Warner Agee’s laptop, a Dell several years old, was connected to a small printer, both devices plugged into the wall. Cords ran across the carpet, printouts piled and scattered, making it hard to walk without tripping or stepping on paper.
Scarpetta suspected Agee had worked nonstop in the hotel room Carley apparently had rented for him. He’d been busy doing something not long before he removed his hearing aids and glasses, and left his magnetic key card on the vanity, then took the stairs and likely got into a cab, eventually headed to his death. She wondered what he’d been able to hear those last moments of his life. Probably not the ESU rescuers with their ropes and harnesses and gear, risking their own safety as they tried to reach him. Probably not the traffic on the bridge. Not even the wind. He’d turned off the volume and blurred the picture so it would be easier to descend into nothingness with no turning back. He not only didn’t want to be here anymore, for some reason he’d decided it wasn’t an option.
“Let’s start with the most recent calls,” Lucy said, turning her attention to Agee’s phone, which she’d plugged into a charger she’d found in an outlet near the bed. “Doesn’t look like he spent a lot of time on it. A couple calls yesterday morning, then nothing until six minutes past eight last night. After that, one more call about two and a half hours later, at ten-forty. Starting with this first one at eight-oh-six, I’ll do a search and see who it comes back to.” She started typing on her MacBook.
“I disabled the password on my BlackBerry.” Scarpetta wasn’t sure why she said it at this exact moment. It had been on her mind but not on her tongue, and now it was before them, as if it was overripe and had dropped from a tree. “I don’t think Warner Agee looked at my BlackBerry. Or that Carley did, unless she got into scene photographs. From what I can tell, any calls, messages, or e-mails that have come in since I used it last haven’t been opened.”
“I know all about it,” Lucy said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jesus. Like a million people have had this number that called Agee’s cell phone. His cell phone’s registered to him, by the way, with a D.C. address. A Verizon account, the cheapest low-minute plan. Doesn’t appear he was much of a talker, maybe because of his hearing.”
“I doubt that’s why. His hearing aids are the newest technology, Bluetooth-enabled,” Scarpetta said.
She could look around the hotel room and deduce that Warner Agee had spent most of his time in a claustrophobic world that often was silent. She doubted he had friends, and if he had family, he wasn’t close to them. She wondered if his only human contact, his only emotional connection in the end, was the woman who had become his self-serving patron: Carley. She gave him work and a roof over his head, it seemed, and now and then showed up with a new key. Scarpetta suspected Agee had no money, and she wondered what had happened to his wallet. Maybe he’d gotten rid of it after leaving the room last night. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be identified but had overlooked the Siemens remote control, which most likely he kept in his pocket as a matter of routine. He may have forgotten about the message on it that would lead someone like Scarpetta directly to him.
“What do you mean, you know all about it?” she again asked Lucy. “What do you know? You already knew that no one had gotten into my BlackBerry?”
“Hold on. I’m going to try something.” Lucy got on her own BlackBerry and dialed a number she was looking at on her MacBook. She listened for a long moment before ending the call and saying, “It just rang and rang. Bet you it’s a disposable phone, explaining why so many different people have had that same number and why voicemail hasn’t been set up.” She was looking at Agee’s cell phone again. “I did some checking,” she then said. “When you e-mailed me and I told you I wanted to nuke your BlackBerry and you said no, I checked right then and saw that new messages, e-mails, voicemails hadn’t been accessed. That’s one reason I didn’t just go on and nuke it anyway, regardless of your instructions. Why did you disable the password?”
“How long have you known?”
“Not until you told me you’d lost your phone.”
“I didn’t lose it.”
Lucy was having a hard time looking her in the eye. Not because she was feeling remorse, because that wasn’t what Scarpetta sensed. Her niece was emotional. She was scared, her eyes a dark green like the deep water of a quarry, and her face was unusually defeated and spent. She looked thin, as if she hadn’t been working out as much, her trademark strength and fitness at a low ebb. In the course of the several weeks since Scarpetta had seen her last, Lucy had gone from looking fifteen to forty.
Lucy tapped keys and said, “Now I’m looking at this second number that called his phone last night.”
“The call made at ten-forty?”
“Right. Comes back as unlisted and unpublished, but the person didn’t bother blocking caller ID, which is why it’s showing up on Agee’s cell phone. Whoever this is, it’s the last person he talked to. At least that we know of. So he was still alive and well at ten-forty.”
