Blood Orchid

16

Holly awoke with the first hangover she’d had in a very long time. Not a bad one, and she was grateful for that, but she was a little fuzzy around the edges, and she was glad she didn’t have to work that day.

Daisy seemed hungover, too, and she had just as good a reason as Holly. She had her breakfast and her walk, not run, in the dunes, then repaired to her bed beside the fireplace and went back to sleep.

Holly went into the study and started going through desk drawers, trying to figure out what might have interested the intruder. Her checkbook was kept on the computer on an extension of the desk, and one needed a password, which was DAISY, to get in. Everything else in the desk was mundane-Post-its, paper clips, stationery, files on household repairs, tax stuff, brokerage statements. The guy might have learned something about her income or net worth, but what good would that do him? It wasn’t as though she kept large amounts of cash or bearer bonds in the house, and he hadn’t opened the upstairs safe. He’d certainly had an opportunity to take the TV or VCR or computer, and she kept her guns locked up, so he didn’t seem to be looking for booty, at least not the domestic kind.

She tried to imagine what information or files she might have that somebody might want-for any reason at all-and she came up short. If everything in her personal files was published on the front page of theOrchid Beach Press-Messenger, she wouldn’t particularly mind everybody reading it. Certainly, she was not harboring some secret that somebody else wanted to know.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Holly, it’s Grant Early. How are you?”

“Very well,” she replied.

“I just wanted to check in and confirm our dinner date. I’m picking you up at seven?”

“That’s good, Grant,” she said, then she remembered she hadn’t made a dinner reservation.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Someplace good; I haven’t decided yet.”

“You said a jacket and no tie would do?”

“That’s right.”

“I own a necktie, and I don’t mind wearing it.”

“You can keep it casual, Grant.”

“See you at seven, then.”

She said goodbye and hung up. He had a very pleasant voice for an FBI agent, she thought.

Grant Early was on time, and Holly wasn’t, which was unlike her, so she had to use the intercom to tell him to come in and sit down. Finally dressed, she came down the steps to find him kneeling and talking to Daisy, who was still in her bed. He stood up to greet her.

“We meet at last,” he said, offering a hand. In her cop’s habit, she ran his description through her frontal lobe: he was six feet, a hundred and seventy, tanned, with thick, close-cropped, iron-gray hair, a straight nose and a firm jaw, pale blue eyes.

“At last,” Holly said. He looked like a runner, she thought-very fit. And he was expensively dressed, in a linen jacket, cream silk trousers, and alligator loafers. For a moment, she forgot this was supposed to be business. “Would you like a drink, or would you rather have one at the restaurant?”

“If you’ve booked, let’s go on,” he said.

“We’re going to a little French place up the road,” she said. “They have a bar.”

He led her outside to a silver Mercedes SL600 convertible, which surprised Holly. She fastened her seat belt. “Have FBI agents had a big salary increase?” she asked.

He laughed. “Nope. Until last week, this belonged to a Colombian gentleman who got out of the country just ahead of us. We confiscated everything. I’m undercover, remember?”

“I like your disguise,” she said.

“Oh, I still own a gray suit and a white button-down shirt, like all the other agents,” he said, smiling and revealing very good teeth.

Holly directed him to the restaurant, and they were seated immediately.

“Drink?” he asked.

“A three-to-one vodka gimlet,” Holly said to the waitress. “Straight up and shaken, very cold.”

“Make it two,” Grant said. “I’ve never had one, but Harry Crisp told me to trust your judgment in all things.”

“That’s funny,” Holly said, “since Harry almost never does.”

Their drinks came, and they sipped.

“Mmmmm,” Grant said, “that’s perfect.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Harry is a fool not to trust your judgment,” he said, “but you have to understand why.”

“Why?”

“It’s a Bureau thing,” Grant said. “The Bureau doesn’t like to rely on outside information or advice until it can corroborate everything to its satisfaction. It goes all the way back to Hoover: The thinking is that nobody could possibly know more than the Bureau about anything. That’s why we’ve always been so lousy at things like running snitches.”

“I went to a lecture at the FBI academy in Quantico on running snitches, and a DEA agent taught it,” Holly said.

“My very point. There probably wasn’t an agent in the Bureau who could have done it as well. Harry’s like all other agents, only more so, since he made agent in charge.”

“Come to think of it,” Holly said, “he was a little more amenable to advice before he got promoted.”

They looked at the menus and ordered.

“So, Grant, why are you undercover in Orchid Beach?” she asked.

“If I told you that, then I wouldn’t be undercover.”

“In that case, you’re already not undercover, since I know who you are. Is Grant Early your real name, by the way?”

“It’s Grant Early Harrison,” he replied. “Early was my mother’s maiden name.”

“That makes it easy to remember, doesn’t it?”

“And anybody who called the Miami office and asked for Grant Early would just get a, ‘Who?’”

“Where are you living?”

“I rented a house on the beach, a few doors north of you, through an agent. I didn’t even see it until yesterday.”

“So what’s your cover? What did you tell the agent?”

“I made a bundle with an Internet company and sold out before the collapse of tech, Net stocks-the company exists, and they’d back me up if anybody checked. I’m thinking of permanently locating around here, and I wanted to rent for a while first to see how I like it.”

“How long is your lease?”

“Three months, with an option to renew. It’s a very nice house, well furnished. The owners are traveling in Europe for a year.”

“Is it as nice as the Mercedes?”

“Yep.”

“Good for you. Looks like the way to live well in the Bureau is to go undercover.”

“Not necessarily. My last assignment was as mate on a charter fishing boat out of Key West. I had to grow a beard, which itched, and I smelled like fish for eight months.”

She laughed. “You got a nice tan, though.”

“I get that walking down the street in Miami; it’s genetic.”

“Did the clothes belong to the Colombian gentleman, too?”

“Nope; they’re my own. I’m fortunate in not being entirely dependent on my Bureau salary. I try to hide that from my colleagues by dressing the way they do on the job. They’re suspicious enough of me already because I’m a bachelor.”

“Me too,” Holly said, sipping her gimlet. This really did not feel like business.

Dinner came, and they talked as if they had known each other for a long time. This is a date, Holly thought, any way you slice it. Thank you, Harry Crisp.