by Eva Hudson
“Who’s the guy on trial? Who killed the property developer, and presumably the kid outside the Taco Bell and Kate-Lynn Bowers?”
Dilner took a beat before answering. “Dennis Sutcliffe.”
Ingrid’s heart felt heavy, like it was sinking inside her ribcage. “Sooty? He’s on trial again?”
“And this time we want the conviction.”
Dennis ‘Sooty’ Sutcliffe was a name Ingrid remembered from her university days in Chicago. A member of the Latin Kings, he’d been on trial in the late nineties for murdering three people. Even though there was DNA evidence, eyewitnesses and CCTV footage that put him at the crime scene just minutes before the shootings, the jury had acquitted him. He was the Illinois version of OJ Simpson, guilty in the media, guilty in the bars and barbershops, but still free to roam the streets. He hadn’t been rich enough to bribe the jury, so the suspicion was he’d threatened and intimidated his way to freedom. If Kristyn Bowers could make sure he was finally found guilty, Ingrid would have done a good day’s work.
“So when will you be here?” Ingrid asked. “When’s the first flight out?”
The cacophony behind him was loud enough to compete with the road noise around her. What was going on in Chicago?
“No can do, agent. We have a big operation going down. Been in the planning for months. All leave has been cancelled. All roles assigned. Believe me, I’d love to take a break in London, but there’s no way I can leave the city, not this weekend.”
Great.
“You can’t be the only agent in London. Can’t you pull in help from other cases?”
Fat chance. The idea that CT and CI agents would lend her a few days—even a few hours—to help put away a gangster from the suburbs was somewhere between zero and zilch. Not with Snowden and Syria kicking off. Up ahead was a set of traffic lights; that meant she had to be approaching a main road. She broke into a run, testing her new boots.
“Agent Dilner,” she said, “I’m going to need your help.”
“I can’t—”
“No, I understand. I’ll do the legwork, but I need you to authorize a few things, set a few things in motion. I need intel. If you want Kristyn Bowers in court on Monday, that means I’ve only got forty-eight hours to find her and get her on a plane. If there are strings you can strum, I need you to start playing a tune.”
“Understood.”
Ingrid reached a busy high street. Shops, cafés, buses, but no damn taxis. She looked up the road, then down. Come on. “So, first things first: do you think Kate-Lynn was killed because they thought she was Kristyn? If they look so much alike, was it mistaken identity?” She kept looking up and down the street, hoping a black cab with an orange light would swing into view.
“It’s not clear, but I’d say it’s unlikely. Kate-Lynn lived in the kind of apartment building where she’d have been in regular contact with the Kings. Most likely they would have known her.” He put his hand over the receiver and said something inaudible to someone in his office. “Sorry about that, we’re starting to move out.”
“Then talk quick and start emailing me everything I’m going to need. You have background on the Latin Kings?”
“Sure.”
“And whatever gang Oboloyo was part of.”
“He wasn’t a gang member. He was just your regular crooked property developer who stole money from the wrong guy. I’m attaching everything I’ve got in an email to you now.”
A black cab appeared up ahead, but its light wasn’t on. Ingrid wondered how close the nearest Tube station was. “So, back to Kate-Lynn. If it’s the same gun they used to kill Oboloyo, they were sending a message, right?”
“That’s my theory too. They couldn’t get to Kristyn but they wanted to send her a message. Why else use the same gun? They wanted her to know if she came out of hiding, if she turns up in that court on Monday, then they got another bullet just for her.”
Ingrid’s thoughts zoomed in on the nursery in Truman Cooper’s house and the .38 caliber. She needed a few moments to piece things together, to make the connections. “Tell me about Kate-Lynn. Tillbrook said it was an assassination.”
“Seems she was just home watching TV; it was still on when the cops were called. No sign of forced entry, though it was a dime-store lock. Time of death is pretty broad. Pathology think she’d been there for three days so it’s hard to be specific, but there were dinner things in the sink, not breakfast things, and her boy was in his PJs, so we’re guessing she’d put the boy to bed, and settled down for the night until someone she knew knocked on, or down, her door.”
