Faith shrugged to mimic him. “What can I say? When it’s there, it’s there.”
They walked up the front steps together. “I never thought I’d see the day when Faith Siobhan Kelly would cut off all her hair, though.”
“It’s comfortable.”
Sean laughed. “I guess if the Bureau likes it-”
“Sean Micheal Kelly.” She gave the middle name the Gaelic pronunciation of
“Tucson, remember?”
“I remember Tucson. What are you doing here?”
“Don’t you read your e-mail anymore?”
“I’ve had a very busy couple of days this week. I had a…” She swallowed back the words. She couldn’t talk about Department Thirty and Leon Bankston to her brother. “…project to work on,” she finished.
“Ah.” Sean made quotation marks with his fingers. “ ‘Special projects’ for DOJ.”
“Yes, sir. That’s me. I’m all about special projects.” She mimicked his finger quotes.
“Smart-ass.”
“Learned from the best.” She elbowed him in the ribs. That was as good as a hug for the two of them.
“Well, anyway, I e-mailed you yesterday and told you I was coming to town.”
“What brings you this way?” Faith asked. “Homeland Security in the heartland?”
They reached the front door, and as Faith opened it, Hendler came out, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, carrying his briefcase. “See you two later,” he said, pecked Faith quickly on the cheek, and jogged to the Toyota. A minute later he was gone.
Faith and Sean walked into the house. Sean took a look at the newspapers on the floor, a few stray items of clothing here and there, cups and glasses still on the table. The place smelled musty.
“Man, sister, you never learn,” Sean said. “Still can’t pick up after yourself.”
“Don’t start, you. I have a lot more interesting things to do than worry about whether there’s a place for everything and everything in its place.”
“I believe you.” Sean sat down on Faith’s paisley-patterned couch. “I drove straight through. I’m sort of on leave from ICE, and I picked up a little freelance job.”
Faith pulled off her green headband and tossed it onto the dining room table. She wiped her sweaty face with a towel. “On leave? What, you mean on vacation?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s twice you’ve said ‘sort of.’ ”
“Don’t worry about it.” He looked at her, his blue-green eyes finding her darker green ones. “It’s good to see you, Faith.”
Faith nodded. “Yeah.” She wiped her face again. “Look at us. One or two-line e-mails now and then, a call on Thanksgiving, not seeing each other for three years. Once upon a time, neither of us could get rid of the other.”
Sean looked surprised. “Boy, that’s deep. I guess hanging out with the Bureau has made you sensitive or something.”
Faith threw the towel at him. “You are so full of shit.”
“Always have been.” Sean kicked off his shoes.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Faith said. “You want some breakfast?”
“No, I still don’t like to eat in the mornings.”
“Good, because neither do I.”
“You got anything to drink around here, though?”
“I made coffee already,” Faith said, her voice trailing down the hall. “If you want juice, I think there’s some in the fridge. Check the expiration date on the bottle before you drink it.”
Sean was already on his feet, working his way to the kitchen. “Not quite what I had in mind,” he muttered. He heard the bathroom door close and the shower start as he opened the refrigerator.
“Here we go,” he said, and pulled out a bottle of Harp ale. “Good Irish beer. Way to go, baby sister.”
Half an hour later, Faith came back into the living room, fully dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and tennis shoes. Since she no longer had a supervisor to report to locally, she dressed how she wanted for each workday. Today was mainly going to be a day spent in front of her computer working on Leon Bankston’s details, so she’d dressed down.
She found Sean fast asleep on the couch. She smiled. He did say he’d driven straight through from Tucson, after all. The smile faltered a bit when she saw the three empty bottles of Harp on the coffee table.
She looked pensively at him for a moment.
She scribbled him a note, tucked it under the edge of one of the Harp bottles, and headed for the door. She stopped with her hand on the knob and looked back at her brother.
She remembered that line her grandfather had always used, the one about any Irish cop worth his salt liking a good drink now and again. Faith looked at the empty beer bottles. Even her grandfather and father had never drunk three bottles of beer in less than half an hour, before seven o’clock in the morning, to her knowledge.
