Welcome to Paths Not Taken, the thirteenth Operation Quickline story. When a sting operation is set up on the resort owned by Lisa Wycherly’s father, she and Sid Hackbirn find themselves revisiting their high school jobs. And hoping their covers don’t get blown. You can read the first chapter here.
Sid had been in quite the mood when he’d gotten back to the resort after his afternoon in San Francisco. It wasn’t Liz, per se. It was the reminder of what I really meant to him. And that he wanted to make it up to me that he’d run off that day and I’d had to stay behind.
We cranked the television on rather loudly to cover up the noise we made. Our sex life is exuberant, and that can be embarrassing to my family members and anyone else on the other side of thin walls. Monday morning, both of us were happy, but a little bleary-eyed. Sid decided he could take a break from the breakfast rush and sleep in a little. It also gave us a chance to figure out what we were going to do next about the plans.
After running and showers, Sid hurried off to the restaurant. I put on my shorts and polo shirt, then turned on the walkie-talkie and checked in. Fortunately, things were quiet that morning. So, after eating some cereal at my parents’ house, I got Motley, and we went back to the staff lodge. Half of the downstairs (the other half being the apartment Sid and I were staying in) and all of the upper floor had been divided into shared rooms with private bathrooms. The kids were all at work, and the lodge was deserted.
Even so, I didn’t waste any time and went through each room, giving Motley a chance to find the floppy. He only alerted once, and that was in the room Marina shared with Donna. I found the package of what was most likely cocaine in Marina’s purse, in a hidden pocket near the bottom of the brown leather bag. I debated taking it, but didn’t want Marina to know that someone had been going through her stuff. Then I searched Dusty’s room extra thoroughly and found nothing. There wasn’t even anything in the downstairs common room, where the kids could hang out in the evenings, since they all worked days, when we needed the help more.
I was just putting the cushions back on the common room sofa when Dusty wandered in, wearing his bright yellow polo shirt and dirty jeans.
“Hi,” I said, brightly.
He seemed startled, then shrugged. “Hi.”
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Fine. Fine,” he said. “I just need my small screwdrivers. There’s a kid whose toy broke, and I said I’d try to fix it.”
“That’s nice of you.” I smiled at him. “Thanks.”
“Yeah. Well.” He scuttled off to his room and reappeared a minute later with a plastic, burgundy-colored, flat case I had not only just seen when I’d searched his room but knew for a fact contained only small screwdrivers.
I watched him leave, then debated what to do next. The common room looked like any other large living room, although there was a large rock fireplace on the back wall. The room was in the middle of the floor, with the bedrooms on one side and the apartment on the other. The apartment had the only kitchen because the kids either ate out of the restaurant, or off the resort, or had pizza delivered.
Actually, there was a lot of pizza delivered to the resort as a whole since we didn’t have room service. A couple of other restaurants also offered delivery, but pizza seemed to be the most popular.
Motley whined a little, and I unlocked the door to the apartment and went in. A light flashed on the answering machine we’d installed at the beginning of the summer. We’d forwarded our business line to Neff and Mary’s old number since Sid and I did have a freelance writing business to keep up. I checked the messages. Marge Benson had left one with a number local to the Tahoe area.
Marge was another Travel Club member. She lived in an RV that was parked most often in South Lake Tahoe and was one of Mama’s friends. Mama, and I had reason to believe, Daddy didn’t know about her connection to the Travel Club or the intelligence community, in general. Marge was technically retired from the CIA and had been for over ten years. But she’d remained part of the upper echelon of covert operatives, coordinating between a variety of agencies, both domestic and foreign.
Sid and I had decided while we were out running that morning to call her. Now that we knew the plans had arrived, and that they were missing, we decided we could use all the help we could get. And since Marge was one of my parents’ friends, it wouldn’t be odd for her to show up at the resort every so often.
I deduced that Sid hadn’t been able to actually reach her, and dialed the number she’d left. Marge picked up right away.
“Good to hear from you,” she told me. “What’s up?”
“Were you updated on Dale’s big plan to catch the operative buying our technology?” I asked.
