Whiplash

22

Erin nearly fell off her chair in a dead faint. She cleared her throat. "Did the witness give you a description?"

"Yes, he did. Longish hair flopping up and down out the back of a baseball cap. Probably brown, like yours, Erin. She was tall and rangy, the guy said. Slender. He said she didn't look like a runner, but he was struck by how gracefully she moved. Fluidly, smoothly, he said. Isn't that interesting?" And Sherlock held her eyes.

She can't know, she can't know, she can't- Erin laughed to keep the terror out of her voice. "That is an odd thing to say. I wonder who she is."

Bowie said, "Whoever she is, she's got Caskie Royal's fate in her hands, and he knows it. His lawyers sure know it, and I'll bet now his bosses in Germany know it. He's scared, but not enough to let us help him yet, the idiot."

Sherlock added, "We also had a gorgeous German agent added to the mix today. Dolores Cliff, one of Bowie's agents, thinks he looks like Adonis. He's not Dillon, but I've gotta be honest here-he's a pretty close second."

Bowie said to Georgie, "You remember Agent Cliff ?"

"Oh, yes, she kicked my soccer ball clear out of the field. It took Coach and a bunch of parents to find it. She showed me how to do the splits. I'll bet Erin does the splits better than anybody."

"Don't kiss up," Bowie said. "Yeah, that's Agent Cliff, a real hardnose. Only thing is, she's acting like you'd better not act when you turn thirteen, kiddo, and discover Y chromosomes."

"What's Y chromosomes?"

"Y chromosomes give fathers nightmares." He ruffled his daughter's hair. "Boys," he added.

Erin said, "You mean this guy, this Adonis, bowled her right over?"

"Yeah. I had to team him up with a guy who wouldn't care what he looked like."

"Why does he look like Adonis?" Georgie asked.

It was left to Sherlock to describe Kesselring, and she did him justice.

Georgie thought about this as she took another bite of her moo shu pork burrito. "I bet Krissy would really like him."

Bowie blinked. "Why do you think Krissy would like this foreign agent, sweetheart?"

"I heard Krissy tell you that she really likes your sexy stomach muscles. I'll bet this guy has sexy stomach muscles like you."

Bowie looked appalled. Erin thought he looked like his heart had seized.

Savich said easily, "This makes me wonder if Sean has passed along any phone conversations he's overheard. Scary, isn't it, Sherlock?"

Sherlock laughed. She leaned over to Georgie. "Do you know, I've probably said the same thing about Dillon. Hmm. I have to say that Agent Kesselring does look like a real dish. But you know what? Even though he looks like a chocolate sundae, I don't like him much. He isn't a straight shooter like Dillon or your dad, and that's something super important. I don't think he's got much respect for us women, either."

"A woman's got to be honest too," Bowie said. "Even if the woman is still a kid," he added, looking at Georgie.

Georgie spooned on some more sauce and took a big bite of her burrito. "Daddy's always honest except when he lies to Krissy."

Another heart stopper.

Bowie eyed his daughter. "I don't lie to Krissy. Why'd you say that?" Why had he asked that question, he, the well-trained FBI agent?

All the adults watched Georgie chew and swallow, and take a drink of her water. "I heard you tell her once that you were head-over-heels with work and couldn't see her. Then you took me out for pizza and a movie."

"Okay, but it wasn't a lie, not really," Bowie said. "I worked after you went to bed." Talk about lame. Well, he had checked his e-mails.

"What about when she wanted to give me a movie-star Barbie birthday party and you told her my birthday was going to be at Grandma's?"

"That was very nice of her, but something came up. Hey, I threw you a party, remember?"

Georgie said to Sherlock, "I was Wonder Woman. I looped all my friends with my lasso of truth so they'd be forced to tell me what was written on the card in their hand-Daddy wrote down stuff-and they had to tell me if it was a lie or not. It was totally fun although the lasso didn't work very well. Well, Billy Bennett did tell me he'd stuck his finger in the frosting on my birthday cake."

