Profile Durango

She chatted about the flu bug going around, the predictions of unusually harsh winter weather set to move into the area and her plans for the weekend with a boyfriend named Jimmy.

By the time they reached the dark sedan parked at the curb, Callie was exhausted, both from the tension of Tom’s nearness and the chattiness of the nurse.

She’d had a headache from the moment she’d opened her eyes that morning. She’d tried to nap off and on throughout the afternoon, but found it impossible. Between the hourly check of vital signs and the visitors who drifted in and out, sleep had been impossible. What she wanted now most of all was the comfort of her own bed and some quiet time.

Tomorrow she’d be back in the lab where she belonged, in a world she understood, a world she found comforting in that there were no shades of gray, only black and white supported by cold, unemotional science.

“Here, take my coat,” Tom said when they reached the car. He began to shrug out of the jacket.

“No thanks, I’ll be fine once you get the heater going,” she replied. The last thing she wanted around her was a coat that smelled of him, that contained the heat from his body.

She slid into the passenger seat, told the nurse goodbye and then watched Tom as he walked around the front of the car to the driver door.

He was thinner than he had been before, although he still radiated with a simmering energy of competence and also a whisper of an edge of danger.

He wasn’t a pretty boy. At thirty-six years old, his features were far too rugged, too boldly masculine for pretty. But he was a man who commanded attention, from men who would be slightly wary and from women who would want to dig beneath the forbidding surface to find the soft center. Callie could tell them, there was no soft center in Tom Ryan.

He got into the car, bringing with him a burst of cold wind and the scent she remembered from so long ago, a clean male smell with a hint of lemon and cedar cologne.

The knot of tension in her stomach tightened. It wasn’t fair that it was he who once again would be protecting her. But, Callie had learned the hard way that life wasn’t fair.

“I can give you directions to my house,” she said once he started the engine.

“I know where you live. I’ve already been by there earlier this afternoon to check things out. Nice place, by the way.”

“Thank you. I’ve been very happy there,” she replied with a touch of fervor. She wanted him, needed him to believe that she was happy, that she’d gone on with her life and he’d merely been a small unimportant blip in her history.

He’d never been a big talker and he was silent on the drive. That was fine with her. She had nothing to say to him, nor was she interested in anything he might have to say.

“How are you feeling?” he finally asked.

“Tired and I still have a bit of a headache, but other than that I’m fine.” She shivered and sighed gratefully as he turned the heater on full blast and warm air began to fill the car.

“Callie, I know this is a bit awkward, but you know you can trust me to do my job,” he said.

A bit awkward? She wanted to laugh. Seeing him again, being in his company was so much more than a bit awkward. Even now a small shaft of pain attempted to pierce through the protective layers that wrapped her heart, but she shoved it away, refusing to dwell on a past that was empty and dead.

“It never entered my mind not to trust you where the job is concerned. Doing your job has always been your number-one priority.” She frowned as she heard the touch of bitterness that crept into her voice. “Hopefully Del Gardo will be behind bars where he belongs in a matter of days and you can move on to the next job.”

“Time will tell,” he replied.

She needed to believe that this time with Tom would be brief, that she could be strong enough to hold back any emotion that threatened to escape with him back in her life.

She breathed a sigh of relief as he turned into her neighborhood. After the flash and gaudiness of Las Vegas, Callie had been drawn to this neighborhood of adobe pueblo-style homes with their clean, pale colors and simplistic designs.

She lucked into the house. The sellers had been a divorcing couple eager for a quick sale in a depressed marketplace. She’d fallen in love with it and had bought it for a song.

It was the first home she’d ever owned and when she’d moved in she’d told herself it was her new start, her clean slate from the pain that had been a constant since the moment Tom had turned his back on her. Her car was in the driveway. One of her coworkers or Patrick must have gotten her keys from her purse and brought it back here.

As he pulled into her driveway she unbuckled her seat belt. It was only then that the reality of the situation with Tom struck her.

