Ransom X

by a b

  There were thirty-six tells that Legacy could have looked to if he’d had any doubt that Wagner was telling the truth. Involuntary responses like the tightening of the skin of the forehead, even-numbered blinking pattern, pupil dilation to name a few, but there was no need. He did, however, harvest a wealth of information on how Wagner presented truth while guarding a greater secret.

  “Then how do you know if it fits? I took it off the wall of a locksmith 200 miles away from a crime that happened twelve years ago. You’re playing the odds, 50/50 to the layman, but altered dramatically if you know the details of the case. He had no connection to the crime, the victim, he didn’t even need an alibi because nobody ever questioned him.”

  “Why would they?” Wagner chimed in. “But he did it. And that key is going to open this lock.” Legacy stared at her hand as she tilted the envelope holding the key and - CLACK. It tumbled onto the desk. She had been unready for the weight of the lock and it slid in her grip.

  “You haven’t already tried the key.” He continued. It was not a question.

  Wagner blew a stray piece of hair out of her eyes, “You asked me not to, and we’re partners.”

  Legacy let that one slip by, and he asked her for the key that he’d left behind in the folder. He spoke his observations out loud as he held the cold steel in his hand. “Nobody has touched this, no oils, and it’s cold as the room.”

  Wagner kept her face neutral. “I could have done it late last night wearing gloves.”

  Legacy didn’t want to explain why she was wrong, the barrel of the key was made of a soft metal, and any resistance from the lock would have left scratches on the louvers. He replied dryly, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  He pulled a key out of his briefcase and put it into the lock. After a moment of fishing around the rusted interior sleeve of the lock, it gave a sharp click, and the lock opened.

  The shock sent a visible shiver through Wagner’s body. Legacy watched as Wagner’s confidence turned to anger. Her feelings seemed so close to the surface that it felt like he might almost touch them.

  Legacy walked around the desk and took all of the evidence from the case and with a long arm swept it into the bin that sat beside his desk. “Time for the next case.”

  Wagner took advantage of the moment. “I have something for you that will sweep everything off your desk.”

  Legacy felt a twinge of authority enter the room. “Put whatever you’ve brought in the filing cabinet, agent, I’ll get to it.”

  Wagner launched into an explanation how this new case needed his undivided attention, that he needed to familiarize himself with the facts over the evening and that she’d come up with a plan to mobilize their assets by the next morning. It took her fifteen minutes to lay out a detailed organizational brief.

  Legacy, in the meantime, moved about his desk shifting the other two cases across the division markers on the desk and away from the trashcan. He then pulled out another file and put it on the extreme left-hand side of the desk. There were five cases again in front of him vying for his attention. He sat and began leafing through the documents in the center one. The noise in the background faded and he looked up.

  Wagner was watching him with impatience. Legacy knew she would be there, but as he tipped his head up he managed a look of surprise. “Are you still here?”

  Wagner looked like she wanted to overturn the desk and jump up and down on his chest with the heels she had discarded because they made her sound like a secretary. Legacy could see that she was looking for a way out of this assignment without conceding defeat. She wouldn’t let this strange attention-deficit poster person ignore her. Legacy had once been told by someone very close to him that every conversation with him was a puzzle that had to be solved. Even silence drove people crazy around Legacy. Wagner filled the silence. “I saw you palm the key you had cut last night, the key for the lock, and realized that the key you left must have been the blank that you made to show the agents who were searching the locksmith shops. You knew that key fit, so you took it home expecting me to use the blank then tell you that the key didn’t fit. It would have proven that I couldn’t keep up with you and gotten me out of your hair.”

  She leaned over his desk forcing him to either stand or look up to a younger woman. Legacy sat with a supremely confident look on his face.

  “I figured it was based on a guess, since you certainly didn’t know enough about what happened to come to a conclusion.” Legacy’s expression was flat and unchanging; he noticed that Wagner couldn’t even look at him. She blasted into a speech, she had a lot to prove and it seemed like she was trying to do it all in one breath.

  Wagner went point by point, she traced Legacy’s notes backward in time, and the profile he had created of the criminal as a meticulous, precise male. Also, there were the photos of intricate knots. This was a guy who would be working in a field where detail was paramount, one where he could work alone, a clockmaker or art restoration. Her feet walked a line back and forth on the carpet in front of Legacy’s desk. She continued, not looking at Legacy for fear that she’d lose control and slap his expressionless face until it turned a blushing shade of red.

  Her voice was under control by the time that she explained how the old sea shanty lock led him to fix on the idea of a locksmith. He’d then sent agents on errands in a radius of the crime, all looking for a trophy case, with a key inside. It would be somewhere in sight of the proprietor at all times. It would remind him of the perfection that he had experienced.

