Sliver of Truth (10 page)

“You still there, Ridley?”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“You still there, Ms. Jones?”

“No,” I answered, and hung up.

Of course, he was waiting for me on the street in his sedan when the cab dropped me off. His partner stayed in the car as he climbed out the passenger side. I ignored him as I put my key in the lock.

“I figured you for a driver, not a passenger,” I said, nodding toward the sedan.

“I’m not allowed to drive the government cars for a while,” he said with a smile that told me he thought a lot of himself. “I’ve totaled three cars in seven months. I’ve got to pass an evasive driving course. Till then, shotgun.”

For some reason, I found myself comparing him to Jake. There was a kind of arrogance (or maybe it was just confidence) to him that contrasted with Jake’s kind humility. He lacked Jake’s essential sweetness but also the rage Jake held at his center. Jake was physically
exquisite,
not just handsome or sexy but truly beautiful to behold. Agent Grace . . . well, there was a hardness to him, a lack of artistry. If Jake was marble, he was granite. But in the curve of his lips, the lids of his eyes, there was an animal sexuality that made me nervous, like you would feel in the cage of a tiger that you’d been assured was as gentle as a lamb. Agent Grace made me miss Jake, the safety I felt in his arms.

I decided I didn’t like Agent Dylan Grace at all. I might have even hated him a little.

“Good night, Detective,” I said, just to be annoying.

“I’m a federal agent, Ms. Jones.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

I was shutting (slamming) the door on him when he stopped it (hard) with his hand.

“Can I come in? We need to talk.”

“In my experience, federal agents are like vampires: Once you’ve invited them in, they’re very hard to get rid of. Next thing you know, they’ve got their teeth in your neck.”

He smiled at this and I saw a flash of boyishness there. It softened him a bit. Then he ruined it by saying, “I don’t want to take you in again, Ms. Jones. It’s late. But I will.”

I didn’t want him to take me in again, either. I was way too tired. I considered my options, then stood aside and let him walk through the door. He let me pass and then followed me into the elevator. We rode to the fifth floor in silence, eyes on the glowing green buttons above as they marked our passage upward. It was so quiet I could hear him breathing. We were so close I could smell his aftershave.

“Nice building,” he said as we stepped into the hallway. “Prewar?”

I nodded as we came to a stop at my door. I unlocked it and we stepped inside.

“Your boyfriend home?”

I turned to look at him as I shifted off my jacket and dropped my bag on the floor.

“What do you want, Agent Grace?” I asked, anger in my chest, tears gathering in my eyes. I felt invaded and helpless against it. He was trampling on every boundary I had, and it was infuriating me. When I’m mad, I cry. I hate that about myself, but I don’t seem to be able to change it no matter how hard I try. “I mean, seriously,” I said, my voice breaking. “You’re playing with me, right? What do you want?”

He got that horrified look on his face that a certain type of man gets when he thinks a woman is going to cry. He lifted his palms.

“Okay,” he said. “Take it easy.” He spoke carefully, as if he were talking a jumper in off a ledge. He glanced around the room; I’m not sure what he was looking for.

“Don’t you get it?” I asked him. “I don’t know
anything.
”

“Okay,” he said again, pulling out a chair at the table and motioning me to sit. I sat and put my head in my hands, noticing that Jake’s file was still on the table where I’d left it. I’m not sure why, but I had expected it to be gone when I came home. Agent Grace sat across from me and I slid the file toward him. Mercifully, my tears retreated soon after and I was spared the humiliation of weeping in front of this stranger who’d forced his way into my life and my home.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Jake gave it to me,” I said, looking up to show him I wasn’t crying. “The article on top—that’s how I knew about Nick Smiley, why I went to Detroit. I couldn’t make any sense out of the rest of it.”

He was quiet for a minute as he shuffled through the pages, then he closed the file with a little laugh.

“Your boy has got an ax to grind, huh?”

I nodded.

