The Chemist

If Daniel was employed by the department or, more likely, one of the organizations that worked closely with it – the CIA, a few military sections, some other black ops floaters that, like the department, didn’t have official names – he would have an electronic tracker on him. Just like she’d once had. Absently, she rubbed her finger across the small raised scar on the nape of her neck, covered by her short hair. They liked to tag the head. If only one part of a body could be recovered, the head was best for identification purposes.

She opened the back passenger-side door and knelt on the damp ground beside Daniel’s head. She started with the place both she and Barnaby had been tagged, brushing her fingers lightly along his skin, then again, pressing harder. Nothing. She’d seen a few foreign subjects whose trackers had been freshly removed from behind their ears, so she checked there next. Then she ran her fingers through his hair, probing the scalp for any bumps or hard spots that shouldn’t be there. His curls were very soft and smelled nice, citrusy. Not that she cared about his hair, but at least she didn’t have to put her hands into some greasy, malodorous nest. She appreciated that.

Now for the heavy lifting. If it was de la Fuentes keeping tabs on this man, the tracker would probably be external. She threw the shoes into the woods beside the road first – they seemed the most likely culprit of his clothes; lots of men would wear the same pair every day. Then she stripped off his shirt, grateful for the button-down, though it was still hard to get it out from under the weight of his body. She didn’t bother trying to get the undershirt over his head; she pulled a blade from her pocket, untaped it, and cut the fabric into three easily removable pieces. She scanned his chest – no suspicious scars or lumps. The skin on his torso was fairer than his arms; he had a faint farmer’s tan, no doubt from building houses in Mexico with a T-shirt on. Or from acquiring superviruses in Egypt – also very sunny.

He had what she thought of as sports muscles rather than gym muscles. No hard-cut edges, just a nice smooth alignment that showed he was active without being obsessive.

Rolling him onto his stomach was hard, and he fell into the foot space, draped over the hump between seats. He had two light scars on his left shoulder blade, parallel and even in length. She explored them carefully, prodding the skin all around, but she couldn’t feel anything besides the normal fibrous, hypertrophic tissue that should be there.

It didn’t take her long to realize she should have removed his jeans before rolling him over. She had to climb on top of his awkwardly positioned form and reach both arms around his torso to get the button fly open. So very thankful that he was not wearing skinny jeans, she then climbed out the other passenger-side door and yanked the pants off over his feet. She was unsurprised to see that he wore boxers rather than briefs. It fit his clothing profile. She stripped the boxers off, then the socks, and then she grabbed up the rest of the clothes, walked them a few feet off the road, and stuffed them behind a fallen log. She made another trip for the backpack. The laptop would be a very good hiding place for any electronic device someone wanted him to carry around unknowingly.

This wasn’t the first time she’d had to strip a target down herself. In the laboratory environment, she’d had people who prepped a subject for her – Barnaby called them the underlings – but she hadn’t always been in the lab, and during her first field trip to Herat, Afghanistan, she’d learned to be deeply grateful to the underlings. Stripping down a man who hadn’t bathed in months was not pleasant – especially when she didn’t have a shower available for herself afterward. At least Daniel was clean. She was the only one working up a sweat today.

She found the screwdriver in the trunk and quickly changed the DC license plate for one she’d pulled off a similar car in a West Virginia scrap yard.

Just to be thorough, she did a cursory examination of the backs of his legs, the bottom of his feet, and his hands. She’d never seen a tracker on the extremities, probably because extremities sometimes got cut off to make a point. She didn’t see any scars. She also didn’t see any calluses that suggested he trained with guns or used them frequently. He had soft teacher hands, with just a few hard spots that spoke of blisters from inexperienced labor.

She tried to roll him back up onto the seat but quickly realized it was a vain effort. It wasn’t a comfortable sleeping position, but he wouldn’t wake up regardless. He would be sore later. Though it was completely ridiculous to even think of that.

As she repositioned the blanket and tucked it around his body as best she could, she was constructing a story about him from the documents she’d read and the evidence in front of her.

She believed Daniel Beach was mostly the man she saw now, the pleasant all-around good guy. The attraction for the avaricious ex was understandable. He was probably easy to fall in love with. After some time had passed, enough time for the ex to take love for granted, she would have been able to shift her focus to the things she didn’t have – the nice apartment, the big ring, the cars. She probably missed this side of Daniel now, the grass always being greener and whatnot.

But there was also darkness in Daniel, buried deep, perhaps born from the pain and unfairness of losing his parents, aggravated by his wife’s betrayal, and then ignited by the loss of his final family member. That darkness would not surface easily. He would compartmentalize it, keep it away from this gentle life, pack it into the dark spaces where it fit. No wonder he could speak of Mexico so blithely. He would have two Mexicos: the happy one the teacher loved, and the dangerous one the monster thrived in. They probably weren’t anything close to the same place in his head.