Soft Targets

by John Gilstrap

  Irene pulled to an abrupt halt as an unthinkable idea took shape in her mind. The suddenness of her action got the attention of the others. “What’s wrong?” Jonathan asked.

  Irene held up a hand for silence, giving time for the details to sink in. She wasn’t sure yet what she was thinking, but there was something in there that rang a big bell.

  I will know and I will kill them.

  Whoever was doing this had inside knowledge. In her heart, from the very beginning, she’d suspected that the bad guy knew more than a random bad guy should know.

  She brought her hand down and pivoted her head to face Jonathan, her jaw agape. “I know who it is,” she said.

  Chapter 7

  “Do you know what time it is?” Amanda Whitney said. She held the door open just a couple of inches. Still an FBI agent, at least for the time being, she had to show a modicum of deference to her boss, but that didn’t mean she had to let her invade her house at zero dark early.

  Irene noted the angle of Amanda’s body relative to the door, the way she was pitched nearly sideways, making a point of showing only half of her body. “Are you shielding a firearm?” she asked. Her right hand wanted to rise to her SIG, but she felt that that was uncalled for. Due to the nature of this visit, Jonathan and Boxers waited in a car a block away, where they could provide precious little assistance if she needed it.

  “I have a right,” Amanda said. “This is my home, and it’s late.”

  “Yes on both counts,” Irene agreed. “Do you think I’m an enemy?”

  Amanda’s eyes darted, and she leaned out to look both directions down the street. At least partially satisfied with what she saw, she withdrew into the foyer and ushered her guest inside. As Irene stepped across the threshold, she cast a glance toward the weapon in her hostess’s hand. She was shocked to see an entirely nonregulation stainless-steel Desert Eagle .44 Magnum.

  “Were you expecting to repel an invasion of elephants?” Irene asked, nodding toward the cannon that some would call a pistol.

  “Why are you here?” Amanda asked.

  “Why are you so frightened?”

  “You first. You came here, remember?” She closed the door and turned the dead bolt.

  Irene’s eyes narrowed as she played a bluff. “Have you called the police yet?”

  Amanda’s face showed just enough recognition to assure Irene that she’d hit the nerve she was going for. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.” Irene let the words hang in the air.

  Amanda held the Desert Eagle higher. The hammer was cocked and the safety was off. “I haven’t called anyone,” she said. “What do you know of it?”

  “What did Tony tell you?”

  Amanda’s features started to dissolve and she sat on the bottom step. “How did you even know? Is he dead?”

  The question startled Irene. “Excuse me?”

  Amanda seemed startled, too. Or, at the very least, confused. “You’re alive,” she said. “I figured that would mean that he was dead.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  Amanda cocked her head. “Are we even talking about the same thing?”

  Irene looked around. The house was small, maybe seven hundred fifty square feet total on the ground floor. It seemed solid enough, and the way Amanda guarded the base of the stairs, she was certain that the kids were sleeping on the second level. Irene pointed toward the tiny darkened living room to the right of the foyer. “It’s been a long night,” she said. “May we sit down on real chairs?”

  Amanda shot a worried glance up the stairs.

  “You’ve got a blunderbuss and I’m a very good shot,” Irene coaxed. “”I think they’ll be okay.”

  Amanda offered a wan smile. She looked exhausted. She rose from her step, gestured toward the living room, and followed Irene through the archway. “Anywhere,” she said.

  Irene took one end of the love seat while Amanda took the other. Both faced the window, and they kept the lights off.

  “What’s happening, Irene?” Amanda asked. She sounded close to tears.

  “Tony kidnapped my children,” Irene said.

  Amanda brought her free hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God. When?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. What has he done to you, Amanda? I need to know everything. Every word.”

  Amanda took her time gathering her thoughts. “He was so angry, Irene. Beyond angry. When we left your office that day, he could barely talk, he was so angry. We went out to TGI Friday’s that evening, and the whole time he sat there, he just got madder and madder. He said he was going to make you pay.” At that last sentence, Amanda rocked her head up to look directly into Irene’s eyes.

