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She pointed to the white chalk marks he’d gotten from the fingerprint powder.
Shit.
He dusted them off, watching the white particles drop to the bar floor.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Having a drink, same as you.” Devine held up a hand to the harried man behind the bar. “Can of Sapporo. Thanks.”
She sipped her drink. “Did you know Sara well?”
Devine said, “Not well. She was our class liaison. Funny, though.”
“What?”
“When I passed by our office building a little while ago, I saw Bradley Cowl’s Bugatti heading into the firm’s garage. Dude must never sleep.”
She looked alarmed when the name Cowl had come up, but Devine was intentionally not looking at her. He was instead staring at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. It was just as informative as observing the real thing.
“Why is that funny? It is his business. And he has a penthouse apartment there.”
“I get that, but you wouldn’t think the guy would want to go back there tonight of all nights. I mean, with Sara’s having died there today.”
Stamos appraised him for a moment. “So, you think you’ll make the cut?”
“Not sure. But you’re good as gold. Six years in and the Book said Sara was the only one ranked ahead of you. But obviously no more.”
As soon as he said this, Devine regretted it. As a newbie operative in the Office of Special Projects, he was showing how ill-trained he was at eliciting intelligence from a target, at least in this setting. He had done okay at it in the Middle East.
“You are such an asshole!” Stamos cried out.
WASP heard this and looked up from his beer. He glanced at his buddies, and seemed to be contemplating something. Devine saw all this in the mirror as well. It was easy enough to read: The man was pondering whether to retake Hamburger Hill from Devine.
“I didn’t mean it like that. But that’s the way things are at Cowl,” Devine said, easing off the gas pedal. “You know it and I know it.” His beer came and he took a healthy swallow. It felt good against the rising heat in here.
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she said in a pouty tone.
“No, you don’t.”
Devine thought quickly. He was making little progress and he had to turn that around. Campbell didn’t strike him as a patient man. His mind flitted over several possible lines of inquiry with Stamos, each fraught with complications. And then, like the soldier he had once been, he decided to cut through the bullshit and try a direct assault.
“Getting back to Sara, did you know her well?”
The answer to this query seemed harder than it should have been for Stamos. “No, not really.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes when she said it.
He decided to up the ante.
“You have any inkling she might kill herself?”
This question seemed to shake Stamos even more. Her eyes bugged out for a moment and her body tensed. However, she quickly regrouped and shook her head, with the mouthed word No tacked on.
“So, no warning signs? Nothing on the grapevine?” he persisted.
“I really didn’t see that much of her. She . . . she was working on other things.”
“Did you get an email about her death?”
“What?”
