by Diane Kelly
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Brett said, turning his head to me and giving me a sexy, satisfied grin. “But whatever it is, I like it.”
Brett had been the unwitting beneficiary of my pent-up frustration and anxiety over the Mendoza case. All that energy had to go somewhere, didn’t it? Lucky for Brett, I’d put it to positive use, treating him to, well, let’s just say enthusiastic sex. He’d returned the favor, being up and ready for a second round in record time. We’d both be lucky if we could walk straight tomorrow. Maybe we could call in sick to work, claim to suffer a temporary bout of EBD—Excessive Boinking Disorder.
He glanced down at my chest then back at my face. “Is it just my imagination or have your breasts grown bigger?”
Not only were my breasts bigger, but so were my ass and my thighs thanks to all those extra-whip heavy-drizzle caramel lattes I drank while trying to stay awake at the post office. “I’ve gained a couple of pounds.” Okay, so it was more than a couple. Sue me.
He was quiet for a moment, an odd look on his face as he seemed to be debating whether to follow up with something akin to “Big boobs! Woo-hoo! Gain away!” Or perhaps “Though these larger breasts are nice, I was perfectly happy with your A cups and you were never in any way inadequate as a woman.” He chose, wisely, to say nothing. No way to win on that one.
As I lay there, snuggling up against him, my eyes began to drift closed. I blinked, forcing them back open, but an instant later the lids began to drift downward again. Ugh. I normally enjoyed the postcoital haze, the mindless bliss that followed the physical ecstasy, lying cuddled together as if nothing else in the world mattered and falling asleep in Brett’s strong, warm arms.
But I couldn’t stay here tonight. I had to be at work first thing in the morning to get a start on the new leads. Besides, I hadn’t even been home yet to feed my cats their dinner. No doubt Henry, my arrogant Maine coon mix, was plotting revenge against me, doing his best to hack up a slimy hairball on my bed pillow or taking a dump in one of my houseplants. Anne, my skinny cream-colored kitty, would be worried, sitting on the windowsill, waiting and watching for my car to pull into the driveway.
I scratched at that darn itchy spot on the nape of my neck, then slid out of Brett’s arms and out of his bed.
He groaned and propped himself up on one elbow. “Stay,” he pleaded, patting the spot next to him.
“As much as I want to,” I said, “I can’t.” I would’ve loved to stay. Brett was like a safe, calm refuge in my otherwise tumultuous, dangerous world. I leaned over and gave him a warm kiss, hoping it would soften the blow. “My cats need their dinner.”
Brett grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me toward him. “They can survive for one evening on dry food.”
True, I always left out a bowl of dry kitty kibble for the cats to snack on during the day, but they’d be expecting their usual Fancy Feast for supper. Still, the cats were only a convenient excuse, one that didn’t require me to remind Brett that my current case was consuming my life.
He pulled me closer and began kissing my neck, working his way from the front to the side, where he began to suck gently on that tender spot where neck and shoulder meet. I felt my eyes drooping again, though this time it was with pleasure rather than drowsiness. If he didn’t stop that right now, I’d never get out of there.
“No fair.” I gently pushed him back.
He made a growling, grumbling sound. “When can I see you again?”
“Naked or dressed?”
“Either.”
“Nice to know you appreciate me for more than my girl parts.”
“So? When can I see you again?” Brett repeated, more than a hint of irritation in his voice.
I had no idea how the investigation would go over the next few days, but the Treasury Department couldn’t fault me for taking a dinner break. A hungry agent would be an ineffective agent, right?
“How about dinner Wednesday? Maybe Chinese?”
“Great. Let’s meet at Ning’s.”
* * *
First order of business Tuesday morning was a quick meeting with the other members of the Lobo’s party planning committee. Despite the fact that sixty percent of the special agents in our office were male, all of the five volunteers were female. Typical.
After a brief debate over the country club’s buffet options—barbecue, French, or seafood—we took a vote. In case my trip to Florida didn’t pan out, I voted for seafood, which won by a three-to-two vote.
