Hungry lion on the loose

OMG! It’s beautiful. I got to the office this morning and Cinnamon was sitting behind a new desk where my old desk used to be. The walls have been painted a soft green. There were plants and a new rug.

11:00 a.m.

Then I came in here. Cinnamon is amazing. The place is unbelievable. The pieces of furniture are generally smaller than Dag’s furniture was. It is sleek and modern with lots of glass. Maizie came in with me and went trotting over to the girliest little bed you’ve ever seen. She was so proud of it!

There’s no place in here to hide anything out of the way. My desk is wide open with nothing more enclosed than a pencil drawer. On it was the remote control for the new 52-inch plasma TV screen that hangs on the opposite wall.

And pictures. She brought some of my photos from the apartment over and put them on my desk. The one of Dag and me at Pier 57 sits by itself on one side of the table. I’ll keep that one here. I don’t know how to tell Cinnamon that the others are all fakes.

I was never photographed much as a child. My mother burned any photos she could find and I kept my little stash well-hidden. The family pictures, even my parents’ wedding picture, are all fake. In fact, they are all pictures of me.

When I was little, I could never pass one of those little photo kiosks without getting my picture taken. It meant that I had a lot of pictures of me, some of them clowning around, smiling, serious, and what have you. But they didn’t have any background of where they were. So, I scanned all the pictures, looked up photos of different scenery on the internet, and airbrushed myself into them in a digital editing program. It worked so well for my childhood photos that when my parents died, I started taking pictures of myself in disguise. I have to admit that one of my disguises looked a lot like my father. I didn’t try to look like my mother for any pictures. I tried to look like what I wanted for a mother.

Then I took all the pictures into my photo editing program and put them together in little family scenes with pictures of me from the photo kiosks. I got pretty good at it, and you have to look really closely in order to tell they aren’t completely natural and right. Cinnamon chose some of my best work. My parents’ wedding picture, the three of us at the Grand Canyon (never actually been there), with my dad at the Space Needle, my graduation picture, and, of course, the one with Dag that I didn’t do anything to but scan and enlarge.

Maybe I’ll leave them here.

When I’d had my tour, Cinnamon closed the door between our offices and left me alone.

I stood by the window looking out over Puget Sound and thought about the past two months. It seems like my whole world changed the day Brenda Barnett brought Simon’s laptop into Dag’s office. I’ve been going for 57 days now thinking about all the crap that she pulled. I was no longer sitting at the desk in the outer office with Dag humming away in here. All Dag’s furniture is gone and I’m standing by his window with stupid tears running down my cheeks and Maizie standing next to me leaning against my leg.

If I start this, I’ll never finish. I’m never going to understand everything that’s happened in these two months. I sat down on the sofa and Maizie jumped up on my lap. I buried my face in her fur and cried.

2:00 p.m.

I got a call from Silas a little while ago. It’s not over. First he said he’d like to hire me to do an analysis of how they were pulling off this mobile phone scam they were doing. Well, that’s pretty easy. What I didn’t figure out, Simon filled in the details of when I was in Croatia. He also said that he needs a bill from me for my services in investigating Simon’s computer. He said he can’t pay me for the field work because officially I wasn’t working for him. But I should be able to bill a lot of time “at Dag’s old rates” for the computer work. That’s good, because I’ve got to pay for redecorating the office and figure out a salary for Cinnamon. She says that Lars submitted insurance claims on behalf of the estate and that most of the new stuff should be covered.

Then Silas casually drops into the conversation, “Oh, by the way, Brenda has escaped from Belize.”

WTF???

“I thought she was in jail where the sun would never shine and the government wasn’t going to help her,” I exclaimed.

“Well, it’s one of the problems with working with a government that isn’t corrupt, like we could have gotten in some countries, but isn’t really so strong that it can enforce all its own laws,” he explained. “In a really corrupt government, we could have spread some money around to the right people and the problem would have been ended permanently.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“No, of course not. I’m just saying we could make sure that things stayed the way we wanted them to,” he said. “The problem with an honest government is that they would be highly offended by any suggestion that they do something that isn’t as respectable as they consider themselves to be. So we can’t make any offers at a level that can enforce the agreement. But that doesn’t mean everyone who works for the government is completely honest. And a very wealthy prisoner can promise almost anything to a low level guard and get a response. Brenda got to someone who just walked out with her at the end of his shift and disappeared.”

“So now what?” I asked.

“Well, we’ve got a search going on. She’ll turn up somewhere. A woman like that can’t live without spending a lot of money. We’ve tapped accounts that she’s likely to use and will be able to track the transactions. She is definitely gone from Belize. But there’s a lot of Caribbean to disappear into and almost all of it has air service to the rest of the world. She won’t get back here, of course. We’ve sealed the borders against her and every known alias that she has.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” I said.

“Don’t worry. We shut down the operation. She doesn’t dare contact any of The Committee. Those guys are hiding behind a cloak of respectability and cooperation. They all know what thin ice they are walking on right now and wouldn’t hesitate to turn in their mothers if we asked for it. The truth is they are all a little relieved that Brenda is out of the picture.”

“So was I when she was out of it. I’ll sleep better at night if you catch her.”

“I’ll do that. What are you doing for dinner tonight? Or should I make appointments with your assistant?”

“Ummm. Is this a business meeting?”

“It was more… well, no… I just thought that… Well, it was so much fun last night…”

“Are you asking me out on a date?” I asked.

“Ummmm. More like a fig, Deb.”

“What?”

“It’s between friends. Just dinner to catch up and thank you.” My sigh was probably loud enough for Cinnamon to hear in the next room.

So how do you dress for a fig?