Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan)

by Leslie A. Kelly

  He didn’t push it. She’d come to accept it sooner or later.

  But as they reached the hospital and she hopped out of the car, he couldn’t help wondering if that last, desperate message from Daniels had done more than convey his true feelings. Jeremy greatly feared it had also spelled doom for his own relationship with Ronnie.

  Because, live or die, Daniels last, Herculean effort was going to stay with her for the rest of her life. And Jeremy honestly didn’t know if she was ever going to allow herself to get over it.

  -#-

  “I love you?” she mumbled, rolling her eyes as she stalked across the hospital waiting room. Back and forth she went, practically wearing a path in the tile. “No way. You didn’t. You wouldn’t!”

  Would he?

  She just couldn’t make the picture come together in her mind. Okay, she could see why Sykes would leap to that conclusion. He didn’t know Daniels the way she did. He hadn’t been there through some of the incredibly rough, dangerous situations they’d shared, when Mark’s abrasiveness and toughness were the only things that had gotten them through.

  She’d believe her rough-and-ready partner had wasted his last moments saying I love you the day she started to again believe in the Easter Bunny.

  No, not again. She’d never believed in that big, stupid rabbit. And she would never believe this.

  “Anything new?” she asked as a nurse marched by the room, pausing to glance in and stare at her, probably because word of her stalking and muttering had spread around the unit.

  “No, he’s still in surgery,” the woman said.

  Ronnie was alone in the waiting room, her lieutenant having gone back to the precinct an hour ago. Other cops came in and out, though none were here now. Daniels’s family—a mother, a brother, an ex-wife, some cousins—lived on the west coast and would arrive late tonight. Sykes hadn’t offered to stay, wanting to keep working the case, which was probably just as well. So it was just her. And with each hour that passed, she vacillated between relief that Daniels wasn’t dead yet and dread because he’d been on an operating table for more than ten hours and how could anybody survive that much damage?

  “Can I get you anything? Is the coffee holding out?”

  She glanced at the industrial-sized pot, which she’d sucked down to the dregs. “I’ve probably had enough.”

  “Okay then,” the woman said. Then, looking back and forth to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, she added, “I heard a couple of the nurses saying things were going well, and that he was one heck of a tough man.”

  She smiled and nodded. “That he is.”

  Too tough to spell out freaking I-love-you!

  Nope. She just didn’t believe it.

  Knowing she needed to get busy doing something or go crazy, she finally remembered the files she’d copied before leaving the research facility. Her handheld wouldn’t be great for viewing the images on, but it was the best she could do here. Besides, she was wasting time when she could be trying to catch whoever had attacked Daniels.

  Sitting in a back corner, where nobody could walk in and look over her shoulder at the tiny screen, she plugged in the micro-drive and pulled up Daniels’s downloads. She wasn’t going anywhere near his last half-hour. But there had been a lot of other things going on yesterday. He’d mentioned them on the phone last night and she wanted to get a little better handle on some of the things he’d told her.

  She ignored much of the morning. She’d been at the precinct for the Bailey interview, and knew Daniels had spent the early afternoon on the Internet looking for info on those six dead O.E.P. implantees. She intended to do the same thing, and read the articles he found, but for now, she was more interested in the time he’d spent at the White House. He had specifically mentioned finding something in the mysterious tunnel.

  “A key,” she murmured. “A strange, little key.”

  When she’d called him at around 9:30 p.m., he’d said he had just left the White House, where he had explored the tunnel. So she started there.

  She went back to the 8:30 mark and opened the file. Seeing that Daniels was already in what looked like it could be the tunnel in question, she backed up several minutes. When she reached the sub-basement, she stopped reversing and went forward again.

  Daniels wasn’t alone. SSA Johansen was with him, and the two of them were opening a secret door behind that breaker panel at the base of the stairs. Ronnie hadn’t been back over there since hearing about the thing, so she hadn’t had a chance to see it in person. It was, she had to admit, pretty impressive. So well hidden, she never would have known to look for it.

  “Okay, so about that key….”

  She slowed things down, watching for several long, slow minutes as Daniels and Johansen explored. The tunnel was well lit, but she noticed her partner still had his flashlight on and was using it to spy in corners, crevices and anywhere else that wasn’t easily visible with the naked eye.

  About ten minutes after they’d started exploring, Johansen said something that stopped Daniels in his tracks. He turned around, shining the beam of his light toward a baseboard that hadn’t been sealed around the bottom. Johansen obviously had a very good eye, because Ronnie doubted she would have seen the small, flat black metallic object stuck halfway beneath the baseboard.

  Daniels went over, bent down and examined it, without touching. Then, realizing it might be important, he pulled out a rubber glove, put it on and gently tried to pry the key out. It took a little bit of twisting, but he popped the thing free and lifted it up for a better look.

  Ronnie paused the screen, staring at the key. It was, as Daniels had said, small and unusual looking. Black, a rounded top, little thumb-nubs, then a stubby cut end. It definitely didn’t look like a key to a car, a house or a safety deposit box.

