Nate looked over. “We get a job?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s the kind we don’t get paid for, isn’t it?”
“Just get my car out of the garage and be ready to go in ten minutes.”
“Where are we going?” Nate said as he swung his legs off the hood and stood up.
“You’re driving me to the airport,” Quinn said.
CHAPTER
STEPPING OUT OF THE TERMINAL AT BUSH INTERCONtinental Airport in Houston was like walking into a wall of gelatin. The air was so thick with humidity it felt like it was pushing Quinn back, daring him to take another step forward.
He glanced at his watch: 3:15 p.m. But that was L.A. time. Here in Texas, it was already two hours later, 5:15. End of the workday, for some anyway.
Houston seemed as good a place as any to start looking for Jenny. It wasn’t just Congressman Guerrero’s hometown, it was hers, too. If she was on personal leave, then perhaps she had gone home.
Quinn picked up a Lexus sedan from the rental agency, then headed toward the city. When he reached Loop 610, he took it west for a while, then south as the big looping freeway circumnavigated the metropolitan area. He got off near Memorial Park and headed west again, this time along Woodway Drive.
He’d done a MapQuest search before he’d left Los Angeles, and had printed out directions to the address Steiner had given him.
Not far from the freeway, he turned right and found himself in an upscale neighborhood. Quinn guessed a mix of middle class and upper middle class. No question the homes were more expensive than your typical government employee could afford. Of course, this was Texas, not L.A. Everything was cheaper here. And, as many were fond of saying, bigger. Few of the houses looked like they were less than two thousand square feet, while many looked to be more than three. Many were multilevel, with BMWs, Mercedeses, and large SUVs in the driveways.
These were people on the rise. Future company presidents and board members who would one day be trading up to even bigger homes with larger lots and more square footage and maybe even a guesthouse in back. Some would suffer heart attacks before they reached sixty, while others would become strangers to their own families as they spent more and more time at the office, if they hadn’t fallen into that trap already.
Quinn found the address he was looking for tucked back in an area where all the roads sounded like names of old blues songs: Lazy River Lane, Old Bayou Drive, Sweet Jasmine Street. The house was a sprawling one-story on White Magnolia Lane. Like many of the homes in the neighborhood, it was made of brick, with white wooden doors and window frames.
An asphalt driveway curved up to the house, then back to the street again seventy feet farther up the road. There were no sidewalks, so Quinn pulled the Lexus onto the grass shoulder and parked. As he got out he heard the buzz of what sounded like an army of insects. He expected to be attacked at any second, but for the moment the bugs seemed content to keep their distance.
As he started walking up the driveway, he realized that if this had been Jenny’s place, she wasn’t here any longer. There were bikes on the grass. Kids’ bikes, preteen size. A portable basketball hoop and backboard were set up in a wide spot of the drive near the garage. Though he hadn’t seen Jenny in at least eight months, she had been childless then. And if the toys weren’t enough to convince him a family now lived here, there was the car that was parked in the driveway. A minivan, dark green and well maintained. A soccer mom car. It had the look of a vehicle that got a lot of use.
He continued walking toward the front door. As he did he saw a young girl standing at the living room window, looking out at him. He put her age at around eight. She had blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and was dressed in jeans and a lavender T-shirt with a cartoon squirrel on the front. She stared at him for a moment, then turned and ran away.
By the time Quinn reached the doorstep, the front door was already open. A woman stood just inside beyond the threshold, a utilitarian smile on her face. She couldn’t have been more than forty, and had the same blond hair as the girl in the window. No ponytail for Mom, though. Her hair was down, stopping an inch above her shoulders.
“Can I help you?” she said, a trace of suspicion in her voice.
“Probably not,” Quinn said. He smiled as if embarrassed, in an attempt to set her at ease. “I was actually looking for the woman I thought lived here. Apparently either I got my addresses mixed up or she moved.”
The woman looked at him for a second, impassive, then her face relaxed. “Must be a mix-up. We’ve been here over ten years.”
Steiner had said the address might be old, but not that old.
Quinn nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said.
“What’s her name?” she asked. “Maybe she’s one of my neighbors.”
“Tracy,” he said, heeding the warning that flashed in his mind, and making up a name on the spot. “Tracy Jennings. Do you know her?”
The woman’s eyes widened just enough for Quinn to notice. The name was not the one she’d been expecting. But she recovered quickly. “Sorry. I don’t know who that is.”
“It’s all right. I shouldn’t have bothered you. Thanks for your time.”
“No problem,” the woman said.
