Flame Out

by M. P. Cooley

  CHAPTER 17

  HALE MADE HIS PITCH BEFORE I STARTED THE CAR. “WANT TO go to the Albany field office?”

  I buckled my seat belt and put the key in the ignition. “Still didn’t make my decision about consulting, Hale.”

  “I have inducements,” he said, pushing the seat back several inches so that he was almost lounging. “You know how I’ve been promising the clear video from the car rental place?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t have that.”

  “I don’t think ‘inducements’ means what you think it means.”

  “However,” he said, giving me a cocky grin, “I do have grainy images of the guy who leased the van.”

  That was enough for me. We wound our way out of the hospital parking lot, braking as a pair of exhausted interns skittered across the street to a Starbucks. We drove through to Arbor Hill, the African-American section of the city. This area of town had the same colonial townhouses as the section where Hale lived, but without the self-conscious gas lamps and ironwork the developer had used in Hale’s neighborhood to make it old-timey. We passed the Palace Theatre. I’d taken Lucy there to see a Christmas spectacular a few months back, carols sung by people dressed as elves and a visit from Santa. Lucy lost interest in the dancing snowmen, endlessly amused by the fact the place had a couch in the ladies’ room. I had made a note to myself not to shell out for tickets next year, but instead to find a bathroom with interesting architectural detail.

  At Hale’s direction, I made two quick lefts, putting us in front of the Federal Building, and continued down a one-way street. Midway down the block was an unmarked parking garage, one I’d never noticed before. We pulled up to the gate and were met by a guard with a gun who studied Hale’s badge closely, writing down the number on a log sheet. A camera flashed, taking a picture of me, Hale, and my license plate, and we were through.

  The lot was full, and Hale told me to take his space, a reserved spot near the elevator.

  “Fancy,” I said.

  “Wait ’til you see the digs.”

  He punched a code into the elevator and then hit the button for the twelfth floor. The door opened on an airy lobby. A wide blond wood desk was manned by a smiling receptionist who was no doubt armed to the teeth. The young man had me sign in and buzzed us past the security door.

  We entered what could have been a cubicle farm at an insurance company, the same burnt-coffee smell, but with wanted posters instead of actuary tables tacked to the cubicle walls. The only other difference was that all the employees wore black suits. Part of this might have been because Hale was now the special agent in charge of this field office, and people were trying to emulate the boss, but the sharp suits also came in handy during investigations: when the agents walked on scene, they demanded attention. It made me wish I’d polished my shoes.

  Hale walked through the office at a rapid clip with me scuttling behind, the hum of voices rising as we approached, everyone trying to look busy. I remembered when Hale was the guy being sent out for sandwiches. Agents snapping to attention seemed odd. It was funny: more than my obligations to Hopewell Falls, Lucy, and my father, the biggest stumbling block to my rejoining the FBI would be the respect for the chain of command, with Hale sitting on top. I didn’t know if I could muster that kind of reverence.

  A distant boom sounded, and I felt a low vibration.

  “Firing range,” Hale said before I had the chance to ask. “We share it with the DEA and the ATF.”

  “Are they testing rocket launchers?”

  “Not today. This whole place is concrete reinforced—”

  “A really tall bunker?”

  Hale’s pace quickened. “You gotta do what you gotta do in these urban areas. Concrete will help us in a bomb attack, but it doesn’t provide the best soundproofing. The floor below is empty, partially because of downsizing, and partially because the IRS wants to stay far away from the rest of us.”

  Hale stopped suddenly in front of a cubicle where a woman sat in front of her computer, earphones on, intently watching a reality TV show. Unfazed by a slacking employee, he introduced me as a liaison from the Hopewell Falls Police Department.

  He peered over her shoulder at her computer. “Got that research for me yet, Agent Harrison?”

  “Yes, sir.” Harrison flipped between screens, notes with dates and times popping up even as the TV show continued playing. She rewound the video past a promo that had Theo and Nate hanging from a cliff in Ireland and froze the image. Theo sat on a couch in front of a bookcase, mouth ajar, caught mid-word.