He couldn’t very well sleep in his car. In order to do his job properly he would have to be in the house with her. “I have a spare bedroom. I guess you’ll be staying there.” There was little welcome in her voice.

He turned off the engine and turned to look at her, his eyes gleaming in the deepening shadows of night. “I’ll try to be as unobtrusive as possible. I don’t want to screw up your life here, Callie. I just want to save it, if it comes to that.”

She nodded and opened her door to get out. “Wait,” he said sharply. “I’ll come around and get you.” She sat back as he got out of the car, grabbed a black duffel bag from the backseat, then walked around to her door.

As she got out of the car he used his free hand to pull her close to him. She knew it was a gesture of protectiveness but it still caused a rush of heat to sweep through her.

When they reached the door, he held out his hand for her key. “I need to clear the house before you come in,” he said. He scanned the area around the front yard as he pulled a gun from a holster beneath his coat. “Stay here and give me two minutes. If you see anyone approaching, sense anyone nearby, get inside the door and scream.”

A new knot of tension balled up in her chest as he unlocked her front door. She looked up and down the street, wondering if somebody was nearby—watching her—waiting for her to return home. Or was it possible somebody was inside her house, lying in wait?

Tom disappeared into the house and the ball of tension expanded inside her. She would recognize Del Gardo anywhere. The last time she’d seen him he’d been distinctive-looking, with his shiny bald head and white beard. Even if he shaved that beard and grew hair, she thought she’d still recognize him.

What she didn’t know was if he’d hired somebody to take her out. A hired killer could look like anyone, a clean-cut young man, a middle-aged businessman, or an attractive woman with manicured nails.

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until Tom appeared in the doorway. “You can come in,” he said. “There’s nobody here.”

Her breath whooshed out of her as she stepped into the small entry with its niches carved out of the wall for displaying items. At the moment those niches were empty. In fact, even though the house was beginning to really feel like home to her, the furnishings were simple with almost no personal items displayed to indicate who lived here.

They walked from the entry into the living room where a beehive corner fireplace promised warmth on a cold wintry night and benches protruded from the wall along one side. The furniture was understated earth tones and woven rugs decorated the hardwood floor.

There were only two items in the room that were personal. The first was a photo of her mother on top of the television and the second was a picture of some of the people who worked at the lab and it sat on top of a miniature rolltop desk that held her personal computer.

Tom walked over and picked up the picture. “Maybe you could give me a crash course on the players at the lab,” he said.

Reluctantly, she walked closer and tried not to smell that hauntingly familiar scent of him. “The gray-haired man in the back is Jerry Griswold. He’s our firearms expert. The tall, dark-haired young guy is Bobby O’Shea. He’s the one who pulled me out of the building last night.” As she continued to name the people in the picture, her headache became a shooting pain across her forehead.

She knew this headache wasn’t from smoke inhalation. It was the band of tension created by Tom. As he placed the photo back on the desktop, she gestured down the hallway. “I’ll just show you to your room,” she said.

He nodded and picked up the duffel bag he’d dropped on the floor. He followed her down the hallway where she pointed to the first room on her right. “You can use the guest bath. Towels and extra soap are under the sink.” She stopped at the first doorway on her left. “You can sleep in here.”

The guest room was a nice size, with a king-size bed and a dresser with a mirror. He walked in and set his duffel bag on the multi-colored bedspread. “Thanks, this will be great.”

“Feel free to help yourself to anything in the refrigerator, although you’ll find the pickings slim. I don’t eat here much. And now, I’ll just tell you good-night.”

There was nothing more she wanted than to escape from him, to get out of the sight of his enigmatic gaze, to go someplace where she didn’t have to look at him.

“Then I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

She nodded and then hurried down the hallway to the master bedroom. All she wanted was a long, hot shower and the comfort of sleep without dreams.

She didn’t want to think about the fact that her life was at risk. She definitely didn’t want to think about the new risk that was now living in her house.

