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What the hell? she thought.
“Sure. Come on over soon as you can.”
“Be there in about ten minutes,” he said and hung up.
She held the disconnected phone, staring at it. She hadn’t given him her address.
Ninny, she scolded herself. With the connections he seems to have, I’m sure he can find out anything about me.
He knocked on her door nine minutes later. In the intervening time, she had picked up the living room, straightened up the kitchen, and changed into slacks and a blouse, back into her uniform, then into slacks and a blouse again. She also closed the door to her bedroom. No visitors had ever seen the frilly pink décor.
She opened the door. Simpson wore his usual jeans and a plaid long-sleeved wool shirt. He also wore loafers and a medium-weight black coat.
“Thanks again, Robert.”
“This should be the last time, Greta. It’s definitely going outside my job description or duties and could be construed to endanger the other matter I’m involved in. I don’t see a problem yet, but there are bureaucrats who live to find deviations from protocols.”
“Here I thought it was only at my level that bureaucrats ran things.”
“Oh, they don’t run things, if running implies actually accomplishing something.”
“I stand corrected.”
She led him to her table and showed him her laptop loaded with Balfour’s PowerPoint slides.
“Here’s what I got,” she said and took him through the origin of the file and her suspicions. She pulled up the photo with a sign in a language spoken only on Madagascar, on the opposite side of the world from Peru.
Simpson squinted at the little sign she pointed out. “Christ, Greta, you’ve got good eyes. I doubt I’d have noticed that in a thousand years. I assume this is one of the photos you’d like checked?”
“Yes, and I’ve picked out three others. Let me show you which ones and why I picked them.”
The second picture showed a dozen children, ages five to ten. She’d chosen it because the features and the skin tones didn’t quite match those of the people in the first photo. Next was a shot of what supposedly was the mission church in Sevite while just being built. She picked this one because the resolution was greater than any of the other nineteen photos. The final photo showed a dozen children in an open-air classroom. They sat on wooden benches and appeared to pay attention to an adult, presumably their teacher. What Greta noticed was palm fronds in the background. They stood distant in the background and appeared to have coconuts. What were coconut trees doing on the eastern side of the Andes at that altitude and so far from the ocean?
Simpson looked at the other slides without suggesting changes to her photo selection. He asked her to copy each of the four images into a separate file. She then logged on to her email account and let him address an email with four attached photos to his contact. There was no message included, only the photos.
She watched over his shoulder. When he clicked send and the email was on its way, she felt relieved.
“That’s it,” he said. “Hopefully, it’ll come back in your inbox by sometime tomorrow.”
She sat in the other chair at the table. She had no reason to feel relief, and she well knew all this might lead nowhere. Despite that awareness, she still felt a level of excitement, an obsessive need to get answers. She also needed a diversion from her frustration with the Toompas case.
Her empty wine glass sat at the back of the table. Suddenly, she wanted more and on impulse . . .
“I think I want a glass of wine. Actually, another glass because I already had some with dinner. Would you like one? It’s a white, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I’m not a connoisseur. White’s fine.”
She went to the cabinet, retrieved a second glass, and poured pinot grigio for both of them.
They sat at the table talking for an hour. The wine was gone in half that time. She thought briefly of opening another bottle, then decided against it because of her history of drinking too much around men she didn’t know. They talked about the local weather and the feeling of remoteness of this part of the Oregon coast. He asked whether she would try for the Olympics. They exchanged general information on their families—no names or places. They found that she preferred baseball over football, and he, the opposite. When she reflexively yawned, he took it as a hint and said he’d be curious to hear if she got an email answer about the photos.
She saw him to the door. As he said good night and turned to leave, she had a flash of disappointment he hadn’t tried to kiss her. He didn’t see her blush at the thought.
Good night, woman! she thought. You are getting hard up. You know hardly anything about him or even whether he might be interested in you. Hell, he might be married with six kids. Maybe it wouldn’t occur to him to pair up with a woman taller than he is, even if only an inch or so.
Despite the self-criticism, she felt a lingering modicum of regret.
CHAPTER 22