“Taxi!” Ingrid shouted and stuck her hand out. “Taxi!” The cab swerved toward the sidewalk and slowed down. She exhaled as the driver lowered his window. “Grosvenor Square.” She jumped in. “You still there?”
“Still here,” Dilner said. “But not for much longer. You got about a minute more of my time.”
“Then you have to do one thing. Kristyn Bowers traveled on her sister’s passport and I’m guessing she didn’t have the kind of money to pay for a flight. She was on a United flight, left LAX two days ago. You need to authorize a warrant to find out who paid for her flight.”
“Hang on a sec. You’re saying Kristyn Bowers only just went to England? Where’s she been for the past nine months?”
“California. It’s a long story.”
“So who reported her missing?”
“A client of hers.”
“She’s a hooker?”
She might have been selling her body, but not like that. “Not as far as I know, but who knows what she’ll have to do for money now she’s on the run. Listen, arrange the warrant, let’s find out who paid for the flight, put a lock on Kate-Lynn Bowers’ passport and send me that intel.”
“Email’s on its way. Do you know where to find her, agent?”
The cab was stuck in traffic. Ingrid didn’t have time for this. “Not yet, but I do have a lead.”
“You do?”
She leaned forward and tapped the glass to speak to the driver. “Change of plan. Take me to Vauxhall.”
24
Even though the cab hadn’t moved for five minutes, the meter continued to tick over.
“It’ll be all right once we’re through this junction,” the driver said. “After this it’s a straight run down to the river.”
Ingrid didn’t really care. It gave her time to work a few things out. She dialed Jennifer’s number.
“Legal Attaché program, criminal division.” It was Don’s voice.
“It’s Skyberg. Where’s Jennifer?”
“Oh, hi. Um, she’s, ah—”
Cut to the chase. “Don?”
“Agent Simmons asked her to shadow him today.” He sounded appropriately sheepish. Everyone knew they’d had a stand-up row the day before.
“And she said ‘yes’?”
“He kind of didn’t give her a choice.”
Ingrid thumped a fist into the fake leather seat. “But she’s my assistant. She works for the criminal division not Git-Man’s counter-terrorism.”
Don took a deep breath. “She knows that. She was real uncomfortable about it.”
Ingrid was so angry she could spit. Agent Eugene Simmons was a manipulative, unprofessional, bullying piece of shit. Taking advantage of a keen and eager-to-please girl. Putting her in an awkward position. What had Sol called him? An asshole. And a jerk. And a thug. And a… she didn’t have time to be angry, but the next time Ingrid saw him she was going to do a hell of a lot more than swear at him in Russian.
“OK then, Don, whatever it is you’re working on, park it,” Ingrid said. “Whatever is on your desk, clear it. We’ve got work to do.”
“Oh, OK. Cool.”
Cool? Did he really just say ‘cool’? “The Kate-Lynn Bowers case is now the Kristyn Bowers case.”
“Her younger sister?”
“You know about her?” Ingrid almost gasped. Something inside her leapt at the thought Kristyn was going to be
easier to find now they had the right name.
“Only from Facebook. An old post of Kate-Lynn’s, years ago.”
“Is Kristyn on Facebook?”
“She’s only seventeen, isn’t she? She’s going to want to hang out on Facebook as much as she’s going to want to think about her 401k.”
“What about elsewhere online? Any trace of her?”
“Not that I remember. I’ll check with Jen, but give me a couple of hours and I’ll see what I can find. Might help if I knew who she was.”
Ingrid looked through the glass at the taxi driver. He would be hanging on every word; eavesdropping was one of the perks of the job, like being paid in cash. She calculated the risk was low: black cab drivers were supposed to be like priests; what gets said in the cab stays in the cab. She inhaled. “You paying attention?”
“Always.”
“Kristyn Bowers witnesses a murder late last year. She disappears. No one knows where she is, because she starts using her sister’s ID.” Ingrid paused as she pieced together the next part of the story. “She enrolls in a surrogate program in California—”
“What?”
