Bubba Dupuis–as he introduced himself–was a great bear of a man with a walrus mustache and a shiny bald crown topping a fringe of salt and pepper hair he kept long enough to tie back in a ponytail. He wore torn denims tucked into biker boots and a faded white T-shirt with black lettering that read: I SURVIVED KATRINA AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT AND A PLASMA TV.
He didn’t look like any pilot Tobie had ever seen. But then, she’d never been in a private jet with swivel leather seats and mahogany tables, a divan, and a bathroom complete with a shower.
“Dallas?” said Bubba, when Jax told him where they were going. “You couldn’t just drive to Dallas?”
“We’re in a hurry.”
Flying time to Dallas in Bubba Dupuis’s Gulfstream was forty-five minutes.
Tobie washed her face, then went to sit at the polished table where Jax had spread out a bar cloth so he could clean his gun.
“How long have you been in the CIA?” she asked, watching him.
He glanced up at her. “Ever since I graduated from college. Why?”
She rested her elbows on the tabletop as he depressed the Beretta’s release button and removed the magazine. “So what did you major in? Skulduggery?”
Amusement tugged at the corners of his mouth. “History. At Yale.”
“Yale? I’m impressed.”
He thumbed the disassembly latch and pulled forward the slide. “Don’t be. The only reason they let me in was because the Winstons have been giving Yale money for something like ten generations.”
“The Winstons? As in the Connecticut Winstons?”
“My mother’s family.”
“So what are you? The family black sheep?”
He gave a sharp laugh. “Something like that.”
She watched him lift the recoil spring guide and take out the barrel. His fingers were long and lean, his movements quick and sure. He’d obviously cleaned this gun many, many times.
“Does it bother you, killing people?” she asked suddenly.
“Sometimes.”
“Not this time?”
“Not when it’s kill or be killed.” He took a small piece of oil-soaked rag and pushed it through the barrel with what she realized was a cocktail stirrer from the bar. “You were in Iraq, weren’t you?” he said.
“Yeah. But I never shot at anyone. I was a linguist.”
“Somebody shot at you. You were wounded.”
“Friendly fire.” Then the implications of what he’d just said hit her and she leaned forward. “How did you know I was in Iraq?”
“I saw it in your file.”
“My file? You saw my file?”
He wiped the barrel and put it back inside the slide.
She said, “So you know they gave me a psycho discharge.”
He eased the spring back on the recoil guide.
She said, “I’m not crazy.”
He pushed the slide back on the handgrip assembly and looked up at her. “Really? A lot of people would tell you that I am.”
Startled, she met his gaze and gave a sudden laugh.
Through the window she could see the lights of Dallas on the horizon, and she went to settle in one of the swivel leather seats. As she fastened her seat belt, the lights of the city rushed toward them, millions of floodlights and streetlights lined up in neat rows that seemed to stretch on forever across the flat Texas plains. The contrast between the city they were approaching and the one they’d just left was profound.
Flying out of New Orleans, the lights had been dimmed, with great swaths of the city still as empty and black as the swampland that surrounded it. Even though she lived there and saw the lingering signs of destruction every day, it had still been a jolt to realize just how much of the city lay dark and abandoned all these years after the hurricane.
But Dallas was booming, flush with oil money and the benevolent hand of a federal government run by politicians always eager to please that big block of Texas voters. As the small jet dropped lower, the lights separated into wide boulevards, shopping malls, row after row of tidy houses.
She swung her head to look at Jax. “Do you know what part of the city those coordinates were in?”
“Irving,” he said, coming to buckle into the seat opposite her. “But I want to check out Fitzgerald’s house first.”
“Why?”
“Because if you’re right about these coordinates, I have a feeling our appearance at this building of yours is going to stir up the natives.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in remote viewing?”
He grinned. “I don’t.”
He rented a Chevy Trailblazer from a sleepy clerk who threw in a map of the city. “Here,” he said, handing Tobie the keys.
“What? Not another phone call?”
“No. There’s something I want to try.”
He navigated her onto the freeway headed south, then took out Paul Fitzgerald’s phone and started flipping through the menus.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Home.” He hit the speed dial and listened as the call went through. On the fourth ring an answering machine picked up with a man’s voice that said curtly, “Leave a name and number after the tone.”
