Cindy said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m following you. The killer shoots them, shoots Chan—and Joe got there after the shootings?”
“It’s a good theory,” I said, while wondering, Is it?
“What happened to Joe? And what happened to Ali Muller?”
“I wish I knew,” I said sincerely.
“According to my calculations,” Cindy said, “the plane went down about sixty-two hours later. Right?”
I nodded, remembering the run-up to that crash vividly.
I’d worked the hotel crime scene with Conklin, Clapper, and Claire, and that night, Joe had come home very early on Tuesday morning, two days before the crash. We’d made love and had breakfast together and I’d told him about the hits at the hotel. We talked about it.
Then I’d gone to work.
That day, we got an ID on Michael Chan. Conklin and I had driven out to Palo Alto and notified Shirley Chan that her husband was dead.
And except for the recording of Joe watching us at the Chan house, I hadn’t seen him again. As Cindy had said, two and a half days after the shootings in the hotel, WW 888 had blown apart.
Cindy was doing her best to drive and process everything we had just seen on Jad’s fifteen-inch laptop.
She said to me, “Look, I have a problem writing this story. Joe is pivotal. He talked about the plane from Beijing. That information, if it had been used properly, might have saved a few hundred lives. So how do I write about that? I have no fricking evidence. I can’t print this as a rumor.”
“Can you sit on this for a day?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I have to get some answers.”
“From whom?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as I can tell you.”
“Lindsay.”
“You don’t have to say it, Cindy. I promise. You get the exclusive. If I find out anything at all.”
CHAPTER 75
WHEN I WALKED through the front door to the apartment I once shared with my husband, the wonderful Mrs. Rose said to me, “Lindsay, I have to go. My son is waiting for me at Tommy’s and I have to dress. You’ll find some pasta salad in the fridge. Oh, Martha has to go for a walk and the baby hasn’t eaten or had her bath. She just wouldn’t play ball with me. Sorry, dear.”
I told Mrs. Rose thanks for everything and have a good time and stood at the open door until she was gone. Then I closed the door and leaned against it, exhausted by the meeting with Cindy and Jad, thinking, No more. Please, I can’t take any more.
I was a mess.
I was the primary investigator on a quadruple homicide without witnesses or forensic evidence, and it was further compounded by a tangle of international players, a terrorist attack, and intelligence agencies working on the sly.
My husband was party to some or all of this, and he’d sucker-punched me, kneecapped me, and left me alone in a blind alley.
I was grateful to Cindy for including me in her meeting with Jad, and also thankful that she had agreed to sit on the story until I had answers.
But she wouldn’t sit on it forever.
I’d fed her the only theory of the murders I could think of, which presumed that Joe was not guilty of murder.
But he might well have had foreknowledge, if not his actual hand on a trigger. And for all I knew, he was a killer, many times over.
I became aware of Martha, who was whining and pushing at my legs. I said, “OK, OK, I hear you.”
We went to Julie’s room. I woke my daughter up very gently, and of course, she started to cry. I talked nonsense while dressing her in fleece and a hat. Then I awkwardly opened her stroller and strapped her in.
Martha was ebullient, and I hated to disappoint, but this was going to be a short, short walk.
I wheeled Julie into the elevator, keeping Martha on a tight leash, and somehow, Martha’s business was quickly done. She was desperate to go for a run. She pulled and barked at me when I turned to go back into the building.
“You don’t always get what you want,” I said to Jules and Martha. “And that goes for me, too.”
I then proceeded to do what single mothers all over the world do—that is, everything at once.
I fed the baby and I fed Martha, and after drinking the dregs of the opened bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, I dished up some pasta salad and wolfed it down.
On the way to the dishwasher, I grabbed a basket that I keep on the counter near the microwave. It’s eight inches square, four inches high, a catch-all for receipts and the odd paper clip, marking pen, and business card.
Two men from the CIA had paid me a call last week, the point of which was to tell me to stop looking for Alison Muller. They had left their business cards on the counter. I couldn’t remember seeing those cards again.
I hoped Mrs. Rose had put them in the receipt basket.
I upended the basket and pawed through the contents, and yes, I found the cards. Michael J. Dixon. Christopher Knightly. Case officers, Central Intelligence Agency. Phone numbers were in the lower left corner.
I remembered that Dixon, the dark-haired one, had seemed to be the one in charge.
It was nearly 8 p.m. Would he answer his phone?
I had to try.
I dialed the number and he answered on the third ring.
“Agent Dixon, this is Lindsay Boxer. You visited me a couple of days ago to talk about Alison Muller.”
“I remember, Mrs. Molinari. How can I help you?”
“I need to see you. I have information that concerns national security. It also concerns my husband, and I think you’ll want to hear all about it.”
Dixon gave me an address and told me to come in the next morning at nine. I didn’t know what I was going to say when I met with him, but I had all night to figure it out.
The whole minute-by-minute sleepless night.
CHAPTER 76
I GOT OUT of bed before my baby girl woke up. I showered to get my blood running, and while Mrs. Rose buttoned down the corners of my household, I called in sick, asked Brenda to tell Conklin that I would talk to him after lunch, and then ordered a taxi to drive me to the CIA office on Montgomery Street.
I dressed to impress, meaning I put on my best blue gabardine pantsuit, just cleaned, a good-looking tailored shirt, and my smart Freda Salvador shoes, which I’d last worn to meet in DC with FBI honcho June Freundorfer.
Mrs. Rose topped up my coffee mug while I Googled the address Dixon had given me and found that it was the location of a CIA division called the National Resources Program, or NR.
I read and clicked and read some more.
And what I learned was that the NR was to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, what schoolyard pickup hoops were to the NBA.
The NR recruited largely untrained people with access to information: foreign nationals living in the United States who were willing to gather intel for cash and probably a feeling of self-importance. The NR also hired on Americans with overseas access to government workers, aircraft manufacturing plants, newspapers, and the like.
These part-time operatives came with a variety of backgrounds. Some were college students, some were corporate executives, entertainers, and young techies—like Jad. And like Bud and Chrissy, who had been secretly filming Michael Chan and Alison Muller.
And while these geeks had been spying on spies, Joe Molinari had been right in the thick of it.