Before I Wake (26 page)

“Not that I’ve been able to identify. What would you suggest?”

“He found the cash.”

Bruce set down the knife he was using to dice the onions. “Found it.”

“It makes more sense than won it. Maybe he found a buried coffee can of old gold coins on his land; maybe a former homeowner left behind a letter signed by Abraham Lincoln under the floorboards. People come into things of great value all the time. That’s why they are called discoveries.”

Rae shrugged. “Maybe it’s as simple as the fact the man tossed his change into a barrel all his life and he finally got around to cashing in all that loose change. I heard a guy once cashed in twenty thousand dollars worth of pennies.”

“Henry has been hanging out with Bob Teal lately. The man is the former president of the local bank.”

“So maybe the man got some good financial advice fifty years ago and took it. Did you ever think Henry might have just turned eighty and decided it was time to spend rather than save some of his lifetime earnings? His family doesn’t need the cash; his wife has passed away—it’s time to live a little.”

“I’m all for that answer. I’m just afraid it’s not going to be something that neat.”

“Unless you think he just became a criminal and the cash came from something illegal.” She looked up from the chip and salsa she held and saw his expression. “Bruce. Don’t even go there. I can see by the silence you aren’t discounting that idea.”

“The former sheriff is at home in this community. He knows where every secret is buried.”

“The man has Nathan for a grandson; he’ll be honest to the point of being squeaky clean. I personally vote for the buckets of change getting cashed in. You want me to ask him?”

“He’s already pretty much told both Nathan and me to mind our own business.”

“I ask nicer than you do.”

“You can have a run at him if you like. It can’t hurt.”

“He drives a Porsche? He’s got a nice eye for a good car.”

“You’ll have something in common.”

“True.” Rae accepted the plate Bruce handed across to her.

“Don’t wait for me; these are best eaten while the wrap is still warm.”

“I don’t plan to.” The soft tacos were going to be a mess to eat, but she loved them. She found herself extra napkins and moved from the island over to the kitchen table. She pulled out a chair. “What did you hear about Nella?”

“Not much different than this afternoon—Sillman was still searching the house and the coroner was busy with tests.”

“Personally, I’m guessing she was murdered by a boyfriend.”

“Facts or hunch?”

“Pure hunch,” Rae replied. “It just felt like a personal death. She lives out in the middle of nowhere. Someone had to want to go to Nella’s house.”

“It’s not going to be natural causes?”

“Three times in a row?” Rae shook her head. “At least one of these is a murder. And Nella would be the likely fit.”

“The rumor at the diner is that she was seeing a much younger guy.”

“Any basis for that rumor?”

“Not that I could tell.”

Rae smiled. “The blessings of a small town—rumors circulate themselves into becoming facts.”

Bruce brought over a plate for himself. “What time do you want to head into the city tomorrow?”

“Early, if you don’t mind. Say nine.”

“That will work for me. Assuming you get home tonight in a reasonable time to get some sleep.”

Rae laughed. “I’ve missed these Friday nights together. Nothing ever quite replaced them in those years away.”

“I’m hoping there are many more of them to come. I even bought a pie for dessert.”

“Great planning.”

* * *

Rae settled into the leather couch in Bruce’s living room, extending her sock feet to absorb the heat coming from the fireplace. “This is perfection. Moon out, snow on the ground, a cozy couch to disappear into while you watch some television. You’ve got a very nice place, Bruce.”

“You look good right there.” He settled into the big chair at an angle to the couch. “You’d best make it a habit to come over often.”

She set her mug of hot chocolate down on the floor rug within easy reach. “I’m good at making myself at home.” She leaned her head against the cushioned back and studied the ceiling. She laughed. “I’m so tired it feels like part of the world is spinning in circles.”

“It’s been an intense week since you drove into town, and I did mention you might want to go easy on those hot peppers.”

“I know, but I love them so.” She listened to her own heartbeat for a while as her socks warmed up, then found the energy to move again and look over at him. “Where are we going, Bruce? You and I?”

