No Way to Die (42 page)

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Why would she do that?”

Jennings said, “It may have something to do with the fact that there were two wire transfers made early yesterday concerning Ms. Kenworth: First, at seven o’clock yesterday morning, into her account in Seattle for four million dollars from a Swiss bank. Second, at about four thirty yesterday afternoon, another wire that closed her Seattle account and transferred the entire sum to an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands. We're still checking, but we believe that the Cayman accounts have also been closed now with all the funds moved somewhere else.”

“I'll be damned. There’s your answer, Toni,” I said. “She got paid for turning you—and us—over to Marlowe. She was probably promised a bonus once Marlowe got away with the device. But Marlowe double crossed her and tried to kill her alongside us.”

"A plausible explanation," Jennifer said. "Once Holly knew that Marlowe was dead, she needed to hide her complicity. She simply faked like she was heavily under the influence of drugs until she'd been admitted to the hospital. Once the heat died down, she phoned in her wire transfer, got dressed, and left."

“And now she’s gone?” Toni asked. “Can you track her?”

“We started early this morning,” Jennifer said. “But if she has a twelve-hour head start on us, it could be that she simply jumped on the first international flight. She might be six thousand miles away by now.”

“How about her brother?” Toni said. “She said she has a brother in Boston.”

“We started checking that first thing as well. So far, our Boston field office has not been able to identify a brother. As a matter of fact, as near as we can tell, there is no brother.”

“What? No brother?” I said. “None at all?”

“That appears to be the case.”

“Holy shit. If we’d have known that—that she continued to lie to us even after we confronted her—we’d have run this whole operation differently.”

“Don’t knock the outcome,” Jennings said.

“Well,” I said, “that’s true. I just hate to leave a loose end like this.” I shook my head. “What a bunch of idiots we’ve been! We bought her story completely. She played us like complete fools.”

“Twice,” Toni said.

“That’s right,” I said. “Twice. We even believed her the second time after we caught her lying to us the first time.”

Jennings laughed. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said. “Look at us. Half our time is spent trying to mitigate our own mistakes. But we learn from them and try not to make the same ones twice.”

“Hopefully, we’ll learn, too,” I said. “But damn! She escaped with four million bucks right out from under our noses. She’s probably lying on a beach somewhere, drinking a piña colada. Man, that’s a lot of getting-away money.”

“It is, but don’t forget,” Jennings said, “she’s implicated in a conspiracy to murder Thomas Rasmussen. We’ll be looking for her—and we never stop. She’ll need that money.”

“Yes, she will,” Marilyn Rodgers said. “Ms. Blair, Mr. Logan—I believe that about wraps things up for us here, though. Ron, I’m sure you’ll continue the hunt for Ms. Kenworth from headquarters, right?”

“That’s right.” He turned to me. “Mr. Logan,” he said, reaching forward to shake my hand. “Well done. You take care of yourself.”

“I’ll catch up with you guys back at the office,” Jennifer said to the others as they started to leave. “I have a couple of things to go over with Mr. Logan.”

* * * *

After they’d left, Jennifer turned back to us. She looked at me, and then turned to Toni.

“Toni,” she said, “would you mind terribly if I spoke to Danny alone for a minute?”

“Sure,” Toni said. “That’s no problem.”She started to get up.

“Wait,” I said. I reached over and put my hand on Toni’s arm. I don’t know—I suppose I’d reached a point inside where I’d come to a decision. I liked Jennifer, and I’d certainly enjoyed our relationship together, but in the end, while we may have been intimate physically, we’d never been intimate emotionally. It was convenient, but there wasn’t much of a real connection—certainly no commitment to speak of. Besides, I could feel it getting in the way of a much bigger and more important relationship—that is, the somewhat odd arrangement between Toni and me. Strange and unfulfilled though it might have been, I didn’t want to jeopardize it anymore.I turned and looked at Jennifer. “Jen, I’d like Toni to stay. She’s my partner. We don’t keep any secrets anyway.”

Jennifer looked at me, and then she nodded. “I see. That’s okay then,” she said.

Toni pushed my hand away and stood up. I started to protest. “Shut up, Danny,” she said. “You guys talk. I’m going to get a cup of coffee.” She walked out of the room.

Jen watched Toni walk away. “That’s a pretty special woman you have there, Danny,” she said after Toni’d left.

I nodded. “Yeah.” I said. Then I added, “But I wouldn’t say I ‘have’ her. She’s not mine.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You guys are fooling yourselves. I know you well enough to where I can look in your eyes and see things. Like I told you in the parking lot at U-Dub Thursday, I can definitely see that there’s something between the two of you. I thought you wanted to break things off between us. You say you didn’t. But I can see that you guys have something special—a connection. You two fit together—even if you
do
refuse to recognize it or act on it.” She walked over to the window and looked outside for a moment, and then she turned back and looked at me. “Danny, we don’t have that, you and I. You know that, right?”

I shrugged. “Our relationship is different, Jen,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said, walking back over to me. “Different. We’re great together—don’t get me wrong—but that special connection isn’t there.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a connection.”

She smiled. “Not that kind of connection, you hound.”

“Okay. We’re convenient,” I said.

“Exactly,” she agreed. “We’re convenient. Handy. We’re friends. But we don’t have what it takes to go beyond that, do we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I’d agree.”

“Good,” she said. “Keep that in mind. Believe it or not, this isn’t the reason I wanted to talk to you, but seeing you and Toni together again helps clarify things.”

“Clarify what things, Jen? What’s up?”

