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And Jill Moyers was nowhere on VICAP.

The implications stunned Mike. Either police incompetence was more deeply rooted than his own experience led him to believe, or something far worse was happening. He tried to call Chris again, but his telephone was still switched off. He left another voicemail, asking Chris to call if he could. Then he closed his laptop and paced the airport walkways until his flight was called.

Chapter Eight

Julissa looked at her watch in the dark. It was four in the morning. She was alone in Chris Wilcox’s motel room. She did the math and realized she’d been asleep about sixteen hours.

That made sense.

She hadn’t slept much since she’d learned about Allison. Ben’s call came while she was in a traffic jam on the lower deck of Interstate 35 on her way to work in Austin. She had calmly pulled off at the nearest exit ramp, parked in front of a bagel shop across from the University of Texas campus, and had tried to call Allison at home. The man who answered the phone identified himself as Detective Gonzales, Galveston Police Department. She’d told him she was Allison’s sister, that she wanted to talk to Allison. He asked her where she was, if she was in Galveston. When she answered, he told her to stay in Austin; they’d call her. He took her number and hung up.

Then she drove to Galveston.

Her phone battery died somewhere between Austin and Houston. Too many calls, to too many answering machines. Ben didn’t pick up. Her parents’ cheerful voicemail said they were en route to Istanbul. She pulled off Highway 71 in La Grange and bought a charger and adapter for her car’s cigarette lighter at the WalMart on the outskirts of town. As she drove, she called and left messages. She called her sister’s phone number and a different detective answered but she didn’t quite catch his name. Kentwood, or maybe Ken Wood. She got back on I-10 and headed for Houston, hitting ninety on the empty stretches. She’d stopped once in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant to call Dave Chan. They’d been at AMD’s embedded security division since graduate school. Dave was technically her supervisor, but they ran their division like partners.

Sitting on the second bed in Chris Wilcox’s motel room, with her knees pulled up to her chest, she couldn’t quite recall what she’d told Dave or how many days ago that had been. He was the first person she’d tried to call who not only picked up the phone, but who actually spoke with her. She was pretty sure she’d lost it. She remembered sobbing and telling him she didn’t know where she was. Allison was dead, maybe. She had to say maybe because it wouldn’t be real until she saw her sister’s body.

“Take as much time as you need. I’ll take care of everything here. And we’ll do anything to help you.”

She’d said thank you. Bizarrely, she’d almost told him that she loved him before she hung up, which was odd, because he was just a friend. Maybe it was the shock. Or just the gratitude that someone finally talked to her. She pulled out of the Cracker Barrel parking lot and drove the rest of the way to Galveston, crying and banging on her Acura’s steering wheel.

If almost telling Dave that she loved him was bizarre, the next three days were surreal. She didn’t have perfect recall, but now it seemed she spent most of the time in her car or on the phone. The police wouldn’t let her up to Allison’s apartment. She watched from the street as the marked and unmarked police cars and forensic vans came and left. She went to the main station and walked in, asking for Detective Gonzales. She waited half an hour and was finally told Detective Gonzales was not in the building, but that he would call her. So she drove back to Allison’s place and just watched the front. Her head was thumping with a headache that part of her realized was probably related to dehydration. She had a licensed Sig Sauer match pistol in her glove compartment and at some point in the last three days she had transferred it to her lap. What could she say? She was a twenty-nine-year-old computer scientist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., but she was also a Texan and she liked to shoot handguns. But she had never held a gun for comfort before that night in the car.

She stood from the bed and went to wash her face. She didn’t like what she saw in the bathroom mirror. Her blouse was wrinkled but the wool skirt was holding up. She took off her nylons and threw them away. She put some of Chris’s toothpaste onto the tip of her finger and did the best job she could at brushing. She wanted to take a shower and go back to bed. Instead, she found her car keys on the bedside table and the Sig Sauer under her pillow, and started towards the door of the motel room. Chris had taped a note to the door.
Julissa: You were asleep when I woke. I’ll probably be on the beach across the street. Chris.
His cell number was beneath his name. She left the room and went to her car, locking the pistol in the glove compartment. Then she walked over the motel’s gravelly parking lot and crossed the empty street. Chris was on a park bench on the sea wall; he turned at the sound of her high heels on the pavement.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she said, and raised her left hand. “Sorry about that. You probably think I’m nuts.”

“It’s not a problem. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”

“Thanks.”

She sat on the bench next to him and looked out at the waves. They rolled in and broke along the sides of two jetties made of granite blocks. The surface of the Gulf was black except for where the waves broke white and foaming on the rocks.

“You been up long?”

“Four or five hours. I took a walk on the beach and then I was just sitting here. I guess I’m awake for the rest of the day.”

“Up for a drive with me?” she asked.

“Sure. Where to?”

“WalMart. I think I’ve been wearing this suit four or five days. And these shoes are getting to be a pain in the ass.”

She extended her knees and held her feet up, soles pointing to the ocean.

“Those don’t look like the best.” Chris pointed southwest. “I think there’s a WalMart that way. Couple miles down the seawall.”

They drove in her car.

Chris told her he’d gotten several messages from his private investigator, who would be landing in Houston in a few hours. On his walk, Chris had stopped in the lobby of the Hotel Galvez and had reserved a block of rooms for them for their meeting. She nodded.
 

They parked in the mostly empty lot and walked to the store. Workers in blue vests ran floor-buffing machines through the harshly lit, empty aisles.

