As I stepped back over the threshold and left the Waypoint, I considered Anthriel’s warning. I thought I understood it. I thought he’d meant the FBI or La Familia.
I was wrong.
Chapter 26
Agent Deanna Rezvani felt like she was trapped in one of those time-lapsed movie scenes where a whole day’s worth of activity buzzed around her at high speed while she stood still.
The FBI had commandeered a recently built office building in Pensacola. Most of the Jacksonville Field Office’s personnel and a third of Mobile’s manpower occupied the office now. Deputy Director Barnes ran the Smiling Jack Task Force like an orchestra conductor…if said conductor used a sledgehammer rather than a baton.
Barnes didn’t micromanage. He macromanaged. His philosophy was simply: Know your job, do your job, don’t screw up, and stay out of my way.
And for a composite built from two field offices, the Task Force seemed to be living up to Barnes’ maxim. Everyone had something to do, and everyone seemed feverishly bent on completing their tasks. Everyone except Agent Rezvani.
She stared at her computer screen, continued to squeeze the pencil she’d broken, and clenched her teeth. Bad habit #209, she thought. Each and every teeth cleaning, her dentist told her the same thing: You’re a grinder. You’re wearing down your teeth.
And the recommendation was always the same. Heck with that, she thought. They’ll be selling snow cones on the sun before I wear one of those overnight mouth guards. She’d tried that exactly once, and her breath the next morning had laid waste to her potted plants. Not like the overnight guard would do much good anyway. Most of her teeth-grinding was on the job. Like today.
Except today, she’d been grinding so hard for so long that it had blossomed into a magnitude 6.5 tension headache. The muscles at the base of her neck stiffened, and a rod of pain lanced up into the back of her skull. Not content to cause manageable agony, the throbbing ache blossomed out to her temples like electrified moose antlers. Rez clamped her eyes shut and rubbed her temples, but earned precious little respite. She went to her purse and found the prescription strength ibuprofen her doctor had given her. It usually worked…to a degree…and not right away. But it was better than nothing.
She popped a pill, downed it with Diet Dr. Pepper, and went back to thinking. Or, at least she tried.
“Headache?” came a broadcast-quality male voice from behind her.
Rez spun around and found a Ken doll in a well-tailored, dark suit standing a little too close for comfort.
“Can I help you?” Rez asked, lacing her tone with a little, Back off, loser. I bite.
“Actually, I might be able to help you,” he said, jutting out a hand. “I’m Ted Klingler, top cop from Mobile, well in my division anyway.”
Klingler, Rez thought. She’d heard the name. He’d been pivotal in solving a few high-profile cases in the last year. Against her better instincts, she shook his hand. She regretted it immediately. Klingler’s hand was feverishly hot, like he’d been holding onto a light bulb.
“I saw you shrugging your shoulders and neck,” he said. “Tension headache?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “And I think it’s getting worse.”
He ignored the slight and said, “I happen to be a licensed masseuse. Why don’t you turn around and I’ll—”
“Lose the use of your hands permanently?” Rez interrupted. “Because that’s what’s going to happen if you put those meat hooks near my neck.”
“Meat hooks?” he echoed, looking down at his hands. “Who talks like that?”
“Look, Klinger—”
“Klingler,” he corrected. “Klinger was on M.A.S.H.”
“Whatever,” Rez said. “Where I come from, we don’t give each other neck massages in the office, okay? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. And I’m sure, being top cop and all, you do too.”
Klingler backed away. He looked like a German-shepherd that had just been hit on the nose with a newspaper. But as he stepped out of Rez’s line of sight, she heard him mutter, “…ever right about her. Ice queen, through and through.”
That’s right, Rez thought, the pounding of her headache reaching new percussive heights. I’m an ice queen, especially to smarmy, self-inflated… She never finished the thought. It wasn’t worth it. She had too many other things to think about. Chief among them was how she was ever going to earn her way back into Deputy Director Barnes’ good graces.
