What Lies Behind

by J. T. Ellison

  “Funny, I was just thinking the exact same thing. Moving that info, smuggling it in, is one thing—bringing live diseases and tissue samples? It’s so risky. If Souleyret was working for us, for State, couldn’t she just send an email or pick up the phone and blow it wide-open? For that matter, leak it to the press? Why run the risk of allowing an epidemic on our shores, too?”

  “There must have been a very compelling reason. And you can’t trust the press to work the information. Too much partisanship nowadays. It falls into the wrong hands, it gets swept under the rug, or blown into a different story, or starts an irretrievable panic. But yes, there are all sorts of ways to pass information, secure ways—interagency emails, diplomatic pouches, all that. She must have felt it was too important to chance, and I can understand why. There’s a group out there killing people, and I imagine they’ll do anything and everything in their power to keep it quiet.”

  She messed with her bangs for a moment, smoothing them down. “The problem is, we have no idea who Amanda was hiding the information from, Fletch. If she wasn’t willing to risk coming in through her own service, or letting the people she was working with know where she was, that tells a lot about her situation. She clearly knew what was on the SD card. Why didn’t she go to Girabaldi? Why did she sneak into the country, and how? And she went to a med student in Georgetown instead of her handlers? That’s all kinds of messed up. We need to trace her last steps, find out when she came in and from where, in addition to figuring out why she was avoiding her own people. I don’t see how we can do that without talking to someone who genuinely has her best interest at heart. Who might know what she was thinking.”

  “Like a sister.”

  “Exactly. I don’t have one, but if I did, and I was in trouble, family is the first place I’d go. Who knows what sort of situation she had? They could be close, they could hate each other. But if they are close, the sister might be the key. She may have heard or seen something that she doesn’t even realize is important. We have to find her. That data—if it’s even remotely accurate—could be worth killing for. If Amanda shared, Robin is in danger, too.”

  “I agree. We’re here.” Fletcher made a right and pulled to the curb in front of Souleyret’s place.

  The tall shotgun house was quiet, undisturbed, situated on a street that was also quiet, undisturbed. Real estate agents would call it charming. The whole neighborhood was a small oasis, one of those tiny pockets of homeyness in the middle of the urban sprawl. D.C. was changing all around him. Places that used to be dangerous at all hours were suddenly filled with sidewalks and driveways and grass and flowers and baby strollers. It was disconcerting. He liked it, but didn’t quite know what to make of it. He didn’t trust anything that looked so good on the outside it made people yearn for it.

  He imagined them all sick, dead and dying, the strollers rusting in the driveways, the flowers decaying in their pots. He couldn’t let that happen.

  He unbuckled his safety belt and climbed from the car. Sam followed him onto the small front porch, stood by his side as he slammed his fist into the door three times.

  Nothing.

  He rang the bell, and the dog next door, who apparently didn’t mind knocking but hated the chimes of the tinny bell, went mad.

  Still, nothing from the house.

  He tried the knob, found it unlocked, and his heart gave a little thump. This might be a nice area of town, but no one in their right mind left their doors unlocked. It was still D.C., after all.

  “Exigent circumstances,” he said to Sam. “Back me up?” She nodded, eyes roving the neighborhood as if the answers were printed in the landscaping.

  He called it in, told Hart they were entering the premises. Hart promised to have three patrols there momentarily. But Fletcher didn’t want to wait. Something was pulling him into the house. His years of experience told him something wicked waited inside.

  He stepped into the cool foyer, called out, “Hello? Mr. Oread? Mr. Lanter? Metro Police.”

  Nothing except the cool hiss of the air conditioner, which had been left on high. The whole place felt like the inside of a refrigerator. The floors were polished oak, the foyer empty of furniture aside from a small wooden bench, the walls painted a generic, builder-grade tan. A pair of muddy Wellies and dirt-covered work gloves stood in the corner—one of the renters had been gardening.

  Fletcher cleared the rooms of the bottom floor out of habit; there was no one here, no one hiding, about to jump out. There was a table in the corner of the living room that had been disturbed. Searched, he thought, pointing toward it with his gun for Sam to see.

  It was too quiet. Bad things awaited them above. He couldn’t smell them, but he knew there was death here.

  He saw Sam staring up the stairs. She’d sensed it, too.

  He raised his weapon again and started up. Sam followed in his steps, careful and competent, hands in her pockets so she didn’t accidentally touch anything. He appreciated not having to warn her to watch where she was going.

  “Fletch,” Sam said, low. He turned and saw where she was pointing. A long blond hair, tag attached, drifted from the banister. “We’ll need to collect it. Amanda might have been here.”

  “Or we could have a suspect. You feel it, too, huh? It’s all wrong in here.”

  “Definitely,” she said. “Come on, let’s see what’s up there.”

  When they found the renters, facing each other, one tied up, the other reaching out, such a strange, dislocated scene, Fletcher started to curse. Sam could already hear the sirens approaching; their backup’s arrival was imminent.

  “How long have they been dead?” he demanded.

