Rogue Oracle Read online

  “Please, have a seat.” Aquila gestured to chairs opposite his desk. “We can chat while we’re waiting for the rest of the team to arrive.”

  Tara’s brow wrinkled. Working around Harry’s sensibilities was difficult enough. If she was to be working with others, she’d have to go to greater lengths to conceal her methods. “You’ve assembled a task force?”

  Aquila nodded. He laced his hands before him on his blotter. Tara noticed that the blotter was full of notes—an indicator that he didn’t fully trust the sleek computer sitting on his desk. One of his square hands was adorned with a wedding ring, and his red tie was the only bright spot of color in the room. There were no photographs of his wife and family to watch him. Tara could understand his desire to shield his family from his work. “NSA, the National Counterterrorism Center, and CIA have their fingers wound into this investigation.”

  “They haven’t provided us with much to go on,” Harry groused. “Everything they give us is redacted to the point of uselessness.”

  Aquila held up his hand. “I know. Which is why I asked them to assign someone to us. Hopefully, that will enhance the flow of information.” He turned his attention to Tara. “Would you like some coffee, Dr. Sheridan? Tea?”

  “Coffee would be wonderful,” Tara said. She was missing too much sleep to go for long without caffeine.

  “Certainly.” Aquila pushed out of his chair and walked out of his office.

  Tara blinked. She’d never seen a man at his level go get his own coffee. That boded well—Aquila wouldn’t ask his staff to do anything he wouldn’t do himself.

  Harry nodded in approval. “It’s a nice change from Corvus’s leadership.”

  “I can see that.”

  Tara’s gaze roved around the office. Aquila kept bookshelves of law books, a locked file cabinet, and an impersonal potted plant. She turned around in her seat, expecting to see what she’d see in any other executive office: framed commendations and degrees on a trophy wall. There would maybe be a framed document replica; Tara figured it was a toss-up between whether it would be the Constitution or the Gettysburg Address.

  But her breath caught in her throat.

  Aquila kept a trophy wall, but it wasn’t the kind she’d expected. Instead of a wall devoted to his own laurels, Aquila kept a wall of the Division’s accomplishments. She recognized most of the souvenirs from her days as a profiler. A letter from a child who’d been abducted and rescued was rendered in crayon and kept pristine behind glass. A piece of a foundation from a haunted house, where excavation had revealed twelve suspected yakuza members buried in the foundation. The faded toe shoes of a murderous ballerina. A piece of a satellite that had fallen out of orbit. A disarmed necklace bomb that had been tied around the neck of an activist nun in South America. And a relic from Tara’s most famous case: the Gardener’s curved knife, a Japanese weeding blade called a Hori-Hori.

  Reflexively, Tara’s fingers wrapped around her ribs. She remembered the feel of that weapon cutting into her flesh, the sound of it spreading dirt over her near-lifeless body. Even here, sanitized and cleaned, it was still a shock. It was a tangible reminder of the hold Special Projects had once held over her life, the power of life and death.

  Harry’s hand grasped her sleeve. “Hey. You okay?”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  But when Aquila returned with the coffee, she had to concentrate to keep the liquid from sloshing beyond the rim of the mug as her hand shook. She focused on keeping her hands still, balancing the cup against her knee.

  “I’ll be honest. Special Projects is out of its level with this case.” Aquila settled behind his desk and dunked a tea bag in his cup.

  Beside her, Tara could feel Harry bristle.

  “That’s saying a great deal,” Tara said neutrally. “Special Projects is the catchall for the cases that are out of everyone else’s level.”

  “Yes. We’re the ‘Little Shop of Horrors.’” Aquila grimaced and took a sip from his tea. Tara wondered if he’d been surveilling her elevator conversation with Harry, or whether he’d known the nickname before he’d taken the post.

  A knock banged on the glass door, rescuing Tara from commenting. Without asking permission, a man pulled it open and stuck his head inside. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Aquila stared over his cup. Tara had the sense that Aquila wasn’t a man who brooked breaches in etiquette. The interloper barged in and dragged up a chair beside Harry. He was easily a decade older than Tara, but was attempting to give the illusion of youth with a tan, European-cut dress shirt, hair product that smelled like limes, and a bleached smile. This was a guy trying very hard to be relevant. He leaned over Harry to shake Tara’s hand.