"What did Wonder Woman do about that?" Sherlock asked.

"Billy helped me climb up to where Daddy hid the cake and I got a swipe too."

Bowie stared at his daughter, who looked very pleased with herself, the center of attention. "I wondered why the cake was all smeared."

"Billy and I tried to smooth out the frosting," Georgie said. "With our fingers."

After dinner, Sherlock dried glasses in the small kitchen while Erin washed. "Imagine, both guys tucking Georgie in."

Sherlock buffed up a dish and set it in the cupboard. "Dillon told me he'd like to see how it works with a little girl as opposed to a boy. He's very good at reading bedtime stories."

Erin handed her a plate to dry. "She's precocious. I'm reading her Nancy Drew's Mystery at Lilac Inn right now."

"I remember I always had a Nancy Drew under my pillow," Sherlock said. She added after a moment, "I know Bowie's wife died in an automobile accident. Do you know what happened?"

"Sorry, I don't. Georgie told me once that her mama was in Heaven, but I didn't want to ask her what had happened. And as I said, I only met Bowie yesterday."

"Looking at the three of you, it seems like much longer. You're all very comfortable around one another. Are you working any interesting cases right now, Erin?"

"Yes, one," Erin said without thinking as she washed a fork. She shot a look at Sherlock. "Well, it's not all that important, not really."

Sherlock didn't change expression. "I hope it's not following a cheating husband?"

"Oh, no, I don't do those sorts of thing, at least not anymore. When I first started out, I did half a dozen to feed myself. No, this is about a man whose father is ill and-he's asked me to look into a-financial problem with his drugs."

Sherlock cocked an eyebrow.

Shut up, shut up, do you have a hole in your head? She was facing a real professional who could smell something crooked in the next county.

"What do you think about this murder?"

Relieved, Erin stopped scrubbing the shine off a fork. "From what Bowie's told me, it sounds like this guy Blauvelt went all over the world for Schiffer Hartwin, and cleaned up messes for them, silenced people who were causing problems, that sort of thing, right?"

Sherlock nodded.

"So maybe it's the CEO of Schiffer Hartwin here in Stone Bridge who killed him, maybe in self-defense. What's his name?"

"Caskie Royal. Or maybe whoever killed Blauvelt is planning on killing Caskie Royal too."

Erin said, "You know, I think I'd speak to his wife. Wives know every secret, every sin."

"Her name's Jane Ann Royal. She's on my To Do list for tomorrow," Sherlock said. "Turns out, Caskie was sleeping with one of his executives. I guess the night of the break-in, they didn't make it to the couch."

Yeah, I sure wrecked their fun. Erin said, "I'd shoot the louse if he were my husband. Why is his wife putting up with it?"

"I'll ask her," Sherlock said. "Interesting that you're working on a case about drugs. Tell me about it."

Unfreeze your brain. "Well, I promised the client to keep it confidential, you know?"

Erin was saved by the two men walking into her small kitchen, Savich saying, "The kid's got Nancy Drew memorized."

Bowie laughed. "That's the truth. She said Savich read okay, but she likes your voice better, Erin. She said you should go to Hollywood. I think she really wants you to do her ironing."

Erin was still lying wide awake in her bed around midnight, with Georgie asleep and her apartment quiet, wondering if she'd looked guilty when Sherlock had asked her about her case. Sure she had.

No, she was being paranoid, about all of it. None of them would ever begin to guess it was she who'd dived out of Caskie Royal's bathroom window. Graceful or not, long brown hair or not, they knew her in an entirely different context. They had no reason to suspect her, none at all. She wasn't on their radar, she wasn't on anyone's radar.

Tomorrow, she was driving up to New Haven to have lunch with Dr. Edward Kender at the Berkeley College dining room.

She realized she'd told Sherlock she was having lunch in New Haven with a client at Yale, but that was it. Sherlock probably wasn't even listening.

Erin finally went to sleep and dreamed of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting under the red beanbag in the middle of her living room.