Episode 10.2

I signal to Charlie; he nods. It's time to give him another piece of the puzzle. It takes Charlie ten minutes to explain everything we know about his father's ramshackle apartment in New York.

"I don't get it," she says, sitting back down on her hands. Do you have an apartment in New York?

"Actually, if I had to guess, I'd bet it was rented," she clarified.

"How long did you say you were away last summer?" Charlie asks.

"I don't know," Gillian mutters. Two and a half weeks... maybe three. I never lent much…we hardly saw each other when I was here…" Her voice trails off and it's as if she's been stabbed in the stomach. Her fair skin turns albino white. How much did she say she was in that account they found? she asks.

"Gillian, you don't have to get involved in…

"Just tell me how much there was!" Charlie takes a deep breath. -Three million dollars.

His mouth nearly hit the ground. -What? On my father's account?

Impossible. How could he...? He cuts off abruptly, and the cogs of the wheel begin to spin rapidly… moving through all the possibilities. The whole time, even though it was Charlie who broke the news to him, he keeps his eyes on me. He thinks that's why they killed him, right? he finally asks. Because of something that happened with that money...

"That's precisely what we're trying to find out," he explained, hoping his brain would keep moving.

"Did his father know anyone in the secret service?" Charlie asks.

"I don't know," Gillian says, still overwhelmed by the latest news. We weren't very close, but…but still I thought I knew him better than that.

"Do you keep any of his things at home?" Charlie asks.

-If some.

"And has he ever checked them?" "Just a little," she says, and her voice begins to rise slowly. But wouldn't the Service have...?

"Maybe they missed something," Charlie tells him. Maybe there's something they didn't see.

"Why don't we take a look together?" —I propose. It is the perfect offer.

Perfect, Charlie smiles.

I ignore the compliment; I feel guilty. Regardless of how much she can help us, it's still her dead father's house. I've seen it before in her eyes. Her pain does not leave her.

With a hesitant nod from Gillian, Charlie rises from her chair and I follow him to the door. Behind us, Gillian is still at the kitchen counter.

- He is fine? -I ask. "I just want to know one thing her," he says. Do you really believe that they killed my father?

"I honestly don't know what to think," I say. But just twenty-four hours ago I saw one of those guys murder one of our friends. I watched him pull the trigger and I watched his guns turn towards us... all because we found a bead with his father's name on it.

-That does not mean...

"He's right, that doesn't mean he was murdered," Charlie agrees. But if they didn't, why aren't they here trying to find him?

Sometimes I forget how aggressively sharp Charlie is. Gillian has no answer to that.

She takes one last look at the apartment and studies every detail. The absence of furniture, the windows covered with paper, even the rusty machete. If we were the bad guys, she'd already be dead.

Gillian slowly steps down from the counter, stands on the linoleum floor in her bare feet, pausing briefly as if she's about to say something. She's trying not to look distraught, but when her hand grips the doorknob, she still needs to digest what's going on. Without turning around, she utters nine words.

"This better not be a prank."

Charlie and I left the apartment. She follows us. She doesn't shine the sun yet, but she soon she will.

"Gillian, she won't regret this," Charlie says.

Gallo gripped the edges of the computer screen tightly in his calloused hands and looked down at the laptop balanced between his belly and the steering wheel. For two hours he had watched Maggie Caruso prepare lunch, wash the dishes, straighten the bottoms of two pairs of pants, and hang three silk blouses on the line outside the window. In that time, he received two calls: one from one of her clients, and the other from a wrong number. "Can you get her ready for Thursday?" and "Sorry, no one by that name lives here." That was all. Nothing more.

Gallo turned up the volume and opened the feed to all four digital cameras. Thanks to his last questioning, and Maggie's recent contact with her children, they were able to extend the authorization and install a camera in her bedroom, another in Charlie's room and a third in the kitchen. Through the screen, Gallo had views of every major room in the Caruso apartment. But the only person there was Maggie, bent over the sewing machine at the dining room table. In one corner, an old television set was broadcasting a midday talk show. Closer up, the sewing machine was hitting the fabric like a jackhammer. During two hours. That was all.

"Ready to take a break?" DeSanctis asked as the passenger door opened.

"What the hell took you so long?" Gallo asked dryly, not taking his eyes off the screen.

"Patience... Have you ever heard of patience?"

"Just tell me what you found out." Anything that can help us?

"Of course he can serve us…" Still out of the car, DeSanctis placed two aluminum briefcases on the front seat, one on top of the other. He slid past them and settled the one on top on his lap.

"Did they give you a hard time?" Rooster asked.

DeSanctis replied with a sarcastic smile and the opening of the locks on the briefcase.

