Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

She didn’t answer. That was fine. He’d had enough of this conversation, anyway.

He took the pillow from his side of the bed and carried it down the hall. He was pissed off now. The drive and his recreational outing with Rebecca had cooled his jets, and now he was all tense and edgy again.

He lay in bed, eyes shut, and took himself back to Rebecca’s bedroom, his hands working her over, her mouth issuing soft grunting protests that rose gradually to screams. Muffled screams, choked off by the pillow she pressed to her face so her neighbors wouldn’t hear-but screams, nonetheless.

Eyes closed, he shivered with pleasure, and unaccountably he thought of Abby Sinclair.

He would like to make that bitch scream, too.

He really would.

Abby was a downward facing dog, or more exactly she had arched her body into the yoga position of that name, when her cell phone rang. Her first thought was that Tess was calling with news on the witness protection thing. It was only eight o’clock in the morning, though. A little early to be hearing about that.

She pushed herself to a standing position and answered. “Abby Sinclair.”

It wasn’t Tess. It was Reynolds’ assistant, the ice princess, Rebecca somebody-or-other, who’d rejected Abby’s sisterly appeal. “Please hold for-”

“Congressman Reynolds,” Abby finished. “I know the drill.”

Evidently the congressman was too important to dial his own phone. She waited for a half minute, wondering how much she should reveal about last night’s less-than-successful enterprise, until Reynolds came on the line.

Surprisingly, he didn’t ask any questions. “I’ll be in L.A. for lunch today at the Brayton,” he said without preamble, and with none of his synthetic charm.

Abby was confused. “You’re asking me to lunch?”

“No.” His tone registered impatience with her stupidity. “I’m having lunch with some contributors. I’ll meet you at the hotel beforehand. The rendezvous court, eleven thirty. Go through the lobby and the galleria, past the elevators, and you’re there. Got it?”

“There’s not much I can tell you so far.” And there was even less she wanted to tell.

“I want any information you have.”

Click, and the call was over.

Abby was beginning to seriously dislike this man. What was worse, she was beginning to distrust him.

There might be some connection between Andrea Lowry and Jack Reynolds, but she didn’t think it had anything to do with housekeeping.

The Brayton Hotel was downtown. L.A.’s central library was right across the street. It had been a while since Abby had done any research there, the Internet having rendered it largely unnecessary to comb the stacks. But there were some items she couldn’t find online. On its Web site, the L.A. Times archived its articles as far back as 1985, but included no photos. It was the photos that interested her. The library would have the complete editions-text and pix-on microfilm.

She decided to head downtown early.

It took her ninety minutes of scrolling through microfilm, but she found it.

An article in the Los Angeles Times, dated July 14, 1991, about Orange County District Attorney John Reynolds. He hadn’t been Jack then. The populist persona appeared shortly afterward, upon his entry into politics.

The story was a puff piece, a human interest item on the D.A. at home. A tough man on the job, but tender with his kids, ages seven and five. There was a description of Reynolds flying a kite with the children on a windy bluff overlooking the ocean. Daddy at home making pancakes-“griddlecakes,” as he charmingly called them-on Sunday morning before packing the kids off to church. His wife Nora speaking of her hubby’s soft side.

But not to soften up the D.A. too much, there was also much talk of his stern dedication to the law. Asked if he had any hobbies, he answered, “I like to put people in jail.” It was reported that he said it with a smile.

Buried in the story was a brief acknowledgment of the real reason for the sudden interest in the life of a district attorney-rumors of a run for political office next year. The Times story was obviously a way of testing the waters, and of putting out a favorable impression of the potential candidate.

None of which mattered. All that interested Abby was the photograph accompanying the article. The Reynolds clan at home-husband, wife, kids… and their housekeeper, Rose Moran.

Rose was in the background of the shot, serving up a plate of hot dogs at a family dinner in the backyard. In the fuzzy black-and-white photo her face was hard to make out. Abby fiddled with the knobs that controlled magnification and focus until the woman was centered in the microfilm reader’s blue crosshairs in blurry close-up. She had a sharp, thin face with narrow lips and close-set eyes.

Not Andrea Lowry. Even the passage of fifteen years could not turn this pinched bone structure into Andrea’s broader, squarer face.

There was no way Reynolds could have looked at Andrea Lowry and seen Rose Moran. His story was a lie. As lies went, it was a pretty good one, but not quite good enough.

Abby hated being lied to. It really frosted her corn flakes.

She fed a coin into the slot and printed out the page with the photo. Suddenly she was no longer worried about what she would say to Jack Reynolds. She had questions for him.

And she wanted answers.

Tess didn’t want to think about Abby. She wanted to forget she’d gotten the phone call last night. She wanted to put the whole thing out of her mind and make it go away.

This attitude sustained her during the first hour and a half of her workday, which began at eight fifteen with the weekly squad supervisors meeting. Her self-control continued when she returned to her office. It lasted long enough to allow her to dictate two letters and review three reports on ongoing investigations, sign out some mail, and initial a variety of paperwork, transferring it from her in-box to her out-box.

None of this was very glamorous, nothing at all like a day in the life an FBI agent in the movies, and yet she took a secret thrill in even the more mundane aspects of her job. She never took her position for granted. To be in charge of a regional field office was a major accomplishment for any agent, rarer still for an agent who was not yet forty, and almost unprecedented for an agent lacking a Y chromosome. Only fifteen percent of special agents were female, and before Tess there had been just one female SAC, whose resentful male colleagues had dubbed her Queen Bee.

There were plenty of agents who looked back fondly on the Hoover years, when women had been permitted in the Bureau only as support staff. Some of those nostalgic types were the old guard, dwindling as they hit the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, but most were too young to remember Hoover as anything other than an unsmiling face in one of the official portraits that hung in FBI offices everywhere. Still, they kept his traditions alive, including the casual, almost jocular misogyny that had been part of the Bureau’s culture from the start.

In her days as a street agent, Tess had heard herself referred to as a skirt, a split tail, and-her personal favorite-a breast fed. She tried not to take offense. A certain amount of ribbing and rough talk was normal in law enforcement. In theory the Office of Professional Responsibility could be summoned to investigate sexually derogatory comments, but the policy was rarely enforced. No agent, female or otherwise, wanted to be known as a troublemaker who couldn’t take a joke-not in an institution that valued loyalty to the team above almost any other virtue. Anyway, she was an SAC now, at one of the country’s larger field offices, and nobody called her a split tail these days. At least, not to her face.