  Sam touched the boy closest to the door on the arm. “You know I can’t tell you that without a liver temp. And with the air-conditioning set this high, it might retard the decomposition process. A day, maybe. It wasn’t recent, they’re out of rigor, but they haven’t begun to leak. The air-conditioning has helped preserve them a bit. I’d say within the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Goddamn it all. We’ve been fucking around with the damn SD card while these kids rotted.”

  She gently moved the boy’s arm. “Fletcher, I can’t tell you exactly, but they’ve been dead longer than you’ve been on the case. It wouldn’t have made a difference. You couldn’t have saved them.”

  But she understood his frustration.

  She saw a small piece of paper under the unbound boy. Carefully eased it out. “Fletch. We have another note. Listen to this. ‘I’m sorry, I had no choice. It’s better this way.’ Do you think it’s a coincidence? Could we have another murder-suicide?”

  “I guaran-goddamn-tee you this isn’t a coincidence.”

  There were voices outside. The police were here. Neighbors started to gather; Sam heard questions being shouted.

  She ignored them, looked closer at the bodies, the positioning, the dried white strings of saliva around their mouths. Carefully eased a mouth open. Saw a brilliant red; the mucosa lining was irritated. “They ingested something. Something that worked fast. There are no signs of regurgitation, just froth. Whatever it was killed them very quickly.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Not until I get them on the table—or Amado does, I mean. OCME has the in-house tox screen. I’d advise you have a death investigator take a blood sample and hightail it through the system, so we can see what we might be dealing with. And we should check glasses, cups, anything that’s been left out.”

  “We’ll do that. I’m going to go let them in and get a crime scene unit here.” He stopped in the door, looked back at her. “Who the hell are we dealing with?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, Fletch. But we’re going to figure this out.”

  Hopefully, before too many more people die.

  * * *

  There was a b
ig problem with being a professor, and not a medical examiner. Sam had to leave the room and let the D.C. people come in and do their work, without guidance or instruction from her. She could have pulled rank, thrown her FBI badge around, taken control, but honestly, she needed to keep herself separate and allow the investigation to continue.

  She’d asked the death investigators to look carefully for injection sites, just in case her first instinct, that they drank some sort of poison, was incorrect. She had to assume whatever killed them had been administered against their wills, whether injected or ingested. She texted Nocek and asked him to rush the tox screen. But then she’d stepped away to let them do their jobs. There was nothing else she could do here.

  Her fingers itched for a scalpel, to peel back the skin and see what sort of havoc the poison had wreaked. She checked her watch instead, counting silently. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.

  She looked at her watch again. Baldwin should be calling soon; he’d promised her an explanation. She walked down the stairs and went through the kitchen into the tiny backyard. Sent Daniels a text: Anything yet?

  He responded immediately: Yes, I’ll have a full report shortly. Call you at this number?

  Hurry. We have two more down.

  She stowed the phone in her front pocket. She was good at waiting, but her agitation wouldn’t allow her to sit still. She wondered about the long blond hair on the banister—both of the men had short, dark hair, and there was only one bedroom that seemed to be in use. There were three bedrooms upstairs, and the other two were set up as offices, with couches that looked like they could pull out into guest beds. She didn’t like to make assumptions, but the setup screamed couple, not roommates. So probably no girlfriends staying the night. Which made exactly zero difference to the investigation. The hair could belong to anyone, friend or foe. But her first instinct when she saw it was to think it belonged to whomever had been here last. An automatic turn to the nefarious.

  She started prowling the backyard, walked out into the alley and bumped into a small, portly woman with tightly marcelled white hair, wearing fluorescent yellow gardening clogs and holding a pair of dirty gloves. Her face was red, with both exertion and shock, Sam thought.

  When Sam disentangled herself from the woman’s grasp, she patted her down slightly under the guise of making sure she hadn’t hurt her, but also looking for any surprises that might be coming. But the woman was clean, the gloves the only thing in her possession. She began asking questions immediately, voice high and breathless.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. Oh my. Whatever is happening? I saw all the police cars. I was coming over to make sure everything is okay. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “You’re a neighbor?”

  “I am. I live next door. Please tell me nothing’s happened to Mike or Jared.”

  She seemed a kindly old soul, but Sam was well-marshaled in the ways of crime scene investigation. “What’s your name?”

  “Eloise Poe. I’m over there.” She waved a hand absently toward her fence. The dog they’d heard earlier uttered a short, sharp bark. “Hush, Tervis.” She turned to Sam, eyes full of concern. “Are the boys okay?”

  Sam shook her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “Oh my. Oh my.” She had a hand on her chest, the red face going a duskier pink. Sam eyed her, making sure she didn’t fall or faint, but the woman kept her feet, uttering small exclamations of distress until Sam touched her arm, which seemed to bring her back to the present moment.

  “When I didn’t see Jared on his run this morning I wondered if he was ill. I never imagined, oh my!”

  “So they have a routine, a regular schedule?”