Tom was definitely a risk to her well-being, for he brought with him the threat of unearthing memories she’d thought she’d carefully buried, memories too painful to bear.

TOM AWOKE before dawn was even a promise in the eastern sky. The first thing he did was reach over to touch his gun on the nightstand. It was an automatic gesture, born of years as an FBI agent.

The second thing he did was think of the woman sleeping in the room at the end of the hallway. He’d always believed that he’d made the right decision for both of them when he’d walked away from her.

It had taken the undercover assignment in Mexico and a near-death experience for him to reexamine the path of his life and think about the successes and the failures.

Certainly his job had been one of the successes. Growing up in the foster care system, it would have been easy for him to have wound up a statistic of failure, either dead at an early age or in prison. It had taken a local cop seeing Tom flirting with trouble to intervene and give Tom a new purpose and drive to succeed.

As he swung his feet to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, he scratched the ropey red scars that crisscrossed his chest and belly. Fifteen slashes, that’s what he’d received from the members of the drug cartel he’d infiltrated when they found out he was undercover FBI. They hadn’t stabbed him to death. That would have been too quick and easy. Instead they had cut him just deep enough to torture him, then had left him to bleed to death.

He’d spent four months in a Texas hospital fighting one infection after another and it was during that time that he’d realized that his personal life was a failure and much of his sense of failure came from his decision to leave Callie.

Water under the bridge, he thought as he got up and grabbed clean clothes from the closet where he’d hung them the night before. He darted across the hall and into the bathroom for a hot shower and once he was dressed for the day, he headed for the kitchen to make some coffee.

Minutes later he sat at the table and watched as the sunrise spilled orange light over the horizon. He heard the sound of water running and knew Callie was not only awake but in the shower.

It was going to be a tough day. Not only did he have to contend with Callie’s cool disdain, he also had a memorial service of sorts to attend. He frowned as he thought of Julie Grainger.

She had not only been a fellow agent, she’d also been a good friend. This morning Tom was meeting two other agents at a nearby park to say personal goodbyes to their fallen friend. Although officially Tom wasn’t assigned to Julie’s murder case, he intended to participate as much as possible unofficially.

Callie came into the kitchen, her features carefully schooled to indicate no emotion. “I see you found the coffee,” she said as she moved to the counter to pour herself a cup.

“You weren’t kidding about the refrigerator being bare. There wasn’t even a single egg in there.”

“There’s a cafeteria in the building with the lab. You can get breakfast there,” she said. “I’d like to leave here in about fifteen minutes and get to the lab.”

“Before we go we need to talk about your schedule,” he said.

She carried her cup to the table and sat down opposite him. One of her delicate blond eyebrows rose slightly, a gesture he knew indicated a certain level of stress. “What about it?”

“I think it would be in both our interests if there are no more late nights.” He held up a hand to still the protest he knew she was about to make. “Personal feelings aside, Callie, you have to work with me here. There’s no question that it’s more difficult for me to make sure you stay safe in the dark. I’d like you to leave the lab each day by dusk so we can get back here by nightfall. That’s the only thing I request of you, that small change in your schedule.”

The thinning of her lips as they pressed together let him know she didn’t like being reined in, but instead of protesting, she nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’m off the streets at dusk.”

Tom released a small relieved sigh. He had a feeling this would be the first of many battles they might have, but at least he’d won this one.

He took a sip of his coffee and eyed her over the rim of his cup. Clad in a long-sleeved white blouse and navy slacks, she looked all business, but the floral scent that emanated from her was all female.

“Callie, maybe it would be a good idea for us to talk, to clear the air between us,” he said as he lowered his cup.

Her shoulders straightened. “There’s nothing to talk about and the air is fine between us.” She got up from the table and took a gulp of her coffee. “I need to get to work.” There was a note of finality to her voice that indicated the subject was closed.

He got up from the table and placed his cup next to hers in the sink. “Just let me get my coat and I’ll be ready.”

