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Deadly Grace
Taylor Smith


On a cold winter night in a small Minnesota town in 1979, someone comes looking for Grace Meade. She is killed and her house is set ablaze. Incredibly, the prime suspect is her own daughter, Jillian.Rescued from the burning house, Jillian Meade is hospitalized, unable–or unwilling–to speak. After an attempt to take her own life, Jillian's doctor gives her a blank journal to encourage her to write about her mother's death.Unaware of what has happened, FBI Special Agent Alex Cruz comes to Havenwood, Minnesota, to interview Jillian. Two elderly women were found murdered in their homes in England, and Jillian, it seems, was the last person to see both women alive. When he learns that Jillian's own mother met a similar fate, he realizes that there is far more going on than anyone ever imagined.When Jillian suddenly disappears, Cruz has only her journal to decipher the story of Grace and Jillian Meade. A story of a wartime heist of Nazi gold, of unforgivable betrayals and ruthless actions. A deadly secret from the past, Cruz learns, has surfaced. And if he doesn't find Jillian soon, she, too, may be made to pay the ultimate price.









Praise for the novels of TAYLOR SMITH


“A former international diplomat and intelligence analyst, Smith uses her experience to good effect in her latest thriller.”

—Library Journal on Deadly Grace

“Taylor Smith combines the best of Grisham and Le Carré into a fabulous suspense thriller that is uniquely her own style.”

—Midwest Book Review on The Innocents Club

“Fifteen rounds of sturdy international espionage-cum-detection…”

—Kirkus Reviews on The Innocents Club

“Taylor Smith…John Grisham. It’s a perfectly plausible comparison—though Smith’s a better prose stylist.”

—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts

“The mix of suspense, forensic science, romance and mystery make this a real page-turner.”

—Orange Coast on Random Acts

“The story line is fast-paced and filled with numerous twists…. Taylor Smith…continues her amazing rapid climb to the top rung….”

—Painted Rock Reviews on Random Acts

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spellbinding tone of immediacy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies

“The pace is swift and the action is concentrated…making it a perfect summer read.”

—Orange Coast on The Best of Enemies

“In this absorbing tale…characters are engaging….”

—Publishers Weekly on Common Passions




Also available from MIRA Books and TAYLOR SMITH


THE INNOCENTS CLUB

RANDOM ACTS

THE BEST OF ENEMIES

COMMON PASSIONS

GUILT BY SILENCE




Deadly Grace

Taylor Smith





www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


A work of historical fiction like this owes much to many people, especially to the Allied veterans of World War II, to whom I offer profound thanks for their sacrifices. Among those, in addition to my father and my father-in-law, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to three people who were kind enough to share their personal memoirs with me: Ben Ward, U.S. Army glider pilot; and Jean Grant and Pam Orford, British nurses.

My dear friend, Holocaust survivor Louis Posner, was unfailingly generous with his extensive research library, as well as his memories of the events of that tragic period. Sadly, he died suddenly during the writing of this novel and never got to see the finished product, but for a spellbinding true-life story of his gripping experiences, I highly recommend Louis’s published memoir, Through a Boy’s Eyes: The Turbulent Years 1926-45 (Seven Locks Press, 2000).

The character of Miss Vivian Atwater is loosely based on real-life British spymaster Vera Atkins. After extraordinary wartime service with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, Miss Atkins (unlike her fictional counterpart, happily) lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two in a cottage overlooking the English Channel where, on a clear day, it is said, she could see the coast of France.

Special thanks to Special Agent Gary L. Price, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, who graciously answered all my questions on his discipline and his branch of the Service. Thanks also to my writing buddy, Doug Lyle, M.D., for his medical advice, as well as former FBI Special Agent Jack Trimarco, who gives all G-men a good name. Deepest thanks also to my agent, Philip Spitzer, and to my editors Dianne Moggy, Amy Moore-Benson and Valerie Gray, who’ve been incredibly understanding through this past tough year. I’m very grateful.

It may be noted that the town of Havenwood bears a certain similarity to another prairie town I frequent and love, and that some of Havenwood’s colorful characters seem to possess the same spunk as my Lac du Bonnet aunties, who never fail to inspire me and lift my spirits. Thanks to them all (and the uncles and cousins, too) for so many years of love and laughter. And last but never least, love and thanks to Anna, Kate and Richard, who agonize with me through every page and rewrite, poor souls. Lucky me, to have you guys in my corner.


This is dedicated to my Auntie Olly Campbell, who wrote the book on love and loyalty—with thanks from the heart for all you do and all you are.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER 1 (#uf890a81d-ee91-51e6-8842-812dc27dd687)

CHAPTER 2 (#u64e2bbf6-d6eb-536e-a8c5-62b4fff85678)

CHAPTER 3 (#u7dba8610-22fa-5d96-a173-0aad9dde51a8)

CHAPTER 4 (#uc0b0279e-5b2c-51eb-aeb0-a0de5e97f28e)

CHAPTER 5 (#ub46277cc-0b79-5a20-b021-b43c3ee8be0b)

CHAPTER 6 (#u8fe06c0a-8625-5758-ad01-48f4b022a20d)

CHAPTER 7 (#ud61ac572-1588-5434-8ad0-d464d126c49a)

CHAPTER 8 (#u027924e6-a7fc-5f78-bd05-f914538c21c3)

CHAPTER 9 (#u58d13b0c-c867-5c03-b7be-b9f12de343f0)

CHAPTER 10 (#u947f866b-327b-569d-a033-9b32fc78e868)

CHAPTER 11 (#u588e168e-255d-57f6-86d0-21dfce2f5f98)

CHAPTER 12 (#u5282a8eb-f708-5063-9e34-f3cef4b62a7f)

CHAPTER 13 (#u84668316-585b-59bc-9e99-aa7a09fcbc2a)

CHAPTER 14 (#u462ad51c-cf85-555d-9f83-ad6dad65df58)

CHAPTER 15 (#ub559465f-31dc-51f4-a162-654f6948c833)

CHAPTER 16 (#u1e8bdcbc-3a4b-5164-a8fe-22a628850c75)

CHAPTER 17 (#u90f6b08c-2e70-5431-a5b3-fc072526bc7e)

CHAPTER 18 (#u01a7c11c-c439-59a1-b31b-f98f02dbccef)

CHAPTER 19 (#u6c849e5f-3c90-5895-8a11-98c00c152a34)

CHAPTER 20 (#ub8caabfe-4c26-5a2c-a5fd-06ea01767ddb)

CHAPTER 21 (#uae5b8b43-c1af-58ea-9dcd-f8a643cd3513)

CHAPTER 22 (#uf8d38190-0a38-5eaa-a5cb-cc8cc75f4fe6)

CHAPTER 23 (#ub242df23-3005-53d3-a55d-c67a2eb93b6f)

CHAPTER 24 (#u400eaac7-dfe5-5a75-92d1-684f42b11a4b)

CHAPTER 25 (#u832d756c-0359-59df-a682-ef8de8f34995)

CHAPTER 26 (#u2aa3657c-efda-5704-b015-e91ff12d595e)

CHAPTER 27 (#u032012a4-837a-5809-adbe-a055f47f9bad)

CHAPTER 28 (#u74ce3832-6e9c-50b7-941c-41dd81092bb3)

CHAPTER 29 (#u9db5b8fa-0114-540e-a6e1-e06bf5837983)

CHAPTER 30 (#u80c4da6a-39cf-5a63-a99b-772c02128e9f)

CHAPTER 31 (#u38149630-c695-57a8-8818-28ecf7fc71ef)

CHAPTER 32 (#u8ddd7327-4645-56b3-b207-f60a6dbd7d00)

CHAPTER 33 (#u272f77cb-fe10-5250-a046-e8b8b67b1db3)

CHAPTER 34 (#u8a1db08f-3695-56dc-a3b9-cfcbdd648924)




CHAPTER 1


Havenwood, Minnesota

Tuesday, January 9, 1979

She had no memory of her own death. No idea when it might have happened, or how, or how long she’d lain insensible in the netherworld between life and death. But when Jillian Meade awoke, she had no doubt she was in hell.

