They remained in his SUV, keeping a watchful eye on the people coming and going while talking quietly about other things. He purposely tried to keep the conversation focused on topics having nothing to do with the circumstances of the moment. He wanted desperately to ease her mind, to help break the tension and relieve the stress he knew had to be churning her insides into knots. He also wanted to talk about the future, about their lives after this nightmare was resolved and the danger surrounding them no longer existed. He wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted for the future, but he knew what he did not want—he did not want to lose her from his life.
But it was a topic that would have to wait until another time.
Reece jerked to attention. “There.” He pointed toward the entrance of the store. “See that man in the blue windbreaker and gray slacks? The one with his hand to his ear carrying the newspaper?”
“Yes. Who is he?”
“Who he is, I don’t know. But I’ll bet my last dollar that I know what he is. He has FBI written all over him. Make sure you keep him in sight. He might stay outside while I’m inside or he might follow me into the store. If he follows me inside, then you can bet there’s at least one more agent who will be outside.” He glanced at his watch. “Our meeting isn’t scheduled for half an hour yet. Joe certainly got his forces mobilized in record time. He always did get high marks for efficiency.”
Brandi studied the people around the store entrance. “Do you see any more people who might be FBI?” She zeroed her gaze in on another man at the gardening center. “What about that one in the light blue ball cap? He’s not dressed for gardening. If he buys anything, he’ll need to change clothes before he can do anything with it once he gets home.”
Reece flashed a pleased grin at her. “Good catch. The time frame didn’t allow for Joe to muster any available undercover agents who would more easily blend in. He had to pull from agents on duty and get them here immediately.”
He glanced at his watch again. “Joe should be arriving any minute. Or, more accurately, making his appearance from wherever he’s been hiding.”
He clenched his jaw into a hard line of determination. He had been mentally sorting through several thoughts and had come up with a new scenario. “I’m changing the plan.” He saw the immediate surprise that covered her face. “I have an idea that I think will work more to our advantage.”
She looked around, then returned her attention to him. “Did you see something? Why have you decided to change things?”
He started the car and drove toward the entrance of the grocery store, stopping about thirty feet from the front entrance. He sat behind the wheel with the engine idling as he scanned the area looking for Joe Hodges.
“I’m taking Joe for a ride with us rather than talking to him here. It will be pretty easy to determine if someone is following us and will put us in control of the situation without his men standing by. The only downside is that it will allow him to see you even though I won’t be telling him who you are. Is that going to be okay with you?”
She wrinkled her brow into a momentary frown. “I’ll do whatever you think is best.”
He continued to watch the grocery store entrance while scanning the area until he spotted Joe. “There he is…fifty-nine minutes from the time I told him to be here in one hour. Sometimes Joe can be very predictable, but every now and then he has surprised me by doing something totally unexpected. So far, today isn’t one of those surprising times. Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Reece leaned over to Brandi and placed a tender kiss on her lips. “It’s show time.” He saw the apprehension in the depths of her eyes. He extended a confident smile. “Everything will be okay.”
He took a calming breath to steady his nerves, then put the car in gear and eased the vehicle forward, coming up behind Joe. A low-level anxiety churned inside him. He wasn’t completely happy with the plan he had devised, but he didn’t know what else to do. Things would have been so much easier if Joe hadn’t left him with such an uneasy feeling. He’d much rather have had Joe as an ally instead of a possible adversary. But it was too late now. The wheels were in motion, and all he could do was make the best of what he had to work with.
He pulled alongside Joe, stopped and rolled down his window. “Nice of you to come out on this sunny morning. Climb into the backseat and we’ll go for a ride.” He saw the surprise on Joe’s face, but the FBI agent did as he was told without hesitation. Before Joe even had his door closed, Reece sped out of the parking lot. He made a few quick maneuvers around corners, through parking lots and down alleys before finally entering the interstate and heading toward downtown Seattle.
When he finally felt confident that they weren’t being followed, he turned his attention to Joe. “I’m disappointed in you, Joe. I saw a couple of your men at the store. The first one on the scene arrived about half an hour before you did. My intention was to have a private conversation with you, not hold court in front of several FBI agents. You make me feel like a criminal rather than one of the good guys.”
Joe leaned back in the seat, attempting to project a casual manner. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Reece. Being in prison didn’t dull your edge or your instincts.” He glanced in Brandi’s direction. “I don’t believe I’ve met your friend.”
“Don’t tell me that you’ve forgotten Trixie DeBoop…the woman I was living with before I was framed and sent to prison?” Reece glanced at Brandi. “Trixie, this is Joe Hodges. He’s with the FBI.”
A hint of sarcasm surrounded Joe’s words. “A simple it’s none of your business would have sufficed.”
Joe shifted his position in the backseat, moving to the other side of the car behind Brandi where he had a better sideways view of Reece. “If you’re satisfied that we’re not being followed, could we get down to business? I’ve got two questions—where is the cartridge and the shell casing you want me to check, and of even more importance, what does this have to do with Mitch Mantee?”