  Irene nodded. “That’s why you thought he was going to kill me.”

  Amanda’s head pivoted no. “Not at first. I just thought he was blowing off steam. Although the steam was blowing off at really high pressure. He got pretty drunk—stuck me with the check—but I figured that the morning would bring sanity. I mean let’s face it, we did screw up. We screwed up big time. Screw-ups bring consequences, right? I figured that he’d get into that head space all by himself.”

  “But he didn’t,” Irene guessed.

  “Not by a long shot.” A noise outside brought both their attentions to the front window. Amanda didn’t level her cannon at the glass, but she clearly was ready to. Irene had already shifted on the seat to make her own weapon readily available if it was needed.

  “It’s been like that all night,” Amanda said with a deep sigh. “Every time I hear a noise, I think it’s him. Honest to God, when you rang the bell, I almost shot through the door.”

  Irene felt a chill. “Thank you for your restraint. Your neighbors three blocks away thank you for your restraint, too.” The Desert Eagle fired bullets that only stopped when they got tired of flying. “You were saying . . . ?”

  “As you probably know, we both took the last couple of days off. We didn’t want the scrutiny. We wanted the other agents in the squad to get all the trash-talking and rumors out of their systems before we came back.” She looked at the floor. “You know, came back to quit.”

  Irene understood.

  “We hung out. You know, finding comfort among the shunned. It wasn’t like a date or anything, more like commiseration. Only instead of finding some measure of peace, he just got angrier and angrier. He thought—” She stopped herself and wouldn’t look at Irene.

  “Say it,” Irene said. “Whatever it is, just say it. I came to you, remember?”

  Amanda sighed. “He thought you could have done more to intervene on our behalf. He thought you should have done more to intervene. He said terrible things about you. You’re a careerist, he said. You don’t give a shit about anybody else. You’re so set on advancement that you’d kill your own children to—” She seemed not to have heard herself before the words were already out. “I’m so sorry.”

  Irene waved it away as nothing as her vision blurred with tears. She didn’t trust her voice to speak. Is that when he got the idea to take the children? she wondered.

  Amanda cleared her throat, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and continued. “Anyway, he blames you for all of it. For the AUSA’s refusal to prosecute, all the way down to the OPR review. He said he was going to get even.”

  “And you didn’t think to contact someone to stop him?”

  “Well, like I said, at first I thought he was just blowing off steam, but after a while, as I realized that he really meant what he was saying, yeah, I tried to talk him out of it. I told him that he was a sworn agent, and that I was, too. That’s all I said before he went really ballistic. He told me that crossing him would be the biggest, deadliest mistake of my life. When I pushed back and told him not to threaten me, he got this really cold look in his eyes. He said that my report would just be hearsay and that no one would ever take action on it. ‘But if you try,’ he said, ‘there are far more effective ways to get at you than getting direct
ly at you.’ ”

  Irene felt a chill.

  “Those words froze my blood, Irene. He was threatening my children. They’re only babies.”

  “So, you decided to stand by and let him kill me,” Irene said through a smirk.

  Amanda looked away.

  “When was the last time you saw Tony Mayo?” Irene asked. No sense dwelling on Amanda’s transgressions.

  “That conversation was the last time. Two days ago.”

  Irene nodded absently, not because she was agreeing with anything, but because nodding was a kind of crutch when she was thinking heady thoughts. She needed a next step—at least an idea for a next step.

  So, Tony Mayo was their man. She knew that now, just as she knew that Tony would expect her to think that Barney Jennings had written the note and taken the girls. He bought himself important time with that move.

  But time to do what?

  “Let me ask you an unfair question, Amanda. You know Tony much better than I. Do you have any idea where he might have taken my daughters?” Her voice broke on the last word, causing her to clear her throat and look at the ceiling.

