“Good idea.” I doodled ever-expanding circles on my paper. “But the way I see it, Alex is-or was-a key player, but Robin was just an innocent bystander. So why does it matter how they met?”
“Why was he killed inside her home?”
“Because someone was after him and followed them to her place, and found a way inside and… Heck, I don’t know. It was convenient?” But it wasn’t, of course. And there was the whole drugging-of-Robin issue. Nothing made sense about this.
“I’ve come to the conclusion,” Derek said, “that Robin is connected to the mystery behind Alex’s death.”
I thought about it and sat forward with my theory. “Maybe Alex stole something from someone else and Robin got in the way.”
Derek leaned in. “Did Alex steal it? Or did Robin steal it?”
Frowning, I inched back. “Robin didn’t steal anything. If Robin had stolen something, wouldn’t the killer have killed her instead of Alex?”
“Very good point,” Derek said, encouraging me along. “So you think Alex stole something? Maybe he stole it from Robin.”
“Robin doesn’t have anything worth stealing,” I argued. “And who knows if Alex stole anything or not? None of it makes sense.”
“You’re right,” he said firmly. “None of it makes sense until we fill in the blanks.”
“How do we do that?” I sipped my drink and stared at him. “Wait. You have information.”
“I do.”
“Well, spill it.”
With a smile, Derek pulled out his smart phone and slid his finger across the surface until he found what he was looking for. He showed me a picture of a tiny metal box held in someone’s hand.
“What is that?”
“It’s a photograph of a mini flash drive. The smallest one they make, currently. It plugs into a plastic port and fits into the USB slot of any computer. It’s an effective and innocuous way to transport information from one computer to another.”
“Okay. Is that what Alex stole?”
“We think that was his intention.” Derek leaned forward again and spoke softly. “What we know for sure is that a highly placed Ukrainian operative working in deep cover in Toronto was activated recently.”
“Activated?”
“Yes,” he said, making me nervous as he watched my reactions closely. “He was sent to San Francisco to retrieve an item of crucial importance to the government.”
“The Ukrainian government?”
“Yes.”
“I’m assuming that you got this information from your people at Interpol?”
He said nothing, just continued to look at me with the barest hint of a smile. I suppose he thought it best not to say out loud exactly where he’d obtained this information, but Interpol was a safe bet. Still, a part of me was irked. Was he trying to keep me safe from culpability? Or did he simply not trust me? Or did he not trust Robin? Wait. Did he think my house was bugged? Okay, that was ridiculous. I took a deep breath and tried to reel in my overactive imagination.
“So I’ll assume the highly placed guy is Alex, right?”
“Yes.”
“And the crucial item?” I waved my hand at his phone and the picture of the flash drive.
“Exactly,” he said, holding the phone up again to show the photo. “A flash drive. A tiny one.” He put the phone down and held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate how small the metal flash drive was. “This big.”
“Tiny. I get it.” What I was really getting was a bad feeling in my stomach. “And who was he retrieving it from?”
“A soft target.”
“Okay.” Apparently, we were playing Twenty Questions. That was fine; I liked to play games. “What’s a soft target?”
“Robin is a soft target.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at him. I wasn’t so crazy about this game anymore. “You know that makes no sense, right? But let’s continue for the sake of argument. How long ago was this guy sent from Toronto?”
“Six days ago.”
With a heavy sigh, I got up and pulled the small calendar from the wall above the kitchen telephone and counted off the days. “So he came to San Francisco almost a week ago and found the flash drive or whatever he was looking for. Then he just happened to stop at Kasa for dinner and met Robin there.” I pointed at last Thursday, the night Robin returned from India.
“Did he find the flash drive, then meet Robin?” Derek asked. “Or did he meet Robin in order to find the flash drive?”
“Are you trying to make me mad?”
“No, darling,” he said in a soothing voice, and reached out to touch my hand. “I’m trying to find a killer.”
I clutched his hand in mine. He was being objective and I was getting emotional, and that wouldn’t help solve anything. I took a moment to breathe and realign my thoughts. “Okay, we both know Robin is innocent, right?”
“Of course, but she’s also at the center of something thorny. We need to unravel each individual thread in order to help her out of it.”
“Agreed.” I looked at the calendar again. “So, I’ll go with the theory that Alex found the flash drive Thursday, then met Robin that night. So maybe someone else was after the flash drive, too, and they tracked down Alex Saturday night at Robin’s place. Where they killed him late that night, or rather, early Sunday morning.”
“Perhaps. Continue.”
“Okay. I’m thinking of that perfect bullet hole in Alex’s forehead.” I gulped back a shiver of dread and continued. “So whoever killed him was probably another so-called professional operative, right?”
Derek nodded, but said nothing.
“So how professional is it,” I continued, “to kill another operative in the home of some innocent civilian who has no connection to anything? Wouldn’t they wait and whack him on his own turf?”
He smiled at my use of the lingo. “That’s a good point, and there are two different ways to proceed from there. The first is to assume that the killer wasn’t a professional, but the expert bullet placement belies that theory.”
“Right. What’s the second?”
“The second is to assume that Robin was not the innocent civilian we thought she was.”
“And that’s impossible,” I insisted, “so we’ve hit a dead end.”
“No, we’ll just continue to work through it until we arrive at our original theory.”
“What’s that?” I asked, sounding crabby.
“That Robin is innocent, naturally.”
“Oh.” Somewhat mollified, I nodded. “Okay, let’s keep talking.”
“Let me introduce one more tangle,” Derek said. “Perhaps I should’ve mentioned this before, but another agent was apparently dispatched to do the brush, but once Alex was killed, she was told to track down the drive.”
“She?” I echoed. “Would that be Galina?”
He lifted a shoulder. “My source didn’t have a name to give me. I was only told it’s a woman.”
“But Galina seemed more like a spurned lover than a highly trained operative,” I grumbled.
“She also worked out of Toronto, so perhaps you’re right. Perhaps they were lovers.”
I thought about that for a moment. “The fact that they were lovers probably saved our lives.”
“How so?” he asked.
“Galina was as strong as a bull. I have no doubt she could’ve killed us both with two well-placed karate chops. But she was emotional. She was on a wild rant, out of control, so Robin and I were able to get some punches in and distract her enough to push her down to the sidewalk.”
“Excellent theorizing, darling,” he said with a proud smile.
“Thanks,” I said, grinning, then remembered something else he’d said a moment ago. “I’m afraid to ask, but what’s a brush?”
“Brush pass. One agent passes off the item to another.”
“Good to know.” I leaned forward on my elbows. “So Alex was supposed to get the flash drive and pass it on to Galina. But Alex obviously didn’t find it and neither did Galina, because she kept yelling at us to give it to her, right?”