From the outside, the surveillance vehicle looked like a motor home on its last legs, its many badges from past trips appearing to do as much to hold the fiberglass skin together as the rivets themselves. The badges also suggested that the owners were happy albeit tired seniors, many of whose road trips belonged to another millennium: ‘W.B. Caravan Club–Wichita Meet 1991’; ‘We Bridged the Great Divide–1994’. It was plausible that the owners were ‘snowbirds’ – Northerners or Easterners who used to travel annually to southern Arizona for its warm winters but this year never left, their camper coming to rest in this dry subdivision while looking for a final parking place.
Inside the RV, the agents adjusted the antennae and activated a live video feed of the gold van. Eric prepared the receiver to pick up the audio from the listening device they would plant after dark. Scott called the rookies who were still on surveillance up the street and received confirmation that there hadn’t been any movement in or around the van during the night. He then informed them that they were relieved of duties. The agents heard the engine of the unmarked police car start, then fade as it drove away.
DAY SEVEN
Monday
FIFTEEN
Prickly Pear Close, Phoenix: High Noon. The beeping of a digital watch alarm woke Scott and he quickly pressed a button to silence it. He swung his legs over the side of the fully-made bed at the rear of the camper. His ankle-high boots were already on and he was dressed in combat pants and a t-shirt, so there wasn’t much more to do besides a few stretches, preferably avoiding banging his hands against the curved ceiling. He walked the two paces to the foot of the bed and pulled back the plastic accordion door that separated the bedroom from the main room.
Eric momentarily turned his head from monitoring a television screen. ‘Morning.’
‘Anything happening?’
‘Nope. All quiet on the western front.’
‘Got my breakfast?’
‘Your latte’s right here.’ Eric waved a packet of instant Maxwell House coffee.
Scott turned into the bathroom. It was too small for an adult to close the door and still be comfortable, so he left it open; he and his partner had been on enough long stakeouts to get over privacy issues. But the toilet’s holding pan had been filling inexorably, as the surveillance had only been broken by bathroom breaks or naps.
‘Would ya close the lid on that nuclear power plant, already?’ Eric called out.
Scott flushed the toilet and popped his head out of the bathroom doorway, already lathering his face with shaving cream. ‘Worried it’s going to curl your hair, darlin’?’
‘It’s interfering with the reception on this show I’m watching. Seems to have frozen the image for the past three minutes. Wait, make that six hours.’
Scott finished washing up. He emerged feeling like he’d woken up properly but nonetheless decided to make coffee to go with some energy bars.
He sat down next to Eric at the monitoring station. ‘Nothing on the audio either?’
Planting the listening device had been a quick operation that hadn’t afforded any examination of the van itself because some joyriding teenagers had chosen that moment to park in Prickly Pear Close to smoke marijuana, car windows open, listening to music in the dark. The teenagers had stayed until 4.30 a.m., by which time Scott had deemed it too close to daylight for them to try for an undetected examination of the van without knowing the sleep patterns of the street’s inhabitants. They would try again that night.
‘Just that same hum,’ replied Eric. He turned a dial on the audio receiver next to the video screen. A medium pitch, uninterrupted hum became more audible.
‘No fluctuation whatsoever?’
Eric shook his head and turned the volume dial down to its previous position.
‘And no sign of anyone? Not even the homeowners?’ Scott moved on to a second energy bar.
‘No, but it’s summer in Phoenix. If they didn’t get out before eight in the morning, they know better than to come out now.’
Eric pushed himself up from his seat in front of the monitoring station and made a note in the log they were keeping of their hours in the hot seat. Scott moved into the chair, downing the last of the coffee, his eyes already glued to the screen.
Eric walked to the bedroom but halted before closing the accordion door. ‘You made the bed for me. I’m so touched.’
Scott held up his middle finger in Eric’s direction without looking at him.
‘OK, I’m set for nineteen hundred hours unless a party starts,’ Eric said.
Scott settled into the chair, preparing for the challenge of maintaining a high energy level. He was always surprised that it was hard to sustain energy on a stakeout even though in terms of physical activity, it wasn’t all that different to his usual job behind a desk; sit at a screen of some sort all day, get up every now and then. There were fewer phone calls on a stakeout. Maybe that was it. He contemplated calling Jayne. He told himself it would just be to ascertain if she’d arranged to have the Agency checked for bugs.
He knew he wouldn’t call. It was one thing to think while watching the surveillance screen but it was something else to talk with an outsider while on stakeout. Especially with this case. They didn’t even have confirmation this was the right van so they were still hunting those body parts. This just got him thinking about Jayne again.
He smiled to himself, remembering when they’d first met at Quantico. Her confident belief that inefficient processes could actually be improved had struck him as naïve yet liberating, coming as it did on the heels of his months of study of how a bureaucracy fights crime. Her face and body had displayed the last traces of youthful roundedness, as though her figure represented a tightrope between gullibility and mistrust and she was still working out on which side she would dismount.
Now, she looked like she’d tried both sides and found each problematic, deciding that perhaps it was easier to negotiate the tightrope, arms out to the side, inadvertently keeping people away as she waved and balanced. Scott knew his interpretation was self-serving since he felt on a tightrope himself and he hadn’t met anyone else along it, besides Jayne. He’d known for a long time that he wanted to take hold of her but he hadn’t known if that was for the sake of her balance or his. That uncertainty had been at the heart of why he’d never tried to move things to what other people called the ‘next level’.
His previous girlfriends – the ‘lightweights’ as Eric had referred to them – had been easy to pick up so they’d be easy to let go, with the idea of Jayne always in the background and never put to the test. Now that he was around her again, he was even more aware of the reality of his attraction to her. He had no intention of leaving things to his imagination forever. Ever since she’d backed into him on her stairs Friday night, he’d been thinking about the inward curve of her waist and the outward curves above and below . . . he knew he’d have to save that train of thought for after the stakeout. There was no way he could watch the screen, listen to the audio feed, and think those particular thoughts of Jayne all at the same time.
When Jayne heard Carol come in the Agency’s front door, she intercepted her and indicated that they should have a word outside. Out in the parking lot, she asked, ‘Did you find a pay phone that actually worked?’
Carol replied, ‘Third time lucky. The city still comes through on phones even if it can’t keep up the phone books. Someone from Jeppsen, Inc. will be here shortly.’