He rolled down the passenger window. “Get in. Storm’s about to hit. You don’t want to get struck by lightning.”
Huck grinned. “Lightning bolts would bounce off me.”
Vern ignored him and rolled up the window. No sense of humor. Huck climbed into the passenger’s seat. Vern’s best buddy was Huck’s now-incarcerated fugitive, due to go on trial for drug dealing, rape, armed robbery and attempted murder. Although Vern had no criminal record, Huck presumed that his new friend hadn’t exactly led a clean and quiet life. Occasionally, Vern would bitch to him about the bastard who’d turned his buddy into the feds and how he was going to find out who it was and kill him.
But Vernon Glover saw himself as one of an elite cadre of mercenaries who would save the U.S. from its enemies within its borders and beyond. A tall order, but Vern seemed determined and confident-a scary thought as far as Huck was concerned, because it meant Vern and his cohorts either had plans or were completely delusional. Or both.
Thunder rumbled off to the west.
Vern turned around at the small motel, practically in front of Diego Clemente’s truck with its New York plates, and drove out toward Quinn Harlowe’s road, bypassing it since it was a dead end. Huck could see the cute waterfront cottage. Still no car, still no sign of life.
“That an osprey nest?” he asked, pointing to the buoy in the quiet cove, giving Vern a reason for him to be peering in that direction.
Vern made a face. “Yeah. It’s protected. Birds have more rights these days than people.”
Always the optimist, Vern was. Huck said nothing. He had the same feeling he’d had on his run. Something was wrong. He just couldn’t pinpoint what.
4
Quinn rang the doorbell to Alicia’s first-floor Georgetown apartment for a third time, but she instinctively knew her friend wasn’t there. When Alicia moved to Washington, as far as she was concerned, only one address would do-somewhere, anywhere, in Georgetown. With a trust fund her grandfather, a prominent Chicago doctor, had established for her, she bought a small condo in a black-shuttered brick townhouse on a narrow street of the historic, prestigious neighborhood.
Quinn realized Alicia wouldn’t be coming to her front door at all-let alone acting like herself again, explaining that the stress of her job had finally gotten to her and she’d simply freaked out that morning.
Quinn descended the steps down to the street, recalling her last visit to Alicia’s just after New Year’s, when she had broken the news that she was quitting her job at Justice and going out on her own. Alicia, adept at concealing her true feelings, had claimed she wasn’t surprised and wished Quinn well, then let it be known through mutual friends that she viewed Quinn’s departure as something of a betrayal and resented her ability to make the jump into working for herself.
Quinn noticed the flower boxes on the front windows, which last spring Alicia had planted with a mix of bright flowers but now were filled with dead leaves and stale, dry dirt. She loved her home. Jobs and men might come and go, she’d say, but she always had her refuge.
The neglected window boxes were just another sign, if a trivial one, of Alicia’s mounting burnout. In law school, she’d ended up in treatment for depression. The medication she was given didn’t agree with her, but therapy by itself did the trick, and she got better. The entire experience wasn’t something she shared with many people, but Quinn had been there. Now, given Alicia’s bizarre behavior earlier, Quinn wondered if her friend ought to seek treatment for whatever was going on with her-it might not be just some funk she could snap out of on her own. If she was suffering from depression or some other mental illness, she needed to see a doctor. Period.
But Quinn recognized she didn’t have the expertise to make a diagnosis herself.
Debating what else she could do, she walked back down to M Street, Georgetown ’s main commercial street. After giving up on chasing the black sedan, she’d stopped at her office, in case Alicia had asked her driver to drop her off there, but no luck. Now she wasn’t at her apartment, either. And Steve Eisenhardt, who worked with Alicia at Justice, hadn’t called back with any news of her.
If she called the police, Quinn knew they’d ask if Alicia had gotten into the black car voluntarily, and she would have to say yes. Alicia hadn’t screamed for help. She’d been agitated and semicoherent, but she’d somehow found her way from Yorkville to Washington and Quinn’s office, then her favorite coffee shop. If Alicia was having some kind of breakdown, she wouldn’t want the police involved. And Quinn wanted to help, not to make Alicia’s life more difficult.
She crushed the temptation to let her mind spin ahead of the facts and took the Metro Connection bus back to Dupont Circle, a few blocks from both her office and her apartment. She loved being able to walk to work in the morning, one of her favorite perks of self-employment.
She was so preoccupied with the bizarre scene at the coffee shop that she almost walked past the ivy-covered 1896 Italianate brick headquarters of the American Society for the Study of Plants and Animals. Her eccentric great-great-grandfather was one of the founders, and her slightly-less-eccentric marine archaeologist parents were directors, their latest project, funded by a private grant, having taken them to the Bering Sea for most of the past year.
During college and graduate school, Quinn had worked on and off for the Society, and when she decided to go out on her own, she negotiated use of a vacant second-floor office in exchange for modest rent and help with cataloguing the mountains of stray stuffed carcasses, drawings, journals, musty papers, old clothes and junk tucked in the building’s attic, basement and closets, a task the Society’s directors had meant to get to for decades. So far, she had filled more trash bags than Society treasure chests.
A cherry tree shaded the gracious building’s front entrance, its pale pink blossoms fluttering onto the sidewalk in a humid breeze. Quinn mounted the steps, waving to Thelma Worthington through the glass-front door. Thelma had served as the Society’s receptionist since John F. Kennedy was president, the only occupant of the White House to acknowledge its existence when he referred to it as one of the country’s great institutions. Nowadays, its well-managed endowment more than its contemporary relevance kept the American Society for the Study of Plants and Animals operational.
Thelma buzzed her in. When she tugged open the heavy door, Quinn entered another world, one of tall ceilings, ornate moldings, crystal chandeliers, Persian rugs, curving staircases and a respect-an encouragement-of eccentricity and risk-taking. Glass-fronted cabinets lined the center hall. As a child, Quinn remembered displays of glass jars of pickled organs and stuffed wild rodents and raptors. A new director, however, had replaced them with graceful porcelain figurines of wildflowers and songbirds.
Thelma took off the gaudy purple reading glasses she’d picked up at a drugstore. Despite the warm spring weather, she wore a sage-green corduroy ankle-length skirt and an argyle sweater vest over a white turtleneck. She had short gray hair and a Miss Hathaway face. Every summer, she picked ten mountains to climb.
“Any luck finding your friend?”
Quinn sighed heavily, suddenly tired. “Afraid not. Nothing new?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
Alicia had stopped by the Society first, apparently not as agitated as she was by the time she’d arrived at the coffee shop. Thelma thought nothing of telling her that Quinn was just down the street, but she’d already apologized for not having paid closer attention to Alicia’s frazzled emotional state.