  “Ready?” Harrison asked.

  The screen came to life, with Theo telling a sweet story about how the love of nature was instilled in him at an early age, a puff piece meant to humanize the reality show contestants.

  “Mom and Darius, my stepdad, they used to take me and Nate on long hikes into the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. They wanted us to slow down, take in the natural world around us.” He laughed. “Instead, Nate and I raced to the top as fast as we could.”

  A photo filled the screen as Theo’s voiceover continued. In the picture he looked about four, his hair the same blond shade as in the pictures we had seen on the walls of his abandoned house—there was no doubt that Theo Bazelon and Teddy Lawler were the same boy. Next to him in the photo, his brother squirmed in his mother’s lap. With blond hair that was harsh against her freckled skin and a relaxed and happy expression, she was harder to identify. The agent froze the picture on the screen and panned in.

  “That’s definitely Luisa,” I said. “And if I could ID her, anyone could.”

  The agent unpaused the show, and Theo talked more about how his mother was too shy to be on camera, but sent her thanks to all the fans who were rooting for her sons.

  The agent paused the video again and handed Hale some printouts. “Here’s a few newspaper articles on the brothers. There’s nothing revealing in the text, but there’s another photo”—this picture showed Darius, Luisa, Theo, and Nate digging in the dirt. “This one talks about how Louann grew up in Philadelphia and was a young widow when she moved.” Harrison folded her hands in front of her, putting on a faux earnest expression. “It was a very inspirational story.”

  “Quite the fairy tale,” Hale said. “Great work, Agent Harrison. Report in with any additional sightings of our missing woman.”

  Hale continued down the hall, talking the whole way. “When Theo started in about how publicity averse his mama was, I asked Agent Harrison to go through old video from the TV show, see if pictures of Luisa showed up anywhere.”

  Agent Harrison had produced evidence that it would have taken me weeks to track down. “She did all that in forty-five minutes?”

  “We have all the finest resources around here . . . a firing range, working computers . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah. Do you give your employees ponies, too?”

  “No, but I’m sponsoring a little trip up to Saratoga in August to watch the races. You join in time, you will get an all-expense-paid trip to the Whitney. Sitting on lawn chairs, of course.” He opened the door to the corner office. “Shall we?”

  Hale’s office was big, with a large desk and a meeting table. Unlike his home, this was strictly by the book, with midnight blue carpets and recently painted walls. Service commendations and a picture of President Obama hung behind his desk. His back would be to the awards most of the time, but it was no loss: a wall of windows looked out over the Hudson.

  “Do you require spectacular views?”

  “I earned this,” Hale said. “In an ironic twist, my office in Miami got no natural light. I’m making up for years of being vitamin D deficient.”

  He pulled a chair behind the desk so we were sitting shoulder to shoulder. I averted my eyes when he punched in his password, but I needn’t have bothered as the computer had facial recognition software. The screen came on, and grainy video popped up on the screen.

  Images flashed in and out, ghosts from V
egas’s past. The static got lighter and out of the fuzziness came an image of a man.

  “No audio?” I asked.

  “Don’t be greedy.”

  The employee bustled back and forth behind the counter, printing out paperwork, pointing at a signature line, and standing close as the customer counted out bills on the counter.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Cash?”

  Hale nodded. “Yup. Cash.”

  “Who takes cash anymore?”

  “The owner. He’s the guy behind the counter, and he has a policy in place where you can pay in cash if you leave a $5,000 deposit. Gamblers have been known to ruin their credit.”

  I squinted at the screen, but the suspect’s image faded and warped. “I can’t make out the suspect’s face at all. The owner get an ID?”

  “ID was fake. The rental agency kept a copy, and when we tracked it down, it was some army ranger who’d never set foot in Vegas, let alone Hopewell Falls. The owner did get the guy to remove his sunglasses and said his eyes were blue, the same color listed on the license.”