“Trixie, honey…hand Joe that envelope using the tissue so you don’t leave any pesky fingerprints on it.”
Brandi did as Reece had instructed. Joe took it from her, then read the information Reece had written on the envelope, stating the date and time of the test firing along with the make, model and serial number of the pistol.
“Where did the pistol come from? Who owns it, and how did it come to be in your possession?”
“When you run a check on the serial number you’ll probably find that it was stolen—possibly a factory shipment of new pistols en route to a retailer, which would make the serial number a cold trail. As to how it came to be in my possession…I took it away from a man who intended to do me harm.”
“And who would that be? You seem to have a great deal of interest in Frank James. Would he be the person wielding the pistol in question?”
“Don’t push me.”
“You’re certainly being cagey with your answers this morning.”
“I’ve got to be honest with you, Joe. You didn’t instill any feelings of confidence in me at lunch the other day. The farther I get into this mess, the more startling the information I uncover and the bigger it becomes. I need your help with this, but I don’t intend to be your sacri ficial lamb. I’m not interested in you putting my life at risk to get what you want. And worse yet, putting my friend’s life at risk in the process.”
Joe took another quick glance at Brandi, raising a questioning eyebrow. Then he returned his attention to Reece. “Understandable. I’ll run this through the computer and see if I can come up with a ballistics match. I suppose you want to know what I find?”
“Of course.”
“Now, what about Mitch Mantee?”
“I have a couple of very incriminating photographs of Mitch Mantee that I’m sure you’d find very interesting.”
“Photographs?” Joe visibly jerked to attention, his expression saying Reece had hit a home run. “Let me see them.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to
imply that I had them on me. I only meant that they’re someplace safe and I can put my hands on them with a proper amount of notice.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“One step at a time, Joe. One step at a time. First, let’s see what your computer says about the ballistics information.” Reece fixed Joe with a quick moment of eye contact. “And speaking of Frank James…have you done any more digging? Have you come up with anything on him?”
“Nothing more than I’ve already told you. I only met him once, and I haven’t found anyone who really knows him. Sorry, but there’s just nothing new to report.”
After about ten minutes Reece dropped Joe off at a Pioneer Square restaurant in Seattle and quickly disap peared into the traffic. They started back to the cabin by a route that kept them away from Bellevue and the grocery store location where he had met Joe. Reece remained deep in concentration, not offering any conversation. Something continued to tug at his consciousness, some little thing that had happened—something that should have triggered a concern at the time. He searched his mind, going over every moment of the time Joe had been in the backseat. After about ten minutes, he abruptly pulled into a parking lot at an office building.
The startled expression covering Brandi’s face matched her voice. “What’s the matter?” She quickly glanced around, then returned her attention to Reece. “Why are we stopping? Is there something wrong?”
He slid out from behind the wheel, opened the back door and climbed into the backseat of the SUV where Joe had been sitting. “Something’s been bothering me and I just figured out what it was. Why did Joe shift his position from one side of the car to the other?”
“I thought he wanted to sit where he could see your face rather than the back of your head.”
“Yeah, that was my thought at the time. But now I’m not so sure. He agreed to everything too easily. He didn’t offer even one word of objection to getting in the car and being driven away nor did he try to stall for time. I’m sure we weren’t followed. In fact, there didn’t appear to me to have been any attempt at following us even though he had men on the scene. That only leaves one possibility—he brought something into my car so his men could track us.”
“Maybe you should have searched him.”
“I thought about it, then rejected the idea. We need his help. I didn’t want to push him too far.”
Her sincere concern filled her voice. “But he might have pulled a gun on you…arrested you.”
“I wasn’t concerned about that. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he is smart enough to know that arresting me isn’t going to get him the answers he wants. Besides, he has no grounds to arrest me. I haven’t done anything illegal, and I certainly haven’t violated any federal laws.”
Brandi’s gaze swept across the parking lot and out to the street. As much as she tried, she couldn’t keep the anxiety out of her voice. “Do you think they’re watching us right now? Are we in danger? I know it’s the FBI, but…well, that part you said about being a sacrificial lamb…is that true?”
He looked at her, at the apprehension that covered her beautiful face. He heard the quaver in her voice. His heart went out to her, to the stress she had to be experiencing, and it rested heavily on his conscience. He should have left her back at the cabin where she wouldn’t have heard the conversation. Perhaps that would have been easier on her. Then he recalled her words about being involved rather than being left behind.
Besides, it was too late now.
He reached out and lightly touched her cheek. He tried to keep the emotion out of his voice, but didn’t quite manage it. “I’m sorry to put you through this. It will all be over soon. I can feel it. Before long you’ll be able to return to your life and pretty soon all of this will be only a distant memory.”
“And will you be able to return to the life you had before going to prison? Will the nightmare be over for you, too?”
It was a valid question, but he didn’t know how to answer it. He leaned forward and brushed a tender kiss across her lips, then forced his attention back to the matter at hand.