  He instructed the field agent to make a half-hearted bid on the object. If the owner were eager to take it down and show it to the agent, he would do what he could to make an impression of the key secretly and bring it back to HQ.

  Wagner finished up by recounting what Legacy already knew, it had taken Legacy two years to find the right locksmith. After countless hours wasted in expedition, he hadn’t backed off his theories because he had gotten into the head of the killer. He didn’t have a shred of evidence, and he didn’t need any to catch him. She finished with a phrase that stuck in his mind, a crafted complement that nonetheless struck home. “Your work on the case had a peculiar, forward-thinking brilliance – the kind that only gets proved right by result.”

  Wagner immediately stopped short after the compliment. She hadn’t looked up since she’d launched into her narrative, something that Legacy took as fear that he wasn’t paying attention to a word she’d said. But her fears couldn’t be further from the truth. He stared at her, studied her, fascinated with something just below the surface. It was an interest level he reserved for only – well, to be honest he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that involved with words that were not his own – still not a partner he thought.

  “You read all the files in one night?” His most respectful tone still sounded like mockery.

  Wagner nodded. “Now that we know he did it, it should be easy to connect him to the crime.” Legacy could tell that she was up to something.

  “Too easy, I would even anticipate that you’re ready with that information. I would go so far as to expect you to slap it down on my desk in dramatic fashion.” Legacy drummed his fingers on the loose stacks of paper on his desk. A few pages slid off the side.

  Wagner produced a file, and she carefully laid it on the desk. “I’d rather not disrupt your system.”

  The locksmith was named Burt Edger. He had attended high school with Ms. Miller, and he got a job working in the same department as her in college at the reprographics center. Coincidence again when he opened a locksmith shop in the neighborhood where she and her husband moved outside of town. He was contracted to put new locks on their front door two years before the killings. “He was a very patient man,” interrupted Legacy.

  “He saw the act as inevitable; impatience didn't enter the picture.” It was a grace note that Legacy obviously agreed with. Her assessment pleased him visibly.

  “Exactly,” Legacy found himself moved to agree, “you a
lso read my case notes.” Wagner nodded. “A laudable invasion of privacy.”

  “I thought so,” Wagner stretched back in the chair, fingers linking behind her head in victory. “I did my part, now I need you to accompany me to Washington for a briefing. We’re going to be partners.”

  Legacy’s face tightened. He didn’t like the word partner. The word partner led to involvement. It wasn’t personal, but a change came over his demeanor.

  “I can’t leave. I don’t travel.”

  “You have seen duty on all parts of the globe.” People never saw him; they never saw him coming and that was part of the job.

  “I don’t go anywhere, anymore. Whatever you think I’m going to do for you is not going to happen. Get out of my chair.” His tone was suddenly dry and reprimanding.

  Wagner never liked being told to move “It’s your duty, I don’t have to convince you – I can have someone who outranks you on the phone in five minutes.”

  “And I guarantee, I’ll be less impressed with them than I was with you. You should have been honest with your expectations from the start. It would have saved you time.” He’d already started digging through drawers searching for a file. He had begun taking notes on the folder cover when a hand slammed down on his.

  “How honest do I need to be?”

  “I can’t train you in my methods, I can’t reverse your instincts in one day, you’re FBI through and through. I know about the reports and deadlines that came with taking a live case. I can’t work with that.”

  “Give me a chance.”

  “Tell me why I am so damn important, tell me why standard methods are ineffective and the people on the case are so incompetent that you need me. Tell me that and I’ll show you why we can’t work together.”

  Demeaning the FBI struck Wagner like a blow to the cheek, her eyes welled up in fury.

  Legacy compounded her frustration by putting pen to page, motioning for her to start talking. “I’ll translate what you say, from FBI speak to what you’re really saying as you go along. If that doesn’t prove how far away we are, nothing will.” He readied a pen in the crux of his angled fingers. The curves at the joints strongly indicated that they had been dislocated and or broken several times. Still, his grip was a rock and the pen hovered motionless in the air. If there was pain, it was controlled.

  Wagner started, “We don’t need you.”

  He wrote down, “We need you.”

  “There are other people we can go to.”

  Legacy scribbled, “There’s nobody else we can go to.”

  “It’s like you said yourself, it’s not life or death.”

  Legacy paused then “Somebody’s about to die.”

  She tore the paper out of his hand and scanned it for a moment. A wave of tension rippled through her body, and it seemed to persist swirling in the pale green waters of her eyes. Legacy couldn’t put his finger on what drove her desperation. Everything he’d written down was true; he could see it in the way his words had gone through her body. She would lash out at him soon and leave. It was exactly what he wanted, but something else lay below the surface of her anger. He had no idea what it was, and for a moment it fascinated him. Legacy didn’t hear what she had to say, and the sound of the door slamming brought him back to an empty room.

