by Joel Goldman
“They could be sisters,” Joy said, pointing at the dogs as she picked up Ruby’s leash.
I scratched both of them behind the ears, stood, and studied my wife for signs of things she and Wendy had hidden from me. Joy gathered her end of the dogs’ leashes to her chest.
“You’ve got your Bureau face on, Jack. What is it? Have they found Wendy?”
“No, but I think she’s alive.”
Her arms fell to her sides. “Oh, thank God! What makes you think so?”
“I ran into Colby last night. He told me.”
“Colby? Where? How?”
“We were on the same playground.”
Joy balled her fists, a leash in each hand, the dogs lying patiently in the grass. “Damnit, Jack! I don’t have time for your games. We’re talking about our daughter. Tell me what’s going on!”
“I came here to ask you the same thing.”
Her face tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Colby went too far undercover and got involved with the people we were investigating. He stole money from these people and now he’s on the run. I caught up to him last night long enough to get the gist of things. He doesn’t know where Wendy is, but he thinks that she’s alive. He made it sound like she went along for the ride.”
“I can’t believe he would do something like that to Wendy.”
“Why? Because they’re married?”
Her jaw dropped. I could have knocked her over with a wave of my hand.
“How did you find out?”
“I didn’t until just now, at least not for certain. You remember that I copied the hard drive on Wendy’s computer onto the?ash drive you gave me. I looked through some of her files this morning. She owns an interest in a partnership that paid her over four hundred thousand dollars last year. It’s all on her tax return.”
“A partnership? What kind of partnership? I don’t believe it. She would have told me.”
“Why? Because she told you that she and Colby had gotten married?”
Joy crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head away. “Yes, because she told me. After all, I’m her mother.”
“And I’m her father.”
“Is that what this is about? That she told me and didn’t tell you? You’ve known since last night that she’s alive and you didn’t bother to tell me, and the only reason you’re telling me now is because you’re angry that Wendy didn’t tell you she’d gotten married.”
“You should have told me.”
“This isn’t about you or me, Jack. It’s about her. Wendy told Colby she wouldn’t marry him if he stayed at the Bureau, not after what had happened to us. He promised her he was getting out. That was good enough for her, but she didn’t want you to know they’d gotten married until after he resigned. She knew how protective you were and how you felt about Colby. She was afraid to tell you, afraid that you’d go ballistic and take it out on him.”
“I hope that’s true, but it doesn’t square with what I know. You should have told me. The fact that Wendy and Colby are married changes everything. It makes it look like she was a willing participant in whatever Colby was doing.”
“You can’t possibly believe that about your own daughter.”
My vocal cords twisted and froze when I tried to speak. Joy watched me, clutching her throat with one hand as if she felt my struggle. I tried to talk through my tremor-induced stutter, but that made it worse, forcing me to start and stop a couple of times before I could respond. When the words finally came out, they were choppy, like a dog’s bark.
“The facts are the only thing that matter, not what I believe. Wendy didn’t have money to invest in a partnership, not from legitimate sources. Neither did Colby. This partnership was probably used to launder drug money. The least bad explanation is that Colby convinced her the partnership was legitimate and told her that he was putting it in her name as proof that he intended to leave the Bureau.”
“If he had all that money last year, why didn’t he quit then?”
“Everybody in a deal has to bring something of value to the table. Colby worked undercover. He brought information to the table. If he quit his day job, he’d have nothing to offer his partners. I doubt they would have let him quit even if he wanted out.”
“You said Wendy is part of this. How do you know that?”
“Colby said as much. His partners are using Wendy as leverage to get back what he took from them.”
“But if Colby is on the run, he can’t be of any more use to them. And that means Wendy…” She collapsed to her knees without finishing her sentence, weeping and covering her face with her hands. “Oh my God, Jack! Not again!”
Chapter Sixty-four
I headed north on Tomahawk Creek Parkway to College Boulevard, then east to State Line Road, and north again into Kansas City, Missouri, no destination in mind, satisfying my need to keep moving as if that was progress.
Kansas City weather had more mood swings than a teenage girl. Today was cool and getting cooler, the sky a salty seabed, the air tasting like copper rain. A few of the trees had given up, their leaves already brown. I’d blinked and missed the color.
I was used to working out the kinks in a case with my team, sometimes brainstorming until someone shouted out something that made the pieces fit. We’d sit in the center of the war room, surrounded by whiteboards filled with names and dates, questions and answers. Maps, photographs of the crime scene and other physical evidence, forensic reports, and witness statements would be pinned to the walls or spread out on the tables. When we got stuck, we’d walk around the room like we were taking a tour of the murder display at the Museum of Crime, a place that existed only in our minds to catalog the grim work people practiced on one another.
We would challenge each other with theories, shredding some, elevating others to the realm of the possible, even likely. Eventually, patterns would emerge. Explanations that couldn’t possibly make sense would become obvious and inevitable.
For me, it was a team sport. I didn’t claim to be the best and the brightest, but I prided myself on recruiting a team that was just that and I needed them now.