“Alive, but I doubt he was well.”
Lucy typed some more on the MacBook and was rolling through files on the Dell laptop as well, able to do about ten tasks at once. She could do almost anything except have a truthful conversation about what was really important in her life.
“He was smart enough to delete his history and empty his cache,” she said. “In case you’re interested. Won’t stop me from finding what he thought he’d gotten rid of. Carley Crispin,” she then said. “The unlisted number that called him at ten-forty. It was her. It was Carley. That’s her cell phone, an AT &T account. She called Agee, and they talked for about four minutes. Must not have been a good conversation if a couple hours later he jumped off a bridge.”
At ten-forty last night Scarpetta was still at CNN, in the makeup room, talking to Alex Bachta with the door shut. She tried to pinpoint exactly when she’d left. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, and she had a sinking feeling that what she’d feared was true. Carley had been eavesdropping and had heard enough to realize what lay ahead. Scarpetta was going to take her place as a talk show host, or that was what Carley would have assumed, at any rate, because it would never occur to her that someone might say no to the sort of offer Alex had made. Carley was going to be let go, and she must have been devastated. Even if she’d hovered outside the door long enough to overhear Scarpetta resisting the notion and voicing why she thought it was a bad idea, Carley had to accept an inevitability she’d fought like hell to prevent: At the age of sixty-one, she was going to have to look for another job, and the odds were almost impossible that she’d find one with a network as well respected and powerful as CNN. In this economy and at her age, she might find nothing.
“Then what?” Scarpetta asked, after describing to Lucy what had happened last night after Carley’s show. “Did she step away from the door, perhaps return to her dressing room and make a quick call to Warner? What did she say to him?”
“Maybe that his services were no longer going to be needed,” Lucy said. “She loses her show, what would she need him for anymore? If she’s not on the air, he wasn’t going to be, either.”
“Since when do talk-show hosts provide long-term hotel rooms for guests.” Scarpetta got around to that. “Especially these days, when everybody is cutting back.”
“I don’t know.”
“I sincerely doubt CNN was reimbursing her. Does she have money? This hotel for two months would cost a fortune, no matter how reasonable a rate they gave her. Why would she spend that kind of money? Why not put him somewhere else, rent him something infinitely less expensive?”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe it had to do with the location,” Scarpetta considered. “Maybe someone else was involved and funding this. Or him. Someone we know nothing about.”
Lucy didn’t seem to be listening.
“And if she called at ten-forty to tell Warner he was fired and about to get evicted, then why would she go to the trouble to drop off my BlackBerry?” Scarpetta continued thinking out loud. “Why not just tell him to pack his things and leave the hotel the next day? If she planned to kick him out, why would she bring him my phone? Why would he feel obliged to help her with anything further if she was about to cut him off? Possible Agee was supposed to give my BlackBerry to someone else?”
Lucy didn’t answer.
“Why is my BlackBerry so important?”
It was as if Lucy didn’t hear a word Scarpetta said.
“Except that it’s a conduit to me. To everything about me. To everything about all of us, really,” she answered her own question.
Lucy was silent. She wasn’t eager to talk further about the stolen BlackBerry, because she didn’t want to talk about why she’d bought it to begin with.
“It even knows where I am because of the GPS receiver you put in it,” Scarpetta added. “As long as I had it with me, of course. Although I don’t think you were particularly worried about where I’ve been or might be.”
Scarpetta started going through computer printouts on the coffee table, what looked like hundreds of Internet searches for news stories, editorials, references, blogs pertaining to the Hannah Starr case. But it was difficult to concentrate, the most important question a barrier as solid as a concrete wall.
“You don’t want to discuss it or own up to what you’ve done,” said Scarpetta.
“Discuss what?” Not looking up.
“Well, we’re going to discuss it.” As Scarpetta skimmed more news stories that Agee had printed, research he no doubt had been doing for Carley. “You give me a gift I didn’t ask for or frankly want, this extremely sophisticated smartphone, and suddenly my entire existence is on some network you created and I’m held hostage by a password. And then you forget to check on me? If you were really so intent on making my life better-making Marino’s, Benton ’s, and Jaime’s lives better-why wouldn’t you do what any respectable system administrator would do? And check on your users to make sure their passwords are enabled, that the integrity of data is what it ought to be, that there are no breaches in security and no problems?”
