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  “This is bordering on cruel and unusual.”

  Detective Jimenez, who looked like he could use a drink himself, nodded. In a minute, an officer entered with a pitcher and several glasses. Isa poured a glass, drank it, and then poured another.

  “Do they work at the Women’s Free Clinic?”

  “Yes and no. They work in a private lab located in the basement of the clinic. They rented this space when the main clinic downsized and moved most of their operation to a new location.”

  “When was the last time you saw your parents?”

  “At breakfast. They had eggs on tortillas, but I just had cereal.”

  Isa gave details where it didn’t matter. Jimenez had a tell for which questions they most wanted the answers; he stilled the fingers he otherwise incessantly tapped on the table.

  “Do you know where your parents are right now?”

  “At the lab, I presume.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Lots of things. It’s kind of a think tank.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “The lab is divided into three teams: medical testing—they do all the lab tests for the clinic upstairs—medical research, and other general research and development.”

  “What did they tell you about the projects they worked on?” Jimenez leaned in.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did they ever work from home?”

  “What do you mean ‘did’? No. They don’t do the kind of work that you can do just anywhere. I think it’s time you tell me what this is about. What’s going on? Has something happened to my parents?”

  The suits paused, looked at each other.

  Williams finally spoke. “I’m sorry to tell you. There’s been an incident at the lab.”

  “What’s that mean—an incident?”

  “We’re still investigating. The result was that all seventy-five workers in the lab were killed and a number of the people at the upstairs clinic were also seriously injured.”

  “What? All?” Isa couldn’t catch her breath. They continued to fire questions at her, but she didn’t hear them, couldn’t think.

  Dad had always been paranoid, but especially so the last few months. He knew something was wrong. He grilled her on what to do in an emergency, although he never defined what an emergency might be. He’d even made them each pack go-bags with cash, disposable phones, a computer, a couple of changes of clothes, things like that. The go-bags.

  “You can see why it’s important to gather as much information as we can. ”

  “I want to go home.” Isa wasn’t sure at first that the words had escaped her mouth.

  “. . . related to what they might have been working on.”

  “Where are they? Can I see them? Are they here?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you need me to identify them?”

  “It’s not necessary. You shouldn’t....”

  “I want to go home! I want to go home,” Isa screamed.

  “Just a few more questions.”

  The tears came. “We’re done.” She stood and walked to the door. They let her go.

  Detective Jimenez said, “I’ll ask an officer to drive you.”

  Isa set down her portfolio and backpack on a chair on the porch near the front door. Her fingers shook too violently to insert the key to the front door. Soon she realized that there was no need. The door was open. She stepped inside. She closed the door and locked it.

  They had searched the house, quite thoroughly too. It was a mess. She spotted a warrant on the dining table. A few things were gone, mostly electronics. She wondered what else they might have found. She knew she had to be patient and not go straight for the go-bags. There was a step she needed to complete first.

  She carried a lipstick Taser and a professional-grade bug detector in her shoulder bag. The detector looked for audio bugs, telephone bugs, video cameras, and some vehicle GPS trackers. They were legal, easily picked up at the Spy Store. Since her things were with her and therefore not covered by the warrant, the police had left them in her bag, although she felt certain that they had looked through her belongings, maybe cloned her phone. She searched the house room by room, closing blinds and curtains as she went. No cameras. No bugs.

  The den had one wall that was dominated by deep bookshelves covered in books and DVDs. The next wall had three shuttered windows. Even with the shutters closed, streaks of light illuminated the space making it look like a sideways jail cell. A large wooden desk was positioned so the occupant faced away from the shelves, toward a tufted sofa and chairs. It was a male office, all Dad’s.

  The wall above the sofa was decorated with a couple of photos. One was of Mom and Dad, in their thirties, sitting astride his motorcycle. Dad wore his brown leather motorcycle jacket. Mom’s long, thick brown hair hung down her back. Behind them was a California beach. Isa had enlarged, colorized and restored this photo as best she could, given that it was taken three decades ago.

  The second photo was recent. Mom was on the bike in a sexy pose, her back arched and her long, thick black-and-white hair hanging down her back. Dad’s jacket was in a puddle on the ground near her foot. Isa had taken this one at Lake Travis just outside Austin. Isa thought it looked like motorcycle porn, but Dad loved it.

  Isa had taken this photo and several others of her Mom and Dad for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Mom had one of them in her office, where the walls were mostly filled with Isa’s childhood drawings. Mom’s photo was of all three of them in matching white buttoned-up shirts, looking straight and stiff. The picture was meant to be ironic. To her, it looked like a Walmart photo, but Mom had liked it and selected it for her space.

  Isa kept a photo in her room from that day as well. Mom had unbuttoned her white shirt to her mid-chest. A hint of pale pink lace bra showed. They were kissing. Not a little “peck, take my picture” thing, but a full-on smooch. If you looked, you could see a bit of tongue. Isa knew for certain that her parents loved each other and this picture was proof of that.