Lu stepped into my office a half hour later as Eddie and I were mapping out the gas stations, grocery stores, and malls we planned to visit. She closed the door quietly behind her. Today she wore a lemon-yellow Nehru-style jacket with a pair of white bell-bottom pants and cork platform heels. She clutched a rolled-up sheet of paper in her hands. She held the roll out to me.
“What’s this?” I asked as I took it from her.
“Your vacation request,” she said. “Denied.”
“Damn,” I muttered, though I was hardly surprised. Brett would go to Florida alone, and my beautiful red chiffon dress and sexy lingerie would go to waste.
I couldn’t blame Lu for refusing me the time off. I could, however, blame Marcos Mendoza. One way or another, he would pay for making me miss this trip. I crumpled the paper into a tight ball and hurled it into my trash can. Thunk.
Lu let my little act of rebellion slide. “Andrew Sheffield’s wallet turned up in the bushes outside the outlet mall in Hillsboro.”
At least it wasn’t a body part this time. “Any fingerprints on it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not a one.”
I guess a break in the murder case was too much to hope for.
“How’re things going?” The Lobo’s brows rose in an expectant pinkish-orange arch as her eyes surveyed the maps on my desk. “Got some new leads?”
We gave her an update, told her of our plans.
The brows drooped. “Visiting a few stores? That’s it?”
We knew the identity theft cases were a long shot, but they were all we had.
“We’re doing the best we can, Lu.” There was an edge in Eddie’s voice. Apparently the stress of this case was getting to him, too. “There’s not much to go on. Hell, the Texas Rangers and the FBI couldn’t even get Mendoza.”
Lu crossed her arms over her ample bosom and blinked her false eyelashes at us. “Perhaps I overestimated you two.”
Ooh. Them’s fighting words. The Lobo knew just how to push my buttons.
Maybe it was my naïveté, or maybe it was my need to prove to my boss that I could do this job. But whatever the reason, I rose to the bait. “You didn’t overestimate us, Lu. Come hell or high water, we’ll get this guy.” Hell, while I was at it, why not promise to find a cure for cancer, achieve world peace, and stop global warming, too?
The Lobo jabbed a finger in my direction. “That’s what I like to hear.”
As soon as our boss left, Eddie glanced my way and frowned. “Girl, you shouldn’t make promises you may not be able to keep.”
“Shut up, Eddie.”
He narrowed his eyes at me then. “You shut up.”
“No, you shut up!”
Great. Now the stress had me and Eddie at each other’s throats.
* * *
I walked past Josh’s office on my way out, backtracking a few steps as an idea hit me.
He looked up as I entered his digs, his expression wary. Clearly the guy didn’t get many social visits. “What do you want?”
There’s the reason he didn’t get many social visits. He really needed to work on his greeting.
“I’ve got a technical computer question I hope you can answer.”
A smug smile spread across his face. “I can answer any computer question.” Josh had often been accused of being a sniveling twerp and a whiner, but no one could accuse him of lacking confidence, at least when it came to his technical savvy. “What is it?”
“Is there a way to tell who ha
s accessed a file in the Treasury’s database?”
He cocked his head, his eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”
Yeah, Tara. Why? Think quick. “I had some files on the system. Stuff for Lu’s party. The guest list seems longer than I remember, so I’m wondering if someone added to it.” Flimsy. But the best I could come up with on short notice.
“Did the other members of the party committee know you were making a guest list?”
“Well, sure.”
“Maybe one of them modified it.”
Dammit, why wouldn’t he just answer my question? “So is there a way for me to tell who it was?”
“Yeah.” His voice was snide now. “Ask them.”
“On the computer, Josh.” My frustration was evident in my voice. “Just answer the question, okay? Is there a way for me to run a history on the computer system to see who accessed the file?”
“No.” He looked down, straightening a stack of files on his desk. “There are programs that can track that information but we don’t have them on our system. No need. Everything is password protected. Only authorized staff can access the files.”
My mind reeled. If only authorized staff could access the files, then how did Nick Pratt access them? Surely his username and password had been removed from the system when he’d left. Had someone here run the search for him? If so, that meant he’d stayed in contact with someone on the staff. Who would that person have been?
