His eyes were bright. “Catch you later, Warshawski. Catch you later.”

30
Visiting Brass

Peppy jumped into the passenger seat. As I started to slide in next to her, someone got out of a car across the street and crossed to me. I stood back up, leaning against the doorframe.

“Colonel Baggetto. Don’t they need you at the fort?”

“No one is indispensable, especially on a military base where colonels grow like tumbleweeds and captains do the heavy lifting.”

“I didn’t think tumbleweeds took much lifting,” I said. “If you’re looking for me, I’m going back to my room and resting. Alone. If you want the sheriff, I can’t help you—the local LEO I was just talking to is with the police.”

“I was hoping I could buy you dinner,” Baggetto said.

“So you tracked my car down? Wouldn’t it have been easier to phone?”

Under the streetlamps his teeth gleamed white. “I know your car but not your phone number.”

“And you with your degrees in computer engineering and experience with army intelligence. NCIS makes it seem as though all anyone in military intelligence has to do is press a computer button to see every phone call I’ve made in the last ten years.”

“I probably could,” he said, still smiling, “but that wouldn’t be ethical. Can I persuade you to talk to me inside someplace warm, instead of the middle of Eighth Street?”

In the end, because I wanted to talk to him and I wanted to be inside with Peppy, not in a restaurant with her in a car, I told him he could meet me at the B and B. I didn’t feel like feeding him, but he told me he’d pick up a pizza on the way there, along with a bottle of wine.

In the B and B’s laundry room, I changed out of my good clothes into jeans and a sweatshirt, fed Peppy, and settled in the easy chair, leaving the straight-backed chair at the small desk for Baggetto. I turned down the wine.

“I haven’t put scopolamine in it,” he said testily.

“‘Drinking wine on top of scotch / Will a detective’s thinking botch,’” I said. “They taught us that jingle when I was at the detective academy.”

“You didn’t go—”

“To a detective academy,” I said when he stopped in midsentence. “I don’t mind you looking me up—I tried to do the same to you, but your history is, of course, harder to penetrate. What you really did in Afghanistan, for instance. That’s all deeply buried behind DoD fire-breathing dragons.”

“Every teenage hacker can break into the Pentagon computers, so I don’t think there’s anything too secret there.”