“You think he wants a job with the FBI?”

I glared at him. “Something in there has meaning to you?”

He took out the
New York Times
clippings and turned them toward me. “What do these articles all have in common?”

I glanced through them again and nothing popped. I shrugged and looked up at him. He had been watching me as I looked through them and didn’t take his eyes away. There was a strange expression on his face. He reached across and pointed to the byline. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it. What writer reads an article but doesn’t look at the byline? They were all written by the same person: Myra Lyall. The name rang a bell but I couldn’t quite say why.

“Who is she?”

“She’s a career crime writer, short-listed for the Pulitzer twice. Most recently she wrote for the
Times.
”

“‘Wrote,’ past tense?”

“She and her husband, a photographer, went missing about two weeks ago.”

I flashed on the news story I kept seeing on television and in the papers. Still, I had the feeling I’d heard the name somewhere else.

He went on. “Friends showed up for dinner; Myra and her husband, Allen, weren’t there. After a day of trying to reach them, the police were called. There was a pool of blood on the floor in the apartment, no sign of the couple. The table was set for dinner, a roast in the oven, pots on the stove.”

I started to hear that noise I get in my right ear when I’m really stressed out. “What was she working on?” I asked.

“We don’t know. Both her laptop and her box at work had been wiped clean. Even the
Times
server had been cleared of all her e-mail exchanges.”

I thought about this. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Finally I asked, “So this is your case? This missing couple?”

He nodded.

“What does it have to do with me?”

“The last story Myra Lyall published was about three Project Rescue babies, how each had been affected by what happened to them. It was a feature for the
Magazine,
something softer than her usual investigative pieces.”

I remembered now where I’d last heard her name.

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked again, though it was clearer now.

“She had your name and number in a notebook. According to what she’d written there, she’d tried to call you three times for comment but you never returned her calls.”

“The only people I enjoy speaking to less than FBI agents are reporters.”

He gave a little laugh. “Aren’t
you
a reporter?”

I bristled at this. “I’m a writer,” I said haughtily. “A feature writer. It’s not the same thing.”

“Whatever you say,” he answered.

It wasn’t the same thing. Not at all. But I wasn’t going to get into it with this bozo. Subtleties and nuances were lost on people like Agent Grace.

“So you said they’ve been missing two weeks?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “Two weeks, three days, and approximately ten hours, according to the time line we created.”

“But those pictures—my pictures—some of them were taken months ago.”

He nodded, looked down at the table. I got it then.

“The FBI has been watching me?”

“For over a year, yes.”

“Why?”

He took the ME’s report out of the file. “There are inconsistencies in this report. Time of death is about ten hours off, according to our experts.” He pointed to something Jake had circled. “This body weighed a hundred and eighty-six pounds. But you know Max was a much bigger man than that—must have been over two-fifty.”

I looked at the document in front of me. “Okay. So this was a small-town medical examiner. He made some mistakes. It happens all the time. What did he say when you interviewed him?”

“He’s dead,” Agent Grace said. “He had a fatal car
accident
just a few days after he filed the report, right around the time this body was cremated.”

I noticed how he kept saying “this body.”

“What do you mean
accident
?” I asked, mimicking his inflection.

“I mean someone
accidentally
cut his brake lines.”

I scanned the report, feeling desperate and afraid. “Esme Gray identified the body,” I said weakly. “They were lovers once. She would have known it wasn’t Max if it wasn’t.”

Agent Grace looked at me with something like pity on his face. “Esme Gray is not exactly unimpeachable.”

I thought about that last night with Max, how he’d started to cry, how my father had appeared, a dark form in the entryway, how he’d taken Max into his office and shut the doors on me.
It’s the bourbon talking,
my father said, before closing the door.

“So the FBI has been watching me since then, thinking
if
he was alive,
if
he would contact anyone, it would be me? Love, right?”

He nodded. “Has he tried to reach you, Ms. Jones?”