“I didn’t think you liked it when I checked on you.” Lucy rapidly tapped keys on the Dell laptop, going into the downloads folder.
Scarpetta picked up another stack of papers and said, “How does Jaime feel about it when you check on her?”
“This past September he signed an agreement with a D.C. real-estate agency,” Lucy said.
“Does Jaime know about the WAAS-enabled GPS receiver?”
“It appears he put his house on the market and moved out of it. It’s listed as unfurnished.” Lucy went back to her MacBook and typed something else. “Let’s just see if it ever sold.”
“Are you going to talk to me?” Scarpetta said.
“Not only hasn’t sold, it’s a preforeclosure. A condo, two bedrooms, two baths, on Fourteenth Street, not too far from Dupont Circle. Started out at six hundred and twenty thousand, is now a little over five. So, maybe one of the reasons he ended up in this room is he had nowhere else to go.”
“Don’t try to dodge me, please.”
“When he bought it eight years ago, he got it for a little under six. Times were better for him back then, I guess.”
“Did you tell Jaime about the GPS?”
“I’d say the guy’s broke. Well, now he’s dead,” Lucy said. “So I guess it doesn’t matter if the bank takes his house.”
Scarpetta said, “I know about the GPS receiver you installed. But does she? Did you tell Jaime?”
“You lose everything and maybe that’s what finally pushes you over the edge, or in Agee’s case off the bridge,” Lucy said, and her demeanor changed and her voice wavered almost imperceptibly. “What was it you used to read to me when I was a little kid? That poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. ‘The One-Hoss Shay.’ Now in building of chaises, I tell you what / there is always a weakest spot… And that’s the reason beyond a doubt / That a chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out… When I was a little kid visiting you in Richmond, living with you on and off and wishing you would keep me. My fucking mother. This time of year, it’s always the same thing. Am I coming home for Christmas. I don’t hear from her for months, and then she asks me if I’m coming home for Christmas, because what she really wants is to make sure I don’t forget to send her a gift. Send her something expensive, preferably a check. Fuck her.”
“What’s happened to cause you to distrust Jaime?” Scarpetta said.
“You used to sit next to me in bed in that room down the hall from yours, the room that ended up being mine in your house in Windsor Farms. I loved that house. You’d read to me from a book of his poems. ‘Old Ironsides,’ ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ ‘Departed Days.’ Trying to explain the facts of life and death to me. You’d say people are like that one-hoss shay. They run for a hundred years and then one day they collapse all at once into a pile of dust.” Lucy talked with her hands on both keyboards, files and links opening and closing on laptop screens as she looked at anything other than her aunt. “You said it was the perfect metaphor for death, these people who ended up in your morgue with everything under the sun wrong with them, and yet they kept on going until one day it was that one thing. That one thing that probably had to do with their weakest spot.”
Scarpetta said, “I assumed your weakest spot was Jaime.”
Lucy said, “And I assumed it was money.”
“Have you been spying on her? Is that why you got us these?” Scarpetta indicated the two BlackBerrys on the coffee table, hers and Lucy’s. “Are you afraid Jaime is taking money from you? Are you afraid she’s like your mother? Help me understand.”
“Jaime doesn’t need my money, and she doesn’t need me.” Steadying her voice. “Nobody has what they did. In this economy it melts like ice right before your eyes, like some elaborate ice sculpture that cost a fortune to make and turns into water and evaporates. And you wonder if it ever existed to begin with and what all the excitement was about. I don’t have what I did.” She hesitated, as if whatever she was thinking was almost impossible for her to say. “It’s not about money. It’s about something else I got involved in and then I misread everything. Maybe that’s as much as I need to say. I started misreading things.”
“You do a fine job misreading for someone who quotes poetry so well,” Scarpetta said.
Lucy didn’t answer.
“What have you misread this time?” Scarpetta was going to make her talk.
But Lucy wouldn’t. For a moment the two of them were silent, keys clicking as Lucy typed and the sound of paper moving as Scarpetta sifted through printouts in her lap. She skimmed more Internet searches pertaining to Hannah Starr, and also to Carley Crispin and her failing show, news stories about what one reviewer described as Carley’s free fall in the Nielsen ratings, and there were mentions of Scarpetta and the Scarpetta Factor. The only entertainment Carley had provided this season, said a blogger, was the guest appearances of CNN’s senior forensic analyst, the intrepid and steely and scalpel-sharp Scarpetta, whose commentaries were dead-on. “Kay Scarpetta cuts to the heart of the problem with her pointed remarks and is stiff competition-much too stiff-for the flaccid-minded, overblown Carley Crispin.” Scarpetta got up from her chair.