  She thought hard-motorcycle? Storage unit? Nothing rang a bell.

  Zooming the image in as tightly it would go, she magnified the key to a huge size. That’s when she saw the number. Engraved into the key, just above the first cut, was the number 76 in a circle. She grabbed her small note pad, flipped it open and made a quick drawing. Hopefully some expert would be able to tell her more about it.

  Continuing on with the downloads, she went all the way through the tunnel hunt, noting the alcoves, the twists and turns. She also noted—through Daniels, who also noted—that it was well equipped for an emergency. There were medical kits mounted on the walls every thirty feet or so, with symbols for defibrillators. There were also fire extinguishers, panic buttons, even mounted, glass-front boxes with what looked like night vision goggles inside, perhaps in the event of a blackout. What a hideous place to be stuck if the lights went out!

  Eventually, Daniels and Johansen reached the other end of the tunnel, came out in the maintenance shed near the Washington Monument, then turned around and went back the way they’d come. There was nothing more to see and she skimmed a lot of their return. She didn’t slow things down again until Daniels got in his car, at a little after nine.

  “That’s all, folks,” she mumbled, knowing there wasn’t much more to see. She’d called him not long after this, and knew he’d gone to the bar right afterward.

  Frustrated, she decided to find out what she could about that little mystery key.

  Going online, she did a quick search for the words key, 76. She got a ton of hits for musical instruments—keyboards—and sighed in frustration. Trying several variations, she finally thought about what the key might fit. It looked like it was for some type of engine, so she tried that.

  This time, she actually had some luck. A page full of images of keys appeared on the small screen. She scrolled down, and finally saw one that looked exactly like the one Daniels had found in the White House tunnel. Clicking the link, she was taken to a page about…

  “Boat motors,” she whispered.

  The key was apparently very old, hard to find and had been used for watercraft with an Evinrude or Johnson Outboard motor.

  Wh
eels started to turn in her brain, clicking away as she tried to fit the pieces together.

  Not just a key, a boat key. Not just a boat key, an old boat key, the kind that might be used on an old, classic yacht.

  Her heart was beating fast now. Very fast. Suddenly wondering what had been done with the key, she picked up the phone and called her lieutenant. When he answered, she didn’t even say hello, barking, “What happened to Daniels’s personal belongings? Did the E.M.T.’s take it off him? Are they here at the hospital?”

  Her boss didn’t question her sharp tone, he knew her well enough to know when she was on to something important. “His clothes, possessions, everything he had on him was bagged in the emergency room and is now here, in my custody.”

  “Was there a key? A small, black key, with the number 76 stamped on it? Daniels would have bagged it.”

  “No.”

  The doubled heartbeat now went into triple overtime. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive, Sloan, there was no bagged key. The only unusual thing he had on him was a sheath of papers with printouts about some suicides. Otherwise, just his wallet, badge, keys—his personal ones—the usual.” Someone in the background called for him and he barked an impatient reply. Then he got back to her. “What have you got?”

  “Not sure yet,” she said, meaning it. “Right now, it’s just a suspicion, I need a little time.”

  “Call me as soon as you have something and don’t do anything without backup,” he ordered.

  Agreeing, she ended the call and continued to think.

  The key/yacht connection had instantly made her think of Leanne Carr’s boss, Jack Williams. She’d liked the man for the crime from the start, mainly because she’d considered him the perfect person to lure the woman to the White House on Independence Day, and because of how closely he’d stuck to the investigation. The only thing she had no clue about was a motive.

  Then she remembered the memory book. And that torn-out photo.

  She glanced at the clock, hating to leave when Daniels might get out of surgery at any time. Finally, though, driven by a compulsion to follow this new clue to the end, she left the hospital, getting a cab to take her home.

  Once at home, she stripped out of her sticky clothes and got comfortable, knowing she might have a lot of looking to do. Then she went to the table and retrieved the micro-disk with Leanne’s files. She plugged it into her handheld, hooked that up to the huge monitor, and plopped onto the couch. She didn’t go looking at the memories from Leanne’s O.E.P. chip. Instead, she scrolled through those other documents retrieved from her hard drive. To the one called Membook.

  Opening it, Ronnie went right to the large, group shot on the beach—the one half missing from the final book. Remembering what Williams had said about how his assistant had gotten some of the pictures, she did the same thing. The new Google face-and-featured search wasn’t perfect, and you could get a lot of false positive results. But the one in the book had been Williams—she knew that much—and she had the feeling Leanne had found it online. Because if Williams wanted to keep the picture a secret, he certainly wouldn’t have left it around the house for his wife to find.

  Using the software to capture the faces of all the people on the right side of the photo—the side torn from the book—she started a wide search, looking for any matches. Because there were so many at once, she had no problem finding the same photograph, which had been posted on somebody’s Facebook page at least ten years ago.

  “The Internet never forgets,” she muttered as she studied the shot. Now came the hard part. “Who here did you not want to be associated with?” she whispered.

  She was going to have to single out every face on that side and see what she could find about each one.

