Color of Blood(39)

“They’re not my regulations. They’re the Agency’s. The same Agency you work for, I believe, Mr. Cunningham.”

“Jesus,” Dennis said. “I just need to borrow the box of watches.”

She stared at him and turned her head slightly, as a puppy might as it refocused its attention. “Why do you need the watches, may I ask?” she said.

“I need to have a watch expert look at them and estimate their value,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

“Why don’t you just take pictures of them?” she said. “Show the appraiser the photos. Wouldn’t that work?”

“Um, that just might work,” Dennis said, struggling a little with this new possibility. “Yes, I would think something like that would work.”

“Do you have a camera with you, Mr. Cunningham?” she asked calmly.

“No, but I can go buy one.”

“I have a digital camera,” she said, standing up. “I’ll let you use it. You can take the memory stick with you and get prints made from it. Would that work?”

“Yes, that would work fine,” Dennis said. “I’ll return the memory stick later.”

“No need to return the stick. Well, then,” she said, “we have a plan.”

***

“Judy,” Dennis said, “you’re a genius! The watches in the box are crap: worth maybe a total of five hundred bucks.”

“Dennis, it’s three o’clock in the morning here in WA,” she said in a husky voice. “I thought it was an emergency at work.”

“Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting. Bye. I’ll call you tomorrow. Sorry.”

“No, wait, Dennis. You got me up, and we might as well continue. What did you find out?”

He told her that the watches were inexpensive brands and the appraiser was actually offended he was being asked to evaluate pictures of worthless items.

“So, Dennis, I wonder what all this means. Perhaps someone did ‘off’ Garder for his watches and replaced them with these junk items.”

“That seems like a strong possibility,” Dennis said. “I think I should talk to the owner of the watch store in Perth again, and there are a few other folks I’d like to chat with, like the consul general in Perth.”

“Why don’t you dust the watches?” Judy said, her sharp yawn sounding like a yelp through the mouthpiece. “If Garder really put the watches there, then they’ll have only his prints on them. If someone else put them there, they’ll be clean, because that person would have used gloves.”

“Ha!” Dennis laughed. “You think like a criminal!”

“Dennis, you can at least give me some credit for being a law enforcement officer. I’m sure if I were a man, you wouldn’t talk like that.”

“Get some sleep, Judy. I wasn’t calling to piss you off, just trying to thank you—in my typical, stupid way. Sorry. Talk to you later.”

Afterward she tried to sleep, but it was no use; the empty house made her feel lonely and isolated. The faucet in the kitchen was dripping, and she could hear the water rhythmically hit the stainless-steel sink with a plop. Phillip was supposed to have fixed it.

Bastard, she thought as she turned on her side.

***

It took a full week before the results of the fingerprint analysis on Garder’s watches were complete. Garder’s prints were clearly visible on seven out of the ten watches; the other three were either clean or had partial unrecognizable prints.

Dennis sat in his office and looked at the fingerprint results on his computer. He began to feel that squirmy sensation nearly every investigator feels at one time or another; he was missing something important. He took a pen out of his drawer, grabbed a yellow, lined notepad and began writing down his assumptions about the watches, starting with his basic premise:

Garder murdered, made to look like an accident.

Why did they kill Garder?

For his watches.

Who has Garder’s expensive watches now?

The cheap watches were put there by Garder. Why would he keep cheap watches? He hated mass-produced, battery-powered watches.

Did Garder have a lockbox at a bank that we missed?

Are the expensive watches Garder owned worth killing him for?

He could only afford watches worth a thousand dollars or so each, at the most.

Did he have more expensive watches that we don’t know about? Did he own a watch that was rare and priceless, but he was unaware?

Dennis put down his pen and reread his notes. As an afterthought he went to his computer and opened the folder with all of the Garder files, some of which he had not looked at closely.

After ten minutes poring over the files, he was about to close the electronic folder when he noticed an entry from US Rep. Daniel Barkley’s office.

He opened the file and found a scanned letter to the director of the CIA from the New Hampshire Republican. The letter was on Barkley’s congressional letterhead, not on the letterhead from the House Intelligence Committee that he chaired. The letter inquired into the whereabouts of the son of his constituents Fred and Colleen Garder of Epping, New Hampshire.

Their son, an employee of the CIA, had been reported missing while on overseas assignment, and his parents had received scant information from the Agency. The congressman was asking the director if he could intercede on his constituents’ behalf to offer more information on the disappearance. The parents were understandably upset and desperate to find out more details.