Chapel set his jaw. “Miss Taggart—”
“It’s Dr. Taggart. I’m a vet,” the woman told him.
Chapel’s eyes went wide. “Really?” That surprised him — she hadn’t seemed the type. “Which branch of service?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Were you in the army, the navy, the air force?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m a veterinarian. Okay, I think we’re done. I’ll get my own cab, thanks.” She turned and started to walk away.
“Dr. Taggart,” he said, putting a little iron in his voice. The tone they’d taught him to use in officer training.
She stopped, but she didn’t turn around.
“Your mother’s dead, and her killer is still at large. Your father is William Taggart, right? He’s in danger, too. A lot of people are in danger, and I’m trying to save them.”
“My father is on the other side of the continent,” she said, whirling around to glare at him. “This was just some random act of violence. Get your story straight.”
“Your mother wasn’t killed by some crazy drug addict looking for a fix,” he told her. Even saying that much was risking his mission, but he needed to convince her of the urgency of things. “She was targeted. Singled out.”
She didn’t reply. She didn’t walk away, either.
“If I’m going to stop what happened to your mother from happening again, I need some answers, and I need them now.”
She walked toward him, coming close enough to get right up in his face. “My whole life people have kept secrets from me. I don’t enjoy it. Are you going to tell me the truth, Mr. Chapel?”
“It’s Captain Chapel. That’s one true thing,” he replied.
Her eyes took very careful measure of his face. He felt like he was being dissected in a laboratory. She shook her head — but then she got into the cab.
He climbed in beside her. The cabdriver turned and looked back at them. “You know you’ve been on the meter this whole time, right?”
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:37
As the cab crawled through Brooklyn traffic, Chapel watched the city go by. It seemed to take forever to pass each house, each little corner store. Time was ticking away and there was no way to get the minutes back. Chapel thought about what Angel had told him — in New York City, the subway was apparently the only way to get anywhere in a timely fashion. He should have listened to her.
“I really am sorry for your loss,” he told the woman sitting beside him. “That was true, too. It’s got to be… tough.” He reached for more words of sympathy but they were hard to find. “I didn’t know Dr. Bryant, but by all accounts she was a good person.”
“Thanks. I guess,” she said. “Yeah. She was a real saint. As long as you weren’t her daughter.”
“The two of you didn’t get along?” The detective had said so, but he wanted to hear it from her own lips.
“We fought. I was a disappointment to her, and she never let me forget it. She wanted me to go into the family business and I didn’t.”
“She wanted you to become a genetic counselor?”
Julia shrugged. “Not specifically, not necessarily. But she and Dad were both scientists, real scientists, as she would say. They were geneticists. They met in grad school, at Oxford. He was working on a second doctorate while she got her first.” She rubbed at her eyes and then stared at her hands when they came away covered in melted eye shadow. “Ugh. Do you want to know how he convinced her to marry him? He drew a Punnett square. That’s a chart you make, it matches up the genes two organisms have and shows how likely their offspring are to have a certain trait. He showed Mom that if they had kids, there was a statistically significant probability they would have red hair.”
“I guess it worked,” Chapel said.
She grabbed a strand of her hair and pulled it around toward her eyes as if she were checking what color it was. Letting it go, she said, “Too bad he couldn’t predict how they would actually get along. He left us when I was a teenager. Most of what I remember of them is the two of them shouting at each other.”
“Why did they split up?”
“Like I said, people keep secrets from me. Mom would never explain — she just said it was a disagreement over ethics. Which could mean he slept around, or it could mean they differed on their views of stem cell research. Either way I’d believe it. She made him sound like the worst man on earth.”
“What about you? Do you get along with him?”
“I haven’t spoken to him in years,” she said. “And then it was just on the phone.”
Chapel tapped on the window with his real fingers. This wasn’t going anywhere. He needed to get back on track. “Did your mother have an interest in mythology?” he asked.
“What on earth does that have to do with anything?” She had taken a tissue from her purse and was angrily wiping the makeup from around her eyes. When he didn’t reply, she threw herself back in the cab seat and sighed. “No. I don’t remember her ever talking about mythology.”
Chapel nodded. “Did she know any Greek people? Maybe someone who would wish her harm?”
“Maybe the guy who runs the diner where she got breakfast.”
“Cute, but not helpful, Dr. Taggart.”
She sneered at him. “I have no reason to be either, so far. When are you going to start telling me what’s going on?”
He could see in her eyes she was done answering questions until he gave her something. He tried to think of the best way to be evasive without sounding evasive. “The man who killed your mother had her name and address. He also had your father’s.”
She stared at him as if he’d told her he was an alien and he’d just come from the moon. “My mother was assassinated?” she asked.
“I know that’s going to come as a shock—”
“But it’s been twenty years. Why now?”
It was Chapel’s turn to be surprised. “I’m not sure I follow. What happened twenty years ago that would make your mother a target for assassination?”
“I don’t know,” she told him. “She never told me any details. I just know that she and my father both used to work for the CIA, back when we lived up in the Catskills.”
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+8:48
The Catskills. That was where the DoD facility was located, the one where the detainees had been held. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Chapel felt like he was looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and two of them had just fit together for the first time.
“You have no idea what they did for the CIA?”
“None,” Julia said. “They were both pretty good at keeping their secrets. By the time I was old enough to ask — to even wonder about what my parents did for a living — we had already moved to New York City and they had moved on to other jobs. I may have asked about their time as spies once in a while, but they would just tell me to mind my own business and I guess eventually I got the point.”
Spies — well, that was unlikely. Dr. Bryant hardly fit the profile. But the CIA wasn’t just spies; it employed thousands of civilians in all kinds of roles. All of whom were required by law never to talk about what they did. Even mentioning they had worked for the CIA, even to their own daughter, would be forbidden. “They actually said, ‘we used to work for the CIA,’ just like that?”
“No, of course not. Nothing like that. I only knew about it because once a year a guy from the CIA would come to our house for dinner. After we ate, they would send me to my room and tell me to play my music loud so he could debrief them.”
That was standard practice for the CIA, Chapel knew. Defectors from foreign countries and anyone who worked on projects involving national security were debriefed on a yearly basis to make sure no foreign spies had contacted them and they hadn’t accidentally revealed sensitive information.