“Well, that one didn't yield anything,” Eleri said to Noah as they climbed back into the car. She let him drive, just as GJ had, because he knew his way around.
Together, they’d decided to take on the cramp-inducing legwork of checking the dive shops, one by one. Eleri fully expected it to take all day and turn up approximately nothing. But if it worked, it might be a gold mine, so they would visit as many as they could get to and see if Neriah Jones had been by.
So far, they'd managed to hit five, and all were bearing out Eleri’s prediction.
They’d chosen these five shops because one, they were close together, so it was easy to hit them all up. And two, they were away from any of the dive shops Neriah was familiar with. She’d told her friends in her final text that wherever they thought she might go, she wasn’t there.
“Where to next, boss?” Noah asked, slipping the car into gear and backing out of the parking space.
With what she hoped was a well-covered sigh, Eleri checked the addresses on the list she’d organized and said, “These three are nearby. And then there's two more right up here—” she pointed to the tiny map on her screen. “Let's hit up that cluster.”
“There's another one on the way. I know the owners. They're brothers.”
“Then let’s hit it,” she said. “We'll go by the others afterward.” It didn’t really matter. She had no hopes for the day, but this was a box that had to be checked. Leaning back and acting casual, she continued to surreptitiously observe Noah.
Last night, over out-sized slices of chocolate cake that neither of them had finished, GJ had confided in Eleri. “I think something is a little off with Noah Kimball.”
GJ had been unable to articulate exactly what she was talking about, and it clearly frustrated her. Maybe that was why she was eating chocolate cake alone late at night. “There’s just something about the things Noah accomplished. . . quickly. Maybe too quickly? I don’t know.” She’d rescinded her statement almost as fast as she’d tossed it out. “Maybe he's just really good at his job.”
As she talked, she'd waved a forkful of cake around, making Eleri afraid it was going to go flying. At least the place wasn't busy at 10:30.
It was good to mix their small teams up, Eleri acknowledged, rather than admitting she wanted to watch Noah herself today. This morning, she’d contacted Donovan first and let him know she was changing the assignments. She’d told GJ last night that Donovan was having family issues and that he might need a bit of time to look up personal information.
GJ had looked at her with an expression that made it clear the junior agent understood Donovan did not have family. Therefore, what kind of family issues could he be suffering from?
Eleri had watched all the emotions play out over GJ’s face before the words came out of her mouth. “Oh my God, is it Lucy?”
GJ always referred to Lucy Fisher as “Lucy,” while the rest of them tended to still use the old “Walter Reed” nickname. Even so, Eleri didn’t flinch. She only shook her head and refrained from saying that she didn't even know how much Lucy Fisher understood the situation. She had no idea how much Donovan had been telling her.
As agitated as he was, he might have been word vomiting to his girlfriend each night over the phone, but it was equally likely he’d told her nothing. Eleri, eating the cake bite by bite, was glad to get some sugar and fat into her system and let chewing cover for her lack of answer. At least the cake satisfied whatever craving had sprung up as she’d sat in her hotel room getting angry at the walls.
“Look,” she told GJ. “He's likely to be distracted, and that’s all I can say. He did say he was going to try and put it aside for today and focus on this case. So feel free to say, Hey, Donovan, I need you to. . . whatever. But you may very well be in charge.”
“Ooh,” GJ had replied, right around another bite of chocolate cake. “I get to be the boss of Donovan.”
That phrase alone gave Eleri pause, but she didn't comment. GJ was nothing if not logical. So chances were, she simply thought the line was funny. She also would do a good job of keeping Donovan’s work in order. So Eleri let it stand.
This morning, GJ and Donovan had taken off for the branch office and Eleri handed Noah the car keys, ready to spend the day watching him.
She couldn't say she was unhappy about getting GJ’s eyes on the data again. GJ seemed to see the statistics without having to calculate them. Eleri figured they could use that now because, so far, she’d been unable to find any correlations. So far today, nothing had struck her as odd about Noah, but she did not discount GJ's intuition—not by a long shot.
“So,” she said, into the empty air of the car. “Tell me, how did you wind up as an FBI agent?”
Noah immediately laughed in response. “Kind of preordained, I guess.”
“Really?” Eleri almost wondered if his story was similar to hers. Life-changing events—in her case, it had been her sister’s kidnapping—often made an impression and set young minds on life paths. But then Noah opened his mouth and proved her wrong.
“Salt Lake City, Utah, blonde, Mormon,” he said, pointing to his head and circling his face. “What else was I going to do?” He added a half-shrug and Eleri began to understand.
“Oh, you're one of those.” Lots of Mormons from Salt Lake City wound up in service to the FBI, many as agents. It had something to do with the need to serve a higher power and the kind of thinking that the FBI required—logical, precise, orderly—though Eleri had never quite been able to reconcile those qualities with what she understood of the Mormon religion. Mormons in Salt Lake City did so easily, to the point that many incoming Quantico classes featured upwards of twenty percent of these families.
“Yep,” she said. “That does sound preordained. Does your religion mesh well with the Bureau’s?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve been excommunicated. For the gay.” At least he said it with a grin on his face.
“I thought they had changed—”
He was already shaking his head. “I’m not going back. And the whole thing just bothered my family. Apparently, I'm just too obviously gay, and they can’t have that. I was glad to get out of the house.”
“Wow,” Eleri replied. Though maybe it wasn't the best response, it was her initial reaction. Turning around, she began examining him a little more closely. “I have to admit, I don't see it.”
“According to them, it's pretty obvious.”
Eleri thought for a moment. “Were you kissing other men in front of them? That might have done it. Otherwise? Not seeing it.”
He laughed in response and let the topic drop as he turned the wheel. The route took them off the major road and aimed them once again toward the waterfront, where the dive shops tended to be located.
Eleri was a methodical scuba diver. She made plans ahead of time. She booked tours. Around here, the dive shops were almost always right on the beach, as though you might just show up to swim and suddenly decide to scuba. Must be a Miami thing, she thought.
“Here. This is the one I know.” Noah pointed at the sign above the strip mall store, which was less than three blocks from the beach.
Inside, they listened to the door ding and looked around the shop as a man came out of the back, then lit up when he saw Noah. “Secret agent man! You ain't diving in that, are you?”
Noah laughed. He was clearly dressed as a fed today. “Nope. I'm actually here on secret-agent-man business.”
Eleri could see the friendship went back a long way as he introduced her and they quickly got down to the business of flashing pictures of Neriah Jones. Once again, no one had seen her. But two dive shops later, as Eleri and Noah walked back out to the car, they looked at each other and said, “They were lying.”
They had a lead.