CHAPTER EIGHT
“God,” David said. “Faith is gonna kill me.”
Jeff Hammerton nodded slowly. “Yeah. You definitely looked better with hair.”
David rolled his eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy.”
David wasn't completely shaved, just cropped really close on the sides with just enough length on top that he wouldn't look like a skinhead.
He wore his old pair of glasses with their thicker lenses and squared-off rims. He wore a track jacket over a plain white t-shirt and baggy jeans over an old pair of sneakers that he had buried in his closet and forgotten about.
He wore a ballcap to complete the outfit and walked with a slight swagger in his gait.
He'd lower his voice a little when he talked, and the end result would be someone who looked only vaguely similar to Dr. David Friedman.
Which would no doubt cause Faith to have a fit.
“It’ll be better when you grow out your beard,” Greg Rogers offered.
“Faith is really gonna kill me if I grow out my beard.”
“No, the CIA is really gonna kill you if they figure out you’re still snooping,” Greg reminded him. “If they don’t already kill you for the crap you’ve given them so far. Since you’re not smart enough to let this go, the next best thing you can do is not look like yourself.”
David understood the logic, but he would have to go to work eventually.
He had patients to see tomorrow. He might be able to foist a day or even two off on the other staff veterinarians, but sooner or later, he’d need to walk into the office with his tweeny-bopper haircut, and it would be clear pretty quickly that he was still Dr. Friedman, just with a different hairstyle.
I didn’t think this through. Once again, I didn’t think this through.
“Hey, it’s not so bad,” Jeff said. “Chicks dig change. Sometimes.”
David sighed. There was nothing he could do about it now. "Well, it was either this or sit on my ass. How about we stop torturing ourselves, looking at me, and go talk to Mrs. Fenniman?"
“I say that’s a plan,” Jeff agreed. “But we’re taking my car. No offense, but that dinky little thing looks like it was designed for hobbits.”
David had bought a Mazda CX-30 to replace the Subaru Outback that the assassin from the 93rd Testing Brigade had run off the road. It was smaller than the Outback for sure, and since Jeff and Greg were both large men, he understood their desire to take Jeff’s Chevy Suburban instead.
That, and it was probably a bad idea for him to show up in his own vehicle with a license plate registered to his home address.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
He placed his ballcap on his head, advertising his proud support of the Washington Nationals baseball team, and the three of them hopped into Jeff’s Suburban and headed north to Fairfax.
David looked through the window as the idyllic Virginia countryside passed by.
The trees hadn’t reached their full summer coat yet, but the redbud and serviceberry trees were in full display, decorating the roadside with pink, purple, and white.
The hummingbirds wouldn’t arrive for a few more weeks, but bees flitted between the blooms, busily gathering nectar and in the process distributing pollen and bringing about the next generation of the forest.
It was a far cry from the concrete jungle of Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania had its idyllic locales too, and a hop, skip, and a jump north was the third-largest concrete jungle in the United States, but here the modern world was a guest of nature, not its master.
It felt almost sacrilegious that a place like this should hide some of the most disturbing crimes David had ever heard of.
“You good back there, boss?”
“Yeah,” David replied to Jeff. “Just thinking about the 93rd.”
“That why you look like you want to hurt someone?”
David chuckled. “It’s just that dogs are innocent. Not that people aren’t, but… I mean, dogs don’t know any better. They can’t know better. I don’t know. I’m rambling.”
“No, I feel you. Dogs rely on people the way children do. They love people the way children do: with their whole heart. They haven’t learned about evil people or how to avoid them. It’s hard to see people take advantage of that.”
David thought of the way Turk looked at Faith, the complete devotion in his soft brown eyes. “Yes. Exactly.”
Then he thought of the way Sierra looked at Staff Sergeant Whitaker, the haunted despair, the fear, the resignation. Maybe dogs understood more than it seemed.
But no one was looking out for them. Not really. There were groups trying to help dogs in general, but even organizations like PETA and the SPCA didn’t really address the issue of cruelty to dogs. Not effectively, anyway.
Or maybe it’s that most people, when you come right down to it, don’t care.
His lips thinned. He cared. He would do something about it. He would take the risk where no one else would.
“I figure when we reach the house, we’ll drop him off, then pull kitty-corner and watch,” Greg said. “If we see anyone, we’ll get some plates and descriptions and get an ID. Then maybe we can put pressure on the CIA.”
“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” Jeff said. “Plates and descriptions, yes, but I think we need to talk to Faith and SAC Prince before we move forward. I heard Prince has contacts in the NSA who might be able to help.”
“Right. Good idea.”
David smiled. He wasn’t alone. Other people were taking the risk. He had a whole team of people rallying around him, around Sierra and the other dogs. “Thank you guys. I really appreciate you helping out.”
“Don’t mention it,” Greg replied. “My sister has a dog, A Lhasa Apso. Thing sheds like a bastard and doesn’t understand that it’s okay to not bark sometimes.” Jeff chuckled at that. “But it’s the cutest damned thing you’ve ever seen. Likes to sit on my lap when I visit.”
“Yeah, they’re cuties,” David agreed.
The trio shared stories about the various dogs that had touched their lives at one point or another.
David felt a growing affinity for the big, gruff FBI agents.
They came from opposite worlds, but they were united together against a common threat.
A bully that, like other bullies, felt that might made right.
They were going to show the CIA how wrong they were.
The car pulled to a stop behind a beautiful three-story Colonial Revival house that sat on a yard resplendent with geraniums, bluebells, and Dutchman’s breeches.
The wide, pantaloon-shaped Dutchman’s breeches appeared to be a favorite of the bees, and a pleasant buzzing accompanied David on his way to the front door.