Barnes had gone out of his way to keep Agent Rezvani marginalized. He’d made sure she cut ties with John Spector and then thrown her a never ending pile of paperwork loosely related to Smiling Jack. In D.C. he’d have never pulled something like that. He’d always respected her work, even pulling strings to get her involved in some of the most intricate or sensitive cases.
And now? She thought, snapping the pencil into more pieces. Now, even though it was my legwork that turned up the new leads in the Smiling Jack case, now he throws me on the sideline. He doesn’t trust my judgment.
The more Rez thought about it, the more she understood—and hated—her boss’s conclusions. After all, she had demonstrated questionable judgment oh, about a dozen times since arriving in Florida. And, each and every instance, had to do with John Spector. Why had she trusted him? He claimed to be working her side of the fence, only for an agency well above her pay grade. But what real evidence did she have that Ghost had anything to do with a government agency?
He had high tech weapons. That was one thing. But he didn’t even have his own cell phone. He had sharp investigative skills. He was good in a fight. But then, there was the miraculous healing ability. How could he have survived the gunshots? Wasn’t that evidence of being involved in some hush-hush, ultra black agency?
And what about the websites, the articles, and the creepy photos? The truth was, she didn’t really know anything at all about John Spector, aka Ghost. And she had entrusted him with details of a critical ongoing FBI case. It was a lapse in judgment. A big one.
So why don’t I feel like I screwed up? she wondered. This John Spector, whoever he was, felt like a good man. He felt like someone she could trust. He’d freely shared all the Smiling Jack leads he’d discovered. And he had saved her life. But aside from that, there was some intangible quality about him that she couldn’t quite describe. It was as if he somehow radiated trustworthiness. No, it was more than that. Bigger than that. Ghost had a rare purity about him. He didn’t smoke or drink. She hadn’t heard so much as a ‘darn,’ in his vocabulary.
He was like a wall. That was it…or at least as close as she could come to an apt description. An implacable, noble wall. Unlike so many men she’d worked with, Ghost didn’t vacillate under pressure. Some men would make a decision and then look to her as if to say, “Is that right? If it’s not, I can do whatever you think is best.” Rez didn’t need that kind of second-guessing nonsense. She needed someone who knew what was right and did what was right.
A commotion from behind walloped Rez out of her thoughts. A door slammed. Someone cursed. Ten voices argued at once. Rez leaped up, strode past half-a-dozen cubicles, and joined the throng in the floor’s largest conference room. She found a room plastered with maps, crime-scene photos, and brainstorming pads. There was a large gray table, a half dozen computers, and enough cigarette smoke to curdle milk. There was also an angry horde of agents.
‘That’s a bunch of crap!” Field Agent Cadens shouted, the cigarette hanging precariously from his lower lip. “We were all over Louisiana in the first place. This guy’s making it up.”
“Looking for his fifteen minutes!” blurted a squat, toad-like agent named Addams.
“How’d he know about the birthmark then?” Special Agent Garcia asked, her question and tone as sharp as her facial features. The room went silent.
“Maybe he’s Smiling Jack,” someone muttered. Rez couldn’t see who. But that sent the room back into spasms of argument.
Rez spotted the Ken-doll-agent, sidled his direction, and barked a
whisper, “Klingler, what’s going on?”
“Oh, now you want to talk?” he replied, rolling his eyes.
Rez fixed him with a glare that would have melted iron. Klingler blinked and said, “You got problems, Rezvani. You need help.” He gave an exasperated laugh and shook his head.
“Nothing like the problems you’re going to have if you keep stalling,” Rez said. “I need you to tell me what’s going on.”
“Probably nothing,” Klingler muttered. “Some nutball says he’s the father of the recent vic.”
Rez sucked in a gasp. “The woman from Fort Pickens,” she whispered. “We got a name? Where’s he now? Got anybody en route?”
“If you’d shut up a minute,” he replied, “maybe we could find out.”
“…next closest Field Office is Little Rock,” someone said.
“Nah, Dallas is closer.”
