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Another set of steps, not visible from the window they’d been looking through, continued down to an even lower level. They took the steps, looked to their right around the corner: a home theater. To their left, another door. Rae opened it and peeked inside, and said, “Oops.”
Lucas looked: what was almost certainly a body lay on the concrete floor, wrapped in a blue plastic tarp. “Back up,” he said.
Rae backed up: “It’s been here for a while. Barely even smell it. From the size of the shoulders, I’d say it’s a woman.”
“Okay, okay. Shut the door,” Lucas said. “Let’s just say she was shot and get out of here and up to the office and dig around. See what we can find. Fire up that laptop.”
Rae never got a chance to fire up the laptop. She opened the lid and found a piece of paper with a handwritten note in red ink.
She said, “Get a load of this!”
Lucas came around the desk to read over her shoulder:
August 1,
I hope this note is never read and I just put it in the shredder. Clarice is meeting Dr. Lionel Scott of Los Alamos, and his girlfriend, here this afternoon to talk more about Dr. Scott’s plans to save Gaia. Clarice hasn’t given me details, but I fear it involves something dreadful. Dr. Scott is a researcher into viruses, and he has convinced Clarice that he has the solution to world overcrowding and global warming. It’s like she’s joined a cult and Dr. Scott is God. They are planning to go to our Taos place for an experiment of some kind. Clarice has been very angry with me because I won’t hear her out on Dr.Scott’s program, and I’m afraid she is now planning to leave me. She said that Dr. Scott can’t allow me to “opt out of the program,” whatever that means. I don’t even know what the program is, but I suppose I will hear about it this afternoon. I’ll leave this note in case something awful happens.
— Jane Shepard
“We need to call Greet and find out where this Taos house is,” Lucas said. “And we need to go there.”
“Letty’s on her way,” Rae said. “Call her. Now, before you call Greet.”
—
Alec Hawkins wasleaning against the wall outside the Santa Fe airport’s baggage area, giving off, Letty thought, a Eurotrash vibe, although he wasn’t smoking anything. He had a briefcase slung over one shoulder, and another waxed canvas duffel by his feet, bigger than the one he’d had in Oxford. Must be a British thing, she thought. The airport was a mess, with new construction going on, but Letty threaded her way around the problem area to the curb, dropped the passenger side window and shouted, “Hey!”
Hawkins, wearing a blue linen jacket, a cream-colored tee-shirt, sunglasses, and what were probably Italian jeans, lifted a finger, threw the duffel in the back seat, and put the briefcase on the floor in the front, climbed into the passenger seat, pulled her toward him and kissed her.
Letty kissed him back, and when they separated, Hawkins said, “I’m unfortunately happy to see you.”
As she pulled away from the curb, Letty asked, “Why unfortunately?”
“Because I live in London and you live in Washington and I really need to see more of you,” Hawkins said. “I last saw you, what, two days ago? I’ve been pining.”
“Really,” Letty said. They headed out the entrance road. “I don’t think I’ve ever been pined for.”
“I’m sure you have been, even if you didn’t know it,” Hawkins said. “Anyway, what are we doing?”
“A woman traveling with Scott used her credit card at a supermarket in the town of Taos four days ago,” Letty said. “We are now on our way to Taos.”
“Where is that?”
“About an hour and a half north,” Letty said.
“Will we be meeting law enforcement there?” He reached across the seat and rubbed the top of her head.
“Probably not. We’re trying to keep the cops out of it for the time being, because cops talk,” Letty said. She filled him in on Billy Greet’s working group, about finding the hidden laboratory in Los Alamos, and the cartridge shells in Santa Fe. “My father and another marshal are waiting for the go-ahead to enter the house. They’ll call if they find anything relevant.”
He squirmed in his seat, adjusting himself, and Letty asked, “You tired? Hungry?”
“No, we ate on the plane. Terrible food, mostly fat and sugar, so I shouldn’t be hungry for several days. However, as we got closer to Santa Fe, I began mentally reviewing our bedroom time in Oxford, and now of course…you’re right here. At this moment, I have an erection you could drive nails with.”
Letty nodded: “Okay. Well, I’ll keep an eye out for a construction site. They’re always looking for carpenters.”
—
Their route northtook them along the same highway as Letty had taken to Los Alamos—the casinos, the weed merchants—but they continued straight at the Los Alamos turnoff. They passed through another small city, through a slow-moving construction zone, then along the Rio Grande. Here it was a boisterous, roiling river, powering through a V-shaped canyon, rather than the turgid, muddy stream it was further south.
