Rogue Oracle (4 page)

Tara squatted down to peer at the shoes. The almost obsessively neat line of shoes had been disturbed, kicked aside. She knelt and shone her flashlight on the floor of the closet.

Interesting.

On hands and knees, she crawled into the closet and turned around, careful not to disturb the shoes. The closet smelled like leather and jasmine perfume. The shoes had been shoved aside in a pattern that suggested someone had been inside the closet. Someone had been sitting here and hadn’t wanted to have a stiletto boot jammed up his ass.

“You hiding from Veriss in there?”

Tara peered at Harry’s dress slacks, then up. His arms were crossed, and he was staring down at her with a smile playing around his lips.

“Maybe.”

The drone of Veriss’s voice could be heard downstairs, and Harry rolled his eyes. “Is there room for me?”

“Probably. But I think someone was waiting in here for Lena.” Tara gestured to the scattered shoes, which looked like the leavings of a centipede. “I’m guessing that whoever was in here stayed here for a long time. Maybe hours.”

“That fits.” Harry frowned. “Lena Ivanova was last seen three days ago. She owns a local art gallery. She left work after meeting with a client, and hasn’t been seen since. Her car’s still in the driveway. Her housekeeper came in to work, expected her to come by to pay her. When Lena didn’t show, the housekeeper called the police.”

“This is where she was taken. I’m sure of it.” Tara crawled out of the closet, and Harry offered her a hand up. She scanned the bedroom, taking in the elegant furnishings. An antique four-poster bed dominated the room, surrounded by abstract watercolor paintings in vivid jewel tones. The bed was made, and the adjoining bathroom smelled of lemon cleaner.

Tara glanced sidelong at Harry. “How long had the housekeeper been here before she called the cops?”

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Two days. And the local PD took their sweet time declaring the victim to be a missing person. They’re still convinced she might have taken off to Bora Bora on a whim. The housekeeper’s been busy cleaning the house. For two days.”

“And destroying evidence for two days.”

“You got it. Forensics is going through the laundry now, and having a tantrum.”

Downstairs, Tara could hear the musical sound of the maid’s voice, interrupted over and over by Veriss. She tried to ignore it. She could hear muttered swearing from the forensic technicians who were trying to get prints from the freshly scrubbed windows. There had been no obvious signs of entry. And whatever evidence they would find would be so compromised by the maid’s actions that it would never stand up in court.

Tara crossed the plush carpet to the bed. The pile was covered in precise vacuum cleaner tracks, and she was certain that some poor forensic tech would have the task of taking the machine apart to look for unusual fibers. The bed had been crisply made with hospital corners, a jacquard and velvet comforter stretched so perfectly over it that it looked like a page from a catalog.

Not so much as a speck of dust had settled into the posters of the bed. Tara squinted at the carving on the upper posts. What she first took to be scrollwork actually resolved into a pattern of wings … reminding her of the Lovers card from her Tarot readings. In the card, an angel watched the Lovers from on high. What had these wooden angels witnessed?

Tara peeled back the covers, pulling them loose from the pile of decorative pillows. She ran her gloved hands over the cool, plum-colored sheets. The mattress was dented in the center of the bed, suggesting that Lena usually slept alone. But her mind kept tracking back to the Lovers card from her Tarot reading. She turned over the pillows carefully, wondering if the housekeeper had washed them recently.

“Harry,” she said. “Look at this.”

She pointed to a slightly darker stain on the underside of a pillow. It was almost imperceptible against the darkness of the fabric, a small smear scarcely larger than a finger.

“Looks like blood,” he said, squinting at it. “Could be anything. Could be from a nosebleed, given the placement on the bed.”

“Or it could come from our abductor.”

“I’ll get forensics in here to look at it. This will be the most fun they’ll have all day.” Harry left Tara alone in the room. She could hear the clatter of coins in his pockets as he jogged down the steps. He was frustrated. But Tara knew that she could still trust him to be methodical. He was, after all, her Knight of Pentacles. Whether he still wanted to be, or not.

She spun on her heel, thinking. Lena’s bedroom looked very much like a showplace. There was little here to suggest any personality … no photographs of family or friends on the dresser. Everything here fit precisely into a design scheme, and felt oddly impersonal. In some ways, it reminded her of Aquila’s office: no personal life on display.

Except for one thing. On the dresser was a painted Russian doll, a matryoshka. Tara picked it up. The delicate hand painting depicted a woman with dark hair in a kerchief, holding a basket of roses. She turned it over, seeing a legend scribbled on the bottom:
For my Matryoshka, my darling of many faces. Love, Carl.