  “Sam Veriss, National Counterterrorism Center.”

  “Mr. Veriss is an intelligence analyst,” Aquila said, placing his cup and saucer down on his desk. Tara noticed that he didn’t offer Veriss any coffee when he made introductions.

  “Actually, I’m an economist, by training.”

  “Economics. That’s interesting,” Harry said. “But I’m not sure how this impacts the case.” He lifted a questioning eyebrow to Aquila. Tara could see he instinctively disliked Veriss. Harry had a low threshold for artifice, and a lower threshold for uselessness.

  “My specialties are in network theory, and I dabble quite a bit in game theory.” Veriss plunged onward. “I’ve been working on analyzing terrorism networks and predicting terrorist movements using various computer algorithms. Most of it’s derived from intelligence chatter, but I’ve got some pretty good working models that have predicted some fairly significant events over the last few years.”

  “Such as?” Harry challenged him.

  Veriss grinned. “Well, my model predicted the last three suicide bombings in Afghanistan within a radius of four hundred feet.”

  “Great. They were stopped, then?”

  Veriss’s face darkened. “Well, no. The input data wasn’t specific enough to predict the event with that much precision as far as timing. But the model is improving.”

  “What kind of data do you use, Mr. Veriss?” Tara asked, attempting to be polite. Her thoughts flashed back to the Emperor card from her reading. The Emperor was the avatar of science, the embodiment of masculine logic. Veriss seemed wedded to that worldview … which might make him a useful ally, or a source of conflict with Tara’s intuitive way of working.

  “All kinds of sources. Everything from the movement of currency to the results of elections to stock market fluctuations. It’s amazing what can feed into an individual—or group—decision to mount an attack. Lately, I’ve added cell phone traffic to the model, and—”

  Harry glanced at Aquila with a look that said: Why is this jackass sitting here, pissing in my swimming pool?

  “Folks,” Aquila interrupted. “I expect you to work together under Agent Li’s direction. I want you to determine who’s behind these disappearances and the information leaks. I don’t care whether it’s a terrorist group, an individual, or a cluster of suicides. Figure it out, and put a stop to it. Any questions?”

  Tara shook her head.

  “All the resources of Special Projects are at your disposal. Use them.”

  Tara bit her tongue, trying not to burst out laughing at the idea that those resources involved staplers stolen from the Library of Congress.

  The phone on Aquila’s desk rang. Aquila snatched it up, and his expression darkened immediately. Oblivious to Aquila’s reaction, Veriss was chattering at Harry about available server space for his data analysis tools. But Tara watched as Aquila’s face hardened, and his finger massaged his temple. He set the phone down without saying a word.

  “There’s been another disappearance,” he announced, cutting off Veriss’s list of electronic storage demands.

  “Great! Another data point to add to the model …” Veriss chirped.

  “Shit,” said Harry.

  Tara was inclined to agree with Harry.

  LENA IVANOVA WAS N
OT THE KIND OF WOMAN WHO WOULD have disappeared in the night.

  At least, not without packing some really expensive shoes.

  Tara pawed through the missing woman’s closet with latex-gloved hands. She flipped through matching hangers holding a wardrobe of designer clothes, much of it silk and leather. The closet was ordered according to type—blouses, jackets, skirts, and pants—then ordered by season and color. The woman had an enviable collection of shoes lined up at the bottom, arranged by heel height and color. Empty luggage was stacked neatly on the top shelves. Scuff marks on the bottoms suggested she traveled frequently.

  Tara squatted down to peer at the shoes. The almost obsessively neat line of shoes had been disturbed, kicked aside. She knelt and shone her flashlight on the floor of the closet.

  Interesting.

  On hands and knees, she crawled into the closet and turned around, careful not to disturb the shoes. The closet smelled like leather and jasmine perfume. The shoes had been shoved aside in a pattern that suggested someone had been inside the closet. Someone had been sitting here and hadn’t wanted to have a stiletto boot jammed up his ass.

