Deadly Little Secrets

by Jeanne Adams

  She nodded mutely, afraid that if she spoke, she’d never be able to hold back the tears. When had she turned into such a watering pot? The night with Gates sprang instantly to mind, and she ducked her head so Dav wouldn’t see the blush.

  “Pretzky’s with him,” she finally managed to say. “I need to read the rest of his e-mails, and call her back.”

  “Ana.” Gates’s voice echoed in the car. “Pick up the phone, take it off speaker.”

  When she did, he spoke to her, just to her. “Ana-love, this isn’t on you. Your friend proved it. We’re right there, nearly finished with this, and I’m with you, okay? Dav’s with you. We’re going to see this through together.”

  “Okay,” Ana managed, clenching her teeth on the tears, on the scream of frustration and emotional pain.

  “I’ve got to make some calls,” Gates said. “I need to check on a couple of things, but I’ll call you back, okay?”

  She nodded, then remembered she was on the phone and added, “Okay. We’ll wait for your call.”

  “I love you, Ana,” he said as his parting shot. “I’ll make this up to you.”

  What the hell was she supposed to do with that? And why now, when she was already in complete turmoil?

  She was silent for a minute, and he laughed. “I’m trying to get used to saying it. Just hang on to it for me. I need to call in a couple of favors.”

  “Okay, I will,” she promised, and wondered what she’d just agreed to do, and what favors he needed.

  She set the phone aside and read the rest of TJ’s e-mails. The search had led him to someone connected with the Gandolpho family. The Gandolphos hadn’t sanctioned anything, would never do damage to their “mother country,” according to TJ, which had stymied him for months. He’d run into the Burrows/D’Onofrio/Santini situation by accident.

  “Coincidence,” she said, turning a tear-streaked face to Dav. “He figured out this business about the shipping company by accident, tried to use it to get Santini to roll on someone in Gandolpho’s organization, get them to admit they’d been part of the situation in Rome.”

  Before Dav could answer, his phone rang. “Carrie,” he told her, and picked it up.

  Ana knew she had to pull it together. She had put the call from Gates aside, not think about his words or his love. She had to focus on the job. If she couldn’t do the job, she was nothing, and she couldn’t free herself to love anyone, if she couldn’t do the job.

  Knowing that, Ana drew in a deep breath, let her mind clear. Things were falling into place; the obscure pieces were coming together. Everything was converging on her, all the data sweeping into place; everything lining up. She could see the end of the story as a vague, foggy resolution, even though some of the chessmen were disguised by fake names and identities.

  She yanked out the yellow pad, whipped it to a clean page.

  Rome was the real red herring here. TJ’s information had saved her job, but it wasn’t what was going to solve this case. Somehow she had to separate the data, fit the puzzle pieces together, so she started writing.

  Paintings.

  Galleries—San Fran, Miami, Chicago, New York

  She didn’t list the European ones; they’d gone through Pratch, not the New York shipper. That was peripheral, and another red herring so she left it out, drilling into the heart of the path.

  Galleries to Shipper–Burrows/Bates/Santini/D’Or/D’Onofrio–East Coast–torture killings

  Galleries to Shipper–Yountz/Drake–West Coast–executions

  Shipper to Berlin/Pratch

  She drew a line to one side.

  Pratch dead

  She drew a line to the other side.

  Luke Gideon, dead

  She stopped, pen poised over the page as her brain connected the dots. She scrambled through her pages of data, found the information on Jack. There it was.

  She’d forgotten his middle name was Gideon. Ana hadn’t known, hadn’t thought to check, what connection D’Onofrio had to Carrie’s husband, but it was all there in black and white in TJ’s notes, the proof that Jack Gideon D’Onofrio, real name Jackson Gideon Burrows, was Luke Gideon’s cousin. Now she was as sure as Dav that Carrie was in the clear. She’d used D’Or because of the family connection.

  Just as obvious, the East Coast shipper had been dealing with Carrie and Prometheus, cutting into the West Coast’s business. Two shippers all along, two with the same modus operandi, the same connections. Was all this a double-cross?

