Astrid watched Jim’s expression change, his eyes growing wide. Then he surprised her by changing tack.
‘I thought you came here to find a grave? Is it a relative or friend of yours?’
He appeared to be making small talk, something she was never very good at. So she turned it back on him without answering the question.
‘How does a big-time Washington Detective end up in a town like this?’
‘How do you know I was a big-time Detective before I came here?’
‘It’s in the way you handle yourself, the way you move and speak. You have that restless suspicion only gained from years of questioning people.’
‘I told you, I liked the name because of my mother.’
Something flashed beneath his eyes, a glimpse of a life she assumed he’d tried to forget.
‘I think there’s more to it than that, Jim.’ She sipped at the wine again. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
He glanced at the photo, and then back to her.
‘I was thirty years married and thirty years a cop. Then I find out my wife’s been cheating on me for three years with my best friend and partner. Some Detective I was.’ He raised his glass in mock salute. ‘I’d say she left me, but Lisa kicked me out of the house, and I was a laughingstock with my colleagues. I searched for the biggest, darkest hole I could and ended up here.’
She’d heard many stories like it before, but there was something in his expression she identified with: a loss beyond control.
‘You had a kid?’
He hesitated in response, and she scrutinised his expression, recognising what lurked there as a reluctance to talk about himself. She was about to steer the conversation in another direction when he answered her.
‘I’ve got a seventeen-year-old daughter, but I don’t get to see her much.’ A grim shadow crawled across his face. ‘Jenny lives with her mother most of the time.’
Watching the pain consuming every part of him, she was reluctant to continue talking about it. So she scanned the rest of the room and settled on his impressive LP collection, filling three long shelves.
‘Is your music in alphabetical order?’
She was relieved to see a sparkle return to his eyes.
‘Of course it is. How else would you store them?’
Astrid laughed as she stood and checked the records. ‘I never know with you Yanks. You’ve mutilated the English language so much, you might have abandoned the alphabet completely and organised them by spine colour.’
Jim shook his head and got up, moving to the middle of the first row and picking out a record at random. He held it out for her to see, a live album by Nico.
‘Everything in its right place, Astrid.’
She took it from him and scanned the track listing on the back cover.
‘Does that only apply to inanimate objects, or people as well?’
‘What does that mean?’
She removed the vinyl from the sleeve and searched for a record player, finding it in the far corner of the room. He nodded towards it, granting permission for her to drop the needle on the record. She moved to the sound system and switched it on, replying to his question as she set everything up.
‘Did you know there are hospitals in certain parts of the world where all newborn babies are entered into a database and identified by numbers and names?’
He rolled his eyes at her. ‘Most countries have used an alphanumerical system as part of personal identification for decades. Passports, drivers’ licences, ID cards and national insurance numbers are only a few examples.’
‘As far as I’m aware, Detective Moore, none of those start at birth.’
Jim pursed his lips as Nico sang about a marble index. ‘You’ve seen evidence of this, then, on your spy missions across the globe?’
‘Perhaps. Or maybe it’s only an urban myth to confuse the masses, like tales of lizard people and the Illuminati stealing the world’s children for their evil cravings.’
He didn’t seem amused by her words. ‘Groups of perverts abduct kids every day of the week all over the world.’
‘Kidnapping.’
‘What?’
‘If someone takes a kid, it’s kidnapping. Abduction is when it’s an adult.’
He shook his head at her. ‘You’re using semantics with me now?’ He increased the volume on the music centre just as Nico warbled about waiting for the man. ‘And you said we murdered the English language.’
It was Astrid’s turn to shake her head. ‘Well, you can’t spell a lot of the words, can you?’
‘We’ve simplified the language, made it easier for everyone by getting rid of superfluous letters.’
Her laugh tickled her bruised ribs. ‘Get you with the big word. Superfluous indeed.’
Astrid’s enjoyment surprised her. She scanned the record sleeves as the music filled the room. The sound quality was as good as anything she’d heard, and she wondered if Jim’s sound system had cost him a month’s wages.
‘Everything about you Brits confuses me.’
Astrid examined the rest of his collection. ‘In what way?’
‘Well, are you English or British?’
‘I’m both. England is a nation-state within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.’
‘But isn’t there two Irelands?’
She laughed again and wondered if he was messing with her. ‘I’ll explain this to you using records from your collection.’ She went to the front of the first row and pulled out a pristine looking copy of Revolver. ‘The Beatles were English, from Liverpool.’ She placed it face up on the table, then got Let It Bleed and put it next to the scouse mop tops. ‘The Stones are, of course, also English, but from London, so your table now represents the north-south divide.’
He crossed his arms. ‘Are you trying to wind me up?’
