Becoming Quinn

against it. He looked quickly back toward the others. No one was looking his way, so he pulled out his camera and took a couple of quick shots, then examined the markings again.

What he couldn’t figure out from looking at them was the same thing he couldn’t figure out about the kicked dirt back at the tank—when they had actually been created.

With a sigh, he started to stand up, but paused, his eye catching sight of a dark blue piece of paper under a tumbleweed near the base of the tree. Leaning forward, he eased the paper out, then saw that it wasn’t just a piece of paper, it was a matchbook. Not necessarily unusual to find discarded in the desert. What was unusual, though, was the fact it didn’t appear weathered at all. Even after a few days in the desert, a colored piece of paper or cardboard would start to fade, and become either brittle from the heat or softened by the wind as it tumbled across the ground. There was absolutely no fading of color on the matchbook, nor was it brittle or soft. As far as Jake was concerned, it looked like it had just come out of a fresh package.

There was a logo on the front of the flap, a sun rising over the mountains. And on the back was printed LAWRENCE HOTEL. Below this was an address and phone number.

As he turned it back over, it hit him that he wasn’t wearing gloves. He groaned. If this was a piece of evidence, he’d just contaminated it with his fingerprints.

Maybe it’s not so bad, he thought. He’d basically only touched the sides and a little bit of the surface. What he really should do was put it in a plastic bag. Of course, he didn’t have one.

He could ask the ID techs for one, but knew the second they saw what he was holding, he’d be in trouble. Drop it back on the ground and call them over? They’d still find his prints.

A good cop would turn it in, no matter what, a voice in his head said.

Yes, but the detective named Pat had said this area had already been checked. Maybe they looked at it, and decided it had nothing to do with the case.

It was a matchbook at the scene of a fire, though. If one of the matches was missing…

With trepidation, he gingerly teased the flap open.

He almost smiled. None of the matches inside had been used. So, at the very least, this hadn’t been what started the fire.

It was probably nothing, he told himself. Most likely dropped there by some teenager out for a smoke. Jake’s mind took the story a step further. The kid probably grabbed it from a drawer at home. His parents would have put it there after picking it up at a cocktail party at the hotel. All nice and easy.

The matchbook was already in his pocket before he realized he’d slipped it there.

It’s nothing, he told himself again.

6

Durrie lay on the top of a small rise, a half mile northwest of the barn. Mounted on a short stand in front of him was a pair of high-powered binoculars through which he had a clear view of the activity around the burnt-out structure. At full magnification, he could read license plate numbers and see blemishes on the faces of the cops who were crawling all over the place.

The fact that he was still in town was more than a little annoying. Typically, within an hour of finishing an assignment, he was gone, his mind already purging the details of the previous few days and preparing for whatever was next.

“I need you to make sure we’re not going to have any problems,” Peter had said when Durrie called in after going back for his van so that there was nothing left anywhere near Goodman Ranch Road.

“No way. I’m done,” Durrie told him. He didn’t want to be stuck with any mess that might arise from Larson’s arrogant stupidity. “My job ended when I disposed of the body.” That was something he had done right before he called, by way of a pre-dug grave in the middle of absolute nowhere and a slurry of chemicals that would accelerate body decomposition.

“You’re done when I say you’re done,” the head of the Office told him. “Unless you’d rather I start hiring someone else.”

The muscles in Durrie’s jaw tightened.

“This should have been an easy in and out,” Peter went on. “I’m not happy. My client’s not happy. And until we are, you shouldn’t be happy, either.”

“What do you want me to do, Peter?” Durrie asked. “Shove a gun in your assassin’s mouth and pull the trigger?”

Peter was silent for a moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was matter of fact. “Your job is to make sure there are no ties back to us. From your own report, you can’t guarantee that. Therefore, your job is not done. What I expect is for you to finish it properly, and make sure there will be no future problems.” He paused. “Tell me if there’s any fault to my logic.”

There wasn’t, of course, and that had made Durrie even angrier. But all he could really do was say, “I’m on it.”

That was the reason he was lying on the small rise, watching the location of a job he should have been hundreds of miles away from by now. He was annoyed and tired, but he was also a professional and knew how to suppress those feelings and concentrate on the task at hand.

To this point, there had been nothing unusual going on. Just the normal crime scene stuff. Durrie was sure nothing incriminating would be found.

He was starting to feel pretty good about things. Before he arrived at his lookout spot, he’d been concerned that the fire department might have been able to put the fire out before it could do its job, but that had not been the case. The structure was destroyed.

And though he’d seen a tech taking pictures of a few tire tracks that hadn’t been obliterated by the fire crews, he knew they would never find the matching tire. The car Owens had arrived in was already across the border in Mexico, and would soon be disassembled for parts. Durrie was nothing if not thorough.

It looked like he was going to be able to report back to Peter that everything was fine, and in another hour or two he should be heading home. The only open question at the moment was what, if anything, the cops might have found when Durrie hadn’t been on scene to keep an eye on things. But that was being dealt with, too. Peter had put Durrie in contact with a reliable source inside the Phoenix Police Department, a detective named Kearns.

Durrie checked his watch. It had been two hours since he’d talked to the detective. For God’s sake, even if the guy was a complete waste of a badge, he should know something by now. Durrie retrieved his phone and called the detective.

“Kearns,” the man answered after two rings.

“This is Special Agent Marsh,” Durrie said, using the FBI identity Peter had given him. They were using Kearns’s hope of getting hired by the bureau as their means of obtaining his cooperation.

“I haven’t got much for you, Agent Marsh.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you do have?”

In the distance, Durrie could see a car turn off the road, and stop at the opening in the fence of the property the barn was on. He leaned down and looked through the binoculars.

“Really, all we have is a body that’s been shot and burned,” Kearns said. “There’s not much else at all.”

Definitely good news. “Any progress on the investigation otherwise?”

Kearns hesitated. “Sir, I’m not sure why you can’t go through normal channels on this. If you have questions, you should just call Detective—”

“I was told you could help us,” Durrie cut in. “Is that not the case? Because if it isn’t, I’ll need to let the assistant director know.”

“No,” the detective said quickly. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“It’s just, well, maybe if you told me why you’re so interested I’d be able to assist you better.”

Durrie increased the magnification on the binoculars to see if he could get a look at the driver of the car, but