8:41 P.M.
Having scurried around the apartment for the last five minutes inspecting objects and places, Devlin stopped just inside her sister’s bedroom, dropped hands onto hips, and gave the area the once-over.
Harker trailing him, Randall strolled up on her six and mimicked her stance. “Why are you searching all these random spots, Jessica?”
“Downstairs,” she pivoted to face him, “I was thinking. Faith’s gun and phone were found near the door, near the body.”
“That’s right.”
“And we’re fairly sure she had sex with the guy and then showered. Well, what if while she was in the bathroom, her lover was kill—” adding an image to the word ‘lover,’ Devlin made a face, “what if the guy was killed while she was showering? She comes out of the bathroom, sees what’s going on, realizes she’s cut off from her gun and phone, and locks herself in the bedroom.”
Randall nodded. “That would at least buy her some time to figure out what to do next...which was,” he extended a flat hand toward the other side of the room, “to grab a makeshift weapon and prepare to defend herself. We’ve been over this.”
“I know, but,” Devlin opened dresser drawers and felt around under each drawer, “she would also want the perpetrators to face justice for their crime. She would want to leave a note telling someone who they were.”
Harker: “We’ve been over this place a dozen times. I think we would have found something by now.”
“Not if you were looking in,” retrieving a Pelican 1970 flashlight, “the wrong places,” Devlin shined the beam at the gap behind the wall mirror above the dresser while peeking at the narrow vertical line.
“So let me get this straight.” Randall rubbed his forehead. “In a life and death situation, your sister’s worried about making sure her attackers go to jail?”
Devlin suspended her search to face him. “You don’t know her. I do. We grew up together. And let me tell you. Faith’s big on justice...fairness.” She wagged the Pelican at him. “That story I told you about me getting my Colt first, before her?”
He nodded.
“She was pissed at our dad—and me—because it wasn’t fair that she didn’t get one, too. Never mind that she wasn’t old enough to own a handgun.” Devlin ambled to a far corner, her eyes scanning her surroundings. “In her mind, everything always had to be even between us. If I got a cookie, then she had to have a cookie...and that cookie had damn well better be the same size, too.”
His mind building on the Faith Mahoney persona he had been forming, Randall sniggered. “Something tells me your dad had his hands full with you girls, didn’t he?”
Devlin came back to the foot of the bed. “This should answer that question for you. One time we begged dad for a can of pop...it was right before bedtime. He told us ‘no,’ of course. But we sweet-talked him into letting us split a can.”
Randall envisioned a smiling seven-year-old Jessica Devlin, her hair in pigtails, her hands clasped in front of her chest, batting her eyes, and pleading with her father for a treat. “And I’ll bet you were quite the sweet-talker when you were a kid.”
“A kid, a teen,” she lifted a shoulder, “an adult.”
He huffed and tapped his temple with a forefinger. “I’ll remember that the next time you’re asking something of me.”
She smiled. “Anyway, after dad poured our glasses, Faith got out a ruler and measured the height of the liquid in each glass...to make sure it was equal in both.”
He snickered while shaking his head at the floor. “Well, that just makes me want to meet your sister even more now.”
“Yeah,” Harker grinned, “I can’t wait to bring up that story in my next conversation with her.”
Glancing down, Devlin cocked her head and took a knee a second later.
Randall followed her gaze and noticed a half circle of matted carpeting peeking out from under the bedpost.
She smiled, Of course, before curling fingers under the bed frame, lifting, and feeling around under the post.
He squatted and relieved her of the weight.
“Thanks.” She poked her finger into a recessed area under the post on the right and came up empty. Sliding left, and going to both knees, she inspected the left post, rotated her head toward her partner, and beamed at him.
He returned the gesture. “Pay dirt?”
She stood while flattening a balled-up piece of paper.
He lowered the bed to the floor and joined her, standing on her port side.
Harker approached the agents. “What did you find?”
Staring at five lines crisscrossing each other to form a crooked star—a curved line at the twelve o’clock position, the word ‘MARS’ scribbled at the six o’clock position—Randall screwed up his face. “Beats the heck out of me.” Pivoting his torso toward his partner, his right pectoral muscle grazing her left shoulder, he eyed the side of Devlin’s face. “Does this mean anything to you?”
After a few more seconds of gaping at the note, “Sadly,” she let out a long sigh, “it doesn’t.”
The detective held out his hand. “Let me see that.”
She took out her mobile and snapped a photo of the wrinkled white fragment before relinquishing it.
“It’s Detective Mahoney’s chicken scratch, all right. She has the worst handwriting in the department. I’ll,” turning to leave the room, he retrieved his phone, “take a picture of this and get it over to our investigators.”
After working her phone for a few seconds, Devlin faced her fellow agent. “I just sent Deputy Director Thorn—and you—a copy of that pic. I also requested she have some of our tech agents analyze it...see what they can come up with.”
Randall nodded. “So,” he scratched his chin, “how did you know where your sister would leave a clue?”
Devlin sat on the end of the bed. “When we were kids, we watched this documentary on spies and secret agents. We were especially intrigued at how they communicated with their contacts, specifically dead drops. So we...”
Randall sat down on her three o’clock.
“...came up with all these places around the house where we would leave each other notes. We even had a special signal for when a note was waiting...like,” she hesitated, “like placing a certain magnet in a certain spot on the refrigerator.”
He grinned.
She noticed. “Like I said, we were kids. Kids do crazy stuff. And it’s not like we were hiding cigarettes or nudie magazines between the mattresses.”
His face turned stoic. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
She regarded him for a moment. “With a poker face like that, how in the world did you ever make it through CIA training?”
He jerked his head to the right. “I cheated off the guy next to me.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that wasn’t the case. Anyway, the one hiding place Faith and I loved the best was,” she bobbed her head downward, “under the bedpost. We were pretty proud of ourselves for coming up with that spot.”
“I’ll bet.” He gawked at the image on her cell, at the clue left by the missing woman.
After a full minute of studying the digital photo, she shook her head. “What are you trying to tell us, Faith?”
∞=∞=∞=∞=∞=∞=∞
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