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“Just.”
Cautious, she set it down again. “She made overtures to me, friendly ones. I rebuffed them. I wasn’t going to fraternize with the enemy. We pulled through the first semester, then the second, neck-in-neck. I spent the summer buried in data, studying as if my life depended on it. I learned later she’d spent hers hanging out at the beach and working part-time as an interpreter for her state senator. She was a hell of a linguist. Of course that burned my ass. Anyway, we got through half the semester that way, then one of the professors assigned us both to the same project. A team deal. Now I wasn’t just competing with her, I had to work with her. Steamed me.”
Something crashed behind them as a table was bumped. Stowe didn’t look around, but she began to slide her drink around the table at geometric angles. “I don’t know how to explain it. She was irresistible, and everything I wasn’t. Warm, open, funny. Oh, God.”
Grief, horribly fresh still, spurted through her. Stowe closed her eyes tight, grabbed for control. She took her time now, sipped the potent liquor in her glass. “She made me her friend. I still don’t think I had a damn thing to say about it. She just . . . was. It changed me. She changed me. Opened me up to things. Fun and foolishness. I could talk to her about anything, or not talk at all. She was the turning point in my life, and so much more than that. She was my best friend.”
Finally, Stowe lifted her gaze, met Eve’s eyes. “My best friend. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yeah, I understand what it means.”
Stowe nodded, closed her eyes again, steadied herself. “After graduation, she moved to Paris to work. She wanted to make a difference, and she wanted to experience while she was at it. I visited her there a few times. She had this pretty flat in the city and knew everyone in the building. She had a little goofy-l
ooking dog she called Jacques and a dozen men in love with her. She lived huge, and she worked hard. She loved her job, the glamour, and the politics. Whenever her work brought her to East Washington, we’d get together. We could go months without seeing each other, then when we did, it was like we’d never been apart. Just that easy. We were both doing what we wanted, both moving up in our careers. It was perfect.
“About a week before . . . before it ended, she called me. I was on a field assignment, and didn’t get the message for a few days. She didn’t say a lot, just that something was going on. Something odd, and she needed to talk to me. She looked and sounded angry, with a little worry at the edges. Told me not to contact her at work, and not on her home ’link. She gave me a portable number, a new one. I thought that was weird, but I wasn’t really concerned. It was late when I got in, so I decided to get back to her the next day, and went to bed. I just went to bed and slept like a goddamn baby. Fuck.”
She lifted her glass again, drank deeper this time. “I got an early buzz in the morning, some complication with the case I was handling. I had to go in, and I didn’t take the time to get in touch with Winnie before I left. It wasn’t until the next day I even remembered about it. I took a minute to call the number she’d given me, but I didn’t get a response. And I didn’t follow through. I was busy, so I shrugged it off and told myself I’d try later. I never got the chance.”
“She was already dead,” Eve filled in.
“Yeah. She was already dead. They found her beaten and raped and strangled and dumped on the side of a road outside the city. She died two days after I got her message. Two days when I might have helped her. I never called her back. She would have gotten back to me, no matter what. She would never have been too busy to help me.”
“So you accessed her case file and buried your connection to her.”
“The Bureau frowns on personal involvement. They’d never have put me on Yost if they’d known why I wanted him.”
“Does your partner know?”
“Jacoby’s the last person I’d tell. What are you going to do?”
Eve studied Stowe’s face. “I have a friend. Met her when I busted her for grifting. I never had a friend before her. If anyone hurt her, I’d hunt them down if it took the rest of my life.”
Stowe drew in a shaky breath, had to look away. “Okay,” she managed. “Okay.”
“But understanding where you’re coming from doesn’t mean you get off free. Your partner’s a jerk and a fuck-up, I’m betting you’re not. And I’m betting you’re smart enough to have thought it through now and admit that if you hadn’t gotten in the way, that son of a bitch Yost would be in a cage now.”
It was hard, almost painful to look back and face it. “I know it. And that’s on me as much as Jacoby. I wanted to be the one to take him, and I wanted it enough to risk losing him. I won’t make the same mistake again.”
“Then show me your cards. Your friend worked at the Embassy. What did you find out there?”
“Next to nothing. It’s hard enough to dig under the walls of politics and protocol in your own country. Try it as a foreigner. Initially, the French authorities put her death on a lover’s quarrel. Like I said, she had a lot of men. But that was a wash. I looked into that myself. When they ran for like crimes, they hit on Yost. But after they looked around, they put it down to copycat.”
“Why?”
“First place, she was clean. Squeaky. No connections with anything that would have drawn down a contract on her. And none of the men she’d been involved with could have afforded his fee, and if they could have, they just weren’t the type. She didn’t leave lovers bleeding, it wasn’t Winnie’s style. She was upset when she called, and didn’t want me contacting her at work, so I tried poking around there.”
“And?”
“The best lead I got was that Winnie’d been assigned to interpret for the ambassador’s son in some diplomatic deal with the Germans and the Americans on a multinational off planet project. New communications station. It involved a lot of meetings, a lot of travel, and was virtually all she’d been doing for three weeks before she died. I got the names of the main players, but when I tried to slide through and do a deep search I sent up a million flags. These are important, rich, and protected individuals. I had to back off. I push there too hard and I’ve got no chance to work on the Yost investigation.”
“Give me the names.”
“I’m telling you, you can’t dig there.”
“Just give me the names, I’ll worry about when and how I dig.”
Shrugging, Stowe dug a memo out of her bag and coded the names in. “Jacoby’s fixated on you,” she said as she handed the e-memo to Eve. “He has been since before we got here. If he can give you a few professional bruises while he brings Yost down, it’ll make his life complete.”
