Me, Myself and Why? (2 page)

I just want to leave, and disappear,

Alllllll geeeeeeese loooooong.

The screams won’t find me, round and round,

Never will, round and round,

No they won’t they never will,

Say goooood-byyyyyye.

Chapter One

The lilting strains of thrash metal crashed through my skull and I sat bolt upright in bed, clutching my ears. Someone—probably my psycho sister—had set my alarm to WROX and cranked it. It was a lot like being awakened on an airport runway by an approaching DC-10.

I clawed for the snooze button, missed, swiped again, knocked the radio to the carpet, slithered off the bed, fell on
top
of the snooze button, and, mercifully, the Sweet Jerkoffs’ new release,
Raining Hell on Your Stupid Face,
stopped.

Don’t ask me how I knew the song and the band. I won’t tell.

“Too early,” came a sonorous voice from the bed above.
What
the—? “Sleep more.”

I cautiously peeked over the edge of the bed. A strange, nude man was tangled up in my Laura Ashley sheets. His long dark hair covered half his face and flut-tered as he resumed snoring. He had a tattoo of Donald Duck performing a sexual act on Daisy; it was almost four inches across!

And—
what
the—?—I was naked, too.

Over his slurred protests (he smelled like he’d fallen into a tequila vat on the way to my apartment), I pulled him out of bed as efficiently and politely as I could. I found his jeans under the bed, his shirt hanging over my bedside lamp, his boxer briefs on top of the heating vent, one of his shoes in the bathroom, and the other in my kitchen sink. It was tough work getting him dressed while
not
looking at his penis, but I managed.

Don’t ask me how; I won’t tell.

After the stranger was gone, I set about cleaning up the empty tequila bottles, the gnawed lemon slices (one was nestled beside my toothbrush like a bedraggled yellow comma), the spilled salt shakers (my moo cow shaker! in the toilet! darn it all!), and something that looked like a small purple whale.

I was studying it, hoping it wasn’t what I knew it was, when it started to buzz in my hand and I dropped it. What was
that
doing in the fridge?

Never mind. Never mind. I—I had to get to work. Mustn’t be late! Mustn’t be late!

I kicked the vibrator across the kitchen floor until it was close to the garbage, then darted into the bathroom. I took a quick shower, dried at light speed (my blond hair looked all right, but my eyes were bloodshot—what
had
my sister been—never mind, never mind), and dressed in my best conservative navy suit.

Then I grabbed a breakfast Hot Pocket (ham & cheese) and headed out the front door. I had a splitting headache, but some iced coffee ought to fix that nicely . . . along with about ten Advils. No time for makeup, but I twisted my hair up into a large barrette.

“Morning, Ms. Jones,” Ben, the doorman, said on my way out. “Late night, huh?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, as my last memory was of walking down Lake Street at 5:30 p.m. the day before (a peek at the newspaper assured me of the date), but nodded and waved my Hot Pocket at him.

It took ten minutes to find my Mitsubishi Eclipse—I was thankful it hadn’t been towed again, intruding crookedly on the sidewalk as it was—and another twenty-five to drive (a bit more quickly than usual) to BOFFO headquarters, located on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis. It looked like an office building, maybe the corporate headquarters for Target or one of those financial-adviser firms that did so well until 2008. But this was no office.

Well, it was in that there were printers and desks and things, but it was actually a branch of the FBI, the Bureau of False Flag Ops.

After I parked, I took the elevator to the correct floor, slid my key card through the slot, waited for the retinal scan, then popped in. Five minutes early! Victory was mine.

As always, I was greeted by Opus, the custodian for my floor.

“Hi . . . Cadence.”

“Hi, big guy. Have a nice night?”

Opus gave the question careful thought before answering. “Yes.” Opus didn’t understand the concept of small talk—he had savant syndrome (never, never use the phrase “idiot savant”; soooo twentieth century!)—but he could do incredible things with numbers, even if he couldn’t write out a grocery list. He was a shambling bear of a man—well over six feet tall, with shaggy brown hair, bushy eyebrows, mud-colored eyes, and thick forearms. His two-piece brown uniform made him look not unlike a grizzly bear. With a mop.

