by Matt Lincoln
“She’s just messing with you,” I chuckled, knowing that he already knew this. “Anyway, Diane said something about Muñoz coming back today, too?”
“Yeah, I think she’s coming in this afternoon,” Birn confirmed with a shrug. “She didn’t last very long on vacation, either. We’re a sorry bunch, the lot of us, I guess.”
“No argument from me,” I said, as another stream of argumentative language from Diane came from behind the office door.
“We’ll be covered, then, between Holm and us, so don’t worry about taking some time off,” Birn told me earnestly. “If there really is a break in the Holland case and we need you, I’m sure Diane will let you know right away.”
“You’re not getting off that easily,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “The Holland case is just as much mine and Holm’s as it is yours and Muñoz’s.”
“Hey, we were there first,” Birn said, pointing at me, though his tone was good-natured as always.
“Yeah, but you were allergic to a garden variety sedative,” I laughed, and his cheeks turned rosy again.
Then, the door to my right swung open, and Diane came stomping out of her office.
“What’s going on?” Birn asked quickly. “Is it the Hollands?”
“Yes,” Diane sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose and looking more than a bit frustrated. “Though there isn’t as much information as we would’ve hoped.”
“Whatever it is, it’s better than the nothing we’ve been dealing with for two weeks,” I said excitedly, leaning forward in my chair in anticipation. “What’s going on? Was that Sheldon? Or the FBI?”
“Oh, God, no, it wasn’t Sheldon,” Diane said, rolling her eyes at the mere mention of the man she detested so much. “And yes, it was one of my contacts with the FBI. We’re being good about sharing this case, at least. Things have been better between agencies since the New Orleans case.”
This was true enough. Agencies like MBLIS and the FBI tended not to love the idea of working together. Kind of like the various branches of the military, we respected each other a lot, but there was more than a healthy dose of rivalry thrown in there, too. Plus, let’s face it. MBLIS was important, but we didn’t exactly have the clout of the FBI, publicly or privately. If they got their hands on a case of ours, it might as well be gone.
And that’s what had technically happened when Holm and I ran into Nina Gosse, an undercover FBI agent, in New Orleans. I couldn’t deny that she’d been a huge help, though, and that we probably wouldn’t have solved the case without her.
Ever since then, Diane had been in close contact with Nina’s supervisors at the FBI about the lasting effects of the case. And she’d been communicating with them at my request about what they were doing with Lafitte’s ship after they confiscated it and hauled it away in the Bayou, but we hadn’t had an update on that in a while.
I myself had stayed in sporadic touch with Nina. Just like she predicted, she’d been sent to train some new recruits at the FBI academy in Virginia for some rest and recuperation after her long stint undercover.
Thinking of this reminded me that I’d promised to tell her when I made it to Virginia. I made a mental note to send her a message later.
The Holland case had made communicating with other agencies even more important. MBLIS was only really concerned with the coastal territory by nature, after all, and the criminal couple could be anywhere by now, though technically they did seem to own land exclusively on the coast, at least under the Holland name.
“What did they have to say, then?” I asked Diane, clearly hoping for some intel on the Hollands but also secretly hoping that they had finally updated her on Lafitte’s ship. I decided to keep that to myself, though, for fear of being scolded for not having my priorities straight on this one.
“Nothing concrete,” Diane said with a slight shake of her head, her mouth set in a thin line. “Though there was something. A TSA agent with a good eye thinks he saw the Hollands boarding an international flight at the Atlanta airport a couple of days ago.”
“The Atlanta airport?” Birn repeated, incredulous. “A couple of days ago? That’s the biggest airport in the world! That’s not just trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s trying to find a thumbtack in an entire barn!”
“A weird analogy, but an apt one,” Diane chuckled. “It’s good to have you back, Lamarr. How are you feeling?”
I realized that Birn must’ve arrived after Diane locked herself in her office earlier that morning.
“I’m alright,” Birn said with a shrug. “A bit bored.”
“Of course you are,” Diane sighed, shaking her head for real this time. “You spend nearly a week half-starved and dehydrated in a tent in the middle of nowhere, and you can’t even spend half that time recovering.”
“Hey, I was gone for more than a week!” Birn cried. “It’s been more than two!”
“The time you spent in the hospital doesn’t count,” she said dryly, arching an eyebrow at him. “Anyway, you’re on desk duty for now. So is Muñoz when she gets back this afternoon.”
“Oh, come on, really?” Birn complained. “You’re not going to send us to Atlanta?”
“Atlanta isn’t anywhere near the ocean,” Diane pointed out. “And you said yourself that it would be a difficult task trying to glean much of anything from that TSA agent’s tip. It’s not for nothing that this is the busiest airport in the world we’re talking about here.”
“We’re not going to do nothing, though,” I said, gawking at this. “There has to be something we can do.”
“A trip to Atlanta won’t do me in. I swear to God,” Birn said, holding his hands up in the air in protest.
“If we need anyone to go anywhere, it will be Holm and Marston for the time being,” Diane said, and her tone was final. “As for Atlanta, the FBI already has people on the way.”
“Just on the way?” I asked, thinking that this just kept getting worse. “It’s been two days already!”