It was exactly as Reverend Owens had described in the fire-and-brimstone Sunday sermons that had terrified her as a child: acrid smoke that singed the nostrils and choked the lungs. A dry, searing wind that burned the skin like acid. Flying soot that stung the eyes so that she had to blink back tears to see. She was in a place of utter desolation, the darkness relieved only by the flickering of red and orange shadows writhing in the roiling smoke. A low vibration echoed around her, like the menacing growl of some great beast ready to spring for the kill.

And her bones ached, she realized. She was lying on a hard surface, and something was digging into her hip. Jillian shifted position painfully, and like a dreamer slowly awaking, she began to make out shapes in the murky shadows around her. She puzzled at what she saw. Furniture. She was on the floor, wedged into a corner, a tipped-over chair beneath her. She rolled to one side and pushed it away, the hellish light tracing the familiar spindles of its ladder back.

How many times had she sat on the hard, unforgiving seat of one of those chairs as a child, hands stubbornly behind her, fingers clenched around those spindles rather than around a spoon containing pale, woody lima beans or slimy Cream of Wheat? Stifling a cough, Jillian lifted her head. How was it that hell looked so much like her mother’s kitchen? The simple explanation was, of course, that she wasn’t dead, but back at her mother’s house in Minnesota. But why was she lying on the floor? Why was the house in darkness, except for that odd, menacing red flicker coming from down the hall? And why—

Oh, God! Fire!

“Mother!” Coughing and choking, Jillian tried to rise, but when she placed her hands on the ceramic tile floor, her palms, wet and slick, skidded out from under her. She propped herself on her elbows, instead, and screamed again. “Mother! Where are you?”

Blinking through tears, she could just make out the shapes of the other three kitchen chairs, still upright around the oval oak table. A thick, gray brume was circling the room, wafting across the face of the cabinets, undulating under the ceiling like toxic silk.

Avoiding her slippery palms, Jillian used her wrists and elbows to brace herself as she struggled to her knees. Through the archway leading to the front hall and the rest of the house beyond, the subtle pattern of the flowered Victorian wallpaper had taken on a gaudy orange glow. The fire seemed to be coming from down the hall, toward the living room.

She scrambled to her feet.

“Mother!” Her voice was a strangled bleat. A claw of pain ripped at her lungs, and she doubled over, spitting up thick phlegm, coughing and choking, hands on her knees. When the spasm finally passed, she held her breath and unrolled the collar of her turtleneck sweater, covering her nose and trying to take small, filtered breaths.

“Mother, where are you?”

This time there was an answer, but the voice she heard was deep and male. “Jillian? Are you in there?”

It was coming from behind her, she realized, at the back door. She spun around and saw a shadow at the high window. The door handle rattled, but it seemed to be locked. “Jillian!”

“Here! I’m in here!” She knew she should run and open the door. Or go and find her mother. Do something! a voice in her head bellowed. But she was frozen in place, disoriented and growing faint from the expenditure of scant oxygen.

The door handle rattled once more and then the shadow at the window disappeared. A split second later, a gloved fist slammed through the glass. The smoke stirred, twisting and swirling toward this new escape outlet as a great, padded arm reached through, easily grabbing the inside knob and turning it. As the door flung wide, Jillian was knocked to her knees by the rush of superheated air coming from behind her. The fire, fanned by fresh oxygen, was on the move.

“Jillian!”

A pair of hands hooked under her armpits, yanking her upward, and she found herself looking into Nils Berglund’s worried face. He was dressed in uniform, the fluorescent yellow stitching on his shoulder patches glowing in the dim light. His head was bare, and his cropped, snow-dusted hair sparkled in the flickering light as the flakes melted in the heat. He rose to his feet, lifting her easily along with him.

“What are you doing here? Where’s your mother?”

Jillian’s legs felt like rubber, and she was forced to wrap her fingers in the soft, padded bulk of his bomber jacket to keep herself from crumbling to the floor. “I don’t know! I was out cold, and when I woke up…” Another painful spasm seized her lungs and she choked on the smoke once more.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here!” Wrapping an arm around her, Berglund started for the door, half-dragging, half-carrying her with him, but after only a couple of steps, Jillian locked her knees and braced her feet—bare, she suddenly realized—on the hard tile floor.

“No, Nils! We have to find my mother!”

“I will, after I get you out of here!”

They were almost to the door, but she grabbed the rounded tile rim of the kitchen counter and steadied herself. “No, go now! I’ll wait here.”

“Outside, dammit!” he yelled, dragging her off the counter. He shoved her through the door and out onto the wide wooden back porch. “Get away from the house! The fire trucks are on the way. They’ll give you a blanket. Go!”

Not waiting for an answer, he left her there and ran back into the house. “Mrs. Meade! Grace! Where are you?”

Jillian wrapped an arm around one of the porch’s upright beams and drank a greedy gulp of fresh air, but it was too cold, too rich, and her lungs seized. Doubling over again, she coughed and hacked, gasping for air between each painful spasm that felt like a thousand tiny shards of glass slicing her lungs. Snow was falling around the house in great, feathery flakes, spinning and brilliant white against the black night. As Jillian struggled dizzily for air, the entire world seemed to be swirling.

Then, over the raspy sound of her own breathing, she thought she heard the faint wail of sirens. She pulled herself, hand-over-hand, along the freezing porch rail and looked out into the night through wind-whipped snow, ears straining. The half-acre lot on which the house sat was mostly wooded. At the far edge of the wood, as she searched for any sign of the fire trucks, she thought she saw something move—something or someone. But her eyes, smoke-stung and running with tears, couldn’t make anything out. One of the Newkirks, maybe? Was it the neighbors who’d called in the alarm?

A bang sounded from behind her and she spun on her heel. The storm door was swinging on its hinges, buffeted by the pressurized air from inside the house, slamming against the stucco siding. She reached out and grabbed it on the next swing, peering into the kitchen, blinking as smoke and hot air poured out from the inside.

“Nils! Can you see her?”

The only answer was the splintering of glass as the window over the sink just a few feet away on her left shattered and sent glass shards tinkling across the wooden decking. She ignored the sting on her feet as the smoke inside cleared briefly in the newly formed vortex of air. Nils was standing at the framed archway that led to the front hall, but no sooner had she spotted him than he dropped, disappearing from her sight line behind the kitchen table.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“I found her!”

Jillian held on to the storm door while she waited for him to bring her mother out, ducking her head briefly once or twice for a gulp of fresh air. The sirens were unmistakable now, a panicky caterwaul that pierced the cold winter night. She glanced over her shoulder. Through the spruce trees at the bottom of the drive she spotted red lights winking as the trucks rounded the corner at the end of Lakeshore Road and turned up the street toward her mother’s drive. Feeling was coming back into her legs, and the wooden planks were icy under her bare feet. She shivered, her jeans and black turtleneck sweater scant protection against the wicked night air.

Shifting her weight from one freezing foot to the other, she stuck her head around the door frame again. “Come on, Nils! Get out! The trucks are here!”

Silence.

“Nils?”