  “You hiding from Veriss in there?”

  Tara peered at Harry’s dress slacks, then up. His arms were crossed, and he was staring down at her with a smile playing around his lips.

  “Maybe.”

  The drone of Veriss’s voice could be heard downstairs, and Harry rolled his eyes. “Is there room for me?”

  “Probably. But I think someone was waiting in here for Lena.” Tara gestured to the scattered shoes, which looked like the leavings of a centipede. “I’m guessing that whoever was in here stayed here for a long time. Maybe hours.”

  “That fits.” Harry frowned. “Lena Ivanova was last seen three days ago. She owns a local art gallery. She left work after meeting with a client, and hasn’t been seen since. Her car’s still in the driveway. Her housekeeper came in to work, expected her to come by to pay her. When Lena didn’t show, the housekeeper called the police.”

  “This is where she was taken. I’m sure of it.” Tara crawled out of the closet, and Harry offered her a hand up. She scanned the bedroom, taking in the elegant furnishings. An antique four-poster bed dominated the room, surrounded by abstract watercolor paintings in vivid jewel tones. The bed was made, and the adjoining bathroom smelled of lemon cleaner.

  Tara glanced sidelong at Harry. “How long had the housekeeper been here before she called the cops?”

  Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Two days. And the local PD took their sweet time declaring the victim to be a missing person. They’re still convinced she might have taken off to Bora Bora on a whim. The housekeeper’s been busy cleaning the house. For two days.”

  “And destroying evidence for two days.”

  “You got it. Forensics is going through the laundry now, and having a tantrum.”

  Downstairs, Tara could hear the musical sound of the maid’s voice, interrupted over and over by Veriss. She tried to ignore it. She could hear muttered swearing from the forensic technicians who were trying to get prints from the freshly scrubbed windows. There had been no obvious signs of entry. And whatever evidence they would find would be so compromised by the maid’s actions that it would never stand up in court.

  Tara crossed the plush carpet to the bed. The pile was covered in precise vacuum cleaner tracks, and she was certain that some poor forensic tech would have the task of taking the machine apart to look for unusual fibers. The bed had been crisply made with hospital corners, a jacquard and velvet comforter stretched so perfectly over it that it looked like a page from a catalog.

  Not so much as a speck of dust had settled into the posters of the bed. Tara squinted at the carving on the upper posts. What she first took to be scrollwork actually resolved into a pattern of wings … reminding her of the Lovers card from her Tarot readings. In the card, an angel watched the Lovers from on high. What had these wooden angels witnessed?

  Tara peeled back the covers, pulling them loose from the pile of decorative pillows. She ran her gloved hands over the cool, plum-colored sheets. The mattress was dented in the center of the bed, suggesting that Lena usually slept alone. But her mind kept tracking back to the Lovers card from her Tarot reading. She turned over the pillows carefully, wondering if the housekeeper had washed them recently.

  “Harry,” she said. “Look at this.”

  She pointed to a slightly darker stain on the underside of a pillow. It was almost imperceptible against the darkness of the fabric, a small smear scarcely larger than a finger.

  “Looks like blood,” he said, squinting at it. “Could be anything. Could be from a nosebleed, given the placement on the bed.”

  “Or it could come from our abductor.”

  “I’ll get forensics in here to look at it. This will be the most fun they’ll have all day.” Harry left Tara alone in the room. She could hear the clatter of coins in his pockets as he jogged down the steps. He was frustrated. But Tara knew that she could still trust him to be methodical. He was, after all, her Knight of Pentacles. Whether he still wanted to be, or not.

  She spun on her heel, thinking. Lena’s bedroom looked very much like a showplace. There was little here to suggest any personality … no photographs of family or friends on the dresser. Everything here fit precisely into a design scheme, and felt oddly impersonal. In some ways, it reminded her of Aquila’s office: no personal life on display.