‘Bear with me.’ She removed two more albums. ‘Here we have Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, two of Wales’s finest tongue warblers.’ She put the Jones album on top of the Bassey one on the table. ‘These two enjoyed some steamy tongue encounters of a different kind at some point, so we’ll leave them together. Now, we go to Scotland.’ She moved back to the collection. ‘So, let’s see what you have.’ She grinned at the cover of the next selection. ‘Why, Detective Moore, what do we find here?’
He took the Sheena Easton album from her hand. ‘That’s the wife’s. She must have left it behind.’
‘Okay, Jim, put it with the others as we get to the heart of the matter.’ She pulled two more records from the shelves and gave them to him. ‘Thin Lizzy represents Ireland, and the Undertones are from Northern Ireland.’
The Nico record finished playing as he looked as confused as she’d seen him so far.
‘Am I holding on to these?’
‘For now.’ She collected the other albums she’d placed on the table. ‘Great Britain is a geographical term referring to the island, also known simply as Britain. It’s also a political term for the part of the United Kingdom made up of England, Scotland, and Wales, represented here by the records in my hands. It includes the outlying islands that they administer, such as the Isle of Wight, but I can’t think of any musicians from those islands off the top of my head.
‘The United Kingdom is purely a political term. It’s the independent country that encompasses all of Great Britain and the region now called Northern Ireland, which you have there with the Undertones, because where Thin Lizzy came from seceded from the rest of the Union in 1922 to become an independent sovereign nation.’
While he peered at her as if she was mad, she removed Revolver from its sleeve and placed it on to the turntable. The music sprang from the speakers as Jim poured them both another drink.
‘We’ll have a bit of whiskey in the jar later, but how about we finish this bottle of wine first?’
She put the records down and took up his offer. ‘You read my mind, Jimmy boy, and you have an impressive record collection, but I wish your lot had found my phone. There are thousands of albums on it.’
‘I’m sure we’ll find it, eventually.’
The tone of his voice told her it was unlikely as she moved to the window. The building was a large house converted into four smaller apartments, two up and two down. Moore had the first one on the ground floor and spent little time in the garden, from what she saw outside.
‘This is the perfect place for people to disappear.’
Is this why I came here?
‘You mean the ideal spot for someone to set up a human trafficking business?’
‘Do you get many missing person reports through here?’
He shook his head and drained his glass. ‘Hitchhikers and drifters appear at either end of the highway all the time. We could lose a small population that way and never know.’
‘Have you heard from the FBI about the website?’
Moore collected the plates. ‘I expect they’ll be in touch tomorrow; if not, I’ll ring them.’ He glanced towards the bedroom. ‘You have the bed tonight, and I’ll sleep on the sofa.’
Her suspicious mind wondered if this was a ploy to make a play for her. He must have recognised the doubt in her face.
‘I’ve been working so many shifts this last month, I always end up asleep on the sofa. The guys down at the station call me a couch potato.’ His laugh was supposed to ease her caution, but it didn’t.
‘No, it’s okay, Jim. I like to sleep with my eyes on the door, anyway.’ She grabbed a cushion and settled into the weary-looking furniture.
‘Suit yourself, but be aware I’ll be up at five.’
‘That’s fine by me. Hopefully, we’ll have heard from the FBI by then.’
Once that was sorted, she’d be able to leave the town free of any guilt since she expected it to lead to the apprehension of those who killed Caitlin Cruz. There was still her brief romantic entanglement with Officer Eleanor Campbell to think of, but she didn’t expect the married woman to have too many sleepless nights over her.
Jim dumped the plates in the kitchen and brought her a cover. He left her to settle into the sofa and closed the bedroom door behind him. She expected the bodies in the cabin to be identified sooner rather than later, and it shouldn’t take too long for the FBI to find out who was running the trafficking website. With that information, she was confident even small-town idiots could put two and two together, especially with Moore around. There was intelligence about him which she rarely saw in law enforcement.
But what to do about Campbell? She’d call her first thing in the morning at the police station. She’d be leaving in a few days anyway, so did it matter that Eleanor Campbell hadn’t been entirely truthful before they fell into bed? The conundrum rattled through her head for an age before she settled into sleep.
For the first time in ages, her night was uninterrupted by wayward dreams, and all she thought about was returning to England. The relaxation overtook her, so it was a full thirty seconds before she realised someone was standing over her. She rose to tell Moore to go back to bed, her hand up to give him a friendly punch. It was that action which saved her life.
The wire was over her head and aiming for her neck in an instant. Only it didn’t reach there and cut into her fingers instead. Searing pain sliced through her flesh as the attacker pulled her towards him. Her blood seeped on to the wire and her skin as her hand gripped against the garrotte.
