“Short of putting a cop standing beside the box with his hand on the mailer, this is good coverage. If there’s any concern, we lock down the building. It’s a small branch, ten employees, with another thirty who come in and sort mail and go out on deliveries.”
“It sounds like I need to make the popcorn. I like it, Sam. Choose guys you trust from the local office to watch the building and be ready to lock it down if necessary.”
“You think she’s still going to lift the package.”
“I think she knows exactly what you do, and she’s figured something out. If she wants to get caught, she’s going to open the post-office box, take out the agreement, sign in, and surrender. She won’t run. She’ll either slip that package out from under our noses or she will pick it up and surrender.”
Sam blinked. “I actually hadn’t thought of that possibility.”
Paul smiled. “We’re so used to chasing people who run, it seems odd to consider someone might stop running. If she gave us her real name, there’s a chance she’s also decided to end this after thirty tapes and a decent deal and turn herself in. We still don’t know what changed, what caused her to send those first tapes to us. She was out there and unknown, and something changed that she wanted a deal ready if we caught her. We may have been closer than we realized.
“She has to know that once we start to make arrests, there will be thirty people with considerable financial means who will have an incentive to kill her before she can testify. I’d lay fifty-fifty odds she’s going to pick up the package herself, sign the document, have the tapes on her, and turn herself in.”
“You want to come with me? Rita? We should be there, all of us, if she’s going to surrender.”
“Take Rita with you. If our lady shooter turns herself in, keep it low profile, and drive her back to here. Chat if she’s inclined to chat. Put anything she says onto tape. Both you and Rita should be wearing microphones and have a couple turned on in the car. Redundancy will be your friend. If she turns herself in, I’ll buy the dinner when you get back. If she somehow slips this package out from under us for a final time, you’re buying the dinner.”
Sam smiled. “I’ll take that deal. What’s upstairs going to decide about the deal she wants?”
“I have no idea on this one. They’re meeting later today.”
“Rita and I will get on the road just as soon as they have the reply on paper.”
“We’ll take a hit for giving medium security for thirty murders, but I can live with it.” The director finally called the debate closed after two hours of hashing out how to respond. “It’s not worth losing the tapes. Not when they are this valuable.” He turned to the VP. “Write up the offer, Jim, and let’s get those last tapes. Given the ones on the last four high-profile tapes, I need to know the names on these next eight tapes regardless of the cost to get them.
“If she continues to elude us, this deal is just a piece of paper. If we catch her several years from now, she’s going to be in her sixties and the thirty arrests are going to be history. This gets interesting if we pick her up when she retrieves this package. But if we do, the press is going to have thirty murders to take some of their attention. We can ride out the news cycle of it.”
“I’ll have the agreement written up by this evening,” the VP agreed.
“Ann.”
“Hi, Paul.” She smiled when she saw him appear on the screen. “Say hi, Black.”
The dog barked once and stood up with his feet on the table to better see the video. Paul chuckled at the dog, who looked wide awake and wanting to play. “Hello, Black.”
Ann hugged the animal and nudged him back down. “You’re up late.”
Paul glanced at the clock and realized it was nearing midnight. “The last agreement for the last of the tapes is ready to go. Sam will deliver it tomorrow. We’re at the endgame.”
“Nice.” She settled into her favorite chair and picked up a book to show him the cover. “Thanks for the book. I just started it. It’s a good read.”
“I thought you might enjoy it.”
“Neva sent a lemon-meringue pie home with me. I wish you were here to share it.”
Paul smiled. “Same here. I didn’t need anything in particular; I’m just calling to say I’m heading home, and to say good night.”
“Glad you did. Good night, Paul.”
“Good night, beautiful.”
The post-office stakeout wore into days of boredom. No one approached the postbox, no one moved the package. Sam and Rita would at times begin games of I-spy to fill in an hour. They began counting people with red shirts, and then yellow hats. On the morning of the fourth day they began to compare the number of sprinkles on the donuts to select the best one. Paul, listening in on the audio feed, smiled and read files, glad he had not gone with them.
Paul interrupted their animal alphabet quiz shortly after one p.m. on the fourth day. “Guys, Zane just called. The eight tapes just arrived along with a Post-it note that says ‘Thanks.’”
“The package hasn’t moved in the last three days. I can see it, and it’s our package, our label,” Sam protested. “You’re watching the same picture I am, boss. It’s right there.”
“Go retrieve the package. Find out if she looped the security feed on us.”
Paul heard a door slam as Sam left to check out what had happened. “Rita, you might want to give him room to blow off steam when he gets back.”
“After four days of sitting here, I’m liable to kick something too. It never left our sight, boss. We’ve been stuck on this image like bees on honey.”
“Speaking as someone who has that monitor image practically tattooed to the inside of my eyeballs, I didn’t see it either. Maybe something middle of the night, when we only had security lighting to work with to see the box?”
“Maybe. Sam’s coming back.”