I’ll admit, I had a soft spot for the man. I’d had to defend him from occasional taunts from some of my less sensitive co-workers, “rain man” being a popular insult.

It was almost funny that anybody who worked for BOFFO would have the nerve to insult anyone else who worked for BOFFO. After all, we all had—

“Cadence!” George Pinkman was actually dancing from one foot to the other. “I got the new
Halo
! You should come over and help me blow shit up.”

“Some other time,” I replied sweetly. George gave me the creeps. A textbook sociopath, he didn’t think anything was real except the world of violent video games. Why BOFFO needed him I would never understand, but I was certainly in no position to complain or judge. I mean, jeepers! I was a federal cop, not King Solomon. “But thanks.”

“Maybe your sister, then.”

I shivered and moved past him to my desk. He really
was
crazy. Well, sure. He had a BOFFO ID card, didn’t he? And he’d fooled a lot of people with those big green eyes, aquiline nose, and firm jaw. His eyebrows were slashing commas across his forehead, and although he had a slim build, he held no fewer than three black belts. He often dressed and talked effeminately to provoke the local rednecks. Then he’d lure them out into the parking lot and break various bones. All in the name of self-defense, of course, while sporting one of his huge collection of incredibly garish and tasteless neckties.

The one he wore now featured a single cartoon puppy in a dead-Christ pose, against a background of rainbows.

I scanned the morning faxes, checked arrest reports, did some work on the computer, and heated up my Hot Pocket, which I gobbled in six bites (
so
hun-gry!). I got a Frappuccino from the vending machine, balanced it on my Hello Kitty mouse pad, and began gulping it with a few Advils. This would, I hoped, take care of my hangover.

“Cadence Jones!”

I swung around in my chair, nearly spilling my drink. My supervisor, Michaela, was framed in the doorway of Da Pitt (where all her field agents congregated to fight crime and work on their Secret Santa drawings). She was a fifty-something woman with silver, straight chin-length hair and amazing green eyes. Pure green, not hazel. Like leaves! Hair the color of precious metal, eyes the color of wet leaves—she’d have been gorgeous if she hadn’t been so scarily efficient and surrounded by cubicles and printers and mail carts. And today, as usual, she was dressed in Ann Taylor.

I squashed the urge to shake the ringing out of my ears—the boss lady had the volume and pitch of a steamer whistle. “Weren’t we going to work on our inside voice?”

“Debriefing! Thirty minutes!”

“I know, I saw the e-mail.” I pointed at my computer screen. “But thanks for assuming I hadn’t learned to read in the first grade.”

“Leave the mouth at your desk!” Thankfully, she vanished through another doorway.

Now how was I supposed to do that? Physically, it was impossible. Figuratively, it didn’t make any sense, since my mouth was essentially what made me valuable to BOFFO. Maybe Michaela was coming off an odd night, too.

George shoved, hard, and his chair shot over to my desk. “It’s Miller time!” he chortled, pounding his fists on his thighs.

It was a bad joke, of course. Connie Miller, who had poisoned four of her five children in seven years

(Why did she let the oldest live? What was it about the others? Why why why did she)

was being remanded for trial this morning; George and I were to baby-sit her until the local cops came. It was essentially some last-minute paperwork before transfer. Strictly custodial. Mornings like this reminded me that for fearless minions of the federal government, an awful lot of what we did was cleanup. For which we received full medical and dental, so it wasn’t all bad.

Connie Miller creeped me out as much as George did, but for entirely different reasons. Call me old-fashioned, but it was against the laws of nature when moms killed their kids.

And Munchausen by proxy? Getting off on the attention you got when your kids got sick (by your own hand) and died? Weird. Repulsive. Horrifying. I was superglad my sister had helped make the collar; there was no way I could have taken her on my own.

It had become a matter for BOFFO when Miller moved from California to Minnesota. George and my sister had managed to track and nail her. Now the only thing left for BOFFO was routine paperwork, and putting the dead babies out of our minds. Two of the babies she had killed she’d conceived only after spending a great deal of time and money on fertility treatments.

Baffling.

