Actual Stop

by Kara A. McLeod

  Meaghan was unfazed and unrelenting. “So if she said she wanted to make it official?”

  “I don’t know. I think she likes things the way they are, too.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “She’s never said anything to lead me to think otherwise.” Sure, I’d occasionally wondered whether she wanted something more official or permanent, but she was a big girl. I trusted her to use her words. I’d also suspected she had her own reasons for wanting something easy and casual, and the last thing I wanted was to be backed into a position where I’d be forced to reveal my own rationale for craving simple.

  “Because women are so direct when it comes to feelings.”

  “I am.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re the exception to just about every rule.”

  I grinned. “Thanks.”

  “Not a compliment.”

  “Oh, sure it was.”

  “Seriously, though. You know the talk’s coming sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “And when it does?”

  I pursed my lips and bounced my left knee. “Then I’ll think about it.”

  “Okay, this is clearly going nowhere. New topic. How tired is your not-girlfriend of you always having to cancel plans because of the job?”

  “Not nearly as tired as she is of me actually forgetting to cancel plans because of the job.”

  “How many times has that happened?”

  “A couple.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I don’t do it on purpose!”

  She held up both hands. “Hey, I get it. I’ve been there. We all get caught up. She’s a cop, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Intel.”

  “I’m surprised she’s giving you a hard time. You’d think another LEO would understand.” She gave me a pointed look I chose to ignore.

  “Yeah, well, I should remember to call.”

  “You should date another agent.”

  The skin on my face was suddenly warm and a little too tight. “What?”

  “It’s easier. I can’t tell you how much less stressful dating has been since I started seeing Carter.”

  Oh, thank God! She was just talking about generally dating someone else we worked with, not referring to the last agent I’d been involved with and telling me I needed to go that route again. What a relief. I’d taken great pains to hide that relationship for various reasons. And I didn’t want to think about that right now. Or ever, if I could help it. Which I usually couldn’t.

  “I don’t have to explain anything to him,” Meaghan said. “He gets all the subtle nuances of our job, so we never have these problems.”

  “Great.” When had the air become so stuffy and hard to inhale? I cracked my window.

  “I just…I just want you to be happy.”

  “Mmm.” I stared out the windshield as I circled the block, looking for a place to park, Meaghan’s words ringing in my ears.

  I didn’t need a relationship to be happy, but since she’d brought it up, that particular brand of bliss had eluded me for some time: that ass-over-teakettle, rocket-ship-to-the-moon, heart-stopping, nerve-wracking kind of love that simultaneously hijacked and destroyed your entire existence. I’d tasted it once, several years ago, and it’d been achingly glorious.

  Comparisons between holding my hand over a candle and jumping bodily into a five-alarm blaze didn’t begin to describe the difference. Lucia was great, and I enjoyed her company. But what I felt for her was nothing compared to the pull—to be near, to touch, to hold, to protect—the draw, the all-consuming fire of the love I’d once felt for someone else.

  “That right there tells me all I need to know,” Meaghan said.

  “What?”

  “If you were happy, you would’ve argued with me.” She pinned me with a mysterious look and opened her door.

  I swung my own open and hopped out, taking a second to adjust the gear around my waist. I shut the door and rested my hands on the roof of the car. I tried to think of a rebuttal, but all I could come up with was, “I’m not unhappy.”

  Meaghan’s smile was laced with sadness. Or maybe it was pity. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. “I don’t have to tell you there’s a big difference, though, do I?”

  She turned and headed toward the building, leaving me to stare after her. “No,” I said softly, even though she couldn’t possibly hear me. “No, you don’t.”

  I snagged the file folder I’d need out of the backseat and hurried to catch up to her, determined to stay on task and keep all thoughts of love and happiness out of my mind for at least the next couple of hours.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bang, bang, bang!

  My very best police knock broadcast throughout the dreary hallway that something was about to go down. I winced. But people in New York tend to mind their own business. I wasn’t knocking on their door, so they wouldn’t get involved. Still, I looked up and down the hall. No one and nothing moved.