He considered her. “Someplace interesting, I suspect. We know each other, Rae. You want to move slowly; you also just want to be done with this transition and be back on stable ground. So you’ll ignore the caution you feel and knock down the historical stuff fast and sort out the pieces of what you find after you see them all.”

“You do know me.”

“Still like you too.” He smiled. “Drink your chocolate; no use letting good stuff go cold.”

She reached for the mug. “That’s one of the things I missed most about our Friday nights—the hot chocolate and the pie and the conversations that disappeared into the dust corners of unimportant topics, but never seemed to end no matter the hours we’d already talked.”

“You still talk more than I do on occasion.”

She rolled her head toward him on the back cushion of the couch and smiled. “There are a few years’ worth of talking bottled up unsaid. The trivial subjects have got some steam behind them now.”

“Why wasn’t there someone to talk with?”

She shrugged. “Dallas wasn’t so bad; I had lots of friends to hang around with the first year or two on the job. And the years before that at the academy—I was like a duck in water, quite comfortable and not even realizing how much I was missing everything I’d left behind. But Washington, D.C.—you know how hard it can be to work undercover, Bruce, all the things you know or suspect but can never talk about. It turned out to be a place where there weren’t safe people to hang around with.”

“Talk to me about Washington. Not the ending, just the beginning. Did you want to make the move?”

She had to think about it but then she nodded. “I did. It was a big assignment, the kind of case that gets followed by the director’s office and can send an agent up several rungs on the career ladder when it’s over. I was at the point in my career where that kind of return for the risk seemed like a good calculation to make.”

She looked over at him. “That’s hindsight. You get asked to work a substantive case, you jump at it. That’s the cop in you. And this was one of those cases. I barely heard the basic details they laid out before I said, ‘When do I move?’ I regret that now. I regret I didn’t take the time to sort out how much was personal ambition and how much was the case that drew me to D.C.”

She finished her hot chocolate and studied the bottom of the mug. “They approached me in Dallas with the need for someone with good undercover skills who would be a fresh face in the Washington area. They needed someone who had never done a rotation at headquarters. I wasn’t really aware of all the dimensions of the case or all the dynamics going on with it until I arrived in D.C.”

“You were investigating another agent,” he guessed softly.

“Yes.”

She looked over at him. “Cuts doesn’t it, the very idea of a bad cop? They didn’t know who it was; they just had a list of names and a suspicion the agent they wanted found was on the list.”

“A bad cop gave up my name for money and I ended up shot—I understand what it’s like to hear the news there is a bad cop in a place of trust.”

“Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t look so closely at the assignment before I said yes. It was a visceral need to get the guy located and out of our midst.”

“What was he doing?”

Bruce knew it was classified information; she knew it was classified. But it ate a hole inside her as she tried to sort it out on her own—and if Bruce was going to betray her, no one in the world could be trusted. “This will go to the grave with you.”

“I’ve got so many secrets going with me I’ll be lining my coffin with the notes.”

She smiled at his attempt to lighten the moment. “There is something scary about just how much ugly information you have tucked away inside that head of yours.”

She studied her socks and the frayed edge on the left one. “Someone is selling the names and addresses of people in the witness-protection program.” She looked up in time to catch his wince. “Yeah, my thoughts too.

“An internal investigation narrowed it down to nine people on the inside they thought might be the source. They transferred me from the Dallas office to D.C. to get close to one of the agents high on their list.”

“It’s a bad kind of case to work.”

“The worst. And there was an . . . urgency to the case. If enough witnesses die, it doesn’t matter if the rogue agent is found and stopped and prosecuted. No one will ever be willing to testify for the government again, when the protection promised them has been publicly turned into a piece of Swiss cheese.”

Bruce nodded and she knew he understood the type of pressure she was describing.

“It was the first time I’d met the counterintelligence types, Bruce. They’re a different kind of agent, the set of people who were running the investigation. You started to wonder if they believed anything anyone ever said to them.”

