Chapter 15 #2
Javi stopped in the middle of starting the car engine and screwed his face up. He’d forgotten about those.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks. I need to…actually, tell me something. Did Saul ever mention a Miles to you?”
“Miles?” Sue said. “Probably. You’ll need to narrow it down to be sure. Is it a name, a measure of distance… ”
“Miles Sandoval?”
She took a second to answer. Because she needed to lie, Javi wondered, or just to be thorough. “I don’t think so. Not to me,” Sue said. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t know,” Javi said. “I’m just following a hunch. Tell me something, do you still talk to Lara?”
“Yes,” Sue said. “I’m not comfortable with that. I know things between you both are strained, and it’s not fair, but it’s also understandable. So…”
“Her son moved up to middle school this year, didn’t he?
” Javi asked as he turned the engine on and checked the time that flashed up on the dashboard.
He missed a bit of Sue’s reply as she transferred over to the Bluetooth, but the “mm-hmm” he caught sounded like agreement.
“I’m guessing she went with North County Charter, not Dolores Hartley Middle School. ”
They were both good schools, based on demographics, but since Lara had divorced Dolores’s grandson acrimoniously, Javi doubted she’d have signed up to see the name daily.
Sue coughed. “I think that information is outside of the remit of any current investigation.”
So yes.
“Tell Kincaid I need to talk to him,” Javi circled back to his original request. “It’s about what Joel found out.”
He hung up on Sue’s question and grabbed his sunglasses off the dash as he drove out of the lot and into the midday sun.
Lara pulled some notes out of her wallet and handed them to Drew.
“At least one thing that I’d recognize as a fruit,” she told him.
Drew nodded, gave Javi a shy smile, and took off toward the food truck parked at the far side of the playground.
“He doesn’t seem to hold a grudge,” Javi remarked.
“You saved him,” Lara said. She put her sunglasses on top of her head and gave Javi a look. “It was my other son you tried to put away.”
That wasn’t exactly…
How had Sue put it? Unavoidable and understandable. Also, forgiveness wasn’t what Javi needed today. He watched Lara as she repacked her huge floral bag with various parenting equipment and snack-related goods. His stomach rumbled as she picked up a package of Snackables.
“No time for lunch?” she asked, and pointedly ripped it open and took a bite herself.
“I was at the hospital,” Javi said. He left out the sandwich he’d eaten and thrown up. The details seemed undignified. Lara chewed, swallowed, and ran her tongue over her teeth. She looked at the open snack in her hand like she regretted the petty move, folded it over, and stashed it in her pocket.
“The missing agent. I saw it on the news.” She waved her hand at her phone. “The algorithms haven’t caught up that Dad’s dead. I still get all the FBI updates.”
Javi nodded. He took his jacket off and slung it over the bench. There was blood on the cuff of his shirt, and he caught Lara’s gaze on it before he rolled the sleeve up.
“It must have been hard,” he said. “You and Joel were friends.”
Lara blinked. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “She brought some of Dad’s stuff around to get it out of the office. Something you could have done.”
Javi glanced down. “I could,” he admitted. “Just seemed kind of final. You’d think that would have been the funeral, but—”
“You missed that.”
“I was at the funeral.”
“But not at the memorial,” Lara countered. She stopped, pinched her nose, and started again. “Stop interviewing me, Javi. If you want to know something, just ask me.”
“Will you answer me?”
“I don’t know,” Lara said. She crossed her arms. “You have to ask first. But, for the record, I wasn’t dodging your call. I’m just busy. So, what do you want to know?”
“Did your dad ever tell you why he stepped in for me?” he asked. “After Phoenix.”
Lara started to answer, but stopped as her brain caught up with the question. She unfolded her arms and looked disarmed.
“Oh, um, no,” she said. “Although that’s what Joel asked too, when she was dropping off Dad’s stuff. She wanted to know if my dad had ever worked with Everett Kincaid. He’s the FBI director in LA?”
“We’ve met,” Javi said.
“Well, yes,” Lara said. She sat down, her attention on tracking Drew and not really on the conversation.
“I suppose you would. I saw him on the news. I told her Dad didn’t talk to me much about work, but we worked out that Dad and Kincaid had both been in Atlanta at the same time.
Back when I was a kid, actually. Me and Mom were there too.
Funny how careers can start in the same place and end…
differently. Maybe that’s why Dad liked you?
There was a time he was slated to be the head of the FBI one day, you know.
