LITMIR.BIZ

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“Concern may be too strong a word. At this point, I’d call it...curiosity.”

      “Close enough,” Heller said. “So, you want a background check on someone?”

      “Yes,” Mike said after another moment of thought. “I do.”

      * * *

      CHARLIE KEPT AN eye on the rearview mirror as she drove home as fast as she dared. She’d like to get a shower before her early-morning phone conference, and she was already going to be cutting it close. Could she really keep this up two days a week, given her boss’s delight in scheduling early meetings?

      Besides, after this morning’s class, she wasn’t even sure it was worth her time. All that stretching and they didn’t do anything but go over the basic tenets of self-defense. On a chalkboard. Hell, she’d already covered those basics with a one-hour search of the internet. She didn’t need an academic journey through the philosophy of protecting oneself.

      She needed practical tools, damn it. Now. And she didn’t want to spend the next few weeks twiddling her thumbs until Mr. Big Buff Badass deigned to detach himself from his chalkboard and teach them something they could actually use.

      Channeling her frustration into her foot on the accelerator, she made it back to her little rental house on Sycamore Road with almost a half hour to spare. As had become habit, she waited at the front door for a few seconds, just listening.

      There was a faint thump coming from inside, but she had two cats. Thumps didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

      Taking a deep breath, she tried the door. Still locked.

      That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

      She unlocked the door and entered as quietly as she could, standing just inside the door and listening again.

      There was a soft prrrrup sound as His Highness, her slightly cross-eyed Siamese rescue cat, slinked into the living room to greet her. He gave her a quizzical look before rubbing his body against her legs.

      “Did you hold down the fort for me like I asked?” She bent to scratch his ears, still looking around for any sign of intrusion. But everything was exactly as she’d left it, as far as she could tell.

      Maybe she was being paranoid. She couldn’t actually prove that someone had been following her, could she?

      There hadn’t been a particular incident, just a slowly growing sense that she was being watched. But even that sensation had coincided with the first of the dreams, which meant maybe she was imagining it.

      That could be possible, couldn’t it?

      She went from room to room, checking for any sign of an intruder. In her office, her other cat, Nellie, watched warily from her perch atop the bookshelf by her desk. If there had been an intruder, the nervous tortoiseshell cat would still be hidden under Charlie’s bed. So, nobody had been in the house since she left that morning.

      Beginning to relax, she took a quick shower and changed the litter box before she settled at her computer and joined the office conference call.

      Because she worked for a government contractor, Ordnance Solutions, most of her conference calls consisted of a whole lot of officious blather and only a few nuggets of important information. This call was no different. But she wrote down those notes with admirable conscientiousness, if she did say so herself, especially with His Highness sitting on her desk and methodically knocking every loose piece of office equipment onto the floor.

      She hammered out the project her bosses had given her during the conference call, a page-one revision of the latest operational protocols for disposal of obsolete ordnance from a recent spate of military base closures. Most of the changes had come after a close reading by the company’s technical experts. Charlie was used to working her way through multiple revisions, especially if the experts couldn’t come to an agreement on specific protocols.

      Which happened several times a project.

      Nellie, the cockeyed tortie, ventured into her office and hopped onto the chair next to her desk. She let Charlie give her a couple of ear scratches before contorting into a knot to start cleaning herself.

      “Am I going crazy, Nellie?” Charlie asked.

      Nellie angled one green eye at her before returning to her wash.

      The problem was, Charlie didn’t have a sounding board. Her family was a disaster—her father had died in a mining accident nearly twenty years ago, and her mother had moved to Arkansas with her latest husband a couple of years back. Two brothers in jail, two up in South Dakota trying to take advantage of the shale oil boom while it lasted, and her only sister had moved to California, where she was dancing at a club in Encino while waiting for her big break.

      None of them were really bad people, not even the two in jail. But none of them understood Charlie and her dreams. Never had, never would.

      And they sure as hell wouldn’t understand why she had suddenly decided to dig up decade-old bones.

      And as for friends? Well, she’d turned self-imposed isolation into an art form.

      She attached the revised ordnance disposal protocols to an email and sent it off to her supervisor, then checked her email for any other assignments that might have come through while she was working on the changes. The inbox was empty of anything besides unsolicited advertisements. She dumped those messages into the trash folder.

      Then she opened her word processor program and took a deep breath.

      It was now or never. If she was going to give up on the quest, this was the time. Before she made another trip to Campbell Cove Security Services and spent another dime on listening to Mr. Big Buff Badass lecture her on the importance of looking both ways before she crossed the street.

      Pinching her lower lip between her teeth, she opened a new file, the cursor blinking on the blank page.

      Settling her trembling hands on the keyboard, she began to type.

      Two days before Christmas, nearly ten years ago, my friend Alice Bearden died. The police said it was an accident. Her parents believe the same. She had been drinking that night, cocktails aptly named Trouble Makers. Strawberries and cucumbers muddled and shaken with vodka, a French aperitif called Bonal, lime juice and simple syrup. I looked up the recipe on the internet later.

      I drank light beer. Just the one, as far as I remember. And that’s the problem. For a long time, those three sips of beer were all I remembered about the night Alice died.

      Then, a few weeks ago, the nightmares started.

      I tried to ignore them. I tried to tell myself that they were just symptoms of the stress I’ve been under working this new job.

      But that doesn’t explain some of the images I see in my head when I close my eyes to sleep. It doesn’t explain why I hear Alice whispering in my ear while the world is black around me.

      “I’m sorry, Charlie,” she whispers. “But I have to do the rest of this by myself.”

      What did she mean? What was she doing?

      It was supposed to be a girls’ night out, a chance to let down our hair before our last semester of high school sent us on a headlong hurdle toward college and responsibility. She was Ivy League bound. I’d earned a scholarship to James Mercer College, ten minutes from home.

      I guess, in a way, it was also supposed to be the beginning of our big goodbye. We swore we’d keep in touch. But we all know how best intentions go.

      I should have known Alice was up to something. She always was. She’d lived a charmed life—beautiful, sweet, the apple of her very wealthy daddy’s eye. She was heading for Harvard, had her life planned out. Harvard for undergrad, Yale Law, then an exciting career in the FBI.

      She wanted to be a detective. And for a golden girl like Alice Bearden, the local police force would never do.

      She had been full of anticipation that night. Almost jittery

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