“You grow up in Texas?” Chris asked.

“Near Austin. I went to U.T. and then did my doctorate at M.I.T. It was just an accident I came back. AMD recruited me while I was still in grad school.”

“What do you do?”

“I design embedded security circuits for microprocessors. I work for AMD but right now I’m on loan to the NSA.”

“Codes and stuff?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

They walked to the toiletries aisle. She put shampoo and a toothbrush into her cart, then a razor. She went alone to the clothing section and picked a few simple outfits, some shoes. She thought a moment about the larger picture of what she was doing, then decided not to waste her time. She supposed the bottom line was that she trusted Chris Wilcox. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have done it while she was asleep in his motel room. He’d told her his story and she’d believed it.

And he was the only person in Galveston with a coherent plan.

It never occurred to her to let him go back to his life while she went back to hers. Their lives had intersected, however randomly, and now he was inviting her to join his private revenge club. Allison wouldn’t have blinked.

She spent less than ten minutes picking things out, then came back to the front of the store and walked until she found Chris in the magazine section. He folded that morning’s paper and put it under his arm along with a world map rolled in a plastic tube. He also had dry erase markers and a little plastic tub of colored pushpins.

“For the meeting today?”

“Yeah.”

He followed her to the register.

They couldn’t check in to the rooms at the Hotel Galvez until noon, so they went back to Chris’s motel. She took a long shower and washed her hair. Her Sig Sauer was on the toilet tank, within arm’s reach of the shower. She had a feeling that for the rest of her life, she would know exactly how far it was from reach. She stepped out of the shower and toweled off, wondering how many years would pass before she stopped discovering the daily consequences of Allison’s death. Chris might be able to educate her on that.

She dressed in new denim shorts and a tank top, then yanked the tags off her sandals and put them on. She came out with a towel around her hair and tucked the pistol back into her purse.

Chris was sitting on his bed with his laptop computer open.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Not a problem. Your phone rang, though.” He nodded at her phone, plugged into its charger on the floor near the air conditioner. “I didn’t answer it.”

She flipped through the menu to see missed calls, expecting to see the number of her parents’ international cell phone, or Ben, or Dave Chan. Instead it was a number she didn’t recognize.

“Galveston’s area code is 409, right?”

“I think so.”

“Then this must be the cops, finally.”

She redialed the number and put the phone on speaker. She held a finger to her lips and looked at Chris. He nodded. Someone picked up on the third ring.

“This is Timothy Spaulding.”

“Julissa Clayborn. Someone at this number called me.”

“Julissa—thanks for calling back. I’m the district attorney for Galveston County and I called you with regard to the investigation of your sister’s death.”

“Killing.”

“Sorry. I hope I didn’t call too early.”

“I was up.”

“Good.”

They could hear papers being moved on a desk, then the unmistakable sound of someone sipping hot coffee.

“I was hoping you’d come in for an initial meeting to give us background information. I know it’s a hard time, but the detective said you were in town.”

“I’ve been in town since the day she was found. No one wanted to talk to me.”

“Believe me, that was an oversight. We apologize. You can imagine we’re a bit overwhelmed.”

“I can imagine. Look, where should I meet you, and when?”

“How about this afternoon?”

“I can’t, I’m busy,” she said. “How about tomorrow morning?”

“That works.”

“Where?”

He gave her the address of his office in the new courthouse annex.

“All right, Mr. Spaulding. I’ll see you then.”

She hung up and tossed the phone into her purse.

“Why not meet him today?” Chris asked.

“First things first. Your meeting sounds more likely to get somewhere.”

He half-smiled and stood from the bed, closing his laptop. “I hope so.”

Chapter Nine

Just before seven in the morning, and prior to the shift change at the industrial shipyard, Seawolf Park Road on Pelican Island was quiet. Aaron Westfield was parked in a rented Crown Victoria on the grass shoulder near the gate to the submarine park. He checked himself in the mirror on the underside of the sun visor. His nose was swollen and slightly crooked, but his sunglasses hid the bruising around his eyes. He was wearing a black suit with a pressed white shirt and a cheap red tie. He carried a Navy-issue sidearm on a shoulder holster that would be visible if he slid back his jacket’s lapel. He unlocked the glove compartment, put his wallet inside, and picked up the FBI badge in its leather folding case. The badge was a moderately priced fake, but most people had never seen a real one anyway. The Crown Victoria was a more expensive prop, at ninety dollars a day, but his ’81 van would have given him away faster than the badge’s shortcomings.

He started the car and drove back along the two-lane road that ran through the mesquite brush. Gated roadways led off to the industrial docks and offshore rig repair yards that lay out of sight on the other side of several hundred yards of blighted scrubland.

He passed a series of painted wooden signs with colored pennants stapled around the sides:
Pelican Island Bait & Tackle. Live Shrimp. Cold Beer. Ice
.

Westfield could see white oil tanks and crane towers. The superstructure of an offshore oil rig rose over the low trees. He approached a guardhouse in the middle of the Newpark Marine Fabricators entrance drive. Farther down the drive, a sign prohibited smoking, and beyond that, another sign advised that hard hats were required. Westfield had a hard hat on the passenger seat.

He held his badge out to the guard when he stopped next to the booth. Not a Hollywood flip-and-close: he held the badge out long enough for the guard to lean out the window and actually read his name.

“Yes sir?”

“I was hoping to see Mr. Broussard, get him to let me talk to the shift that’s just coming off. They’re not in trouble or anything.”