by Julie Cave
The owner of the property, known locally as Mac, poured two snifters of brandy and took a seat in one of the antique King Louis wingback armchairs.
His visitor, known in the shady world in which he operated as Wolf, due to his ruthlessness, accepted the second snifter and also sat down.
“I presume you have taken care of the situation?” Mac asked, crossing his legs.
Wolf, who outwardly treated the other man with respect and a certain deference, inwardly thought him a vain old fool. Wolf could see the hair plugs from right across the room.
“It’s over,” Wolf answered.
“What,” inquired Mac acidly, “exactly does that mean? Has the subject agreed to our conditions?”
“Not really,” Wolf said, adding before Mac could insert another sarcastic comment: “We’ve had to implement Plan B.”
Mac wrinkled his nose with distaste. “I see. So the secretary is dead?”
“He is,” confirmed Wolf. He took a sip of brandy and grimaced. He would have much preferred the dulcet flavor of black-label bourbon.
“I find it puzzling that he simply didn’t comply with our demands,” Mac said. In truth, Mac didn’t like being in the same room as a man he considered barely more than a trained orangutan.
Wolf shrugged. “Well, he didn’t, so we were forced into Plan B.”
There was a thoughtful silence as Mac swirled his brandy and considered this. “It creates a number of problems,” he said finally. “What have you done with the body?”
“With all due respect, I don’t think you really want to know,” said Wolf, struggling to keep the disdain from his voice.
“Just reassure me that it won’t be found,” said Mac sharply. “Or that incriminating evidence will be found.”
“I know what I’m doing,” said Wolf. “It won’t be found anytime soon, and we’re being careful.”
“I’ve been informed today that the FBI is involved,” Mac said. “So this must never be traced back to you — or I.”
Wolf nodded. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
Mac didn’t quite believe him. Wolf was certainly good at what he did, which is to say he made for an efficient and dispassionate killer. However, Mac suspected he didn’t have the vested interest in the outcome that Mac himself did.
“You may go,” he said coldly. “I’ve wired the money to your account. I hope that this is all over.”
Wolf allowed a smile, which was not at all cheerful. “It amazes me how many clients say that, and yet require my services year after year.”
He let himself out of the country estate, leaving Mac to brood on the circumstances. Plan B had not been his favored method of solving the problem, but it was better than the alternative. He was confident that his own name wouldn’t come up in any ensuing investigation, and if it did, he had no compunction in throwing Wolf to the wolves, so to speak. He chuckled, finished his brandy, and dialed a number.
“This is Perry,” a reedy voice answered.
“It’s Mac. We’ve succeeded in our plan.”
The voice immediately warmed. “Excellent! So the secretary accepted our conditions?”
“I’m afraid he did not,” said Mac. “We’ve had to remove him.”
There was silence. “Please tell me that means you forced him to resign,” Perry said.
“It means he’s been removed from the face of the earth,” said Mac bluntly.
There was a shocked gasp. “Why would you do that? I didn’t — I mean, I never asked…. What were you thinking?”
“As I understood it, we both had our concerns regarding the incumbent secretary,” Mac said. He was rather enjoying this. “I offered a solution to you, which you readily accepted. That makes you as culpable as I.”
Perry gave a short, mirthless laugh. “All I wanted was scientific integrity! I didn’t ask you to kill him!”
“The secretary made it clear he wouldn’t preserve your scientific integrity,” said Mac. “And so the next step needed to be taken. And so I think the words you are looking for are thank you.”
“I — I — I can’t condone killing,” Perry said desperately.
“The thing is, Perry, I have evidence of you asking me to take care of the problem, and the problem was the secretary. As I recall, you used rather ambiguous language, and so a jury wouldn’t have any difficulty believing that you actually meant to kill the secretary.”
Mac waited for this to sink in.
Perry was making interesting choking noises on the other end of the phone. “I can’t believe this!”
“Now you and I are tied together in this business,” Mac continued. “And there are worse friends to have. But I can be a most difficult enemy and I would advise you to remember what I am capable of.”
Perry accepted this in silence.
“Since you got what you wanted, you have no cause to complain. Therefore you will keep your mouth shut and follow my instructions. Do you understand?”
Perry swallowed with an audible click. “Yes.”
“Excellent. Perhaps you’d like to start thinking of a replacement for the unfortunate Mr. Whitfield. I’ll leave that up to you.”
Mac hung up and allowed himself a broad smile. Perry’s feelings about murder were of no consequence, he thought. Ultimately, Mac had achieved exactly what he’d wanted in the situation, and he’d gathered a few scapegoats along the way. Mac always succeeded.
Chapter 5
It was late evening when Dinah and Ferguson arrived back at Thomas Whitfield’s home. It was empty, Eloise Whitfield having gone to stay with her sister. It was time to get into the work that made up so much of an investigation that movies conveniently glossed over.
They tossed a coin and Ferguson lost, so he pulled on latex gloves and went to the trash. The crime scene technicians had wreaked their usual havoc, but their specialty was physical evidence — hair, fingernails, prints, foreign fibers or particles, and other evidence that would tie a perpetrator inexorably to his DNA or his environment. Finding clues about who may have committed the crime and why was left up to the agents.