  Except for one thing. On the dresser was a painted Russian doll, a matryoshka. Tara picked it up. The delicate hand painting depicted a woman with dark hair in a kerchief, holding a basket of roses. She turned it over, seeing a legend scribbled on the bottom: For my Matryoshka, my darling of many faces. Love, Carl.

  Tara’s intuition prickled. Was this a gift from Carl Starkweather, who had also served on the Rogue Angel project? She opened the doll, unscrewing it at the waist.

  Any other matryoshka Tara had seen had been the same: six or eight successively smaller nested dolls, all depicting idyllic country girls in cheerful colors. But this was not a doll like that. The doll inside was a bear … and not a teddy bear. The bear’s jaws were parted in a ferocious expression, golden paint glittering on its claws.

  The next doll was equally strange. A wolf was painted in silvery gray stripes, looking down its long snout at Tara. A pink tongue lolled from between its teeth.

  Curious, Tara continued to open the dolls. Next was a girl, dressed like Red Riding Hood with a crimson cloak and picnic basket. Then, a red fox, its tail wrapped around its feet. A gray tabby was next, smiling like the Cheshire cat. Tara involuntarily thought of Oscar. Underneath its paw was a feather. The smallest doll was a bird … a dove, holding a piece of olive branch in its mouth.

  Tara arranged the shapeshifting matryoshka in order. Something in her subconscious tickled her, and she thought of the World Tarot card. The woman in the center of the card was surrounded by beasts, and she was not what she seemed. Tara made a mental note to go over Lena’s personnel record. From what little she’d gleaned on the ride over, she’d been told that Lena had been associated with Rogue Angel. She might have been anything from a secretary to a spook … and Tara would be curious to see what her relationship with Carl was, what had caused Lena to keep the only sentimental artifact in the whole room.

  A wheeled cart dragged through the carpet, towed by a forensic technician. The tech was a young woman with her blonde hair tied back in a French braid, swimming in a too-large windbreaker with the name ANDERSON embroidered on the front. “Agent Li said there was some blood stain evidence here?”

  “I think it might be blood, but that’s your call.” Tara showed her the spot on the pillow. The tech photographed the location from several angles, then unfolded a large paper bag from her cart to hold the pillow. She handled the evidence with exceptional care, sealing the bag with tape and filling out the evidence tag.

  “This may be a good lead,” Anderson said. “We weren’t able to isolate much
unique DNA in the last case.”

  “What do you mean?” Tara leaned against the dresser.

  The tech’s mouth turned downward. “Our lab took DNA swabs in the Carl Starkweather disappearance. Unfortunately, the DNA was contaminated.”

  Tara’s brows tugged together. “Was there a chain of custody issue?”

  Anderson shook her head. “Not that we were able to determine. All the slides that the lab prepared showed multiple DNA markers.”

  “That’s good, right? More suspects?” Tara’s thoughts raced around the possibility that there might be a group behind the disappearances. Her gut told her that wasn’t the case, but if the evidence pointed there …

  “Not what we ended up with. We got garbage … It was like somebody put samples from a roomful of people in a blender.” Anderson shook her head. “We’re still trying to straighten it out. But it’ll be useless in court. The guy who collected the samples got suspended.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Anderson shrugged. “Aquila has been breathing down our necks on this, and it sucks not to have any answers.” She finished filling out the evidence tag, scanned the room. “And this scene looks like it’s gonna be a bust, too.”

  “Yeah. I hear the maid got a bit overzealous.”

  Anderson shook her head. “Not really her fault. She was just doing her job. But this … this may just be one of those unlucky investigations that’s one clusterfuck after another.”

  HE WASN’T ALONE, NOT ANYMORE.

  Galen lay curled up on his side in the bed of his rented room, listening to Lena’s voice in his head. Wrapped up in a sheet, he scribbled through notebook after notebook, committing Lena’s voice to paper. Her secrets and memories flowed across the page, interspersed with sketches of people and places, maps, bits of remembered passwords and codes. As he filled each notebook by the meager light from the bedside lamp, he cast them aside to a heap with hundreds of other notebooks beside the radiator. Those were Carl’s memories. And Carrie’s and Gerald’s.