The Widow File Read online

  The hope died a quick death when Mrs. O’Donnell strode through the door from the front hallway. All Rasmund employees, even Faces, used the back hallways and rear entrances at all times. Only Mrs. O’Donnell and the very top brass at Rasmund used the front. Clients used the front and the less they saw of the teams that would be infiltrating them, the better. Mrs. O’Donnell was dressed in her customary palette of black and gray, the gray streaks in her swept-back hair making her look to Dani exactly like Anne Bancroft. She even had the same low voice and wry smile.

  “I hope no one was expecting a champagne party.” She wrapped the edges of her long gray cardigan around her slender waist. Dani could see, even from the back of the room, that the cashmere in Mrs. O’Donnell’s sweater made Hickman’s look like low-thread-count sheets.

  Choo-Choo put his headphones on as if to block out the news he knew was coming. Hickman and Fay sighed at the same time and Evelyn made a tsk noise before she spoke. “Do we even know why—”

  “No, we do not.” Mrs. O’Donnell folded her arms as Hickman looked up at her.

  “Is there any word what the job—”

  “No there is not. Our client has pulled the line on the job. He made no move to explain to us why and we made no move to inquire. Patrick Swan has no further need of our services and so this is a wrap.” Her dark eyes showed nothing but their usual icy grace. Mrs. O’Donnell exuded a combination of elegance and iron. Like all members of the team, Dani had every intention of staying on her good side. That anyone wielded authority over her stretched the limits of Dani’s comprehension.

  Hickman made a move as if to speak and Mrs. O’Donnell arched her brow, silencing him. “Mr. Swan’s liaison will be on-site in two hours to collect any and all materials. Usual protocols in place. Purge, burn, block, and black out. Choo-Choo, call in the Stringers. Fay, Dani, try to pack your materials in some semblance of adult order. We don’t need a repeat of the Raisinet incident.” Fay and Dani looked away at the mention of their recent blunder, spilling a whole bag of candy into a client’s case box. “Mr. Hickman, you will oversee the sign-off. Ms. Carr, come see me in my office when you’ve finished wrapping up your end. Understood?” Evelyn turned a tight smile her way. Hickman nodded and Dani wondered if his pinkie was sore from the twisting of his ring.

  Everyone rose from their seats to begin the standard post-job shutdown. All surveillance data and accumulated information would be boxed and tagged and electronic files loaded onto portable drives and double-erased from Rasmund’s hard drives. These materials would then be turned over to the liaison in person, signed off on, and released as soon as proper payments had been wired into the proper accounts. The absence of any trail or evidence was a Rasmund trademark. Which was exactly the reason Dani felt herself sinking into her chair, hoping to render herself invisible.

  Mrs. O’Donnell pushed off from the desk she’d been leaning against and strolled through the room toward the door to Dani’s left. For one beautiful moment, Dani thought she would leave without another word but, like her hope to keep the case open, her optimism was short-lived. The older woman barely paused in her long stride, slowing only long enough to murmur as she passed. “All materials, Dani. Two hours. I suggest you take a pouch.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Dani tried not to cringe. She didn’t know why she was surprised that her boss knew everything that went on in the house. It was her business to know everything. And it wasn’t as if Dani had broken any serious rules by taking nonsensitive materials home. Most Paints loaded documents and audio files onto their Rasmund-issued laptops; data files and bugged phone calls were the starting points for most investigations. But Dani tended to operate differently. It was one of the reasons she had worked so well and so long with Hickman and Fay.

  Fay wagged her finger at Dani as the door closed behind the administrator and Choo-Choo covered his mouth in fake shock, whispering. “Dani B. busted again!”

  “How was I supposed to know they were going to call it?”

  Evelyn didn’t join in on the teasing. Instead, she slithered from her chair and patted her undisturbed hair. “Maybe you should consider being prepared for all eventualities. After all, isn’t scenario prediction supposed to be your specialty? Why don’t you make a note of it and put it on one of your state-of-the-art cork boards?”