“You know, being paid to have someone else’s baby.”
“I know what surrogacy is. But she’s seventeen. That’s got to be illegal.” Don sounded almost prim.
“So we can assume she used Kate-Lynn’s ID for that too.” Ingrid had lost her original train of thought and took a moment to grasp the right thread. “So, she’s in California… the murder suspect comes to trial, then, in the past couple weeks, the witnesses start getting bumped off. So, I’m guessing Kristyn gets spooked, and uses Kate-Lynn’s passport to come to London.” Saying things out loud helped clarify matters.
“Is it OK if I ask a question?”
“Fire away.”
“Why London?”
“That’s where the parents of her unborn baby live.” Saying ‘parents’ felt a little odd, but she guessed that was the best way to describe Tom and Truman. “She must have thought she’d be safer here.” The moment she said those words, they troubled Ingrid: why hadn’t Kristyn been safe in California? Dilner had said no one knew where she had been since Oboloyo’s murder. But something had made her run. “So now she’s missing. She’s seventeen. She’s eight months pregnant and her sister’s just been murdered. Don, we have to find her.”
The taxi started moving. Finally.
“What do you need me to do?” The guy sounded nervous.
I need you to be Jennifer. “First, call the maternity units again. Then find all her social media accounts and track down someone she knows in London. Hell, someone she knows in Europe would be a start. Can you handle that?”
Silence. Not a good sign. “Yup, just making notes.”
“I need to know you’ve got this, Don.”
“I’m on it.” He knew the right thing to say, but he wasn’t saying it with conviction.
“Whatever else you were doing today, cancel it. I need, we need, to get this girl on a plane to Chicago within forty-eight hours because she absolutely has to testify at that murder trial. The Bureau’s been trying to get this guy in jail for over a decade. We’re going to get her on that plane. Got it?” Ingrid caught the taxi driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Can’t you go any faster?”
He stopped looking at her and started paying attention to the traffic.
“Um, Agent Skyberg?” Don said.
“Yes?”
“I’m guessing this is a bad time to mention target practice?”
“Not unless you want to be the target.”
Ingrid swiped to end the call, then immediately scrolled through her contacts for Sol.
“Sol Franklin.”
“It’s Skyberg.”
“I’m about to go into a meeting.”
“Who with?”
“Since when did you start asking questions like that?”
“Since Agent Dickhead commandeers my assistant without the courtesy of consulting me.”
“He ran it by me.”
“Sol!” Ingrid was gripping the phone so tight the screen was in danger of cracking. “You didn’t even think to mention it!”
“I’m mentioning it now.”
Ingrid took a deep, hard breath and filled him in on the basics of the hunt for Kristyn Bowers. “So I need bodies. I need back-up. For the next forty-eight hours, I need to pull in a helping hand from counter-terror, or counter-intel and I absolutely need my own goddamned assistant!”
Sol didn’t say anything.
“What? Some other secret operation I don’t know about?” Ingrid said as the cab drove down a canyon of high-rise blocks in the financial district. “Some big ball Cinderella isn’t invited to?”
Sol sighed. “Something like that.”
“Then I need you to do something for me because I don’t know when I’ll be back at my desk. Can you at least file a request for local support for me? I’m going to need to pull in the Met if the Bureau won’t help its own.”
“Agent,” he said—it was never a good sign when Sol called her ‘agent’—“you know as well as I do that’ll take forty-eight hours to become effective. You’ve got contacts there. You’re our Met liaison for Chrissakes. I suggest you make those calls. Right now, there’s a war starting in Syria and I’ve got to make like a good soldier and get to a meeting.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
“I’ll see what I can do about Jennifer,” he said before hanging up.
Ingrid dropped her cell into her lap. She glanced up at the meter. It was already over £25. She didn’t know how much cash she had on her. She opened her bag and felt inside for her wallet. She had £40 and some change. “How much longer?” she asked.
“We’ll be at the river in a minute. Cut through Elephant and Castle. Should be less than ten,” he said.