  My back to the wall, my weapon side canted away from the door, I glanced across the doorway at Meaghan, who appeared to be listening for some indication of life inside the apartment. She lifted her eyes, head cocked to one side.

  “Anything?” I mouthed silently. I hadn’t heard a damn thing, but I’m not infallible. Maybe she’d picked up something.

  Meaghan frowned and shook her head. The furrow in her brow deepened, and she broke eye contact. She leaned closer to the door, keeping to one side so she wouldn’t be caught in the so-called fatal funnel.

  Bang, bang, bang!

  I pounded with the side of my fist, harder than before, then hesitated as I considered whether to verbally announce our presence. I glanced at Meaghan again. She shrugged.

  “Police. Open up.” Surely the occupant would hear my demand. Again, I checked the other apartment doors. Everything seemed still.

  A soft scuffle sounded from just inside the doorway, and I met Meaghan’s gaze. She nodded, and her right hand strayed toward the butt of her gun. We just wanted to interview this guy, not arrest him, and didn’t suspect that he was either armed or dangerous, but Meaghan’s weapon side was close to the doorway. It never hurt to be proactive.

  I retrieved my baton from my belt and opened it, the clack ominously loud as the metal pieces fell into place. Using the weapon’s tip, I pounded on the door again, a small part of me childishly hoping whoever was skulking there had their ear near the door.

  “Police. Open the door.” I struck the door a few more times.

  Turning locks clicked, and I slammed the tip of the baton hard against the faded-yellow cinder-block wall. It collapsed back in on itself, and I jammed it back into its holster. The door opened as far as its chain allowed.

  “Yes?” The slightly accented voice from within sounded mildly annoyed.

  I held up my badge to the crack in the door. “Amin Akbari.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’d like to talk to you.”

  A long pause followed. I held my breath. My patience with this situation was already becoming threadbare, and I was tempted to free the side of myself that had reduced grown men to tears and force this man to open the damn door. But I’d learned patience as well as situational awareness. It might be best to wait until I was actually inside to unleash the thunder and lightning. So, as the lone eye peered at me somewhat warily through the crack in the door, I flashed my brightest smile and tried to appear nonthreatening.

  “Mr. Akbari, I’m Special Agent O’Connor. This is Special Agent Bates. We’re with the United States Secret Service. We just have a couple of questions.”

  The eye blinked once, but at least the door wasn’t slammed in my face. That was a good sign.

  “I know it’s late, and I apologize for interrupting your evening. We won’t take up much of your time. Definitely less than an hour. We don’t want to keep you from your evening prayer.”

  The eyebrow above the petulant-looking eye went up, and I spotted a hint of surprise in that dark g
aze. The door shut softly but firmly, and my shoulders sagged. As I debated whether to resume my assault on the door, I heard the scrape of a chain being released from its fastenings. A moment later the door opened.

  Mr. Amin Akbari wore a dark-blue galabia and a matching pair of linen pants. Comfortable-looking slippers covered his feet. He rubbed his close-cropped beard with one hand as he looked at me somewhat resentfully.

  “May we come in?” I slid my commission book back into my jacket pocket and gave Meaghan a reassuring glance.

  He stepped back, and we entered. The man’s name and garb and the fact that he didn’t refute my allusion to his evening prayer confirmed what I’d suspected. Akbari was Muslim. Crap.

  Some Muslim men simply don’t want to deal with women. Several I’ve encountered have flatly refused to acknowledge my presence, and Akbari’s guarded expression indicated that might be the case here. I wished I had a male with me. This would probably go a lot better if I had.

  The smell of spiced lamb hung heavy in the air. I cringed. Had we interrupted the man’s dinner? The darkened kitchen behind him and the equally dim dining room to the left of it led me to think not. At least I hadn’t earned any strikes there.

  “Thank you.” I walked into the apartment, giving Meaghan plenty of room to shut the door behind me, and gestured toward the empty dining-room table. “Would you like to sit here?”