He took a deep breath, pushed it through his mouth, and knocked on the door. A few seconds later, it opened a crack, and hooded hazel eyes peered through at him. “Hello?” a cautious female voice said.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” David said. “My name’s Dr. Allen. I was a friend of your husband’s.”
David hadn't considered his opening line until right then. The moment he said he was a friend of Dr. Fenniman's, he wished he had put more thought into it before arriving at her house. Daisy Fenniman's eyes went blank, and she made to close the door. "I'm sorry, now's a bad time."
“Wait.”
He put his hands on the door, and Daisy hissed, “Get off my porch. I’ll call the police.”
“Listen, I’m investigating his disappearance,” David said. “I think…” He hesitated. He didn’t want to let her know that he suspected her husband was still alive. “I think it might be related to a case I’m working on.”
“Now? Six months later?”
“Yes,” David said lamely. “Can we just talk for a few minutes?”
Daisy looked hard at him. “What did you say your name was?”
David thought for a moment, then decided to risk being honest. “I said it was Dr. Allen, but that’s not true. It’s probably better if you don’t know my real name.”
“You know my real name.”
“I know. I just…” He scrambled for a reason to conceal his identity that didn’t sound crazy and couldn’t come up with one. God, I’m really bad at this.
Daisy sighed and stepped back. She opened the door, revealing a petite, dark-skinned woman in her early forties. Her face was lined, and her eyes red-rimmed. She wore a floral print dress that flattered her figure but somehow accentuated the pain in her expression.
Behind that pain was a practiced hardness that reminded David of Faith when they’d first met. This woman wore a thick shell to protect her vulnerable inner self from a predatory world.
“Come in,” she said. “If we’re gonna talk, then we should do it inside.”
David smiled. “Thank you. I really app—”
“Don’t thank me. If you knew what was good for you, you’d let this go.”
David followed her into the home. The foyer was expansive and decorated with marble statues of revolutionary war heroes, or did David guess by their tricorn hats and frilled collars. He wasn't sure exactly who they were.
Past the foyer, the décor became decidedly more homely.
The parlor into which she escorted him possessed furniture of good quality but modest expense, gray stitched cloth sofa and chair around a carved ash coffee table that sat atop a quilted yarn rug.
The walls were bare, but nails and mounts remained where pictures had once been hung.
“You can sit if you want,” Daisy said in a voice that said she’d prefer he didn’t.
"I'll stand, thank you," David said. "I won't be here long."
Daisy nodded and took a seat herself. She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag before blowing the smoke directly in front of her.
The fresh smoke lifted the acrid aroma of stale smoke from the room, and David spied an ashtray on the floor in front of the couch.
That habit would take decades off of Daisy’s life, but David guessed she had bigger problems to worry about right now.
“I don’t know what Richard was working on,” she said, “but whatever it was, it had him out at odd hours and coming home haunted.”
The look in Sierra’s eyes flitted across David’s face again. “He never talked about it?”
“No, never did.” Daisy took another drag on the cigarette. “It was top-secret stuff for the Marine Corps. I guess with dogs because he kept coming home with dog hair on his coat. I’m allergic to dogs, and I’d always get a sneezing fit when he came home.”
“Where did he work? Do you know?”
“Nope. Never told me that either.” She puffed her cigarette again. Her expression was still hard, but more of the pain showed through her reddened eyes.
“I understand he was killed in a car accident?”
Daisy scoffed. “Yeah. That’s what they say.”
“You don’t believe it?”
Daisy chuckled bitterly. She drew deeply from her cigarette, then bent low and tamped the butt out in the ashtray at her feet.
Smoke trailed from her mouth and nostrils as she sat.
“I believe that Richard got himself into trouble. I don’t know how or with who.
I just know that the last three months of his life, he came home wide-eyed and furtive, like he was sneaking around and just waiting to get caught.
I’d believe he was stepping out on me except he was also more…
” She reddened slightly. “Well, he was very… excitable. I guess that’s maybe why I didn’t think so much about it.
I told myself there’s no way he can be in trouble if he comes home and makes love to me like that every night.
” She hmphed and pulled another cigarette from the pack.
“Easier to believe that than the truth, I guess.”
David decided to be blunt. “Do you believe he was killed, ma’am?”
Daisy met his eyes. Moisture wetted hers, but he wasn’t sure if they were tears of grief or irritation from the cigarette smoke.
“I think he got himself into trouble,” she repeated.
“I think he tried to get out of it, and it caught him just the same.” She lit her next cigarette and asked through the side of her mouth, “Are you in trouble, Dr. not-Allen?”
“I’m hoping to put a stop to some trouble,” he replied.
She laughed, a short, sharp bark that ended when she took her first drag on the cigarette. “Yeah. Aren’t we all.”
David got the sense his welcome was wearing thin. “Ma’am, is there anything at all you can tell me about Richard or his work that might have contributed to his… accident.”
Daisy paused a second. Then she met David's eyes. Hers were cold now, bitter, slightly contemptuous, and utterly devoid of pity. "Richard didn't know when to leave well enough alone. You don't either. I can see that. You've got the same earnest look he had."
She took another puff, then said, “Take my advice, Dr. not-Allen. Let it go. Whatever it is, let it go.” She took a third puff, then added, “Now get out of my house.”
David bowed slightly. “Thank you for your time.”
“Yep.”
The brightness of the day surprised him when he stepped out of Daisy Fenniman’s house. He realized then just how dim she kept the place.
But that made sense. She was hiding. Darkness was better for that.
David didn’t blame her for hiding, but he couldn’t do the same.
He couldn’t leave those innocent dogs to suffer while he cowered in the dark.
He hadn’t learned anything useful today, but he was gaining patience.
He would keep digging. He would keep looking.
Slowly but surely, he would find what he needed.
Then he would put a stop once and for all to the 93rd Testing Brigade.