I was?opping around, bogged down in a quicksand of emotions about my wife and daughter that proved that Ben Yates and Troy Clark were correct in kicking me off this case because it was too personal. It didn’t help that I might be falling in love with a woman whom I had almost gotten killed when I let my professional judgment become clouded by my personal feelings or, as my father would have said, when I was too busy thinking with my little head instead of my big head. Toss in an undiagnosed but undeniable movement disorder that could make me collapse quicker than the old Boston Red Sox in September, and I was a mess.
This much I knew. Colby Hudson and Thomas Rice were in business together and they had used the same method of protecting their wives from the risks of their criminal enterprise. That didn’t mean their wives were innocent of what was going on. Jill Rice admitted that she knew her husband was dealing drugs. It only meant that their husbands had insured them against that risk.
I had to stop at that. Thinking of Colby and Wendy as coconspirators, let alone husband and wife, was too disorienting. But there it was. I hung on to to the unlikely prospect that Wendy had been too naive, too in love, or too stupid to have known what Colby was doing.
Thomas Rice had supposedly given up his sources as part of his plea bargain. It looked like the U.S. Attorney had made a bad deal, because Rice plainly hadn’t given up his real supplier. It was likely that Rice, Javy Ordonez, and Marcellus Pearson worked for the same person or persons unknown. He, she, or they had been the real target of my investigation of Marcellus and when I got close enough to shake their tree, bodies started falling out.
They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I had no choice but to test the definition and shake a few more trees. I started with a phone call to Marty Grisnik.
“W
hat’s the latest, big man?” Grisnik asked.
I had pulled into the parking lot at the Ward Parkway Shopping Center.
“Still snipe hunting.”
“Catch any?”
“Getting close, but I could use some help.”
“That’s what I like about you, Jack. You don’t hesitate to ask people to waste their time on wild goose chases.”
“You might want to go along on this one. The geese are friends of yours.”
“How’s that?” he asked, his voice tightening.
“Tanja Andrija and her brother, Nick.”
Grisnik laughed, deep and long. “You are bullshitting me, right?”
“I hope I am. I just need to be certain.”
“The Andrija family has been on Strawberry Hill longer than you and I are likely to live. I spent half my life growing up inside Petar and Maja’s house. You drag them down for no reason, you’ll answer to me. You got that?”
“Wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“I assume you’ve got something solid that ties them in to the bucket of shit you’re trying to climb out of.”
“Colby had a thing for Tanja. I don’t know if that gate swings both ways. Last night, I stopped at the bar to ask her if she’d seen him. She said no and told me to get lost. I said I’d go out the back and she got real nervous, couldn’t wait to show me the front door.”
“You’re willing to ruin a family over that?”
“Not long after I left, Nick showed up driving a pickup. They loaded it with boxes and garbage bags. They were fighting the whole time.”
“You know what would happen you take that pile of crap to my D.A. or your U.S. Attorney? They’d laugh your ass right out of the room.”
“There’s one other thing, but it’s between you and me. Agreed?”
Grisnik sighed. “Agreed-and don’t forget the secret decoder rings.”
“I thought she was hiding Colby in the back of the bar but I was wrong. He was at her parents’ house. I think he broke in, probably looking for something. They caught him and he ran out. Happened just after I drove by. I caught up with Colby a few blocks from there. He didn’t implicate Tanja, but he put it out there between the lines.”
“So what happened to Colby?”
“He got away.”
“That’s it? He got away?”
“That’s it.”
“You still got nothing, but I know you won’t leave it alone until you put the parents in the ground. Tell you what. I’ll go with you to see them. I’m on my way to my kid’s soccer game. It’s my weekend. I gotta call their mother, piss her off about having to break her date with the?avor of the month. I’ll call you later. Don’t do anything stupid without me.”
“Don’t worry. I do stupid a lot better with you.”
My cell phone rang a moment later, the caller ID display showing that it was Ammara Iverson. I grabbed her call like it was lifeline.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Eighty-fifth and State Line. What’s up?”
“Can you come in? Ben Yates and Troy want to talk to you.”
It can be hard to tell the difference between a lifeline and a two-hundred-pound test line with a giant steel hook until you’ve been snagged. I’d been asked, ordered, and threatened to stay away from this case. Now I was being invited back in. I felt the hook anchor deep in the?esh between my ribs.
“Any news on Wendy?” I asked.
“No, but we’re doing everything we can.”
“Then what do they need me for?”
“They want to go over some loose ends with you. They’ll be in the war room.”
Forget about the hook. This was a harpoon. Troy must have finally complained to Ben Yates that I was stepping all over his investigation. Yates had the manual tattooed to the back of his eyelids. If Troy had convinced him that I’d become that big of a problem, Yates would forget about my sick leave and suspend me without pay until I learned to sit at home and watch reruns of Celebrity Poker. If he knew that I was withholding information about Colby, he’d have me fired and go after my pension.
I was amazed how little I cared.
“Twenty minutes,” I said and hung up.