A Donald Duck mask peered down at her, and for a second, she thought she’d been transferred into a nightmare version of Disneyworld, a place she’d always wanted to escape to as a kid in that terrible house. The memory of her father’s horrible smirk forced her knees up, so she twisted her side to bring her leg around and knee her attacker in the gut. He stumbled back and into the TV with a crash loud enough to wake the Devil. He didn’t fall and sprinted out of the door as she tore the wire from her and threw it to the floor. By the time she’d scrambled outside, the would-be killer had vanished into the night.
‘What happened?’ Moore was at her side with a gun in his hand.
Stabs of electricity ran through her bloodied fingers. She held them up, so the scarlet glistened in the moonlight.
‘Did you leave your door unlocked?’
The lines on his face stretched into one confusing point as he turned from her and stared at his apartment. She followed his gaze: the window appeared locked, and there was no damage to the door.
‘I guess I must have,’ Moore said apologetically. ‘We’d better get you to a hospital.’ He peered at her blood dripping on to the floor.
She used her good hand and pushed past him into the apartment. ‘No need for that. I only want a cloth to clean this up and stop the bleeding.’
He followed her inside, having the sense to lock the door this time. She was in the tiny kitchen, washing the blood from her fingers.
‘Are you okay?’
‘It looks worse than it is,’ she said.
He opened a drawer and removed a bandage, wrapping it around her hand once she’d cleared most of the damage away. He threw the bloodied towel into the bin.
‘Opportunistic burglars are rare in the town. I’ll call it in now.’
Astrid held her hand up to stop him. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll recognise those eyes when they try again.’
‘Try what again?’
‘This was no burglary, Jim; they were here to kill me.’
The certainty of it hit her at the front of her skull like a slow nagging hum.
His eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’
That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question she was still trying to answer. The FBI was dealing with hunting down the trafficking operation; it was nothing to do with her anymore.
They went into the living room. It was five in the morning, and she guessed neither of them would get any more sleep. She searched for something to drink, hearing the clink of beer bottles as Moore brought one for each of them. The glass was cold against her good hand, the liquid chilling the back of her throat. She was surprised how refreshing it was. What she’d had in the bar must have come from a bad batch. That and the pain in her fingers made her feel alive and forget about the ache in her ribs. She pushed her face against the window. The sun would be up soon.
‘Perhaps this is all about you, Astrid.’ Moore slumped into the sofa where someone had tried to kill her. ‘This Agency you worked for; do they have a grudge against you?’
She stared through her reflection in the glass and into the town outside. Was it true? Would her former employers have gone to all this trouble to punish the only operative to have walked away from their services? Since coming to America, she hadn’t spoken to George, her mentor and leader of the Agency, but she trusted him completely.
‘Something happened between that woman at the bar and me.’
‘We know it did: she beat you up after you insulted her and the band.’
‘It was more than that, Jim; there’s something I can’t remember about that night.’
He sat up straight. ‘That’s what I said to you. There’s information in your head about Cruz you can’t recall yet, but you will.’
Astrid sipped on her drink while he finished his. Then he went to get ready for work, and she registered for the first time what he wore: a pair of striped pyjamas looking like they came from the Ark. She’d slept in her clothes, and now her body itched like hell.
She tried to recall the events outside the bar while he showered and shaved, but with no success. Something lurked at the edge of her memory, a shadow beyond her reach, and it frustrated her. There were plenty of shades in her mind she kept confined, but she needed to bring this into the light.
He stepped into the room as she tried to resurrect that shadow. He’d changed from his nightwear into a smart suit, his skin glistening from his wash and clean.
‘You scrub up well, Detective Moore.’
He brushed off her compliment. ‘There’s food in the fridge if you want breakfast. Then you should come with me to work; it will be safer for you there.’
Astrid shook her head. ‘I’ll go down the road for food. The fresh air will do me good, and there’ll be no trouble when I’m around others.’
She had to eat before her mind could work, and she didn’t fancy going to the police station yet.
‘Tom’s Diner is ten minutes from here, on the way to the station. We could go there together.’
‘No, you go to the station and see what progress the FBI has made on the website. I’ll walk there, see a bit of the town, and meet you later.’
He didn’t look happy with it, but didn’t talk her out of it. ‘Okay, Astrid.’ He reached into his pocket and handed her a key. ‘Here’s the spare to the apartment, and I’ve written my cell number on this paper.’ She took both of them even though she still didn’t have a phone. ‘Have a shower if you want and ring me when you’ve eaten.’
She nodded in agreement and watched him leave. Then she went and had that shower, settling under the water and feeling the bruises on her ribs. There was no chance of her leaving Bakerstown now.
Someone would pay for what had happened to her.
And for what happened to the Cruz family.