“So, what? The victim jumped off a moving train?” Brooke said.
“Or was pushed from between the cars.”
“And you think it’s your Joe Garrison?”
“I don’t know yet. The ME is trying to untangle the mess under the wheels.”
“We should take over.”
“What?” George said.
“We have to control the crime scene.”
“If it’s a crime!”
“I don’t need any more than suspicion.” She hit the button on her radio. “This is Burrell. I need a crime scene investigation team turnout to the southbound subway platform of Twenty-Eighth Street station on Park Avenue South. This is a level one priority. We need to preserve evidence of a possible crime scene. Authorization level, director, 07206.”
“Wow. You can do that?”
“We’ll find out. I used to be able to when I headed up the FBI’s New York field office.” Brooke then walked over to the inspector with all the gold braid on the visor of his hat and the golden eagles on his epaulets. “Inspector, I am Director Brooke Burrell-Morton on temporary assignment with the Treasury Department, Financial Crimes Investigations.” She flashed her creds.
“Malcolm Johnson, transit. What can I do for you?”
“Sir, I need to take over direction of this investigation. We are on a national security mission and this death may be connected. Until that can be ascertained, I am going to ask that you treat this as a crime scene.”
“You are what now?”
“You’re kidding right?” Brooke said.
“Lady, you just can’t—”
“I just did, and you better get on the horn to your immediate superior and see if he understands that I just took over your investigation and you are now working for the federal government in the gathering of evidence in a possible national security matter.”
She waved him off as he radioed headquarters to check out her claim.
.G.
Brooke walked over to the uniforms who were manning the staircase and showed her ID to the sergeant. “Sergeant, we need to lock down this entire station. Nobody leaves. This is now a potential crime scene in a federal case. Can you seal this place?”
He looked over to his commander, the inspector who was on his radio; he caught the man’s eye and saw him reluctantly give the nod to follow this blonde’s orders, whoever she was. “Sure thing, ma’am.”
“Director Burrell-Morton, not ma’am.”
He turned and barked orders to the five cops stationed on the stairs.
The inspector returned. “You have provisional authority to oversee the collection of evidence but I am told to inform you this is not a formal relinquishing of the crime scene at this time.”
“Whatever, just preserve the evidence and separate and hold the eye witnesses.” She turned to George. “Go push the ME nicely. If it’s not Joe, then we’ll give transit back their turf. I’m going back upstairs.”
.G.
As she walked through the lobby of the building now buzzing with what was happening on the thirty-fourth to forty-first floors, she saw a gaggle of well-dressed lawyers trying to get onto the one and only elevator now serving those top floors.
“Excuse me, excuse me . . .” Brooke said as she wove her way through the throng of suits. The agent holding them back allowed her to pass. That brought much indignation from the denied men. “Wait, who’s she? How come she gets to go up?”
“She’s the agent in charge, that’s how come.”
Brooke cringed when she heard the agent blurt that out. Shit. Now she was a target.
The team shouted out, “We are the counsel to the board of directors and as such have a right to represent our clients. We demand you grant us access to our legally bound duties.”
Another shouted, “You cannot proceed without our clients’ having legal counsel.”
Against her better judgment, she engaged. “First off, your clients have the benefit of in-house counsel, who is also being detained as our investigation proceeds. Second, this is a federal investigation, involving serious issues of national security, so I am going to ask my man here to double check your credentials . . . very carefully . . . twice if he has to . . . to make sure they are in order.” She nodded to the operator to close the doors and go. The last words she said as the door closed were, “You know . . . federal case!”
On forty-one, Brooke grabbed the lead agent of that floor. “Any sign of Morgan Prescott?”
“It looks like he left at 11:50. We’re trying to find out where he went.”
“Look, Bob, these guys are about to be lawyered up the wazoo by the dream team in the lobby. I just bought us maybe ten minutes. See how much you can get out of them before they clam up.”
“Will do, boss.”
Brooke found Harriet in the conference room; she was scared and slightly trembling. Brooke didn’t know if it was the raid or the news that her boss was dead. “Harriet? Brooke Burrell-Morton. I am running this investigation.”
“What’s this all about? What do they . . . you, think we did?”
“Don’t worry about all that right now. Tell me about Joe.”
On cue, Harriet’s waterworks flowed. “Joe . . . he’s, he’s gone.”
“How do you know that?”
“Peggy . . . er, Mrs. Garrison called to tell us.”
“Harriet, take my phone and call her, please.”
She dialed and handed the phone back to Brooke.
“Hello, Mrs. Garrison, I am so sorry for your loss. I hate to ask you something at a time like this but if it wasn’t important, believe me I wouldn’t disturb you.”
.G.
Mrs. Garrison was looking out the window through red, teary eyes, down onto Broadway from the five-room apartment she had shared with her husband Joe for twenty years. “Who is this?”
“Director Brooke Burrell-Morton, Treasury Department.”
“Thank God, you finally got back to me?”
Brooke was thrown, but went with it. “Mrs. Garrison, how do you know your husband is deceased?”
“Is this a joke? I called you people because you have to find him.” She started to get hysterical.
