Mike crossed her legs, put her heels in the empty bucket seat across from them. Swanson was staring out the window, but Mike would bet he was listening for all he was worth. She wondered how he was going to explain his absence and bruises to Melody Finder.
She said low into her mike, “Vanessa was in my dorm at Yale freshman year. I don’t want to say I knew her well—we would say hi if we saw each other, had some friends in common. I was already gearing up for law enforcement, wanted to be a cop like my dad. I would have been happy going straight into the Academy, but he insisted I get out of Nebraska, apply to Ivy League schools, see a bit of the world, make sure I really wanted this life. Yale was as far away from Nebraska as I could get, in mileage and ideology, and, wonder of wonders, I was accepted, and so I humored him and flew to New Haven.”
“Nebraska meets the Ivy League—it boggles the mind.”
“I didn’t exactly fit in at the beginning. I mean, some kids thought I was a hayseed, others thought I was dangerous because I went to the gun range every weekend.”
“What did your roommates think when you cleaned your gun in the room?”
“I was smart enough never to do that. Can you begin to imagine the rep I’d get? It took the whole first semester for them to be comfortable with me and for me to be comfortable with them. So much drinking and partying—just like home.
“Enough of my history. Let me tell you more about Vanessa Grace. When I first met her, I thought she was a princess. She was gorgeous, masses of red hair almost to her butt, guys falling all over themselves to ask her out. It seemed to me she played one against the other, and I thought she was a jerk until I realized she was very shy and didn’t have a lot of social skills. She had no clue how to deal with guys. One of our mutual friends told me she’d lived all over the world with her uncle and had been homeschooled for the most part. She’d been in a few American schools, but she was shy and had trouble fitting in.
“We finally did have a class together, Cognitive Science of Good and Evil.” She’d come out of her shell by that time, even had a boyfriend who was on the rugby team. We talked about what we were planning to do when we graduated; I told her I wanted to be a cop. She said she wanted to take the Foreign Service exam and go to work for State. Her dad was a diplomat and he’d died, as had her mother. She was raised by her uncle, who also worked in the Foreign Service. We all know what it really means.”
“Spies.”
Mike nodded. “I wondered about her mother, but she never talked about her, said only she’d died of cancer, real young. She wanted to be like her dad and her uncle.
“Then we graduated and I went off to grad school at John Jay, and haven’t thought of her since.”
She gave him an arched eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you ever had any adjusting to do, not like I did at Yale?” A pause, then she shook her head. “Of course you didn’t. Eton, Cambridge, the Foreign Office. You fit in perfectly the whole way. And now the FBI, where you’ve been welcomed with open arms. Oh, yes, I like your scruffy beard.”
He grinned at her, touched his fingers to his bruised jaw. “Like my mom and her TV show, and you, at first I was a fish out of water, but this strange and wondrous city is becoming home. I’m enjoying it here. Good food, good peers. Everyone wants the same thing—catch the bad guys, keep terrorists from blowing anything up, and if they do, nail their asses to the floor.” He shrugged. “Do you know, I even like going to Barneys with Nigel. Do you think I’m giddy?”
“What? Giddy? About what?”
He looked embarrassed. “It was just something Nigel said to me last night when I came in half dead, clothes ready for the dustbin. He said I was giddy here in New York.”
Mike realized that, yes, Nigel was right. “Well, I do know you enjoy kicking butt,” she said, and she sent a look in Craig Swanson’s direction.
He didn’t tell her that if indeed he was giddy, she was right there with him.