Special Agent Tom Lange Box Set

by T. J. Brearton

  Tom looked at Heather, suspended in mid-stride on the video, imagining the tiny death-capsule she was carrying. He thought of her reaching around Declan, placing the tiny envelope behind him. Where had she gotten such a lethal chemical?

  “Back to the leak,” Blythe said. “Could anyone, besides Heather Moss and the people in this room, know that therapists sometimes get a pass on security? Maybe someone who’s spent time in lock-up? Do any inmates ever have a view on the security area?”

  Howser shook her head. “No. Not at all. They are taken in and out of jail on the other side of the building. They never see the security entrance. But, Moss could have said something about it to a colleague, even a friend . . .”

  “She’s not supposed to speak about anything that happens at the jail,” Aaronson said.

  Tom did the calculations in his mind — maybe inmates weren’t privy to the comings and goings of the security area, and matters were kept confidential from outsiders, but about ten staffers knew the situation, along with one in-house clinician who worked directly for the jail, and potentially others from County Mental Health. Then there were lawyers who came in to see their clients — and who knew how many of those. To figure out anyone who’d either bypassed security or knew about people bypassing security was a tall order.

  He stepped closer to the control desk and looked over all the monitors, the computers processing all of the information they displayed. Sweeping his hand across the dials and buttons, he asked, “How does this work? This CCTV, this is all digital, yeah? Hard-wired or wireless?”

  “Both,” said Cordova. “The basic system is wired. But the analog is converted to digital by this machine here. So we can take what we call the clean feed and broadcast it wirelessly.”

  “Broadcast it to where?”

  “Both the captain and the sheriff can access the clean feed remotely.”

  Tom glanced at Aaronson, who looked away.

  Cordova said, “Hackers?”

  “I don’t know.” But as Tom turned back to the controls, he was thinking it. Someone — anyone — with the capabilities of hacking the clean feed broadcast to the higher-ups could monitor it from afar. Perhaps even wait until they found the right candidate. Someone like Heather Moss, let into the complex without much ado.

  Someone with something to lose, like her precious daughters, who would have no choice but to cooperate.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A dilemma: incarcerating Heather Moss at Everglades County Jail meant bringing her back to the scene of the crime. But criminal suspects didn’t go to state or federal prison before sentencing. That left neighboring counties such as Lee or Charlotte, but Turnbull decided against it, opting to put her in segregated housing within the Everglades jail, and bringing in fresh C.O.s who hadn’t been on duty yet that day.

  Tom set out his tape recorder and clicked it on. The jail had dressed Heather Moss in inmate fatigues so she now looked eerily similar to Howard Declan. Her wrists were shackled in front of her, but she wore a placid expression, her eyes shining.

  Sitting beside Tom, Blythe noted the date, time, the persons present in the room for the benefit of the recording.

  Heather Moss glanced at the recorder. “I’ve called my lawyer. He should be here any minute.”

  Blythe scowled. “Okay — though that strikes me as a little odd. You’ve said you have nothing to hide, you’ve been cooperating from the start.”

  Heather smiled politely. “Agent Blythe, I’ve been a clinical therapist for almost ten years. I understand a little about the system. Please don’t take it personally, I know you have a job to do. I’m just protecting myself and my girls the best I know how.”

  Blythe gave Tom a long look. The door opened and a man came in wearing a rumpled brown suit. He set his briefcase on the table and shook the agents’ hands. “Robert Ernst. I’m Mrs. Moss’s attorney.” He glanced at the tape recorder on the table, then sat down beside Heather. “How are you doing? Are you okay? Are they treating you alright?”

  Another look from Blythe, who rolled her eyes.

  “Okay,” she said. “So, can we continue?”

  Ernst settled in. “The charge against my client is fleeing the scene of a crime?”

  “That’s the current charge filed. Now we go to the prosecutor, and based on our recommendation, we can add to that charge.”

  Ernst stared back at Blythe. “Such as?”