Brooke heard another woman’s voice on the other end of the phone consoling her in Spanglish. “Mrs. Garrison, please, I know it’s hard, but please tell me what you know.”
“Joe called me from the train. He was panicked. I heard him struggling, screaming. I heard the noise of the subway, then I heard him scream. Then screeching. Then I heard people screaming and saying he was dead. I screamed into the phone but no one heard me . . . Oh, where is he? I know he’s dead.” She began to hyperventilate as the Spanish-speaking woman who was with her tried to calm her down.
Brooke could not imagine the horror his wife had experienced hearing her husband die. “Mrs. Garrison, Mrs. Garrison, please try to hold on a little longer; I promise I’ll call you back as soon as I learn anything.” As she hung up the phone she momentarily flashed on her husband Mush, and the instantaneous image of her receiving a call like that from the Navy. Then in an unnecessary correction of procedure, she changed the mini-nightmare to a scene of two naval officers and a chaplain in full dress blues knocking at her door. She erased the momentary, sympathetic horror scene from her mind and focused on the matter at hand.
Brooke hung up. Harriet was crying and asked through her tears, “Where, where is Joe?”
“I’m afraid Joe could be the person who died in the subway.”
Harriet gasped and wailed into her hanky, which muffled the cries.
Brooke dialed George. “It looks like your Joe may be the subway victim after all. I just spoke with his wife; she heard the whole thing over the phone. And from what she said, it sounds like he was pushed. I’m coming back down.”
Chapter 4
&nb
sp; Federal Case
The Secretary of the Treasury was not usually involved in day-to-day investigative procedures, but Warren Cass hailed from Wall Street. Many of his contemporaries, and a few fellow country club members, were connected to Prescott as well, so he asked to be updated hourly while this new enforcement phase was being executed. Up till now, FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, was mostly that, a network. Essentially, it was a resource to local and national law enforcement agencies, supplying financial forensics and other services to help get convictions. Bringing a gunslinger like Brooke Burrell-Morton on board marked a change in the mission from support “bureau” to active enforcement “agency.”
This being the first case for its new role, Cass asked to be kept informed minute by minute. That’s how he knew there was trouble and why he canceled his afternoon appointments. Instead, he was now chewing-out his head of operations. “Did we make a mistake bringing in this woman, this Burrell?”
The undersecretary for operations, Moskowitz, answered, “Sir, you are assuming that the investigation was somehow compromised . . .”
“Wiped their hard drives and servers? Yeah, I’d say somebody hit the alarm,” the Sec Tres said out of frustration.
Trying to keep the conversation calm, Moskowitz continued, “. . . somehow compromised, but I assure you if there was a leak it didn’t come from our team.”
“How can you be so sure, Steve?”
“Sir, as an agent, Burrell was one of, if not the best operative and planner in the business. Even you, sir, are not cleared for a full accounting of all the impossible four-cushion bank shots she has pulled off for this country and the president.”
“Oh, right, I remember now. It was your cousin on the president’s protective detail who recommended her.”
“My cousin was assigned to her immediate superior, Dr. William Hiccock. He knew of Burrell because she was a member of Hiccock’s team.”
“After she was with the FBI. Yes I know.”
“And after she saved all of New York and the tristate area from a gas attack that would have killed millions.”
“Okay, I get it, she’s James Bond, John Wayne, and Mother Teresa, all in one package. But I still got a busted play up in New York, and you haven’t told me what I got for three months and one million seven hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of manpower and overtime. Not to mention sneaking around and spying on people who are personal friends of mine . . . that I know and worked with!”
One of the agents who had accompanied Moskowitz was wearing an earpiece and turned his head as he pressed the bud deeper into his ear. “Sir, we are just getting word there was a death.”
“One of those money managers shot at us?” Secretary Cass said.
“No, sir, a subway accident that could have impact on our investigation: apparently a key source to our deep mole in Prescott.”
“Was it suicide, jumping in front of a train?”
“Or pushed . . .” Steve Moskowitz said.
“We don’t know yet. Director Burrell has shifted her focus to the death and we should get some more information shortly,” the agent reported, still monitoring his earpiece.
“This Burrell had better get some results soon.”
.G.
By six o’clock that night, Brooke only knew two things for certain: her investigation was compromised and a murder had been committed. Three things: Hawaiian Airlines flight fifty-one, non-stop to Honolulu, would leave without her tomorrow morning. It was disastrous that Prescott Capital Management, LLC had somewho been tipped off. Brooke knew she was now committed to initiating an investigation into the Treasury’s internal procedures and personnel to find the leak. The murder, however, complicated everything by a factor of ten.
Brooke grabbed a yellow pad and pen from the CEO Prescott’s desk that she had temporarily made her own and jotted notes, interrogating herself as a way of establishing where these fast-moving events had landed. The first question was why? Why kill someone who didn’t knowingly aid our case? Who was it that ordered or felt threatened enough to improvise the death of Garrison? It had to have been an impromptu hit, she reasoned. Otherwise they would have hit him outside his house, or in an elevator. The subway during rush hour, being so public, was the least probable setting for a professional hit; too many witnesses and too little means of escape.