“I’m still saying it’s a waste of time,” Addams muttered.
“Send some plain clothes over there to pick’m up,” Cadens suggested. “We got bigger fish to fry here.”
“Exactly what fish do we have to fry here, Leonard?” Deputy Director Barnes thundered. “We got an unidentified body cooling in the morgue, and nothing but the cause of death and a few footprints in the sand. We got no trail. We also got no time to waste. Brookheart?”
“Sir?” a narrow, dark-skinned Special Agent bounced from his chair.
“Get on the horn to Little Rock,” Barnes commanded. “Dallas has too much going on with that serial poisoning case. Little Rock’s got the new choppers; they can get there in what?”
“Forty minutes, give or take,” Brookheart replied.
“And we need someone on the ground there too,” Barnes said. “Dagget, you and Klingler get over to the chopper. The rest a’ you, get back to work!” When Deputy Director Barnes pounded his fist on the conference table, the room cleared out as if someone had dropped a grenade.
Agent Rezvani had to flatten herself against the door to avoid the stampede. As the torrent turned to a trickle, Rez rounded the door and stomped over to Deputy Director Barnes. “How long, Sir?” she demanded.
Barnes looked up suddenly and whisked away his reading glasses as if embarrassed to show a chink in his granite armor. But, nonetheless, he glared at her with his usual intimidating confidence. “Did you say something, Agent Rezvani?”
“With all due respect, Sir,” Rezvani said, mentally weighing her career against speaking her mind. For a wildly insane moment, speaking her mind appeared to tip the scales. So, she plowed on. “With all-due-respect, your hearing hasn’t gone yet. You heard my question, and you know precisely what I’m asking.”
He folded his hands and, for a split heartbeat, Rez thought she saw the hint of a grudging smile crack his brickish jaw. “Until the killer is caught,” he said.
“I’ve never known you to waste resources, Sir,” Rez said. “I know the Smiling Jack case as good or better than anyone in the Agency. You know my fieldwork. Why are you wasting me?”
“You know why.”
“Spector?”
He nodded.
“For crying out loud, Sir. You forced me to spend my own vacation time to follow leads I believed were there. Then, as soon as I find something, you freeze me out. Spector gave me my best leads. The camera—photos, video—he gave that to me. And…in the meantime, we took out a La Compañía heavyweight.”
“Temporarily,” Barnes said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Lawyers got Ramírez out. Four million bail.”
That stunned Rez for a few ticks. She remembered Ramírez’ threat to Ghost. She shook her head to focus on the matter at hand. “I just don’t understand why, Sir? I mean…really why?”
“Agent Rezvani,” he said, “you are a very capable investigator. What do you think happens when a case gets reopened? When a major case gets reopened?”
“It makes people wonder why the case was closed to begin with.”
“Bingo,” Barnes said. “It’s a great big dunce cap for the FBI. And not just people. Press. Certain members of the journalistic community are very interested in publicizing such an embarrassment, and certain people in our organization are rather sensitive about such things.”
The dot-to-dot picture suddenly formed a clearer image. Rez sighed.
“Right,” Barnes said. “Now suppose that an enterprising reporter for a national news agency does a little digging and discovers that, just before the case gets reopened, the only agent who was still interested in the case was forced to investigate on her own time, and then a body shows up, finally—finally—legitimizing the case?”
“Crap.”
“You need to be out of the public eye,” Barnes said. “Or someone’s going to paint that dunce cap fire-engine red. You don’t want to see that happen, do you, Agent Rezvani?”
“So Director Peluso’s willing to shelve me and take the risk that—”
“I asked, do you want to see that happen, A-Gent-Rez-Va-Ni?” He glared at her as he sharply enunciated the syllables.
She squinted back at him, not understanding. This wasn’t his My Final Word routine. “Nossir,” she said at last.
“See, now I knew you were a team player,” Barnes said. He stood, strolled to the conference room door, and shut it. He returned to his seat and leaned forward. “So, you’re officially off the Smiling Jack case,” he said, his voice strangely thin. “Present here in only the most cursory support capacity. So you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a Mr. Paul Graziano who claims to be the father of the victim left at Fort Pickens.”