  Akbari merely turned away without a word.

  Meaghan’s long look said she was seriously contemplating kicking my ass later for dragging her out on this call. I shrugged one shoulder in apology and followed Akbari to the table.

  “Before we start, Mr. Akbari, is anyone else in the house with you tonight?” The living room, visible from our vantage point in the foyer, was obviously empty, and I could see most of the bathroom through the open door at the end of the hall. That left the bedroom unaccounted for. I didn’t detect any other signs of life.

  “No.” He flipped a switch to turn on a chandelier over the table and took a seat.

  “So, you’re here alone?” I wanted to be absolutely clear. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’d had someone wander out of a back room in the middle of an interview and then listened to the interviewee claim they hadn’t understood exactly what I’d meant.

  “Yes. It is just me.” A pause. “And now you.”

  Akbari’s intense stare was giving me the creeps, as if I needed yet another reason to hurry the hell up and complete this interview. I laid the packet full of papers I’d brought on the dining-room table and helped myself to a chair. The one I chose allowed me to face the bedroom, and I turned it slightly so I had a partial view of the front door out of the corner of my eye, if anyone decided to join us.

  Meaghan hesitated for a fraction of a second before taking the seat next to me and arranging her chair in a similar fashion. She opened her notebook to a blank page and retrieved a pen from her pocket, ready to record the pertinent facts. She was taking notes so I could focus all my attention on the subject of my interview.

  “Mr. Akbari, do you know why we’re here?”

  Akbari shook his head, but recognition flickered behind his eyes.

  I nodded once, as if I accepted his answer, and put my hands on top of the papers I’d brought. His gaze was drawn to them, and now his expression was equal parts curiosity and caution. Perfect.

  “I have some questions. As I said, we’ll try not to take too much of your time.”

  Akbari remained mute.

  Okay. He was going to make me work for it. I could do that. If he thought the silent treatment would intimidate me, he was clearly misinformed about the tenacity of American women. And he’d really misjudged me. I saw his reticence as a challenge and became that much more determined to break him.

  I managed to restrain a smile. Barely. “Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way,” I suggested casually. “Do you have any identification?”

  “Why?”

  Interesting. He was reluctant to provide me with ID. Why?

  Now I did smile. “I just want to make sure I’m talking to the right guy. Plus, it’ll allow my partner here to get the necessary information, so you and I can keep talking. It makes this whole process go faster.”

  Akbari swallowed once and took a deep breath. He’d tensed, and I ensured that my own body language conveyed complete ease.

  Akbari stood and retrieved a worn leather wallet from a nearby credenza. Slowly he fished out a driver’s license, his hands shaking almost imperceptibly. If I hadn’t specifically been looking, I’d have missed it.

  I took the license and passed it to Meaghan without even turning my head. Akbari resumed his seat and fiddled absently with the wallet, which he’d placed on the table in front of him.

  “How long have you lived here, Mr. Akbari?”

  “Two years.”

  “And where did you live before this?”

  “Anaheim, California.”

  “Did you like California?”

  “Yes. It was very nice.”

  I inhaled deeply and adjusted myself in my chair, leaning forward and resting my weight on my forearms. I held his gaze until he dropped his eyes.

  “Mr. Akbari, before we go any further I should probably explain something to you. Just because I ask you a question doesn’t necessarily mean I’m looking for an answer.”

  Akbari appeared confused. His brow pulled down as he looked at me. “I don’t understand.”

  “People don’t tell the truth, Mr. Akbari. Unfortunate, I know, but those are the times we live in. Me? I like to know where I stand with people, whether I can trust anything they tell me. Many of the questions I’m going to ask you, I already know the answers to. I ask them anyway to see whether you’re going to be straight with me.”

  I paused deliberately. Akbari’s jaw tightened, and a light sheen of sweat broke out across his forehead.

  “We’re already off to a bad start, Mr. Akbari. You’ve just lied to me twice, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the interview.” I paused again. “Are you familiar with criminal law?”

