him drawing closer-he was a whisper of breath, a rustle of cloth in the silence, a warm, humansize hole in the blackness. A fragment of lyric started going through her mind: Closer. Come a little bit closer. Let me whisper-
Now: she sprang forward, flailing with both fists, swinging, missing, swinging again and again, striking something soft, then something hard and metallic. Her fingers closed around a…a camera…? he was wearing a camera on his-
No, goggles. Night vision. Of course. She yanked them off, swung them where his head had been. He ducked under the blow, came at her low, drove his head into her belly, knocking her backward. She drew her legs up, tried to kick him away, but he was too close, she didn’t have the leverage. She swung at him again; he grabbed her wrists and pinned her to the mattress.
Now he was on top of her, lying on her, his body pressed against her and his face only inches from hers. She sensed him lowering his head; she knew that he meant to kiss her. She willed herself to go limp, waited until she could feel his breath warm and coppery against her face, then brought her head up and forward with all the strength she could muster.
5
“He must have been a tiny little guy,” commented Pender. He and Sid were standing before the altar of the Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo, better known as the Carmel Mission, looking down at the sarcophagus of Father Junipero Serra, which was barely five feet long.
“And yet this simple, humble monk, this ‘tiny little guy,’ as you so eloquently phrased it, was responsible for the genocide of tens of thousands of California Indians.”
A family of tourists had entered the cool stone chapel and were gathering around the sarcophagus; Pender decided to egg Sid on. “Now, now, Sidney. Surely that’s a tad harsh.”
“One of the greatest mass murderers in the history of the Catholic Church,” said Sid. “Which is no mean company to keep. And now they’re talking about beatifying the evil little dwarf. I’m sorry, it just pisses me off.”
After the chapel, the Moorish bell tower. Pender took advantage of the elevation to call Dorie’s number; he tried it again as they strolled through the gardens behind the church. “I don’t understand it-she said she’d be home all day.”
“So you keep saying.”
“Maybe her phone’s out of order.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she took one look at you, decided to head for the hills.”
“You’ve always been jealous of my success with the ladies,” said Pender.
“Yeah, that and your wardrobe. Look, if you want to drive by her house, see if she’s okay, quit nudging and just say so.”
“Good idea,” said Pender, as if he hadn’t been dropping hints to that effect since they’d left Pebble Beach an hour earlier.
“Where’s Mary?” asked Pender, as they pulled into Dorie’s driveway, Sid behind the wheel of their rented car.
“Mary Cassatt-Dorie’s car. Roadmaster wagon. Should be in the carport.”
“Let’s review, shall we?” Sid shifted into park, but did not cut the engine. “Lady’s not answering her phone and her car’s not in the driveway. What does that tell us, pard?”
But Pender had already unbuckled his seat belt. “Be right back.”
“It tells us the lady is
Pender rang the bell, tried the front door, which was locked, then checked the windows for signs of forced entry as he walked around the side of the house. The back door was also locked. Okay, so maybe she flaked, he told himself. Or maybe it’s me, maybe I read too much into it when she said she’d be home all day.
But as he continued past the studio (once a sleeping porch, now glassed in and shuttered) and around the far side of the house, where a narrow, musty-smelling cement walkway was hedged in by a high board fence overgrown with ivy, keeping his eyes trained on the ground for blood spatters, footprints, whatever, he almost walked smack into the studio door, which had swung open, blocking the walkway.
Pender stuck his head through the doorway. Dim light, shutters closed, smell of paint, turpentine, linseed oil. “Dorie?”
No answer. He entered the studio, glanced around. Everything looked about the same as it had last night, when she’d given him the grand tour. The canvases she had intended to gesso today were still stacked against her workbench, and her plein air gear-portable easel, folding stool, walking stick-was leaning against the wall, just inside the door.
“Dorie?” he called again, mostly for form’s sake. He was pretty sure she wasn’t home-the house just
6
The climate inside the DOJ-AOB was so oppressively perfect that toward the end of her second day closeted with the mountain of redacted transaction records, Linda Abruzzi would have killed for a little fresh air or sunlight- even a rainstorm-and was beginning to entertain Count of Monte Cristo fantasies. I could tap on the wall in Morse, she thought, make contact with some other poor office-bound wretch-maybe we could tunnel to freedom together.
Around four o’clock, as she was washing her hands in the ladies’ room after using the facilities, Linda asked her reflection in the stainless steel mirror over the sink (for security reasons, there were no glass mirrors in the building) to remind her again why she was putting herself through this, when she could have been kicking back at her parents’ new house out on Long Island, being waited on hand and foot by her mother.
But all she got out of the haggard brunette in the mirror, who appeared to be trying to disprove the second half of the old saw about how you couldn’t be too rich or too thin-alarmingly prominent Neapolitan nose and a chin you could have opened a beer bottle on-was a beats-the-crap-outta-me shrug.
“Okay, back to work,” she ordered herself. “There’s only another hour left-then you can go
Forty-five minutes later, she felt like celebrating instead, having stumbled across a federal credit union account so bogus it was a wonder it hadn’t stunk up the whole office. Some GS-13, judging by the size of the paycheck automatically deposited into his or her account every month, had also made several large cash deposits spread out over a period of thirty months.
“Bingo,” she called to Miss Pool in the outer office. “I’ve either found our you-know-what or uncovered the dumbest double agent in the history of espionage.”
“Congratulations.” Pool appeared in the doorway; she already had her coat on.
“Should I call Maheu now, or wait until tomorrow morning?”
“Neither.”
“When, then?”
“Two weeks from yesterday.”
“How come?”