  “Good idea, Evelyn,” Dani coughed and waved the perfume funk away as the redhead strolled past her. “Maybe I can fasten it to the wall using that stick you’ve got up your ass.”

  Hickman let Ev walk out in front of him, pausing by Dani. “I won’t let you get busted for my materials.” He leaned in close so only Dani could hear him. “Get them to me on the side. I’ll make sure they get in the box before it’s sealed, okay?”

  “Thanks, Todd. I think I’m running out of good graces with Mrs. O’Donnell.”

  Ten minutes later, Dani was gripping the wheel of her ’97 Accord, muttering “Shit shit shit” as she threaded her way through Beltway traffic to her apartment. Even at midday on a Saturday, the Embassy Row neighborhood had no parking spaces available, so Dani parked in a loading zone and fished around under her seat. A sign for Big Wong’s Thai Delivery in the windshield and a flick of her hazards and Dani figured she had at least thirty minutes before anyone decided to ticket her.

  Thankfully Ben had headed off to work. They didn’t technically live together but he spent as many days working from home at her place as he did his own Capitol Hill apartment. She peeked into the bedroom. The space didn’t have room for anyone to hide, but Dani wanted to be sure. Ben didn’t really know what she did for a living. He thought she worked the information desk for the Rasmund Historical Society because that’s what her badge said, that’s what she said whenever anyone asked, and that’s what the Web site linked to her e-mail said. They had been together four months and Dani had never felt the urge to unburden her secret to him.

  She moved down the narrow hallway to the utility room. It was really more of a cubby created when the original building had been broken down into smaller units. A compact washer and dryer filled in a corner beside a folding table surrounded by shelves of detergent and paper products. Ben teased her about her need to squirrel away supplies in every available corner. He had no idea what she had hidden. She pulled open the accordion doors across from the washer, revealing an ironing board piled with clothes in a shallow closet.

  Ben had left a pile of shirts to be ironed. “You really are a dick,” Dani muttered. She pitched the shirts onto the table and reached under the ironing board for the catch. One press and she unlocked the board from its latch, lifting it and locking it in place against the side wall. A batik sheet of Tibetan prayer symbols covered the back wall of the cabinet and Dani pulled out the little step stool in the lower corner, still having to stretch to her full length to grab the upper corner of the fabric. A quick pull and the sheet separated from the Velcro that held it in place. Dani bumped the sides of her fists against the bare wall and it separated along a barely visible seam.

  Dani had built the hidden cubby into the wall not long after taking the apartment. It hadn’t taken much—some light plywood, interior hinges, magnet clasps, all assembled with enough care to be easily hidden behind the wall cloth. She had a similar cubby in the floor of her bedroom beneath the bed, which was where she kept her passport and some extra cash. She didn’t really have anything to hide. None of the materials she kept in the wall cabinet were sensitive. If anything, Ben or anyone else who might have stumbled upon them would probably just question her strange hoarding habits. Besides, Ben didn’t notice much of anything in her apartment, including the fact that she rarely, if ever, ironed. She wondered how long he would leave those shirts piled there before giving up.

  She began removing the pushpins from the left side of the cubby and dropping them into the little plastic case that hung on the rear wall. Marcher’s phone records, credit card bills, photocopies of receipts, and e-mails with personal identifiers blacked out came down first. Nobody co
uld learn from looking at these papers who the target was. Hickman knew the kind of materials she liked to work with, the kinds of patterns she specialized in discovering. For example, it didn’t matter who the phone numbers on the record belonged to. That was Fay’s specialty. What mattered to Dani was how often they were dialed, how long the calls lasted, and what time of day they usually occurred. Regardless of status, pressure, or fear, humans were creatures of habit. Figure out the habit and you could predict the next move.