  She grabbed her computer, hit SEARCH, but nothing came up. No signal for the wireless card. “Gates, I need Gates,” she said, snagging her phone and calling Gates back. “Where is he?”

  “Who?” Dav said, pressing the phone into his shoulder.

  “Gates. I can’t get him on the phone. He said he had to check something, do a run.” She looked at Dav, her heart stopping. “Oh, my God.” She made the intuitive leap that brought the points of the data together.

  Gates knew the Gandolpho family. They knew where D’Onofrio was. There were favors owed. If they were right and D’Onofrio was Santini and Bates, then it made perfect sense with TJ’s notes. One guy, playing two women and two families off against one another. The translations; the warnings from both families for D’Onofrio to stop fooling around.

  TJ had tried to pressure D’Onofrio to roll on the Gandolpho family, using the aliases and the bigamy as leverage. D’Onofrio had far more to hide than just women, however, which TJ hadn’t known.

  Hines and D’Onofrio. Working together. Hines certifying D’Onofrio’s shipping company to Carrie and Luke, Luke certifying D’Onofrio as trustworthy. TJ was dead, blown to pieces. Hines liked a Mossberg for close-in work. Ana being shot at, sniper style. Hines liked a Tikka sharpshooting rifle. Hines was unavailable the day she’d been shot at.

  Hines and D’Onofrio were still out there, and so was Drake Yountz.

  Gates was in love with her. He’d read the data too. He knew Hines wasn’t going to go down without trying to kill Ana again.

  “Oh, my God.” Ana nearly moaned the words aloud as it all fell into place. Gates knew the Gandolpho family. The family knew D’Onofrio and where he would hide. D’Onofrio and Hines would be together.

  Gates had gone to call in some favors that might save Ana’s life and solve her case. Or, might get him killed.

  “Oh, God, I didn’t tell him I loved him,” Ana whispered, listening to the endless ring of Gates’s phone.

  Chapter Twenty

  When they arrived at the seedy White Plains Rodehouse Inn, the scene was chaos. Pretzky was already there, state troopers’ cars circled the building, their lights flashing silently off the white cinderblock walls, turning the alley to a wash of red and blue. Crime scene techs took pictures and laid down markers, or, alternately, picked them up and put them away as they finished with a section of the parking lot.

  Pretzky was there, directing the two DC agents to gather data from cops and civilians alike. She seemed to be in her element.

  “Burton, fill me in,” she demanded when Ana hurried up.

  “It’s a mess,” Ana stated. “It’s so frickin’ convoluted I can hardly stand it. Look.” Holding out the legal pad, she walked Pretzky through the steps.

  “How does Hines fit in?”

  “He and another guy are the money, and info. Kickbacks too, I think,” she said. “I can’t find Hines though.”

  “Yeah, last word I had is he’s still off the grid,” Pretzky said. “What else?”

  “I think he’s here. He’s the shooter, both at me and here, killing TJ. McGuire said he liked a Mossberg for close-in work.”

  Pretzky rubbed at her eyes. “That would do the job,” she said, looking bleak.

  “I think Hines set Perkins on me, on our computers. I think he’s who compromised Davis, too.” Ana showed her the data on how Hines had certified D’Onofrio. “I think he may have been playing a West Coast shipper too, Drake Yountz—that’s the money guy, I think.”

 
; “Isn’t that the Bootstrap guy?” Pretzky said, surprised.

  “Yeah,” Ana said, with some satisfaction. She hoped to see slimy-hands Yountz in custody.

  “How’s he connect to D’Onofrio? And TJ?”

  “D’Onofrio, Bates, and Santini are the same person. I think that’s what TJ found. He figured out that Santini was married to one woman and Bates to another, but he connected Bates and Santini, posited that they were the same person, that he was married under each name.”

  “Bigamy? This just keeps getting better and better.”

  “He was asking me to do these translations,” Ana said. Seeing Pretzky’s frown, she said, “I know, I know. I never in a million years thought they’d be connected. Believe me, I’d have come to you if I had.”

