Blood Orchid (Holly Barker 3)

Grant Early was on time, and Holly wasn’t, which was unlike her, so she had to use the intercom to tell him to come in and sit down. Finally dressed, she came down the steps to find him kneeling and talking to Daisy, who was still in her bed. He stood up to greet her.

“We meet at last,” he said, offering a hand. In her cop’s habit, she ran his description through her frontal lobe: he was six feet, a hundred and seventy, tanned, with thick, close-cropped, iron-gray hair, a straight nose and a firm jaw, pale blue eyes.

“At last,” Holly said. He looked like a runner, she thought—very fit. And he was expensively dressed, in a linen jacket, cream silk trousers, and alligator loafers. For a moment, she forgot this was supposed to be business. “Would you like a drink, or would you rather have one at the restaurant?”

“If you’ve booked, let’s go on,” he said.

“We’re going to a little French place up the road,” she said. “They have a bar.”

He led her outside to a silver Mercedes SL600 convertible, which surprised Holly. She fastened her seat belt. “Have FBI agents had a big salary increase?” she asked.

He laughed. “Nope. Until last week, this belonged to a Colombian gentleman who got out of the country just ahead of us. We confiscated everything. I’m undercover, remember?”

“I like your disguise,” she said.

“Oh, I still own a gray suit and a white button-down shirt, like all the other agents,” he said, smiling and revealing very good teeth.

Holly directed him to the restaurant, and they were seated immediately.

“Drink?” he asked.

“A three-to-one vodka gimlet,” Holly said to the waitress. “Straight up and shaken, very cold.”

“Make it two,” Grant said. “I’ve never had one, but Harry Crisp told me to trust your judgment in all things.”

“That’s funny,” Holly said, “since Harry almost never does.”

Their drinks came, and they sipped.

“Mmmmm,” Grant said, “that’s perfect.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Harry is a fool not to trust your judgment,” he said, “but you have to understand why.”

“Why?”

“It’s a Bureau thing,” Grant said. “The Bureau doesn’t like to rely on outside information or advice until it can corroborate everything to its satisfaction. It goes all the way back to Hoover: The thinking is that nobody could possibly know more than the Bureau about anything. That’s why we’ve always been so lousy at things like running snitches.”

“I went to a lecture at the FBI academy in Quantico on running snitches, and a DEA agent taught it,” Holly said.

“My very point. There probably wasn’t an agent in the Bureau who could have done it as well. Harry’s like all other agents, only more so, since he made agent in charge.”

“Come to think of it,” Holly said, “he was a little more amenable to advice before he got promoted.”

They looked at the menus and ordered.

“So, Grant, why are you undercover in Orchid Beach?” she asked.

“If I told you that, then I wouldn’t be undercover.”

“In that case, you’re already not undercover, since I know who you are. Is Grant Early your real name, by the way?”

“It’s Grant Early Harrison,” he replied. “Early was my mother’s maiden name.”

“That makes it easy to remember, doesn’t it?”

“And anybody who called the Miami office and asked for Grant Early would just get a, ‘Who?’”