The smoke swirling under the ceiling was thick as soup now and dropping fast. Jillian hesitated for a moment, then drew a deep breath and ducked low, trying to stay under the worst of it as she headed into the kitchen, across to where she’d last seen him. Rounding the oval oak table, she saw his back, POLICE stenciled on his jacket in large, reflective yellow letters. He was crouched on the floor, and to one side of him a pair of stockinged legs lay akimbo, splayed feet shod in familiar, tiny black pumps. The pose was uncharacteristically awkward, but Jillian would have recognized those legs anywhere—veinless, smooth and remarkably girlish for a woman of sixty. A source of great pride to her mother.

“Oh, God, Nils! Is she—”

His head snapped up at the sound of her voice. “Jill, no!” His arm shot out to hold her back.

Too late.

Jillian froze as his body shifted and she saw what it had been hiding. She dropped to the floor. “Oh, my God! No! Mother!”

Her mother lay on the tile floor, head tilted strangely to one side, intense blue eyes staring dully into space, half-hidden under heavy lids. Her silver-blond hair was tucked up as always into a chignon at the nape of her neck, virtually unruffled except for a single strand that had come loose and lay across her slack jaw. Her mouth was open, as if she’d been struck dumb in midprotest. Jillian’s gaze dropped to the dark stain that had seeped across the front of her mother’s pale cashmere sweater. All color was obscured by the strange tinge to the light flickering from the hall, but she knew the sweater set was robin’s-egg blue, just like her mother’s eyes. Grace had been wearing this sweater as she sat in her favorite wing chair in the front room…. When? Only moments ago, it seemed, sitting there, large as life, her spine ramrod straight, held away from the chair back, her hands clasped delicately in her lap, knees together, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. Always the picture of a lady. Now, the sweater was ruined. Her mother was lying sprawled on the floor, and the irrational thought crossed Jillian’s mind that Grace Meade would be appalled to know she’d been found in such an ungraceful state.

“Let’s get out of here!” Nils yelled over the roar of the fire and the wail of sirens that were right outside now. He coughed, drawing in air that was rapidly becoming completely un-breathable as he gathered the small, limp body into his arms.

Jillian stood and pressed herself against the wall, repelled by the burden in his arms, yet unable to look away. Her gaze rose with him as he struggled to his feet. He was huge, her mother’s tiny form almost lost in the bulk of him.

He cocked his head toward the back door. “Get going! I’ll follow you!”

He shifted the weight in his arms for a better grip, and as he did, her mother’s head turned, those pale, dead eyes fixing Jillian with an accusatory glare. She recoiled, and as her knees buckled, she slid down the wall, landing with a thud on her backside.

“For Christ sake, get up!” Nils bellowed. “The fire’s spreading! The whole place is going to go!”

She wanted to run but she was nailed in place by the judgment she saw in her mother’s eyes. Nils hefted the body over one shoulder, freeing up a hand, and he used it to grip Jillian’s upper arm. She shook him off and turned away, squeezing her eyes shut. Anything but to look at the stare of that monstrous thing that was—but couldn’t be—her mother.

Mummy, no, please!

He grabbed her again, but she fought him off and scuttled down the hall, deeper into the house, moving toward the dull roar and the flickering light of flames that had now fully engulfed the living room.

“Jill! Get back here, dammit!”

Instead, she lay down on the threshold of the dining room, opposite the fire, pressing her cheek into its waxed and buffed cherry planks. The fire crackled in her ears, but beyond that sensation, which was more pressure than sound, she was aware of nothing. Her eyelids closed, and she gave herself over gratefully to whatever void she could find.

It wasn’t to be. Something clamped on to her arms, and she was lifted in two sharp yanks, first to a sitting position, then to her feet. She opened her eyes. Nils held her by the elbows, both of his hands free now of that other load. He shook her once, then again, all will had drained out of her. Her head flopped, her body limp, joints unstrung.

“Dammit, Jill, come on! Do you want to die in here?”

A sweet lassitude overtook her. Yes. Leave me alone.

He caught her face and cupped it in his hands, his wide, worried face filling her field of vision.

“Jill, please!”

He leaned toward her until their foreheads were touching, and he held her close, thumbs stroking her face. Then his head tilted and he kissed her, hard. She felt his lips on hers, and for a moment, she was seventeen all over again. The intervening years faded away, and they were Nils and Jill, inseparable, deeply, obsessively in love, the way it only happens the first time, when every experience is new, every touch a revelation. It all came back to her—the smell of him, the taste of him, the safe refuge of him.

When he pulled back and looked at her again, his expression tortured, she nodded. He got to his feet and extended a hand, and she reached out, ready to take it, until she spotted the dark stain on the left shoulder of his jacket. Blood, she realized, soaked deep into the padding. Her mother’s blood. She tried to push him away—push the blood away—only to realize that her own hands, too, were sticky and wet with it. She stared at them, horrified, and she screamed.

He grabbed her roughly. She fought him, scratching and kicking, but it was a hopeless mismatch. He was huge, well over six feet and even heavier now than he’d been in his high school linebacker days. He lifted her easily and was about to sling her over that same bloody shoulder when a lucky kick from her right foot connected with his groin. His grip weakened momentarily, and as he crumpled, Jillian pushed herself off his brawny frame and started to run. But before she’d gone more than a couple of steps, her bare heel hit a wet patch and skidded out from under her. She landed flat on her back on the hardwood floor, the wind knocked out of her.

She lay there for a moment, then rolled over—only to find herself right where Nils had laid down his bloody burden, face-to-face with her mother’s dull, half-lidded stare. Unblinking, it cut through her like a judgment.

She was, indeed, in hell, Jillian thought. Exactly where she belonged.




CHAPTER 2


Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, January 10, 1979

Much later, when it was all over—and yet not really over because, as Alex Cruz knew, there were some events you never truly got over but only locked away in that dark recess of the mind where nightmares live—afterward, he did the calculations, backtracking, trying to figure out the exact sequence of events. Where he’d been the first time he’d heard the names Jillian and Grace Meade. Whether he’d had any premonition he was about to encounter a face of evil unlike anything he’d seen before in either his professional or personal life. Whether there’d been any warning sign that this would be the case to finally push him over the razor-thin line between the letter of the law he’d sworn to uphold and the rough justice of the vigilante; the line between his troubled past and the uncertain fate that lay ahead of him.

Even before he’d heard of these two women, Cruz had already witnessed more than his share of the horrors that human beings could unleash upon one another. He’d been a grunt in the jungles of Vietnam, then spent more than a decade as a U.S. Army criminal investigator, specializing in homicide, rape and other crimes of violence. Now, as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he spent his days tracking the worst of the worst—terrorists, kidnappers and serial killers who claimed the entire planet as their personal hunting ground.

At this point, there wasn’t much he hadn’t come across in the way of human depravity, but the events at the root of Grace Meade’s murder and the others connected to it would forever stand alone in his mind, unequaled in terms of sheer cruelty. Did he have the slightest inkling of that the day the case first landed on his desk? One thing was reasonably certain: On the night Jillian Meade was trying to die in Minnesota, Cruz would have been eighteen hundred miles away and, taking into account time zone differences, already in bed. While the fire in Minnesota blazed, trapping mother and daughter, Cruz was struggling with the restless insomnia that had plagued him for almost as long as he could remember, part of the price he paid for past mistakes. If Jillian Meade was trying to die that night, Alex Cruz had long since resigned himself to the knowledge that he was condemned for his own sins to live.

The day after the fire, Cruz arrived at the office early. If he hadn’t been trying to dodge Sean Finney, who worked in the next cubicle, he might have overlooked the notice regarding Jillian Meade, only one of at least a half-dozen pending cases sitting in his “In” basket. Given his already heavy caseload, he might have passed this one on to someone else, or at least delayed following up on it for a few days. But that morning, Cruz was determined to find a reason to get out of the office and avoid the loaded questions and broad hints Finney had been lobbing his way with increasing frequency of late. He needed a case that would take him on the road where he could slip back into comfortable anonymity.

