Killer Instinct - James Patterson Page 0,22

else have a question?” he asked.

CHAPTER 25

TRACY SHOOK his head with a chuckle as he dipped a spring roll into some hot mustard. “You’ve gotta admit, this is pretty funny,” he said.

“What is?” I asked.

“This,” he said, looking around our living room. “Us.”

“What about us?” asked Elizabeth.

“A straight girl shacking up with two gay white guys who have a black South African baby,” he said. “And we’re all eating Chinese food. This is either a Benetton ad or the pilot for a sitcom that’s trying way too hard.”

Tracy had no idea where I’d been that afternoon, but after paying my last respects to Ahmed, I was in desperate need of a laugh.

Elizabeth laughed, too. She was in the middle of slurping a lo mein noodle, and that only made her laugh harder. She was still banged up, still in some pain, but it was good to see. By the looks of her when she first walked in, her day had been as much of a bummer as mine. It certainly didn’t help that reporters were continuing to stake out her apartment building.

We’d just put Annabelle down for the night and were sitting around on the floor of the den eating takeout from Han Dynasty and watching the news. It was twenty-four seven about the bombings—the victims, the survivors, and now the search for the terrorists responsible. Naturally, the blame game had begun. The police? The FBI? The CIA? The NSA? Homeland Security? Who dropped the ball?

“Do you want me to change the channel?” I asked Elizabeth.

“I would love you to,” she said, “but don’t. I need to watch, like it or not.”

She was right. It was part of her job now.

The only thing she’d shared with us—the only thing she was permitted to share with us—was that she’d been assigned to the Times Square investigation. Tracy and I didn’t ask her for any inside scoop, and she knew enough not to offer one. I was wondering, though. Had she been briefed about Ahmed and his being embedded with the terrorist cell? Would she ever be?

There was something else, too. Elizabeth had gotten what she wanted. She’d been taken off the Professor Darvish case. But somehow she hadn’t seemed all that pleased about it when she told us. What was bothering her?

Hold that thought.

The sound of Annabelle crying suddenly filtered to us from down the hall. “I’ve got her,” I said, starting to get up.

“No, let me,” said Tracy, beating me to it. “It’s my turn.”

Parenting is life’s biggest learning curve, but Tracy and I at least had the balancing act part of it down pat. We didn’t actually take turns tending to Annabelle. It’s not like either of us kept count of who did what for her. It was more instinctual. We both just had a sense of when one of us should step in for the other. Can you really be good parents without that?

“I’m calling that last dumpling, though,” said Tracy, pointing at the box in front of me as he headed for Annabelle’s room.

No sooner had he gotten there than Elizabeth turned to me. “I need to ask you something,” she said.

“Anything,” I answered, although I immediately regretted it.

“Before Pritchard reassigned me this morning I showed him the video of Darvish and his mystery woman,” she said.

“And?”

“And Pritchard pretended to have no idea about the white glow obscuring her face.”

“How did you know he was pretending?”

“It was a look he had,” she said. “It was super quick, came and went in an instant, but I saw it. I know I did.”

“What kind of look?”

“The same kind you gave me last night when I showed you the video,” she said. “You already know what’s causing that glow.”

“You’re that sure, huh? All based on a look?”

“Actually, I wasn’t sure until after I walked into your apartment tonight. That was the clincher.”

The second she said that, I knew she had me. I hated it when Elizabeth reminded me of how smart she was. But I loved it even more.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You haven’t once tonight mentioned the video. You haven’t asked about my meeting with Pritchard, what he thought about the glow, anything …”

“You’re right, I haven’t,” I said.

“Because you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Or maybe I can’t talk about it.”

“Too late,” she said. “What are you not telling me, Dylan Reinhart?”

CHAPTER 26

I GLANCED down the hall, listening to the faint sound of Tracy singing softly to Annabelle.

When we first brought her home, we discovered she was basically lullaby-proof.