She said to her niece, “Remember one of those visits to Windsor Farms when you were angry with me and formatted everything on my computer and then took it apart? I believe you were ten and misread something I’d said or done, misinterpreted, misunderstood, overreacted, to put it mildly. Are you formatting your relationship with Jaime and in the process of completely dismantling it, and have you asked her if it’s merited?”
She opened her kit bag and got out another pair of gloves. Walking past Warner Agee’s messy, clothes-strewn bed, she began looking in drawers in the bowfront dresser.
“What has Jaime done that you’ve possibly misread?” Scarpetta filled the silence.
More men’s clothing, none of it folded. Undershorts, under-shirts, socks, pajamas, handkerchiefs, and small velvet boxes of cuff links, some of them antique, none expensive. In another drawer were sweatshirts, T-shirts with logos. The FBI Academy, various FBI field offices, the Hostage Rescue and National Response teams, all old and faded and representing memberships Agee had coveted and would never have. She didn’t have to know Warner Agee to figure out that what drove him was a desperate need for validation and an unflagging belief that life wasn’t fair.
“What might you have misread?” Scarpetta asked again.
“It’s not easy to talk about.”
“At least try.”
“I can’t talk about her. Not with you,” Lucy replied.
“Not to anyone, let’s be honest.”
Lucy looked at her.
“It’s not easy for you to talk to anyone about anything deeply relevant and profoundly important,” Scarpetta said. “You talk incessantly about things that ultimately are heartless, trifling, meaningless. Machines, the invisible intangibles of cyberspace and the people who inhabit these nothing places, people I call shades, who fritter away their time Twittering and chattering and blogging and blathering about nothing to no one.”
The bottom dresser drawer was stuck and Scarpetta had to work her fingers in, trying to dislodge what felt like cardboard and hard plastic.
“I’m real, and I’m here in a hotel room last inhabited by a man who is in a broken heap in the morgue because he decided life was no longer worth it. Talk to me, Lucy, and tell me exactly what’s wrong. Tell me in the language of flesh and blood, in the language of feelings. Do you think Jaime doesn’t love you anymore?”
The drawer pulled free, and crammed inside were empty Tracfone and Spoof Card packages and instruction booklets and guides, and activation cards that didn’t appear to have been used because the PIN strips on the backs hadn’t been scratched off. There were printed instructions for a Web-based service that allowed users who can speak but have difficulty hearing to read word-for-word captioned telephone calls in real time.
“Are the two of you not communicating?” She continued asking questions, and Lucy continued her silence.
Scarpetta dug through tangles of chargers and shiny plastic envelopes for recycling prepaid cell phones, at least five of them.
“Are you fighting?”
She returned to the bed and began digging through the dirty clothing on it, pulling back the linens.
“Are you not having sex?”
“Jesus,” Lucy blurted out. “For God’s sake, you’re my aunt.”
Scarpetta started opening bedside drawers and said, “I put my hands on naked dead bodies all day long, and having sex with Benton is how we exchange energy and empower each other and belong to each other and communicate with each other and are reminded we exist.” Journal articles, more printouts in the drawers, nothing else, still no Tracfone. “Sometimes we fight. We fought last night.”
She got on the floor to look under furniture.
“I used to bathe you and tend to your wounds and listen to your tantrums and fix the messes you made, or at least snatch you out of them one way or other, and sometimes I cried in my goddamn room, you drove me so wild,” Scarpetta said. “I’ve met your long string of partners and dalliances and have quite a good idea exactly what you do with them in bed because we’re all the same, have basically the same body parts and use them similarly, and I dare say I’ve seen and heard a lot that even you can’t imagine.”
She got up, not seeing any sign of a Tracfone anywhere.
“Why on earth would you be shy around me?” she asked. “And I’m not your mother. Thank God I’m not that wretched sister of mine, who practically gave you away, only I wish she had. I wish she had given you to me and I’d had you all the time from day one. I’m your aunt. I’m your friend. At this stage in our lives, we’re colleagues. You can talk to me. Do you love Jaime?”
Lucy’s hands were quiet in her lap, and she was staring down at them.
“Do you love her?”