Eleven months into a new job with the FBI, he was close to violating one of his cardinal rules: never blur the boundaries between the job and his private life. Maryanne Finney was Sean’s cousin, and Cruz had met her at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by his co-worker. An attractive redhead with hair that corkscrewed halfway down her back, Maryanne had an infectious smile that didn’t take no for an answer, even from a taciturn newcomer who tried to telegraph he wasn’t looking for romantic entanglements. Within hours of meeting her, Cruz had found himself accepting an invitation to a Sunday dinner at her parents’ home in Bethesda, seduced by Maryanne’s sweet Irish blarney when she’d assured him that it wouldn’t be a formal date but that he’d be doing her a favor by going.

“They’re a fine bunch, my family, but forever nagging me to settle down and produce a gaggle of little Finneys. They can’t help themselves. It’s a genetic defect—the Irish Catholic thing, you know. Last thing I’m interested in, believe me, after spending my days in a classroom riding herd on other people’s rambunctious monsters. If a stranger’s around, though, they’ll be on their best behavior. Might actually stifle themselves about my pitiful life, at least for one day.”

Like he himself wasn’t the pitiful one, Cruz thought, an old stray taken in by a kindhearted woman. And so it had started, light and friendly, but in the usual way of these matters, one thing had led to another. Maryanne’s enthusiasm in the bedroom, he’d discovered later that evening, was as cheerful and energetic as everything else about her. When she finally fell into sleep, it was deep and undisturbed, leaving him awake in the dark with only his guilty conscience for company. As he’d watched the pale luminous curve of her shoulder and neck in the soft glow of the candles she’d lit before they made love, he’d seen a Botticelli painting of uncomplicated virtues, a woman who, despite her protestations to the contrary, did seem to hanker after a man who’d stick around for the long haul.

He wasn’t what a nice woman like that needed or wanted. After all these years, he was too wedded to his solitude and too addicted to the job. Sooner or later, every woman with whom he got involved came to the same conclusion, and the endings were always the same—tears, angry words and self-recrimination. So Cruz had done what seemed like the kindest thing—he called Maryanne the next day to apologize for letting things go further than they should have.

He’d been avoiding Sean Finney ever since. Like every matchmaker since the beginning of time, Finney took bumptious delight in the thought that his introduction of cousin and co-worker might bear fruit. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sean was evidently plugged into some mysterious Finney family tom-tom network that seemed to have been vibrating since the moment Cruz’s path had crossed Maryanne’s, so that Sean spent half his time haunting Cruz’s cubicle, fishing for details on what was transpiring between them. She deserved better than the both of them, Cruz thought guiltily, flipping through the papers on his desk.

He was assigned to the FBI’s International Liaison Division, investigating a wide array of cross-border offenses—organized crime, kidnapping, terrorism, outlaw motorcycle gang activity, child abduction, art theft and violent crimes such as murder, rape and robbery—sifting through evidence, following up leads and liaising with law enforcement agencies domestically and internationally. During his Army career, Cruz had worked homicide cases all over the world, and the Bureau, desperate for experienced agents to help deal with the burgeoning of cross-border crime syndicates and international terrorism, had snapped him up as soon as he’d resigned his commission and his résumé had hit the street.

By 9:00 a.m., he’d narrowed down his day’s work to the two or three cases that offered him the chance to get out in the field. Before the day was out, the Meade affair would push all the others aside. It wouldn’t be long after that that he would be pursuing the elusive mystery of Jillian and Grace Meade with a single-mindedness bordering on obsession.

He was reaching for his coat when Sean Finney’s rust-colored head and myopic gray eyes suddenly popped up over the beige fabric-covered divider that separated their desks. “Hey, Alex! What’s cookin’? You comin’ or goin’?”

“Going,” Cruz replied, regretting that he hadn’t moved a little faster. Engrossed in his review of background briefs, he hadn’t even heard the voluble, heavyset Finney arrive. Yet there he was, larger than life, with his gravely smoker’s voice and his unavoidable bonhomie.

“Where you headed?”

Cruz held up a blue sheet of paper, one of the stack of color-coded international alerts that crossed their desks daily. “Gotta track down a subject, try to take a statement.”

The alerts, part of a global cooperative effort between various national law enforcement agencies, sought information and assistance in locating wanted persons. Red bulletins warned police and border checkpoints to be on the lookout for fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants. Green ones were for career criminals, like child molesters or pornographers, likely to commit repeat offenses in several countries. Yellow notices meant missing persons, gray ones detailed organized crime groups. The white notices, most often directed to Sean Finney’s desk, provided details on stolen art and cultural objects. Black diffusions sought help in identifying dead bodies that had turned up with false or missing identification.

A blue alert like the one Cruz held in his hand was a request from a foreign police agency—in this case, Britain’s Scotland Yard—to trace a witness to a crime. Many of these witnesses were actually suspects who, if the evidence panned out, would eventually be the subjects of red Fugitive Wanted notices. Once the suspect was located, an extradition request would be the next thing to come down the pipeline.

It was in this blue-printed notice that Cruz had spotted the Washington address of a witness wanted for questioning regarding two homicides that had gone down in Britain a couple of weeks earlier. One of the victims had been a seventy-one-year-old former civil servant by the name of Vivian Atwater, who’d been shot in her London apartment, which was subsequently torched. The other was a sixty-year-old spinster in Dover, England, and the murder of Margaret Entwistle appeared to have followed a similar M.O. Both women were somehow linked to an American whose address, conveniently, was right there in the capital, only a couple of miles from his office.

“ScotlandYard sent this over. They’ve had a couple of what they’re calling ‘elder murders’over the past couple of weeks,” Cruz told Finney. “They’re asking us to have a talk with a woman here in D.C. who knew both vics, see if she can shed some light.”

“She? We got a female perp?”

“Don’t know. Apparently she’d met with both victims a few days before they were killed. The fact that she called on one of the victims might be coincidence, but two starts to look a little hinky.”

“You got that right. So you’re gonna run her down?”

“Gonna try,” Cruz said as he started to lock up his cabinets.

“Need some backup?”

“I think I can handle it.”

“Oh.” Finney sounded disappointed. Cruz felt the air move as he tossed his coat over the spare chair in his cubicle, then heard the hiss of a match as his neighbor lit the first of many cigarettes that fouled the air around his desk daily.

All the more reason not to let the guy ride along in his car. Finney leaned over the divider. “If you change your mind and decide you could use some help—”

“You bet. I’ll let you know.” Cruz nodded and headed out of his cubicle. The squad room had filled by now, agents and analysts sifting paper, typing up case notes and working phones that never seemed to stop ringing.

Cruz made it as far as the elevator before his luck ran out. Finney’s voice cut through the hum like a rusty hacksaw. “Hey, Alex, by the way—seen Maryanne lately?”

Caught in a trap of my own damn making, Cruz thought grimly, as heads popped up all around. Just then, the elevator door wheezed open. He leapt on, playing deaf and dumb as he hit the Close Door button.

According to the passport details supplied by Scotland Yard, the witness sought for questioning on the two open-book homicides in the U.K. possessed dual citizenship due to her parentage. Mother: English. Father: American. Date of birth: July 14, 1944. Place of birth: Drancy, France—which, technically, Cruz supposed, would make her a citizen of that country, too, if she ever cared to claim the right. A war baby, obviously. Thirty-five years old, born on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

Cruz, too, had an historic birth date: December 7, 1941, the day of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This coincidence might have seemed auspicious, had he thought about it at the time and been the type to find meaning in such things. If he had, perhaps he’d have been able to predict that, with such mutually bloody birth dates, he and this woman were bound to become the bitter adversaries they did.