  It was a throwaway question, a desperate question that should have prompted an instant no. Instead, Amanda fell silent.

  “Amanda?”

  “No,” she said, but the vowel was drawn out in an unspoken however. “I mean, I don’t know anything for a certainty, or even strongly enough to make an accusation.”

  “Anything is better than nothing at this point.”

  Amanda sighed. “Well, I was thinking about this,” she said, “when I feared for my boys. I worried about, you know, what might happen to them if Tony tried to do something. My thoughts kept going back to this huge prostitution case we’ve been working. We’ve been running surveillance on—”

  “Gran Donnelin,” Irene said, bringing her hands to the sides of her head. Of course! Why hadn’t she put those pieces together for herself? A thirty-four-year-old ne’er-dowell, Donnelin was known to have peculiar sexual tastes, but nothing that had crossed the line from twisted and weird to illegal. The Bureau had received multiple unconfirmed reports that the first-generation Irish immigrant had been enslaving runaways and selling them off to Mexican brothels, but no real evidence had ever been found. In fact, none of the FBI’s sources south of the border had ever heard of Donnelin or any of his known aliases. As a result, the Bureau had been reduced just watching and following. After nearly four weeks, Donnelin hadn’t given them even the hint of a reason to cut a warrant.

  “Do you think Tony knows him?” Irene asked.

  “I don’t know that, no. But we did all the surrounding research into the, um, industry. You know, the young-girl prostitution business—”

  “They’re calling it human trafficking now,” Irene said. Sort of sad, she thought, that so horrendous a crime could be so common as to earn its own catchphrase. Her heart rate doubled for the instant that she allowed herself to see her girls embroiled in such a nightmare.

  “Sounds way too sterile for me,” Amanda said. “But the point I was making was that maybe Tony found some contacts that way. He wouldn’t need to go anywhere near Donnelin.”

  Irene closed her eyes, wishing that it was possible to make all of this just go away. Tony could be anywhere—literally, anywhere. In the hours that they’d been tracking down Jennings, he could be on an entirely different continent.

  No, she told herself, that was not true. This was not a planned crime, this was a fit of passion. He hadn’t had time to prepare passports and plan for the thousands of tiny details that were required for foreign transportation. Even when traveling on commercial airliners, foreign travel was complicated. Throw in all the moving parts of a human-smuggling operation, and only an idiot would try to do it on the fly. And Tony Mayo was no idiot.

  From a distant corner of her brain, Irene told herself that the passing time only helped Ashley and Kelly. They were sweet little girls, even at their pissiest, and she told herself that over time, their charm would erode Tony’s anger away. He wasn’t a true monster, after all, not in the same vein as Jennings. Surely over time, he would realize the mistake he had made, and—

  What? What would he do then? What could he do then? Even if he repented and changed his ways, and decided that he’d made a huge mistake, by then, he’d have two witnesses. He couldn’t ever return them to their home, not without surrendering himself to a life prison sentence.

  Was the certainty of a life behind bars enough motivation to kill the girls?

  No! No, that couldn’t possibly be the only recourse. What he’d be forced to do, she thought, would be to carry through with his original plan. He’d have to sell her daughters to a second monster.

  Irene understood that all of this was wild conjecture on her part, but she needed that in order to have the courage to go on. There had to be hope. There had to be a scenario in her head that would justify all that she had done, and all that she was willing to do to get her little girls back. If that meant concocting wild stories and scenarios, well, so be it. It worked.

  What she couldn’t do was—

  Her pager beeped on her hip. She didn’t care who it might be or what they might want, but she pulled the electronic leash from her belt and checked the message. It was Paul Boersky’s direct line, followed by the suffix 911, which meant that it was an emergency. She and Paul had worked countless cases over the years, and she’d actually told him that she would be taking time off, and that she shouldn’t be disturbed until she returned. He wouldn’t have sent the page if it wasn’t important, and he wouldn’t have used the panic code if it hadn’t been damned important.