  “We’ll let you know once charges are prepared and issue a warrant.”

  Ernst shook his head. “You can’t keep her in here for fleeing the scene. She’s never been arrested; has no criminal record. She’s a single mother of two young girls and an upstanding member of the community. I’ll request she’s released on her own recognizance.”

  Tom watched Heather carefully as Ernst spoke. Her eyes were downcast. It was hard to get a read on what she might be thinking. Finally, she looked up, right at him.

  “How are my girls?”

  “I’ve just checked and they’re perfectly okay. They’re playing. I told them to make sure Olivia has art supplies.”

  Tom was happy to see his smile reflected back in Heather’s face.

  Blythe cleared her throat. “Okay, Mrs. Moss. If your attorney will permit it, we’d like to get into the events of this morning. Let’s talk about what happened.”

  Heather glanced at Ernst, who nodded and snapped open his briefcase. He was in his forties, balding, with a mole on his upper cheek.

  “I was on my way to work,” Heather said, “running late. I got a phone call.”

  “I’m sure you’ve checked my client’s phone,” Ernst interrupted.

  “We have,” Blythe answered. “Our forensic team found that a call was received this morning at 7:58, lasted for seven minutes.”

  “They said that they were watching my girls,” Heather said. “They described what each of them was wearing, what they were doing. They said they would hurt them if I didn’t do exactly what they said.”

  Tom saw Heather’s lower lip begin to tremble. The therapist was fighting to keep composure, but her blue eyes were welling up.

  “You’re saying ‘they’,” Blythe commented. “Did you speak to more than one person?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Blythe cut Tom a sidelong look. “Was it like a party line?”

  “It was some kind of computer voice. It said ‘we’ several times. ‘We’re watching. We will hurt them.’”

  Tom interrupted. “Focusing on the voice — what do you mean, ‘like a computer?’ You mean like the, ah, the group Anonymous? That sort of thing?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen someone at the clinic — not my own client, but another therapist’s — with an assistive device that provided speech output. They were in a wheelchair, like Stephen Hawking. But this voice was, I don’t know, better sounding, more human. I imagine they have different versions or something?” She stared off, shook her head. “I really don’t know.”

  “Okay. So no way to guess an age or gender?” Tom asked. “Or an accent?”

  “No. Not at all. I can tell you he or she talked a lot. He told me Florida was a nice place to live. He told me his people were sitting outside of my daughter’s school. He described to me what Olivia was wearing.”

  Heather was repeating herself, growing upset again. A tear escaped her left eye and tracked down her cheek.

  Ernst rose from the table and went to the door, alerted the guard with a knock. “Can I get some tissues in here?” The guard outside nodded and radioed the request. Ernst closed the door and sat back down.

  Tom spoke to Heather. “Like Agent Blythe said, we have your phone. We’ve got the number and we’ll do everything we can to track this person down and get to the bottom of it.”

  Ernst faced her. “Why don’t you tell them about the vehicle you saw.”

  She nodded. “The caller said he could see me. I looked around and thought I maybe saw a black SUV.”

  “Like a Chevy T
ahoe?”

  “I don’t know. It could be. It was big, four doors. I only saw it, you know, in my mirrors.”

  “Anything remarkable about the vehicle?”

  “Tinted windows, I think.”

  “Any chance you caught the license plate?”

  “No. Sorry.” She glanced at Tom’s bandaged hand. “Thank you for what you did this morning.”

  He felt his cheeks warming. “Anyone would have done the same thing.”

  “The girls — they were so scared . . .” Heather became emotional again, turning her face away, as if embarrassed.

  The door opened and the guard set a box of tissues on the table. Heather looked at it blankly for a moment, then plucked one out. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She made as if to put the wadded tissue in her pocket. Then she laughed. “I have no — no pockets to . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Tom said. “Just set it aside.”

  After tidying up her tear-streaked face, her eyes acquired the blank look of fear. “Am I going to be charged with murder?”