The address supplied in the blue notice led him to a weathered, four-story brick apartment building near Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. On the intercom board between the building’s open outer door and the locked inner door, Jillian Meade’s name was listed next to 204. Cruz pressed the buzzer and waited, peering through the art deco stained glass windows of the inner door to a black and white tiled lobby. When there was no response after half a minute or so, he tried the buzzer again, then jiggled the handle on the lobby door. Locked. Turning back to the intercom, Cruz noticed a red plastic strip punched with the letters Super in white. He tried the buzzer next to it, with the same result as before. He had just about decided the trip had been a waste of time when he was startled by a crackled shout from the overhead speaker.

“I already called the cops, assholes!”

Taken aback, Cruz hesitated, then leaned toward the intercom grill. “Is this the building superintendent?”

“Who’s this?”

“Federal agent. I’d like a word, please.” Silence. “Sir?” When there was still no answer, Cruz rang again. Nothing. He was getting ready to lean on the buzzer for as long as it took when he heard a muffled but crotchety voice from the other side of the lobby door.

“Yeah, yeah, keep yer shirt on! I’m not jet-propelled, y’-know.”

Through the stained glass window, Cruz made out the image of a small, grizzled man in a dark jump suit limping across the lobby. The old man put one rheumy eye to the glass and hollered, “You’re no cop!”

“Yes, sir, I am,” Cruz said loudly, straining to be heard through the heavy door. “Sort of.”

“What ‘sort of’? Where’s your damn uniform? Ya either are or you’re not, fella, and if you’re not, then I can tell you right now, the real ones are on the way.”

“I’m a federal agent,” Cruz said, pulling out a leather folder and slapping it up against the glass.

The old man peered at it, then pulled back, head shaking. “Well, that looks real official, I’m sure, but I’m damned if I can read it, ’specially without my glasses.”

“I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sir.”

“The whoosis? Who are they when they’re at home?”

“FBI.”

The old man cupped a hand behind his ear. “Who?”

“Sir, if you could open the door—”

“Wait, wait, lemme open the friggin’ door.” The super pushed it open a crack but stood barring the way with his bantam rooster frame. Cruz towered over him, looking down at the shine on the top of his bald head.

“Lemme see that,” the caretaker said, waving a gnarled finger at Cruz’s ID folder. “Oh, the FBI! Why didn’t you say so? Jeez, Louise! I was figuring on the D.C. coppers.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir. I’m just trying to locate one of your tenants.”

“You didn’t come on account of I called the police?”

“No, sir.”

“Well that just friggin’ figures, don’t it?” The old man peered around Cruz toward the outer door and the street beyond. “Called more’n three-quarters of an hour ago, but they never bloody show up when you need ’em.”

“What did you call about?”

He waved an impatient hand. “Tenants were complainin’ ’bout somebody hittin’ the intercom buzzers. Then they go answer and nobody’s there. Kids, prob’ly. It’s happened before. You get these punks’ll lean on all the buzzers, see. Chances are somebody upstairs is waitin’ for pizza delivery or something, unlocks the door without checkin’ who is it. Next thing I know, I got graffiti all over the hallways and units gettin’ broke into. Real pain in the ass. One of the tenants says she saw some frizzle-headed guy wandering around a while ago, lookin’ like he didn’t know where he was going.”

“Did she speak to him?”

“Nah. Said she figured he was there to visit somebody. Only mentioned it because when she came down here, she heard a couple of the neighbors complainin’ ’bout gettin’ buzzed. I woulda gone up to check it out myself, ’cept I got this hernia problem. Goin’ in to get it fixed next week. Otherwise, I got no problem goin’ after the little buggers myself and givin’ ’em a rap upside the head so they don’t come back here. Figured I better call the cops this time, though, let them do it. Only now,” the old man added resentfully, “you tell me you’re not even the cops.”

“Sorry. I’m sure they’re on the way if you called.”

“Course I called. I said it, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. Look, if you like, I can go up there with you to check it out.”

The super looked him up and down for a moment, as though trying to decide whether or not Cruz made a suitable bodyguard. “Nah. It was over an hour ago already. If the guy was up to anything, he’s been and gone already. I’ll hear about it soon enough. So what about you? What do you want?”

“Like I said, I’m trying to locate someone who I understand lives in the building. A Jillian Meade?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I know her.”

“She around, do you know?”

The super hefted his thin, blue-clad shoulders. “I dunno. You buzz her?”

“Yes, but there was no answer.”

“Then she’s probably at work.”

“Do you know where that is?” Cruz asked. “Where she works, I mean?” He was answered with another shrug. “How long has she been living here?”

“Oh, I dunno, couple, three years, at least. Yeah, at least that, come to think of it, ’cause she was here during the Bicentennial, I remember. She was one of the ones decked out her balcony in red, white and blue bunting.”

“What kind of tenant is she?” Cruz asked, pulling a notebook out of his hip pocket and making notes.

“What can I say? Pays her rent on time, quiet.”

“She’s single? Lives alone?”

“Uh-huh. Kinda shy, but okay, you know. Goes to work early, comes home between, oh, six and seven most nights, I’d say. Never had any trouble outta her.” The old man peered over Cruz’s shoulder, trying to see if he was getting this all down in his notebook.

“Any friends you can point me to? A boyfriend, maybe?”

The super thought about it, his stained fingernails scratching across the stubble on his chin. “Not really. All the time she’s been here, can’t say I seen her go out on many dates. Now and then, there’s this older guy comes around. Not that I’m spyin’ twenty-four hours a day or nothin’ like that, but my place is right down here on the ground floor, and I keep an eye on things. You gotta, in a city this size. Stuff goin’ down all the time.”

“Uh-huh. But this man who comes to see Miss Meade?” Cruz prodded. “You got a name, by chance?”

“Nah. Seen him come and go with her a few times, is all. Not a real social butterfly, is Miss Meade.”

“And he’s the only one?”

“Only one I ever seen. She ain’t ugly, that’s for sure, ’specially if you catch her without those glasses on. But she ain’t no girl no more neither, know what I mean? I figure she’s just another one of those career office gals this city’s full of. But, hey! At least she don’t make trouble, right? All my tenants should be so easy.”

“Okay,” Cruz said. “You say she gets home from work around six or so? But you don’t know where she works?”

“Well, now, hang on a minute, lemme think about that.” The old man’s bristly eyebrows skidded together over his nose as he frowned, thinking hard. “I asked her that once, now you mention it. A few months back, it was. I was up in her apartment fixin’ a leaky john. Just tryin’ to make a little conversation, ’cause God knows, that woman hardly says ‘boo’ herself. And I did ask her what she did for a living. Now where did she say she worked? It was someplace, you know, like…oh, hey!” He snapped his fingers. “I remember. The Smithsonian. Yeah, that’s it!”

Cruz’s pen paused in midair over the notebook. “Like, at that big old castle, do you mean, or at one of the other related museums? ‘Smithsonian’ covers a lot of territory.”

“Ah, well, now, that I can’t tell you. Anyway, what does the FBI want with Miss Meade? She in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s just a routine inquiry.”

“I had a guy here once worked for the State Department. FBI came around, then, too, checkin’ him out. For a security clearance, they said. That what this is about?”

“Something like that,” Cruz said. A flash of light bounced off the stained glass of the lobby door, and both men turned to see a black and white cruiser pull up to the front of the building, cherry lights rotating. “Looks like the police finally made it.”

“Well, it’s about friggin’ time.”

“I’ll leave you to deal with them, then, sir,” Cruz said, pocketing his notebook. “I appreciate your help, Mr.—?”