Dinah started in the study. It was the messiest and would probably yield the most important information. Crime scene had taken the computer to check its hard drive. Dinah began to look through the paper littering the floor. It was mundane and time-consuming. She sorted the paper in two piles — relevant and irrelevant. In the relevant pile, she put bank statements, phone records, and correspondence. In the other pile, she put electricity bills, health check-up reminders, and charity donations. The best thing about this sort of work was that it utterly consumed Dinah, and she couldn’t dwell on anything else.
She secured the two piles with rubber bands and went about replacing the books on the shelves. Every book she checked for exactly what the intruders had been looking for — loose leaf paper jammed between pages, cryptic messages penciled inside the front dust jacket, or anything that was out of the ordinary for a very ordinary bookcase. As she went, she wrote down the names of each book and its author in her notebook. Most of the books were scientific and business textbooks and therefore of very little interest to Dinah. Yet she dutifully copied it all down, knowing that the tiniest detail could mean a major breakthrough later on in the case.
“Hey,” Ferguson said, appearing at the door and startling her. “I’m done with the trash. Found something interesting.” He glanced around the study and shook his head at the mess.
“What is it?” Dinah asked absently.
“Cell phone. At the bottom of the trash can.” Ferguson held it up, and then wrinkled his nose. “Man, I stink!”
“Yeah,” agreed Dinah. “Can you try to stay downwind? Whose cell phone is it?”
“Thomas Whitfield’s,” said Ferguson, a note of glee in his voice. “I haven’t checked, but hopefully there’ll be text messages or some clue in the call register.”
“Do you think they’d be that careless, given their attention to detail so far?” Dinah asked, her curiosity pi
qued.
“All right!” crowed Ferguson several moments later. “They’ve finally made a mistake. No text messages.”
“Hardly surprising,” interjected Dinah. “Thomas was not exactly part of the text message generation.”
“But,” said Ferguson, with a momentary glare in Dinah’s direction, “call register intact. Ready to write?”
Dinah copied down the lists of numbers from both calls received and made registers, in addition to how many times each number appeared in the register, and what date and time the calls were made and received.
While Ferguson sifted through the living room, Dinah had a quick look at the bank statements. Often large withdrawals or deposits were a good indicator that a person had been planning a so-called abduction. Sometimes they were indicators of other illegal activities that had contributed to the person’s disappearance. In any case, large withdrawals and deposits often gave an investigator a little thrill of hope.
However, the Whitfield’s bank statements appeared, at first glance, to be very routine. Thomas’s salary was deposited each month. Regular withdrawals and payments were made during the course of the month. Checks were cashed on a regular basis.
Frustrated, Dinah stood and stretched, allowing her mind to wander. Why had Thomas Whitfield been abducted? What was there to gain by abducting him? Who had abducted him?
Dinah got the sense that the Whitfields were orderly, regular people, despite the disarray the house was currently in. While they were certainly comfortable, they were not obscenely wealthy; and in any case, a ransom request had not been received.
Who on earth could find Thomas Whitfield’s existence a threat?
Ferguson reappeared in the study. “I don’t know about you, but I need to get some sleep. Are you done here?”
Dinah gathered up the evidence and the two agents left the house in darkness.
As Ferguson drove her home, Dinah said, “I was just thinking to myself who would want to make Thomas Whitfield disappear? For all accounts, he was a normal guy living a normal life.”
“He was high profile,” Ferguson said. “Not many of us have direct access to Congress.”
“Minor league high profile,” corrected Dinah. “Not exactly an A-list celebrity.”
Ferguson smiled. “What’s on for tomorrow?”
Dinah pointed at the evidence bags held in her lap. “We’ve got phone records, bank statements, and cell phone numbers to analyze.”
Ferguson groaned.
• • • •
Dinah slept fitfully, her dreams haunted by a vision of herself bound and gagged the way Eloise Whitfield had been and unable to struggle free. When she awoke in the early morning, her eyes were grainy and scratchy, as if she’d spent too much time at the beach on a windy day. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for her alarm clock to chirp, and tried to think of reasons to get out of bed and face another day.
She had hoped that becoming involved in another case would work as a form of therapy for her, that occupying her sharp mind and keen instinct for the unusual would keep her from dwelling on the despair that consumed her. She knew, two days into the investigation, that this wasn’t working. In fact, she doubted that anything could erase the darkness that enveloped her world.
The alarm clock sprang into noisy action, and Dinah dragged herself from bed into the shower. The hot water did not ease her fuzzy headache. Just after getting dressed she thought about eating breakfast, but she felt very uneasy from lack of sleep and the thought of food made her stomach churn uneasily.
She put on the holster last and opened her front door.
A dozen bright lights immediately flashed, momentarily blinding Dinah and increasing the fuzzy headache to a full-blown roar. Confused, she let go of the front door and it clicked shut behind her.
When she could see again, a crowd of reporters and cameramen were crowded around her walkway, and now she became aware of the cacophony rising around her.
“Why were you brought back into active duty, Special Agent Harris?”
