“You know I love to play the Killer game,” I began, taking a moment to register just how much my life had changed in the last few months. Brooklyn Wainwright, bookbinder-cum–murder solver extraordinaire. “But do you really think it matters how she met him?”
“I’m beginning to think it matters very much.”
“She told us what happened that night.”
“But we’re missing something. I want to start at the beginning and make notes.”
“Good idea.” I doodled ever-expanding circles on my paper. “But the way I see it, Alex is—or was—a key player, but Robin was just an innocent bystander. So why does it matter how they met?”
“Why was he killed inside her home?”
“Because someone was after him and followed them to her place, and found a way inside and . . . Heck, I don’t know. It was convenient?” But it wasn’t, of course. And there was the whole drugging-of-Robin issue. Nothing made sense about this.
“I’ve come to the conclusion,” Derek said, “that Robin is connected to the mystery behind Alex’s death.”
I thought about it and sat forward with my theory. “Maybe Alex stole something from someone else and Robin got in the way.”
Derek leaned in. “Did Alex steal it? Or did Robin steal it?”
Frowning, I inched back. “Robin didn’t steal anything. If Robin had stolen something, wouldn’t the killer have killed her instead of Alex?”
“Very good point,” Derek said, encouraging me along. “So you think Alex stole something? Maybe he stole it from Robin.”
“Robin doesn’t have anything worth stealing,” I argued. “And who knows if Alex stole anything or not? None of it makes sense.”
“You’re right,” he said firmly. “None of it makes sense until we fill in the blanks.”
“How do we do that?” I sipped my drink and stared at him. “Wait. You have information.”
“I do.”
“Well, spill it.”
With a smile, Derek pulled out his smart phone and slid his finger across the surface until he found what he was looking for. He showed me a picture of a tiny metal box held in someone’s hand.
“What is that?”
“It’s a photograph of a mini flash drive. The smallest one they make, currently. It plugs into a plastic port and fits into the USB slot of any computer. It’s an effective and innocuous way to transport information from one computer to another.”
“Okay. Is that what Alex stole?”
“We think that was his intention.” Derek leaned forward again and spoke softly. “What we know for sure is that a highly placed Ukrainian operative working in deep cover in Toronto was activated recently.”
“Activated?”
“Yes,” he said, making me nervous as he watched my reactions closely. “He was sent to San Francisco to retrieve an item of crucial importance to the government.”
“The Ukrainian government?”
“Yes.”
“I’m assuming that you got this information from your people at Interpol?”
He said nothing, just continued to look at me with the barest hint of a smile. I suppose he thought it best not to say out loud exactly where he’d obtained this information, but Interpol was a safe bet. Still, a part of me was irked. Was he trying to keep me safe from culpability? Or did he simply not trust me? Or did he not trust Robin? Wait. Did he think my house was bugged? Okay, that was ridiculous. I took a deep breath and tried to reel in my overactive imagination.
“So I’ll assume the highly placed guy is Alex, right?”
“Yes.”
“And the crucial item?” I waved my hand at his phone and the picture of the flash drive.
“Exactly,” he said, holding the phone up again to show the photo. “A flash drive. A tiny one.” He put the phone down and held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate how small the metal flash drive was. “This big.”
“Tiny. I get it.” What I was really getting was a bad feeling in my stomach. “And who was he retrieving it from?”
“A soft target.”
“Okay.” Apparently, we were playing Twenty Questions. That was fine; I liked to play games. “What’s a soft target?”
“Robin is a soft target.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at him. I wasn’t so crazy about this game anymore. “You know that makes no sense, right? But let’s continue for the sake of argument. How long ago was this guy sent from Toronto?”
“Six days ago.”
With a heavy sigh, I got up and pulled the small calendar from the wall above the kitchen telephone and counted off the days. “So he came to San Francisco almost a week ago and found the flash drive or whatever he was looking for. Then he just happened to stop at Kasa for dinner and met Robin there.” I pointed at last Thursday, the night Robin returned from India.
“Did he find the flash drive, then meet Robin?” Derek asked. “Or did he meet Robin in order to find the flash drive?”
“Are you trying to make me mad?”