Sam slammed the door. “It’s been steamed open and replaced with a bunch of white paper. She had to have done a swap with one blue-and-white package for another, retrieved the documents, and swapped the package back so that when Tim walked by and glanced at the label for us he would see the same handwriting as what he had put into the box. The view of the package is rarely blocked on the video, maybe half a minute when someone tall stops to have a conversation at the end of the aisle. Someone on the post-office staff was helping her. They were at the box at least twice and not challenged by staff as not supposed to be there. We can pursue it. We have the security feed. She had inside help, boss.”
“I agree. But we don’t have time to pursue it today. We have all thirty tapes. We don’t have her. Come home, Sam. I need Rita identifying the names for these tapes, and you and I have thirty arrests to plan. We’ll come back to this and ask questions later about who helped her.”
“I feel like an idiot.”
Paul smiled. “She’s good at this. She probably had someone watching the same video you did, so don’t worry about it. Just remember, you’re buying dinner.”
Sam laughed. “Yeah, rub salt in the wound, boss. We’re coming home.”
Paul took the eight tapes to Nathan in the audio lab himself. “The same as the last tapes, I need copies carefully made, we will listen to the tapes and bring you a list of names, and we need you to find an audio match and tell us who is on each tape.”
“Got it.”
“One new reality. You find a match and find a name, you tell that name to no one but me. Not Sam, not Rita, not Arthur, not even the director.”
“Knowing the names from some of the earlier tapes, I can imagine who these might be. I’ll tell only you. I would prefer to duck the politics of this and not write anything down until you give me the green light to make the names official.” Nathan made copies of the tapes and handed them to Paul.
“I’ll be back with the names shortly. It’s not much, but order dinner on me. Something good.”
Nathan smiled. “Appreciate it.”
Paul entered Arthur’s office shortly aft
er eleven p.m. the next evening and closed the door. “We have names for the last eight high-profile tapes. It would be worth interrupting the director’s evening to put him on a secure conference call.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
Paul drove home, trying to reach Ann on her phone but getting only her recording. She must be in the air. It was going on one a.m. and he hoped she would be on the ground soon. He left a message for her, that they had the thirty names, and for her to call him when she could.
They had thirty tapes, they had thirty names. Now it was arrests, interviews, a press conference, arraignments, and then passing the thirty murder cases off to the U.S. attorney general’s office. The list of names was enough to make the anger run deep. People with money and power paying for murder. He needed the arrests just to be able to sleep at night. He needed the justice.
Paul found Sam and Rita in the war room early the next morning, comparing notes over a box of donuts. “Where are we at, boss?”
Paul found himself a glazed donut from the box while he waited for the locks to engage. After the click, he nodded to the board. The list of thirty were neatly written in Rita’s handwriting. “I’ve got the green light for arrests,” he told them. “The U.S. attorney general is sending a task force of lawyers. We lock them in the room to keep from leaking word of this, and we brief them on what is going to happen. We plan the deal we are going to offer for each of the murders. We don’t have the lady shooter to testify, so we hope we can get some of these people to take a deal and offer a guilty plea. And we hope our lawyers are good.
“Sam, assemble our full team in the conference room. Let’s brief them in. Then let’s decide who we want to conduct each interview. We’ll put our guys into the field in the next twenty-four hours to the nearest FBI office based on where their arrests are going to be made. I want to have the interviews happen within hours of the arrest. Have you decided the ones you want?”
“Henry Green and Lilly Delta.”
“Rita?”
“Nichole Sims and Frank Teller. Who are you going to take, boss?”
“I’m going to stick to roving between cases based on who needs help. And I’m going to take responsibility for herding those lawyers to make sure they are helping us rather than slowing us down.”
Sam pushed the box of donuts over. “That’s a two-donut problem.”
Paul laughed and took a second one.
Paul walked to the front of the conference room, onto the platform, and turned on his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, please find a seat at one of the tables and give me your attention. I am about to tell you why your boss had you surrender your phones and electronic devices on the way in, and why you have now been locked in this room.”
The lawyers and paralegals in the room found chairs and the room grew quiet.
“My name is Paul Falcon, I’m FBI based here in Chicago.” He turned on the projector and began to click through thirty murder-scene photos. “One lady shooter murdered all these people. She was paid, and paid well, to kill them. She began in 1989, and her thirtieth murder was in 2003. She’s been silent the last nine years. That changed a few months ago.”
Paul changed the photo on the screen to tapes spread out on his desk. “These are thirty tape recordings of the murders for hire. Who to kill, how much they would pay, and why they wanted it done. She’s offered the tapes in return for a deal for when she is caught. We have identified the voices on the tapes.
“Tomorrow we are going to be arresting”—he looked at a list on a sheet in his hand—“four congressmen, three CEOs, two CFOs, one professional football coach, two State Department officials, two cops, three DEA agents, a former governor, a mob boss, three mob-family enforcers, a banker, two arms dealers, and five rich ex-wives.” Paul started displaying the photos of the arrest targets on the screen while he waited for the burst of conversation to die down.