Tara’s intuition prickled. Was this a gift from Carl Starkweather, who had also served on the Rogue Angel project? She opened the doll, unscrewing it at the waist.

Any other matryoshka Tara had seen had been the same: six or eight successively smaller nested dolls, all depicting idyllic country girls in cheerful colors. But this was not a doll like that. The doll inside was a bear … and not a teddy bear. The bear’s jaws were parted in a ferocious expression, golden paint glittering on its claws.

The next doll was equally strange. A wolf was painted in silvery gray stripes, looking down its long snout at Tara. A pink tongue lolled from between its teeth.

Curious, Tara continued to open the dolls. Next was a girl, dressed like Red Riding Hood with a crimson cloak and picnic basket. Then, a red fox, its tail wrapped around its feet. A gray tabby was next, smiling like the Cheshire cat. Tara involuntarily thought of Oscar. Underneath its paw was a feather. The smallest doll was a bird … a dove, holding a piece of olive branch in its mouth.

Tara arranged the shapeshifting matryoshka in order. Something in her subconscious tickled her, and she thought of the World Tarot card. The woman in the center of the card was surrounded by beasts, and she was not what she seemed. Tara made a mental note to go over Lena’s personnel record. From what little she’d gleaned on the ride over, she’d been told that Lena had been associated with Rogue Angel. She might have been anything from a secretary to a spook … and Tara would be curious to see what her relationship with Carl was, what had caused Lena to keep the only sentimental artifact in the whole room.

A wheeled cart dragged through the carpet, towed by a forensic technician. The tech was a young woman with her blonde hair tied back in a French braid, swimming in a too-large windbreaker with the name
ANDERSON
embroidered on the front. “Agent Li said there was some blood stain evidence here?”

“I think it might be blood, but that’s your call.” Tara showed her the spot on the pillow. The tech photographed the location from several angles, then unfolded a large paper bag from her cart to hold the pillow. She handled the evidence with exceptional care, sealing the bag with tape and filling out the evidence tag.

“This may be a good lead,” Anderson said. “We weren’t able to isolate much unique DNA in the last case.”

“What do you mean?” Tara leaned against the dresser.

The tech’s mouth turned downward. “Our lab took DNA swabs in the Carl Starkweather disappearance. Unfortunately, the DNA was contaminated.”

Tara’s brows tugged together. “Was there a chain of custody issue?”

Anderson shook her head. “Not that we were able to determine. All the slides that the lab prepared showed multiple DNA markers.”

“That’s good, right? More suspects?” Tara’s thoughts raced around the possibility that there might be a group behind the disappearances. Her gut told her that wasn’t the case, but if the evidence pointed there …

“Not what we ended up with. We got garbage … It was like somebody put samples from a roomful of people in a blender.” Anderson shook her head. “We’re still trying to straighten it out. But it’ll be useless in court. The guy who collected the samples got suspended.”

“I’m sorry.”

Anderson shrugged. “Aquila has been breathing down our necks on this, and it sucks not to have any answers.” She finished filling out the evidence tag, scanned the room. “And this scene looks like it’s gonna be a bust, too.”

“Yeah. I hear the maid got a bit overzealous.”

Anderson shook her head. “Not really her fault. She was just doing her job. But this … this may just be one of those unlucky investigations that’s one clusterfuck after another.”

H
E WASN’T ALONE, NOT ANYMORE
.

Galen lay curled up on his side in the bed of his rented room, listening to Lena’s voice in his head. Wrapped up in a sheet, he scribbled through notebook after notebook, committing Lena’s voice to paper. Her secrets and memories flowed across the page, interspersed with sketches of people and places, maps, bits of remembered passwords and codes. As he filled each notebook by the meager light from the bedside lamp, he cast them aside to a heap with hundreds of other notebooks beside the radiator. Those were Carl’s memories. And Carrie’s and Gerald’s.

Galen flexed his fingers, feeling his hand cramp. Like a molting snake, his skin flaked away, and he absently scratched at it. His attention was seized by a lump on his left ring finger, and he dug more deeply at it. The skin sloughed away, revealing Lena’s ring, embedded in his finger, just below the last knuckle. He gave it an experimental tug, but it would not pull free. Not yet.

Galen padded, naked, to the bathroom. He stretched, and a few extra vertebrae in his back popped. He knew this stage was temporary. After he’d consumed Lena, it would take some time to finish digesting her. His fingers roved over the planes of his face, grown a bit lopsided in the mirror, like wax too close to a flame. He was reminded of the Dali painting of the melting watches, running out of time.

