The Puppet Master

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6

LOSS

Apparently, you had to be Bill Gates or the Director of NASA to get permission to look at surveillance-camera tapes of the parking lots at Moffett Field.

Alanna stood in the security office and looked at the line of monitors behind the security guard. In several of them she could see the noon lunch traffic going by.

Well, she thought, a person at least needed to sound reasonably sane. I thought I saw someone who looked like my dead fiancée clearly hadn't sounded sane to anyone. Not to Moffett Field security. Not to the police detective who'd investigated Ray's accident last fall. Not even to the handful of people she and Ray called friends. Even the woman in division of human relations who'd brought Ray in as a contractor a year ago had listened to her question with barely concealed skepticism. The records showed that Ray Savoy was diseased.

Aside from HR representative, everyone had obviously felt sorry for her, of course. Alanna had heard the note of sympathy over and over again.

And that was really about to drive her crazy.

She didn't want sympathy. She lived in the world of real, hard, quantifiable data. Yes, she had been distraught after Ray's death. She was still distressed. But she wasn't crazy. Or, at least, she didn't think so. If hallucinations now had to be added to her troubles, though, she'd go right down and have herself committed.

She hated this uncertainty. She hated doubting herself. Either Ray had been here or he hadn't. The answer was simple enough to find out.

"Ready?"

"Are you sure you aren't going to get to any trouble for this?" She knew the security guard who was bending the rules to help her. Juan's grandmother was a good friend of Alanna's own abuela. She'd known the young man since he was a teenager and, in fact, had been a reference for him when he'd been hired a couple of years earlier.

"No," he replied. "Seriously. No trouble at all."

She still hesitated. She understood Juan thought of her almost like family. She shouldn't have asked him, Alanna thought. She didn't want him risking his position here. His wife had given birth to their first child just before Christmas, and Alanna knew that Juan was the only wage earner in his household at the moment.

Alanna realized she was talking herself out of accepting the offer.

"It's no problem, Dr. Mendez," he said, looking at her meaningfully. "You said someone hit your car in the parking lot. It's a very common situation. People come and ask to do this all the time."

Because it was lunch time, the two of them were the only ones in the security office at the moment. The other security personnel were out enjoying their break. She looked down at the line of monitors again and saw herself in one of them. A camera mounted high in the corner monitored those who did the monitoring.

Alanna decided that the lie will be hers. "Yes, a scratch. They didn't leave a business card or anything."

Juan motioned to her to come around the counter. "Why don't you have a seat by that monitor, and we'll see if we got anything useful?"

Alanna hadn't told him over the phone anything about having seen her dead fiancée. She'd only asked if she could see the tapes of the parking lots and the bus stop for that particular morning. Juan hadn't asked any questions. He didn't need any further explanation, and Alanna hadn't offered any. He knew she was no spy. He knew she had no plan to sell the layout of the parking lots to either North Korea or Wal-Mart. What he didn't know was that she was only testing her sanity.