Heartbreaker

'I do scare him. He doesn’t want any of the things I want, but he doesn’t want to hurt me. Last night was a mistake,' she whispered. 'And now it’s over,' she added. She tried to sound as though she’d already moved on, but she knew she’d failed when Noah patted her hand.

'Did it feel like a mistake last night?'

She shook her head. 'No, but like you just said, I’m a big girl. I can get on with my life. I’m not so easily shattered.'

'No, of course you aren’t.'

'You’re humoring me, aren’t you?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Let’s talk about something else,' she suggested. 'Could I ask you something?'

'Sure. What do you want to know.'

'How come Wesson dislikes Nick so much?'

'It goes way back,' he said.

'But what started the antagonism?' she asked with another quick glance at Nick.

'I guess you could say it was a cat that started the rivalry, although now that I think about it, Nick’s attitude also played a part. He was new to the section, and he thought he knew it all. Morganstern had only just gotten the okay to run the Apostles, and Nick was his second recruit.'

'Who was the first recruit?' she asked.

'I was,' he answered with an arrogant grin. 'Pete was handpicking his agents, getting them from outside and putting them through his own special training program. Wesson was dying to be a part of it. Actually, I think from the very beginning he wanted to run the program, but that wasn’t going to happen.'

'Did Wesson become one of Morganstern’s recruits?'

'No. Morganstern didn’t take him in, and that really chafed.'

'So that’s what started it?'

'No, it was a cat,' he patiently repeated. 'There was this particular case. A three-year-old girl was missing, and the FBI was called in. Wesson was on the rotation schedule, and there was no way he was going to let one of Morganstern’s hotshots come in and take over. Wesson wanted to solve the case and solve it quick.'

'Did he?'

'No, but Nick did. Here’s what happened. The little girl was with her mother in a department store. The building was real old, with wooden floors that squeaked and groaned when you walked on them, and high plastered ceilings, and big old vents along the baseboards. It was drafty and cold inside. The building was located near the warehouse district and the city market right next to the river. It was a nice little shopping area, all the buildings had been buffed and restored, but there was a problem with rats, and so the owner of this particular family-owned department store kept a cat there.'

'Go on,' she urged, wanting Noah to finish before Nick and Tommy returned.

'It was around noon on the Saturday before Christmas, and the store was crowded with last-minute shoppers. It was real chaotic and loud, with Christmas music blaring, but one salesclerk happened to notice a man in his midthirties wandering around the store. She thought he might be a shoplifter. He was wearing beat-up old clothes and a long gray raincoat. She said it was dirty and torn. She couldn’t give a great description other than to say he was thin and had a scraggily beard. She told us she was going to call security, but then she saw him heading for the front door, and she thought he was leaving. She was being pulled in twenty different directions by impatient customers.

'A customer in line remembered seeing the man squat down next to the little girl and talk to her. She said the mother had elbowed her way to the counter and was digging through her purse, looking for her charge card, and she didn’t notice her daughter was talking to the stranger. Then the customer said the man got up and walked away.'

'Did he take the little girl?'

Noah didn’t answer the question. 'Another customer said she almost tripped over the child when she darted out in front of her. The little girl was chasing the cat,' he added. 'About five or ten minutes later, the mother was frantically searching for her daughter. Everyone was helping, of course, and then the clerk remembered the man in the raincoat, and the customer remembered she’d seen him talking to the child. The security officer called the police while the owner called the FBI. To his credit, Wesson got there fast,' he added. 'Morganstern got the call from Wesson’s superior and wanted Nick and me to get a little experience, and so he sent us in, but neither one of us could get there until late that night. I came in from Chicago, and Nick caught a plane out of Dallas. He got in about fifteen minutes before I did, rented a car, got a map, and picked me up.'

'Wesson wasn’t happy to see you, was he?'

'That’s putting it mildly. It didn’t matter to us though. He didn’t have any authority over us. We reported to Morganstern and no one else. Wesson was extremely reluctant to share what he had with us, and that really pissed… I mean, angered Nick. When he gets mad, his temper’s worse than mine,' Noah said with admiration in his voice.

'What did he do?'

'He let Wesson know what he thought of him. Nick could have been more diplomatic, but, anyway, he backed Wesson into a corner, and Wesson told him he had a suspect, and that the situation was under control, which, of course, wasn’t the case. Wesson also went on record as saying that Morganstern’s team was a waste of time and money, and that Nick and I should go home and find real jobs.'

'In other words, butt out.'

'Yes,' Noah said. 'Of course, we didn’t care what Wesson thought or wanted. We had a job to do, and we were going to do it with or without his approval. While Nick was looking around, I got one of the other field agents aside and read his notes.'

'Was the little girl all right? Just tell me, please. Did you find her in time?'

'Yeah, we did, thanks to Nick,' he said. 'It was one of those too few happy endings.'

'How did he find her?'

'I’m getting to that,' Noah said. 'Everyone left the store. It was around two in the morning, and it was freezing inside that building. Wesson had set up a command post at the police station a couple of blocks away, and every available man was out on the streets searching for the man in the raincoat. Nick and I were standing on the curb outside the store, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. The security officer was locking the doors to go home when Nick told him he wanted to go back inside. He convinced the old man to turn the alarm off and give us the keys.

'Both of us went through the building from top to bottom again. We found nothing, so we left. I was driving,' he said. 'I wasn’t sure where I was headed. I was just trying to clear my mind the way Morganstern taught us, and I remember I had just driven past a hospital when I asked Nick what the hell we were going to do, being squeezed out by Wesson the way we were.'

Noah paused to smile and then added, 'Nick didn’t say anything. He popped a piece of gum in his mouth, and I figured he was doing the same thing I was trying to do. You know, trying to clear his mind. And all of a sudden, he turned to me and said, ‘So, where’s the cat?’

'We started doing what Morganstern would probably call a little free-associating then. Kids love animals, most do anyway, and a customer had reported she’d seen the little girl chasing after the cat. We both figured out what might have happened then. I was driving like a bat out of hell, trying to get back to the department store as fast as I could, but then I saw the hospital emergency entrance, and I pulled in. Nick and I went running into the emergency room, flashed our badges, and grabbed a doctor who was just going on break. Nick told him he was going with us and to bring his stethoscope with him.'

'The little girl was still in the store, wasn’t she?'

'Sure she was,' he said. 'She went in one of those big old vents after the cat,' he explained. 'Crawling around on the floor by the walls, no one would have noticed her, as busy and crowded as the store was. The vent didn’t hold her, and she went down two and a half floors and got trapped on a ledge above the basement. The fall should have killed her,' he added. 'She had hit her head and was unconscious when we finally got to her. The cat stayed with her. We could hear the faint meowing through the stethoscope.'

'But she was all right.'

He smiled again. 'Yeah, she was okay.'