He ran his hands over his scalp. A few strands of Lena’s long hair clung to it. It smelled like jasmine. He pulled it across his nose to enjoy the fragrance before reaching for the electric clippers. The buzz of the blades against his skull scythed through the bits of Lena’s hair, leaving Galen with a bald, lumpy scalp and a nest of hair in the sink.

He looked more human when he was finished. Not like himself, yet. But less like Lena.

He turned on the shower, let the hot water beat upon his flesh. He grasped a stiff bristle brush and scrubbed at his body. Skin sloughed away in parchment-thin flecks, circling the drain. He scrubbed until his skin was raw and pink, until he could see the glitter of Lena’s gold ring more clearly.

He wrapped a towel around his body, dug around under the sink. The ring was an inorganic compound. He wouldn’t be able to digest it. It would have to come off.

Galen slapped his hand down on the edge of the sink. He grasped the edges of the ring with a pair of pliers and pulled. The ring shifted a bit, but wouldn’t budge over the shiny red knuckle. He’d waited too long; he could feel it grown into the bone.

He grasped the pliers again, with more determination, feeling the bite of them against the circle of metal. With all his strength, he twisted and pulled. He could feel his knuckle split, and warm, red blood seeped down over the pliers. He cast the bent ring into the sink with a clatter.

Wrapping his bleeding hand in a towel, Galen picked up the ring. Lena remembered it. She remembered when Carl had given it to her in Red Square. Carl had said it was a promise, but Carl had forgotten.

But Galen wouldn’t. Resolutely, he turned back to the nest of papers on his bed. He picked up his pen, determined to write everything Lena knew down, before her bones dissolved into his and her memory faded.

Before he was alone, again.

Chapter Four

T
ARA ALWAYS
found it difficult to assimilate into an investigation already underway. There was always a good deal of playing catch-up, and she hated being at a disadvantage. Sometimes, all she could do was retrace the steps of the previous investigators. She knew from the file that Carl had been married, with four children. The Lovers card had appeared in her reading, and she suspected that there was more to Carl and Lena than it first appeared. Had they run away together?

The only way to find out would be to see for herself.

She stood outside the Starkweather house, a nice house in a suburban Falls Church neighborhood. The house was a bit too big for the tiny lot, but each one of the other houses on the cul-de-sac had been built that way. She guessed this was a neighborhood populated by government workers, imagined that nobody could speak much about what they did at block parties. They probably talked more about the shiny, late-model cars in the garages and the kids pedaling their tricycles in the driveway than what anyone actually did for a living.

The pansies lining the walkway were a carefully mulched blend of violet, white, and red that grew in a riot of color. Tara wondered if gardening was Mrs. Starkweather’s hobby, or if they had a gardener. The front walk had been freshly power-washed, and the grass clipped short in diagonal furrows across the lawn. Whether she was doing the work herself or overseeing it, Mrs. Starkweather had been keeping busy.

Tara rang the doorbell and waited. She heard the mincing
tap-tap
of impractical shoes on the inside floors. Eventually, the front door opened. A tanned, blonde woman in cropped pants and a pink tank top looked at her. She was easily a decade younger than Carl, very beautiful, in a California beach girl way. Nothing like Lena. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Starkweather? I’m Tara Sheridan, from the Department of Justice, Special Projects. I’m investigating your husband’s disappearance.”

“Oh.” Her well-manicured nails flexed on the door handle. “You people were just here.”

“We just have some additional questions.”

Carl’s wife nodded, opened the door. “Please give me a moment to send the kids out to play.”

“Of course.”

Tara stepped into the foyer. The travertine floors had been freshly waxed, and Tara could smell lemon cleaning solution. Mrs. Starkweather rousted two children out of a kitchen shiny with stainless steel appliances. The kids were about nine and twelve. The kids clomped down the hall, and Mrs. Starkweather gestured for Tara to take a seat at the kitchen barstool. She scrubbed at a sticky mess left by the kids with a dishcloth. Her left hand was heavy with a diamond setting the size of a bottle cap.

“Your children are beautiful,” Tara said.

Mrs. Starkweather beamed. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so. The house feels a bit empty, now that Jamie’s off to summer school and Mark’s a college student working an internship in New York this summer …” She trailed off, continued to scrub at the stain on the granite before it set up.

