Laszlo Read online

  She sat back with the paper and read it over. She held out her hand for a pen and signed the bottom. As she did so, she stood, handed it back and said, “I hope you find out something soon. Just thinking this guy might have hired men to kill me makes me a little less willing to leave it alone.”

  “Any idea what triggered the attack?”

  She nodded. “Honestly I think it was coming here and making the complaint.”

  “When did you first make a complaint?”

  “A month ago, to my supervisor. Like I said, I was shuffled out of the department very quickly—as in within days. Everybody told me that I was making it up, asking me how could I damage a good Christian man’s career like that?”

  Laszlo understood. Often those who hid behind their pious attitudes were the worst offenders. As if it gave them a shield for acting badly.

  “First thing is, I’ll talk to him. Then I’ll talk to the rest of the staff and see if anybody knows anything.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said with a smile. She walked toward the door and turned. “I guess there’s nothing we can do but wait.”

  He nodded. “That’s true. I promise I’ll give you a call in another day or so.”

  She nodded and stepped outside.

  Laszlo turned and said, “I presume you don’t mind if we do some more digging?”

  “No. Just make sure you don’t cross the line,” Carson said, his voice hard. “Levi has vouched for you, says you’re one of the good guys, that you have a lot of skills he would like to use himself. What I don’t want to have happen here is you go all vigilante. Protect her, please, because too often we get called after the fact.” He tapped the file. “Last night’s attack is a case in point. And go ahead and dig, see if you come up with anything. But make sure you send it my way as soon as you find out something. And, if you don’t keep it legal, we don’t have a case. So, like I said before, don’t cross the line.”

  Laszlo reached out and shook his hand. “Won’t be happening. I’d like to see this guy go away for a long time.”

  “Just make sure that a long time doesn’t mean permanently.”

  Laszlo grinned. “I know the difference.” He turned and walked out.

  Minx waited in the hall for him. She raised a brow, inquiring, and he shrugged.

  “Just the usual warning about making sure I don’t interfere in police business.”

  She snorted. “That’s hardly an issue.”

  “I can understand his point though,” Laszlo said quietly. “What they can’t do is have guys taking off and going after suspects on their own. But it won’t stop me from hunting them down. If he wants to jump in at the last minute, then he can jump in. But if not”—he shrugged and gave her a grim smile—“you can bet I will.”

  Chapter 13

  Outside they got into the truck. She checked her watch. “Right on schedule. It’s lunchtime.”

  “Yeah, but it took a whole lot longer here than we expected.” Yet Laszlo just sat here instead of turning on the engine.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  He lifted a finger and pointed down the block. “Him.”

  She glanced over to see Geir walking toward them. “Where did he go?”

  “He was around, but he’s got a very interesting ability to hide among … anything. It’s not that he walks in the shadows, but he blends into groups, into people, into trees. He’s very much a chameleon.”

  “So, you should have called him Chameleon.”

  “We tried. But it got quickly shortened to Cami, and he took great offense to that,” Laszlo said with a delighted grin on his face.

  Just then Geir opened the door to the truck. She slid over to the center console, and he slipped in beside her.

  “I hear I’m not supposed to call you Cami,” she said. The look he shot her had her gaze widening as she moved instinctively closer to Laszlo. “Whoa, okay. I was just kidding.”

  “Nothing is funny about that,” he said quietly.

  Laszlo chuckled out loud, turned on the engine and pulled the truck out into traffic. “Ready for a burger?”

  “Ready to talk to Agnes,” Geir confirmed. “How was the police visit?”

  “They took my fingernails and pictures of my neck,” she said quietly. “And apparently my first case, the sexual harassment complaint, has been handed over to Carson, so he’s handling both now, as long as he can find proof that they’re connected.”

  “He’ll find it,” Geir said comfortably. “It’s what he does. Trust in the system.”

  “I want to. But I haven’t found much in any government system that’s worth trusting.”

  At that Geir let out a bark of laughter. “You got a point there.”

  “What about you guys? Did you find it worked in the military police or NCIS or whatever law enforcement is in your particular tribe?”

  “It worked. It was often rough justice and with very little tolerance for stepping outside orders or guidelines. But it worked.”

  “What’s one of the worst offenses?” Her gaze went from one to the other. “What would get you kicked out of the service?”

  “Lots of things that you would expect, like murder, rape, etc. But one of the things most people don’t think about is doing something that causes your team to lose trust in you. And that includes lying.”

  “Lying?”

  “For example,” Geir said, “one man was kicked out of the marines because he lied about falling asleep on his watch.”

  She stared at him in bewilderment. “So, an entire career was killed because he fell asleep?”

  “Not just fell asleep though,” Laszlo continued the story. “When he was asked if he’d fallen asleep, he lied. He said no. He was given one more chance to tell the truth, and he still said no, said he hadn’t fallen asleep. But, once faced with proof that he had fallen asleep, he capitulated and admitted it.”

  She sat here in confusion. “I don’t get it.”