  The right side of the cabinet looked like a modern art take on public trash. Wrinkled brochures, snack wrappers, Metro Passes, valet parking stubs, even a champagne cork—the kind of stuff people dumped out of their pockets at the end of the day. In fact, much of what she’d tacked to the wall had been obtained just that way. Hickman didn’t list pickpocketing as one of his skills but he was known for it. He’d seen Dani pull results, patterns, and secrets out of the debris targets kept at the bottoms of their handbags and in their raincoat pockets. He knew to skim the detritus from desk drawers and office supply trays. If he couldn’t swipe it, he photographed it, blowing the pictures up for Dani to study. To Dani, strangers dragged trails of information behind them like a comet drags a tail. She read them. All she knew for sure about Marcher was that he ate an awful lot of fois gras and had a weakness for Argentinean steakhouses. Nothing earth-shattering on its own and might never have led to anything but it was the kind of detail that Dani noticed. To say the least, the materials were not sensitive.

  Dani had no illusions about who had the more dangerous job. She knew what she provided was color and background, the type of information that could make a big difference in an undercover operation. Hickman and Evelyn and the other Faces put themselves into the thick of the job. The Stringers worked in even rougher terrain, skirting the shadier ethical questions for Rasmund and operating under full anonymity. Even Choo-Choo didn’t know their names, only their identification codes. Dani, Fay, and the other Paint crews operated safely in the well-protected bosom of Rasmund and that was just the way she preferred it.

  Which is why it pained her to have to disassemble her materials board. Dani didn’t just enjoy her job; she loved it. She loved this point in a job where ideas and patterns lurked just beyond the grasp of her fingertips. She could feel her mind reaching, stretching, and just barely bumping the soft edges of whatever the random bits of information were trying to tell her. She dreamed about her jobs, imagined she could see the swirls of colored papers rising and bending into arrows and shapes that would become worlds to her. These little bits of debris triggered associations that she couldn’t consciously explain but that she and her employers had come to trust. To have to pull the plug at this stage in a job felt like being cheated.

  She stuffed all the materials into the blue canvas Rasmund pouch. Like everything else Rasmund, the pouch only looked like a simple book bag. In truth, the bag was waterproof, fireproof, and, unless Choo-Choo was pulling her leg, could stop a small-caliber bullet and a sharp knife. It certainly weighed enough to be lined with Kevlar.

  She had to hurry. She still had to get across the bridge and out to the estate, log the materials back in, and slip out of sight before the client’s liaison came for the package. Maybe Hickman would treat them all to lunch the way he usually did after a job. He wasn’t all oozy charm like many of the Faces. When he was off-job, Hickman’s easy laugh and adolescent humor could occasionally eclipse even Fay’s resentment. As a matter of fact, the thought occurred to Dani more than once that her two teammates might have more going on than just a professional relationship. It wasn’t the kind of thing her friend would talk about. Fay joked about Dani’s sex life but her own private life she kept pointedly private. Still, Dani knew she wasn’t the only one who got a touch of a thrill peering behind the curtains of strangers’ lives. Some might even call it a kink.

  Speaking of kinks, she realized she was standing there holding Ben’s shirts up to her face hoping to get a whiff of his scent. All she got was laundry detergent and she threw the shirts onto the ironing board, now back in place in front of the hidden cabinet. She threw them with enough force to lock the board in place. She threw them like it was their fault. Closing the accordion doors and hauling the Rasmund pouch up onto her shoulder, she promised herself not to dwell on just how weird she probably was.

  She made better time on the way back but she was still cutting it close. Her phone beeped as she pulled off the interstate but she ignored it, concentrating on not getting smashed between two semis as she merged onto the two-lane highway. It seemed she had timed her arrival perfectly with a convoy of enormous trucks that stretched for miles in either direction. At least the turnoff for the back road to the estate came several miles before the turnoff for the client entrance. Maybe the liaison would be sandwiched in the same convoy, giving her an advantage.

  She turned left onto an unmarked county road then took the right fork onto another unmarked road, this one narrow enough to barely be considered two-way. The trees hung low over it, pin oaks and poplars already dropping enough of their leaves to obscure the little bit of shoulder the road provided. Blackberry bushes and brambles crowded along the sides, sometimes scraping the edges of her side mirrors. This service road was for Rasmund employees only. Dani could just imagine what the reaction would be from the company’s elite clientele if they had to drive their Beemers and Jags over this rough stretch of road. Well, they could keep their overpriced ego-rides. Dani whistled to herself as the little car hugged the curve. With its front-wheel drive and heavy body, she knew the car could drive up the side of a tree if necessary.