“Thank you for talking with me, Mrs. Starkweather. I really appreciate it.”

She grimaced. “Mrs. Starkweather sounds like Carl’s mother. Please call me Suzanne.”

“Suzanne, can you tell me the last time you saw Carl?”

Suzanne rinsed the dishrag out in the spotless sink. “Two weeks ago, he said he was going to Vegas with some of his old friends. I dropped him off at the airport.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she savagely wrung out the dish-rag. “I kissed him good-bye, and he took his suitcase and went into the terminal.”

“Did Carl travel often?”

Suzanne nodded. “He was always prone … to a kind of wanderlust, I guess.” She carefully arranged the dishcloth over the faucet so that it would dry out. “It’s just the way he is. After he retired, he got restless. I guess he was used to always being on the go.” She looked up at Tara. “Would you like something to drink?” She wandered over to the refrigerator. “I have juice, milk, regular and diet pop, iced tea …”

Tara felt some sympathy for her. She had the impression that Suzanne tried hard to make things perfect for Carl, keeping the perfect house and watching over the children. Her body was well toned and tanned, her hair expertly highlighted. She did her best to make him happy, to support him, and now he was gone. Not by an assassin’s bullet on the job, in a hero’s fall and folded flag. He was simply gone, with no explanation. “Thanks. An iced tea would be great.”

Suzanne pulled a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with ice from the refrigerator door. The iced tea pitcher was full of lemon slices. Tara smiled when she tasted it. It was perfect, sweet but not too sweet, just enough lemon.

“We’re looking into a number of disappearances of people who have worked with Carl,” she said, reaching into her attaché case. “I’m wondering if you know any of them?” She fanned out pictures of Gerald Frost, Carrie Kirkman, and Lena Ivanova. Tara watched how Suzanne’s gaze lingered on Lena’s picture, and how her jaw tightened.

“Carl golfed with Gerald every Sunday, before he went overseas. Carl said he vanished, but suspected he found some Russian girl to keep him company in his old age.” Her collagen-enhanced lips thinned. “I don’t know her.” She pointed at Carrie’s photo.

“What about this one?” Tara slid Lena’s photo across the granite to Suzanne. It wasn’t very current, but still showed the flush of Lena’s exotic beauty, ten years ago.

Suzanne wouldn’t touch it. “She worked with Carl.”

“She’s gone missing, too.” Tara watched the play of emotions crossing Suzanne’s chemically frozen brow.

“That son of a bitch.” Suzanne’s well-manicured hands balled into fists. “Did he run away with her?”

“I don’t know. Were they—?”

Suzanne glared at the photo. “I told him that I never wanted him to have anything to do with her again. I heard all the excuses. He was half a world away, he was lonely …” She shook her head. “I told him that if he dared divorce me, I’d take everything. And I meant it.” Tears glistened on her eyelashes. “I did everything for him. Everything.”

Tara impulsively reached across the counter to pat Suzanne’s hand. Starkweather had been consumed by his career, to the exclusion of his personal life. Tara didn’t wish that on Suzanne. “We don’t know anything for certain.”

Suzanne dabbed at her eyes. “Have you ever been married, Ms. Sheridan?”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

Suzanne’s mouth was set in a hard line. “Don’t get involved with a man who works in shady government business, who works with secrets. You’ll wind up being alone. You do everything alone—fixing the furnace, making sure the kids’ report cards get signed, taking them to the emergency room.” She shook her head. “It’ll only bring you suffering.”

T
ARA DOZED IN
H
ARRY’S CAR
. I
T HAD BEEN ALMOST TWO DAYS
since she’d snatched more than an hour or two of sleep, and it had begun to drag at her. She’d wrapped her arms in her jacket, feeling the warm night air blowing on her face, when Harry spoke over the click of the turn signal:

“Um. So, do you want to stay with me while you’re in town?”

Tara opened one blue eye. Illuminated by the green dash lights, she could see a shadow of worry over Harry’s eye. This was awkward for him. And her. It had been months since they’d been together, and it felt like they were renegotiating boundaries all over again.

“I mean, you don’t have to.” His words tumbled over each other. “Special Projects will put you up at a hotel. I just thought …” He trailed off, floundering, as he changed lanes on the freeway.

“Sure,” she said, winding her fingers in her sleeves. “Thanks.”

She’d often wondered where Harry lived. She wondered if he lived in a posh neighborhood with nightlife, like Old Town Alexandria, with a view of the Watergate lights playing on the Potomac. Or did he find a place near a college, like in Georgetown? On the phone, he’d never really talked about where he’d moved to.

