Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.

Odds on a Dead Pigeon Part 1

It was the second agent killed in two weeks. They had both been discovered in a hotel room, shot with their own weapon. They had both checked in with a woman - an average woman.

"Unless I read the man completely wrong, it's out of character," said Billy, frustrated with their lack of information. "Credle was married. He wasn't a player, was he, Lee?"

He sighed. "Not really. At least no more so than the average guy." He flirted some with the steno pool girls, and - to his displeasure - he'd seen him watching Amanda with an almost hungry expression once or twice, but he'd never acted on anything. "But, then again, neither was Treloggen."

Suppose it was just a run on the agency. Of course their social lives would have to be shut down, but who could hide forever?

It wasn't feasible, and it just didn't make sense.

If it was a run on the agency, he wanted Amanda to be aware of it. So he called her, as soon as he had a minute the next morning. He'd spent a few hours checking stories at the hotels where Credle and Treloggen had been found, and then another hour in Billy's office.

He was afraid the phone would just ring, thinking that it might in fact be this week that she was gone to Shenandoah National Forest. But there was the familiar click, and then Amanda's voice said, "Hello?"

He was careful, nowadays, to say hello. It irked her so badly whenever he didn't.

"Hi, Amanda."

There was silence on the other end - a strange, creeping silence that stole through the phone line, through his ear, and down his back.

"Uh, did I pick a wrong time? Can you talk?"

"Lee?" she asked. "Uh, no. No. Sure, I can talk. Uh, what is it you wanted?"

She rarely, if ever, said his name on the phone. Clearly her mother and the boys were out of earshot.

"Amanda, uh, we're really kind of short handed down here and I couldn't remember if it was this weekend or next that you were gonna do that, uh, camping thing."

When had he started rambling? She rambled when she was nervous - maybe he was, too.

"Well, it was this weekend, but I wasn't feeling so well. So, I sent Mother and the boys on ahead."

"Oh, well, if you're not feeling well, I —"

"Oh, no, I'm... I'm all right now. I thought I was catching a cold. But I guess it was, you know, just an allergy, or something."

Did Amanda have allergies? That was something to add to the growing list of things he was learning about her.

"Oh, great. Great, 'cause we can really use you down here. How soon can you come?"

She sounded hesitant, now. "Uh... Well, I could be there quickly, except the uh, the car's not running."

So how had Dotty and the boys been able to go? Probably a neighbor took them.

"Well, I guess I could pick you up?"

Her voice was enthusiastic again. "Oh, Lee, that'd be great. Um, I tell you what. In case I'm upstairs and I don't hear you, why don't I just leave the front door unlocked?"

He was going to pick her up from the front door! Maybe he wouldn't have to skulk around the back door forever after all.

He knew at once that something was terribly, horribly wrong. The front door had been left not only unlocked, but open a few inches.

He glanced around, at this quiet neighborhood, uneasy as the hair on his neck bristled.

"Amanda?" He kept his voice calm.

There was no answer.

He raised his voice, and heard the sound of growing panic. "Amanda?"

There was still no answer.

Now was not the time for wondering what the neighbors would think. He drew his gun, stepped to the hinge side of the door, and reached out a trembling hand.

When she had almost been kidnapped by Sinclair's goons, the door had been wide open and there had been the sounds of a struggle. This silence unnerved him.

He forced the door back, keeping out of the opening and out of the line of sight of anyone in the house.

The blast of a rifle tore through the quiet neighborhood as both barrels went off at once. Whoever had shot at him would need time to reload, so he flung himself into the house, bent almost double, ready to overcome whoever he needed to.

But no one was there. A shotgun was rigged carefully to have him take the full blast as soon as he walked in the door, but no one was there.

Fear pounded in his ears, fear that he would come across Amanda's unmoving body, as he moved carefully from the door to the rest of the house.

He stopped cold on the stairs between the kitchen and the den.

