Soul Kiss (25 page)

"She doesn't remember. The last thing she can recall is being in a train station in Chicago, then waking up in the hospital."

"But she's okay?"

"She has some serious injuries, but she's recovering. There's a police guard stationed outside her room now to make sure no one can hurt her again."

"I want to go there."

Roly shook his head. "That's not a good idea. She nearly sacrificed herself to keep these men away from you, Daniel. They may still be watching her, hoping you'll show up."

"Do you know how they found her?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No idea yet. Did you do anything unusual in the last couple of weeks, Daniel? Anything that might have drawn attention to you?"

"I applied for a driver's license. Could that be it?"

"Could be. It's possible they had someone monitoring license requests."

My mouth dropped open. "Oh my God," I said. "The SATs."

Roly looked at me.

"I made Daniel take the SATs. He got a perfect score too. Suppose they were checking those tests for genius kids." I started to cry. "Oh, Daniel, I'm so sorry!"

Daniel put his arm around me, and I leaned my head against his shoulder.

"We don't know how they found Daniel," Roly said. "So don't get upset, Melissa. They could have been scouring apartment leases or utility bills or who knows what else."

"Why are they going to so much trouble over Daniel?" I asked. "I mean, he's smart, he's a genius. But there must be other smart people in Cuba."

"It's not just Daniel. His mother told us there were a lot of other women who took the same shots she did, back in Cuba. There could be dozens of kids out there like Daniel. If the government can get hold of them, they can brag about starting a super smart population. And then force every woman to have the same shots, and who knows where that would lead?"

Roly stood up. "I've got more work to do. You guys sit tight."

"Can't we help you?" I asked.

"You can help us best by just staying here and not causing Angus any trouble."

"You don't get it. We're smart, right? Yesterday you saw us prove that. Give us stuff to read. Maybe we can find connections you haven't."

"I want to help you find these men who hurt my mother," Daniel said. "It's the only way she and I can ever really be free."

"They have a point, Roly," Angus said. "I've seen the way they can digest and understand material. At least let them try something."

"You know I can't just give out access," Roly said. "You need top secret clearance to read some of those documents."

I couldn't help laughing. "You already know everything about us, Roly," I said. "And you've got us locked up here. What can we do?"

Roly wavered. Finally he said, "We'll start with declassified documents. See what you can figure out from them."

Angus set us both up with laptops in the conference room, and started giving us materials to read. Another agent brought us hoagies for lunch, though he called them sub sandwiches. As we were finishing, washing them down with more of that pineapple soda Daniel liked, Angus came in with a cell phone. "You want to talk to your mom, Daniel?"

He jumped up and grabbed the phone. "Mami?" He launched into a torrent of Spanish. I couldn't translate the words, but I understood what he was saying all the same. I walked over to the other side of the room and called my mom's cell phone.

I went right to voice mail. Figures. She was probably showing a client a house or something. But I needed to talk to somebody about finding Daniel's mom, so I called my dad's office.

"Richard Torani."

"It's me. Daniel's mom showed up in a hospital in Chicago."

"Chicago? How did she get there?"

"We don't know yet. She got hurt, but the doctors say she's going to get better." I looked across the room to where Daniel was still talking to his mom. I was so happy for him. And I kind of missed my own mom, too.

"We're worried about you, Melissa," my father said. "We don't want anything to happen to you."

"I'm fine, Dad. I mean, honestly, could I be anywhere safer right now?"

He couldn't argue with that. I told him I loved him and Mom and even Robbie, and hung up. By then Daniel had finished his call, and he and I went back to the laptops again.

It was the slowest, most tedious thing I've ever done. The documents they had us reading were endless details of peoples' backgrounds and movements. But we both kept on going. Around three o'clock Daniel looked up. "Have you got a guy named Francisco Sanchez?"

"I have at least four of them."

"There's one who's a self-employed computer consultant."

I nodded. "Yeah, I remember him. From Atlanta."

"He went to Washington last March." He swiveled his laptop around to show me. "Mario Garcia was there too, at the same time."

"The bookstore clerk from San Francisco?"

"Yup." He pointed at a digital receipt from a coffee shop on Pennsylvania Avenue. "Both of them have receipts at the same time, in the same coffee shop."

"And the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe they were planning a bombing or something."

"Let's see if we can put them together anywhere else."

We spent the next two hours focused on the two of them. By the time Angus came in to ask us if we wanted dinner, we had put Garcia and Sanchez together three different times, in different cities. And we had found that Francisco Sanchez got around; he was connected to two other men we had files on.

"Can we show you something, Angus?" Daniel asked. I had been playing secretary, creating an Excel spreadsheet that listed all our connections. Angus pulled a chair between us and we pointed out what we had found.

"You picked these things out of all that data?" he asked.

"I know it's not much," Daniel said. "But we're new at this, and we're really trying."

Angus shook his head. "There's nothing to apologize for. We've had agents looking at this data for months, and they haven't come up with what you guys found in a couple of hours." He stood up. "Wait here. Roly has to see this."

When he brought Roly back, we showed him our spreadsheet. He, too, was amazed.

"It's mostly Daniel," I said. "He's the one who made the most connections. I was just his sounding board."

"No, you found stuff too," Daniel said.

Roly said, "Let me at that, Melissa," and I handed him the laptop. "I'm going to send this stuff to my own account. And then I'm going to make a few phone calls."