Or at least running somewhere like LA. Instead, he ended up here. ”
“What happened?” Javi asked.
“I was a kid,” Lara said. “What did I know? At the time I thought it was the best thing that ever happened to us. We moved to California, even if it was Plenty and not someplace cool, and we got to stay here. No more moving or fighting or me being picked up from school by agents. It was only later I realized that Dad probably didn’t enjoy it quite as much, but it meant he kept his family so… ”
“What do you mean?” Javi asked.
Lara hesitated as she looked up at Javi.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to say that,” she said.
“I know how much you look up…looked up to Dad. And it was a long time ago. I’ve not even thought about it for years.
Although I guess, maybe that’s why he did want to give you a second chance. Because Mom gave him one.”
Javi had never met Felice Lee. He’d seen photos—there had always been one in the office and in Saul’s wallet—and he’d heard stories. She’d been a doctor, like her daughter. A good one. He didn’t know if she’d have liked him, but from how people talked about her, he’d have probably never found out.
“Fed and doctor, those are two demanding careers to fit in one marriage,” Javi said as he tried to feel his way through the conversation. “One of them is always going to have to take the back seat.”
“It wasn’t that,” Lara said. She took a deep breath and then sighed as she admitted, “I think Dad had an affair. I don’t know how serious it was, but Mom left him. For a while.”
That almost made sense. One person who’d hobbled their career to make up for bad choices in a relationship taking pity on another. If Javi squinted, he could be a bit disappointed in Saul, but still accept that as an explanation.
It left a few loose ends, though.
“Was it with Kincaid?” he asked.
Lara blinked at him. Her attention, for a second, not locked on the kid she’d almost lost. Surprise gave way to a blurt of laughter.
“No,” she said. “God, no. I mean, it was in Atlanta as it goes…but no. That guy would not be Dad’s type.
It was a junior agent. She used to come with her husband all the time.
They even babysat me sometimes. Then one day, they just stopped.
Dad stopped going to work, and he was drinking all the time.
Mom tried for a bit, and then one day she just took me and left.
It was a month before Dad came to find us.
They managed to work it out, but I think part of the deal was coming here.
So they’d not run into her again, so Dad wouldn’t be in any position to have that sort of relationship again.
I mean, there’s you, obviously, but you aren’t his type, and even if you were…
I don’t think Mom would have cared, since she was dead by then. She was a very practical woman.”
It still didn’t work for Javi.
Javi didn’t have the right to make that call. He might have respected Saul, but Lara had known the man her whole life. She had the right to claim to know him best.
She didn’t know the FBI, though.
No one had known about Javi and Kincaid, but people had known. And everyone had known about Javi and Eric. If Saul Lee had a history of fucking his subordinates, someone would have brought that up as a reason for him taking Javi under his wing.
“Did you ever hear about the agent again?” he asked.
Lara shook her head. “No,” she said. “When Dad died, I tried to find her, but I couldn’t. I found her husband, but he’d remarried, and he didn’t answer when I emailed. It didn’t seem in good taste to push. I’ve no idea what happened to Jessie Sandoval.”
…
Sandoval. The name had to have come from somewhere, Javi supposed.
“Was her husband called Miles?” Javi asked.
Lara gave him a confused look. “No, but…that’s my brother’s name. He died, but that’s what he was called. Miles. Why? Did Dad talk about him?”
No.
And again, that didn’t fit with Saul. He’d talked about his wife and his daughter and his career, but never his dead son and never the fact that he’d worked in the same office as Kincaid. Atlanta wasn’t New York. The office wasn’t big enough for them not to have crossed paths.
“Thanks,” Javi said. He reached out to pick up his jacket. “That’s really helpful.”
“It was?”
“Sorry.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I didn’t…I don’t want to be mad at you, I just am,” she said. “Joel said the same thing. No matter how many opportunities she gave you to be a fuckup, you kept just showing up and being a good agent. She was just scared to trust it.”
Javi hesitated halfway through pulling his coat on.
“I’m not sure what that says about me,” he said.
Lara shrugged as she stood up. “It says that you should appreciate Deputy Witte,” she said. “He sees what everyone else does, and he still trusts you.”
She walked away to join Drew in the sand. Javi stared moodily at the sepia-tinted scene as he finished getting his jacket back on.
How many lies would it take to get Cloister to join everyone else in doubting his intentions, he wondered. Hopefully more than one. Even a big one.