“Chamomile sounds great.” It sounded like drinking weeds, but Duke wanted any excuse to stay.
“Do you live far from here?”
“Rancho Cordova.”
She shot him a look. “You don’t seem the type.”
“Because it’s a working-class city?”
“Maybe.”
He shrugged. “It’s my parents’ house.”
“You live with your parents?”
“They died. A plane crash.”
“I’m sorry. Recently?”
“Thirteen years ago. Now it’s just me and Sean.”
She put the tea in front of him, slid over the honey. He sipped it, then added some honey.
“What happened?” she asked.
He realized she thought his entire family was gone. “I should say, it’s just Sean and me in the house. My older brother Kane is a soldier for hire in Central America. The twins, Liam and Eden, are younger than me and live in Europe.”
“Europe?”
“They run their own personal security company there. For the rich and famous.” He laughed, but it didn’t sound funny. Maybe because he’d never thought it was a good idea.
He changed the subject. He didn’t mind talking about his family, but he wanted to find out more about Nora. “I like your house.”
Even in her exhaustion, she brightened. “Thank you. I’ve been here seven years. Bought it just after I turned thirty. It’s always been my dream …” Her voice trailed off and she grew melancholy.
“To own a house?”
“To have a home.”
There was a distinction, and Duke was curious. “Did you move a lot growing up?”
She didn’t say anything for a long minute. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“What would you say?”
“You don’t really want to know.”
“I do, or I wouldn’t have asked. I’m not making small talk.”
“Then what are you doing?” She looked him in the eye. She was suspicious, wary, and sensitive. But there was something about her tone, something
Duke leaned back. “I’m getting to know you. It’s what people do when they work together. When they like each other. When they’ve been interested for, oh, four years. It’s called conversation.”
“I must have missed that lesson.” She glanced down at the mug, but there was a half smile on her lips, a smile she didn’t want him to see. She sighed and said, “I didn’t have a conventional upbringing. I didn’t go to school, for one. Lorraine claimed she was homeschooling me.”
“Lorraine is your mother?”
“Unfortunately. Her idea of education was teaching me about her favorite social causes. I learned how to pick a lock, paint a protest sign, and make bombs.”
That wasn’t the answer Duke had been expecting. He didn’t know what to say. How could he have worked with her on half a dozen cases over the years and not known?
Nora waved her hand as if it didn’t matter, but Duke saw it mattered greatly to her. “Some of Lorraine’s friends were saner than she was. I learned how to read because of Gigi, a wonderful but eccentric woman who followed the Grateful Dead around for fifteen years, earning her way by knitting and selling sweaters. I used to have some. My mother left me with Gigi for a few months when she went off on one of her crusades. The first time was when I was five, but I stayed with Gigi quite a bit. She had a pickup truck with a camper shell. Almost like a home.”
The wistful angst in her voice twisted his heart. No one should grow up like that.
“I assume your father wasn’t in the picture.”
She shook her head. “Not mine, not Quin’s. Different fathers. So we think. Lorraine knew who my father was-at least his name. I tracked him down much later. He died at the age of thirty-two, drunk. He fell off the cliffs near Soquel. Lorraine doesn’t know who Quin’s father is-never cared, either. She named her Quin Teagan because Teagan was the name of some guy she liked-but admitted to me that she’d never slept with him. I don’t know where she got Quin from. I think she took it from a Bob Dylan song, but spelled the name wrong. Probably on purpose. Lorraine never liked conventions.”
She looked out the window into the dark.
“I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories-”
“You didn’t. Today-it was just a hard day.”
“The lake.”
“That, and the arson, and the killer-you said something earlier.”
“About the psychopath.”
He remembered it well, because it had affected her.
“I knew a psychopath once. Cameron Lovitz. My mother met up with him when I was nearly sixteen. She’d always been a criminal, a petty criminal. Nothing more violent than graffiti, trespassing, and petty theft. A few bombs-but they rarely worked. She didn’t know I’d been sabotaging her plans for years.” Nora sighed. Duke didn’t interrupt. She needed the time to tell her story the way she wanted.
“I was just waiting until I was eighteen,” she said a few moments later, “but honestly, I didn’t know if I would leave-I couldn’t leave Quin. I was the one who made sure she went to school, and I taught myself with her schoolbooks. I used to live in libraries …” She cleared her throat, sipped her tea. “But Cameron Lovitz was a terrorist. He boasted of sinking a boat off Santa Barbara that was carrying a high-ranking oil executive and his family. I didn’t know if I could believe him, but at the public library I researched his claim and learned a board member of an offshore oil drilling company had died in what was apparently an accident. Did Lovitz do it? Maybe.
“But I became less skeptical of his claims when he pulled my mother into crazy plans. Setting bombs in new housing developments, planning to derail a train carrying toxic waste to show the dangers of toxic chemicals. Lorraine bought into it. And I was in the middle of it.”
She got up and poured her half-gone tea down the drain, rinsed the cup, and left it in the sink. “Lorraine was so stupid. And blind. And she said she loved Cameron and would do anything he asked her. Including breaking into Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Knowing what I know now, there was no way their plan would have worked, but that wasn’t the purpose. I think the purpose was to scare people. And maybe they should have been scared.”
“What happened?”
“I turned FBI informant when I was seventeen. Worked with the Los Angeles office, gave them everything, and they were there to catch them.”
“But they didn’t?”
“Cameron Lovitz is dead. The others are in prison, including my mother.”
“And then you joined the FBI?” It seemed incredible and unexpected, but it fit Nora.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do after my world fell apart.” She walked over to the counter, leaned against it. “My handler lied to me. About a lot of things, but I didn’t know that until he died during the operation. I hated him, but I didn’t. I understand why, now, but at the time …” Her voice trailed off. “I met another agent out of Los Angeles, Rick Stockton. He’s now a director at the FBI lab. He was everything that Andy Keene was not. And he taught me a lot, helped me gain custody of Quin, helped me get my GED and go to college. Urged me to take psychology because of my aptitude tests.”
“Psychology? Are you a profiler?” It made sense, the way she analyzed where the arsonists took the ducks.
“I have the certification. The BSU offered me a position, but it meant a lot of travel.”
“You don’t like to travel?”
“One week here or there for vacation? Sure. For my job? No. I wanted a home. A place of my own. A place
