New Tricks - By David Rosenfelt Page 0,74

choose one without the other?”

Is it possible she’s considering this? Or even taking it seriously? “I don’t know; I didn’t think it through. But let’s see… you can choose one, but only if it’s the moving-back-here one.”

“Can I think about this?”

“Sure. I’ll go downstairs and have a sandwich.”

“I don’t mean think for a few minutes, Andy. I mean think it through.”

“Sure. No problem,” I say. “How long do you think it will take? Are we talking hours, or months?”

“Andy… ,” she admonishes.

“Okay, sorry. I don’t want to blow this. But if we meet with the FBI agent, can I introduce you as my fiancée?”

“No.”

“Laurie, he’s an FBI agent. We can’t just tell him that we’re sleeping together.”

“Then we’ll stop sleeping together,” she says.

“On the other hand, what business is it of his? What is he, the sex police? I’m sick of government intruding in the bedrooms of private citizens like us.”

“Andy…”

“What?”

“I love you. And thank you for asking me to marry you. Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

“I’ve tried to a bunch of times, but I could never quite get up the nerve. I always assumed you’d say no.”

“Maybe I will,” she says, softly.

“And maybe you won’t.”

CINDY CALLS ME at eight AM to tell me that Corvallis will see me this afternoon.

She will not be joining us, possibly because Corvallis knows we’ll be talking specifics, and she isn’t on the case. If she is upset or offended about it, she hides it well. It is simply how the bureau functions. I promise her that I’ll tell her everything that goes on.

Laurie still wants to go with me, and we agree that I will introduce her as my investigator, without mentioning that she is a law enforcement officer in Wisconsin. That might complicate matters for Corvallis, so there’s no point even going there.

This time Corvallis is all business. He seems to understand from last time that he can’t push me around or intimidate me, and he makes no effort to do so. He seems fine with Laurie being there, but he does not have any of his staff sit in with us.

“You’ve got the floor,” he says.

“Okay. Part of what I’m going to say I know for a fact, and part is what I believe. Just so you’ll know, regardless of what you do, I’m going to act as if what I believe is absolutely true. It’s the only way I can defend my client.”

I continue, “Walter Timmerman was working to develop synthetic DNA, which is why you were watching him so carefully. The implications of what he was doing were enormous, for reasons I don’t have to tell you.”

Corvallis doesn’t react at all to what I am saying; he just stares impassively and listens.

“He went to Charles Robinson, a friend of his, to help him benefit from his discovery. My assumption is that Robinson was going to use his connections in the energy industry to capitalize on what could be an incredible new source of energy, one that could have a real impact on the geopolitical balance in the world.

“I don’t know if Charles Robinson had Walter Timmerman killed. I doubt that he did, though it’s possible they had a falling-out; perhaps one of them felt that he was being betrayed by the other. It’s also possible that another party, perhaps one with an interest in maintaining the energy status quo, decided to remove Timmerman from the picture before he could complete his work.

“Once Timmerman was dead, the killers for some reason wanted all evidence of his work destroyed, so no one else could get it. That is why they blew up the house, and that is why they tried to kill the dog. Because the dog is a product of this invention”—I can’t help but smile—“and has a high energy level of his own.

“So I’m not sure of Robinson’s role in the murders, though the fact that he wanted possession of the dog is incriminating. He could well have planned to kill the dog, or at the very least see to it that his DNA was never tested. But the dog was taken from him, and at this point his whereabouts are unknown.”

Corvallis speaks for the first time. “So what are you proposing?” he asks.

“I believe that whether or not Robinson is a murderer, he is at the center of this. I believe I can scare him with what I’ve learned, and maybe shake him into admitting something that both of us can use.”

“How?”

“By meeting with him and confronting