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“What?” Joey asked.
“‘Urinati.’”
“Aren’t you quick on the draw,” she said. “So? Is any of this of interest to El Hombre de Ninguna Parte?” Her accent was crisp, on point.
“No,” Evan said. “It’s just more of the same mess and corruption—government, military, private sector. Everything I left in the rearview. I don’t see why it should involve me now.”
A low-pitched whining issued from behind Joey, and then Dogthe dog’s head reared into view. Big doleful eyes, tragic jowls, ears perked in desperate anticipation.
“As you can see, I’m getting hounded by the puparazzi for a walk.” Joey pivoted to Dog. “Yes itis! Who wants to go for walkies? Who’sthe most handsomest boy who wants to …”She seemed to realize that she was still streaming, gave a double take back at the camera, resumed Resting Scowl Face. “Internal DoJ report from a failed insider-trading investigation lists his other business contacts, last-knowns, ex-girlfriend, all that.” She leaned over, fastening a skull-and-crossbones collar on Dog the dog, who whinnied with delight. “I’m glad you’re not getting involved, X. Seems like a high-grade clusterf—uh, charlie foxtrot, even for you. Especially after everything you went through. If you ever connect with whatever passes for your internal emotional state, feel free to call for expert feminine guidance. Here if you need me.”
“I won’t.”
“Yeah you will. First time I’m gone and you get captured by the government? Sound like a coincidence? I think not.”
She blinked off the screen.
Evan sat for a time staring at all the intel arrayed about him. So many reports and investigations, business dealings and spheres of influence. What a relief that Luke Devine and his byzantine affairs were not Evan’s concern.
He moved to quit out of the running software when the DoJ report caught his eye, the former girlfriend, Echo Gabriel, named along with a cell number and a Manhattan address. An underlined note jotted in the column read“psychological abuse?”They’d split up about twelve months back. He remembered what Naomi Templeton had said about Devine:He was your typical power player on the rise, but about a year ago he seemed to go into hyperdrive. He wondered if Echo might shed some light as to what had happened around that time.
His hand hovering above the mouse, Evan stared at the number, waging an internal argument. Vera III lookie-looed from the desktop, a judgmental over-under gaze from beneath the spherical ice cube she held aloft like a vegetative Atlas.
“Fine,” he told her. “One exploratory call. Then I’m out.”
He tapped the digits into the RoamZone. The line rang more times than made sense. No voice mail. He was about to hang up when he heard the click of someone picking up and a rush of wind.
“Hello?”
“Echo?”
“Yes?”
She sounded younger than her thirty-four years.
“I hoped you might answer some questions about Luke Devine.”
A faint laugh, the sound sucked away by a breeze across the receiver. “I’m busy right now,” she said dreamily.
“It’ll just take a few minutes.”
“I’m so sorry. You interrupted me.”
Something about her voice. “Doing what?” he asked.
“Killing myself.”
20
A Cry for Help
Echo stood beside the tall, narrow pane of her elongated tilt-and-turn bathroom window, bare feet on the wide ledge, gazing down eleven stories at Broadway below. The wind cut straight through her jeans and sweatshirt as if she were wearing nothing at all. She had a good grip on the inside of the window frame, so all in all it was a pretty safe scouting exercise, one she’d undertaken a number of times, venturing to the sheer edge of what her nerve would allow.
She’d forgotten about the phone in her pocket, its ringing nearly startling her off her semisecure perch. She’d debated not answering. If she was going to take the plunge, what would an unanswered phone call matter? And yet not picking up a call that had arrived serendipitously seemed like putting her thumb in the eye of fate. And who could afford to dothaton the way out?
At first she’d thought it might be her mother, which would have sent her over the edge with haste. Mom derived her pleasure not from luxuries but from the superiority she felt projecting the strictures of her own contorted morality, a perennial litmus test everyone else failed. Not that Echo had stopped trying to pass.
Not all the way through Dartmouth, principal cellist in the orchestra, crew team captain, magna cum laude, four years volunteering in the music-therapy program at the Children’s Hospital. She’d been the first in her class to open a business, midway through senior year. It was a music-therapy online start-up—or, in Mom’s words, a rent-seeking scheme for Echo to get her snout into the medical-industrial trough.