Ingrid’s phone buzzed in her lap. The illuminated screen told her she had a text from Ralph. Use your Met contacts, she heard Sol say. She swiped to read the message.
What are you doing tonight? Drink? Maybe? Perhaps?
She should call him. Even though she didn’t have time for a drink, and even though she had to tell him about Minnesota, she should absolutely call him. She flushed at the thought. Maybe later. The Met contact she really wanted to hear from was McKittrick, but right about now she was probably sitting at one end of a long boardroom table, finding out whether or not she still had a job.
Of course, there was one other person Ingrid could dial for help, but Nick Angelis was someone you only called when you had absolutely no other choice.
Ingrid tapped her phone back into life and read the documents Dilner had sent through. The details of Oboloyo’s murder were gruesome. His body parts had been sent, one by one, day by day, to his widow: the more she read, the more determined she was that Dennis Sutcliffe had to be put behind bars. And to do that she had to find Kristyn. She just had to find her.
“Where do you want me to drop you?”
Ingrid looked at the meter: £38.80. “Right here, right now.”
She opened the door and stepped onto the sidewalk of a busy six lane highway. She handed two £20 notes through the open window to the driver. She resisted saying ‘keep the change’ and only hoped that, somewhere in the universe, the fact she had over-tipped the night of Tom Kerrison’s private view somehow balanced out her penny-pinching this time around.
She walked briskly toward the row of shops she’d seen the previous morning. Vauxhall was little more than an intersection combined with a construction site: the new embassy was being built somewhere nearby. Between six lanes of traffic and the bus, Tube and railway stations, Vauxhall was the sort of neighborhood you passed through. It wasn’t a destination. Yet this was the place Kristyn Bowers had asked for directions to. Why? It wasn’t anywhere she’d have seen in a movie. It wouldn’t have gotten a mention in any guidebook.
The only connection Ingrid could make between a scared seventeen-year-old girl on the r
un and Vauxhall was the enigmatic Manuela: she was from Portugal and Vauxhall was full of Portuguese restaurants. Someone had to have guided Kristyn’s choices. Someone had to be helping her. Ingrid was working on a hunch that Manuela must have given her an address of somewhere she could go, or the name of someone who could get her to safety. It was a long shot, but when you’ve only got one lead, you follow it.
Ingrid walked past a Portuguese deli, a tapas bar and a specialist Portuguese bakery displaying custard tarts ranging in size from gem-like to gigantic. There were just too many establishments to choose from. Somehow she needed to make the connection between one of them and Manuela. Further down the highway, on the opposite side of the street, she came to Café Porto and something about it was attracting her attention. She crossed the road to take a closer look.
It was more of a sandwich shop than a café and didn’t look like it had been remodeled since the 1960s. Its windows were covered with a film of grime, but Ingrid peered inside as best she could. She looked down and saw the morning’s mail was still on the mat: the place hadn’t opened for breakfast, and it didn’t look like it was preparing to open for lunch. That raised Ingrid’s interest: what were the owners of Café Porto doing instead? What urgent mission had taken them away from making the day’s profit?
And then she made the connection. Stacked above the coffee machine were leaning towers of cardboard cups, all of which bore the café’s logo: a red rooster. She had seen the same cup on Manuela’s desk. Adrenaline surged through her blood. Whether the place was owned by Manuela’s relatives or she was just a regular customer, she now had a reason why Kristyn had headed for Vauxhall.
Ingrid knocked on the door. She didn’t expect anyone to answer: the place had clearly been abandoned for something more important. Like helping a teenage runaway to disappear. She knocked again, waited, then ducked down an alley that led into a yard behind the café. Smelling of urine and barely three feet wide, it was cluttered with crates and bin bags. Ingrid stepped carefully through the obstacles and quickly found herself in what was more of a garden than a yard. Sun-bleached plastic garden furniture was strewn across an overgrown lawn that extended thirty or forty feet toward a broken fence. The next time someone told her that working for the FBI sounded glamorous, she’d tell them about this place.