Jude Devine Mystery Series (94 page)

Debbie took a bottle of spring water from the door and went back into the living room. Balancing the phone, she removed the bottle cap. Lone still wasn’t talking. Debbie knew what was going on. Lone would simply wait for her to change the subject, then they would both pretend she’d never suggested meeting at Lone’s house in the first place.

Angry with her for refusing to make this one small compromise to improve their relationship, Debbie said, “Well, I guess you’re not willing to meet me halfway. Enjoy your pizza.”

Before Lone could answer, if she was even going to, Debbie hit End and placed the cell phone back on the coffee table. Lone wouldn’t be expecting that. She was used to Debbie apologizing, crying, and blaming herself. Well, new rule: If Lone didn’t want to talk, fine—she could have all the peace and quiet in the world.

Debbie turned on the TV and rubbed her tears away so she could focus on the screen. She was hurt. She thought their relationship mattered as much to Lone as it did to her. Apparently not. She turned up the volume and tried to figure out what was going on. The movie was an older one, the colors kind of hazy. Debbie wanted to switch the channel but the TV wouldn’t let her. Tulley had warned her about that. Jude had TiVo. When the little red light came on that meant she was taping a program.

Debbie resigned herself to watching and was pleasantly surprised that she started to get involved in the story once she came to grips with the plot. An assassin was hired to kill the president of France for reasons to do with the Algerians. The film wasn’t exciting, but it was nerve-racking and Debbie wasn’t sure how it would end. She didn’t know if it was based on fact and whether Charles De Gaulle was a real man who actually did get assassinated. The security around him was tight, but the Europeans allowed De Gaulle to do risky things so they could avoid arguing with him. Debbie thought an American president would know better.

Sill, the detective trying to track down the assassin was very clever and the cat-and-mouse contest between the two men had her hooked. In the end, she was shocked to find herself half hoping the Jackal would succeed, he’d gone to such elaborate lengths to plan the killing. Of course she was relieved when the plot failed, but she found herself wondering what happened later, who the Jackal really was, and how he ever became such a cold-blooded killer. That was the mystery, she supposed: why people do terrible things.

*

“Sheriff Pratt says you were with the Bureau before you moved out here.”

Special Agent in Charge Aidan Hill moved forward a couple of steps. They were waiting in line for a table at one of the better Mexican restaurants in town.

“Yes, the CACU,” Jude said.

“Quite a change of pace.”

Jude shrugged. “I was ready to get out.”

Hill stared like Jude had just thrown up a hairball on a valuable rug.

A waitress summoned them. “You want a table by the mariachi band or a window booth?”

“The window.” Jude glanced sideways at Aidan Hill. They’d given the same reply in unison.

As the SAC strode after the waitress, Jude took full advantage of the view. The agent’s butt was firm and toned, even if Hill moved like she had something prickly up there. The walk was familiar. Female agents made an effort to lose their natural hip sway, along with other signs of their gender, in the drive to avoid the “nutty or slutty” label applied routinely to Bureau women. And fraternization was tantamount to career suicide, so no one wanted to be seen as a flirt.

Jude decided no agent who wanted to keep his manhood intact would attempt to grope Hill in an elevator. Her vibe was all work and no play, and she backed up that first impression with a communication style that could only be described as libido-numbing. Pity. Jude could have been tempted regardless of butt tautness. Lately she’d been looking twice at any female under ninety who smiled at her. Not that she would act on her primal urges. For all she cared, Hill could be a half-dressed hottie who only packed a 9mm for the kink factor, and Jude still wouldn’t go there. The part of her that wanted to get laid was diametrically at odds with another part that felt physically sick at the thought of any woman getting under her skin again.

Besides, the zone under her skin already had a tenant. Mercy Westmoreland lived there, causing an itchy awareness that Jude could not escape. What would it take to end her fixation? She imagined driving past Mercy and Elspeth’s house and seeing Mercy in the yard screaming at a bunch of kids, a cigarette hanging off her lip, saggy breasts, lank hair, and jeans that didn’t fit anymore.

Dream on.

Jude ran her eyes over Hill as she slid into the opposite side of the booth. If the brunette was sending any covert sexual cues, she would spot them, and just in case she’d misread her as a sexless drone, Jude sent a subtle signal herself, letting her gaze linger on Hill’s shirtfront. She waited for the nipples to react. Nada. Perhaps Hill was wearing those silicone gel nipple covers some of Jude’s colleagues in the CACU used. Breast petals. The name made her smile.

Hill gave her a quizzical look. Like everything else about her, the coffee brown eyes transmitted a “hands off” signal. And there was something else, too. Jude’s downhill career path didn’t sit well with this over-achiever. That she could have traded the Bureau for a two-bit gig in a sheriff’s office in Bumfuck, Colorado, was incomprehensible to a straight arrow like this woman. Jude resisted an immediate urge to invite Hill to the shooting range so she could show her how a loser handles a 1,000 yard benchrest in shifting winds. A five-shot group in less than three inches—would that earn a little respect? Or maybe, to even up the odds, they could face off at 600 yards. See who came closest to a sub-inch. Or there was always hand-to-hand combat. Hill had a nice body, very fuckable. But she looked soft. Jude could take her. Ten seconds, maybe twenty if Hill managed a couple of moves.

“Devine?” The tone was sharp. Hill closed her plastic-covered menu with a thwack.