“Finding spies in their midst—that’s a recipe to suspect everyone, and a motto that becomes trust, but verify.”

Rae brooded over that. “I wasn’t ready for it, no matter what I thought about my undercover skills going into it. It wasn’t like undercover work where you knew the guy was guilty, but you were looking for the evidence. I was getting close to a guy that was numerically more likely to be a good cop than the one bad one, and I was trying to figure out if he was the one bad one.”

She sighed. “I think I started to get paranoid; that’s the only way I can describe how the case affected me. I was trying so hard—knowing the investigators needed me to not miss any detail, knowing the guy that was selling these names was extremely careful and deadly, feeling caught between thinking I knew this guy I was investigating and yet suspecting everything about him—it messed up my head a bit.”

He didn’t answer her right away and she was glad he wasn’t dismissing her words with the suggestion it hadn’t been that bad. It had been that bad.

“Rae—when you’re undercover in a big case, you’re in the midst of a fast-flowing murky river. You’re often swimming in the dark, working with incomplete information, seeing only shadows of facts. You depend on your handlers, those spotters standing on the bridge watching everything, to put the details together and keep you swimming in the right direction. It sounds like this is a case where you didn’t have that help; your handlers weren’t connecting very well with you.”

“I always felt like they were assessing me as much as they were assessing the details and evidence I brought them,” she agreed. She was grateful he’d worked undercover as long as he had and could articulate what she could only look back on and understand.

“It didn’t help that I often used gut instinct to say something was right or wrong and they didn’t know me well enough to trust that answer. Since I couldn’t rely on it as a reason for what I reported, I was often on the defensive.”

She felt the words themselves as a frustration, just remembering. “Then another witness got murdered; the intensity ratcheted up . . .” She let the words trail off as she remembered those last months.

“What?”

She realized tears were washing down her cheeks and she pushed them away. “It ended very bad.”

“I saw your house.”

She either told him the rest of it or she buried it again. She wanted to bury it, the truth was so raw, but it was never going to ease off. It needed to be said, at least once.

“His name was Mark Rivers. The case looked solid against him. I thought it was him. But as it turns out, he was not the guy selling the names. I accused an innocent man of murder, Bruce.”

She couldn’t look over at him, didn’t want to know his reaction to her words. It was so intensely bad, that ultimate failure. “And I can’t even apologize to him. He’s dead.”

He let her drift in her thoughts, let those words settle before quietly asking, “What happened, Rae?”

She looked up and saw nothing in his expression but the quiet stillness of him listening to her that she had depended on all her life. She tried to hold his gaze but couldn’t and looked away, back to the fire, blinking against the tears.

“Mark found one of the hidden microphones. My back was to him, and I didn’t realize why he was asking the questions he did until the last moment. I saw the instant it clicked with him that I was suspecting him, that the wire was to capture him—and I think he lost it mentally in that moment. He had wanted to be an agent since he was a kid, and I was literally destroying his life even as I stood there and smiled at him and asked if he wanted pineapple in the stir-fry or not. He put his hand out to grab something and it happened to be the knife that was on the cutting board.”

“Your handlers?”

“They were in a house across the street, recording from a distance.”

She didn’t say more, couldn’t. The night was still a living wound inside her. “It became personal, Bruce. And maybe that is where the biggest of the errors was made. I didn’t realize just how personal the case had become to me after that witness died.”

“Have they caught the agent that is selling the names?”

“No. And I’m sure my dramatic ending gave the guy they wanted to find plenty of time to go deep underground again. There was no way to cover up a dead agent and another injured one, not when the agents on the suspicion list worked in the same basic area of the building.”

“I wish you’d called me. I wish I had been there for you in those first days after it came apart.”

“I thought about calling you; it’s one of the reasons I had dug out your number.” She tried to smile. “I’m decompressing, Bruce; I know that, in my own unique way. I’m still trying to find my sense of balance again. I can’t figure out how to pace this fall into a new life—it’s cautious; no, fast ahead; no, cautious. I fluctuate between nothing and everything.”