  “What the hell?” Dani slammed the brakes unnecessarily hard, since she wasn’t even going ten miles per hour. She slammed her fists on the steering wheel. “What is this?”

  An unmarked black panel truck was parked facing her, blocking the opening of the rear Rasmund security gate. Dani stared at it for several seconds, her mouth open. This could not be happening. Was someone trying to get her fired? She climbed out of the car, stomping up to the cab of the truck, but it was empty. The engine was warm. Whoever left it here hadn’t left it long. Pounding her fists on the hood of the truck, she swore her way through her frustration.

  “That’s it. I’m fired. I’m fired. Life hates me and I’m fired.” She marched back to her car, noting without surprise that there was no way to squeeze it past the truck. Backing up on the narrow road required an optimism she didn’t feel and besides which, she was out of time. She grabbed the heavy pouch from the car along with her purse and keys. She could imagine the sight she would make, standing muddy on Mrs. O’Donnell’s carpet. “See, there was this truck and Ben’s shirts were on the ironing board and there’s never anyplace to park on my street and there was this convoy on Route Seven and…” She double-timed it up the road.

  “Oh and the gate’s open,” she said out loud to nobody. “That’s safe. Not like we have security measures in places, stupid trucker-fucker.” She knew the security cameras were filming her and could just imagine Choo-Choo watching her running and talking to herself. She held the pouch up to a camera she knew hung hidden along the fencing, mouthing “Please!” to the lens. Hopefully they hadn’t sealed the box yet. Hopefully the client’s liaison was having the same trouble she was having getting into Rasmund.

  She punched in her code at the garden door, barely waiting for the soft snick of the latch before barreling through. She took the steps to the main floor two at a time, no easy task with her short legs, and tried not to pant as she ran down the hall. The carpet muffled her footsteps and she strained to hear the sounds of Mrs. O’Donnell through any of the oaken doors leading to the front of the house. Materials would be signed off on in the library, and if she could just make it to the rear door she could signal to whoever would be sealing the box. She hoped it was Hickman. He’d be watching for her, stalling for her.

  She didn’t hear anyone talking. That could be a good sign, a sign that the liaison hadn’t made it yet or
was still being greeted in the foyer. It could also mean she had missed the drop altogether.

  Slowing down, pulling the pouch to her chest, and quieting her breathing, Dani peeked around the rear doorway of the spacious library. At first glance it looked empty and she didn’t know whether to swear or sigh. She tiptoed through the door, trying to spy any sign of the plain white materials boxes that would be stacked under the front windows. Instead she saw a patch of blue sticking out over the arm of one of the high leather wingback chairs.

  “Hickman,” she whispered, knowing that cashmere elbow anywhere. She could see his expensive wingtip-clad feet casually kicked out in front of him. “Todd!”

  She crept up behind the chair, hoping she could just pass the pouch off to him and sneak out before Mrs. O’Donnell’s inevitable entrance with the liaison in tow. If Hickman felt relaxed enough to sprawl in the chair rather than grooming himself for the meeting, she figured she couldn’t be as late as she feared. She let out the breath she’d been holding.

  “I thought I’d missed this.” She kept her eye on the door to the foyer as she stepped around, slinging the pouch off her shoulder. “Some asshole parked his truck right at the—”

  The words died in Dani’s throat when she came around to face Hickman. Her first thought was that he had ruined his beautiful sweater. Two black-and-red holes marred the soft cashmere just under his collarbone. They matched the small black-and-red hole in the center of his forehead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  She didn’t scream. She didn’t feel faint. She didn’t even feel fear. All she could do for several loud heartbeats was stand there and stare, her brain scrambling to figure out which out of all the many, many things wrong with the tableau before her was the worst. Different. That was the only word she could think of. Todd Hickman looked different; he looked wrong. He didn’t look like he was sleeping or unconscious or made of wax. He looked like Todd, but he looked like a wrong version of him. Finally the correct word rose to the front of her mind. Dead.