“Ripkin. No problem. I run a nice quiet buildin’, you know. Don’t want any funny stuff here.”

“Sure thing. Listen, Mr. Ripkin, I’m going to try to contact Miss Meade through her office, but if I miss her there, I’ll check back here again this evening. If you see her or hear from her before then, though, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention I came by.” Cruz had no idea whether or not Jillian Meade presented a risk of flight, but there was no point taking unnecessary risks.

“Whatever,” the super said distractedly, the glare returning to his beetle eyes as his attention shifted to the street, where two beefy D.C. patrolmen were lumbering up the building’s front steps. “About bloody time you guys showed up!” he hollered as the front door opened.

Cruz gave the patrolmen a sympathetic nod and slipped out around them.

There was a drugstore at the corner of the street. Cruz ducked into it to use the pay phone and put in a call to the Smithsonian Institution main switchboard. The operator, after consulting a master directory, was able to tell him there was a Jillian Meade listed on staff at the National Museum of American History, one of several buildings scattered around the capital that fell under the Smithsonian’s broad organizational umbrella.

The museum was located just across Constitution Avenue from the red-roofed buildings of the Federal Triangle. Its architecture was boxlike, a pink marble mausoleum that housed a vast collection of Americana, from the original star-spangled Banner that Francis Scott Key had seen “by the dawn’s early light,” to a pocket compass used by Lewis and Clark—a massive assemblage of memorabilia that ran the gamut from priceless national icons to sentimental kitsch.

In the main lobby, Cruz waited to ask the busy guard at the Information desk where he could find Jillian Meade’s office. All around him, the halls echoed with the shouts and laughter of children, the hissing and shushing of their teachers, and the valiant efforts of docents to be heard above the din of young voices and feet tramping across Italian marble floors. Once he’d gotten directions, Cruz dodged kids careening up and down the stairs as he made his way to the third floor, where, according to the guard, he would find Miss Meade in a corner suite of administrative offices next to the military history display.

Most of the third floor was taken up with exhibits of ceramics, printing presses, money and medals, but on the far northeast side of the floor was the permanent exhibit on the history of the American armed forces. Passing through it to reach the admin offices, Cruz ran an uneasy gauntlet past mannequins dressed in U.S. military uniforms from down through the years, standing on sober guard. There were artifacts and photos linked to various conflicts, from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars and the UN action in Korea, all laid out in glass-covered display cases, a proud collection of weapons, tactical plans, strategic maps and portraits of victorious men and officers.

By contrast, Cruz noted, the exhibit on Vietnam was pitifully small, tucked away in the farthermost corner of the section. It was a case study in controversy avoidance, set up to carefully dodge the temptation to assign blame for the debacle that had taken fifty-eight thousand American lives in a war that couldn’t be won. Five years after the fall of Saigon, emotions were still running too high for any kind of national consensus on that war, and the display reflected the national mood, treating the period like the historic equivalent of a drooling idiot relative whose embarrassing existence the family preferred to ignore. One day there would be a reckoning, Cruz thought. But not yet.

He was almost past the exhibit when a photograph in a case near the end of the display area caught his eye. He stopped and stared, his attention snagged not so much by the platoon of grunts in familiar jungle camouflage peering out at the camera, looking pitifully young in their face paint and false bravado, as by the buildings and hills behind them. He knew this place, he realized. Had stood on that very spot. It was a staging area outside Da Nang, a camp from which a small recon unit of seven men, himself included, had set out one day in 1966 under the command of an incompetent 1st Lieutenant named Darryl Houghton. A scared kid from Dayton, Ohio, Houghton had tried to cover his fear with bullying and intimidation, then issued one dumb order too many and never came back.

Cruz felt the air move and he looked nervously over his shoulder, but there was no one else around except for a uniformed guard standing watch over a Civil War cannon. For the moment, he was alone, falling through time and space. Logically, he knew the drumming sound in his ears was the rumble of kids’ feet running up and down distant halls and not the drone of helicopter blades, but he couldn’t explain why his nostrils had suddenly picked up the distinctive odor of heated gun oil—the familiar smell of petroleum steam that issued from the red-hot muzzle of an M-16 rifle after it had been fired. And there was something else: the sour stench of rotting plant material, the kind that always managed to work its way inside his clothes and ears and nose as he crawled on his belly on the jungle floor, trying to stay beneath the sight line of roving VC patrols. Worst of all, he was smelling black vinyl body bags, the way they got when they’d been filled and left out too long in the brutal heat.

An eruption of childish giggles brought him back to the present as a school group guided by a harassed docent spilled around the corner and spread out across the armed forces exhibit. Shaking ghosts off his back, Cruz moved on.

Passing through a door marked “Museum Staff Only,” he found himself in the reception area of the corner suite of offices to which the Information guard had directed him. A woman sat at a secretarial desk, turned away from him so that he was out of her peripheral field of vision. Fingers flying over the keys of an IBM Selectric, she seemed not to notice the click of the door or the raucous group outside.

Approaching the desk, Cruz saw why. She was wearing a set of headphones, half-hidden in the feathery, swept-back layers of her blond hair, connected to a Dictaphone machine on the desk beside her. Putting a hand to his mouth, he coughed once, then again, louder. She glanced up, then did a startled double take.

“Oh, my Lord! You scared the you-know-what out of me!” she cried, ripping off the headset with one hand as her other hand flew to her heart. Her chair swiveled around. Her eyes were heavily shaded with blue, her lashes blacker and thicker than Nature had ever been capable of producing without the help of the cosmetics industry. Early twenties, Cruz guessed.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I tried to make as much noise as I could coming in.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, it’s okay. Never mind. Happens all the time. I just get so absorbed in what I’m doing, you know?” He nodded sympathetically and she gave him a smile. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here to see Jillian Meade.”

A perturbed crease marred the smooth expanse of her forehead. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No, but I was hoping to catch her in. It’s important.”

Deeply pink lips twisted in a grimace of regret. “You should’ve called ahead. Could’ve saved yourself the trip. She’s not in.”

“Will she be back later?”

“Unh-unh, not today, not tomorrow, either, I don’t think. I was told she’s out probably till the end of the week.”

“Out where? I happen to know she’s not at home.”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“No, this is official business. Is there someone who can tell me where I can find her?”

“I’m not really sure?” the woman replied, her voice rising uncertainly, as if posing unhelpful responses as questions might make them less irritating. “I’m just a temp? The girl who usually works here was in a car accident a couple of days ago and I was just called in to take her place while she’s laid up.”

“So, who would know?”

“Maybe you should talk to Mr. Twomey.”

“And he would be who?”

“The boss here,” she suggested, cocking her thumb at a set of double doors behind her. A brass plate at the side of the door noted the room number and the occupant: Haddon Twomey, Chief Curator. “Can you hang on a sec and I’ll see if he’s free?” When Cruz nodded, she rose, then seemed to have second thoughts. “Can I tell him who you are?”

“Special Agent Cruz with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Whoa, FBI? Okay then, let me go ask.”

She disappeared into the corner office. As murmuring voices sounded from behind the door, Cruz looked around the reception area. It was a study in beige, furnished entirely in plastic and steel. The tan walls were covered in brightly colored posters left over from the Bicentennial celebration. A half-dozen buff-colored, steel-framed chairs lined the walls, and back issues of the Smithsonian Magazine were splayed across beige plastic cubes that passed for tables. There were three other doors around the reception area besides the one he’d come in, all made of the same dark wood as the curator’s, although these others were single rather than double openings. None had name plates. Maybe one of these was Jillian Meade’s office.

Cruz heard the soft click of a door latch and turned as the receptionist came back and nodded, holding the door open for him. “You can go in now,” she said, pressing herself against the door as he passed, then closing it behind her.