Scarpetta started emptying wastepaper baskets, digging through balled-up paper.
“What are you doing?” Lucy finally asked.
“He had Tracfones, maybe as many as five. Possibly purchased after he moved in two months ago. Just bar codes, no stickers that might say where he bought them. Probably was using them in conjunction with Spoof Cards to disguise and fake caller ID. Do you love Jaime?”
“How much time on the Tracfones?”
“Each came with sixty minutes’ airtime and/or ninety days’ service.”
“So, you pick it up in an airport kiosk, a tourist shop, a Target, a Walmart, and pay cash. When you’ve used up your sixty minutes, instead of adding more airtime, which usually requires a credit card, you toss the phone and get a new one. About a month ago, Jaime stopped wanting me to stay over.” Lucy’s face was turning red. “First it was one or two nights a week, then three or four. She said it’s because she’s so frantic with work. Obviously, if you’re not sleeping with someone…”
“Jaime’s always been frantic with work. People like us are always frantic with work,” Scarpetta said.
She opened the closet, noting a small wall safe. It was empty, the door open wide.
“That’s worse, isn’t it? That’s the fucking point, isn’t it?” Lucy looked miserable, her eyes angry and hurt. “That means it’s different for her, doesn’t it? You still want Benton no matter how busy you are, even after twenty years, but Jaime doesn’t want me and we’ve barely been together one. So it’s not about being fucking busy.”
“I agree. It’s about something else.”
Scarpetta walked her gloved fingers through clothes that had been stylish in the eighties and nineties, pin-striped three-piece and double-breasted suits with wide lapels and pocket kerchiefs, and French-cuffed white shirts that brought to mind caricatures of gangsters during the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Draped over hangers were five striped ties, and looped around another hanger were two reversible belts-one stitched, the other a crocodile print-that were compatible with the brown and black Florsheim wing-tip dress shoes on the floor.
She said, “When you and I were trying to track my missing BlackBerry, it became patently clear what your WAAS GPS receiver can do. It’s why we’re sitting in this room. These nights when Jaime has been away from you and you’ve been tracking her remotely? Did you get information that was helpful?”
At the back of the closet, pushed against the wall, was a very large black hard-sided suitcase, badly scuffed and scratched, a tangle of torn luggage tags and their strings still wrapped around the handle.
“She hasn’t gone anywhere,” Lucy said. “Was working at the office late and at home. Unless she didn’t take her BlackBerry with her, and it doesn’t mean someone didn’t come to her apartment or she doesn’t have something going on with someone in her office.”
“Maybe you can hack into the provider that supplies the security cameras for her apartment building, for the district attorney’s office, for all of One Hogan Place. Will that be next? Or just install a few cameras in her office, in her conference room, in her penthouse, and spy on her that way. Please don’t tell me you did that already.”
Scarpetta was wrestling the suitcase out of the closet, noting how heavy it was.
“Jesus Christ. No.”
“This isn’t about Jaime. It’s about you.” Scarpetta pressed the clasps on the suitcase, and they sprung open with loud snaps.
The crack of a shotgun blast.
Marino and Lobo took off their hearing protectors and stepped out from behind several tons of concrete blocks and ballistic glass, about three hundred feet up-range from Droiden in her bomb suit. She walked to the pit where Scarpetta’s FedEx box had just been shot and knelt to examine what she had defeated. Her helmet turned toward Marino and Lobo, and she gave them a thumbs-up, her bare hand small and pale surrounded by dark-green padding that made her look twice her normal size.
“Like opening a box of Cracker Jacks,” Marino said. “Can’t wait to see the prize.”
He hoped whatever was in Scarpetta’s FedEx box was worth all the trouble, and he hoped it wasn’t. His career was a chronic conflict he didn’t talk about, didn’t even like to admit to himself what he really felt. For an investigation to be rewarding meant there needed to be real danger or damage, but what decent human being would hope for such a thing?
“What we got?” Lobo asked her.
Another tech was helping her take off the bomb suit. Droiden had an unpleasant expression on her face as she put her coat back on, zipping it up.
“Something that stinks. That same nasty smell. Not a hoax device, but not like anything I’ve ever seen. Or smelled, for that matter,” she said to Lobo and Marino as the other tech busied himself with the bomb suit, packing it up. “Three AG-ten-type button batteries and aerial repeaters, pyrotechnics. Some kind of greeting card with a voodoo-looking doll attached to the top. A stink bomb.”
