Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(55)

“That would be the thought process, yes. Factoring in the calculus that they’d never get caught for said decision and were not doing anything to actively aid and abet.”

“And this bad thing, whatever it is, this attack, is going to happen on November first?”

“Everything we’ve learned so far is pointing strongly to that.”

“Have you talked to other intelligence? CIA, NSA?”

Mr. Ruby nodded. “We’ve been in touch with our counterparts, sure. But there’s always so much online chatter about pending attacks that it’s almost impossible to say what’s real and what isn’t. If you’re not exposed to the kind of information that we look at, it’s hard to describe the flood that hits our desks daily. There’s extremely credible evidence for a dozen different attacks to happen on any given day, every day, somewhere in the world. Most the public never hear about. Some fall apart on their own, some are stopped—and some happen.”

“So where do you go from here?”

Mr. Jade looked glum. “Try to find someone else willing to talk. But Karen Li had unique access. Even under the best of circumstances she’d be hard to replace. By November first, impossible. That’s less than two weeks from now. We don’t know what kind of evidence she had. Whatever it was, there’s no trace. We’ve checked everywhere.”

I nodded absently. Thinking that “checked” could mean one of three things. Maybe Karen had been lying. Maybe Care4 had found and destroyed whatever it was.

Or maybe these two hadn’t checked the right places.

The two men in front of me seemed competent. But they didn’t seem wildly creative.

Mr. Ruby asked, “Can we count on you, Nikki? To help us if you learn more?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure, I’ll be your man in Havana. Graham Greene would love this.”

“It’s not funny.” This from Mr. Jade again. “We got to you today. Which means other people can, too.”





29


“I need your help,” I told Jess.

“Sure, gimme a sec.” She was finishing with one of our regular customers, Lennis. He was an old man in a blue flannel shirt, jaw roughened with white stubble like moss over bark. He came in about every other week to clean out our science-fiction section and swipe pours of bourbon. He saw me and winked, mug in one hand and a stack of worn paperbacks cradled under his arm. “Great coffee you serve here.”

“Aren’t you supposed to wait until after lunch?”

He grinned. “After lunch it might not be free.”

Jess rang him up while I hung a CLOSED sign on the door. “What’s up?” Jess asked when we were alone in the store.

“Remember that man who came to the bookstore when we were closing the other week? The one with the briefcase who you sent upstairs?”

She thought for a second and nodded. “Yeah, vaguely. Something happened to him?”

“Not exactly. He hired me to follow an employee of his, a woman named Karen Li. So I did. Now she’s dead.”

“Oh my God, dead? Like, murdered? What happened? Who did it?”

“I don’t know.” Saying it made me see it. The cabin. That broken window. That broken body. The cracked pane of glass somehow suggesting all of the futility and desperation about the whole thing. I forced the memories out of my mind. “She hid something that she wanted me to know about. I need to figure out what it was.”

“And you’re going to find out how…?”

I placed a stack of paper on the desk between us. Jess looked from me to the papers and back. “Don’t tell me Ethan’s making you edit his dissertation?”

“Printouts of locations. From the GPS tracker I put on her car. Everywhere she went recently. That’s how we’re going to find whatever she hid.”

“What if it happened before you started following her?”

I thought about the look on Karen’s face. The fear. “I don’t think so. It was close to the end. After she was scared by whatever it was she found. If she hid something it won’t be too obvious. She suspected people were watching her. But also somewhere she could get to it again.”

“And you know this how?”

“I don’t know. Not for sure. But it’s all we have.”

“Okay.” Jess shrugged. “Tell me where to start.”

Each paper was a printout showing a time-stamped location. I started going through the stack one by one, reading out the addresses. Jess had her laptop open to Google Maps. She looked up each address as I read it off, skipping the repeats. As we worked, Karen Li’s life began to coalesce with haunting accuracy. Most people stuck to routines. Karen was no different. We put all the repeats in one pile. The Care4 office, her home. I’d been by there already. A bland townhouse in San Jose, surrounded by rows of identical homes. A new development, probably built within the last few years. I hadn’t even bothered to try to get in. By this point the police would have been inside. Probably other people, too. Now it would just be her family. The long, sad task of retrieving possessions that were no longer needed. Going through books and silverware, jeans and underwear and shoes, paintings and souvenirs, making those hopeless and meaningless decisions. What to give to charity, what to throw away, what to keep.