He called Vance. Despite the early hour she picked up on the second ring.
“I’m in the office,” she answered. “Actually I never left the office. Where are you?”
“Driving.”
“Driving where?”
“Not sure.”
“What happened to you last night? You just sort of disappeared after we got Julie squared away.”
He didn’t answer.
“Robie?”
“I just had to step back for a bit, get my head straight.”
“Is it straight now? Because we have a case to work.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t have dinner. And I haven’t had breakfast. There’s a twenty-four-hour place around the corner from WFO. You know it?”
“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes,” said Robie.
He beat her there and had already ordered them both mugs of coffee when she walked in.
“I thought you said you hadn’t been home. You’re wearing fresh clothes,” he said.
“I keep a set at the office,” she replied as she sat down and picked up her coffee and took a sip. “You don’t look good,” she said.
“Should I look good?” he shot back. He wondered for a moment if she could tell he had been with another woman.
They sat in awkward silence drinking their coffees until Robie said, “How’s Julie?”
“Fidgety, depressed. I think she believes you’ve abandoned her.”
“How did you explain things to your boss about all this?”
“I skirted the line. Told him some things, didn’t tell him others.”
The waitress came over and they ordered. After she had refilled their coffees she left.
Robie studied Vance. “I’m not looking to derail your career over this, Vance.”
“You know, you can call me Nikki, if you want.”
This offer seemed to deepen Robie’s guilt. “Okay, Nikki, at the end of the day you need to be able to walk away from this with everything in your life intact.”
“I don’t think that’s possible, Robie.”
“My point is you don’t have to cover for me. It was unfair to ask it of you.”
“And my point is if I don’t cover for you the FBI will come down like a ton of bricks. Too many questions, not enough answers.”
“I’ve got some professional cover.”
“Not enough. And quite frankly, I’m not just doing it for you. If everything does come out, my butt is probably off this investigation and it’ll get so muddled we’ll probably never figure it out. And I obviously have a real problem with that happening.”
“Just so we understand each other,” said Robie.
“I’m not sure I completely get you, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not your shrink. I’m just working with you to see if we can put away some killers.”
“Leo Broome,” he said. “Anything found on him that would help? He said they had gotten to his wife?”
“He had nothing on him. We’re trying to trace where he came from. There was no car parked nearby that was unaccounted for. That late at night we can rule out the Metro probably. We’re checking with cabbies to see if we can determine where he was picked up.”
“Or else he could have walked,” pointed out Robie. “But there was no hotel room key card, nothing else to show where he was staying?”
“Nothing like that. But we did find one thing.”
“What was that?”
“A hoplite tattoo on his forearm identical to the one on Rick Wind’s arm. And it has to match the one Julie said her dad had on his arm.”
“So they must’ve known each other in the Army, then,” said Robie.
“What if this isn’t connected to you after all? They were in the Army together, maybe had some secret. Now it’s come back to haunt them.”
“Still doesn’t explain me and Julie walking off that bus. Or them missing you and me in front of Donnelly’s.”
“No, I guess it doesn’t. You said they let him escape after they killed his wife. Part of the game, you said. They might be screwing with you, but there has to be some purpose to it all.”
“I’m certain there’s an excellent purpose. I just don’t know what it is.”
“If this is a contest of sorts between you and them, there must be something in your past to account for it. Given that any thought?”
“Some. But I have to give it a lot more.”
“What line of work were you in, Robie? DCIS isn’t your real home, but somewhere else in the federal government obviously is.”
He drank his coffee, said nothing, because there was nothing he could say.
“I’m not read in, is that why your lips aren’t moving?” asked Vance.
“I don’t make the rules. Sometimes the rules suck, like now, but they’re still the rules. I’m sorry, Nikki.”