The house was a mess. There were leftovers - from a can, no less - on the stove. Dishes were piled high in the sink. The coffee table was covered with papers, a pack of cigarettes, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. An almost-empty glass of alcohol had no coaster underneath it.

This was wrong. Just plain wrong.

He left the den, picking his way carefully around so as not to disturb whatever had happened there. He crept slowly, silently, up the stairs.

The boys' bedroom was as clean as he'd ever seen one, and so was Dotty's. He peered under beds and in closets, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

But Amanda's room was different. Her room reeked of cigarettes. Her bed had been slept in, clearly. She was not there.

If it weren't reality, it would be one of the worst dreams he'd ever had.

The sight of one of the papers had startled a memory that he hadn't even realized he had back into focus. It was a clip of an article about the day Lloyd Redding had been killed. He had been the one to pull the trigger.

He thought he knew, now, why Credle and Treloggen had been targeted.

But that didn't clear up what had happened to Amanda.

Frowning, he turned his car once more down Maplewood. He had spent the rest of the day looking for Amanda with no success, and he was exhausted.

As he drove past the house, light spilled from the windows and fell on the familiar shape of the station wagon in the driveway, and for a moment he just stared at it, dumbfounded.

His tired mind refused to put any pieces together no matter how hard he tried to fit them. He would just have to see if he could talk to her.

So much for being able to come in the front door, he thought, wryly, as he crept toward the kitchen window.

He had been worried sick about her, and there she was, in her kitchen and with her mother, carefully doing an inventory of the house's contents. She had even cleaned the kitchen.

He heard Dotty's voice clearly through the partially opened window.

"To know that somebody was here, in this house. Oh. It makes me feel so violated."

What was going on? Had Amanda told her mother that she had been held at gun point and forced to lure Lee to his death?

Violated was a good word for it.

"I know, Mother." The placating tone told him that Amanda had NOT told her the truth.

"Well, it's all right. I mean, you gotta remember, nothing was stolen and nobody's hurt."

Not for lack of trying. He was glad that he had taken the shotgun with him at least. Try to explain that one!

He thought he heard Dotty leaving, and he raised his head to get a clearer look at Amanda, when Dotty jumped.

"Oh!"

He ducked back down, cursing his stupidity. Had she spotted him? How would he explain this?

"Your grandmother's silver!"

Some part of him - the part that wasn't awash with relief - was disappointed he didn't have to come clean to Dotty about sneaking around her garden all the time. Shotgun notwithstanding, it had been nice to come in the front door for once.

Amanda turned back to the window as he stood up, and their eyes met. Meet me at the back door, he motioned to her, and her answering gesture told him to duck back down and she would come to him.

He heard the click of the latch, and he almost unconsciously reached for her.

"Lee?"

"Amanda. Oh, thank God you are all right."

She wanted to talk about the house, and the state Redding had left it in when he forced her to call Lee, but there was no time for that.

"Now you listen to me. I want you to move your mother and the kids to a hotel tonight. It is me he's after. And I don't want any of you in the middle of th—"

Her eyes were blank and uncomprehending. "Lee, I don't know what you're talking about."

"What? I'm talking about our phone conversation."

"What phone conversation?"

Did she not remember? "This afternoon!"

She started stammering. "This after— I didn't talk to you on the phone this afternoon."

This was bizarre. "What do you mean you didn't talk to me this afternoon? Who was I—"

"I mean that you didn't talk to me, 'cause I didn't talk to you!"

Then who on God's green earth had he been talking to?

"Wait a second, wait a second. This is getting way out of hand. All right, now look. Get everybody to a hotel. And you meet me here tomorrow morning and we will go through this house and see what we can find. Okay?"

She agreed, bewildered and hurt.

He watched her go back in the house, thinking furiously.

He would have thought they might have used a doctored recording of her, except that she had never said the words "come in the front door" to him in her life. A wave of something approaching jealousy passed through him at the thought that it could have been said to another man and just recorded.

This was getting out of hand.