“Hell, yes.” Marge sighed. “I’m right here, aren’t I? Well, I was going to be.”
“What’s going on?”
“Red Light. That long-haul courier on your line.”
“What about him?” My tone may have been more than a little acerbic.
Red Light, whose real name was Scott Morgan, was a perpetual thorn in Sid’s and my sides. He was an amazing tail, but we’d had more than a few problems with his attitude and tendency to assume he knew what he was doing.
Since Operation Quickline’s primary mission was moving information around, each colored line had several stops that led to New York. The idea was that no two stops were more than a couple hours away from each other, allowing couriers the chance to lead seemingly normal lives. The stops were necessary to confuse enemy operatives who were trying to follow the information coming in from Europe and South America.
But there were things that were sometimes physically too big for couriers to handle, such as guns and some surveillance equipment, or that couldn’t go by air for various reasons, but needed to go directly to Washington, DC. That’s why we had Morgan working as a long-haul trucker serving all four of the different lines.
“I’ll be taking his place for the time being,” Marge growled, adding a couple extra curse words.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“No.” More cursing. “The idiot got his head blown off over the weekend. Got cocksure and walked right into a trap.”
“Oh, no!”
“We told him to let you two handle the Soviet buyer. But no. He had a whole load of PCs and was using them as bait. Thank God, the buyer didn’t get Red Light’s truck.”
“Oh, the poor guy,” I said.
“Well, you don’t live long being stupid in this business.”
“Believe me, I know.” I sighed. “I guess Sid and I had better find something else to do. We’ve got a lot of territory to cover here, and we have to be careful how we do it, especially now that Hattie’s here. My father knows that she’s part of the Travel Club, and he’s beginning to get suspicious. You haven’t told my folks that you’re part of it, have you?”
“Hell, no.” Okay. She didn’t say hell. “Your dad is too damned smart to try and put something past him. I tried telling Dale that, but would he listen?”
“Of course not.” I shut my eyes as my blood began boiling.
“Dale said, no. You two have worked around your father as yourselves before. You’d make it work.” Marge cursed again. “He’s got some plan for the two of you. I have no idea what it is, but he’s been grooming Sid for years.”
“You’d think Dale wouldn’t want to blow that by messing up our covers,” I grumbled.
“You’d think. I’ve got to give Dale a lot of credit. He is insanely good at managing all the chess pieces, if you know what I mean. But some days, I have to wonder about him.”
I thanked Marge and went to put Motley back in the yard at my parents’ house. After playing with Bowser puppy for a bit, I took him outside to do his business, then put him back in his crate.
I needed to talk to both Sid and Hattie and decided that since it was getting close to one in the afternoon at that point, it was time for lunch. So, I went to look for Sid, and instead found Bracha Solomon wandering the perimeter of the resort near the woods beyond the horse barn, where a small creek ran.
“Hey, Bracha,” I called to her.
She was tall, with a solid build, black hair, and deep brown eyes. She was wearing a t-shirt and her checked chef’s pants but hadn’t put on the white coat she wore in the kitchen.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked as I walked up to her.
Her eyes flitted to the woods. I could have sworn I saw a bit of yellow flash between the trees.
“Oh, just getting some kinks out,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “I worked breakfast this morning. I’m taking a split shift so that Felix can work dinner tomorrow for my night off.”
That didn’t quite compute to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. I left her to her walk and headed back to the restaurant to find Sid.
He was in the kitchen, so I decided to get some lunch at the same time.
“What’s the special?” I asked him as he filled salad plates for one of the waiters.
“You’re going to love this.” He shuddered. “Chili burgers with fries and coleslaw.” He turned. “Marina!”
“Thanks, Sid.” Marina rushed up and looked the plates over. “One was no carrot.”
Sid pointed. “That one.”
Marina quickly dressed the salads, then put them on a tray and rushed out.
“I’ll have the special,” I said, grinning. Chili burgers are one of my all-time favorite foods. “If this is a good time.”
“As good a time as any.” He put the order into the ordering computer.
I frowned. “I’m guessing the special isn’t about doing something nice for me.”