Harry exited south of DC, just over the line into Virginia. He wound down some residential side streets, past a donut shop, a nondescript grocery store, and several fast-food places, and into an apartment complex with tan vinyl siding, a pool, and a freshly paved parking lot under yellow streetlamps.

“It’s not fancy,” he said, shutting off the engine in a numbered parking spot. “But, as far as short-term leases go, it was a good deal.”

“Why the short-term lease?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral.

Harry lifted Tara’s suitcase from the trunk. “I don’t know what’s in store for me at Special … at the Little Shop of Horrors. I’m still on temporary transfer. No telling where they’ll send me next.” He slammed the trunk and frowned. Tara left it alone.

Harry led her up the steps to a second-floor apartment. His keys jingled in the lock, and he opened the door. “Home, sweet home.”

The light clicked on to reveal a living room with plush tan carpet. The vanilla paint on the walls still smelled new. A black leather couch was pushed up under the living room window, tags still dangling from the back, facing a flat-screen television. Cardboard boxes stacked neatly up against the walls, along the line of the living room wall into the galley kitchen.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I haven’t really unpacked.”

Tara nodded. “No worries.” Deep down, she suspected what Harry did: that he wouldn’t be here very long. “It’s a nice place.”

“Thanks. I call the décor ‘Overworked Federal Agent.’” He bent down to pick up the mail scattered on the floor that had accumulated through the mail slot.

“It’s attractive. I especially like the clock.” Tara gestured to the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It was shaped like a black-and-white cat, and the eyes moved right and left in time with the switch of the pendulum tail. It looked over the kitchen sink, where a lonely coffee cup stood.

Harry rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Pops sent that to me.”

“It’s cute,” she insisted. Harry’s adoptive father had an odd sense of humor.

“He also sent me a banana hammock as a housewarming gift.”

Tara blinked. “He sent you a
what
?” Perhaps Harry had been having more of a wild time in DC than the solitary coffee mug suggested.

Harry plucked an item off the counter to show her, a sheepish expression on his face. It was a C-shaped device on a wooden base with a hook at the terminus of the C. “You hang a bunch of bananas on it to keep ’em from bruising. Pops calls it a banana hammock.”

Tara laughed out loud. It felt good to be in the small, warm circle of light in Harry’s modest kitchen, with the cat clicking time over them. It felt almost like the way things had been, months ago. “I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a banana hammock before,” she kidded him, with an arch glance.

“Pops will be thrilled.”

Harry brought her suitcase to the only bedroom, set it on the bed. Tara followed with her hands clasped behind her back, but her heart thudded under her tongue. Harry stepped away, hands in his pockets, jingling the change in them nervously.

“I’ll take the couch. Make yourself comfortable, and uh … let me know if you need anything.”

Tara nodded, swallowed, smiled. “Thanks.” But she wanted to say:
It’s okay. You don’t have to sleep on the couch.

Harry closed the door behind him, leaving her alone. Again. She sighed, turning back to her suitcase. She unzipped it and began pulling out her clothes. She opened Harry’s closet to hang her suits, and noticed a hole in the wall beside the closet.

She frowned, running her fingers over the chalky dent. It was at her shoulder level, the perfect crater of a fist. She wondered at it, worried at the kind of stress Harry was under that would drive him to take it out on his walls. She’d never known Harry to be needlessly violent. That … that was out of character for him. Was Special Projects devouring him, causing stress fractures in his personality as it gnawed through him? She would hate to see it chew Harry up and spit him out, as it had done with her.

She turned her attention back to the closet. Harry’s closet was nearly bare. His suits and shirts hung on the left side, shoes lined up below. Tara hung her clothes beside his, but gave them a respectful distance, so they weren’t touching. She turned on her heel, taking in the sparse room. Some part of her wondered if Harry always slept in his bed alone. The boxes stacked in the corner made her wonder if the memory of her was packed away with the rest of his past, not urgent enough to unpack in the present. If there was someone else, she didn’t really blame him. And she didn’t really want to know.

She took off her watch and placed it on a dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. Even the bedside lamp sat on the floor. Aside from the kitchen implements, Harry’s dresser was the only other place in the apartment that showed any evidence of his personality. A glass peanut butter jar held coins, probably dug out of his pockets at the end of the day. A framed picture beside it showed Harry and his adoptive father, Martin, holding fishing poles. On the mirror above the dresser was tacked a scrap of paper. Tara reached for it, and her heart skipped.