He finally gave a whistle and the mike amplified it enough he got the silence he wanted. “Yes, we are very certain on the audio matches and the authenticity of the tapes. Your immediate task is to put together a package of search warrants for financial and phone records, and to craft the deals we will offer to each individual in return for a guilty plea for murder for hire. We plan to look hard at each of these individuals, and for whatever else they might have done to break the law in the years since.
“Each murder will be assigned a legal team and a lead prosecutor. Your boss is making those assignments. I need the best work of your career because you can bet each one of these individuals is going to have the best defense attorney money can buy on retainer. The clock is running. We begin the arrests in twenty-four hours.”
“Ready to go make some arrests?”
Paul paused from digging out his keys. Ann was waiting at his car with two cups of coffee. He grinned because he couldn’t help it. “It’s five a.m.”
“I hate this early-morning start of a job, but I hear you—for some reason—like it.”
Paul took one of the coffees. “Thirty arrests need an early start.”
“I thought I would offer to chauffeur today, and I’m good at keeping the coffee coming. I know about Margaret’s secret stash.”
Paul leaned forward and kissed her. “Thanks. You don’t like coffee.”
“These are both for you. I figured you couldn’t have too much caffeine on a day like this. Do we need to go get donuts for Sam and Rita?”
“They’re already in the field, but I can use a box. I know a place on the way.”
“Then let’s go to work, Agent Falcon.”
The arrests began at six a.m. and rolled through the day, the last of the thirty being made shortly after two p.m. Paul paced the main conference room, glad to have his full team working on the case now, shifting off between several phones, listening to updates. Agents were acting across two dozen different cities, serving warrants and making the arrests.
“Here.” Ann put a soda into his hand.
He turned, startled, and she smiled. “You’re growing hoarse.”
“Thanks.”
Ann rejoined the intern, who was working the grid on the board, checking off when an arrest was made, when the interview began, when the offer was made for a deal, when warrants were served, when phone and financial evidence began to be gathered.
Paul had enough agents that even thirty arrests were unfolding in an orderly way. Half of the interviews had already begun, and all of the warrants had been served. What Paul didn’t have yet, what he was hoping to find, was someone with more information about the lady shooter willing to trade it for a better deal.
Paul saw a check mark go onto the board in the column with the heading Deal Accepted. He looked at the name on the board of the agent doing the interview and smiled. “Way to go, Franklin,” he said softly, wishing he was there in person to congratulate the man.
Moments later another check mark went on the board. Rita had a deal accepted. Paul mentally raised his expectations from three people accepting a deal to eight. An audiotape could shake the most confident person.
The head of the legal task force passed him, circling the room in the opposite direction. Paul had decided he liked the man. The director had been by earlier, and Arthur was a regular. Paul was a bit surprised not to see the VP here to watch the arrests unfold.
Paul scanned the muted televisions they were monitoring to see how this case was breaking in the news cycle. Reporters had most of the thirty murders. The connection to a common, single lady shooter had just been made. Paul thought in an hour the news of the audiotapes would be out there.
He crossed the room to join Ann. He didn’t care who was in the room or who was watching. He wrapped his arms around her to give her a hug. “See where your middleman wreck eventually went? You pushed to crack the day-planner codes, we found the house, we did interviews, she reacted, and now we have thirty murders solved. This all began with you.”
She smiled. “Ice cream works as a nice thank
-you.”
“Whenever this case finally ends,” Paul promised. “Do you think she is out there watching the breaking news as arrests are made?”
“I think she’s watching, and she’s wondering how close you are to knocking on her front door.”
“Let’s hope that day arrives. In case you get an MHI call and need to leave, let me tell you now how much I appreciate you being here.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Boss, I’ve got Sam for you.”
Paul walked over to take the phone.
Paul switched to decaf during the three weeks after the arrests in order to survive the pace of the job. Margaret already had a mug poured for him as he walked into Suite 906. She put it in his hand with a smile. “He’s expecting you.”
Paul took a deep breath and drank half the coffee. “Can I bargain for one of those ten-minute interruptions of yours?”
“I’ll interrupt in ten minutes.”
Paul headed into the office. “Boss.”
Arthur set down his phone and waved him in. “Have you had time to catch your breath yet?”
The question caught Paul off guard enough that he had to laugh. “No, sir. It’s been a busy few weeks. I think I’ve met myself coming and going a few times.”
Arthur pointed to a chair. He came around to lean against the front of the desk. “The U.S. attorney is pleased. His legal teams are up and running for the thirty murder cases. We’ve got nine guilty pleas, and six more angling to give a guilty plea on better terms. Even the press is positive. Where are you at with the lady shooter?”
“Sam, Rita, and I just finished a detailed review of what the interviews provided us in new info about her. The bottom line, there’s little new to work. A search of the Boston area for someone who recognized her old picture has come up dry. We’ll keep looking, but I’m not optimistic. Unless she makes a mistake, we may never catch her.”
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