  “How is this even possible? You can’t pick up your dry cleaning without three forms of ID and a background check.” I wanted to walk out right now. “We’ve got nothing.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Hale said. He switched views to a camera positioned across the street from the rental place. A cab pulled up and despite the distance, I was able to make out every number on the license plate.

  “The casinos,” Hale said. “Thanks to them, there’s not a single place in the whole of Las Vegas without surveillance.”

  “Facial recognition software?”

  “Impossible to avoid, but our guy did a nice job of hiding under sunglasses and a hoodie. Witness identification didn’t go much better. Cabdriver could only give us tall, sunglasses, and ‘wearing a lot of clothes’—unhelpful to say the least.” Hale opened a separate file. A police sketch. Our guy who rented the van looked vaguely like the Unabomber.

  I watched as the path of the car was tracked backward to its origin, the camera from Caesars Palace following the car to the place where the camera from the Parisienne picked it up. Someone in the FBI had done some good footwork, going from casino to casino, collecting footage. Unfortunately, their work hadn’t given us the result we needed: I couldn’t make out the guy’s face.

  The cameras shifted, and we were now in the airport, everyone walking backward. I spotted our guy, still in sunglasses, despite being indoors. He backward-marched through the airport, but slowly: he had a pronounced limp. I pushed my chair close to the computer trying to get a better view. Was it Dan Jaleda? Or Brian? He arrived at the Southwest terminal, going right past the Minneapolis gate to the one arriving from Detroit. “How can you be sure he didn’t connect through Detroit from Minnesota?”

  The screen flashed again and we were in a different airport. “Detroit,” Hale said. Our suspect rode an electronic sidewalk through the flash of fluorescents in a mile-long passageway.

  “That’s gorgeous,” I said. “It’s like you’re underwater.” It made me want to visit Detroit.

  “One time my flight to Atlanta was delayed and I took the walkway back and forth three times,” Hale said. An instant message screen popped up in the corner of Hale’s screen, and I watched him type “5 mins,” before minimizing the dialogue box.

  “Watch this,” he said.

  The suspect took off his sunglasses, dazzled by the lightshow. The shot was grainy, and the lights played havoc with the images, but it looked like Brian Medved.

  I almost smacked Hale. “Why didn’t you start there?!”

  “I wasn’t convinced.”

  I was. Brian had the straight stance of a soldier, as did this man. He put his sunglasses on, retreating up an escalator, down a hallway to a gate marked ARRIVAL: ALBANY.

  “The plane from Albany didn’t convince you?”

  “It did, it did,” he said, spinning around in his chair to face me. “But then I remembered. The leg.” Hale tapped his knee. “The metal joint-work would set off TSA alarms, and he would have to take the leg off for inspection. We interviewed a bunch of TSA agents who were working the gates the morning he was traveling, and there are no records of someone with a prosthesis.”

  I stepped closer, and without asking, Hale rewound, stopping at the second where the guy took off his glasses.

  “With the limp, there’s a chance it might be Dan Jaleda . . . but it looks like Brian . . .” My face was inches from the screen. Brian made a lot more sense than Dan Jaleda—despite his injury, his military training would give him the skills to overpower most people, but especially a small woman like Luisa. And anyone who did patrols in the desert wouldn’t blink about driving a hostage across country.

  “Are you sure his leg would set off the alarms?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” Hale said. A message popped up in the corner of his screen and he typed “on my way.” He picked up a file from the desk. “I have a four p.m. meeting, but I could go to the bar with you later.”

  “We’ll be crashing a party,” I said. “Bernie’s homecoming, and I’m guessing that Maxim and Jake have pulled out all the stops for their brother’s shindig. Pulling Bernie’s nephew outside might start a riot.” I followed Hale out of his office and down the hallway. “Plus I really want to get home and check on my dad.”

  “I may do the same with Dave. Our friend is looking a little hollowed out, and it might do him some good to get out. How’s your dad taking it?”

  “It’s weird. Normally I’d expect him to be stoic, or to leap into action. Instead he’s sharing his feelings.” I thought of him in the car, unable to navigate Bernie’s forgiveness. “I blame my mother.”