“Has the investigation into Thomas Whitfield’s disappearance stalled?”
“Could this be the work of terrorists?”
That was a particularly stupid question, Dinah thought. She was still off-balance and utterly shocked that the media had found her so quickly.
“Can you confirm whether Thomas Whitfield is alive or dead?”
“Can you confirm whether there have been recent conflicts between Thomas Whitfield and the board of regents?”
“Do you think you can handle the case, given that your mental instability endangered the lives of others on your previous assignment?”
Dinah winced, shock draining the blood from her face. “What did you say?” she said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
The reporter who’d asked the question did not hear her, amidst the noise of the other reporters clamoring for Dinah’s attention.
Dinah was frozen, her limbs locked into place. She stared at the sea of faces uncomprehendingly, her thoughts lost in that dreadful day.
Then she heard a familiar voice shouting above the rest. “Dinah! Get in, quickly!”
She roused herself and saw past the flock of vultures to where Ferguson had pulled the Crown up to the curb and was frantically motioning her to get inside the car.
Dinah pushed through the crowd, shoving past them as they pressed around her. After what seemed like ages, she finally made it to the car and Ferguson accelerated hard away from Dinah’s apartment, the tires squealing.
Dinah slumped in the passenger seat, her heart still galloping like an out-of-control racehorse.
“You need to look at the paper,” Ferguson said gently, pointing at the middle console.
As she took the Post, she noticed her hands shook uncontrollably.
The front page caused a wave of cold nausea to roll over her. A large picture of her had been taken with a telephoto lens, emerging from the Whitfields’ home clutching the plastic envelopes of evidence.
The headline screamed, DISTRESSED AGENT IN HIGH-PROFILE CASE. With a mixture of disbelief, fury, and dread, Dinah continued reading.
An FBI agent with a history of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues has been assigned to the high-profile case of the disappearance of the Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Thomas Whitfield. The FBI has defended the appointment of Dinah Harris, previously a Special Agent in Charge, to the case, citing her as being a competent investigator. However, Special Agent Harris was demoted twelve months ago and assigned to a lecturing job after a gang member extraction situation she was supervising disintegrated. . . .
Dinah threw the paper to the floor, disgusted. She couldn’t bear to read any further.
“As soon as I saw that photo this morning, I thought the media might have followed you,” Ferguson said. He was silent for a time, then added, “I’m terribly sorry, Dinah. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
Dinah nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
They drove in silence to the J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Dinah trying to control the stormy mass of thoughts and memories inside her head. Ferguson began talking about the case, trying to distract her, but Dinah barely heard him.
The SAC, George Hanlon, was waiting for her at her desk, and she approached him with a sense of dread.
“A minute of your time?” he said, motioning to his office.
Ferguson shot her a look of concern and sympathy as she followed Hanlon, feeling like a mischievous child sent to the principal’s office.
Hanlon pointed at the Washington Post. “I assume you’ve seen this?”
Dinah nodded.
“Is this going to compromise your investigative ability in this case?” he asked without preamble. In George Hanlon’s world, individual feelings didn’t matter. All that mattered was the current investigation and how quickly the agents would be able to wrap it up. This enabled Hanlon to call a press conference, get his face on tel
evision, and tell the world what an all-around great agent he was for taking care of the bad guys.
“I don’t believe so,” Dinah said. “Although I can guarantee that the media won’t stop here.”
“It’s not a good reflection on the bureau,” continued Hanlon. “It makes our agents look …flaky and maladjusted.”
Dinah said nothing. Since Waco and 9/11, the FBI was particularly nervous about scandals.
“We can’t afford another slip-up in the field. I need your assurance that you will handle this case professionally.”
“You have it,” said Dinah tightly. “As I’ve already told you.”
Hanlon sighed. “I’m worried, Agent Harris, and I don’t think you can blame me. I’d be much happier if you were teaching and Ferguson had chosen someone else to help him on this case. But if you are certain you will be able to cope with this case, including the media interest, then I’ll allow you to remain with Ferguson. But you should know, I’ll be watching you very closely.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Dinah, trying and failing to sound sincere.
Hanlon stared at her, brows furrowed, wondering whether to call her on it. In the end, he sat at his desk and motioned toward the door.
• • • •
While he waited for her, Ferguson had split up the bank statements, phone records, and the other evidence they’d gathered from the Whitfields’ home and deposited it on Dinah’s desk. He saw the thunderous look on her face and wisely chose not to say anything.
Dinah sat and resigned herself to a day of paperwork, which never happened in the movies. In the movies, there was always something exciting going down. Or there was a brilliant piece of evidence that led straight to the perpetrator.
She stared at the stack of credit card statements and felt strangely depressed by it. Sometimes she was struck by how marginal a human being’s life could be — a fully functioning person, in a position of authority and prestige, reduced to the calls they made, the purchases completed, the tracking and analysis of the most boring daily routines. In the absence of the force of personality and individuality, everyone assumed the same bland personhood. In the end, it didn’t matter who you were, reflected Dinah, everyone was the same at this level; everyone had to eat, go grocery shopping, and pay the bills.