“My guess is that he left something in the vehicle, probably a cell phone with GPS tracking. The time frame I gave him didn’t allow for any fancy maneuvers on his part. I’ve been watching for helicopters in case he had one following him, but I haven’t seen or heard any. He didn’t need to have any of his men follow us in a car. They were tracking our location in real time. I think he changed positions to the other side of the seat to remove himself from the location of whatever he left.”
Brandi watched as Reece looked under the front seats to see if Joe had shoved anything underneath from behind. Then he looked on the floorboards under the seat where Joe had been sitting, then where he had repositioned himself. He came up empty. Next he ran his hand down between the seat cushions. Just when he was about to consider his search a failure, his fingers closed around the object. He withdrew the cell phone. A smile of satisfaction pulled at the corners of his mouth.
“Joe thought he was pulling a fast one, and he almost got away with it. All he needed to do was offer a little bit of a protest at going with us and I never would have thought to look for something he purposely left behind. I hope the Bureau doesn’t go too hard on him for the loss of his cell phone.”
He opened it up and removed the battery, then removed the GPS chip. He dropped the chip on the ground and crushed it under the heel of his boot. He tossed the disabled phone into the glove compartment of his SUV.
“Why are you taking the cell phone with you? Wouldn’t it be safer if you tossed it in the trash?”
“No. I removed the GPS chip, which allows the phone to be used as a tracking device, but the cell phone does belong to an FBI agent. I don’t want to take the chance of someone finding it and being able to retrieve information even if it’s only a list of recent incoming and outgoing phone calls. I don’t want Joe tracking me, but I certainly don’t want to compromise anything that could be sensitive. My guess is that leaving his phone was a desperation move. It was that or nothing and he knew he had to track me. Unfortunately for Joe, this is where the trail ends.”
They got back into the SUV and headed away from Seattle. Even though Reece felt a little more comfortable, he still continued to check to make sure they weren’t being followed. Yes, he might have felt a little more comfortable, but not all that confident. There were still some pieces of the puzzle that they needed in order to complete the picture.
“I’ve got one more stop to make before we head back into the mountains. I called in an order that I need to pick up. I may be giving in to a bit of paranoia, but better to err on the side of caution.”
He pulled into the parking lot of an electronics supply store. “You wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Brandi watched as Reece disappeared inside the building. An electronics store—what could he be picking up that he thought was necessary to their safety? What type of electronics did the store sell? There wasn’t anything visible that said it was computers, televisions, CD players or any other type of entertainment electronics.
He returned a few minutes later carrying a large box and a sack. He put the box in the back of the SUV, then opened the sack. He took out the small battery-operated meter, turned it on and slowly walked around the vehicle. Then he sat in the back behind the driver’s seat. A wry grin turned the edge of his lips. He reached under the seat and found the small bug attached to the underside. He held it up for Brandi to see.
“That Joe is a sneaky one. He left the cell phone for me to find, hoping that would stop any further search. But he also planted this tracking bug. When someone is looking for something, once they find it they normally stop looking. I found the cell phone, so the theory says I would stop looking for anything else.”
He started to drop it on the ground, then quickly changed his mind. “No, if I destroy it then it will obviously stop transmitting. That will tell Joe I found it. But if it continues to transmit, then he’ll cont
inue to track it. So—” he looked around the parking lot “—the thing to do is let it lead him on a wild goose chase.”
Reece walked over to a van making a delivery and attached the tracking bug under the back bumper. The van would be constantly on the road, making lots of stops in all sort of places. He returned to his own vehicle. He slid in behind the wheel and they were on their way back to the cabin.
Brandi waited to see if he would volunteer what else he had purchased, but when he hadn’t mentioned it by the time they arrived at the cabin her curiosity got the best of her. She watched as he took the carton from the back of the SUV.
“What’s in the box?”
“Special thermal imaging cameras. They’re battery operated with closed-circuit transmission. Not only do they work during the day, they also work at night without any lights. They pick up on heat sources, such as car engines and body heat. They transmit an image of the shape of the heat source. You don’t see a picture of the person as in being able to recognize or identify a face, but they transmit the shape of whatever it is that’s giving off heat, such as the figure of a person. They won’t tell us who is approaching, but they will certainly let us know that something is approaching and what shape it is. We’ll be able to distinguish between a deer roaming through the woods, a car and a person. We’ll be able to tell how many people are in the car. If the people are on foot, we’ll be able to see where they are and which direction they’re moving. If they’re hiding behind a tree, we’ll know that, too.”
She held the cabin door open for him as he carried the box inside. “That sounds pretty sophisticated. Is it some type of new technology?”
“New technology? Nope. It’s been around for a while. Both the military and law enforcement use it regularly. It’s the type of thing you would use for a specific application, and it seemed to me that this was one of those. As I said, I have the ownership of my vehicle and the cabin hidden behind a barrage of obstacles. In fact, if someone manages to get through the maze on my car ownership, that won’t lead them to this cabin. But that’s not to say that someone who is determined enough and has the resources at his disposal won’t be able to ultimately find this place. So, this type of thermal imaging surveillance is yet another precaution. It will give us a warning that someone is approaching.”
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? Page 14