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“Bad oysters, Talia said.”
“Must’ve been. Did you like the restaurant?”
“Superb. Thanks for the recommendation.”
A light came on. Talia appeared as a silhouette in the open doorway between the kitchen and porch. She looked at Drex but didn’t say anything. Jasper turned to her and extended his hand. She went to him and linked her fingers with his.
The gesture spoke volumes, the message was clear: We’re a pair, a united front.
Drex covered a yawn with his hand and hitched his chin toward the staircase. “Well…I’m bushed. Good night.”
Jasper responded with a good night.
Talia said nothing.
Drex climbed the staircase. The screen door was unlocked, but he used his key on the solid one. Inside, he crossed the living area in darkness, went into the bedroom, and switched on the lamp on the rickety nightstand. Then he returned to the bedroom door and shut it, preventing prying eyes from seeing him unzip the duffel he’d retrieved from his trunk. He took from it his laptop, binoculars, the audio surveillance equipment, FBI ID, and pistol.
Since connecting Talia to Jasper in Key West, he’d taken these items along whenever he went out. As a precaution. Just in case someone came searching the apartment. Someone to whom a locked door wouldn’t be a deterrent.
And if someone did come snooping, he wanted to know it.
So he’d taken another precaution.
He picked up the lamp by its base and lowered it to the side of the bed where he had sprinkled talcum onto the floor, but not so much that it would be noticeable unless one was looking.
“Huh.”
Between the time he’d left for his dinner and now, the powder had been smeared, as though someone had knelt at the side of the bed, perhaps to look beneath it or between the mattress and box spring.
He set the lamp back on the nightstand and switched it out, picked up the binoculars, opened the bedroom door, and went into the living room. At the window, he focused on the house next door. There were no lights on inside, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t being watched.
Jasper had never intended to make that dinner date. He’d had other plans for the evening.
Drex huffed a soft laugh. “Bad oysters my ass.”
Chapter 13
Talia never touched the latte.
She had bought it only to rent a table, which were in short supply. The coffee shop was an offshoot of the ground floor lobby of the multistoried medical building. This morning the place was crowded; the baristas were bustling to fill orders.
Talia surmised that countless patients had come here following medical procedures or examinations, the outcomes of which were either cause for celebration or cause for an immediate reevaluation of one’s priorities.
At a table near hers, a young couple was laughing into a cell phone, sharing obviously happy news on FaceTime. Also nearby was an older couple. The woman was crying softly into a tissue while the man sat with shoulders slumped, his features haggard, his eyes glazed with despair.
Talia’s emotions fit somewhere in between. She wasn’t happy, but she refused to let hopelessness set in.
“Talia?”
She raised her head. Drex Easton was standing over her.
“I thought it was you. I spotted you from…” He paused in jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the lobby and leaned down to take a closer look at her. “What’s the matter?”
She bowed her head again and pressed her fingertips against her forehead. He was the last person she would wish to bump into right now. She simply wasn’t up to dealing with him. Rather than engage at all, she chose to retreat. She picked up her handbag and stood. “I was just about to leave. You can have the table.”
But as she moved away, he closed his hand around her biceps, stopping her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
