“Where’d you get a name like that?”
“I take that as a yes,” she replies, reaching below the counter, retrieving an envelope, handing it to him. “This guy came in earlier, asked me to give this to you when you were about to leave.”
“How much earlier?” He slips the envelope into a pocket, mindful of who might be watching.
“Maybe a couple hours.”
So the man with the fake accent called Win after the letter was dropped off here, never intended on a meeting.
“What did he look like?” Win asks.
“Nothing special, kind of old. Had on tinted glasses, a big trench coat. And a scarf.”
“A scarf this time of year?”
“Shiny, silky. Sort of a deep red.”
“Of course.” A man in scarlet, just like Nana said.
Win walks out into the rain, and the dampness of the night makes him feel sticky and wilted. His grandmother’s car is a dark-finned hulk on Summer Street, in front of the Rosebud Diner, and he walks along the wet pavement, looking around, wondering if the man in scarlet is nearby, watching. He unlocks the car, opens the glove box, finds a flashlight and a stack of napkins from Dunkin’ Donuts, wraps several of them around his hands, and slits open the envelope with one of the keys dangling from the steering column. He slips out a folded piece of lined paper, reads what’s neatly printed on it in black ink.
You’re the one AT RISK, half-breed.
He dials Lamont’s home number and she doesn’t answer. He tries her cell phone. She doesn’t answer. He doesn’t leave a message, changes his mind and tries again, and she answers this time.
“Hello?” Her voice doesn’t have its usual energy.
“You want to tell me what the hell’s going on!” He cranks the engine.
“No need to be upset with me,” she weirdly says, sounds strained, something off about her.
“Some wacko with a wacko fake accent just called me about the Finlay case. What a coincidence. Somehow the guy has my cell-phone number, another amazing coincidence, and coincidentally said he’d meet me and didn’t show up, left me a threatening note. Who the hell have you been talking to? You send out a press release or something…?”
“This morning,” she replies, and a muffled male voice in the background says something Win can’t make out.
“This morning? Before I even got to town! And you couldn’t bother to tell me?” he exclaims.
“That’s fine,” her non sequitur follows.
“It’s not fine!”
The person Lamont is with — some man at almost one o’clock in the morning — says something and she abruptly ends the call, and Win sits in the dark inside his grandmother’s old Buick staring at the lined piece of paper in his napkin-wrapped hands. His heart pounds so hard he can feel it in his neck. Lamont alerted the media about a case that’s now supposed to be his and didn’t ask his permission or even bother telling him. She can take her At Risk shit and shove it.
I quit.
See what she does when he tells her that.
I quit!
He has no idea where to look for her. She didn’t answer her home phone, only her cell phone. So she probably isn’t home. Well, it’s hard to say. He decides to cruise past her Cambridge house anyway. In case she’s there. The hell with who else might be there, and he wonders who Lamont sleeps with, if she’s one of these alpha-dog women who doesn’t like sex or maybe the opposite. Maybe she’s a piranha, eats her lovers to the bone.
He roars away from the curb, fishtails — damn rear-wheel drive — skids on the slick pavement, and the windshield wipers drag loudly across the glass, driving him crazy because he’s already feeling crazy, as if he’s in the middle of something crazy that he was crazy to get in the middle of, dammit. He should have refused to fly back up here, should have stayed in Tennessee. It’s late to call Sykes. It’s rude. He’s always doing this to her and she always lets him. She won’t mind, and he enters her number, remembering it’s Tuesday night, and usually on Tuesday nights at this late hour, the two of them are dressed like preppies, listening to jazz at Forty-Six-Twenty, drinking fruit-infused martinis and talking.
“Hey gorgeous,” Win says. “Don’t kill me.”
“Figures the one time I was actually sleeping,” says Sykes, an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and an insomniac, her hormones hateful these days.
She sits up in bed, doesn’t bother with the lamp. For the past six weeks she has spent a lot of time talking to Win on the phone, in bed in the dark, alone, wondering what it would be like to talk to him in bed, in the dark, in person. She listens for her roommate through the wall, doesn’t want to wake her up. The funny thing is, when Sykes drove Win to the Knoxville airport, she said to him, Well, for once our roommates will get a full night’s sleep. Since she and Win began their training at the National Forensic Academy, they’ve talked the nights away, and since the student apartments don’t have thick walls, their roommates get the raw end of that deal.
“I think you miss me,” Sykes says, joking but hoping it’s true.
“Need you to do something,” Win says.
“Are you all right?” She switches on the lamp.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine. What’s going on?” She gets out of bed, stares at herself in the mirror over the dresser.
“Listen. An old lady was murdered in Knoxville twenty years ago, Vivian Finlay. Sequoyah Hills.”
“Let’s start with why the sudden interest.”
“Something damn weird’s going on. You were in Tennessee back then. Maybe you remember the case.”
Sykes was in Tennessee, all right, yet another reminder of her age, and she looks at herself in the mirror, her silvery blond hair sticking up everywhere, like Amadeus is the way Win once described it. If you saw the movie, he said. She hadn’t.
“I vaguely recall the case,” she is saying. “Rich widow, someone broke in. An unbelievable thing to happen in Sequoyah Hills in the middle of the day.”
The mirror is especially unkind at this hour. Her eyes are puffy. Too much beer. She doesn’t know why Win likes her so much, why he doesn’t seem to see her the same way she does, maybe sees her the way she used to be, twenty years ago when she had creamy skin and big blue eyes, a tight, round butt, and perky boobs, a body that flipped the finger at gravity until she turned forty and gravity flipped the finger back.
“I need the original police file,” he is saying over the phone.
“By chance you got the case number?” Sykes asks.
“Only the autopsy case number. Just microfilm print-outs from that, no scene photos, no nothing. Got to have that file too if we can ever find it in the Bermuda Triangle of storage. You know, when the old morgue moved. Or at least Lamont said it did. I’m assuming she’s right.”
Her again. “Yeah, it moved. Okay, one thing at a time,” she says, getting stressed, irritable. “First, you want the police file.”
“Got to have it, Sykes.”
“So I’ll try to track it down first thing in the morning.”
“Can’t wait. Whatever you can get your hands on now. E-mail it to me.”
“And who do you think’s going to help me out at this hour?” She is already opening her closet door, yanking a pair of blue cargo pants off a hanger.
“The Academy,” Win says. “Call Tom, get him out of bed.”
He drives fast toward Mount Auburn Hospital, turns off Brattle Street, headed to Monique Lamont’s house so he can ruin the rest of her night.