We moved through various secure areas, slipping key cards through scanner after scanner. There were very few security guards at BOFFO: too many of us were paranoid and would begin acting like inmates. (Some of us, I suspected, had been in the past.) So whatever security could be automated, was.

Connie Miller was sitting quietly in an interrogation room, dressed in a lime jumpsuit with BOFFO printed in black letters on the back and sleeves. She was handcuffed in front, as she was deemed docile, cooperative, and even oddly friendly, not to mention in her early forties and overweight.

“Ms. Miller!” George called. “Ready for your day in court?”

“I can’t wait,” she replied, twinkling up at George. Her blue eyes (almost, I hated to admit, the exact same shade as mine) were wide and practically glowing. “The jury will believe me, once I explain everything.”

“Don’t forget to mention how you used peach puree to cover up the acidic taste of the poison,” George suggested amiably. He yawned and scrubbed his face with his palms; he’d been up until the wee hours playing computer games, no doubt. “The jury will eat it up. Get it? Eat it up? Heh. You do realize your poor dead babies are going to be waiting for you in hell, right?”

I resisted the urge to kick him in the ankle. For one thing, George was an atheist. Rather, he did believe in God, and he believed
he
was that God. For another, he wouldn’t have minded if Miller had killed twenty babies. George, like all sociopaths, lived for fun, passion, and challenges. Morality wasn’t just an alien concept for him, it was utterly unknown.

No, he was just fucking with her. It was cruel, even for someone like her. Whatever we were, we were
professionals
.

I forced a smile, ignoring the throbbing in my temples. “If you could just sign here. And here. And initial here.” It was a little like accepting a package from FedEx. “And sign here.”

Connie obediently scribbled with the soft-felt-tip pen I’d handed her.

George sprawled himself in a chair opposite her and stroked his dead-rainbow-Jesus-dog tie. “Your problem is, you got greedy. One baby, okay. Two? Prob’ly would’ve worked. But four? And you crossed state lines? And let every hospital have your chart?”

“I can explain everything,” she muttered, her red hair falling into her eyes as she huddled over the paperwork I was handing across the table.

“Tell it to the judge, sweetie.” Like many sociopaths, George was charismatic and could make an insult sound like a flirtation. He was even leering at her, which would only confuse the poor woman.

It wasn’t the first time I’d questioned Michaela’s judgment in putting a pure sociopath on the team. They were just so darned unpredictable, not to mention unreliable when it came to pulling their weight at the Secret Santa party.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” the killer said primly. “The Lord has blessed me with many babies and many challenges.”

“Challenges!” George hooted.

“Stop it,” I pleaded. What was his point, other than to upset her? She had been caught. The jury would put her away. She’d spend the next thirty years in Shakopee. There was no point to this and it was upsetting the prisoner.

And
me.

“Yes,
stop it
!” she shrieked, and lunged over the table at me. I stepped away from her and

Chapter Two

Caught her by the wrist, twisted, ignored her howl, and flipped her away from me.

“Ohhhhhh!” someone chortled. “And Shiro sinks a three-pointer
right before the buzzer
!”

George Pinkman. Of course. “Be quiet,” I snapped. Connie Miller came up for me, clawing, shrieking something about how my children were not safe from the whims of the Lord, how she was the Angel of Death, how she would separate the wheat from the yak-yak-yak. The prattling set my teeth on edge and made it easy to break her arm at the elbow, just so I could hear something different come out of those sweaty, nonsense-mongering lips.

Foolish woman. I could understand her initial mistake, as Cadence was an idiot who could not defend herself against a paper cut, but once I was there, what was the point of pissing me off?

Perhaps she was fooled by my size. Like many Asian Americans, I was a bit short.

It was hard to talk over Miller’s screams, but I managed. “You have explaining to do, George Pinkman.”

“What?” Being a bully, he was amazed when things went too far, and did not make the connection between his comments and her reaction. “She’s the psycho, not me.” He laughed, a nasty sound and entirely out of place amid the screams of pain.

A single guard raced into the room, trying to look everywhere at once. He secured Ms. Miller’s hands—this time behind her back—and hauled her away, presumably to the infirmary. I did not especially care where they took her, so long as I did not have to listen to the wailing.