“Nobody home,” said Jax, hitting End.
“Maybe his wife’s in bed and just didn’t answer the phone.”
“With hubby out of town? I don’t think so. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”
It occurred to Tobie she hadn’t even thought to notice. “A lot of men don’t wear wedding rings,” she said. “Why would he have his home number programmed into his phone if there’s no one at home to answer it when he’s gone?”
“The answering machine’s probably set up so that he can remotely access his messages.”
“Oh,” she said, and shut up.
“You want the next exit,” he warned her.
She turned off into a subdivision of hulking stucco houses with tiny yards of neatly trimmed box hedges and flickering gaslights. The dawn was still just a pale hint of lightness on the distant flat horizon. “Mr. Fitzgerald seems to have been doing quite well for himself,” said Jax.
“What do we do when we get to the house? Break in?”
“We don’t need to break in. I have his keys, remember?”
Paul Fitzgerald’s house stood at the end of a gently curving cul-de-sac. She pulled in close to the curb and got out. The night air felt surprisingly cool compared to New Orleans, without the suffocating, wet-blanket humidity of the Crescent City. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, but it sounded like the yappy complaint of something like a bichon frise or Chihuahua. People who lived in houses like these rarely kept big dogs that crapped on neatly manicured lawns and tracked mud onto white carpets and shed all over designer furniture.
They walked up the short path to the front door. On the porch, Jax paused to flip open Fitzgerald’s cell and hit the speed dial for Home again. From the far side of the heavy leaded glass door came the peal of a phone, followed by the answering machine.
He tucked the phone away and drew out a black zippered case from which he selected a pair of gloves and a small black device about the size of a box of matches. He held it up to the door.
“What’s that thing for?” she asked.
“It tells me if the door has an alarm system—” The box’s green light suddenly started blinking red as he neared the corner of the door casing. “Which it does.”
As Tobie watched, he took out another small box. This time he stuck the gadget up against the wall and left it there.
“And that?” she asked.
“The sensor on the door is wireless. This jams the frequency so we can open the door without setting off the alarm.”
He tried a couple of the keys on Fitzgerald’s ring in the door. The third one opened the lock.
He pushed the door in about a foot, then stopped. Holding the alarm detector in his hand, he moved it slowly up and down just inside the door, his gaze trained on the device’s tiny LED. The green light stayed on.
Jax grunted. “Cheap sonofabitch doesn’t have a motion detector. The only alarm is on the door.”
Tobie cast a quick, nervous glance around. “Can we go in now?”
The house had travertine floors and thick moldings and an entry hall that soared two full stories high. When Tobie asked, “What are we looking for?” her voice echoed.
“Anything that catches our eye. You take the upstairs. I’ll start downstairs. And here—” He handed her another pair of gloves.
She left him pulling out drawers in the living room, but most of them were empty. The house reminded her of a hotel—professionally decorated but impersonal, like a stage set. Or the home of a man who was rarely there.
There were four bedrooms upstairs, each with its own en suite. On the bedside table of the master bedroom she found a silver framed photograph of two boys. They looked about eight or ten years old, and were grinning into the camera. The boys’ mother was nowhere to be seen.
Unsettled, she set the photograph back on the table and went quickly through the drawers, then the closet. Nothing.
She went back downstairs to find Jax Alexander dismantling the computer in the den.
“It’s password protected,” he said, yanking out the hard drive. “We’ll have to take it with us.”
“Where haven’t you checked?”
“The kitchen.”
The kitchen was all black granite and stainless steel industrial appliances that didn’t look as if they’d ever been used. She found a scattering of opened mail on the counter, including a bank statement with an eye-opening balance of $250,000. She stuck it in her bag.
She was just turning back toward the den when her gaze fell on a book that lay at one end of the breakfast room’s oval oak table. It was a Koran, the intricate blue and yellow mosaic pattern of its cover terribly familiar. She picked it up and headed back toward the den.
“Look what I found in the kitchen,” she said. “A Koran. It’s the same edition as the one from the Charbonnet Street house.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, look at this.” Jax pulled out a cardboard box from beneath the desk and flipped back the lid. Tobie found herself staring at stack after stack of Korans, with empty spaces where perhaps as many as a dozen copies had already been taken out.