“Yes, but they just got the tip themselves,” Diane said darkly. “My contact called me the second he was told. So, we are working together at least. They’re not hanging us out to dry.”
“But someone else is hanging us out to dry if the tip just came in,” Birn pointed out, and I nodded in agreement.
“It shouldn’t take that long, should it?” I asked. “Usually, tips come in straight to us without going through too many channels.”
“Yes, but that’s us,” Diane emphasized, crossing her arms and sighing as she leaned back against one of the desks sitting between mine and Birn’s. “We’re a smaller agency, and our tips are more regional and have fewer rungs to go through in the process. The FBI is a whole different animal, I’m afraid. Their wider reach comes with a bureaucratic cost.”
“Of course it does,” I scoffed, shaking my head and wringing my hands together. “Should’ve guessed.”
“I’m still not getting how it takes two days for a viable tip to get through the channels,” Birn complained bitterly.
“Best-case scenario, it doesn’t,” Diane sighed. “But when you’re asking everyone in the world to look for two rather generic-looking people, and it’s the FBI telling them to do it—an agency they see all over TV and the movies—everybody’s going to start to see what they want to see. And then it takes too much time to comb through all the tips and get to the credible ones in a sea of nothing.”
Secretly, I wasn’t so sure that Chester and Ashley Holland, or whatever their real names were, were all that generic looking. I’d spent more than my fair share of time staring at the pictures in their files, and they both resembled prunes more than people from all the tanning and fancy treatments they’d clearly used to try to circumvent the aging process. It hadn’t worked, in my humble opinion, leaving them looking kind of dumb as far as I was concerned. But I figured that there were probably enough people who fell into the same cosmetic traps to create a lot of false positives on the tip line.
“I guess
that makes sense,” Birn admitted, though he didn’t sound all that happy about it.
“So what makes the FBI think that this tip is credible instead of all the other ones?” I asked. “How many do they get for something like this, a couple hundred?”
“More like thousands,” Diane corrected, and Birn looked like he just might choke at this news.
“Thousands?” he repeated. “In a couple of days? Okay, that can’t be all that efficient.”
“It’s not, but it does cast a wide net, which is helpful here,” Diane explained with a shrug. “And if it was the Hollands, it’ll make it all worth it. A small lead is better than shooting in the dark any day of the week.”
“Fair enough,” Birn relented with a nod.
“So what about the tip?” I pressed again.
“Right, so I think they were able to get some clear-ish security photos of the man, Chester,” Diane explained, her eyes widening with excitement as she got to the good part. “He was wearing a baseball hat and glasses, so it’s not as clear cut as you would want, but they’re pretty sure it’s him. I guess he’s got a small birthmark or sun spot or something on his right temple, and they think they can see that on the security footage.”
“They think?” Birn repeated, sounding more than a little skeptical of this. “What’s that supposed to mean.”
“Well… that’s what I wasn’t so happy about,” Diane sighed, averting her eyes from ours. “There’s also a possibility that it’s just, well, a smudge.”
“A smudge?” I repeated, gaping at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You can’t be serious,” Birn echoed.
“What can I say? These things take time,” Diane said, throwing her arms up in the air in a helpless expression. “Time that I worry we won’t have. We don’t exactly know what these people are planning.”
This was true enough, as well. Sure, we hoped that the Hollands were just fleeing the scene of the crime in the Keys, in which case the law would no doubt catch up with them sooner or later, even if it did take some time to distinguish between birthmarks and smudges, or whatever. But the couple’s associates down under had more than hinted at a much broader conspiracy surrounding Chester and Ashley.
We’d interviewed these associates, to be sure, as had the police in the Keys. A few Naval officers from the base on Key West even joined in on the interrogations. And an FBI agent flew down from Virginia to observe since it was technically still an MBLIS case. But the Hollands had covered their tracks just as well with their criminal associates as they had with their financial assets, and none of the leads that the lowly foot soldiers of the Holland drug empire provided us with panned out in the end.
“So I’m still trying to work out how exactly these people are able to mix up a birthmark or a sunspot or whatever with a smudge?” Birn asked, narrowing his eyes at Diane. “A smudge on the guy or on the camera?”
“Way to miss the forest for the trees, Birn,” I chuckled but turned to Diane for an answer since I was interested in what she had to say, anyway.
“I’m not sure,” she said, shaking her head again. “The camera, I think. The picture’s pretty blurry, though better than the other ones in the file. But Ethan’s right. It’s beside the point. Either it’s him, or it isn’t, and we’re going to have to figure out which.”
“Nothing on the wife?” I asked.
“There is a woman with him of the same general shape, size, and age as Ashley Holland,” Diane said. “But she’s wearing this big floppy sunhat, and the cameras only got her from behind, anyway. Couldn’t even clock a hair color when I looked at the footage.”
“That tracks,” I sighed. “So what’s the next step? There’s no way they’re anywhere near Atlanta by now, even if it was them. It’s been two days. Unless their stop was in Atlanta, that is….”