  The paper was on the floor. She’d ripped it into remarkably uniform strips. And looking at a fragment of his notes, it finally hit him. He understood what was going on. Now he just needed to decide what to do about it. He looked over the desk at a phone that he hadn’t picked up in five years.

  Wagner dropped her keys three times on the way to her rental car. It was a nervous tick. She dropped trivial things, like business cards and college boyfriends. She’d never dropped anything important. She’d never dropped her weapon when training in an Alkali swampland during training. Even when the first layer of skin cells turned slippery due to the drop in Ph levels. She had never dropped a coffee cup on the way to her mouth. It was her keys. Perhaps the sound of them clattering against the pavement comforted her. She couldn't wait to discharge her weapon at something.

  She wondered if she could tune in on any felonies in progress. No, killing somebody in the commission of a crime wasn’t the answer. It was an answer, but it wasn’t the solution.

  She picked the keys up off the pavement. Her fingers began deftly flipping the keychain over and over like a pinwheel. The keychain slalomed up her fingers only to slide down the backside of her hand. It was like the old coin trick except as the ring moved up, her other fingers rotated the keys.

  It did keep her mind off of her frustration, and it kept her hand off her gun. Two very positive results. Frustrated was not the right word, pissed off. Of course that was two words but she was willing to be verbose in this instance to set the right internal descriptive tone for her feelings. Pissed off and something else, she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  She was going to have to report to her superior that she was ineffective in activating Legacy on the case. It would look even worse after the tantrum she’d thrown in his office in front of the director. There was no going back to this case; it was a disgrace. The only thing that could save her would be if one of the leads that she’d dug up before she’d left turned the case around. She started mentally reviewing every contact she’d made in the last week.

  Fingers occupied, mind occupied and she still couldn’t help her body from shaking in anger. She was so pissed off and something else, what was it? CLANG the keys dropped.

  Her phone vibrated as she knelt to pick up the keys. Wagner thought that she’d inadvertently pushed one of the buttons as she leaned over, but a second vibration had her reaching under her coat to her belt where it was strapped. Bailey’s voice was on the other end.

  “Legacy called me, he needs you back.”

  “I’ve been humiliated enough for one day, I’m pissed off and – and-” she searched through her vocabulary for the most acid-laced word that would describe how she felt. She really wanted to get a little bit back from Legacy and the way he’d trivialized what she stood for, which made it all the more surprising when the word she spit out hit the air. “And ineffective.” That was it, ineffective! She had never been ineffective in her entire life. It was a description that had never been placed beside her name, and now she was using it in judgment of herself. Bailey was also clearly not prepared for the quick change in her tone and his voice took on the syrupy false timber of step-fatherly support.

  “You’d best hear what he has to say.” She ended the connection and stood in the garage. Pools of light zebra-striped along her path back to the entrance. It seemed such a long way back.

  Legacy sat in the conference chair in the central briefing room. The file that she’d left sat closed in front of him. Wagner entered from the door behind him, as she did her best to sneak into the room. Legacy’s head rose immediately. A smile spread across his face. His opening move had been met, and he was pleased with the young agent’s ability to adapt. She didn’t let him enjoy the moment.

  “So what did you learn in five minutes?”

  “Nothing, I haven’t read it. You realize that we cannot work on this together, I’ll give you my insights and then you can take them back to your superiors. That’s all I have to offer. We won’t work together again after today.

  Wagner thought for a moment, then walked slowly to a nearby chair, kicked it out from under the table. She let the rattle of the metal legs ring in the room for a moment before quieting them by sitting down.

  “On the inside, my heart is breaking Agent Legacy. Really. Am I going to sit here while you read it?”

  “No,” Legacy was suddenly serious, focused. He made no wasted movement, and his eyes were as piercing as a blade. The temperature the room seemed to drop. Wagner pulled her arms close to her body and crossed them. “I am going to tell you what is in the report without reading and watch you. I should know everything I need to without asking you a single question.”

  Le
gacy began. The case was certainly an abduction, or rather a series of abductions. Murders get attention and nothing matching any of the facts of the case. At this Wagner interrupted, “but you don’t know any of the facts of the case. You said so yourself.”

  “I don’t need to.” Legacy didn’t bat an eye and continued. He told her that the first victims had been released unharmed, but that it seemed to be escalating and recently one of them had been killed.

  “If you’re just guessing, I can talk to a psychic down the hall –”

  Legacy spoke over her, every word emphatic. “And now someone has been taken – and this time they’re somehow connected to the FBI.” It was a connection that Legacy surprised himself with.

  “How could you know that?”

  “Believe it or not, you told me at the end of our last discussion.” When Legacy worked himself into this state there was no time for distractions; he pursued the facts like an addict. His voice was insistent. “An agent?”