The office in which he found himself was markedly more luxurious than the utilitarian reception area. A massive desk the size of a dinghy took up nearly half the room, angled catty-corner against fully loaded bookshelves that covered two of the room’s four walls. The desk, made of dark wood, was intricately carved with pillars and scrolls, and it looked very old—and, Cruz thought, very expensive. Several brightly colored area rugs covered the same nondescript carpet as in the reception area. The rugs, Cruz was reasonably certain, were genuine Navajo, and old ones, too. As for the rest of the pieces in the room, he suspected were rare antiques, as well.

Opposite the desk were two floor-to-ceiling windows set into the building’s northeast corner, one on either side of the supporting corner block. Heavy silk panels in a rich shade of gold framed the windows, while the glass was covered with sheer gauzy material that did little to cut down the amount of light from the clear January day streaming in.

“Good afternoon…Agent Cruz, I believe?” The carefully modulated voice came from a silhouette that stood in front of the windows, back-lit so that Cruz found it impossible to tell whether the man was facing him or not.

“Yes, sir.” Crossing the room, Cruz angled his approach so that he put the windows to one side, affording a better view of the other man. His eyes adjusted to the change in the light, and Twomey’s features began to emerge from shadow.

He was tall, thin and patrician-looking, slightly stooped at the shoulder. Somewhere in his fifties, Cruz estimated by the mix of gray and white in his hair, which swept straight back off Twomey’s high brow, waving slightly over his collar. His blue pin-striped shirt was open-necked under a crested navy blazer that seemed faintly nautical, although it probably reflected his status as an alumnus of some Ivy League school. Was this the older man the building super had said sometimes called on Jillian Meade? Cruz wondered. The man’s eyebrows were tufted, his eyes half-lidded, as if he were bored or weary or both. His nose was long and prominent, with deep crevices running from either nostril to the edges of his plummy, turned-down lips, giving him the appearance of being permanently offended by the whiff of something malodorous in the air. Just the sight of him made every working class hackle on Cruz’s neck stand up in protest.

“So, you’re a junior G-man, are you?” Twomey asked, his hand dangling in Cruz’s general direction.

Cruz shook it and found the skin icy to the touch and uncommonly smooth for a man. Like picking up a carp.

“We’ve had occasion to seek your people’s assistance in the past,” Twomey said. “An irreplaceable silver tea service manufactured by Paul Revere himself went missing from one of our exhibits some time back. The FBI said they had a lead to a New Orleans-based antique dealer of rather shady reputation. They suspected he’d secreted it out of the country, hidden in plain view in a shipment of English silver that an equally dubious but very wealthy client living in Barbados had bought at an auction around the same time. There’d been an export permit issued, but I suppose most government bureaucrats wouldn’t know plate from pewter, much less Paul Revere, would they?”

Cruz opted not to speculate about which ignorant bureaucrats he was referring to. And while they were on the subject, wasn’t Twomey on the government payroll, too? “Did you ever get it back?”

“No. Your people still haven’t come through for us.”

Cruz had the feeling he was supposed to feel guilty, but he was damned if he was going to apologize for not showing up with Twomey’s missing teapot.

“I’m trying to get in touch with Miss Meade,” he said.

“Yes, so the girl said. Jillian is one of my curatorial associates, but she’s not in today. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Can you tell me where I might find her?”

“She’s out of town.”

“A business trip?”

“No, personal. What’s this about?”

Cruz gave him the same stock answer he’d given the caretaker—the same answer he gave anyone with no need to know and without the sense to realize they had no need to know. “It’s a routine matter. When do you expect her back at work?”

“I’m not sure. Friday, maybe? Monday, at the latest, she said.”

“Where did she go?”

“To Minnesota to see her mother. I had the impression there was a problem at home, although Jillian didn’t come right out and say, and I certainly wasn’t about to pry.”

“What kind of problem?”

Twomey moved to the desk and perched on the edge of it. “As I say, I didn’t press her on it. I do know that her mother had a cancer scare last year, so perhaps there was a recurrence.”

“Where in Minnesota, do you know?”

“A small town called Havenwood. It’s about a hundred miles from Minneapolis, I think Jillian said. She grew up there.”

“She wasn’t born there,” Cruz noted.

Twomey arched a brow, and the disapproving lines around his mouth deepened. “No, she wasn’t, as a matter of fact. Been doing your homework, I see. She was born in France. Her mother was an English war bride, her father an American pilot with the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. That’s—”

“The forerunner of the CIA, yes, I know,” Cruz said. He might not know plate from pewter but he wasn’t a total idiot. “So the family came back to the States after the war?”

“Jillian and her mother did. Her father was killed in action over there. His parents invited Mrs. Meade to bring the baby—Jillian, that is—and come live with them. That’s how she ended up out there, although Jillian left after high school. Attended Georgetown University, and then she came to work here.”

“What does she do here? You said she’s a curatorial associate. What does that mean, exactly?”

Twomey shrugged. “She puts together exhibits for our permanent and roving collections. Researches background materials, writes pamphlets and monographs. We have several different departments here, a couple of dozen researchers, but Jillian is really quite the best of the lot. Her specialty is the military and social history of World War II. She’s been working on an oral history for the past four or five years, collecting interviews with people who were involved in various anti-Nazi operations in the European theater. It’s fascinating work, you know. That generation isn’t going to be around forever, and she’s doing invaluable work, collecting their reminiscences. I’ve been encouraging her to develop it into a book or a doctoral thesis.”

“She’s been looking at operations in the European theater?” Cruz said, his interest piqued now.

“Yes. It started with recently declassified OSS files here in Washington that I’d arranged for her to have access to. Jillian began sifting through them and then got permission to follow up with some of the retired operatives. She’s amassed quite an amount of interesting material. As I say, I think she has the makings of a book. Jillian’s published several monographs and co-authored a couple of exhibit-related books under the auspices of our presses here, but I think this is going to be her breakout work.”

“You seem very impressed with her.”

“Absolutely. In the field of history, Agent Cruz, there are good researchers, good interviewers and good writers. Rarely, though, do you find all three in one person. Jillian is that rare exception. Unfortunately, unlike others of far lesser talent, she doesn’t seem to realize her own gifts. I must confess, I despair sometimes of her reaching her full potential. It’s a question of self-confidence, isn’t it? But I’m trying to encourage her in any way I can.”

“So, you’re sort of Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle?”

Twomey arched his brow slightly. “If I can mentor someone with Miss Meade’s talents, Agent Cruz, then I am happy to do that.”

Right, Cruz thought. The guy’s in love with her. If she attracted a prig like this Twomey, he could just imagine the kind of dry, repressed, severe old maid this Jillian Meade was going to turn out to be. But that said, she hardly sounded like someone who’d be out creating mayhem and leaving dead bodies in her wake. “Had she been to Europe lately?”

“Yes. She was over in London and Paris last month. She’s working on a new exhibit we’re pulling together here on American covert support to the French Resistance. We’d been offered access to some materials at the Imperial War Museum in London and the Quai d’Orsay. I sent Jillian over to take a look. She was obviously the best person for the job, but I was encouraging her while she was there to follow up on her own research, as well.”

“What did she tell you about her trip? Anything unusual happen while she was over there?”

“Like what?”

Like, two people were murdered and she was among the last people to see them alive, Cruz was tempted to say. But he was there to get information, not offer it. “Anything unusual,” he repeated, shrugging. “Anyone she met, or anything she might have seen that was out of the ordinary.”

“I haven’t really gotten the full rundown yet on how she made out over there. She just got back a few days before Christmas, and then she was leaving to spend the holidays with her mother. I was off with friends and then attending a symposium at Harvard last week. I’d no sooner gotten back into town than Jillian told me she had to go out to Minnesota and look in on her mother. Ships passing in the night, you see.”