“That’s one question, but we’re pretty sure they didn’t leave into the city,” Diane said in a confident tone. “We can’t see their faces well, but we can see their movements. Or at least a portion of them. They were going through security to get into the airport at the time, so if they’re still in Georgia, it’s because they faked us out intentionally. Which I suppose isn’t technically out of the question considering who we’re dealing with…”
Her voice trailed off as she considered this possibility for a brief moment, but I shook my head.
“Doing that would just give the security cameras more opportunities to catch them,” I pointed out. “It wouldn’t make much sense on their end. So they were probably headed somewhere else. I’m guessing there’s only the one shot, and there’s no footage of them as they’re boarding or even heading to a gate?”
“No, though there are people still reviewing all the footage from that day to make sure,” Diane said with a slight shake of her head. “They’ve already been through it all once already, though. They may have missed something considering it is a big airport. But we can’t count on it.”
“They must’ve been in Georgia, then,” Birn said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with the palm of his large hand. “They went through security, so they started their travels there. Did they own property in Georgia? I don’t remember seeing anything about that in their file.”
As if on cue, I pulled the thick Holland file out of my bag.
“I thought I told you to stop taking that out of the office,” Diane said sternly, giving me a pointed look.
“Right, sorry,” I said dismissively, knowing that she didn’t really care as long as I got results. And I wasn’t exactly one to misplace important items. The ‘don’t take the files out of the office’ rule was mostly for Holm, anyway, ever since he spilled coffee on an important case file a while back.
“So?” Diane asked with a sigh of resignation, turning her attention to the file, as well.
“No, it doesn’t look like they own any property in Georgia, at least not under the Holland name,” I said, flipping the file to a map of the eastern coast of the United States peppered in small yellow dots to indicate where the Hollands’ real estate empire extended. “Nothing in the surrounding states that would use the Atlanta airport as a launching off point, either. Most of their property—no, actually all of it—is in coastal zip codes.”
“Atlanta is mostly a layover airport,” Birn noted with a shrug. “That narrows down the pool of visitors they could be if they started their trip there.”
“That’s a good point,” Diane said, pointing at him and biting her lower lip. “I’ll make sure the people reviewing the other footage from that day keep that in mind. It’ll help them figure out what tapes to focus on and which ones to just give a cursory glance.”
“Alright, then, so was that all the FBI had for you?” I asked, glancing up at her from the map in front of me on my desk.
“Yes,” Diane said, heaving a long sigh as if she didn’t like admitting this. “I wasn’t too happy that this is all they had, and that it took them this long to verify it, but it is what it is. There’s no going back now. We’ll have to work with what we have, as always.”
“Alright then,” Birn shrugged. “I still say one of us should go out there. Clearly, they were staying in the area, even if they’re gone now.”
“The FBI is on that,” Diane reiterated dryly. “You’re behind the desk for at least a few days, remember? Until I’m sure that you’re actually recovered and not just bored out of your mind.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Birn said, waving a hand dismissively at this. “But Holm and Marston can go, then. Or just one of them. You’ve got a friend in the FBI, right, Marston?”
Birn winked at me at the mention of Nina, and I suddenly felt my own cheeks grow hot. Holm made a point of making fun of my potential romantic interests around the office any chance he got, and the fiery FBI agent was no exception.
“No, I don’t want to send them all the way out there when I may need them back here,” Diane corrected. “And I doubt the FBI will respond well to us stepping on their toes in their terri
tory. They’ve extended the same courtesy to us in the Keys so far with this investigation.”
She said this almost a little bitterly, and I knew she was thinking, as I was, about how the FBI took over our New Orleans case. It was only fair that they did, in a way, considering how long Nina had been undercover there. But after chasing the same drug lord, Solomon, during our case in Haiti, Holm and I would’ve liked to get the official credit for that one, too. I knew Diane probably felt similarly, always protective as she was of her agents.
“They have been good to us,” I reiterated, for myself as much as for Diane. “And it’s important to keep those channels open and cooperative on a case like this. Who knows how long it’s going to take to track these people down. We could be stuck working with them for a long time.”
“That’s true,” Diane said, scrunching her fine brows up into a long, thin line, indicating that she was deep in thought. “Though I worry we’ll be stretched too thin, focusing so much on one case. We’ve been getting a lot of other, unrelated cases lately.”
This was painfully accurate. It felt like Holm and I had been on assignment almost constantly lately.
“And you were pushing for Muñoz and me to stay away longer,” Birn scoffed, shaking his head at her in mock frustration. “Face it. You wouldn’t function without us.”
“Our MBLIS office wouldn’t function without MBLIS agents, that is correct,” Diane said blankly, blinking at him, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
They both looked at me.
“What?” I asked with a shrug. “I missed having everyone in the office. Let’s go with that.”
“Alright, alright, so the question remains: what’s the plan, boss?” Birn asked again, turning his attention back to Diane.
“That’s a good question,” Diane said, putting her thinking face back on and leaning against the nearest desk again. “I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see some more. I’m not sure what else we can do. We’ve done our interviews, we’ve combed through the files, and we’re still in contact with the FBI, CIA, TSA, and the local police in the Keys. We might as well add Atlanta to that list. I’ll get in contact with their police department next.”