Could it have been Eddie? I doubted it. Nick and Eddie had partnered on earlier cases, so Nick would know that Eddie was a by-the-book kind of guy. Besides, Eddie had a family to support. He wouldn’t do anything that would risk his job.
The faces of the other agents ran through my mind. Since I hadn’t been with the IRS back when Nick had worked here, I didn’t know who else he might have been close to.
Could it have been Lu? Every time she mentioned Nick’s name, she seemed to become upset, as if she harbored regrets about how things had turned out in the earlier investigation.
I suppose it could’ve been Josh, but I had my doubts. He wasn’t a likable guy.
What did all of this mean? Why would Nick Pratt feed me information that might help us nail Mendoza? Had things soured between the two of them, or was Nick simply toying with me, playing both sides again in some kind of sick game? And how did Nick know that I’d been assigned to investigate Mendoza?
I wished I could talk to the guy and get some answers. After I’d spoken to Lindsay McFarland I’d debated trying to contact Nick myself, but my instincts told me not to. Nick had taken pains to call me from public places using random phones that belonged to other people. Perhaps his phones were being monitored by Mendoza or Torres. I couldn’t risk tipping them off that the investigation had been resumed. Of course that assumed Nick hadn’t already spilled the beans. Still, something told me he hadn’t. What would he have to gain at this point? I wished I knew exactly what he was up to.
Josh interrupted my scattered thoughts. “There’s always the possibility that a hacker accessed the files. Some bored teenager from Hoboken might’ve thought it would be fun to see if he could hack into the IRS system. It’s happened before.”
A hacker, huh? Could Nick have hacked into the system?
I had lots of questions. But I was short on answers.
The only one who had the answers was Nick Pratt.
“Thanks, Josh.” I scurried back to my office and programmed my phone to forward all calls to my cell.
If Nick called again, I didn’t want to miss it.
* * *
Eddie and I spent all day and evening Tuesday making our rounds of the gas stations, grocery stores, and malls at which the counterfeited cards had been used. Like Lu, we didn’t hold out much hope we’d learn anything of importance. The cards had been used months ago and it was unlikely the stores would have retained any of the security videos or the employees would retain any recollection of the transactions.
All of these leads were dead ends. Rather than waste more time and gas traipsing all over town, on Wednesday morning I called ahead and spoke to the head of security at the electronics store, a woman named Courtney Schwartz. The electronics store had a better security system. Because employee theft was a big problem for the merchant, the management retained their footage for longer periods of time in case the video would be needed to nab and convict a thieving employee. Ms. Schwartz said the store had lost thousands of dollars last year in credit card chargebacks due to fraud and she’d be glad to help.
The store sat in the center of a strip mall. I went inside, checked in at the customer service desk, and waited for Ms. Schwartz. In a few minutes, a woman with spiky dishwater-blond hair and minimal makeup met me at the desk. She wore the company’s trademark neon orange knit shirt with navy pants and rubber-soled loafers, probably steel toed. She was lean and fit, like a female golfer. Her nametag read LOSS PREVENTION but her attitude read “Don’t Fuck with Me.”
“This way,” she said, gesturing for me to follow her to the back of the store.
As we walked down the main aisle that bisected the store, separating the small electronics from the big-ticket items, a tall pale-faced boy with black-dyed flat-ironed hair came running toward us. The kid held a laptop computer tucked under his arm, no doubt the display model given the lack of packaging and the severed security cable trailing behind him. Following him was a male employee, a tiny wisp of a man who simply couldn’t keep up with a teenager motivated by a free laptop if he could clear the front door and the possibility of jail time if he could not.
Before our minds registered what was happening, the thief ran past us, moving surprisingly fast in his skintight skinny jeans.
“Stop him!” the salesman squealed.