  Pretzky stared at her for a moment, then looked away. Nodded. “I believe you. Now we just have to figure out how to get all the data TJ had.”

  “He sent most of it to me,” Ana said. “I had fifteen e-mails from him, a sequence of steps. They stop, though, before he can wrap it all up.”

  Pretzky sighed. “Which is, of course, what we need.”

  There was motion at the door to the second-floor hotel room: a gurney rolled out under the tape and the two Coroner’s assistants lifted it down the stairs. Ana watched it roll to a stop behind the dark van, and saw one of the assistants drop a set of keys. When he bent down, she could see his boxer shorts. When he stood back up, he hitched up his pants, a natural gesture that froze her in place. Boxers. A random visual that kicked the last bit of information loose in her mind.

  His pants. “That’s it,” she murmured. “That’s it. Come on,” she ordered Pretzky, running to where the Coroner’s team was preparing to load the body.

  “Wait,” she called to the men as Pretzky ran up. “Hang on a sec,” she said. Turning to Pretzky, she gasped out the words, winded from her run and her emotions, “We have to check his pants.”

  “What?” Pretzky demanded.

  “Ma’am, we checked his pockets. There wasn’t anything—” one of the guys began.

  “No, not his pockets, his boxers.” Everyone looked at her as if she was insane.

  “You’re kidding, right, Burton?” Pretzky was dumbfounded.

  “No. TJ always used to say that the bad guys would check your pockets, your mouth, your ass, and even your ears, but never your shorts.” Ana said it as fact. “When we worked together in Rome, he used to say that all the time. He sewed a pocket in all his boxers. We have to check.”

  The techs looked at one another, and the taller one shrugged. “Won’t be the first weird thing we’ve had to do,” he said, unzipping the body bag.

  TJ had been shot in the chest at close range. The blast had taken off part of his right arm as well. He’d have never survived his wounds. She prayed that it had been quick.

  Her heart clenched at the sight of his face, calm now in death. Tears rolled unheeded down her face as she remembered her friend. So many people dead.

  “Pull it together, Burton,” Pretzky murmured for her ears alone. The older woman gripped her arm, but it was more of a reassurance than a warning.

  The tech unbuckled TJ’s belt, reached into the pants, and felt around. Surprise lit his features. It snapped Ana back to the moment, kept her from drowning in the grief of yet one more friend gone.

  “Hey, I got something,” he said, and they heard a ripping noise. There, in the man’s gloved hand was a scrap of fabric and a small data stick. Specially manufactured for the Agency, the tiny data sticks held an inordinate amount of data in a small package.

  “Holy crap,” Pretzky said, stunned. “You were right.”

  Wiping at her face, Ana gave a watery laugh. “Yeah, that’s TJ, always a surprise at the end. And smart. They don’t check your shorts,” she said, and her voice broke.

  “Hold on,” Pretzky said, recovering faster than Ana. When Ana would have taken the chip, Pretzky blocked her hand. “Hey, hey you!” Pretzky summoned one of the crime scene techs, got photos. “If there’s anyone to take to court, we have to document this.”

  Ana nodded, trying in vain to set aside the image of TJ’s damaged body and still features. He’d had such a mobile face, always with a laugh or frown pulling at his mouth. He was always restless, hyperactive. To see him like this was alien, as if who he was, what he was, had been extinguished, and this was some wax doll made up to look like her friend.

  “Okay,” Pretzky said, taking the chip. “Let’s go see what we got.”

  Ana waited long enough to press a hand on the body bag, say a silent farewell, before she rushed after Pretzky. The only way to help TJ now was to finish what he’d started.

  She climbed into the limo with Pretzky, Dav, and one of the NY state cops to get the file, see where D’Onofrio and Hines might go next. They were in the limo, reviewing the data when the phone rang once more.

  “Gates,” Dav said, and Ana snatched the phone from his hands.

  “Where are you?” she demanded.

  “A warehouse,” he whispered. “Halfway between your location in White Plains and New York City, in Port Chester.” He rattled off the address.

  “Jesus, Gates, what are you doing?” she hissed, terrified that with his wounds, with his stubborn need to fix things, he would die too before she had a chance to talk to him, tell him she forgave him—loved him.