  “He was kicked out not so much because he’d lied and not so much because he’d fallen asleep, but because, when he was given that chance to step up and admit what he’d done, he didn’t. And that meant nobody could trust him. And, in our world, trust is everything.”

  She digested that for several moments. “That would have been very hard for Mouse.”

  They looked at her in surprise.

  Geir asked, “Why?”

  “Because Mouse always said you had to be the bigger, better, fastest liar in order to survive in this world.” She caught the strange silence in the cab. “And we’re back again to thinking my Mouse can’t be your Mouse.” She shook her head. “I just don’t get it. The man you’re talking about is not the boy I knew.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” Geir said. “Think about it. That boy was abused, learned to lie, cheat, steal—I presume, since he was caught shoplifting. The man we knew was honest, capable, durable. He took whatever was thrown at him, and he kept on going.”

  “Mouse had that adaptability,” she said slowly. “He did take whatever was thrown at him, and he did bend to the wind. And he always managed to stand back up again. But he swore that the only way to survive in life was by cheating and stealing, but particularly by lying.” She glanced at each of them. “Have you ever considered the Mouse you knew was living a big lie? That, even if he was my Mouse, between being my Mouse and your Mouse, he was something else, someone else?”

  This time the silence went on even longer.

  She nodded. “It just occurred to me, as we’re dissecting these two personas of the same man, maybe there’s a third one as well. One that bridges the gap between them.” She looked at Laszlo, then Geir. “When did he become a SEAL? When did you guys first meet him?”

  “Only a year before our accident,” Geir said, his voice thoughtful. “He was the youngest of all of us.”

  “And that’s a very interesting concept,” Laszlo said. “Maybe it wasn’t two separate Mouses. Maybe it was one person, playing three versions
of Mouse.”

  “But that would imply that each iteration of who he was, was just as powerful as the first,” Geir said. “We’ve certainly seen personalities change, grow, become something else. And sometimes morph into something very different than what they first started out being.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “So, the question really is, what would it take for the child Mouse to turn into the man Mouse who would then turn into being the Mouse you knew?”

  “Whatever it was, maybe we should be thanking him,” Laszlo said. “Because the Mouse we knew was a good man.”

  She wanted to believe that. She really did. At the same time, she just wasn’t so sure. Because what if the man they knew was just a sneakier, cleverer, more brilliant man version of what she knew as a child?

  Laszlo drove into the parking lot to find Agnes’s place completely packed. He shook his head. “Okay, so this might explain how they stay in business.”

  “Drive around to the back,” Minx said quietly. “There’s usually parking back there for one of us deemed as special customers.”

  Sure enough, they drove around to the very back, and between two vehicles was a spot. He pulled into it carefully as it wasn’t very big. “Do they keep it for you?”

  “I’m only one of easily thirty people they keep it open for.”

  “That many?” Geir asked.

  “It could be twice that by now. I was gone for a lot of years. But every time I come around here, it’s been empty.”

  “Good.” Geir hopped out, the others doing the same.

  As they walked into the restaurant, Laszlo realized the parking lot was indicative of the table situation. “There isn’t any place to sit.”

  But she walked ahead of them without a care, sitting at the bar. There were three stools. But it wasn’t private.

  As they sat down on either side of her, Laszlo said, “Hardly a way to talk.”

  “I know, but a table will clear eventually, and we can take it then.”

  Agnes came over and gave each of them an intense look. But she wrapped an arm around Minx until she caught sight of her throat. Her voice deepened as she snapped, “Did you catch that asshole?”

  Minx opened her arms and stepped into a nice big hug from Agnes. “Laszlo did.”

  Agnes looked at Laszlo, but he shrugged self-consciously and accepted a cup of coffee from Bart. Agnes stepped back, reached around with one arm, and, with a long squeeze, she hugged Laszlo too. “Thank you.”

  Laszlo heard such a deep-felt emotion in her voice. As he glanced at Minx, her eyes glistened. “Maybe this is why Minx came back home. Because you were somebody who cared for Minx,” Laszlo said to Agnes.

  When Minx felt the tears burning the corner of her eyes, she quickly wiped them away and said, “Geir found the second guy.”

  Agnes’s gaze turned to her. “Two of them?”

  Minx nodded. “Both the men were at the coffee shop I ran to after calling Laszlo, and they followed me home.”

  Agnes looked around, took one look at Geir and said, “Thank you.”

  Geir, much to Minx’s amusement, made a similar shoulder shrug, a self-conscious reaction to the affection or the accolade.

  “We’ll get you some food really quick. And then I want to hear the details.”

  Realizing she had forgotten to put her scarf back around her neck, Laszlo picked up her scarf and held it out to her. She quickly arranged it to hide the worst of the marks on her throat before the rest of the crowd noticed. He understood she wasn’t the kind to attract attention. The problem was, she was damn pretty. But then, with her upbringing, she’d probably developed a second sense of trouble following any undue attention. Same for Mouse.

  As if mirroring his thoughts, she said, “The thing about Mouse, he was very streetwise.”

  “And?” Laszlo asked.

  “Whatever it is that happened to him, he should have seen it coming. He was very aware that way.”