“Nossir,” she said, shaking her head comically.
“So an address in Shreveport of 618 Bay Avenue would be of absolutely no interest to you.”
“Nossir,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got so much meaningless paperwork to complete that I can’t afford to take any more of your time, Sir. I apologize for the intrusion.”
“Thank you for your understanding, Agent Rezvani,” Deputy Director Barnes said. “One thing more: if something gets done, and you get this guy, you know who gets the credit.”
Rez didn’t say a thing, but she knew.
“Uh, huh,” Barnes said. “But, if this gets screwed up any worse and it gets public?”
“Siberia?” she asked.
Barnes turned on his Final Word grimace. He said, “If you’re lucky.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“The choppers are all gone,” Rez muttered. “The cavalry’s already en route to Shreveport. What the heck am I supposed to do?” Maybe that’s why Barnes threw the info my way, she thought. Just enough information to get me off his back, but nothing I could really do anything about. Not really.
She’d tried calling Mr. Graziano, of course. She’d tried six times and got no answer. She’d used the Bureau’s digital files, up to her clearance level anyway, to see what she could find out about the guy. Paul Louis Graziano was a retired mill worker. He had divorced four years ago; never remarried. He didn’t have much of a record. Late on his taxes a couple times. There was a flag in his file, but when she clicked on it, nothing came up. That usually meant it was something recorded before the FBI completely overhauled their databases in 2001, after the Y2K scare. Citizens who were categorized as “low risk” didn’t get a lot of love from the FBI data geeks.
Rez leaned back in her cubicle chair and thought about the murdered young woman. She’d been in her early twenties when Smiling Jack took her life. If Graziano was actually the woman’s father, why didn’t he have a missing person report filed?
Of course, she knew there could be a thousand reasons. Maybe he was just a scumbag. He was divorced. Maybe the wife had custody. Maybe father and daughter were estranged. Maybe she’d run away from home and become one of the nameless many to disappear into the sexual cesspool in and around Hollywood.
Rez shivered. She couldn’t shake the image of the dead woman. If the ME’s report could be trusted, she�
�d been violated and had her throat cut…bled out most likely from the vaginal wounds…wounds that might be consistent with an abortion. She’d been used up and slaughtered, left in that blasted fort, and arranged to lie in the fetal position. She’d looked innocent when they found her, almost like she was sleeping. But there was blood: stark red blood against her skin. So pale she looked ghostly.
Crap, Rez thought. I’m an idiot. She yanked out her cell phone and started dialing.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Halfway back from the cemetery in Jackson, I’d pulled into a parking lot of a truck stop called the 231 Bistro because I’d had an idea. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to look earlier.
Assassins were a secretive lot. When I’d initially searched his car, I’d found an arsenal of weaponry. I could have probably pawned those for all the money I’d need. But I’d dismissed that idea, knowing that the guns would end up in the wrong hands…more or less because of me. I’d destroyed the weapons, but I’d never thought to snoop around the car a little more.
I opened the glove box, found a little magnetic key box stuck to the side. When I opened it up, I found a wad of hundred dollar bills. “I’m an idiot,” I muttered, thinking of all the Waffle Houses I’d passed up in the morning.
When I’d thought I had no money, I’d willed my hunger away. But now, my body woke up and demanded food. I didn’t think I could bear to drive south again to search for a Waffle House. I practically jogged into the truck stop.
Surrounded by a bunch of burly, bearded guys wearing flannel shirts with the sleeves cut out, I ordered two T-bones, double mashed potatoes and gravy, and a salad.
The waitress brought the food a short time later and set it out for me: all four plates worth.
“Sure you got room for all that, honey?” the waitress asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I replied. “I’ll have room for dessert too. You have dessert, right?”
“Best Pecan Pie you ever had,” she said. “Butter brickle brownie cake too.”
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