Part 1 The Dash to New York #3
Ajax (m, 25)
Cassandra (f, 23)
Alexei (m, 6)
Katya (f, 5)
‘Not that weird,’ I said. ‘It just looks like he had a thing for the Trojan War: Hector, Helen and the next two, Ajax and Cassandra. But for the last two, Russian names, I presume at the behest of their mother.’
Heidi shook her head.
‘Rich. Famous. Handsome. Oversexed but well read. And now—poof—he’s vanished and five detectives are called in. This is strange, Sam.’
‘Yeah,’ I said slowly. ‘Very strange.’
The second sheet of paper listed the five detectives who had been summoned to New York.
It read:
REQUESTED DETECTIVES
XIAO, Zhang
(New York, NY)
Age: 61
Nationality: American
- Based in Chinatown;
- Solved kidnapping of the son of China’s UN Ambassador and kept it out of the media.
WOODS, Montgomery
(New York, NY)
Age: 33
Nationality: American
- Cyber expert; recovered $88 million in bitcoin from Russian hacker farm;
- Known as ‘the Tech Detect’.
EVERHART, Juno
(Chicago, IL)
Age: 36
Nationality: American
- Ex-Marine; former military criminal investigator;
- Often does work for military and government.
GARRETT, Merritt
(Newark, NJ)
Age: 57
Nationality: American
- Found and rescued the kidnapped heir of Whitman family;
- Located and killed the ‘Funhouse Killer’ in Atlantic City; was wounded in the confrontation.
SPEEDMAN, Samuel (Ph.D.)
(Houston, TX)
Age: 38
Nationality: American
- Solved the ‘Southern Families’ case;
- Neurodivergent.
‘Hey, Juno Everhart’s on this list!’ Heidi said. ‘I’ve read about her. She is one bad-ass chick. You’re in good company.’
‘Neurodivergent?’ I said, frowning at my entry. That was a bit judgemental. ‘Whoever wrote this didn’t mention any unusual traits of the other detectives. Why only say that about me?’
‘Sam,’ Bill said, ‘a low-level FBI bureaucrat wrote this for high-level FBI bureaucrats to read, that’s all. Don’t let it bother you.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s still a dick move,’ Heidi said. ‘We love you just as you are, little man.’
An hour into our flight, I asked Bonnie if she was FBI.
‘No, I’m just a regular little ol’ flight attendant,’ she said. Her accent was pure Alabama. ‘Like the pilots, I come with the plane and serve whoever leases it.’
‘Which is the FBI for this jet?’
‘For the last year or so, yeah.’
The downward inflection of her tone caught my interest.
‘The FBI aren’t the nicest customers?’ I probed.
Bonnie glanced around. The two FBI agents travelling with us were at the other end of the cabin.
‘The directors and senior agents are okay,’ she said softly.
‘But the junior agents can be world-class assholes. Had one on board the other day, shuttling from D.C. to New York, a cocky special agent named Hooper who “accidentally” brushed his hand across my ass and then asked if I wanted to meet him at his hotel. I’ve seen plenty of sleazes in my time and he was a total douche. I declined.’
I told her I thought she’d fit in well at Southwest Airlines but she said the pay was better here.
I settled in for the rest of the flight, gazing out the porthole beside my enormous leather seat.
One thing stuck in my mind.
I’d been named by whoever had kidnapped Aristo King as one of America’s five best detectives.
I tried to rationalise how this could have happened.
I mean, it wasn’t like there were lists of these things.
Then I realised why.
It was probably because I’d become a little bit famous.
I gotta tell you, fame might look fun but after a while it wears pretty thin.
After I solved that case in the South and exposed all those rich families, a bunch of newspapers and websites did profiles on me (almost all of them were titled ‘The Detective’ because that had been the name of my one-man detective agency when that case had started; headline writers are very unoriginal).
All of the attention, of course, peaked with the feature about that case which appeared on 60 Minutes.
After that, my life changed.
I got famous.
It was very peculiar.
Some of it was nice: strangers would make eye contact as they passed me on the street and nod respectfully.
Some of it was amusing: drunk university students would call out my name and run over to high-five me.
Some of it was downright strange: pretty girls would give me their phone numbers or—even more strangely—send nude pictures of themselves to me via the office email account.
(At first, Heidi thought this was appalling, but then she started admiring their physiques. As for me, being skinny and with thick glasses, for my whole life, I have not been the recipient of unprompted female attention, so I found it very odd.
Besides, I have a girlfriend now, so I just sent all those emails to the trash folder. I think Heidi kept some.)