“It is, and it isn’t.” Sid rolled his eyes. “The kitchen inventory is a separate file on a separate computer than the ordering system. Which makes it really hard to coordinate what’s being ordered with what’s in the freezer.” He sighed. “Bracha found a whole bunch of ground beef this morning just after our regular order had arrived.” He smiled at me. “I did suggest the chili burgers on your behalf. But tomorrow, we’re going to be doing sloppy joes. Your dad’s idea. And we have a lot of extra cabbage because no one ordered cole slaw last week. So, there’s going to be a lot of coleslaw on special.” He shook his head. “This ordering system would work a lot better if it were integrated with the rest of the restaurant’s computers. In fact, it would be nice to coordinate the restaurant’s computers with the rest of the resort’s systems so that we could get some data on which of the restaurant customers are staying here and who’s coming in from the outside. The good news is your dad agrees. I told him I’d work on it.”
My chili burger came up just then. Sid decided he could use a break and grabbed the plate, nodding toward the breakroom. I shut the door and got a tumbler from the cupboard and filled it with Dr. Pepper from the room’s soda fountain.
“You want some?” I asked.
Sid loves Dr. Pepper but can’t drink it too often because it upsets his stomach if he does.
He finished setting my place at the back table. “Oh, what the hell. Thanks.”
I filled a second tumbler with the soda and brought it over. I smiled as I saw the place setting. Sid had even remembered to add my newest passion to the plate: a tiny cup of mayonnaise. Over the past couple years, we’d been to Europe several times on Quickline business. The Belgians and French rarely put ketchup on their fries. They put mayonnaise on them. I’d fallen in love with the practice.
“How did your search go this morning?” Sid asked as I dunked a fry and ate it.
“Fine, I guess.” I got a big bite of my burger and sighed happily. “Oh, my god. This chili burger is fabulous.”
“I’m glad.” Sid grinned. He seems to think it’s entertaining to watch me eat. [It’s not just entertaining. It’s incredibly arousing. – SEH]
“I didn’t find the plans.” I winced. “I found some cocaine hidden in Marina’s purse. Or what looks like cocaine. It’s a white powder, and it was in a hidden pocket.”
“Could be heroin.” Sid mused. “But coke seems to be the current favorite.” He looked back at the kitchen. “Funny. Marina doesn’t act like she’s using anything.”
“Could she be really good at covering it up?”
“It’s possible.” Sid thought it over as he sipped his soda. “On the other hand, I’ve been working with her for a couple weeks now. I find it a little hard to believe that I wouldn’t have picked something up. I spotted Lee Whitney’s problem almost immediately.”
“Lee Whitney’s on drugs?”
Sid nodded. “Marijuana. Well, I can’t say for certain. I haven’t smelled it on him or caught him stoned. But he sure acts like it.”
“What are we going to do?” I looked at him, worried.
“There’s nothing we can do until I actually catch him. It’s not as though he’s messing up on the job. He’s not the greatest manager out there, but he knows what to do and gets it done.”
“So, what do we do about Marina?” I fidgeted with one of my fries.
Sid sipped. “Probably nothing. I’ll keep an eye on her, but let’s face it, we’re not looking for drugs. We’re looking for plans.”
“We probably should stay focused on that. Unless the drugs are where the plans are hiding.”
Sid chuckled. We’d seen that before.
“I’ve got to bring Hattie up to date on this,” I said, wiping my mouth. “Anything you want me to tell her?”
“Sounds like you’ve got it covered.”
“Wait. I forgot something.” I got up and got some more soda in my cup. “I saw Bracha walking around the edge of the resort. She said she was working a split shift so that Felix could cover her tomorrow.”
“There was some sort of scheduling snafu.” Sid shrugged. “I have to stay out of it because that’s not my side of the business. Bracha told me when I came on this morning that she needs to stick around here more, anyway. Said having me around had made her lazy and she needs to stay on top of things better.”
I also told him about the call with Marge. Sid took Red Light’s death philosophically.
“You’re right. It’s sad,” he said. “But it comes as no surprise.”
“True.” Then I told him about Dale’s plans.
“Dale has plans for everybody.” Sid chuckled. “It’s not necessarily going to do him any good.”