The FedEx box had been blasted wide open. It was a mass of soggy shredded cardboard, broken glass, the remnants of a small white cloth doll, and what looked like dog fur confined within a berm of dirty sandbags. A recordable voice module not much bigger than a credit card had been blown into several pieces, the mangled button batteries nearby, and as Marino got closer he got a whiff of what Droiden was talking about.
“Smells like a mixture of asphalt, rotten eggs, and dog shit,” he said. “What the hell is it?”
“It’s whatever was in the vial, a glass vial.” Droiden opened a black Roco sack and got out evidence bags, an epoxy-lined aluminum can, face masks, and nitrile gloves. “Not like anything I’ve ever smelled before, sort of a petroleum-type smell but not. Like tar, sulfur, and dung.”
“What was it supposed to do?” Marino asked.
“I think the point was you open the box, and there’s a greeting card inside with the doll attached to the top of it. When you open the card, it explodes, causing the glass vial of this stinky liquid to shatter. The voice module’s power source, the batteries, was connected to three commercial repeating aerial bombs tied to an electric match, a professional pyrotechnic igniter.” She pointed to what was left of three flash firecrackers attached to a thin bridge wire.
“E-matches are very sensitive to current,” Lobo told Marino. “A few recorder batteries were all it took. But what someone would have had to do was alter the voice module’s slide switch and recorder circuit so the battery current set off the explosion as opposed to playing a recording.”
“The average person couldn’t do it?” Marino said.
“The average person could definitely do it, as long as he’s not stupid and follows directions.”
“On the Internet,” Marino thought out loud.
“Oh, yeah. You can practically build a fucking atom bomb,” Lobo said.
“If the Doc had opened it?” Marino started to ask.
“Hard to say,” Droiden said. “Could have injured her, that’s for sure. Maybe blown a few of her fingers off or gotten glass in her face and eyes. Disfigured her. Blinded her. For sure it would have gotten this nasty-smelling liquid all over her.”
“I assume that was the point,” Lobo said. “Someone wanted this liquid on her, whatever it is. And to mess her up pretty good. Let me take a look at the card.”
Marino unzipped his briefcase and gave Lobo the evidence pouch Scarpetta had given to him. Lobo pulled on a pair of gloves and started looking. He opened the Christmas card, an upset Santa on the glossy cover being chased by Mrs. Claus with a rolling pin. A woman’s thin, off-tune voice singing. “Have a Ho-Dee, Do-Dee Christmas…” Lobo peeled back stiff paper and slid out the voice module as the annoying tune continued, “Stick some mistletoe where it ought to go…” He disconnected the recorder from its batteries, three button batteries, AG10s no bigger than what goes inside a wristwatch. Silence, the wind gusting in from the water and through the fence. Marino couldn’t feel his ears anymore, and his mouth was like the Tin Man’s, in need of oil. It was getting hard to talk, he was so cold.
“A bare talking module ideal for greeting card mounting.” Lobo held the recorder close to Marino to show him. “The kind used by crafters and do-it-yourselfers. Full circuit with a speaker. Ready-made slider switch for auto play, which is the key to the whole thing. The sliding contact closes the firing circuit and triggers the bomb. Ready to order. Hell of a lot easier than making one yourself.”
Droiden was plucking bomb parts out of the wet, filthy mess in the pit. She got up and got closer to Marino and Lobo, holding silver, black, and dark-green plastic and metal fragments and black and copper wire in the palm of her nitrile-gloved hand. She took the intact recording module from Lobo and began making a comparison.
“Microscopic examination will confirm,” she said, but her meaning was plain.
“Same kind of recorder,” Marino said, cupping his big hands around hers to shield the frag from the wind and wishing he could stand there for a long time that close to her. Didn’t matter if he’d been up all night and was turning into a chunk of ice, he felt suddenly warm and alert. “Jesus, that stinks. And what is that, dog fur?” With a synthetic rubber-sheathed finger, he prodded several long, coarse hairs. “Why the hell is dog fur in it?”
“Looks like the doll was stuffed with fur. It might be dog fur,” she said. “I’m seeing significant similarities in the construction. The circuit board, the slider switch, the record button and microphone speaker.”
Lobo was studying the Santa card. He turned it over to see what was on the back.
“Made in China. Recyclable paper. An environmentally friendly Christmas bomb. How nice,” he said.