  When she had left that morning, the sofa in Dad’s office had been covered with papers, books and a laptop. While Mom had her own little office in one of the bedrooms on the second floor, she preferred to work in the company of Isa’s dad. She surrounded herself with her work in Dad’s office. All of that was also gone.

  There was a dust square where Dad’s home computer had sat on his desk. Isa moved the chair out of the way. She unlatched the bookcase that hid the secret closet.

  Up until a few years ago, they had lived in Cupertino, California. Dad worked in Apple’s massive research and development department, happily coming up with ideas for iPhones and cloud-computing solutions. And then one day he came home and announced that it was “too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Mom had asked.

  “Humanity.”

  Dad had been recruited for a new job at a think tank owned by the Wagner Company in Austin. He spent his days thinking up ways to save humanity from itself. He had been happy again. For a while. And then one day he just walked out the front door of the Wagner Company and never went back.

  Mom had laughed at Dad about his precautions. She and Isa both thought it endearing but unnecessary. At this moment, Isa was incredibly thankful for those same precautions.

  A closet in the guest bedroom was designed to be four feet wide and seven and a half feet deep—a big storage space for a family. After they moved in, Dad had added a wall three and a half feet back. He converted one of the bookshelves in his office on the other side of the wall to open as a secret door into a hidden closet. He lined the new hideaway with metal sheets and bought some wire-rack shelving. It wasn’t a panic room for people. It was a hiding place for things.

  Isa wasn’t sure if the police had found the closet. It was still neat and organized. The first thing she noticed was that the backup hard drive and her parents notebooks—cardboard covers filled with paper on which they had written notes—were gone. On the shelve
s, there were emergency food and water, a medical kit, and the go-bags. The medical kit was untouched. She thought that was good, but some of the water and food were gone.

  Normally, the three go-bags were stuffed on a bottom shelf together. Dad’s was first. Dad’s was gone. He had been here. He had taken the bag. He was alive. A wave of relief poured over her.

  She pulled out her bag next.

  She stuck her hand into the back of the space. Mom’s bag was there. Isa hugged the bag to her chest. She knew what that meant. Mom didn’t need her bag because she didn’t survive.

  Isa went back to her bag. It was not as neat as she had left it. She stuffed the first aid kit inside. Dad had split Mom’s cash with her. He’d kept Mom’s phone and the pictures of the family that Mom had kept in her bag. Isa pulled her burner phone from her bag and dialed her Dad’s number, preprogrammed in. No answer. She tried Mom’s number. No answer. She searched her bag and then Mom’s.

  And then she sat on one of the guest chairs in her father’s office. On a side table, she noticed two plates stacked up with dried egg on them leftover from breakfast. They were in a hurry and left the dirty dishes the last place they stood in Dad’s office. In her mind’s eye she could picture them discussing some aspect of work, preoccupied with their plans for the day, as Dad picked up papers and notebooks from his desk and put them into his briefcase. Mom set the dishes on the table without thinking for Isa to pick up when she got home from school. Mom could be messy. Mom wasn’t a housekeeper.

  Isa picked up the plates and walked toward the kitchen, but she couldn’t make herself put them into the sink to soak like she normally would. She held them to her like a baby blanket. The last thing her mother touched before she left for work that morning.

  Isa sat on the living room sofa and held the plates.

  Detective Jimenez’s phone rang. He knew who it would be. The DSG security man who had taken over his case.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “So far as I can tell, nothing,” Jimenez said. “She hasn’t gone out. She hasn’t called anyone. She closed the curtains, but there’s a little crack, so I can see her when she’s in the living room. Shadows indicate she’s curled up on the sofa with the television on, watching the reports.”

  “The TV is saying terrorism, blah, blah, blah. The police are saying too early to tell, blah, blah, blah. She doing anything else?

  “She’s clutching a couple of plates.”

  “What kind of plates?”

  “Like eating plates. They’re white with some kind of yellow pattern.”

  “Hmm

  After sunset, Rory circled the block where the free clinic had been. The street with the clinic was mostly university-related buildings, fast-food places and shops. The next block was old patrician homesmany converted to sorority and fraternity houses. Behind them were older homes where families still lived.

  It was a quiet area of town after classes let out for the evening. Unlike in the daytime, there were a few places to park on the street. On his first tour around the block, Rory noticed the black Lincoln Continental with a man in a dark suit sitting inside. Rory’d been off Continental’s since those weird, creepy-ass commercials with Mathew McConaughey. Maybe the private security company with the olive vests owned this fancy SUV. Maybe it was one of those dicks of a private cop. For sure it wasn’t a city cop unless he was very dirty. Rory made a note of the license plate number.

  On his second circle, Rory parked four cars behind the SUV, near the alley he knew would go back behind the clinic. He was somewhat familiar with the layout of the building as he had been all over the clinic when he did his story on them.

  Rory was patient. He sat in his car and watched for two hours. Every thirty minutes, the man would get out and walk around and then down the alley and back, like a well-oiled cuckoo in a clock. On the hour and half hour. Rory guessed they didn’t pay these guys to be smart.