“He’s not exactly somebody we can say no to.”
Sid got up and stretched. “No, he’s not. But at some point, he’s going to have to face it that I’m not his long-lost son. In the meantime, I’m going to try not to think about his plans. We have plenty of other things to worry about right now.”
“You’re right. I’ll go talk to Hattie.”
“Thanks.” He leaned over and gave me a very warm kiss.
“I’ll see you later, sweetie.”
“Hey.” He smiled softly as I turned. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Sid.”
Hattie was nonplussed about the situation with the plans, to say the least.
“Where, in Heaven’s name, could they be?” she asked, pacing the room.
“Practically anywhere,” I said. “We don’t even know if your brother actually brought them with him.”
“We should have at least found the dummy plans then.”
“One would think.” I sighed and shrugged. “He didn’t tell Sid much about what he was doing, and nothing we didn’t already know. If anything, he told Sid to stay out of the way.”
Hattie groaned softly. “Is it possible for Miles to have been any more aggravating?”
“I don’t know.”
Hattie was about to say something else, but at that moment, my walkie-talkie squawked.
I was not happy about the summons to my father’s office, but I couldn’t refuse, either. I told Hattie that I had to run, and she let me go, shaking her head.
There were two detectives in my father’s office waiting for me.
“Detectives, this is my daughter, Lisa Wycherly,” Daddy said.
I couldn’t help smiling briefly. Unlike a lot of people, my father hadn’t changed my last name for me when I got married. Mama told me that Daddy had actually been rather proud that I’d kept my maiden name instead of taking Sid’s. It did make things interesting when I adopted Nick, since he chose to keep his mother’s last name and take Sid’s and my last names as his middle names. Which means none of us has the same last name, and there are folks who do not get that.
“I’m Detective Olson,” said the first guy, a medium-sized fellow in a tan suit. “This is Detective Pfizer.”
The second guy was a little taller and considerably younger than Olson.
“May I see your IDs, please?” I asked with a smile.
Pfizer grinned as Olson sighed. Daddy just smiled. I looked at the IDs, then back at the two detectives.
“As we explained to your father,” Olson said. “This is just routine. The coroner found a burn on the decedent’s palm and we’re trying to find out how it got there.”
I’ll admit I was not terribly comfortable with the way Daddy was watching me at that moment. Fortunately, I was genuinely puzzled.
“Honey, can you take these gentlemen to the facilities shed?” Daddy asked. “I told them about that TV that fell. Maybe that could help them figure it out.”
“Sure. Happy to.”
The facilities shed wasn’t really a shed, just one more out-building on the resort. But it was Ty Larson’s lair and where we stored most of the tools for things like basic plumbing problems, and other stuff on the resort that needed fixing. That Dusty and Ty had bonded did not surprise me in the least. The two were cut from the same cloth, both quiet and reclusive, both amazing at fixing things. The only difference between Dusty and Ty was that Dusty was young, and Ty was older than dirt.
I showed the two detectives to the shed. It was a one-room building which would have looked larger if it hadn’t been crammed with tools and worktables. Ty had a desk in the back, but you really had to look for it to see it under all the papers and miscellaneous tools and parts.
Neither Ty nor Dusty was in the shed when we got there. It didn’t matter. The TV from room 305 was the only television in there. It sat on a table near the door, its screen shattered. I tried to remember if it had been broken when I saw it, but then thought it had to have been. It had fallen off the dresser.
Pfizer looked at it, then Olson, and nudged his partner.
“He must have dropped it and that’s how he got it,” Pfizer said.
Olson glared briefly at his partner, then smiled at me.
“Yeah. That makes sense,” he said after some consideration. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
I walked the detectives back to the main lodge, feeling entirely unquiet, at best.
Honestly? If cops get sloppy, it’s because ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’ve already seen something more times than they can count and they have a pretty good idea of what they’re dealing with. The stuff that Sid and I see? Well, that’s pretty rare. So, you can’t blame the cops if they don’t pick up on it, and in this case, they couldn’t know what might have happened.