  Because she had noticed right away that the person closest to Williams on the torn-out side was a pretty young woman, she started with her. Cropping her face, she enlarged it as much as she could, then added it to her search parameters and began again. She bit her fingernail as the program began to load hits on the screen.

  There were lots of hits. Her eye was drawn to the very first one, a newspaper photo. Newspaper meant newsworthy.

  She clicked on the link and was taken to the source photo, posted with an article from the Miami Herald dated April 13, 1991. The minute she read the first paragraph, everything began to fall into place. The timing, the lure, the violence, the crime.

  The memory book.

  Going back to the search results and clicking several more links, reading all the follow-up articles, she became even more certain. She understood. At last, she understood.

  Though she thought about calling her lieutenant, Ronnie knew he’d want to take time putting together a team to evaluate her findings. She didn’t need a team. She just needed one sharp, brilliant mind. So she picked up the phone and called Sykes. She didn’t tell him anything over the phone, instead asking him to come over.

  He was there in under ten minutes.

  “It’s Williams,” she said the moment she swung open her front door. “Jack Williams killed Leanne Carr.”

  He didn’t ask stupid questions or question her certainty. He merely stalked in and said, “Explain.”

  She did, telling him about the key, about the memory book, the photo and the search. She pulled up the images as she spoke, proving her case clearly and concisely.

  “That girl’s face shows up in dozens of newspaper articles because she was brutally murdered in April of 1991. She was a college student from Wisconsin, visiting Florida for spring break. She was cut to pieces, her body dumped on the beach. It was one of the most violent murders Miami ever saw.”

  He seeing it exactly the way she did. “M.O. sure sounds similar.”

  “Doesn’t it? One of the articles said that somebody close to the case hinted that police were suspicious of someone, but they couldn’t find any definite proof of a connection between him and the victim. It also implied this person had powerful connections and they couldn’t act without more evidence.”

  “Williams.”

  “Right. His father was a senator, remember? They would have lawyered him up so fast and threatened so many lawsuits, the cops would never have moved on him without a rock-solid case and sure wouldn’t have released his name to the press.”

  “Think this beach photo would have given them the proof they needed?”

  “Absolutely. It would have at least shown a connection between Williams and the victim.”

  “Jesus. Can you imagine what he thought when he opened that birthday gift and saw that picture staring up at him?”

  “He must have panicked. Until that moment, he probably thought he’d gotten away with this decades ago.”

  But there was no statute of limitations on murder. He’d have to know that.

  “Tearing the page out wasn’t enough,” Sykes said. “He had to make sure Leanne hadn’t stumbled over anything else about this young woman.”

  Her bitterness creeping into her voice, she replied, “Yes, and I think he figured he might as well have some fun while he was taking care of his problem.”

  They were both silent for a little while. Thinking about that. About a nice young woman, well-liked by everyone, including her boss and his family, being lured by him to her horrible, brutal death. Had she known? Had she figured out who he was?

  Considering just how evil this crime—and the one in 1991—had been, she had to assume he would have wanted her to know. He’d been careful not to let himself be seen by that camera in her head, which, of course, he had known about, but he would have done something to clue her off. Because that’s just how evil worked.

  “There’s one thing that doesn’t fit, though,” Sykes mused. “Well, two things, actually.”

  She was way ahead of him. “Brian Underwood and Eddie Girardo.

  “Right.”

  “I know. It stumped me too. Then I started thinking about that case several years ago, when a guy who wanted to kill his wife we
nt to a store near his house and put poisoned capsules in packages of over-the-counter pain medication. He bought one, his wife died, as did a couple of innocent people who’d bought the other bottles. Everybody thought she was the victim of a random killer.”

  “I remember. So you think Williams killed two other implantees when he realized everybody was focusing on the fact that Leanne was part of the O.E.P. experiment? He wanted to make it look like it was connected to the program, not the person?”

  “Philadelphia and Richmond are pretty close to D.C.,” she said with a shrug.

  “How would he find out their status as implantees?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But he’s got a lot of money and a lot of connections. I imagine he could pay for any information he wanted. Frankly, it’s the best I’ve got. We won’t know for sure until we question him.”

  At that, Sykes let out a rude noise.

  “What?”

  “You really think we’re going to get anywhere near him with this? We’re going to have to walk on eggshells with this guy. We can’t just call him in for questioning like Bailey.”

  She hated to admit it, but she knew he was right. They would have to be extremely careful and they needed more evidence than they had now to even try to talk her boss into having Williams brought in.

  “If only we had that stupid key,” she muttered. “I’ll bet it had his fingerprint on it.”

  The key’s presence in the tunnel might not have been damning, but it did help add to the pile of circumstantial evidence that might have brought the man down.

  “Think that’s why he attacked Daniels? So he could get it back?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Sykes frowned. “So how’d he know Daniels had it? He wasn’t with him in the tunnel.”

  “Definitely not.” She snapped her fingers. “But Johansen was! What if he told him? He might have mentioned it to Williams, might be able to make some kind of connection between them.”

  “We need to talk to Johansen.”