We walked up the driveway to the heavy wooden door. Max stood aside and let Tauber knock. The door opened almost immediately.
“Mark?” Miriam Fine said with a sharp gaze. “What’s happened?” The look on her face suggested she either wasn’t all that pleased to see him or didn’t like the way he looked. Neither answer would’ve been a shock. Tauber definitely wasn’t her type-she was a slim, youthful fortyish, dressed in a ruffled white blouse, charcoal just-so suit and pearls. Ridiculously well-put together for 9 in the morning. Where Tauber seemed to have fallen apart without the program, Miriam Fine had obviously thrived. The instant after sizing Tauber up, she turned her attention to me and Max and her expression changed. Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t-this was a pattern among this whole group and not one that made me real comfortable. “Come inside,” she said in a stage whisper. “You don’t want to be seen.”
The living room was straight out of some decorating magazine, paint by numbers. Everything looked fine and went together, I guess, but the place might as well have been a movie set. There was nothing personal anywhere-no magazines on the table, no trash or cups or loose papers anywhere. Just two matched couches, a TV in an old-style armoire and a neat little computer desk with the CPU in a box attached to the leg. The desktop held her monitor screen and a neat stack of papers-bills, one purple Sticky note and her paycheck stub-a real corporate, computerized stub, not the handwritten job we got whenever Dave made us a little money at the store. The place was so orderly, I was afraid to sit down.
“What’s happened, Mark? Why are you here?” Fine asked, but she kept glancing at Max, who was hovering quietly in the background. Before Tauber could answer, she started retreating to the kitchen. “Let me get you some water-I’m sure you’re thirsty.”
“We’re fine,” Max said but she was gone for just a few seconds, returning with a pitcher and glasses on a tray. Nobody took any.
“Dave Monaghan’s dead,” Tauber answered finally. Fine lowered her eyes and took a breath, slow and deep. She daubed at her forehead a couple times.
“How?” she said.
“Shot dead in Florida yesterday.”
“How do you know?” she asked, which struck me as an odd question.
“We were there,” I said, indicating Max and me. “They shot him through the bathroom window and then they blew up the house.”
“Who did?” she asked and I wondered why she was asking questions, with words. She was in the program, wasn’t she? Couldn’t she just read our minds? Maybe the other two were blocking her, which seemed kind of odd too. Or maybe she felt a need, for some reason, to hear their answers aloud.
“Two mindbenders,” Max answered. “Minor league, less than. 5 on the Kirlian scale. We met them half an hour later trying to go through Dave’s office.” Fine’s eyes widened.
“What happened to them?” she asked. “Did they-could they tell you anything?”
“They didn’t know enough to tell,” Max said. “But they came in an expensive SUV under suggestion with after-action forms to fill out and phone numbers to report to.”
“Did you get the phone numbers?”
“They’re useless,” Max shrugged. “You get a recorded message that asks for the extension you wish to dial.” He and Fine had a kind of staring contest going. “But they were clearly cogs in a pretty organized wheel.”
“Whose?”
“Can’t tell. They blocked well-no names or titles. Their thoughts were in English, so no language cues.”
“Did you dispose of them?” Miriam Fine said and I squirmed at the directness of the question. I squirmed a little more at being the only one in the room who seemed uncomfortable with it.
“I put them out overnight. They have to be up and around by now-and raising the alarm.”
“Which is why you’re here,” Fine said.
“Dave left a list of agents he felt should be contacted-he must have felt you were in danger.”
“That’s what you think?” Fine said, settling into a chair by the fireplace, smoothing her skirt under her, her eyes never leaving Max. “What is your plan?”
“My…plan?” Max stammered. “Just to follow Dave’s blueprint. Just…just to warn you.”
“Against what? Against whom?”
“Whoever killed Dave,” he answered, like it was pretty obvious-I thought it was. Fine stood up from her seat like the perfect hostess, like all this life-and-death stuff was getting in the way of her socializing.
“Does anyone want coffee?” she asked quietly.
“Tea?” I asked and Max shot me a look like I’d asked for a handgun.
“I really think we should get going,” Max said. “They have to be looking for us.”
“Oh?” Fine said, still smiling. “Are they lurking outside, waiting to attack?” She shivered theatrically.
“How can I tell?” Max said, sinking into a chair opposite her. “There’s so much static around here-you don’t notice it?” Fine just stared at him. “I’m not comfortable when I can’t tell what’s going on around me.”
“Well, I’m not comfortable running away without a good reason,” Fine answered, speaking slowly, biting each word off as if they came a la carte. “We don’t know why Dave was killed, we have no real reason-other than your unspecified fears-to feel endangered ourselves. You say he left you a list, you think you know what it means, this one here-” she waved her hand at me “-says he saw Dave die and the house blow up. Even if I grant all these things on faith, why should we go anywhere?”
“I have no facts to offer,” Max said, “but I sensed that these agents were low-level, low-status. They wanted the list but only to hand it over to someone well above their pay grade.”
“You sensed,” Fine repeated, the words a hiss. “In what way? Automatic writing? Ideagrams? Narrating out of a trance? Which process do you use?”
“I–I have my own approach,” Max said.
“I’m sure you do,” Fine said and turned, all at once, to me. “And you? You are?”
“I’m Greg-”
“Greg lived with Dave,” Max explained. “Dave had a group of veterans living with him, making the transition back to civilian life. Dave helped them…adjust.”
“That sounds like Dave,” Fine demeaned politely. Her eyes were on me. Her eyes glinted at me as though we shared a secret, a juicy one. She was an attractive, confident, well-organized person, someone who could help me, who could help us all get ourselves together. If she was in charge, we wouldn’t be running all over the map. “You saw him dead too, then,” she said.
“I saw him first.”
To Max: “You weren’t there?”
“I arrived late.”
Fine’s eyes were slitted, like Tauber’s had been. “How late?”
“Five, maybe seven minutes-that’s right, isn’t it?” he asked me.
“I think so,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “I…lost track of time.”
“You were under stress-that happens,” Miriam Fine said, smiling at me. She had a cup of tea for me, the way I liked it. I didn’t remember her leaving the room to get it but there it was. She was considerate that way, I could tell. She went out of her way for people. At least, she had for me-neither Max nor Tauber had anything to drink. She turned back to Max. “If you say you arrived late, does that mean you were on your way when it happened?”
Now there was something in the air-Max looked uncomfortable. “Dave warned me they were coming. When I first sensed them, I didn’t realize they were coming after him.”
Fine nodded. “You thought they were after you,” she cooed. “Because there’s always someone coming after you, isn’t there?” With each word, he shrank and she blossomed. His eyes seemed to shrivel into his head, the hollows under his thick eyebrows darker and deeper by the second.
“It’s not like that,” he said but we all knew it was. He’d already told us it was. Fine might be a bit of a tight-ass but she was the first together person I’d encountered since Dave got shot. She was smart and clean, she lived in a nice house in a respectable neighborhood, she had a regular life and a regular job. She had pictures on the wall and a desk with a big computer monitor and computerized paystubs from a real corporation, not a handwritten chickenscratch job that the bank teller looked at you sideways over. Miriam Fine was a corporation and I was traveling with a freak show. She had every reason to feel good about herself.