He typed for a minute, then handed the computer back to me. "Get these guys some dinner, Angus," he said. "We're going to be here for a while."

I took advantage of the break to call home again. This time my mom answered. "It's really cool," I burbled. "They gave us all this data to read, and Daniel and I made some connections nobody else had been able to see."

"They've put you to work now?" my mother asked. "That's not right. You're only seventeen."

"Mom. This is so exciting. It's like we're helping out with national security or something."

"I just want you to come home, sweetheart. I won't feel right until I see you back here."

"Honestly, Mom. When I'm home you ignore me. Go fix Robbie some weird food or something. Go online and research his condition. Call his doctor or that parents support group. You won't even notice I'm gone."

"Melissa! How can you say that?"

"Because it's true, Mom."

"It most certainly is not. What about all those piano lessons I took you to? Every parent-teacher night, every time you were in a school play. All those hours I spent reading to you, going over your homework with you? How can you be so ungrateful!"

In the background I heard my father say, "That's enough, Caroline. Give me the phone."

Was that true? Had my parents really spent all that time paying attention to me? Was I just a jealous, ungrateful little bitch?

"Your mother is upset, Melissa," my father said. "Both of us just want you home, safe. We love you."

"I know, Dad. I'm sorry I made Mom go crazy. I love you both, and I'll be home soon."

I hung up the phone and stared at the wall in front of me. For years I'd been nurturing this grudge, feeling that my parents never loved me or paid attention to me because the Big Mistake was so much trouble, because he seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room.

But what if my mom and dad had been taking care of me too, all that time? It couldn't have been easy for them, both of them working, dealing with all Robbie's problems and still trying to keep the house going. I did remember my mom taking me to buy new shoes, running me to the doctor and the dentist, making dinner every night for us. That had to have been hard. And even once they got Robbie on the right diet, there were still so many things to do--laundry and taking care of the yard, and looking after my mom's parents when they got sick. And I had been so mean and ungrateful the whole time.

"Melissa?" Daniel asked. "What's the matter? Why are you crying?"

I didn't even realize I had been. I wiped a tear out of my eye and said, "I want to go home. I don't want to leave you alone, but I want to see my mom and dad. Even the Big Mistake."

Angus came in with pizza then. "Don't worry, Melissa. Things are breaking fast. We may be able to send you guys home tomorrow."

For the first time, food in Miami was totally familiar. The pizza tasted just like the ones that Brie's family got, with a crispy thin crust, spicy sausage and sliced mushrooms. I was totally in heaven.

By the time we finished dinner, I was feeling tired. We had been concentrating all day, and I just wanted to relax and watch something stupid on TV. I asked Angus if they still needed us, or if we could go back to the motel.

He said, "Let me see what I can do," and walked out of the room.

"How are you feeling, Daniel?" I asked.

"Tired. We didn't really do anything all day but read, but I can barely keep my eyes open."

"Me too." I snuggled up next to him and rested my head on his shoulder. "This has been amazing, but I'm ready to go home."

"Me, too. But I want my mother to be there."

Daniel and I both closed our eyes, and Angus startled us when he came back in the room. "They can do without me. Come on, I'll take you over to the motel."

"Are those men we found the information on the ones who hurt Daniel's mom?" I asked, as we walked to his little car.

"I don't know, Melissa," Angus said.

"And you wouldn't tell us if you did."

"Some things are classified," he said, getting behind the wheel. "But I really don't know that, and I don't think we'll know until we pick those guys up and question them. And honestly, maybe not even then."

I was happy to be helping the FBI, don't get me wrong. But I was tired, I wanted to go home, and I didn't know when that was going to happen. That was not a good feeling.

As we drove back to the motel, I realized that neither Daniel nor I had any clean clothes for the next day. "Is there a washing machine anywhere?" I asked Angus.

"Beats me. Let me see."

He called someone, probably Roly, who told him to take us to a mall down the street and buy us some clean clothes. We went into a big discount store, and I made a beeline for some new stuff. Daniel and Angus trailed along behind me.

All my tiredness was gone and I felt giddy. "Do we have a budget?" I asked, picking out a shirt with a label I recognized and holding it against me.

"Don't go overboard," Angus said. "Just get what you need."

I made a noise through my lips and went back to looking. "Come on, Daniel, you want to look at stuff for you?" Angus asked.

"No, wait," I said. "I want to shop for Daniel."

The two of them looked at each other. "I'd do what the lady says, if I were you," Angus said.

"Good answer." I picked out a nice gauzy pink dress with spaghetti straps, and a black T-shirt to go underneath it. A new pair of jeans with studs embroidered up the legs, and a flowered tank top. I sent the guys over to the men's' department while I picked out my undies, then met up with them as Angus was holding up shirts.

"I want to see Daniel in polo shirts." I picked a bright green one and a dark blue one off the rack. "And you need new jeans, ones that fit you." I flipped through them until I found his size and then sent him off to the dressing room. Angus and I stood by a display of belts and ties to wait for him.

"He's a good kid," Angus said. "I hope everything works out for him."

"I did something I should tell him about, but I'm not sure how," I said.

Angus turned to me. "Really? What's that?"

"I applied to college for him."

He looked confused. "How did you do that?"

I explained how I had hacked into his school account, written his essays, and used my mother's credit card. "I know, it was all wrong. But he wasn't even going to apply. And you see how smart he is."