  “No,” Ernst answered. “There’s no way they can charge you with murder. This was not your fault, and that’s clear to them, right?” The lawyer looked between Tom and Blythe.

  Blythe answered. “Right now there’s no felony complaint. But there could be. And as a capital offense, it could go before a grand jury.”

  “We can waive that,” Ernst said to Heather.

  “Why would we waive a grand jury?”

  “Because as both these agents know, grand juries almost always return an indictment. It’s a rubber stamp.”

  “The statewide prosecutor has an obligation to present exculpatory evidence,” Blythe said and shifted in her seat. “Your client was the last person with Howard Declan. The video shows she — it looks like she passed him something. I think you, and your client, need to be prepared for the charge. But, again, that would be for the grand jury to decide, or there would be a preliminary hearing.”

  Heather leaned back, tilted her face toward the ceiling and blew out a long breath. “Murder,” she repeated quietly. “Oh my God.”

  Ernst patted her hand. “No. Never gonna happen. It’s okay . . .”

  “Mrs. Moss,” Tom said quickly. “Please just answer me this — the call that came in on your phone this morning went on for over seven minutes. You say the caller threatened you, threatened your daughters in order to convince you to go along. And through all that talking, he could have said something —anything — which could help us. We don’t want this to be on you, Heather.”

  There was a lot going on behind her eyes — tragedy sitting just inside her gaze. “Yeah, he talked. He talked a lot. He said he’d been watching me. He knew how I came into the jail and lately had bypassed security. I tried to argue, I tried to reason with them, but then he said . . .”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘We’re not normal, rational people.’”

  The room fell silent, just the low buzzing of the wall clock.

  She spoke again. “He also said — he was talking about a truck that was driving near me on the road — he said, it was ‘probably full of illegals’. But that’s it. That’s all I remember. For the next two hours, all I could think about was my girls.”

  Tears cupped in her eyes again.

  Tom said, “We’re going to figure this out. Okay?”

  Blythe leaned forward, interlacing her fingers on the table. “Mrs. Moss, did you look inside the envelope at any time?”

  “You don’t have to answer that,” Ernst cut in.

  Blythe rolled her shoulders. “What did you think was in the envelope? Weren’t you curious?”

  “The caller made it clear I shouldn’t look inside.”

  She hadn’t exactly answered the question, Tom thought, and felt a weight slide over his heart. But maybe she was just trying to protect herself, her daughters all along, like she said, hadn’t looked, hadn’t wanted to look.

  Ernst was getting agitated. “Heather, you don’t have to answer any more of this.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Blythe. “You want exculpatory evidence? Let her tell us her story. Let us figure out what happened, and if she’s on the level then it can only help her.”

  The lawyer’s eyes flitted back and forth between the agents. “No prosecutor or judge would dream of charging this woman with murder, not when she was so clearly under duress. What you need to be doing right now, Agents Blythe and Lange, in my humble opinion, is going after the person who threatened my client, threatened her daughters. You need to be going after the people who wanted Howard Declan dead.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Howard Declan had a home in North Naples, where narrow streets wound through a residential neighborhood filled with modest homes like Heather Moss’s, one-story places with small front lawns. The lowering sun threw long shadows over ground wet from the afternoon rain. A sheriff’s deputy parked in front.

  Tom pulled up across from the deputy, Blythe riding in the passenger seat beside him, finishing up on a phone call to the communications department of the state bureau.

  “Okay,” she said into the phone. “That could be helpful.” She scribbled something on the pad balanced on her knees.

  Tom watched little kids further down the street pushing themselves around on scooters, silhouetted by the setting sun. They reminded him of the photos on Heather Moss’s fridge.

  “Thanks, Matt,” Blythe said into the phone. “And can you pass this on to Cheyenne in Research: we want the full workup on Declan — all the agencies. Let’s get his income tax returns, employment history, residences; run him through the department of public safety, corrections, all that. I want to know when his last check-up at the doctor was and the color of his urine. Thank her for me.”

