The Serpent's Kiss

70

Jill clicked off the car radio. Derek and Jill had been listening to the press conference in the car as they drove north. “No comment, Matt,” she said to the radio. “You could have said, ‘no comment.’” She tapped Derek’s arm. “Doesn’t that piss you off?”

Derek shrugged. He had been unusually quiet and thoughtful after they left the parking garage.

“Come on, Stillwater—”

”Derek.”

“Fine. Derek. Doesn’t that piss you off? I mean, really? He’s trashing your reputation. Smearing you all over the media. It’s uncalled for. It’s unprofessional.”

Derek shrugged again.

“Earth to Stillwater. Hello?”

“I’m really hungry,” he said. “And I could use some caffeine. Is there a decent restaurant around here?”

“How about the Motor City Grill?”

“Whatever.”

She found a parking spot behind the Fisher Building and they entered the Motor City Grill, past the fish tanks, and were seated by a window looking across Second Street toward the New Center One building.

“So,” Jill said, as they looked at the menus. “The Serpent killed himself.”

“Mmm,” Derek said.

Jill put her menu down. “Stillwater?”

The waitress appeared and took their drink orders. They both wanted coffee.

“How’s their caesar salad here?” he asked Jill.

“It’s fine. What do you think about The Serpent killing himself?”

“Interesting.”

Exasperated, Jill pulled the menu down so she could look at Derek. “You haven’t kept your opinions to yourself all day. Now you’re keeping your mouth shut. Come on, Still… Derek. What do you think?”

He leaned forward and planted his elbows on the table. “What do you think?”

“I think Matt’s statement was premature.”

“Me, too.”

“Why?”

“You first.”

“Okay,” Jill said. “They should have run everything at the garage before they made that statement. They still need to thoroughly search the casino. They need to make some sort of physical evidentiary link between Harrington, his house, his office, the car, the Boulevard Café, Scott Hall, Rebecca Harrington’s house…” She trailed off.

“And?”

Jill frowned. “And intuition.”

Derek launched a cockeyed grin. “And your intuition says what?”

“It’s too easy.”

Derek nodded. The waitress reappeared with their coffee and took their orders. Derek stuck with a tried and true chicken sandwich and a salad. Jill ordered the caesar salad. When the waitress left, Jill said, “What about you?”

“I think it’s very convenient. And very careless.”

“So you think…”

“I think we’ve been manipulated every single step of the way today, and this strikes me as being too good to be true.”

Jill sighed. “So now what?”

“Well, you’re unofficial. And you could get into a lot of trouble, Jill. I don’t really want to jeopardize your livelihood more than I already have.”

“Oh, so now you’re concerned about my career.”

Derek shrugged.

Jill considered. She leaned toward Derek. “Here’s the deal, Derek. I’ll help you. I’ll go out on a limb and help you dig and see if we can satisfy ourselves as to what’s really going on and what happened in the parking garage. But first, you have to come clean on a couple things for me.”

Derek toyed with his fork. He nodded.

“Irina Khournikova,” Jill said.

Derek leaned back in their booth. “You don’t have a high enough security clearance for that.”

“And I suppose you’ll have to kill me if you tell me.”

Derek toyed with his fork some more, not meeting her gaze. Finally he said, “You know better.”

Jill blinked. “Fine. When we’re done eating, I’ll drop you off somewhere.”

Derek shrugged. “Let me think. I can probably tell you some of it.”

Jill cocked her head. “Is this for real, Derek? Or are you feeding me a line of bullshit?”

“Not everything that happened last month has gone public. You know that.”

She did and she said so.

Derek nodded, as if to himself. “The real Khournikova is an agent with the Russian FSB, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or the Federal Security Service. She’s a Russian anti-terrorism expert.”

It took Jill a second to process that. After a long silence, broken only by the tinkle of silverware and the music playing overhead, she said, “They say you killed her by suffocating her to death.”

“They are very wrong,” he said. “Irina Khournikova, last I heard, was back in Moscow. She may be in Mexico, though, because she’s dedicated herself to hunting down The Fallen.”

“The terrorist behind last month’s attack at U.S. Immuno.”

Derek nodded.

“But what about the woman you…”

“She was impersonating Irina Khournikova. She was The Fallen’s lover. I killed her, yes. It was accidental.” Something blurred his face for a moment, a complexity of emotions. “What do you call an interrogation that accidentally results in death, Jill?”

Before she could respond, he said, “They call it an assassination. She knew the location of her group’s headquarters, she knew where they had taken the biological agent they stole, and she knew what they were going to do with it and when. I didn’t have time to take her to headquarters and dick around waiting for the paperwork to go through. I needed to know what she knew and I needed to know it right there. But she accidentally died before I could get that information from her.”

Jill saw the pain on his face as he recounted that story. She said, “I’m sorry. And Matt mentioned something about a helicopter pilot.”

She watched as Derek put a studied neutral expression on his face. Slowly, he said, “I was working with a Coast Guard helicopter crew. I commandeered them, actually. They were shot down by The Fallen. The only survivor was the pilot, but she’s in pretty bad shape. Broken back, broken pelvis, legs, burns. She’s alive, but her recovery’s been tough. She’s not walking yet. Maybe never will.”

“That doesn’t seem like it’s your fault.”

He shrugged. “A lot of people do, though. Like your boss.”

Jill sat back. “Okay, Derek. I guess that’s enough for now.”

Derek frowned. “These cases… like today… they get hairy. And I usually work alone. Sometimes, like with Cindy, and the fake Irina, people around me get hurt.” He looked her in the eye. “And killed. It can be dangerous working with me, Jill. And you’re not official any more. So think about that before you agree to pursue this with me. Think about it hard. You’ve got a son to take care of.”

She nodded. “I have. I have thought about it. What’s next?”

Derek smiled. “After we eat, I want to check out William Harrington’s body. You know where the morgue is?”