Allison Brennan - Playing Dead

She shook her head, her eyes wide. “I just remember what he looks like. I’m good with faces. And he was sitting in his car a long time after he left.”

“His car? Do you remember what kind of car?”

She shrugged. “Not really. Tip was walking me home. It was raining pretty hard and we were walking really fast. I thought maybe he didn’t want to drive in the rain.”

Steve asked, “Did Tip see the man in the car?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

Mitch retraced the conversation. “This man came in after dark, and how long do you think he stayed in the bar?”

“I don’t know. Long enough to have a drink.”

“Did he seem nervous? Agitated? Angry?”

Lora Lane frowned, her eyes worried and confused. Mitch backtracked. “Did this man act strange?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But you remember him having a drink?”

She blinked in confusion. “I got to bring him his beer. Tip lets me do that sometimes, especially when it’s slow, and I like to help.”

“Were there any other strangers in the bar that night?”

She looked worried. “I don’t know. Should I know that?”

“No, not necessarily.”

“If you have a picture I might be able to remember. I’m very good with faces,” she repeated.

“You’ve been a big help already, Ms. Lane.”

“I have?”

“Yes. Thank you for your time.”

They left.

“Who did Maddox call at the Rabbit Hole?” Mitch asked. “Directions? And why the second call?”

“Maybe it was a mistake, a misdial,” Steve suggested.

“A rainy Sunday night. No other strangers. Barney has the only connection to Maddox through Frank Lowe. But why?”

“Maybe he followed Maddox out of town. Ran him off the road.”

“Maybe. But why was Maddox sitting in his car?”

“Waiting for Barney to leave, maybe. Want to go back and push him?”

“We need something else. Lora Lane is not a reliable witness. Something definitive, otherwise we’re just fishing and if he is guilty, then we’ve tipped our hand.”

“No pun intended,” Steve said as he unlocked the car.

Mitch rolled his eyes and slid into the passenger seat. “Let’s get the background check on Mr. Barney and see what we can find. We can always come back.”

“Great,” Steve said sarcastically as he turned onto River Road. “I hate driving this road.”

“Could be worse.”

“How?”

“It could be dark and raining.”

Lora Lane liked pretty things.

Ribbons for her hair. Shiny jewelry for her fingers and ears. Manicures and pedicures and keeping her boring brown hair blond.

She didn’t like working in the dirty tackle shop, but she liked the money she earned every Friday. Her mama always said she was a pretty little girl without an ounce of common sense. Daddy let her live at home because she wasn’t very good with her money and he said people would take advantage of her.

She knew she wasn’t a smart girl, but she was smart enough to know that people thought she was a retard. She’d heard them talking. Her daddy shut them up right quick, but she heard them sometimes. She ran the tackle shop almost all by herself, knew the difference between a night crawler and a butterworm, and made the world’s finest lures. Her daddy said so himself, and everyone came into the shop to buy them because they worked.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew how to mind her mouth. She didn’t tell those nice men about her agreement, did she? No, she didn’t. She kept it to herself like she’d sworn on the grave of her grandmama that she would.

For two years, Lora had watched Tip Barney like she was told. Every night she went to the Rabbit Hole and watched him. She kind of liked him, he was nice to her and didn’t treat her like she was dumb. He talked to her like she had something important to say, even when she didn’t say anything. He was nice-looking, too. Had nice blue eyes and a pretty smile.

When the men came to her house, Daddy wasn’t home. He was working. He had an important job, just like she did. He was a policeman. The chief policeman in Isleton. At first she was scared, but then the pretty man smiled at her and she felt all fluttery inside.

She had a job. And it was as important as her daddy’s job. She was undercover for the Department of Homeland Security. She reported back to Agents Smith and Jones everything that happened at the Rabbit Hole. Everything. She took very good notes.

She liked Tip, but he was a terrorist. As Agent Smith said, not all terrorists look like terrorists.

She was protecting her friends and neighbors from being killed like those poor people in New York. Lora was important.

When the two nice men left her tackle shop, she called the special number she was given for emergencies. Only to be used if someone was asking questions about Tip’s Blarney.

“Harper.”

She frowned. “Agent Smith or Agent Jones, please.”

There was silence, then several minutes later there was a click. “This is Agent Jones.”

“Two men came to my shop today. They were asking questions about Tip and another man.”

“Who?”

“That man you told me about. Mr. Maddox. The terrorist who was going to poison the river and kill all the fish.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“Of course. I got their business cards, too. They said they were from the FBI. Agent Mitch Bianchi and Agent Steven Donovan.”

Agent Smith had told her that a lot of people lie. She knew that. Her mama lied about a lot of things to her daddy. Mama didn’t think Lora knew, because she thought Lora was stupid, but Lora was smarter than that. She knew that her mama wasn’t at Book Club on Thursday nights.

“What did they say?”

“They asked if I remembered Mr. Maddox. I told them yes. He was in the bar. I told them the entire truth, except about the poison.”

“You did very good.”

“I did?”

“Yes. Lora, this is very important. If a woman comes to the bar who you don’t know, and starts asking about Mr. Maddox or a man named Frank Lowe, I want you to do the same thing to her that you did to Mr. Maddox. Can you do that for me?”

“Is she a terrorist too?”

“Yes. Her name is Claire O’Brien and she is very dangerous.”

“I promise. I can do that.”

“Thank you, Lora. There’s no one else we can trust with this very important assignment.”

She hung up and smiled, went upstairs, and closed her bedroom door. She locked it, even though she knew her daddy wouldn’t be home for a long time. She went to her closet, into the far back, behind all her shoeboxes. She pulled out the secret box where she kept things she didn’t want her daddy to find. She used to keep candy and the weekly magazines her daddy hated in the locked box. Now, the only thing inside was a large vial of poison.

Terrorists needed to die. And Lora knew how to do it.

Greg Abrahamson was much harder to get an audience with than Claire thought. He was now a detective, and she left several messages trying to track him down.

She didn’t want to talk to him on the phone. She needed ten minutes in person. People were more forthright in person.

Claire took the opportunity while waiting for Abrahamson to return her call to stop by Rogan-Caruso and do more research, this time on Don Collier. He’d canceled his classes and seemed to have disappeared, according to Agent Donovan.

She typed in search parameters and pulled up far more detailed records of Collier than she could from home.

He’d earned tenure last year at Davis. Now eleven years as a professor, took pro bono cases, yada yada. Big do-gooder on the surface. His affiliation with the Western Innocence Project was noteworthy. He’d been written up in the paper many times. Philanthropist this, noble that. Blah, blah. But the more she read about his good work, the more she wondered if she was wrong about him. She dug deeper, using her PI license to do an employment background check.