A Quarter for a Kiss (41 page)

“You should keep asking around,” I said. “But I don’t think anyone else will have seen her.”

Fortunately, the lights were still on when we arrived at the command center. Tom and I parked and went inside to find the technician and one other agent there, the one they called Craig. They said that the case agent, Holt, had gone over to St. Thomas to follow up on the action there.

Much to my surprise, the technician stood and reintroduced himself to me and then to Tom, insisting that we call him by his nickname, Rig, so named because “if I got a coupla wires, I can rig anything.”

He looked reverentially at Tom.

“Hey, listen, man,” Rig added, “I’m sorry if I was short with you this morning. If I had known who you were and all…”

“No problem,” Tom replied, obviously embarrassed.

“I’m, like, a huge fan of your work. Bennett’s Theorem is so elegant, so intricately calculated and yet so simplistic in its algebraic design. It has saved me hours of work, I just can’t tell you.”

“Oh, well, thank you,” Tom said modestly.

I was quiet for a moment, caught up in the realization that Tom actually had a theorem named after him. Other than keeping a perfectly balanced checkbook, mathematics and I didn’t really get along. As this FBI agent nearly gushed in Tom’s presence, I was reminded of my boyfriend’s stature in certain circles. I was very glad this agent was a fan, in particular, since that might make him more willing to help us out.

“Rig, we need to see some of the video from today, if we can,” I said, collecting my thoughts. “Really, starting from the beginning.”

“No problem,” he said, popping a CD into a drive. “I just finished putting everything on disk in chronological order.”

He sat at a computer and brought it up onto the screen while Tom and I grabbed some chairs and positioned ourselves on either side of him. I had him play the available images of Dianne at Virgin Gorda, from when she got off the ferry until she met Merveaux on the beach.

“There,” I said finally. “Stop there.”

He pressed a key and the image froze, showing Dianne standing there on the beach, scanning the horizon. She was looking almost directly into the camera that the FBI had had hidden on the boat.

“Right there,” I said. “It seems like she’s looking around to make sure they aren’t being observed. But what if, instead, she’s really looking around to make sure that they
are
being observed?”

“You’ve lost me,” Tom said.

“Think about it. Hit play. Watch what she does next.”

On the screen in front of us, Dianne and Merveaux walked to a rock and sat, facing the water.

“For a women who knows all about security protection, she isn’t being very savvy. She knows she’s in the sight line of at least one boat. She knows she is sitting still instead of moving around. I think she knew we were there. More than that, I think she wanted us there.”

“You’re saying we were set up?” Rig asked.

“Play the conversation,” I told him.

We listened to the audio between Dianne and Merveaux—crystal clear except when she told him the drop points.

“The first will be at th…ist,”
she said, and then later,
“the drop will be at F twel…ake’s Pond.”

“Watch what she does when she says those things,” I told them. “Play it again.”

Rig did as I asked. Sure enough, both times, as Dianne named the drop points, she reached up and blocked her mouth with her hand—once by fixing her sunglasses, the second time by smoothing the scarf over her hair. The FBI mikes were good, but they weren’t perfect. Dianne must’ve known she could block the sound by blocking her face.

Tom stood and began pacing.

“Callie’s right,” he said suddenly. “If this woman were all that smart, she would’ve held their meeting walking around between all of those rocks. We could’ve caught snippets of what they said, maybe, but for us to catch the entire conversation, we needed her to be on the beach and to be stationary. And that’s what she gave us.”

Rig turned around in his chair and looked from Tom to me.

“So what are you insinuating?” he asked. “That she had a death wish? That she wanted to be caught or killed?”

I shook my head slowly.

“Fast-forward to the scene at the boat, where your people move in to make the arrest. This is after she went home and came back out again.”

He did as I asked. Once we had video of her emerging from the truck and walking toward the
Enigma
, I had him put it on slow motion. I leaned forward and studied the screen.

“Now look at her,” I said. “At the way she stands. At the way she walks. Do you see it?”

The men were silent until Tom sucked in his breath and whispered, “You’re right.”

“What is it?” Rig asked.

“Keep watching,” I told him. “You’ll see.”

In slow motion the agent appeared from behind the barrel, holding out his gun. Dianne started to surrender, but the goon practically tackled her and threw her on the boat. Once there, as it began speeding away, he stayed flat while she struggled to get up.

“There!” I said. “Freeze.”

Rig hit the button. On the screen in front of us was the image of a woman, taken from behind, trying to stand. Her skirt was askew, her legs bare.

There was no scar on her thigh.

“The woman killed in the boat explosion today,” I said, “was not Dianne Streep.”

“So who was she?” Craig asked as we stared at the image on the screen.

“I think her name was Sunshine,” I replied sadly. “Or Freebird. I don’t know if she had made up her mind by then or not.”

“Oh, man,” Tom whispered. “How it all falls into place, huh?”

Vividly, I could picture Larry at Miss Lucy’s the night before, romancing a woman who was old enough to be his mother. How excited he must have been when he first found her in the bar. The fact that she had no friends here yet and no real connections back home had made her the perfect choice.

No doubt, he had carried out his mission well—first by getting the woman drunk and then probably by dragging her to his mother’s home. There, they must have played with the perfect “look”—floral scarf, big sunglasses—that would turn her into Dianne’s double. And whether the woman had gone to the
Enigma
willingly or by force, I felt certain she didn’t know she was walking into her death. Dianne’s goons must have also been unaware that they were expendable.