He left her in the kitchen and headed to his bedroom. He supposed it had been foolish of him to try to get her to talk about the end of their relationship. And really, what could he say? That he was sorry? That he’d been a fool?

He’d known he’d broken her heart and that would always be between them. He couldn’t take back what had been done, so maybe she was right. There was really nothing to talk about.

He strapped on his shoulder holster then pulled on the black suit jacket that matched his pants. He grabbed his winter coat, then left the room and found her waiting at the front door.

Her light-blue ski jacket made her eyes an electric blue and complemented her blond coloring, but those eyes held the same cold frost they’d held the day before when she’d realized for good or for bad, he was back in her life.

They were both silent on the drive to the lab. He was already thinking ahead to the memorial service for Julie and at the same time watching the rearview mirror and their surroundings for any sign of trouble.

The Kenner County Crime Unit was located on the third floor of an old Kenner City annex building. “Don’t get out of the car until I come around to get you out,” Tom said as he parked the car in the parking space designated for Callie.

He shut off the engine and opened his coat to allow him quick and easy access to his gun, then left the car and walked around to the passenger door.

The air was frigid and held the scent of the possibility of snow. The long-term forecasts were warning of several potential big snowstorms coming into the area in the next couple of weeks.

He opened Callie’s door and as she got out of the car he pulled her close against him. He felt her stiffen, but he didn’t release his hold on her. This wasn’t about emotional baggage between them. This was about her safety.

He didn’t release her until they got inside the building. They were early enough that there was nobody standing to wait for the elevators. He pushed the up button and the doors immediately opened.

It was only when they were in the small enclosure that he began to relax. She would be safe here at the lab during the day when the place was filled with both law enforcement officials and coworkers.

“I’ve got some things to take care of today,” he said as they rode up. “Needless to say, I don’t want you leaving the lab for any reason until I’m back here to escort you home.”

She gave him a dry look. “I might not like what’s going on in my life, but I’m also not self-destructive or likely to be stupid. I’m not about to break the rules and get myself killed.”

“Good,” he said in satisfaction. There was nothing worse than being assigned a protective duty to somebody who didn’t really want to be protected or thought it might be fun to try to lose a bodyguard. Those were the people who usually found themselves dead.

The elevator door whooshed open and they stepped out into the hallway. A faint odor of smoke lingered and at the end of the hallway the supply closet was blocked off with bright orange cones that indicated it was a crime scene.

When they stepped into the reception area the dark-haired, dark-eyed receptionist greeted them.

“Oh, Callie, I’m so glad to see you’re back here and okay,” she exclaimed.

Callie smiled. It was the first genuine smile Tom had seen on her face and it punched a hole in his heart. He’d forgotten how her smile lit up a room, how it not only curved her lips but also warmed her cold blue eyes. “I’m fine. Elizabeth, this is FBI Agent Tom Ryan and Tom, this is Elizabeth Reddawn, receptionist extraordinaire.”

“Tom Ryan? Oh, I have a package for you,” Elizabeth said. She picked up a manila envelope from her desk and handed it to him.

It had been forwarded to him from FBI headquarters. He turned to look at Callie. “Is there someplace private I can go to open this?” He couldn’t imagine what might be inside.

“You can use my office. Follow me.” She led him across the lab to a door at the back of the room. The office was small and as impersonal as her home had been. “Feel free to use my desk if you need to,” she said as she grabbed a white lab coat that hung on a hook just inside the door and left the room.

“Thanks,” he said to her retreating form. He sat at the desk and tore open the manila envelope to reveal a letter-sized envelope inside. It was addressed to him and marked personal. In the return address space were the initials JG.

Julie Grainger? His heart began to pump with a rush of adrenaline. As he ran his fingers across the envelope he felt something hard inside. What the heck?

He carefully tore the top of the envelope open and withdrew the piece of paper that was folded up inside. He opened it and saw that it was a map of some kind. At the top of the map was a strange symbol, like the letters VDG entwined with grapes and vines. Vincent Del Gardo?

