was meeting you today.”

“I’m not meeting her,” the reporter said.

Travis felt his heart race.

“I don’t have an appointment with her.” The reporter raised an eyebrow again, stepped into the crowded elevator, and gazed past Travis while the doors closed.

Travis stared at the lobby.

So she lied. Why?

Even the sunlight seemed to be mocking him, the great pretense of the day written into everything he could see outside the plate glass windows. He was in the wrong place in the wrong part of the city, a schmuck worried about a girl who’d blown him off with a tall tale. He could see her again, refusing to meet his eyes. He’d been so smitten with her that he didn’t see it coming. An idiot, that’s what he was. Worse than an idiot.

But the firing pin was missing and the gun wouldn’t fire.

Maybe she was still at the Hearth & Hook, reading the paper, taking her time. She lived nearby. Or maybe she was in the same shopping center, in another store. Maybe he would run into her if he went back to Cleveland Park.

Low on cab fare, he took the Metro. He sent another text on the way up the escalator and then paced the blocks of restaurants and coffee bars, peering in windows. Inside the Hearth & Hook sat two lovers, a lush young brunette in a red sweater holding hands with a gray-haired man, but the other tables were empty. Lunchtime was over. The day was wearing on.

No Lexie. Travis stared up the avenue. The traffic had thinned out. One lone figure wove through the crosswalk, Harley, a homeless man who always wore a Harley Davidson shirt. Harley disappeared behind the library.

Travis felt his stomach tighten like a fist. Why would she lie? They’d established a relationship. They were close. He’d slept on the couch in her bedroom. Her damned best friend. He almost got killed with her.

He stared down the block at Buchanan House. Behind its walls the Rock Creek Park wilderness spread as far as he could see. Thoughts about Lexie formed like thunderclouds in his mind. It was obvious. She’d taken the gun in the woods to look for her brother.

T
ravis stared into the trees. She must have been planning all day how to manipulate him out of the gun without saying a word about her brother. His face burned. He’d sat there for an hour with her at the Hearth & Hook while she rearranged her silverware and avoided his eyes. She could have been upfront about it. He was her friend, not her keeper.

But he wouldn’t have given her the gun if he’d known she was going back in the woods. It was that simple.

“Well, it won’t fire,” he said out loud, first to her, as though she was standing there, and then to himself. “So you’ve got to find her.” He looked back at Buchanan House. Nobody appeared to be watching him. The sky had grown an ugly gray and he could smell rain. Go as far as the creek, he decided, and stop. Stay safe. Stay in sight of the avenue.

Then he saw a flash of blonde in the trees.

It had to be Lexie. She was coming down the path, or heading into the woods, and if he hurried he could catch her. His timing was a stroke of luck.

Relieved, he went through the hedge, followed the shady path down the rocky slope, waded across the creek, and climbed up the far bank, where he stopped, panting. Where did she go? The woods opened up before him without any sight of her. Ravines, mysterious mounds and rotting logs covered the forest floor, buried under an endless carpet of brown leaves. Wind rushed through the scruffy cedars growing along the gorge. The sky was about to rip right open.

The flash of blonde appeared again, deeper in the woods. His heart leaped. Lexie. He pulled his coat close and climbed up the next hill, breathing hard and making too much noise, but when he lumbered down the other side, he’d lost her again. Countless trees spread over the hills until they faded together in a gray haze.

The wind gusted. Something blonde appeared again where the creek wound out of sight.

Was she in the rocks? Huffing, he slid down in the gorge into a nightmarish jumble of lichen-spotted boulders that jutted out of the banks like gigantic teeth. He was too big, and it was hard for him to crawl through the rocks. Tangled weeds that were almost invisible in the fading light snared his shoes and scratched his skin. He began to think about what he would say to her when his heart fell. The ghost he’d been chasing had snagged itself in the bramble. The wind fluttered through a yellow plastic bag and sent it sailing down the creek.

He stared at the dismal woods. He’d never intended to come this far.

Call her. The thought steadied his nerves. Maybe she’d answer this time. He reached for the cell phone and touched the strange device he’d stolen from the black triangle. He’d forgotten about it in his rush to find her.

The heavy object gleamed in the half light. For a split second he thought about cracking the thing open to see what was inside it, but he couldn’t make himself destroy it. In frustration he pulled on the hook and rapped on the metal. The hook melted without warning, spread like flowing mercury, and gripped his fingers. A miniature image glimmered over the surface and formed a diagram.

Shocked, he tried to pull the device off his hand, but it held fast.

It was showing some kind of a map. His pulse raced. Rock Creek Park. The creek he’d just crossed, and the path, and the gorge with individual rocks and trees. The shining diagram moved along the ground to a humanlike symbol with a blue sun in the chest.