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“That’s a wig?” Sam says, not really asking, but in that way when you haven’t gotten your head around something yet.
She stumbles away from me, her face red. “I asked you to help me. All I wanted was your help!” Her voice is ragged and guttural. She sobs suddenly, and this time I am sure her reaction is entirely real. Her nose starts to run. “I just wanted—”
She turns and legs it back toward the dorms.
“Mina!” I call after her, but she doesn’t turn.
* * *
Sam suggests that we should go off campus for breakfast, rather than standing in the middle of the baseball diamond, freezing our asses off discussing what information we got out of Alex after Mina ran. It’s only a little after six in the morning, and we have until eight before classes start. I could do with pancakes.
I get into the passenger side of Sam’s hearse. I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes. It’s just for a moment, but the next thing I know Sam is shaking me awake. We’re parked in back of the Bluebird Diner.
“Get up,” Sam says. “No one gets to sleep in my car unless they’re already dead.”
I yawn and scramble out. “Sorry.”
I wonder if this morning was any kind of useful training for being a federal agent. After I graduate from Wallingford in the spring and enroll in the official training program with Yulikova, I’ll learn how to catch real blackmailers. Blackmailers who aren’t like Alex DeCarlo and don’t believe I’m holding a real gun when I push two fingers against my jacket pocket.
Blackmailers who are actually blackmailing someone.
We go inside. A waitress who has got to be at least seventy, her cheeks rouged like a doll’s, seats us and passes out menus. Sam orders us a round of coffee.
“Refills are free,” the waitress tells us with a frown, like she’s hoping we’re not the kind of people who ask for endless refills. I am already sure we are exactly those people.
With a sigh Sam opens his menu and starts ordering food.
A few minutes later I am drinking my third cup of coffee and poking at a stack of silver dollar pancakes. Sam spreads cream cheese on half a bagel and tops it with salmon and capers.
“I should have spotted that wig,” he says, pointing the dull knife toward his chest. “I’m the special effects guy. I should have noticed.”
I shake my head. “Nah. I don’t even know how I noticed. And besides, I have no idea what it means. Why do girls wear wigs, Sam?”
He shrugs and finishes off another cup of coffee. “My gran wears them to keep her head warm. Think it’s that?”
I grin. “Maybe. Who knows, right? I mean, you’d think we could find out if she was being treated for a serious illness. She’d miss class.”
“Doesn’t hair fall out from stress? Maybe all this lying has really gotten to Mina. She’s not the pro that you are.”
I smirk. “Or sometimes people have a condition where they pull out all their hair. I saw it on some late-night reality TV show. They eat their follicles too. And they can get this giant deadly hair ball called a bezoar.”
“Trichotillomania,” he says, clearly proud to have summoned that word from somewhere. Then he pauses. “Or it could be blowback.”
I guess we were both thinking it. “You mean those could be photos of Mina working Dean Wharton? If that’s true, the first question is, who took them? And then the other question is, why give them to us? And the most important question is, if she’s working him, what’s she doing to him?”
“?‘Why give them to us?’ But she didn’t. You grabbed them out of Alex’s hands,” Sam says, raising his cup, signaling to the waitress that we need another round of free refills. “There’s no way she wanted us to see the photos.”
“Nah. She must have,” I say. “Or why even send Alex with them? And why take them in the first place? I think she got upset because we saw the pictures without hearing what she wanted us to hear.”
“Wait. You think she took the pictures of herself? So there’s no blackmailer?” Sam is staring at me like he’s waiting for me to tell him that Mina is a robot from the future come to doom our world.
“I think she’s the blackmailer,” I say.
After Mina left, we got Alex to explain the story he was supposed to give. Mina told him to say that the blackmailer was Dr. Stewart and that Stewart wanted five grand or he was going to ruin Wharton’s career and Mina’s reputation. Dr. Stewart was sending word through Alex for Mina to get the money and bring it to him. Or else.
I had Stewart last year. He’s a hard-ass. The kind of teacher who seems delighted when you fail a quiz. I always figured him as a guy who loved rules—and who thought that if you didn’t stick to the rules, then you deserved what you got.
Not exactly the criminal type.
