The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [33]
“I should go,” Quincy said. “I want to speak to Everett first thing in the morning.”
“Everett?”
“Special Agent in Charge. He’ll want to know about the phone calls, assuming he doesn’t already. Plus, I need to type up this list of names.”
Rainie glanced at the clock. It was now after midnight.
“Quincy,” she began.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m not that far away. One hour tops, I can be at your front door.”
“And then what, Rainie? Then everything’s all right, because now I’m your charity case?”
“Hey, it’s not like that at all!”
“Yes? And what do you think it is I’ve been trying to say? Understanding is not pity. Oh, but excuse me, in your world it is.”
“Quincy . . .”
“Thank you for the update, Investigator Conner. Good night.”
The phone punctuated his sharp sentence with a click. Rainie thinned her lips, shook her head, and replaced her own receiver much more slowly.
“But my case was different,” she muttered.
Her motel room remained silent. She figured that was an appropriate enough reply.
Later, six hours later, the motel alarm clock beeped to life and Rainie crawled blearily out of bed. Jet lag had caught up with her. She gulped down twelve ounces of Coke for breakfast and still felt half dead.
She hit the four-lane street, running for thirty minutes through the concrete maze of a seemingly endless strip mall tucked conveniently off Interstate 95. Middle-aged men in rumpled suits poured out of the motel. A line of cars sat impatiently at a McDonald’s drive-through.
Rainie ran through parking lot after parking lot, dodging reckless cars and people already fed up with their morning commute. Tall maple trees and dark waxy magnolias beckoned lushly in the distance. Wild honeysuckle grabbed at cement barriers lining the parking lots as if the vine would reclaim the urban jungle as its own. Rainie coughed on diesel fumes from spewing trucks and fought her way back to Motel 6, wishing the green landscape didn’t make her think of Bakersville again and long for the feel of salty ocean air upon her face.
She took a five-minute shower, towel-dried her hair, and combed in mousse. Expecting another long day, she donned a pair of worn jeans and a clean white T-shirt, the official uniform of the aspiring PI. She checked her phone messages on her home answering machine while lacing up her shoes. The weather was already brutally hot outside. Man, what she would give to wear sandals and shorts.
She blew the thought aside while hearing that she had six new messages, a personal record. She grabbed the motel pen and pad of paper.
First two messages were from clients wanting updates. She really should do that. The next three messages were all hang ups, received in hourly intervals. If the person couldn’t be bothered to leave a message, she decided, she couldn’t be bothered to wonder about who they were. The final message was from some lawyer she’d never heard of, requesting a basic information packet.
She eyed the clock, judged it to be four A.M. Pacific Coast time, and shrewdly called back the law firm to tell the lawyer that her secretary would send him something in the mail. Then she left her number at Motel 6, just in case the lawyer wanted a more immediate reply. She now felt industrious and exceedingly clever and it was not even noon.
Rainie finished lacing her shoes. After a moment’s hesitation, she slid her Glock .40 into a shoulder holster. A simple black jacket covered the bulge.
Seven A.M., she picked up her notes and headed out the door. The sun glared harsh white, causing her to blink. Her tiny rental car felt like it was two hundred degrees inside. Damn, she thought. It was going to be a killer of a day.
9
Quantico, Virginia
“The first call arrived at two thirty-two P.M., Tuesday afternoon.” Back in the bowels of the earth, Quincy reported last night’s events in his crispest voice to Special Agent in Charge Chad Everett, while the SAC nodded attentively and a fluorescent bulb buzzed ominously overhead. “At ten-eighteen P.M., I personally handled