“We’ve not kept any secrets from each other, right?” Before I could answer, she continued. “I found out last week while I was in Virginia that there’s an opening in Washington, D.C., in Ron Jennings’s department for a senior special agent. I get along well with Ron, and I like the work—I’d be traveling all over the country, doing counterintelligence work.I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I’ve. . . I’ve decided I’m going to take the job.”

This was a surprise. I halfway expected her to break things off—but a move to Washington? “When’d you decide this?” I asked.

She stared at me, but didn’t answer.

“Jen?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a few days, but I guess I made up my mind just now,” she said.

“Jen, why?”

She turned and looked out the window. A few moments later, she turned back to me with tears in her eyes. “Danny, I don’t know how it works for sure, but I think we don’t get very many opportunities to hook up with our perfect soul mate. I look at you, and I look at Toni, and I wonder. She might be ‘The One’ for you; she’s got so much going for her. I could never forgive myself if I somehow stood in the way of that and messed it up for you. It wouldn’t be right. I like you too much. And seeing the two of you here together again this morning—well, it just reminds me of how it’s supposed to be.”

I listened, but I didn’t say anything.

“I think our little relationship is about to get too expensive for both of us, Danny.”

“How do you mean?”

“For you, I think it might be getting in the way of you finding who you’re supposed to be with.” She thought about this for a second, and then added, “Me, too, maybe. But for me, it’s also going to get in the way of my career. And you know,” she said, smiling, “that’s something I’d never allow to happen.”

“Never,” I said, smiling. “You’re out of here.”

She looked at me. “You understand, then. I think we’ve about run our course.”

I nodded. “What will you do?”

She brightened. “I’m pretty mobile, as you know. I’ll move back next week. The new job will be good for my career. And it’ll put me four hours closer to my mom down in Georgia.”

It was quiet for a few seconds as I considered what she was saying. “Wow, Jen,” I said, shaking my head, leaning back against my pillow, digesting this.

She smiled at me. She really was pretty. “I want you to know that I had a wonderful few weeks with you, Danny,” she said. “I won’t forget them. You’re a pretty amazing guy. And I’ll be coming back from time to time. I’m gonna check in on you. If you’re still single, maybe we can hang out some more.”

I smiled and nodded.

She looked at me for a few long seconds.

“But if I’m any judge of things, you won’t be. You’ve got somebody pretty special waiting for you. You’d better not blow it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said, “I’ll miss you, Jen—that much I do know.”

She nodded, and then she leaned forward and kissed me. She smiled, her eyes welling up with tears.

“You’re a lucky man, Danny Logan. Take care of yourself.” She turned and walked away. I listened to the
clack-clack-clack
of her heels slowly receding as she disappeared down the hallway.

I LET OUT a heavy sigh and stared at the ceiling. I’d been dumped by girls several times in the past. Sometimes, it hurt. Sometimes, not so much. Sometimes it was more of a relief than anything. This time, oddly, I felt a little of all of these things. I was still thinking about this when Toni walked back into the room.

“Jennifer stopped by the cafeteria and told me she was all done,” she said.

“That was nice of her.”

“Yeah.” Toni paused, and then she said, “She also said she was moving to Washington, D.C.”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“Washington, D.C. How do you feel about that?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Mixed, I guess.”

“Mixed?”

“I don’t know. Jen and I had an odd kind of relationship, as you’ve been quick to point out in the past. And it’s weird—you’d probably expect a manly man like myself to think that a relationship that was all sex and no emotions would be a dream gig.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Exactly,” I said. “But I think I’ve found out it doesn’t work that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the whole point of the no-commitment-friends-with-benefits-type relationship is that it’s not supposed to have any strings, right? No costs. But I can tell you, that’s all fucked up. It has plenty of costs, believe me.”

She looked at me but didn’t speak, so I continued. “If you’re both decent people, feelings grow and develop between you—even if that wasn’t the original intent.”

“You’re saying you have feelings for Jennifer?” she asked.

“Yeah, of course I do—she’ll always be a friend—more than a friend, even. You might call it friends-with-history. And because she’s a friend, it hurts that she’s leaving, yeah. So there’s a cost that I didn’t expect. You can turn on that kind of friends-with-benefits relationship pretty easy, but turning it off isn't so easy and it's likely to hurt.”

She nodded.

I looked outside for a minute, and then I said, “But I guess that’s just part of the problem. Jen and I don’t line up, and we both recognize this.”

“What does that mean?”

“Line up? Look, you can put two people together—almost any two decent people—and they can become friends. That’s what’s happened with Jen and me. We became friends.”

She nodded.

“But the bigger thing is,” I continued, “it takes two special people—people who fit together just right—to line up perfectly so they can become more than friends. Like I said, Jen and I aren’t there. We never were, and we never would be. It’s not happening. And the problem is that the relationship she and I had can get in the way of some bigger, more important things.”

“Like what?”

“Things like her career, for example. Or even more important,” I looked up at Toni, “things like forming a relationship with someone you
do
line up with.”

She looked at me for a few seconds, and then she turned away and sighed. “Do you really believe that exists?”she asked. “That there’s someone special who you line up with?”

“Toni,” I said softly. She turned and looked back at me. “For me?Definitely. I
know
there’s someone. And I’ve handled it badly. And I’m sorry.”

She bit her lower lip and looked into my eyes. Neither of us spoke for a moment.

Then I continued. “I’ve been thinking that for the past four years, every good memory I have—every damn one of ’em—has you in it some way or another. And when you were gone—when Marlowe took you, I lost it. I controlled it on the outside, thank God. But inside, I was a wreck. I hate to say it, but I think the thought of losing you made me realize how important you are to me—how much you really mean to me.”