“Who?” I asked obtusely.

“Max Smiley,” he said impatiently. “Your uncle, your father, whoever the hell he is to you.”

“No,” I said, almost yelling.

“There was an overseas call to your number the night before last at around three-thirty
A.M.
,” he said sternly, leaning into me.

I remembered the call. Had forgotten about it until then.

“There was no one on the line,” I said more softly. “I mean, whoever it was, they didn’t say anything. I thought it was Ace.”

He looked at me hard, as if he were trying to see a lie in my eyes.

“If you’re monitoring my calls, then you know I’m telling the truth.”

“We’re not monitoring your calls,” he said, though I’m not sure why he’d think I’d believe him. “I subpoenaed your phone records this morning, trying to figure out why you went to Detroit.”

“Can you do that?” I asked, indignant. “I haven’t broken any laws.”

“If I thought you were aiding and abetting a wanted man, certainly, I could listen to your calls, have someone on you twenty-four seven.”

“That’s a lot of time and money for someone like Max. Meanwhile, I still don’t get what this has to do with your missing couple.”

Like the last time we’d met, he had a dark shadow of stubble on his jaw. I wondered if it was a look he was cultivating, something to make him look older, possibly unruly. He wasn’t like any of the other FBI agents I’d ever met. All of them had been stiff and clean-shaven, good boys with spotless records—or maybe that was just their shtick. Dylan Grace seemed lawless.

“I mean I
really
don’t get it,” I said when he remained silent. “You see my name in a notebook belonging to this missing writer, right? So instead of calling me and interviewing me, you make some arrangement with my photo lab to steal my pictures, then you accost me on the street and haul me in? It seems like you overreacted a little. I was a perfectly logical person for her to call—I’m practically the poster child for Project Rescue.”

He didn’t say anything, just kept those eyes on me.

“Okay, so there’s more to it,” I said after a moment of the two of us staring at each other. I thought about it a few seconds longer. “You plugged my name into whatever computers you have over there and you found out I was already under surveillance.”

He still didn’t say anything. It was pretty annoying.

“That’s right,” I said as he stood up and moved toward the door. “You get to ask all the questions. What is it you want from me?” I asked.

He opened the door. “Good night, Ms. Jones,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you. I’ll be in touch.”

“Just tell me one thing,” I said, getting up and following him out into the hallway. “That overseas call? Where did it come from?”

“Why do you want to know?” he said, turning around.

“Just curious,” I said. “Maybe it was someone I know. You know, someone innocent.”

He considered it for a minute. Then: “London,” he said. “The call came from London. Know anybody there?”

I shrugged. “I guess not.”

After he left I tried to figure out what he’d gained by our conversation, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I’d received quite a bit of information, however. For the rest of the evening, I felt as if I’d gotten one over on Agent Grace. I wouldn’t figure out until later that he’d been the one to get over on me. He’d pressed all my buttons. Wind her up and watch her go.

About an hour later as I lay on the couch watching a rerun of
Gilligan’s Island,
trying and failing to block out for a while everything that had happened and everything I had learned, I heard the key in the lock and Jake walked in. He wore a black wool coat over a gray V-neck cashmere sweater I had given him and a pair of Levi’s I think he’s had for ten years. He spotted me on the couch and moved toward me. I sat up and then went to him, let him take me into his arms. He held me hard, put his mouth to my hair. I pulled off his coat and he let it drop to the floor as he pressed his mouth to mine. The only feeling I had in my heart was desperation, this desperate need to connect to someone, to know someone well. I let him back me into the bedroom, let him lift my sweater over my head and watched as he lifted his off as well. I put my face to his chest and felt the silky hardness of his abs and chest.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he crawled on top of me on the bed, the frame creaking lightly beneath us. I could hear the television in the other room, see its blue flicker. I felt the heat of his body, watched his muscles flex and relax as he moved. I could smell the scent of his skin.