  “He’s here, Ana,” he whispered. “Get your team down here, before Gandolpho’s men find him.”

  He hung up.

  “Damon!” Ana shouted. Everyone froze as she shouted orders to the driver. Even Pretzky jumped as she fired out directions to send them speeding down the highway. “Here’s the address,” she read it out to Damon. “How far?”

  “Ten minutes.” The answer came from the NY state trooper. “I know that section. I’ll direct him.”

  He opened his own phone, relayed the destination to the state troopers following them. One peeled off, took a ramp, and disappeared.

  A few minutes later, they also took a curved ramp at speed, and all the blue-lights went dark, the sirens silent. How Pretzky had managed this much cooperation in this short a time, Ana couldn’t imagine. As she hung on to the car’s handholds, she decided instead just to be grateful.

  Cars lined the entrance to the industrial park. A variety of men stood by or leaned on the cars. None of them looked happy, and none of them looked innocent.

  “Gandolpho Family,” the trooper in the car with them murmured, puzzled. “But they’re just waiting.”

  “Gates,” Dav said, understanding dawning on his face. He turned to Ana. “You said he called in a favor.”

  The trooper looked at him warily. “What favor? With the Gandolphos?”

  “Long story,” Ana said. “Here, we’re at the warehouse. What now?”

  “Sir, you stay here,” Pretzky told Dav. “Looks like the locals have SWAT in place. Agent Burton and I will move closer. We’ll keep you posted.”

  “Gates is down there,” Dav whispered to Ana. “He’s close, watching this guy. He’d feel like he needed to do this, be part of it, to make it up to you.”

  She nodded, understanding what he was saying. Gates was his priority, not D’Onofrio or the art case. Dav was willing to let anything else go to keep Gates safe.

  “I understand,” Ana said, knowing she felt the same way. Her loyalties were split now, between the job and Gates. Her heart might be torn up and scarred by the events of the day, but it knew what it wanted in the end: Gates.

  “Be careful. He needs you,” Dav murmured, his voice layered with worry, pride, fear, and frustration. Ana knew how he felt, but could do nothing to help. Dav wasn’t trained for this and had to rely on her, on others, to protect his friend.

  With a last squeeze of her hand, Dav released her, and closed the limo door quietly behind her. Within minutes Damon had eased the big car back, not quite joining the Gandolpho lineup, but away from the potential firefight.

  The warehouse sat in a tree-lined
dip, hidden from view of the main road, and the highway to the right. A phalanx of police cars blocked the drive and, Ana presumed, any other entrances and exits.

  Their trooper took up a position with the SWAT team, talking in a low, hurried shorthand to fill the SWAT commander in as Ana and Pretzky joined them at the blockade of two unmarked cars. Beyond them, the wide concrete driveway to the warehouse lay empty. FOR LEASE signs blocked part of the view of the building, but the trucks were silent, the lights dark. The building was almost eerily quiet.

  “I’ve got two men moving up on the near side,” the commander filled them in after they’d shaken hands, introduced themselves. “Three going round the back.” He looked over to where another heavily armed, dark-clad woman stood. “Elsa,” he called. The woman nodded, banged on her black helmet, adjusted her mic, and gave a thumbs-up. “Take the roof.” He pointed up, pantomiming the climb and perch of a sniper, just in case her mic wasn’t working. She nodded, banged on the side of the helmet a couple more times as she trotted off. Within minutes, Ana could see her climbing the fire stair to the roof, a dark spot on the gray-white stone of the warehouse.

  “So, we’ve got everyone in position. What’s the word? We after this guy alive at all costs, or what?”

  Pretzky shrugged. “It’s gonna be a pissin’ match to see who gets him. Our case is nine years old, but he’s been running two different businesses with two different names, maybe three out of this warehouse, so the locals and state are going to want a shot too. Probably good for at least three murders with our case.”

  At least four, Ana thought, her mind running scenarios, thinking of Luke Gideon.

  “What’s the Gandolpho connection?” the commander asked without taking his eyes off his men.