Chapter Sixty-five
I felt like a kid who’d been called to the principal’s office as I walked down the hall toward the war room. Heads popped up as I passed cubicles, some people nodding silent greetings that said “tough luck, old buddy, but better you than me.” Others chose the safe alternative and averted their gaze so that they wouldn’t turn into a pillar of salt.
I took the long way around in order to go past my office. The door was closed. The magnetic strip with my name on it had been peeled off the nameplate. At least no one else had claimed it yet.
I hoped to run into Ammara, but she wasn’t in her cubicle and she wasn’t roaming the hallways. I guessed that Troy had told her to call me, knowing I’d pick up. Whatever was going on, she wouldn’t have liked doing that. It wasn’t a good sign that she was avoiding me.
I stopped outside the war room, deciding whether to knock, but didn’t because asking permission to come in would have been an act of surrender. I opened the door wide, took two steps inside, stopped, and surveyed the room, hoping I had the rested, confident look of a man who’d just returned from vacation instead of someone who was living inside a Cuisinart running on slice and dice.
Ben Yates and Troy Clark were sitting on the far side of the room. Yates was reviewing a report, his white cuffs expertly shot past the sleeves of his dark gray suit coat, his hair trimmed and well-parted, his face relaxed but intent.
Troy had the haggard look of someone running a tough case on too little sleep and too much coffee. His eyes were puffy and his chinos and polo shirt were wrinkled. He was shuf?ing through photographs we both knew he’d already looked at a hundred times.
Neither acknowledged my presence. I knew the rules of this game. I’d been summoned, not as a colleague but as someone to be intimidated and interrogated. It was an approach reserved for suspects and subordinates. They were reinforcing the message by ignoring me, intending that I stand there like a supplicant until they could work me into their schedule.
I didn’t feel like playing, so I ignored them and walked slowly down the length of the room, taking note of what was written on the whiteboards. The list of witnesses Ammara had started in the hours after the drug house murders had grown, Wendy and the Andrija siblings the latest additions.
I found a list of the evidence removed from Latrell Kelly’s house, noting again the large quantity of?ashlights and batteries, recognizing them as essential supplies for the secret hiding place Latrell must have had and where he believed that I had followed him.
I grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and jotted down the two things I’d just taken note of, the Andrijas and Latrell’s hiding place, adding question marks to both. My gut told me they were the keys to the case. I tore the page off the pad, folded it, and stuck it in my pocket. Round one went to me when Yates blinked first.
“Take a seat, Jack,” he said.
The worktables were laid out in the same open rectangle they had been in when Yates gave me the boot. I pushed my way inside the tables and dragged a chair to the side opposite where they were sitting, pulled up to the edge of the table, and folded my hands on the surface, hoping they’d stay in one place. Then I kept my mouth shut and waited because I knew that the first liar didn’t stand a chance.
Yates leaned toward me, his hands gripping the table. His eyes were robin’s-egg blue, the corners creased enough to be crinkly, not wrinkly. The hard set to his mouth made it clear that he hadn’t gotten to where he was on good looks and charm alone. He was the kind who smiled when he stuck the knife in you.
“How are you, Jack?” he asked.
“I’m fine. You’re fine. Troy’s fine. We’re all fucking fine. So can the bullshit.”
Troy smiled and rolled his eyes as if I’d made his point for him.
�
��I know this must be a tough time for you,” Yates continued.
“Save it, Ben. You don’t give a crap for what kind of day I’m having, so you can skip steps one through seven in the manual on building rapport while establishing power and get to the point.”
Yates leaned back, folded his arms over his middle and frowned like a disappointed father. Troy used the pause to jump in.
“Jack, you went to Wendy’s apartment what, yesterday? Or was it Thursday?”
“Thursday.”
“Where did she keep her computer?” Troy asked.
That she had a computer was a given. I didn’t know where he was going, but I could feel the setup coming.
“On a desk in the living room.”
Troy nodded. “That’s where I would have kept it. No reason to clutter up the bedroom and the kitchen is too small.”
He obviously wanted me to know that he’d been in Wendy’s apartment. If he hadn’t been by now, he wouldn’t be doing his job. I kept silent, not because I had anything to hide, but because I wanted to make Troy tell me what this was all about.
“You see, Jack, we got a search warrant this morning for her apartment. Once we told the judge that the daughter of one of our agents was missing, he couldn’t sign the warrant fast enough.”
Troy didn’t add that she was also a person of interest in an ongoing investigation involving murder and drug dealers, though I assumed he’d also explained that to the judge. I pressed back against my chair, forcing myself to stay calm, but I couldn’t convince the tremors. They scattered across my body. I put my hands down, letting them vibrate against my thighs, afraid they’d found something that incriminated Wendy. I forced the words from my mouth.
“What did you find?”
“That’s the thing,” Troy said. “It’s what we didn’t find that we’re interested in. These days, the first things we carry out of any place we search are the computers. You know that. Only Wendy doesn’t have one. Which gets us thinking.”
“About what?”
“About what happened to her computer. Young woman like her, works at the Board of Trade, dates one of our agents; she has got to have a computer. So we thought we’d ask you.”