Brooke had the ability to see a crime like it was movie. To stop it and play it backward and forward. As she mentally reconstructed the decapitation scene from the movie of today, she had an insightful observation. Based on the fact that he died as the train was pulling out of a station, one that he used every day. That could mean that Garrison must have been detained. Someone had to have stopped him from getting off at his stop. And yet not cause a scene. Who could do that? Someone he knew? Maybe it wasn’t a hit? Maybe he was escaping. Escaping? She circled the word then grabbed her phone and called George, who had taken over the COO’s old office down the hall. “George, who didn’t show up for work today and did anybody come in after the incident?”
“Good thought. I’ll run it right now and get back to you,” he said.
.G.
Seeing that the forensic accountants and the computer division had as good a handle on their tasks as they could, Brooke returned to her New York home. An apartment she had lived in and out of since she was first assigned to the FBI’s New York field office. She’d flourished in the bureau, making investigations and arrests that, although she’d just been doing the job she was being paid for, had caught the notice of her superiors. Unknown to her, they’d scored each clean bust, each successful conviction she achieved, as a career-advancing step. She rose quickly through the ranks. And through it all, she’d come home to this apartment. Now, as a result of her time attached to the Quarterback Operations Group out of the White House, she had a place in DC as well, and she had the captain’s quarters on base, now that she and Mush were living at Pearl Harbor.
She grabbed a coconut water from the fridge and plopped down in the well-worn leather recliner that was once her dad’s. It was the odd duck in the room. Totally out of sync with the other furnishings, yet it was the safe-at-home cradle she longed to sink into on those nights when supersonic bullets snapped a few fractions of an inch over her head. Any closer and her time would have stopped, her lifeline abbreviated. She would have been given one doozy of a funeral, and then her body and the memory of her would start to erode. No one to miss her; no one to say her name.
But now the “memory of her” had an insurance policy, a shot of living on after her service and her life ended. The sole reason for this immortality was Brett “Mush” Morton. Not that he was a shaman or magician, but with him she had a chance at a family. He was the first male she had ever met who fit her puzzle of what kind of man she could create a family with. In the past, others had had some of the pieces, but when held up to the light of reality and stripped away of lust or any temporary emotional need, she’d seen holes. Small missing pieces that, although they were not needed at the moment to have a “relationship,” were absent from the big picture. Mush was obviously different; she needed no similar critical analysis when it came to him. He was a perfect fit; no holes. They’d met when he saved her life. This had been a storybook way to meet someone who she could allow into her heart and then, together, find happily ever after.
.G.
From outside, on the Rue Saint Sulpice, it didn’t look like anything was amiss at the Galerie Nouveau. Inside, the man with the gun spoke in clipped staccato speech. Four of the five gallery employees were huddled behind the large floor-to-ceiling canvas of “Dystopia Angénieux.” It was a bawdy, bold work that contemporary critics hailed as “mass societal commentary in acrylic and mixed media,” which blocked the view from the windows of what was happening within.
The two male employees were sweating and the two women were sobbing. Not knowing
what was going on added to their terror. The staff didn’t see these two men enter the rear of the gallery sometime during their early morning meeting.
.G.
Two or one? If there was another man, he must be in the back office, Jacques, the assistant manager, thought and then finally asked with his hands up, “What do you want?”
“Nothing. Just be quiet. this will all be over soon.”
“You are not Quebecois?”
The gunman, decidedly American, just remained mute.
A knock on the door caused Francine to jump and let out a little scream.
The gunman pointed at one of the men. “You, answer the door. Tell him through the glass that you are closed till ten, doing inventory. Sorry for the inconvenience. Don’t say another thing. Don’t try to signal or let on what’s going on here. Otherwise . . .” He grabbed Francine, threw her down on the floor and forced the barrel of his AK-47 into her mouth; there was definitely the sound of a tooth breaking.
“Okay, okay, Messieurs, I will do as you say. Please . . .”
Francine moaned.
“Shut the hell up!” the gunman said as he kicked her without taking his eyes of the man. He then politely added, “And don’t forget to smile . . .”
.G.
In the back room, the other man had convinced the gallery’s manager to use his password to gain access under the threat of killing the other four workers one by one. The man chose not to challenge the gun-wielding gas company man. As soon as he finished typing, he dutifully followed the instructions to breathe deeply as an ether-soaked rag was put over his nose until he was unconscious. Fareed rifled through the filing cabinets as the LED light on the hard drive, plugged into the gallery’s computer, blinked. He quickly scanned the documents, shoving those that were not the ones he was looking for back into the drawer. Then he found the folder. He slid it inside his gas company overalls and closed the drawer. Then he took the opened end of a box wrench and disconnected the gas line from the heater. Soon the computer’s light stopped flashing. He unhooked the drive and also slid it under his work garments. He then clicked on Secure Erase and then clicked to verify that he indeed wanted to erase the contents of the computer’s drive. The progress bar said three minutes. Now that he had what he needed, he grabbed the bottle of ether from the desk and set the unconscious man’s hands back on the keyboard. Fareed took one more look around to make sure he left no clues, then went out to the gallery to join Paul, the leader of this mission.
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