He shook the envelope and initially he thought it was a coin that dropped out on the desk. He didn’t touch it, but instead got up and called to Callie.

When she appeared in the doorway he pointed to the coin. “This coin or whatever it is came in an envelope from Julie Grainger.” Callie’s eyes opened wide as he continued. “I was wondering if you could check it for fingerprints.”

“Let me get a set of tweezers and a fingerprint kit and see what we have.” She left the office and returned a moment later. She carefully flipped the item over. “It’s not a coin. It’s a St. Christopher medal.”

“St. Christopher medal?”

“The patron saint of travelers. Legend has it that he once carried an unbearably heavy baby across a wide river and it was later learned that the baby was Jesus Christ.”

He looked at her in surprise. “How do you know that?”

“One of my mother’s best friends was not only a showgirl, but also a Catholic who had statues of most of the patron saints in her apartment,” Callie explained. “She taught me about them whenever she’d babysit me.”

Tom watched as she opened the fingerprinting kit then twisted the top of a bottle of metallic powder. Using the ostrich feather duster, she deftly swirled the powder onto the medal. She frowned as no ridges showed up. She flipped it over and dusted the other side with the same disappointing results. “Nothing,” she said, stating the obvious. “At least no fingerprints, but there are several numbers etched into the back of the coin.”

“Numbers?” He bent closer to take a look and tried to ignore the scent of her, the warmth of her body so close to his own.

“Looks like a seven, a nine and a four. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.” He frowned and stepped back from her. “Can you dust the map?” He pointed to the piece of paper he’d withdrawn from the envelope.

“Sure.” She pulled out a bottle of black powder and began the process of dusting the paper. “What is this?” she asked as she worked.

“I don’t have a clue,” he replied. He was going to have to look at it more closely, see if he could make heads or tails of it.

“VDG,” Callie breathed softly, reading the initials at the top of the map. “Maybe this is some kind of a clue as to where Del Gardo might be hiding out?”

“Who knows?” At least for the moment the tension that had existed between them was gone, vanished under the bigger questions of the mystery map and the medal.

He picked up the envelope that he knew had probably been handled by too many people for fingerprinting. “It was mailed the day before her murder.”

Callie looked up at him, her eyes wide. “That gives me goose bumps. You think she sensed she was in some kind of danger?”

“I don’t know.” He watched as she finished fingerprinting the paper. She lifted two prints. Tom figured one was probably Julie’s and the other was his own and said that to Callie.

“You’re both in the system so we’ll be able to quickly rule you in or out,” she said as she straightened.

“Do you have a copy machine? I’d like to make a couple of copies of that map, then I want you to put the original in an evidence bag and lock it up.”

“I’ll get some copies made for you.”

Tom looked at his watch. “And then I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to be someplace in half an hour.”

It was just after eight when Tom left the building and got back into his car and headed for the park where he was meeting two other FBI agents for a quiet goodbye to Julie.

Julie, Tom, Dylan Acevedo and Ben Parrish all had gone through FBI training together and even though they didn’t often see each other, they’d shared a particularly close friendship that had lasted since their days at the academy. Julie’s murder had devastated them all.

He reached the park and got out of his car. The copies of the map he’d received burned hot inside his pocket, as did the St. Christopher medal that now hung on a cheap chain around his neck. Why had Julie sent them to him? What did they mean? What was he supposed to get from them?

He headed toward the gazebo in the center of the park and saw that Ben and Dylan were already there waiting for him. Ben’s dark blond hair shone in the early morning sunshine while Dylan’s black hair seemed to absorb the sun.

Dylan raised a hand in greeting while Ben merely hunched his shoulders against the cold breeze and kept his hands in his pockets. Ben had always been quiet and brooding, but lately he’d seemed more distant than ever.

“Heard you’re on guard duty,” Dylan said in greeting. “You think it was Del Gardo who tried to take out Callie last night?”