is basically in the dark.
“Would you like to be brought into the light?” I ask.
“I would.”
“And can I count on you to keep everything I tell you in confidence, except the parts you don’t have to keep in confidence?”
“Not knowing what the hell you are talking about, I’ll say yes.”
I proceed to tell her everything I know, and everything I suspect, about the Timmerman case. I’m glad to do so, because I’m pretty far out on a limb here, and Cindy is really smart. If she thinks I’m way off base, she’ll tell me so and show me how.
She doesn’t. Instead she just says, “You could be right about this, Andy. I’ll call Corvallis; when do you want to meet?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she says.
“Boy, you FBI people are really sharp. Cindy, I would like to get moving on this before the jury delivers a verdict.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back.”
When I get off the phone, I update Laurie on what she said, and my request for a meeting tomorrow.
“If you get the meeting, I want to go with you,” she says.
“Why?”
“You’re starting to get into potentially dangerous territory, and dealing with danger is not exactly your forte.”
“Danger is my middle name,” I say.
“Robert is your middle name.”
“No, I changed it while you were in Wisconsin. I thought Danger would be more appealing to chicks.”
“I knew there was something exciting about you, I just couldn’t place it.”
I finally agree to let Laurie come with me to the meeting, because she’s smart and I value her opinion. Also, because I really hate saying no to Laurie. At least I think I would; I’ve never actually tried it.
Laurie tells me that she taught Waggy a trick, which she wants to show me. We go down to the basement, and she tells me to get him excited, which I do by throwing a tennis ball. He is firmly into his nut-job routine when she demonstrates the trick.
She puts her hand toward the floor, palm-down, and says, “Quiet time, Waggy. Quiet time.”
He doesn’t even bother to look up, just continues to roll around with the ball, in wild excitement.
Laurie makes her voice even sterner. “Quiet time, Waggy. Quiet time.”
Waggy yelps a few times as the ball rolls away from him, and then leaps on it, grabbing it in his mouth and violently shaking it and his head from side to side.
“It’s a great trick,” I say. “But you might want to perfect it before you do it on stage.”
“Do you want to watch a movie?” she asks, ignoring the dig.
“Did you teach Waggy to load a DVD also?”
“That’s for tomorrow,” she says.
We go back upstairs and watch
When we’re finished we go upstairs and make love, which on second thought is my favorite way to spend time, including the NFL.
Afterward Laurie looks at me, probably surprised that I haven’t fallen asleep within eight seconds. “What are you thinking?” she asks.
“That I want you to move back here and marry me.” These are words that I’ve said a thousand times, but they’re usually in my head, and never actually come out through my mouth. This time I involuntarily speak them, loud and clear, and even Tara looks over in surprise.
“Excuse me?” Laurie asks, meaning she didn’t hear me the first time or she wants to give me an easy out to pretend I never said it.
Since I have no way of retreating, I push ahead, rephrasing it as a question. “Will you move back here and marry me?”
Ten seconds that feel like ten years go by before she answers. “Is it all or nothing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if I wanted to, could I choose one without the other?”
Is it possible she’s considering this? Or even taking it seriously? “I don’t know; I didn’t think it through. But let’s see… you can choose one, but only if it’s the moving-back-here one.”
“Can I think about this?”
“Sure. I’ll go downstairs and have a sandwich.”
“I don’t mean think for a few minutes, Andy. I mean think it through.”
“Sure. No problem,” I say. “How long do you think it will take? Are we talking hours, or months?”
“Andy… ,” she admonishes.
“Okay, sorry. I don’t want to blow this. But if we meet with the FBI agent, can I introduce you as my fiancee?”
“No.”
“Laurie, he’s an FBI agent. We can’t just tell him that we’re sleeping together.”
“Then we’ll stop sleeping together,” she says.
“On the other hand, what business is it of his? What is he, the sex police? I’m sick of government intruding in the bedrooms of private citizens like us.”
“Andy…”
“What?”
“I love you. And thank you for asking me to marry you. Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
“I’ve tried to a bunch of times, but I could never quite get up the nerve. I always assumed you’d say no.”
“Maybe I will,” she says, softly.
“And maybe you won’t.”
CINDY CALLS ME at eight AM to tell me that Corvallis will see me this afternoon.
She will not be joining us, possibly because Corvallis knows we’ll be talking specifics, and she isn’t on the case. If she is upset or offended about it, she hides it well. It is simply how the bureau functions. I promise her that I’ll tell her everything that goes on.
Laurie still wants to go with me, and we agree that I will introduce her as my investigator, without mentioning that she is a law enforcement officer in Wisconsin. That might complicate matters for Corvallis, so there’s no point even going there.
This time Corvallis is all business. He seems to understand from last time that he can’t push me around or intimidate me, and he makes no effort to do so. He seems fine with Laurie being there, but he does not have any of his staff sit in with us.
“You’ve got the floor,” he says.
“Okay. Part of what I’m going to say I know for a fact, and part is what I believe. Just so you’ll know, regardless of what you do, I’m going to act as if what I believe is absolutely true. It’s the only way I can defend my client.”
I continue, “Walter Timmerman was working to develop synthetic DNA, which is why you were watching him so carefully. The implications of what he was doing were enormous, for reasons I don’t have to tell you.”
Corvallis doesn’t react at all to what I am saying; he just stares impassively and listens.
“He went to Charles Robinson, a friend of his, to help him benefit from his discovery. My assumption is that Robinson was going to use his connections in the energy industry to capitalize on what could be an incredible new