  Akbari shook his head and licked his lips.

  “Title 18, United States Code 1001 is a particular favorite of mine. I won’t bore you with all the legalese. You can look it up yourself sometime if you’re so inclined, but basically it says that it’s a crime to lie to federal agents. Did you know you can go to jail for up to five years for violating that statute? Eight, if the matter under discussion relates to terrorism. And that’s in addition to a hefty fine. You’d be amazed how often I need to bring that up. I’ll admit, it makes me long for a simpler time when people were honest and respected the law and those who work tirelessly to uphold it. It breaks my heart when I have to remind people of their duty as human beings to do unto others.”

  Meaghan bumped my leg under the table, and I used my hand to hide my grin. Okay, she was right. I was laying it on a tad thick. But the bastard had lied to my first two questions. And they were the easy ones. What was I going to get out of him when I started asking questions I didn’t know the answers to?

  “Let’s try this again, Mr. Akbari. How long have you lived here?”

  “Three weeks.” His shoulders slumped, and his voice came out a bit shaky.

  I nodded. That was the answer I’d been looking for. “And where did you live before this?”

  “Rockville, Maryland.”

  “Who did you live with down there?”

  “My mother.”

  Three for three. Perfect. Now came the hard ones. I opened the folder on the table in front of me and retrieved a clear plastic envelope containing a counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bill. I laid it flat on the table between us and studied him to gauge his reaction.

  Akbari’s eyes went flat as he stared at it, and he clenched his hands together.

  “Do you recognize this?”

  Akbari hesitated. “It’s a hundred-dollar bill.”

  “Very good. Do you have any idea why I might have driven ove
r here so late in the evening to ask you whether you’d seen it before?”

  Akbari shook his head, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the bill. I didn’t expect him to recognize it. Not that exact bill anyway, which was a prop I’d borrowed from the Counterfeit Squad for dramatic effect. We’d gotten it from a bank in Manhattan, which had received it from some store’s night drop bag. It was scheduled to be entered into evidence later in the week. We had no idea where it’d come from or who’d passed it off to the store. The only things that bill had in common with the one I was asking him about were that it was fake and it was a hundred. Everything else—identifying numbers, the paper it was printed on, the method in which it’d been counterfeited—was completely different.

  Showing him the bill did serve a purpose, however. I mean, besides making him think I was a superagent and had gotten my hands on the fake hundred he’d passed at a grocery store down in Maryland. I peered at him as he looked at the note, watching carefully for the recognition I was positive wouldn’t come. I was right. It didn’t. And that alone said more than anything he could utter for the rest of the interview.

  When my friend Sarah had called me from D.C. earlier that day to ask me to run down this lead, she’d suspected this guy was just a low man on the proverbial totem pole, and if he did have any involvement in the actual printing of the counterfeit currency—an unlikely scenario, as far as she was concerned—it was superficial at best. If his reaction, or complete lack thereof, was anything to go on, he wasn’t involved in the printing at all. If he had been, he’d have recognized that the bill I was showing him wasn’t his work and would’ve known I was bluffing. Clearly, this guy wasn’t a major player in the operation. But I suspected he knew who was, and that was the information I was really after.

  I gave him another moment to formulate a reply. He didn’t. He just sat there looking at the bill with a dazed expression. Time to turn up the heat.

  “A few weeks ago you visited a grocery store in Maryland and attempted to use a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill to pay for a carton of milk and some eggs.” I was very careful to word my statement so as not to claim that the bill in front of me was the bill he’d used. “The clerk recognized that the bill was fake, and you left abruptly when she mentioned it to you. They pulled video surveillance of the cash-register and parking-lot areas and tracked you to your car. You were identified by your vehicle’s license plate. The store footage of you that our agents in Maryland viewed matched your Maryland driver’s license photo. There’s no doubt it was you on the tape, but, just to be sure, the cashier was shown a photo lineup. She identified your picture immediately.”