Still, the detectives were wondering about a burn on Lipplinger’s palm, and it sure sounded like they were thinking he’d been electrocuted. The problem was that I was pretty sure the TV had been unplugged before it had been dropped because the cable cord had already been disconnected. So, how could it have electrocuted Lipplinger?
Nor did I remember the screen being shattered. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been. I’d only been able to get a quick glance at the room before I had to bail to avoid barfing all over. There were two other people who had seen the room as well. Daddy, who I did not want to ask about it, and Mira.
I found Mira and Lourdes in the housekeeping office snarling at each other.
“What’s going on?” I asked, far more brightly than I felt.
“Nothing!” snapped Lourdes.
She turned on her heel and all but stomped upstairs.
“She does not understand how to handle this place!” Mira groaned.
I sighed. “Yes, I know she can be difficult. But that’s not why I’m here right now.”
“It would be nice,” Mira grumbled.
“Mira, I know it’s hard dealing with her.” I smiled even though I didn’t feel it. “Right now, I’ve got a bigger problem. It’s about last Thursday.”
Mira made a face. “The dead guy?”
“Yeah. Do you remember the TV?”
“It was on the floor.”
“But what shape was the screen in?”
Mira looked at me funny, then thought. “It was okay. I mean, the only reason you thought it was broken was because it fell.”
“And it was unplugged.”
“Oh, yeah. Both the cable and the electrical cord. What’s going on?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
I went back upstairs. Daddy was waiting for me.
“Well?” he asked.
“The screen was shattered, and the cops figured that’s what did it,” I said.
Daddy looked at me as if he didn’t entirely buy my explanation.
“Are you sure about that?” he asked.
“Look, Daddy, if the cops are going to go with that, I’m fine.” I sighed.
He frowned. “I suppose.”
“I’ll talk to Ty about the screen,” I said. “Who knows?”
Daddy frowned at me again, but let it go and went back to his office. That’s when it hit me that the TV was the one part of Lipplinger’s room that I had not gone over with a fine-tooth comb.
Ty and Dusty were still elsewhere when I got to the facilities shed. I looked at the TV, then took the back off it. I suppose I could have gone through the screen, but there were several jagged shards of glass in the frame.
As I turned the box around, something sharp bit my hand. I looked more closely. A small copper wire protruded from the inside near the bottom of the box. I grabbed a screwdriver from another bench and got the back off relatively easily. I also found the wire from the outside of the box. The wire led inside the TV set to a small orange cylinder that had a wire protruding from either side and had been soldered to what had to be a circuit board. Just beyond that, on the floor of the box, I saw something glint.
It was a series of strips of black electrical tape stuck to the bottom of the box. I pulled them up to find the plastic casing of a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk underneath. I got the disk unstuck and into my pocket. I hurried away from the shed feeling very unsettled and couldn’t put my finger on why.
That evening, Sid made a cheeseburger casserole and coleslaw using some of the excess ground beef and cabbage from the restaurant. It was delicious, and I almost forgot about the floppy disk that I’d hidden under the pillow of our bed in the apartment. But it didn’t last long. I got pensive while we cleaned up. I thought Daddy was going to say something, but before he could, Janey talked us all into watching the videotape of Roxanne that she’d pulled from the resort library that day.
Sid called me on my mood as we got ready for bed that night.
“What’s going on?” he asked as he took his contact lenses out.
I winced. “I found something weird today.”
I told him about the cops and going back to the shed, then showed him the floppy disk.
“Are those the plans?” he asked.
I groaned. “I have no way of knowing. But it is weird. Lipplinger had to have hidden the disk in the TV on purpose. The problem is why?”
“Have you talked to Hattie about it?”
“I wanted to talk to you about it first. There was that wire, too. I don’t know why that’s important, or even if it is. But it is an anomaly.”
Sid frowned. “I’m sorry, my beloved, but I have no idea why that wire would make a difference, except that it probably shouldn’t have been there.”
“You’re right.” I bit my lip as I thought it over. “It shouldn’t have been. Sid, I think Lipplinger may have been murdered.”
Thank you for reading. For more information about the Operation Quickline series, click here.
Please check out the Fiction page for the latest on all my novels. Or look me up at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Vroman’s, in Pasadena, California.