“Something to drink?” the waitress inquired, tapping her pen and sighing like she needed to be somewhere else.

“Go ahead,” Jude politely invited her dinner guest.

“She ordered already,” the waitress said.

“Okay, I’ll have what she’s having.”

The waitress got perky. “Two frozen strawberry-fuzz-coladas coming right up.”

Jude squirmed. She wasn’t sure what shocked her more, that SAC Hill had just signed up for a girl drink that would arrive in a huge glass with a slab of pineapple dangling from cherry-studded toothpicks, or that
she
had not been paying enough attention to dodge that unseemly bullet herself.

“Both virgins, right?” the waitress asked.

A nonalcoholic drink, that’s what she was talking about. Insult after injury.

“Want to change your mind, Detective?” Hill asked blandly. Something in her tone suggested she thought this was funny.

“No, I can handle a virgin,” Jude said.
Take that.

The unsubtle innuendo was lost on both women. The waitress announced that tortilla chips would arrive momentarily, and Hill asked for an order of guacamole without garlic. Maybe she was planning to kiss someone. Jude almost laughed out loud at that idea. She watched a prom-queen type suck on a straw at a nearby table. In front of her a bowl-sized glass brimmed with icy pink gloop.

“Wait,” Jude called the waitress back. There was a fine line between stubbornness and outright stupidity. “Make that a beer after all. Fat Tire, thanks.”

“Do you want ice with that?” came the helpful suggestion. “Our beer fridge isn’t working that great in the heat.”

No, I’ll just have Agent Hill blow on it.
Jude kept that sentiment to herself. “Sure,” she said. “What could be more alluring than warm beer on the rocks?”

As the waitress left them to talk among themselves, Hill said the magic words, “Doing anything later, Devine?”

“What?”

She must have looked dazed because Hill slowed her speaking voice to a village-idiot pace. “I thought we could grab some take-out coffee after dinner and go over the briefing for tomorrow afternoon in my room. Just a preliminary pass. See if I have all the bases covered.”

You’re shitting me.
Jude gave a feeble nod. “Sounds awesome.”

And the night was just beginning.

Chapter Eleven

“My deputy has an angle.” Jude thought she may as well throw it out there.

She and Hill had spent the past mind-numbing hour discussing the facts that had emerged from the FBI probe into the ASS. Everyone seemed to agree that the men involved were the dregs of the white power movement, none with an IQ over 90. Someone smarter had to be running the operation. The question was who, and what was the agenda?

“He thinks the attack could target a film called
My Enemy’s Enemy
. It deals with Klaus Barbie.”

“Ah, a Holocaust movie,” Hill latched on immediately. “The ASS are Holocaust deniers. They’ll assume a Jewish audience. Not a bad theory.” With a humorless laugh, she added, “Wait till I tell the team we’ve been outbrained by a hicktown cop.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time,” Jude said mildly. “I’m curious, are you planning to wait for a body count before you show us some respect and listen to our views, or are we only on board so we can take the heat for screwups?”

Hill didn’t bat an eyelash.

Jude thought,
Arrogant bitch
. As usual, that made her look twice at the woman concerned. Hill had gotten comfortable after they adjourned to her room, dumping her shoulder holster and exchanging her crisp shirt and tailored slacks for a faded college sweater and sloppy tracksuit pants. The look had a certain youthful, tousled sexiness that made Jude think fondly back to the FBI Academy.

She’d had crushes on a couple of New Agent Trainees who were probably a lot like Hill. They were deadly serious about their careers even then, putting in extra physical training for the PT tests and practicing defensive tactics with other NATs outside of classes. The only reason Jude got her hands on various lust objects was because she was the NAT to beat in hand-to-hand, so they all wanted to spar with her after hours. Jude had the sense that Hill would like to take her on now just to see how long it would take to disarm her.

She let her gaze drift from Hill’s determined face to her sensibly manicured hands. She was the pride of her family, Jude speculated. Her dad was on the job, and one of her brothers was probably a firefighter.

Looking to confirm her guesswork, she said, “My dad was a cop.”

Hill drew the wrong conclusion from the remark. “Mine, too, so I have no prejudices in that department, I can assure you.”

“Are you an only child?” Jude asked casually.

“No, I have two brothers.”

“Cops?”

“Neither of them. One owns a restaurant and the other is a firefighter.” Hill tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ears impatiently. “You know, I don’t care if we don’t become friends for life, so we can bypass the getting to know each other bullshit.”

Jude shrugged. “Works for me.” She decided Hill was sex starved. She emitted the same tightly coiled frustration Jude detected in herself.

“I’ll check in with the festival liaison about that film,” Hill said. “It’s a definite contender.”

“For the record, I don’t think Holocaust denial is the issue,” Jude said. “If we’re looking at an outside party working with the ASS, the film could give us an angle but it’s not the usual.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“If it’s about Barbie and the CIA, you know it has to be about the Cocaine Coup.”

Hill gave her such a blank stare Jude had to assume she was new to the counterterrorism division. Apparently it hadn’t crossed her mind to explore the intelligence tradition she was now a part of. Maybe that was the norm now that the “war on terror” was sucking up so many agents with limited experience. Jude thought about the chats she and Arbiter sometimes had, just shooting the breeze. The guy was an encyclopedia of counterintelligence history and rumor. She’d learned a lot from him that she never knew when she was working in the CACU.