And, yes, you heard that right: I have a girlfriend!
Special Agent Audrey Mills of the FBI. We met during the Southern case and began dating soon after it concluded, and we are, I’m proud to say, still dating.
I’m 38 and Audrey is my first ever girlfriend, so I’m eager not to mess it up.
Audrey is 36, very smart, very attractive—curly blonde hair, blue eyes, cappuccino complexion—very fit and very devoted to her career at the Bureau.
She’s a catch by any definition and according to Heidi, ‘so far out of your league, little man, I’m starting to think you did a deal with the Devil to nab her.’
Being intelligent, good-looking, athletic and capable, Audrey has never been short of male attention and she was even married once, but that was for a very brief time to another FBI agent. He was from a rich family and went to Yale.
(Detective note: how do you find out if someone you’ve just met went to an Ivy League university? Answer: you don’t have to. Within thirty seconds of meeting them, they’ll tell you.)
Anyway, two years after they were married, Audrey found out her husband had been cheating on her—with her best friend—so she divorced him.
One truly strange part of Audrey’s divorce was that her parents, astoundingly, still liked her ex and, to this day, urged Audrey to forgive him and take him back.
(‘He’s a good boy from a good family,’ her mother told her. ‘He just made a mistake, that’s all,’ her father said.)
I’ve never met Audrey’s ex-husband so I can’t comment on what kind of person he is or what his family is like, but I think he must have been out of his mind.
I would never cheat on Audrey because (a) she’s an amazing person; (b) it would be mean; and (c) she’s so far out of my league even I wonder sometimes if I talked in my sleep and inadvertently did a deal with the Devil to nab her.
Audrey’s parents—her father is Black, her mom is white—live in Florida, to be close to her brother who has two young children.
I met them once and I think they found me a bit weird.
(I actually overheard her father say, ‘That boy is weird.’ Remember: detective.)
Audrey’s niece, Marnie, is nine years old and she worships Audrey. They read Nancy Drew books together because Audrey says reading Nancy Drew books inspired her to go into law enforcement.
Anyway, in four days it was going to be our second Christmas together as boyfriend and girlfriend and I wanted to give Audrey a better gift than I did last year.
Back then, I gave her a black leather belt with a rectangular silver buckle.
It seemed like a regular buckle but it actually folded open, containing within it a secret compartment, one that was big enough to hold a credit card or a key.
I’d found it on a travel website and thought it was very sensible. Audrey had laughed when I’d given it to her even though it wasn’t meant to be funny.
She wore it sometimes but not a lot, which made me think maybe it had been a poor fashion choice on my part (see above: ‘no God-dang fashion sense at all’).
This year I’m giving her a first edition of the first Nancy Drew novel, The Secret of the Old Clock. It cost me $539. I think she’ll like it more than the belt.
Audrey divides her time between the Bureau’s Dallas Field Office and its Counterintelligence Division in Washington, D.C., which was where she was when I’d been woken up in Houston.
Oh, and we have sex.
Quite often.
It’s really awesome.
I’ve actually changed in a few other significant ways since that last case.
For instance, I now own a pair of tan-coloured jeans.
It’s a bold fashion choice, I know—all of my other jeans are blue—and to be honest I’m still getting used to it.
But on a recent trip to the mall with Darla from Hooters, Darla said I needed them to go with my new dark brown jacket [see below].
(Note 1: On that same shopping trip, Darla tried to get me to buy a Houston Astros ball cap but I refused because in 2017 the Astros cheated, ultimately winning the World Series because of their cheating. I don’t like cheaters.)
(Subnote 1 to Note 1: I did once wear an Astros ball cap during an incident at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston involving agents of the Saudi Arabian government—I was also wearing a gas mask and a bathrobe; long story—but that was a disguise.
I was probably caught on security cameras on that occasion, so anybody who saw me in that Astros cap would’ve taken me as a fan of cheaters, which made it an excellent disguise.)
When I told Darla all this, she just shrugged and handed me a brown ‘Ariat’ ball cap since ‘it looks like a Texas hat’ and I bought that one instead.
I also wear different sneakers these days.
They’re from the Hoka brand and they are absolutely sensational.
I saw Bill Brewster wearing a pair one day.
In short, they have really thick soles that are super comfortable. Honestly, it’s like walking on air. I wear them everywhere.
(Well, almost everywhere.
My new Hoka sneakers—bought at the mall with Bill in Darla’s absence—did not go down well with Darla at all.
‘Darlin’! Why on God’s green earth are you wearin’ those hideous shoes!? They’re old man’s sneakers!’