Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,101
patient, chances are something bad happened to you. Or you’re old and losing functions. Some people handle that better than others. But Lew’s okay.”
“So tell me about Michelle…Fontaine?”
“Michelle started just a few weeks ago,” says Miller. “She’s great. But she didn’t get along with Lew. He’d say things that were pretty, uh, insensitive. They clashed a lot.”
Books nods, stays silent.
“So,” says Tom, heaving a sigh. “He goes to Chicago one weekend, y’know, to do one of those speeches. And that’s the same weekend as that bombing there. So Lew makes a comment like ‘A bunch of dead homeless people is a good start.’ And Michelle, she kinda flips out. They argued about it, more than once. She asked him yesterday if he had an alibi for the Chicago bombing.” He looks at us for a reaction. “Which I’m thinking…must be why you guys are here?”
Books says, “What did Wagner say when she asked him about the alibi?”
“Well, she didn’t really wait for an answer. She just stormed out. She wasn’t serious. But Lew—Lew took it pretty seriously. He asked me if I thought she might turn him in.”
“He felt threatened by Michelle.”
“Sure seemed like it. He definitely wasn’t happy.”
Books mulls that over for a moment. So do I.
“And then Michelle quit yesterday?” I ask. “Just a few weeks after she started?”
“Yeah. She sent an e-mail last night, apparently,” says Miller. “Louise showed it to me. She said it wasn’t a good fit for her and she was sorry, but she was leaving, effective immediately. She was leaving Virginia, actually. Moving back home or something.”
“Where’s home?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Never got to know her all that well. Nice lady, though.”
“She said in her e-mail it wasn’t a good fit,” Books says. “You think she quit because of Lieutenant Wagner?”
Miller shrugs. “I mean, probably. But you’d have to ask her.”
I’d love to ask her. But she isn’t here. She seems to have vamoosed.
At exactly the same time as Lieutenant Martin Wagner.
101
BOOKS AND I look at each other, each with questions about Michelle Fontaine, but Books’s phone buzzes before he can speak.
“Excuse me,” Books says. He gets up and leaves the room.
A break in the action. Miller drums his fingers on the desk. “So how real is this?” he asks. “Are you sure about Lew? I mean, he’s rough around the edges, but…”
“Tell me more about Michelle,” I say, avoiding the question.
“Not much to tell,” says Miller. “I know she’d worked as a therapist before. She said that. But she didn’t say where. She was kind of private.”
“Describe her to me.”
“Describe her? Well, she’s tall, maybe a little shorter than me, but tall for a woman. She’s—I wouldn’t call her heavyset but…not petite. Lew asked her if she played basketball. I think she was insulted.”
I nod, thinking all this through. Trying to put together so many things that don’t make sense. The cash…the Taser…the Garfield watch…
“Why do you ask?” Tom asks. “Michelle’s a great person.”
“Tell me something,” I say, avoiding another one of his questions. “Did Wagner ever talk about money?”
“Money?” He shrugs. “Not really.”
“About banks, maybe? Do you know why he would have kept large sums of money at his house?”
“Like under his mattress or something?” A humorless smirk plays on his lips. “Kind of a paranoid, antigovernment thing to do, I guess. But no, I don’t know about that.”
Books pops back in. “Emmy, can I grab you a second?”
I join him in the hallway. “What’s going on?”
He’s holding his phone. “I totally forgot. I have a shipment coming today at two.”
“A shipment of books?”
“Yeah, for that other job I have, where I own a bookstore? The one I suck at, apparently.”
You don’t suck at running a bookstore, I want to tell him. You just don’t love it like you love being an agent. “Is Petty there?” I ask. “It’s Thursday afternoon.”
Monday through Thursday, Books said, he comes in like clockwork in the afternoon, stays the night.
Then again, Sergeant Petty wasn’t there last night—Wednesday night—so who knows how reliable his schedule really is?
“If he’s there,” says Books, “he’s not answering the door while they pound on it from the alley. He probably doesn’t think he should, with the store being closed.”
“And you can’t call him?”
“It’s not like he has a cell phone, Em. He’s a homeless guy.”
Right. I guess that makes sense. “So go, Books,” I say. “Go take care of it. You can be there in half an hour, accept the shipment, and come back. Barely more than an hour.