The security guard turned and ran after the shoplifter. On instinct, I turned and ran after her. In seconds, Courtney was on the kid’s heels. The thief made his way outside and Courtney tackled him on the sidewalk. He grunted as he hit the pavement, the laptop crashing to the sidewalk next to him and exploding into a barrage of plastic and metal bits. A beat-up blue Hyundai that had been idling out front tore away from the curb, tires squealing. The getaway car no doubt.
The laptop lay in shattered pieces on the concrete, the keyboard’s ESCAPE key lying, ironically, next to the thief. There’d be no escape for him.
Several employees, including the salesman, had gathered in the store’s doorway. Courtney and the thief struggled on the sidewalk. The boy was on his back, doing his best to throw her.
I suppose I could’ve jumped into the melee, but I was wearing my favorite red blazer today and didn’t want to risk a tear. I yanked my Glock from my hip holster. “Freeze!” I hollered at the kid, adding “IRS!” out of habit.
The shoplifter looked up at me, his face contorted in confusion. He might not have understood why an IRS agent was brandishing a weapon at him, but he understood that running away from the scene was no longer an option. He stopped struggling. “Okay! I give up!”
Courtney glanced my way, too. “IRS agents carry guns?”
Always the same question. People generally thought of IRS agents as nerdy pencil pushers who merely performed audits. Society at large had no clue that the Treasury Department employed a team of crack agents whose job it was to pursue criminal tax evaders. And, yep, we carried guns. Pepper spray, too. I’d lobbied for nunchuks, brass knuckles, and Chinese throwing stars, but to no avail. Something about civil rights, abuse of power, yada yada yada.
I nodded and slid the gun back into my holster.
Once the police had been summoned and the would-be thief had become the responsibility of Dallas PD, Courtney and I headed to her office. She tucked her shirt back into her pants on the way, but otherwise seemed unruffled by the encounter.
“Nice job back there,” I said.
She waved off the compliment. “Served two tours of duty in Afghanistan. That punk was nothing compared to a Taliban insurgent with an AK-47 and a rocket launcher.”
“Boy howdy!”
Her office was a small room just inside the wide swinging door that led into the stockroom. A shadow box perched on top of a metal file cabinet displayed an assortment of military medals, including a striped white, red, green, and black ribbon denoting her service in Afghanistan.
She slid into the rolling chair behind her desk. Her tidy desktop supported a neat stack of manila files, a plain white coffee mug that served as a pencil cup, and a computer with an oversized flat-screen monitor. I took a seat on a folding chair in front of her desk.
I pulled the insurance agent’s credit card bill from my purse and slid it across the desk, pointing to the entry for the electronics purchase. “I need to find out who made this charge.”
“Okeydokey. Let’s see what we can find.” She positioned the paper next to her keyboard and angled the flat screen so that we both could see it. The monitor displayed a screen split twelve ways between the multiple security cameras positioned throughout the store and over the front and back doors. The image in the top left square showed an employee on the sidewalk in front of the store sweeping up the pieces of busted laptop.
Courtney maneuvered her mouse and minimized the video-feed screen, pulling up another screen containing blanks to be filled in. She typed the counterfeit credit card number into her system along with the sales date and pressed the ENTER key.
Her eyes squinted as she reviewed the information. “The charge was run through at 11:32 A.M. Register five.”
Dang it, there was that annoying scalp itch again. It seemed to be growing worse. I clawed at the back of my head. Maybe I should make an appointment with a dermatologist.
Courtney clicked back on the video surveillance icon. The screen was again split twelve ways, but the notation at the bottom of the screen now showed the date for the day after Thanksgiving last year.
Black Friday. A smart time to use a counterfeit card. The stores would be swamped, the cashiers rushed and pressured to keep the lines of customers moving, hardly looking up as they rang up sales and processed payments.
Courtney dragged her computer mouse, forwarding the time to eleven-thirty and clicking on the feed that showed the cashier lanes. A single line of customers waited in a roped-off space, each proceeding to the next available checkstand when it was their turn. At the front stood a woman pushing a stroller, a thumb-sucking baby happily slapping at the spinning toy mounted on the seat in front of him. Couldn’t be her. The card used here bore the name of the insurance agent, a man’s name.