  “But he was also looking to be loved,” Geir said. “So, if somebody in his inner circle turned around and betrayed him, that’s a different story altogether.”

  “I hope it wasn’t. But you’re right. He was looking to be loved. Whether that was sexual, romantic or on a friendship level.”

  “We need to have a talk with Lance.”

  “Sure, but like I said, he disappeared off the face of the earth, so chances are that won’t happen.”

  “But that doesn’t change the fact that sex is the easiest way to get under somebody’s skin.” Geir took a sip of his coffee and continued. “Sex is the easiest way to get close to a person and to get through their defenses.”

  “I get that, but I’d sure hate for that to have happened to him.”

  “It already did once,” Laszlo said. “A pedophile out there has a lot to answer for.”

  “And yet we still don’t have any answers.”

  Laszlo pulled out his phone and checked his messages. “Nothing yet.”

  It was frustrating. They’d sent in a ton of information, but they weren’t getting much back in response to that added intel. But then he had no way to know what was going on in Erick’s world either. On the off-chance he might get some response with another reminder, he sent a quick text message, saying, Any news?

  The answer came back quickly. No. Still working on it. No sign of the pedophile. No sign of your Lance dude. We’re getting backgrounds on both men. And we have a persona made up on the handler. But zero history. As if it was just created for the job.

  Laszlo quickly relayed that information to the other two. Both shook their heads in disgust. “In other words, he’s been doing it for a while.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you said something about an Afghanistan link?”

  “No, that was with our original problem. But we still haven’t heard anything from him either.”

  She looked confused, and he wanted to leave it that way. Enough was going on right now without adding all that mess to it. But he exchanged glances with Geir and saw the question in his eyes. He shook his head.

  Laszlo sent another message to Erick. Anything else coming out of the weapons dealer?

  I’ll ask Ice and Tesla.

  Laszlo leaned forward and said to Geir, “He’ll check if there was anything on that bug we planted.”

  “Right. Well, at least there’s that little bit. What we should have done was gotten an easy way to communicate with that rebel leader,” he said. “At least then we’d have a way to follow-up on whether somebody in his own army was bad news.”

  Laszlo’s phone rang, and he answered it. “Erick, what’s up?”

  “Just talked to Tesla. She got something out of the bug we left at the arms dealer in Afghanistan. She’s been trying to run it through translators and confirm the intel. But it looks like the weapons dealer’s number one supplier—the rebel leader we met in Kabul—went through a cleaning up of his house. A large grave was found with ten bodies—all suspected to be his men.”

  “Ten?”

  “Which, if you think about it, our little guy could easily have been setting up his own minor army to take over the big guys. You know for a fact that, every time you gain power, you watch out for those below you coming to knock you off.”

  “Right. But there’s no way to know how or why, or whether it’s the asshole we’re thinking of.”

  “The arms dealer is nervous. He knows some of the men who died, but he’s not sure why they were taken down or by who exactly.”

  “Presumably because they were trying to overthrow the rebel leader, the boss man in charge of that area.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Can we confirm who was killed? Is it the buyer, the man who set up the mine?”

  “No. But we’ve got somebody over there that’s on it.”

  “Keep me in the loop.” He hung up the phone.

  Just then Bart arrived with large platters of fries and burgers. Laszlo stared at them in delight. “I don’t know how you do it, but th
ese burgers are dynamite.”

  And true to style, a salad arrived in front of Minx. Laszlo glanced over at the supersized burger plate with fries and her second plate with the salad. “Are you going to eat it all?”

  She chuckled. “Watch me.”

  To his amazement she did. But Geir once again couldn’t finish his fries, although, by the time Laszlo was almost done with his own, he wasn’t sure he could help Geir out either. With multiple pots of coffee sloshing through his system, the food settled in nicely. Now what they needed to do was talk to Agnes. And that would mean waiting until the rush was over. And so they did.

  They finally moved to a table in the back, and, with only one table in the front still occupied, Agnes sat down beside them. “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re looking for a handler,” Laszlo said quietly. “The two men who attacked Minx were hired, but there was a middleman. And this handler is someone these two men have worked with for years.”

  She leaned forward as she thrummed her fingers on the table. “And you want to know who he is?”

  “Do you know who he is? The only name we got was Bill Fenders.”

  “It’s not his real name.” Agnes glanced over at Minx. “You know him too.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I do?”

  “You do.”

  Minx shook her head. “I don’t have any connections anymore to that life.”

  “I didn’t say a connection. But you’ll know the handler. He didn’t start that way. He went underground, and he stayed underground.”

  “Who is he?”

  Agnes glanced around, but nobody was here now. Then she said, “He was very close to Mouse.”

  Laszlo’s gut clenched. In a soft tone he said, “Lance Smithson?”

  Agnes nodded. “Bingo.”

  “In other words, he’s so far underground that he doesn’t care anymore? He knows he won’t get caught.” Laszlo leaned forward. “But why would he let anybody go after Minx?”

  “A couple reasons. Lance hated Minx because she tried to break them up.”