My biggest question was whether Jodi had in some way been a participant in this masquerade or if she had also been held somewhere against her will. I felt sick at the thought that she might have been inside the house when it blew up.

“Now show us the satellite feed from the house,” I said to Rig.

We watched the distant shot of the entire estate, then the zoom on the men at the helicopter, then the tighter zoom as they ran toward the house.

“Freeze it there,” I said, and he did, catching the scene just as the two men looked up at the sky.

“Can you make the image larger, get us a better view?”

Rig tried, typing instructions, enhancing the contrast, enlarging the picture.

“That’s about as good as it’s gonna get,” he said finally.

Tom and I leaned close. It sure looked like Larry and Earl to me.

“Those aren’t doubles,” I said certainly. “Do you really think Dianne killed her husband and son?”

Tom leaned back in his seat, nervously tapping his foot.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. Do you know what they’re doing there?”

“What?” Rig and I both asked.

“They’re looking right at us,” he said. “They’re giving us a good, clear picture of their faces. They know we’ve got them on satellite, and they want to make sure we know it’s them.”

“But why?”

“Hit play,” Tom instructed, and we watched as the two men went inside the house. “Now watch.”

The two men ran back into the house. The counter ticked up an excruciating ten seconds. Then the house blew up.

My head snapped back, jarred as if it were just happening again. I didn’t understand what we were seeing—but I knew it wasn’t real.

Somehow, those two men had not died in that explosion.

Forty-Five

We raced across the island in two cars, Tom and I leading the way with Craig following behind. Rig had needed to stay behind and keep an eye on the command center, and as we left, he was attempting to contact Agent Holt to tell him our theory about Dianne and Sunshine.

We didn’t have much of a theory yet about the other two—except that somehow they had escaped that fiery blast. They must have had a preplanned escape route, a quick way into the front door and back out some other exit. Because the satellite had been zoomed in on the men, we didn’t have a shot of the entire building. My guess was that they ran in the front door, ran out a back door, and somehow escaped from the top of the mountain unnoticed because of the distraction of the fire. They had either rapelled down the rock wall, or they somehow snuck around the perimeter of the property until they were able to run down the private road to the beach. They’d probably had a boat waiting for them there—and then they had sailed away unseen.

I was determined to find proof they had left the building alive—and maybe find out if Jodi was still alive somewhere in the process.

A St. John cop was stationed at the base of the driveway when we arrived there, lights flashing but siren off. He checked our ID and radioed it into Rig at the command center. Once we had the okay, he let us through. It had grown quite dark by this time, but Tom was a good driver, even with his bandaged hands, and he handled the myriad twists and turns of the driveway with ease.

As we neared the top, we saw that two agents were there, still processing the scene, and they had mounted three big work lights from a generator. Craig had been in contact with them on the drive over, and they came and met our cars when we pulled to a stop behind their van, ready to examine this new possibility. The night air was chilly, and I pulled on my sweater before getting out of the car.

While the men concentrated on the back side of the property, looking for evidence or footprints or other oddities, I decided to focus on how Earl and Larry could have gone all the way down to the beach without being seen. I started in the place where I thought they might have run from and then tracked it myself, pretending that I was trying to get away from my burning house in broad daylight as it was descended upon by law enforcement officers.

I didn’t see any signs that they had been there, but I kept my eyes open as I went, trying to put myself in their shoes. How had they done it? I felt certain they had given the tennis court a wide berth, so I did the same, coming dangerously close to the rock wall before realizing it. I stepped quickly back in surprise and—whack!

“Ow!”

Just like Tom, I had crashed into the metal pipe that protruded from the ground. Unlike him, however, I fell all the way down, and I stayed there for a minute clutching my toe. Ouch! I wouldn’t be surprised if it were broken.

“Callie? Are you okay?”

Tom had heard me yelp and came running. Now he knelt next to me in the grass, ready to be my knight in shining armor.

“Would you believe it, I hit the same stupid pipe you did? Gosh, it hurts.”

“Take your shoe off. Let’s have a look.”

I did as he instructed, not surprised to see that the toe was swollen. It wasn’t, however, dislocated or cut, so I pulled my sock and shoe back on and then sat there for a moment, feeling it throb.

“Shall I kiss it and make it better?” he asked softly.

I put one hand to my mouth.

“No, but ow! Ow! My lip!” I whispered. “It hurts, it hurts.”

“Let me see what I can do,” he whispered back.

We were well in the shadows, hidden by the greenery that surrounded the tennis court. And though a million and one things were vying for our attention, somehow it didn’t seem wrong to take a moment and simply reconnect.

Tom kissed me lightly at first, and then more deeply before we slipped into an embrace, just sitting there on the grass in the dark, rocking back and forth, holding on to one another. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I thought of all the times I had done investigations by myself with no one around to help me with the bumps and the bruises. This investigation, conversely, had been done as a team. If Tom never investigated another case with me again, I would always be grateful for the time we had shared on this one.

The sky grew suddenly a bit darker, and then we heard one of the agents, from across the lawn.

“Hey, Craig, why’d you turn off the—”

His voice stopped with a grunt and then a thud.

Eyes wide, I looked at Tom, who also seemed to sense that something wasn’t right. We didn’t speak but instead slowly and silently pressed ourselves down into the grass, side by side. My heart pounded in my throat.

What was going on?

We listened to a sudden, familiar sound, trying to place it. Then I realized we were hearing duct tape being pulled from a roll. We couldn’t see anything from where we were, but eventually the noise stopped. Another work light went out.