  “They do...they did. Jared ran every morning at six. They both left for work at eight, together.” She gave Sam an assessing look. “They were together, you should know that. It didn’t matter to me. They were beautiful young men, very much in love. Jared said they might get married one day. And I thought that would be just grand. Well-suited to each other, did a nice job with the house, splitting the chores. And who am I to tell someone who they can love? I’m eighty-one and I’ve loved quite a few in my day who upset the people around me.”

  Sam smiled. God bless nosy neighbors.

  “When was the last time you saw them, ma’am?”

  “Eloise, please. Jared ran yesterday morning, but I don’t remember seeing them last night. They usually sit out on the porch at night, have a beer, talk about their day. Oh, how could this have happened? How did they die?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t discuss any details with you. I need you to come with me, though. You’re going to have to talk to the detectives.”

  Eloise Poe stopped short. “You aren’t a detective? Who are you?”

  “My name is Dr. Owens, and I’m with the FBI.”

  “The FBI is here? Oh my.”

  Yes, Sam thought, oh my indeed.

  Chapter 32

  Capitol Hill

  SAM PASSED OFF Eloise Poe to the uniforms at the front door, and went back inside to find Fletcher. Before she got very far, her cell phone rang.

  Baldwin. Finally. She ducked off into the white-and-black kitchen, answered with, “I hope you have a whole lot of answers for me, because my list of questions is growing. I’ve got more dead.”

  “More dead? Where?”

  She filled him in. He cursed once, very gently.

  “Baldwin, I can’t keep operating in the dark. We need to know what we’re dealing with, because this case is getting weirder by the second.”

  “I know. I’m all yours.”

  “Then would you like to tell me why Souleyret was killed, and why someone seems to be knocking off people who have connections to her, too?”

  “I’ve had some back-channel conversations since we talked last. You already know Souleyret was tasked with working on incidences of pharmaceutical espionage.”

  “That’s what the file says. Girabaldi seems to feel otherwise. She thinks Amanda was working on a bioterror threat.”

  “Right. Well, Amanda had a specialized skill set. For lack of a better term, she was a honeypot. She’d get friendly with the people we needed to look at, get into their systems, load up the software that allowed us to take a look at these company’s practices.”

  “I can imagine that would piss some people off. It sounds like she found the source of this threat, and someone realized they’d been taken. And now they’re killing everyone around her.”

  “They’re looking for something.”

  “I know what they’re looking for.” She told him about the SD card Souleyret had smuggled in and the vaccines they’d found. “We have the vaccination schedules for the whole region. Girabaldi thought the illness outbreak was an isolated incident. The files Amanda has here prove otherwise. They’ve been testing for a while now. It’s scary stuff.”

  “Is that all you saw on the SD card?”

  “All that we’d found as of an hour ago. We have an eager beaver from Quantico at Fletcher’s place, looking for Robin Souleyret.”

  “Daniels, yes, Charlaine told me. He’s very good.”

  “Yes, he is. The SD card was built on a sophisticated cipher, layers of encryptions. He cracked the initial code, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more.”

  Baldwin was quiet.

  “Come on, spill. We have no more time for secrets. We’ve got to find the sister, see if she knows anything and protect her.”

  “You won’t have to protect her,” he said.

  “So you know where she is?”

  “Where? No. Who? Yes. She’s a CIA asset. Or was.”

  “Was CIA? Is she dead?”

  “In a way. Listen, Robin works for a guy I know. She’s unstable at best.”

  “Unstable, how?” Sam aske
d slowly.

  “Robin got blown up a couple of years ago. Literally. She never recovered all the way. She was tough as nails, but the PTSD got her. CIA kept her on the payroll, but she hasn’t been given real assignments in months. She works for my friend from time to time, on specialty jobs, but she’s lost her edge.”

  “What did she do for them? What was her position? An analyst, a handler?”

  “Um, her work was very specific. You know what Xander was used for often in his position with the Rangers? She was, too. That’s all I’m willing to say. But she’s messed up in the head. She’s better left alone.”

  She knew exactly what Baldwin meant. Xander was an Army Ranger. He could do most anything well, without conscience or remorse, if he was given the order to do so. He’d been through every specialized school the Army had to offer, but he’d especially excelled at sniper school. Long-range hits.

  Assassinations.

  A cold finger paraded down her spine. Snipers scared her. Face-to-face assaults she could handle, but the idea of someone hundreds of yards away controlling your life genuinely freaked her out. Anytime, anywhere, Xander had told her. Pow.

  “I see. What does Robin look like?”

  “Like Amanda actually. They bear an uncanny resemblance to each other. She’s smaller, though, and a natural blonde.”

  Sam thought of the long blond hair on the banister. About a woman who spent her life evading capture and arrest, who worked for the CIA.

  Which led her straight to the meeting at the State Department, and Regina Girabaldi. That’s why she was involved—Sam would bet this month’s shoe budget the undersecretary knew Robin Souleyret, and had worked with her while she was still at the Agency. It explained the urgency of the meeting this morning. Sam had been right on the money; Girabaldi was closer to this than she let on.

  “Did she work for our favorite undersecretary, perchance?”

  “Wait,” Baldwin said. “Go careful here, that’s dangerous ground. Are you asking if I think she might be running this?”