  Irene braced herself. “May I use your phone?” she said.

  Paul’s voice was heavy with concern. “Are you all right, Irene?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “What’s up?”

  Paul dropped a beat. In her head, she could see him scratching a spot behind his left ear, his tell for being uncomfortable with a subject. “Look, I know that you’re up to something, and that it’s urgent. I heard it in your voice last time we spoke, and I hear it now. The fact that you’re not at the office in itself speaks volumes. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’ll stipulate that I probably don’t want to, but I want you to know that I’m here for you in case you need me.”

  Irene appreciated the gesture of kindness, but resented the time it consumed to be delivered. “Thank you,” she said, though her tone told an entirely different story. “Is that why you paged me? To tell me that?”

  “No,” he said. “I paged you because of what I pray is just a crank call. There’s a guy in North Carolina named Sam Sadler, he’s an attendant or a cashier at an Exxon station in someplace called Hoffman, population something like four. He called your line five times apparently, and then ultimately called the front, who snagged me as your partner.”

  That was way more preamble than Irene either needed or desired. “What did he want?”

  “His Exxon has a kind of store attached to it, and he said that a little family of three came in there to do some snack shopping. A father and two girls, maybe eleven and thirteen. Sadler said there was a weird vibe to them—”

  Irene’s eyes flooded with tears that she fought desperately to control. This was it. This was the hope.

  “—but he couldn’t really put his finger on why. Anyway, the older girl needed to go to the bathroom, and apparently, this freaked dad out. He told her that gas station bathrooms were dirty or some such, but Sadler did his best to set the guy’s mind at ease. Anyway, the girl ended up going to the bathroom, but on the way out, she tripped and knocked some cans off of a shelf. This really pissed dad off, and he hustled them out of the store. Here’s where it gets interesting. Sadler said that the little girl gave him, Sadler, a pleading look, and then cast a glance over to where the spilled cans lay.”

  Please, God, just get to the point.

  “When Sadler picked up the cans, he said he found one of your business cards
on the floor among the cans.” Paul paused. “What’s going on, Irene? Are those girls yours? I tried calling your house before I paged you, and no one answered. Is someone coming at your children?”

  Irene’s breathing started to race as she considered the possibilities. Now they at least had a patch of geography to start searching. “How long ago did this happen?” she asked.

  “I hung up from Sadler just about a half hour ago, but he said he’d been trying to get in touch for well over an hour.”

  “Did Mr. Sadler by chance get a license number?”

  “He did, and it’s from a stolen vehicle. I’ve already taken the liberty of asking North Carolina PD to put out a BOLO for it.”

  Irene nodded and pressed her hair off her forehead with her free hand. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. Do you have an address for this Mr. Sadler?”

  “Irene?” Paul asked. His tone had changed to something between suspicion and sympathy. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Shit, shit, shit. This was why rules existed—if only to be able to share useful details with a wider audience. “Look, Paul,” she said. “Some bad things have happened in the past few hours, some of them at my hand.”

  “Don’t need a confession,” Paul interrupted. “I just need to know if those are your daughters, who the bad guy is, and what I can do to help.”

  By the time she finished telling him, she figured that he was sorry he asked.

  Chapter 8

  Irene said nothing as she departed Amanda’s house, leaving the once and future star agent to wonder what the hell had just transpired. Irene had made a mental note that if she, Irene, enjoyed anything close to a happy ending through all of this, she was going to pull every string she could find to make sure that the OPR report would not scuttle Amanda’s career.

  She’d left Jonathan and Boxers in a 7-Eleven parking lot just a half block from Amanda’s house, and as she unloaded the details of her conversations with both Amanda and Paul Boersky, they grew progressively more excited.

  “Congratulations,” Jonathan said. “You’ve got a data point on your daughters. That’s a place to start, but the real question is where does he plan to finish?”