Zig sat up straight. “Pain in the ass?”
“I was saying it with love. Make it happen and I pretend buy you the Back to the Future car.”
Charmaine froze as she said the words. She physically touched her own lips, like she was trying to put the sentence back in her mouth. Years ago, when she and Zig had first gotten married and money was tight, they’d make pretend purchases for each other. “I pretend buy you tickets to the Phillies World Series.” In no time, it became their inside joke: “I pretend buy you these fourteen Yorkie puppies in this pet store window.” It escalated from there: “I pretend buy you doormats with obscenities on them that we would never display in public.” “Only if I can pretend buy you that historic house we saw in Missouri with the jail on the back of it.” Needless to say, after the divorce, the pretend buying stopped—until this exact moment, when Charmaine accidentally let one slip out. “Just do me a favor, Ziggy, and find out what the hell’s going on.”
He nodded and grabbed the videotape, then his phone, already dialing. Even with records this old, there’s always a trail to follow.
Fortunately for Zig, he knew the perfect person for that.
28
Quantico, Virginia
Amy Waggs was well aware she’d be late.
“I know, please don’t give me guilt,” she said into her phone, speed-walking through the FBI’s nearly empty parking garage, her short brown hair bobbing with each step. “I’m on my way.”
From the moment her office phone rang—7:00 p.m. on a weeknight, for Chrissakes—there was no avoiding it. In the FBI’s Biometric Lab, late calls meant emergencies from time zones where the sun was just coming up. Picking up those calls was part of the job.
The truth of it was, Waggs got a charge from those calls, talking to a partner agency when a bomb went off in a Libyan church, helping them pull prints off a dead body so they could figure out if any of the victims might’ve been in on the attack. It wasn’t an easy task. To print the dead, you need the right skin conditions as well as skin temperature. But again, phone calls like that were worth it.
What wasn’t worth it? When the call came from a kid, some nineteen-year-old bomb technician in Kuwait who’s so new on the job, he forgot to put ink in his print kit, and sorry, ma’am, but . . . um . . . what do I do now?
This is why no one likes children, Waggs thought, picking up speed in the garage, still annoyed at how long it took to teach young Ahmad how to pull prints using adhesives like name-tag labels or even Con-Tact paper.
“Mikel, I swear I’m already in the car,” she lied to her boyfriend, looking around, her only focus being where she’d parked. She’d regret that soon enough.
Her heels clicked across the concrete. On her wrist was a pale yellow corsage. Every few steps, she’d extend her arm to admire it, its elastic strap perfectly covering the small clock tattoo on the inside of her wrist, with the exact time her mother died. A few years back, Waggs became convinced that she’d most likely share a similar fate, eventually dying alone. It felt good to think she might be wrong.
“So, twenty minutes?” Mikel asked, sounding skeptical.
“Twenty for sure. Twenty-two at the most,” Waggs insisted, knowing that at this time of night, with the traffic on 95, she probably wouldn’t be there until—
“You know I can hear your voice echoing in the garage? You’re not even in the car yet, are you?” he teased. “You’re lucky you’re so cute.”
“Actually, you’re the lucky one since . . . hurr . . . wow . . . no matter how I end this sentence, it’s gonna sound either super self-congratulatory or like a deliciously plump middle-aged woman trying far too hard to flirt.”
“Don’t undersell middle-aged flirts. Not all heroes wear capes.”