“The girl outside said she was due back Friday?”

“Or Monday,” Twomey replied, nodding.

“Do you happen to have a number for her mother in Minnesota?” Cruz asked. Whatever else was going on, it was stretching credulity to think this Meade woman was going to be a murder suspect. Maybe this was one of those cases he could dispatch with a quick telephone interview, then move on to other, more pressing cases.

Twomey moved behind his desk, rummaging around in loose papers. “Yes, she did leave a number. She’d sent some new brochures off to the printer, and I wanted to be able to get in touch with her if there was any problem with them. Look, what is this about? Why is the FBI, for heaven sake, taking an interest in Jillian Meade?”

Cruz shrugged. “Just a routine inquiry, as I said.”

“Aha, there it is!” Twomey spotted a scrap of paper taped to the corner of his telephone. Withdrawing a fountain pen from a burled walnut holder on his desk, he copied a number on a piece of paper and handed it to Cruz.

“Appreciate the information, Mr. Twomey.”

“It’s Dr. Twomey, actually.”

“Right,” Cruz said. He was already at the door with a hand on the knob, but he paused to examine a row of framed photographs and certificates he hadn’t noticed on the back wall. Most seemed to feature Twomey himself, alone or in a group, standing at lecterns, or shaking hands with assorted dignitaries. “Is Jillian Meade in any of these?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s see…” Twomey moved beside him to scan the collection. “No…no…yes, there she is. This was taken during the Bicentennial two years ago. There was a Smithsonian ball on the Fourth of July, and we all ended up on the roof watching the fireworks. That’s Jillian right there, in the red dress.”

Cruz leaned in to peer at the group Twomey indicated. He was a little surprised to find Jillian Meade not quite as homely as he’d been picturing her. She was one of a dozen men and women of various ages, the men in black tie, the women in gowns, caught by someone’s camera as the fireworks exploded in the air behind them. She appeared to be slim and fairly tall, with long, dark hair tucked behind her ears and a soft fringe of bangs. She wore a simple red dress that rose high on her neck but was sliced away at the shoulders, halter-style. Like several others in the picture, she was holding up a glass of wine in an apparent toast to the nation’s two hundredth birthday. But where other faces were laughing or animated, her expression was relatively sober as she stared, clear-eyed, at the camera, only a hint of a smile—superior? sardonic?—at the edge of her lips. Twomey was in the group, too, Cruz noted, holding his glass up distractedly to the camera, his gaze focused…where?

On Jillian Meade.




CHAPTER 3


Montrose, Minnesota

Wednesday, January 10, 1979

Something clattered, faintly melodic, like wooden wind chimes or a handful of pencils dropped on a floor. The sound pulled her out of the drifting, soundless, seamless place in which she’d been floating. Jillian lay still, her senses on alert, afraid to open her eyes. She wanted to go back to that quiet place, but it was like trying to hold smoke in your hand. It slipped away on a wisp of air.

Whatever sound had awoken her was gone, too, before she could identify it. She heard only a low murmuring, like voices whispering from the bottom of a well, subdued and just beyond the range of the audible. She let the hum carry her along, until at last she felt herself floating again, drifting, back into the comfort of the white void. Stay here, the murmuring voices seemed to say. Stay here with us where it’s safe.

Fine with her. There was nothing for her outside that formless place. She was content to drift there forever, a shade without substance. Anything else was too hard.

“Jillian?”

She felt a hand at her shoulder, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through her, as if she’d been touched by a cattle prod. Her body contorted, folding in on itself. The hand closed over her shoulder, a squeeze of reassurance, and then a light shake.

“It’s time to wake up. Open your eyes now.”

She was terrified, but she had no will of her own. The dead are like that, aren’t they? Jillian thought.

She opened her eyes on horizontal bands of silver. She was supposed to be dead, but those looked like guardrails made of brushed steel, just inches from her face. They seemed very real. So did the wall beyond, solid-looking, a flat, dull green not found in nature. Her fingers slid tentatively across a field of bleached cotton to test the rails. Sure enough, they were hard and cold to the touch.

“How are you feeling, Jillian?” The voice came from behind her, a woman’s voice, vaguely familiar and yet not. “I’m Dr. Kandinsky. I’ve been in to see you before. Do you remember?”

A doctor? And so…guardrails…a hospital bed. She was in a hospital bed. Was she sick? Or had she been in an accident? A car accident? When? How long had she been here? Obviously long enough, Jillian realized, for this doctor to have been to see her more than once. She stared at the wall, terrified to move. Terrified to breathe. If she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, she wouldn’t feel pain.

But she was breathing and every inhalation hurt. She took a quick survey of the rest of her body. She could see, she could hear. She could smell—antiseptic, a plastic smell, and… smoke? She could feel air blowing gently into her nostrils. Could feel the soft mattress under the right side of her face, and a tiny, line-like hump along her cheekbone. A hose. She was hooked up to a thin plastic hose pumping air…no, oxygen, probably, into rasping lungs that hurt with every breath.

All right, she calculated, she was lying on her right side in a hospital bed looking through guardrails at a green wall, breathing air that hurt. What was wrong with her? She didn’t feel particularly sick or feverish, though she was very groggy. Carefully, she flexed her muscles, group by group, without moving her limbs, an isometric test of a body that hadn’t even seemed corporeal until just moments ago. All she wanted was to go back to that soft, quiet, safe place, but the voice wouldn’t let her.

“Jillian? Come on now, it’s time to wake up,” it said again, kindly but firmly.

Arms, hands, legs, feet, neck, spine. Everything there, everything working. No pain, except for a dull headache and, when she inhaled, the sensation that her lungs were full of sand. She also had a sick, terrified feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was very, very wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be there. If she could only go back to the quiet place.

Leave me alone!

“Jillian, how about if you roll over and sit up? Can you do that?”

The pressure increased on her shoulder, trying to force her onto her back, pulling her toward the voice.

No!

Jillian’s left hand shot out, and she gripped the steel rail tightly, fighting to slow the spinning of her body and her mind. She felt a stinging pain in her left arm. She looked at it and froze. There was a bandage just inside the elbow, a thick white square of gauze anchored in place with adhesive tape that pulled at her skin. A small, red stain showed in the center of the gauze where blood had seeped through.

I thought I dreamt it….

Was it possible it had really happened? She’d had a dream about sirens and an ambulance, about being in an emergency room under blinding lights with people hovering and holding her down while she cried and tried to get away from them. She’d fought them, hard, until someone had stuck something into her right arm. She’d cried out—or maybe she only thought she had, because then everything had faded and she’d fallen into the quiet place.

Later, she dreamed she’d awakened and found herself lying on a gurney, only now there was no one around and the lights were dimmed. In the dream, she pulled herself groggily up to a sitting position, confused and frightened, because she knew there was somewhere else she needed to be. They’d taken her clothes, but she climbed off the gurney, anyway, naked except for the sheet she held around her, and started looking for something to put on so she could leave. That was when she found a drawer with paper-wrapped packages labeled Syringe. And suddenly, somehow, she’d known there was a faster way to get to where she needed to be.

She’d ripped open one of the packages and withdrawn a syringe, pulled back the plunger and slipped the plastic cap off the needle. The tip was in her arm and her thumb was on the plunger when the room had erupted in shouting and blinding light. Someone had knocked her to the ground and ripped the needle out of her arm. She’d cried out in pain, her blood streaming onto the floor as she fought them again, until finally, they’d stuck yet another needle into her and she’d tumbled into the quiet place once more.

She’d thought it was a dream, but that blood-stained bandage on her arm was only too real, and so she knew it was true. She had failed.




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