  Hale stopped short. “Your mother? You have a mom?”

  I was offended. “A lot of people do, you know.”

  Hale laughed. “I had thought you sprang full-grown from your father’s knee. You never talked about her, that I remember.”

  Explaining my mother was hard, starting from when my parents met, my dad arresting her at a peace rally. There were the homemade granola bars in my lunch bags long before they were fashionable, and the time she attended the policemen’s ball wearing an Indian print dress. But those were easy compared to the big things: leaving us and moving to Florida, and her selfish behavior at Kevin’s funeral. The funeral still made me wince, but no way was I talking about it with Hale. Hale and Kevin had been close, but during the time Kevin was ill we hadn’t been friends—we’d almost been enemies—and Hale missed the funeral.

  “I should go,” I said, pointing at the exit. “Family awaits. Thanks again for putting the FBI at our disposal.”

  “Consider it a recruitment trip. All this could be yours if you decide to return.”

  “Even the parking space?”

  “Well, maybe not everything.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I STAKED OUT MY HOUSE. TWO NEWS VANS WERE PARKED END to end out front, and a reporter fiddling with his phone was talking to a bored cameraman who sat on the back bumper, smoking. It would be easy to get in the side door before they could get any footage. I could rescue my dad and Lucy from my mother, and everyone could sleep in their own bed tonight.

  At the hotel, I discovered they didn’t needed rescuing. My father was nowhere to be seen, and Lucy was sitting at the dinner table, quiet and still. Usually her silences worried me as they preceded all hell breaking loose, but this was different. She was listening to my mother.

  “June had been begging for a treehouse for months,” my mother said. “For her seventh birthday, your granddad and I built one. Up she went, scaling the ladder, poking her head out of the window and waving down at us. But that wasn’t high enough for our June.”

  “It would be fun to climb to the top of a tree,” Lucy said, and I choked back a protest. As a child, playing in my treehouse was my favorite thing to do. As a parent, it would be a cold day in hell before I let my daughter hang ten feet above the ground on a couple of
hammered-together two-by-fours.

  “No, not to the top of the tree,” my mom said. “Onto the roof of the playhouse. She was having a grand old time right up ’til she realized she was stuck up there.” Mom made a cartoonish shocked face and Lucy laughed. “Your granddad and I were too big to fit through the hole, and we were almost ready to call a fire truck when your mom’s cat decided to join her on the roof.”

  “Were they both stuck?” Lucy asked.

  “No, and we can thank the cat for that. It guided June down, showing her the safe places to step until she’d shimmied back to the ground. I’m convinced that cat is her spirit animal.”

  “Grandma, can we build a treehouse this summer?” Lucy asked before noticing me. “Oh, hey, Mom.” She wore clothes I’d never seen, a striped shirt over a T-shirt, with a polka-dotted skirt and leggings that had the same pinks and oranges as the stripes in the shirt. It almost matched, a first for Lucy.

  I reached out my hand to Lucy, who ignored it. “Ready to go home?”

  “I like it here,” Lucy said. “I want to live here forever.”

  “Because they have a pool?” I asked.

  “A pool and Grandma.”

  My mother beamed. “We’ve had a wonderful day, June. Lucy told me all about her best friend Kaylie and starting judo next year, and I told her stories of when you were a little girl.” She waved me over to a chair. “Let me make you a plate. It’s mushroom risotto, and there’s plenty.”

  “That’s OK, I’m not hungry.” A statement that was about the farthest you could get from the truth.

  “Are you sure? Lucy isn’t finished.” My daughter was pushing stuff around the plate rather than eating. My mother hadn’t gotten smart to that trick yet.

  The food smelled delicious, and I didn’t want to leave without my father, so I dropped my bag onto a chair, draped my coat across the back, and took the plate my mother offered.

  “Where’s Dad?” I said between mouthfuls. It was very good.

  “He went to visit Dave,” she said. “Your friend needs a father figure right now, and your Dad is as close as he might get.”