The Shield of Darius Read online

  Dreu smiled thinly. “Locked away in Bellevue in Manhattan. Should be there a long time.”

  Adam raised his elbow again to the back of the couch and rubbed his fingers across his chin. “Well, you’re in luck,” he said, reaching up to lift the black patch that covered his left eye. Beneath it, the prosthetic eye was perfectly matched in color and had a life-like shine that made it almost indistinguishable from the right – but not quite. She looked back and forth between the eyes, then raised a questioningly brow.

  “This one,” he said, pointing to the prosthesis, “happened to be my judgmental eye. It saw flaws in people that shouldn’t have mattered. You’ve never asked about it – and I guess now I know why. I’ll tell you sometime.” He lowered the patch and pointed at the other. “This one is my ‘thing of beauty’ eye. It’s all I have left… so when I look at you, and I mean anywhere on you, that’s all I see.”

  Her own eyes teared and they sat for another hour, telling more truths. He explained how he had lost the eye in a military flying accident, and she confessed that she hadn’t been in a relationship since her attack: partly because of the scars, partly out of fear, but mainly because she found men a little too obsessed – one way or the other – with how she looked.

  “You want so badly to be seen as more than a pretty face,” she said. “But you also don’t want to be defined by a couple of ugly scars.”

  “All I notice is that you have a great backhand,” he teased, and she bent forward and kissed him.

  As he held her in the front entryway before saying goodnight, he again gently rubbed her back beneath her shirt.

  “If you decide you’re comfortable with this going further,” he said, “there’s nothing about you that will trouble me in the least.”

  “How about dinner tomorrow night,” she said.

  From the night of truth-telling, he had added to the information in Fisher’s dossier that Dreu was the daughter of two physicists who worked for a private research group in Palo Alto, California. Her mother, a first generation Indian immigrant from Mumbai, met her father, a Sephardic Jew, while both were graduate students at Stanford. Both had shattered family taboos when they married.

  As he had listened to her from the other end of the couch, Adam began to understand her dark, multi-ethnic beauty and innate genius. But the genius had come at the price of growing up in a home of continuously unmet expectations. After a year working for Microsoft, a year during which she was constantly reminded by both parents that her career path should be on a steeper trajectory, she fled the West Coast to pursue a modeling career in New York.

  “My younger brother rebelled first,” she laughed. “He’s a professional cyclist, racing with a team in Italy. Drives my parents crazy. But I had a high school friend who had become successful in New York, and she connected me with her agent. It turned out I was pretty good at it…. And I don’t think my agent ever really believed I went to Stanford. Even when I told her I was leaving to work for a computer programming firm, I could tell she was skeptical.”

  Brain farts aren’t limited to small-town guys from Nebraska, Adam thought. But said, “And that’s what brought you to Texas…?”

  She nodded matter-of-factly. “Yup. A position as one of the lead systems designers for a Dallas group called FedTegrity. We provide contracted computer security for departments of the federal government. Mom and dad are soo proud…”

  “I’m impressed!” Adam said with a convincing smile. And though he had known before he met her exactly what she did, hearing her say it and looking at her curled comfortably at the other end of the sofa did make an impression.

  She had chosen to live in a modest condominium on the south edge of the Dallas suburb of McKinney where she spent the 6:00 a.m. hour every weekday morning at the gym – not trimming her flabby thighs, but keeping her lithe figure in enviable condition and working stretch into the fibrous tissue of the scars. Adam had never been so smitten by a woman, and that troubled him more each time he lied to her.

  In the gym’s locker room, he twirled the numbers into his combi-nation and instinctively checked his iPhone. There was only one text, but he immediately pulled out his clothing and gym bag, closed the locker and, without changing, walked out of the building to his blue Nissan Sentra that sat surrounded by more expensive SUVs. He slipped into the driver’s seat, fished a second cell phone from the bag, and punched in a fifteen digit number that encoded the call as it was entered. The “yes” that answered was slow and rasped with age.

  “I received your message,” Adam said, referring to the text that had simply announced that his dry cleaning was ready for pickup.

  “There’s an email waiting,” the voice said. “It may require immediate attention.”

  “I’ll get right to it. Do you need a reply?”

  “Only if you need more information,” the aged voice said.

  “Very good.” Adam pushed the ‘end’ button and fumbled again for the iPhone, quickly tapping in a brief text to Dreu.

  “Called in for an unexpected work assignment. Will call later. Enjoy your meetings!”

  He dropped both phones onto the seat, started the car, and eased out of the parking lot toward the turn under the Sam Rayburn Tollway that took him back to Stacy Road. At Custer Road he turned north into McKinney and relaxed back into his seat. He had been inching his way toward Marshall Ding and FedTegrity so slowly that it sometimes felt like trying to run in a dream – every step a slog through wet, ankle-deep mud. The message from Fisher might be just what he needed to slap himself awake and put some pace back into this investigation.