something else to talk with an outsider while on stakeout. Especially with this case. They didn’t even have confirmation this was the right van so they were still hunting those body parts. This just got him thinking about Jayne again.
He smiled to himself, remembering when they’d first met at Quantico. Her confident belief that inefficient processes could actually be improved had struck him as naive yet liberating, coming as it did on the heels of his months of study of how a bureaucracy fights crime. Her face and body had displayed the last traces of youthful roundedness, as though her figure represented a tightrope between gullibility and mistrust and she was still working out on which side she would dismount.
Now, she looked like she’d tried both sides and found each problematic, deciding that perhaps it was easier to negotiate the tightrope, arms out to the side, inadvertently keeping people away as she waved and balanced. Scott knew his interpretation was self-serving since he felt on a tightrope himself and he hadn’t met anyone else along it, besides Jayne. He’d known for a long time that he wanted to take hold of her but he hadn’t known if that was for the sake of her balance or his. That uncertainty had been at the heart of why he’d never tried to move things to what other people called the ‘next level’.
His previous girlfriends – the ‘lightweights’ as Eric had referred to them – had been easy to pick up so they’d be easy to let go, with the idea of Jayne always in the background and never put to the test. Now that he was around her again, he was even more aware of the reality of his attraction to her. He had no intention of leaving things to his imagination forever. Ever since she’d backed into him on her stairs Friday night, he’d been thinking about the inward curve of her waist and the outward curves above and below . . . he knew he’d have to save that train of thought for after the stakeout. There was no way he could watch the screen, listen to the audio feed, and think those particular thoughts of Jayne all at the same time.
When Jayne heard Carol come in the Agency’s front door, she intercepted her and indicated that they should have a word outside. Out in the parking lot, she asked, ‘Did you find a pay phone that actually worked?’
Carol replied, ‘Third time lucky. The city still comes through on phones even if it can’t keep up the phone books. Someone from Jeppsen, Inc. will be here shortly.’
‘Was that the first one on Eric’s list?’
‘No, the second. The technicians at the first place were busy all week.’
Jayne shook her head. ‘I can’t believe there’s this much call for people who do private bug detection.’
‘Well, I spoke to one of the principals at Jeppsen. He seemed nice enough.’
Jayne heard the phone ring inside and darted in ahead of Carol. She listened to the deep, Midwestern- accented voice rumble down the phone line. ‘This is Bill Ledbetter from Wisconsin. I’m Amy’s father. You wrote my wife and me an email about Amy around a week ago.’
Jayne placed Amy. She’d gone missing while on her way home from the Dairy Queen several years earlier. ‘Hello, Mr Ledbetter. Nice to have a voice to go with an email. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, we’ve been thinking over what you said about Amy being alive but maybe not knowing who she is. I gotta admit, that hadn’t occurred to us. We know she’s alive. Plus, the cops up here already used Amy’s hairbrush to see if she had . . . passed away and they didn’t get any matches.’
‘You mean, they tried to do a DNA match?’
‘They sure did. Right at the beginning.’
‘I see.’ Jayne knew that whenever DNA was involved, many people tended to see things in black-and-white, even though DNA doesn’t always lead to a match even when it should. Often, a failure to find a DNA match only proves that DNA isn’t in any system at the point a search is run. Jayne knew it would have been difficult for a detective to look the Ledbetters in the eye, explain that, and then watch hope borne of certainty yield to fear borne of uncertainty.
Mr Ledbetter said, ‘When we got your email, we thought we’d like to go ahead and do a profile at your organization, just for the hospitals.’
‘Well, Mr Ledbetter, when we make up a forensic profile of a missing person, the police will automatically compare it to all unidentified persons. The FBI keeps one big file for everyone, alive or not.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. And it makes sense, since how we identify people doesn’t really change that much either way.’
Jayne heard two female voices shouting in the background on Bill Ledbetter’s end.
His voice became somewhat muffled as he covered the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘Melissa! Becca! Please keep it down. I’m talking long distance.’
Then a young girl’s voice. ‘But,
‘OK. I’ll be off the phone in a minute.’ Then he was back with Jayne. ‘Sorry about that. Well, let me talk to my wife, and then I guess the main thing we were wondering was if we had to come out there to do the profile?’
‘Not at all. We can talk to you about Amy over the phone and we can tell you what kind of other documents we’d need. You can send these to us in the mail and when we’re done, we’ll send the originals back.’
When they hung up, Jayne pictured Bill Ledbetter’s world. He was still being a parent while dealing with something that no parent could expect and prepare for.
Lex Jeppsen was a big man who introduced himself to Agency 32/1 as the ‘brains’, while his partner, Michael Eagen, was the ‘hands’ of their bug sweeping operation. They had been in business for three years, since leaving the FBI in search of better pay and more flexibility. They asked how the Agency found them and Jayne mentioned Scott Houston and Eric Ramos. Lex and Michael laughed and asked how ‘those two sonsabitches’ were doing. Then they asked Jayne, Carol, and Steelie to stay in Reception while they worked.
They all trooped inside. Lex first used a machine, holding it a few inches out over the walls, while Michael took apart the telephone on Carol’s desk. Eventually, Lex asked if they had a key to the cage surrounding the generator outside. Jayne gave him the key and listened to him whistle as he went out the back door again.
When they returned, Michael was smiling and holding an object. Jayne and Steelie exchanged a worried glance and they all stood.
Lex began. ‘First question: you have three phone lines here?’
‘Yes,’ replied Jayne.
‘You get any wrong numbers or hang ups in the past couple of months?’
She shook her head.
‘How long you been in this building?’
‘About a year.’
Lex looked at his colleague, who shook his head and said, ‘Hasn’t been there that long.’
Steelie interrupted. ‘Can I just ask if that’s a listening device or what?’
‘Indeed it is,’ replied Michael. ‘RF transmitter, just like what was found at the apartment.’
‘Where was it?’
‘On the one phone line outside but within the cage for the generator.’
Jayne said, ‘Well, we just got the generator.’
Lex answered. ‘It could predate it but we’ll check it out.’
‘When we find this type of wiretap at a business, it’s usually at corporate headquarters or an office were corporate secrets are discussed.’ Lex paused to look around the modest room, taking in the aloe plant in the corner. ‘You’re running a charity here?’
Carol nodded.
Lex continued: ‘You got a competitor? Or have any proprietary methodology – something not patented?’
Steelie said, ‘Competition’s a bit thin on the ground in our line of work.’
He looked around the room again. ‘What is it you do here?’
‘Forensic profiles of missing persons.’
Michael raised his eyebrows. ‘You do anything to piss off the cops?’
Jayne refrained from offering up the possibility that Steelie drove over a policeman’s foot on Friday night. ‘What we do complements law enforcement. And we have contacts with LAPD. If they want anything, they just ask.’
Michael shrugged and started to pack up his gear. ‘Might not be LAPD. Could be any cops anywhere, if I’m