  As the door slammed after the half-hour check, Rory slipped quietly out of his car and down the alley. He brought a full-spectrum infrared night-vision recorder and a pry bar with him as he remembered the guard with the boards and the hammer. The back door to the clinic was boarded over. As silently as he could, Rory pulled loose the planks. He stepped inside.

  He turned on the camera, not yet recording. The clinic was chaos, but there was nothing to indicate that the murderers cared about the clinic, so Rory didn’t either. He was on a short time frame. He remembered where the basement door was located and went to it. He assumed he would have to pry open this door as well, but it hung wide-open.

  Rory turned the camera on to record. He used its night vision to make his way down the dark stairs. He stood in shock when he reached the bottom.

  There was nothing in the basement. It was stripped bare, in most places right down to the studs. The concrete floor covered in white vinyl sheets and outside walls looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to them, crumbling the surface here and there. Rory walked all around the space recording what he saw. Nothing. Until he spotted one thing that the murderers had overlooked.

  He turned off his camera and crept back outside and into his car. No wonder the guards weren’t diligent. There was nothing to protect.

  Rory was close to Kolli Vedkka’s house, so he decided to take a walk over, maybe talk to the pretty daughter.

  Outside, the motion sensor went off. It had been tripped a couple other times that night by that detective walking around the house trying to peek into the windows, but Isa could see the detective in his Toyota sedan eating some sort of sandwich.

  She rummaged through her purse.

  She turned up the television.

  She slipped outside, but he still heard her approach and turned at the last minute.

  “I’m looking for your parents,” Red said.

  Isa signaled for him to go into the house via the back door. She followed him inside. Once Red was four steps into the kitchen she used the Taser on him and he went down.

  Isa dragged him into the dining room as it had no windows and zip-tied his hands. She tried to lift him into the head chair, the only chair of their dining set to have arms, but he was too heavy, so she leaned him against a wall.

  She searched his person until she found a wallet. His driver’s license said his name was Rory Burke. A reporter from KNUS. He wouldn’t know anything. Isa thought about dragging him back out before he woke, throwing him back like a too-small fish, but he groaned. Too late.

  Isa did a Google search on her iPhone.

  “What’s your story, Red?” she mumbled to herself.

  “That’s original,” Rory mumbled, shaking his head to bring back alertness. “It’s because I have red hair. Red. Carrot top. Ginger. One guy in college called me Flamethrower. I kinda liked that one. Want to call me Flamethrower?”

  Isa stood and went into the kitchen. She searched through a drawer.

  “Snarky. Think that will help your situation,” she said as she reentered the dining room.

  “I have a situation?”

  Isa plastered a piece of duct tape across his mouth.

  “I’m not ready to talk to you yet.”

  She went back to her iPhone. As she searched, she plugged in the phone to charge, indicating that this was not her first search of the day.

  Rory Burke was an on-air television personality. He wasn’t very impressive. No big stories. Nothing very interesting. Kinda boring, really. Maybe he was searching for that first big break.

  Isa glanced at him. Rory was sitting calmly watching her.

  Isa tried Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. He had accounts everywhere. A public personality. Arrogant. Conceited.

  He was attractive. Tall, lanky. He had those thick, long eyelashes some guys get, but his weren’t black. They were a soft brown that went with his pale skin and a light smattering of freckles.

  She checked out his personal information. He was twenty-eight, single. Not much personal information there. Secretive maybe.
Private.

  She filled a plastic glass with water.

  She pulled the tape from Rory’s mouth and gave him a sip of the water. He looked at her, shot at her with those doe eyelashes and gave her a pretty-boy smile with too much teeth. She didn’t trust him.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Like I said, I’m looking for your parents.”

  “My parents don’t talk to reporters.”

  They stared each other down.

  Isa turned her back. She didn’t want her face to betray her.

  “There was a fire at the lab where they work. The police say everyone who worked in the lab was killed. Seventy-five people. They counted.”

  His voice had gentled. “I sorry. I knew your father. I liked him very much.”

  Tears sprang unbidden in her eyes and flowed down her cheeks.

  Rory put his arms around her and held her to his chest. He felt warm and comforting. She let herself sob for a few brief seconds before she jumped away.

  “Wait,” she said. “How did you get loose?”

  Rory held up a small knife. He set it on the table and slid it away from him toward her.

  Isa noticed that his pant cuff was turned up. The old knife-in-the-boot trick. She should have searched him. She was taught better. And she didn’t zip-tie his legs. All he had to do was lift his foot to within hands reach. Stupid on her part.

  “I really mean you no harm,” Rory said.

  “I’m not a very experienced. . . .”

  “Criminal, anarchist, mastermind,” he filled in.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, each gathering their thoughts, masking their feelings.

  “May I ask you a few questions?” Rory finally broke the silence.

  “For your story?” Isa said the word story like it left a bad taste in her mouth.

  “I want to know what’s going on. Don’t you?”

  “All afternoon your station has been saying the same thing as everyone else—terrorists.”

  “That sounds like bullshit to me.”

  Isa was starting to like this redheaded stranger, but she still didn’t trust him. She needed to keep up her guard. Just the same, she heard herself admit, “It sounds like bullshit to me too.”