Lomax agreed with a slow nod that had preface written all over it.
“What?” Art asked.
“I have to give you a case. It could get fairly involved.”
Art eased back and did a few neck rolls. “All right.”
“This is quiet. You only use resources if absolutely necessary.”
Interested now, Art straightened in his chair. “Resources.”
“Other personnel in the office. You don’t go outside under any circumstances.”
“A one man show, is what you’re saying.”
“Yes. The file’s in your vault on the system. The reference name is ROMA.”
“You want to give me a quick synopsis?” Art probed.
“It has to do with your houseguest.”
“Simon?”
Lomax nodded. “NCIC got a DoD hit on the fingerprints of the guy who killed Simon’s parents. Not even a category hit. The prints were a hospital set taken when the guy was wounded in Grenada.” The National Crime Information Center had links to fingerprint files of other government entities, and in this instance at least, the system worked perfectly.
“Who was he?”
“The name was Mike Bell. He was Marine Recon, and apparently did work for about a dozen government agencies after that.”
“Work?” Art questioned. “We’re not talking nine to five.”
“We’re talking nine millimeter,” Lomax confirmed.
“I doubt that’s in his records.”
“Look at the holes,” Lomax suggested. “Holes are where things happen.”
“Was he working for anyone when this happened?”
Lomax shook his head. “It doesn’t look like it. He was excused from his last position over a year ago.”
“What position?”
“He was doing ‘training activities’ at Fort Meade,” Lomax answered doubtfully.
“A Marine training at an Army base?” Art wondered with equal doubt.
“Meade is a big place,” Lomax said as a reminder. From the look on the A-SAC’s face he saw that he got it.
“I’ll take a look at that hole.”
Lomax pushed himself up from the chair and arched a crick from his back. “Chicago PD is backing off until we have a chance to look at it.”
“There’s no family to demand answers,” Art said. He felt the sadness of that fact.
Lomax thought quietly for a moment, then asked, “Do you think he might talk about it?”
“I don’t know.”
Lomax nodded without pressing the point. “Let me know what you find.”
“Will do,” Art assured the SAC, and called up his personal ‘vault’ on the computer system as Lomax left. After entering his password, graphical icon folders dotted the screen. He noticed the new one right away and double clicked on it.
A vapid, coarse face stared back at him a second later, red hair atop and a crooked cleft in the chin. Art looked long at it, not even bothering with the written information yet. He studied the eyes, the lines of age, the crook of the mouth. On the generous monitor the face was as large as his. Mike Bell could have been sitting two feet from him.
“So, what did you want with Simon’s family?”
The answer did not come, but Art did not expect it yet. The dead did not come right out and answer. You had to drag it out of them. And it only made it easier if you already hated them.
“Do you have anything to declare?” the youthful customs inspector at the Vancouver, B.C., International Airport inquired of the oddly exotic Asian woman as she set her purse on the inspection table before him.
Keiko Kimura smiled behind dark glasses and beneath a silky blonde wig. “Only that you’re cute.”
The inspector, mindful of the plainclothes Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer standing a few feet away, suppressed a smile and dutifully examined the woman’s passport. “Miss Jiang, you are coming from Hong Kong?”
Keiko nodded. The glasses hid her eyes, and she doubted that the scrumptious young man would notice the difference between Japanese and Chinese features. Oh, if only that dreadful Canadian lilt didn’t taint his speech he might pass for American. But that really did not matter. America was not far away. A short drive. So close.
The inspector took a quick look in Miss Jiang’s purse, and handed her passport back. “Enjoy your stay in Canada.”
“I will,” Keiko said, and left the customs area with an exaggerated wiggle in her walk. The inspector admired her until she disappeared into the terminal.
Chapter Six
Blood Tears
It was called the guest room, but in reality the only guest that had ever used it was Anne’s twenty year old daughter, Jennifer, when she stole a free weekend once from her studies at Stanford. Now Simon occupied it, sitting on the bed, legs barely touching the floor, his thin frame tilting to and fro.
In the open doorway, leaning against the jamb, Art stood watching the young man, thinking, wondering.
“You should come to bed,” Anne said, coming up from behind and sliding her arms around Art’s waist, feeling him breathe beneath her touch. “He’ll fall asleep eventually.”
Art nodded absently and crossed his arms over hers. In one hand a sheet of paper was rolled into a white tube, which he tapped against his bare chest. “He misses them.”
“His world is out of sorts, Art. Miss probably isn’t something he comprehends.”
Simon rocked gently, silently, hands folded on his legs. His eyes danced over something, over nothing, over a bare space in the corner.
“He misses them,” Art repeated.
Anne cocked her eyes toward Art’s face and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. He could still surprise her, the rugged, stubborn G-Man. “Come to bed. Soon.”
Art nodded and felt Anne’s hands ease away. A moment later, when the door to their bedroom down the hall clicked shut, Art opened the rolled paper and looked to it. It had been taken off Mike Bell’s body at the Lynch house, folded in his coat pocket. Of all the other information in the ROMA file, the fake Chicago PD credentials, the copies of Lynch family medical records found in Bell’s van, their driver’s license photos, this one page stood out because it had no apparent meaning. It was a hole, and Art knew Lomax’s words to be quite true when it came to investigations. Looking at the holes would give texture, sometimes form, to the surrounding landscape of inquiry.
But this was a hole like no other, a hole of numbers, and letters, covering one entire sheet of paper. Art looked from it to Simon as his fingers curled it again into a tube.
What happened in that house, kid? Art wondered, knowing that soon he would have to pose that question outright. Maybe Simon would answer, maybe not, but beyond that there was the paramount question that Art knew he would have to give satisfaction to. The question whose response more often than not generated more questions. Art resisted the urge to crush the flimsy roll of paper and loosed the query upon himself. Why? Why to this family? To this kid?
Thousands of miles west, in a club on the expansive Seattle waterfront, a Willamette University student squeezed through a crush of people at the bar and ordered a Sharp’s from the bartender. His elbow innocently brushed the bare arm of a pretty woman on his right.
“Excuse me.”
Keiko Kimura, black hair sculpted into a French braid that narrowed as it crept down her back, looked to the young man through small, round, blue-tinted specs. She smiled, her eyes traveling down to his arms, over biceps that did not deserve to be hidden by sleeves, past the casually rolled-up cuffs just below the elbows, to forearms that might have been chiseled from marble by a Roman artisan.
And then to the hands. The perfect fingers spread on the bar, thumbs prominent, nails clean and tailored.