"You know how Delta Dash do it: tell them what you need, tell them it's an emergency, and bing-bang-bing, all the James Bond gadgets are in the next shipment. All you have to do is pick them up at the luggage room.

Inside the silver case, encased in a black foam mold, DeSanctis found what looked like a round camera with a huge lens. A sticker at the bottom read DEA Property. Typical, DeSanctis agreed. When it came to high-tech surveillance, the DEA and Border Patrol always had the most advanced toys.

-What's that? Rooster asked.

"Germanium lenses... Indian antimony detector..."

—In Christian!

"Infrared camcorder with full thermal image," DeSanctis explained as he peered through the viewfinder.

"If she wants to sneak out at night, the camera will pick up her body heat and be able to locate her in the darkest alley.

Rooster looked up at the bright winter sky.

"What else have you got?"

"Don't look at me like that," DeSanctis warned. Setting the infrared camera on his lap, he put the first briefcase on the backseat and opened the second. Inside was a high-tech radar gun with a long barrel that looked like a police flashlight. It's just a prototype," DeSanctis explained. Measure movement, from running water to the blood that runs through your veins.

-And means?

"And it means that it allows you to see through stationary objects." Like the walls.

Gallo crossed his arms with a skeptical expression drawn on his face.

"Don't fuck...

-Works. I've seen it," DeSanctis insisted. The built-in computer lets you know if it's an overhead fan or a kid going around in circles on the roof. So if she runs into someone in the hallway, or if she gets out of the camera's line of sight...

"We'll get it," Gallo said, picking up the radar gun and pointing it toward Maggie Caruso's apartment. All we have to do is wait.

"Where do you want to start?" Gillian asks as we walk into her father's faded pink house.

"Wherever you want," Charlie says as I move through the crowded living room. Laid out like a flea market, the room is filled with…well…a little bit of everything. Bookshelves packed with science fiction and engineering books line two of the four white stuccoed walls, stacks of papers bury an old wicker chair, and

At least seven different cushions, including one in the shape of a flamingo and one in the shape of a laptop, are haphazardly placed on the stained leather sofa.

In the center of the room, a Woodstock coffee table is hidden under remote controls; faded photographs; an electric screwdriver; a handful of bills and coins; plastic figures of Happy and Bashful from Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs; a stack of Sun Microsystems coasters and at least two dozen impossibly brightly painted rabbit feet.

"I'm impressed," Charlie says. This room is an even bigger mess than mine.

"Wait till you see the rest," Gillian says. My father was purely function over form.

"So all this stuff was his?"

"Most of it," Gillian says. I've been trying to look at it to decide what to do with it... but it's not that easy to get rid of someone's life.

That comment hits you right on the head. It took my mother almost a year to get rid of my father's toothbrush. And that she hated him.

"Why don't we start there," he suggests, leading us toward the room his father used as an office. Inside, we find an L-shaped black Formica countertop that projects from the back wall and covers the right side of the room. Half is covered with papers and documents; the other half with tools and electronic parts: cables; transistors; a miniature soldering iron; a set of pliers; a set of jeweler's screwdrivers; and even some dental tools for working with small electrical connections. On the desk is a framed photograph of Gepetto from the Disney movie Pinocchio.

"What about that Disney fetish?" Charlie asks.

"It was where he worked…fifteen years as an engineer in Orlando.

-Really? Has he ever designed any worthwhile rides?

-Sincerely I dont know; I hardly saw him when she was little. He used to send a stuffed Minnie doll for my birthday, but that was it. That was the reason my mother abandoned him, we were his second job.

"When did he come back to Miami?"

"I think five years ago, he said goodbye to Disney and found a job at a local computer game company. The salary was half, but luckily he had a good handful of Disney preferred stock. That was how he was able to buy this house.

"He wasn't a big shot at Disney, was he?" -I ask.

-Potato? he asks with that absolutely captivating smile. No, despite his engineering degree, he was nothing more than a worker bee. The closest he got to action was when he linked the computer systems together so that when Disney's central weather station sees rain threatening, all the gift shops in the park are immediately ordered to bring out umbrellas and ponchos. Mickey. The shelves are full of them before the first drop falls.

-That's very good.

"Well, yeah... maybe... although knowing my father, his role might have been a bit... overrated."

"Welcome to the club," I say, nodding. Our father was a...

-Our father? He exclaims. You are brothers?

Charlie glares at me and I bite my tongue.

-What? Gillian asks. What is the problem?

"Nothing," I tell him. It's just... after what happened yesterday... we're trying to lie low. As I say these words, I notice that she is weighing each one. But, like Charlie in her best days, Gillian lets it slide. It's okay," he says. I will never say a single word.

"I knew you wouldn't," I tell him with a smile.

"Can we continue with what we were doing?" Charlie interrupts. We still have a whole house to check.