  Blythe hung up, gazed toward the same playing kids as she spoke to Tom. “So this technology — this electronic device providing speech output — there’s a few different versions on the market. A lot of it is used by special schools, places for the blind, mute, autistic, etcetera. There’s something called an AAC, which is . . .” she read from her notes, “an ‘augmented or alternative communication device.’ That’s usually a computer program which synthesizes speech from text.” Blythe shook her head, sighed. “Weird story, if you asked me — someone is driving around with a computer in their car, telling Moss what to do with this . . . voice?”

  “Are there mobile versions?” Tom asked. “Seems like these days you could get a phone app or something.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s ask him — Matt. Can you call him back?”

  Blythe gave Tom a sidelong look, opened her mouth, closed it. She dialed Matt again, asked him, listened. Then said, “Uh-huh. Huh. Okay, thanks,” and hung up. “Matt said there’s something called ‘Fusion’, which is a portable device for people who can’t speak.”

  “Okay, yeah — a speech synthesizer. You type in one end, a voice comes out the other.”

  “I still don’t know how someone would use it as they drove, though, not at the same time . . .”

  “Maybe it’s just to mask the voice.”

  When Blythe didn’t respond, he continued: “We should look at the companies who sell it anyway. Plus we’ll keep an ear to the street for any black market purchases of potassium cyanide. Maybe we can come around to a couple of C.I.s, see if anything shakes out of the bag.”

  Finished, he pressed back in the seat and stared out at Declan’s house. Declan’s lawn was dominated by a short, squat palm tree that resembled a pineapple. “And we’re going to talk with some of the jail staff individually?”

  “Correct. I’ve lined up McNeill — can’t wait to get in a room alone with him — Cordova, Howser, Clements, and Rizzo.”

  Tom thought of the muscular guard with the Mr. Clean haircut. “Rizzo is the one who watched Howard Declan go into convulsions, vomit, and chew off his tongue.”

  “That’s right. Cordova was working the CCTV. Howser, as you know, w
as one of the two who let Heather Moss in. The other is named Pendleton.”

  “What about the floater? She was the deputy who brought me in, brought Heather in, too.”

  “That’s Clements. She had a family thing, is coming back in this afternoon. I’ll be talking to her, too.”

  “And we’ll talk to the other clinicians from County Mental Health.”

  “That’s the plan. You ready? Any more questions or requests?”

  Tom frowned at her, then the two agents got out. They crossed the street and greeted the deputy, signed their names on his clipboard. The deputy led them to Declan’s front door, letting them in with a key.

  Tom stepped into the gloomy house. The air was hot and breathless, redolent of must and neglect. There was an air conditioning unit sitting in one of the windows with a red light flashing on the console. All the other windows were closed.

  Blythe moved off down a hallway and Tom stepped into the kitchen. A fridge with no pictures, just a magnet advertising an auto salvage yard, a couple of unwashed dishes in the sink. In general, though, the place was much neater than Heather Moss’s house. This was the home of a single man, no kids.

  Tom moved through the house, noticing a stack of The Week magazines in the living room, bookshelves against one wall containing several computer manuals. A closed laptop sat on a desk in the corner.

  There was a fair amount of unwashed laundry in the bedroom closet. The roll of toilet paper in the bathroom was almost gone. A single toothbrush on the sink.

  The house featured a small, screened-in back porch and Tom spied a chest on the ground, unlocked. With his latex gloves on, he lifted the lid and peered inside to find stacks of papers and photos, a couple of photo albums. He squatted down and pushed the materials around, halting when he found a picture of Howard Declan with his arm around a woman. She had a wild head of red hair streaked with gray. That and the lines in her skin put her at about fifty, fifty-five years old. Tom dug a bit deeper through the photos and found more pictures of the woman. They looked like a couple, riding bikes, taking trips, lounging at the beach. Declan was on the tall side, skinny, with a beakish nose.