“Could you at least tell me how much danger I’m in?” I asked at last.
Pause. “None if you walk away now. A lot if you keep sticking your nose in it, which I know you will. It’s best to let some things lie, Barbara.”
“Did I mention the dead body of a multimillionaire falling from a tall height and nearly crushing me?”
“You did. I don’t know why they did that. I suppose it was to send a message.”
“You mean a warning?”
“No, more of a message. They didn’t want to kill you. At least I’m pretty sure they didn’t. They obviously wanted you to take notice, though.”
“I do wish you would stop being so cryptic, Junior.”
“I’m a spy. You’re a spy. Cryptic is what we do.”
I had to laugh at that. He always was fun to be around.
Something occurred to me.
“I didn’t tell anyone I was going to SerMart. I was going for a… surprise present.”
I had almost slipped and said it was for Martin. Best to keep him out of it.
“You may not have told your friends or family, but I bet you told SerMart,” Gary said.
I blinked. “Why yes, yes, I did. I called the evening before to ask their hours.”
“At what time?”
“Around five-thirty.”
“And when did you say the murder was?”
“Hours later.” Long enough to plan. “So Escudo Security has tapped their phones?”
“Not tapped. It’s part of their contract to monitor phone calls to head off any threats. Serengeti.com has a lot of enemies. That’s why they bought that service.”
I leaned back in my chair, my heart racing. You might think that my heart was racing as a nervous reaction to having my phone conversation listened to and traced by some mysterious Panamanians (later Mexicans, now Americans, really who-knows-whats), but that wasn’t quite correct. My heart was racing because I was feeling it again—that old thrill of being in the game.
James once compared it to gambling, a vice neither of us had ever indulged in. Civilians went in for hollow thrills. If you want a real thrill, act undercover in some third world dictatorship that would just love to throw you into some dank dungeon and torture you for a few years before dumping your mangled body into the sea. Why bet on horses when you can bet on your life, with the stakes not only being that you get to see another sunrise but that you can make a real difference in geopolitics? Why get a vicarious thrill off of television when real action is happening all around you?
And this case had all the real action I had loved in my working years—CIA involvement, shadowy figures, a mysterious death, missing loot, and a chance for me to make a difference.
The question was, a difference with what?
“So are you saying the good folks at Escudo Security wouldn’t have involved me at all if I hadn’t announced that I was coming to SerMart?”
“I’m not saying anything, Barbara.”
And that was that. I didn’t get another tidbit of information from him.
I did a little online checking on Escudo Security and found little, just a few mentions of contracts with major companies in the state and some photos of the president, Ricardo Morales, at various functions. Some of the other employees were in the background. The photos on their website were genuine. Whatever they had fled from in Central America, they felt safe enough to be out in public these days.
And why not? They’d been let in by the CIA, after all.
My phone rang again. It was Grimal.
“To what rare circumstance do I owe the honor of receiving not one but two phone calls from you today?” I asked.
“Can it. The fingerprints came back,” he said.
“And?”
“The bedroom and bathroom had the fingerprints of the butler and maid all over them, but that proves nothing. It’s their job to be in there. None from the cook, which lessens the chance of at least her direct involvement although she could have still been an accessory. And no fingerprints on that label Florence Nightingale yanked off the catwalk. Except hers, of course.”
“The way she mangled it, I’m not surprised.”
“Yeah, that made me cringe. But here’s the kicker.”
“What?”
“When we took the body out of your shopping cart, we found another bar-code sticker stuck to the bottom of it, the bar code facing up. And get this—it was for the exact same product.”
“Another coincidence. This case seems full of them.”
“Yeah, but what does it mean?” His voice came out whiny, pleading. He wanted my help but was too proud to ask.
I wish I knew how to help him. I had no idea of the significance of the stickers either.
I had to hope Albert would come up with something on his night shift. I called him just before he went to work to remind him of his duties and fill him in on all the details of the case so he would know what to look for. He had forgotten everything I had told him earlier, of course, but at least he seemed sober now.
“How did you ever pass the drug test?” I asked him. “Surely a company as security conscious and controlling as SerMart would have made you take a drug test.”
Albert laughed. “Those are easy to fool! There’s a drink you can get at smoke shops that takes it right out of your system. Chug a bottle of that a couple of days before your test and you’re home free.”
“I see,” I said, nettled that he knew something about the darker side of life that I didn’t. “How does it work?”
“Some sort of chemical thing. How should I know? Makes you pee like a Russian racehorse. I was going to the john like three, four times a—”
“That’s quite all right. I don’t need to know the details. Just remember to keep your eyes open at work, all right?”
“Sure, grandma. I’ll call you if I see anything weird.”
And he did. He woke me up at one o’clock in the morning, but he was good to his