Faith never drank hard liquor herself, only beer or wine, and never more than three drinks at one sitting. She hadn’t been what she considered drunk since her junior year in college, when she woke up in a strange bed with a strange guy beside her. Given her family history, Faith became a “lightweight” in a profession where social drinking was common and expected.
She’d never thought of Sean as having a problem with it. But then, she and Sean hadn’t been around each other much as adults.
She closed the door quietly behind her and headed out into a light mist.
7
SEAN SLEPT UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, while a plains thunderstorm raged outside, thunder cracking like a whip and rain pounding the house like a demon begging to be let inside. Getting up, he read Faith’s note, blinking at the three Harp bottles. He very carefully took them to the kitchen trash and put them in, taking care not to shatter them.
He retrieved his duffel and laptop from the Jeep, getting soaked in the process. Then he showered, shaved, and put on clean clothes. His sister didn’t seem to have a laundry basket or hamper, just a large pile in the corner of her bedroom. Grimacing at the mess, he took his clothes and some of hers, dark colors mostly, to the washing machine and started a load. Then he went to the wooden kitchen table-not as nice as his, but a good piece of work nonetheless-and powered up his laptop.
He was still online when Faith came home at a little after five. He saw her eyes fall on the coffee table first, then on him. “Hey,” Faith said.
“Hey,” Sean said. “Busy day?”
“Special projects,” she reminded him.
“Aha. Do you have plans for tonight? Are you seeing the Bureau?”
“He has a name, Sean.”
“What is it again?”
“Scott. His name is Scott.”
“Right. So are you?”
Faith dropped her purse and briefcase on the couch. “Hadn’t planned on it. What would you like to do while you’re here?”
“I need to find a hooker.”
Faith stopped in her tracks, staring at him. He wasn’t smiling.
“A hooker,” Faith said.
“You know what that means?” Sean said.
“I know what it means. They don’t have hookers in Arizona? Besides, you were always the guy who got all the dates.”
“Very funny. Not for me, thank you. The freelance job I mentioned? I need to talk to this woman, who I believe is a hooker in Oklahoma City.”
“You must be kidding.”
“Nope.” He turned back to his laptop. “You know where Shields Boulevard is?”
“Southeast part of the city. Why?”
“That’s where I’ll start. That seems to be a starting point for a lot of the working girls.”
“How did you find that out? You’re in this town less than twelve hours and you know where to find a prostitute?”
Sean tapped the computer. “The Internet, sister. If you’re patient, you could find almost anything.”
“You want me to go with you?” Faith said.
“No,” Sean said. “This is a low-profile job. I looked it up on Mapquest, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. It’s sort of a ‘special project.’ ”
Faith, heading down the hall, flipped him off without turning around. Sean grinned.
Sean waited until after dark to set out. He stopped by a copy shop and made an enlarged copy of the photo of Daryn and the taller woman with the stringy hair. Then he carefully cropped Daryn out of the picture as much as he could, until all that could be seen of her was her arm where the other woman’s was linked through it.
Following Mapquest, he made his way to Interstate 44, then to Interstate 40 just south of downtown Oklahoma City. He took the downtown exit, but instead of turning north toward the skyline, he went south. He crossed a long bridge, then slowed as the street became Shields Boulevard.
Sean had read online that Oklahoma City’s prostitution district had once been along Lincoln Boulevard, just north of the state capitol. Then it was cleaned up in the eighties, most of the ratty pay- by-the-hour motels being bulldozed, replaced by new state government buildings and legitimate businesses, parks, and landscaping. A great triumph of urban renewal, especially since the location in the shadow of the state capitol had been a major civic embarrassment for years.
But, as with any city of size, the scene searched for a new location and was reborn on the south side, along a strip of motels on Shields Boulevard, with additional street corners being worked a mile or so away on South Robinson Avenue.
It was still raining lightly, the streets slick, as Sean drove the Jeep slowly south on Shields. He’d never seen the area during the day, but at night it looked dreary: the cheap motels, the liquor
