Fatal Identity

by Marie Force

  “Not really, but I said I would and I will.” She rubbed her hand over her abdomen. “My stomach suddenly feels like I swallowed a dozen bats.”

  Smiling, he squeezed her shoulder and gazed into her eyes. “You’re going to kill it. I know you are, and think of all the good you’ll do for a cause that’s near and dear to us.” The speech was part of their plan to use the national stage to advance their own agenda on a number of issues.

  “I know all that. I just hope I don’t puke on the stage or something equally embarrassing. And do not laugh at me!” She poked his hard-as-a-rock belly when he laughed anyway. “Eat up, everyone! It’s time to get to work! I need some threads to pull!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AS HE DID upon awaking every morning, Gonzo reached for his cell phone on the bedside table. It wasn’t there. What the hell? He glanced at the clock, which read seven-thirty, and sat up straight in bed. He was late for work. Again. At this rate, he wouldn’t have a job to go back to if and when he got his shit sorted out.

  Running his fingers through his hair, he tried to establish some order. His body ached after the longest stretch of sleep he’d had since Arnold was killed. He went into the bathroom, took a leak, brushed his teeth and went in search of Christina and Alex. They were having breakfast when he emerged from the bedroom.

  Christina eyed him in the wary, guarded way she had for weeks now. It pained him to see her walking on eggshells around him, but he supposed he couldn’t blame her.

  “Morning,” he said as he poured some coffee and then went to kiss his son. “Where’s my phone?”

  “I have it.” She seemed extra nervous as she tended to Alex.

  “Why do you have it? And where is it?”

  “You were sleeping,” she said beseechingly. “For the first time since AJ died, you were actually sleeping. I didn’t want you to be disturbed, so I took the phone out of the bedroom.”

  He held out his hand for it, his anxiety growing as it became apparent that something had happened while he was out cold.

  “Please don’t be mad at me, Tommy. I did what I thought was best for you.”

  Continuing to stare her down, he waited for her to put the phone in his hand. He clicked on the power button and it came to life to reveal a flurry of text messages from his colleagues and several missed calls from Dispatch. “Fuck,” he whispered under his breath so Alex wouldn’t hear him and repeat the word. Scrolling through the texts, his heart began to beat super fast, and he felt light-headed at the realization that he’d missed a Homicide call. Son of a bitch.

  “Tommy.” Christina laid her hands on his shoulders.

  He flinched and shook her off. “How could you do this to me? Do you know how much trouble I’ll be in for missing a Homicide call?”

  “You’re not in trouble. I talked to Sam and she talked to Malone. They agreed that you needed the sleep more than you needed to go to work. We did what we thought was best for you.”

  Though he was furious—at her, at Sam, at Malone, at the man who’d gunned down his partner, at Arnold for dying the way he had—he kept a lid on it so he wouldn’t frighten his son. If the lid ever blew off, he hated to think about how epic the explosion would be. The last text was from Sam, calling everyone to her house to work the case. He ran for the shower.

  Christina followed him. “Tommy, the meeting with Dr. Trulo is at noon today.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” Maybe it was the eight hours of uninterrupted sleep or maybe it was the rage that fueled him. Whatever it was, he wanted back in the game, and he wanted in right now.

  * * *

  “LET’S START WITH what you learned from the men who took Freddie and Josh,” Sam said when Malone and Hill had arrived and after Sam and Nick sent Scotty off to school with his detail. “Captain?”

  Reading off the suspects’ names, Malone said, “They refused to talk without lawyers present, so we got nowhere with them. We’re hoping to have the chance to talk to them today.”

  “And what did Crime Scene get from Hamilton’s house and Cruz’s car?”

  “We got some decent prints off the golf club at Hamilton’s that are with the lab. They’re still working on the car.”

  “What’re we doing to find Josh?” Sam asked.

  “We’ve done all the usual things,” Malone said. “We’ve issued a second APB, alerted the airports, train and bus stations to be on the lookout and we’ve asked the local media to publicize his photo. We’re doing everything we can to find him, but because of the way he was taken, it’s safe to assume that whoever took him doesn’t want him found.”

  “Are we thinking he’s dead?” McBride asked.

  “I really hope not,” Malone said. “Especially if it turns out that he’s Taylor. Imagine those poor parents looking for him all this time only to learn five minutes after they find him that he’s dead.”

  Avery looked up from his phone. “We may have a secondary issue. It appears that FBI Deputy Director Dustin Jacoby is missing too. No one has heard from him since early Saturday. Our people are trying to track his phone and credit cards. He and Hamilton were tight. They came up through the ranks together, and Hamilton handpicked Jacoby for the deputy’s job.”

  “This case is getting crazier by the second,” Sam said.

  “The attorney general has named the associate deputy director, Gillian MacKenzie, the acting director,” Avery added. “We’ve got people at Jacoby’s house and talking to his family and friends, trying to track him down.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Sam said, “but it’s unusual for someone with Jacoby’s job to be off the grid for more than twenty-four hours, even on a weekend. Am I right?”

  “You are,” Avery said, nodding. “He and Hamilton and their top management team are on call 24/7.”

  “Are you thinking that something has happened to him too?” Malone asked.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Avery said. “This entire situation is unprecedented. People within the Bureau are on edge, to put it mildly.”

  “Have there been any threats against the Bureau in recent weeks?” Carlucci asked. “Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing more than the routine stuff, and I would’ve heard if there was something more.” After a pause, Avery added, “Since we spoke to Courtney Hamilton last night, I’ve been thinking about the administrative assistant who worked with Hamilton and Jacoby in Knoxville. I did some digging, and I found that she still works in the Knoxville office. I’m thinking about going there to talk to her.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sam said.

  Nick gave her a look of fierce annoyance that pissed her off.

  “On my own dime and my own time, of course,” Sam added for the captain’s benefit.

  “Of course,” Malone said drily.

  “I’ll get my assistant to put us on the next flight,” Avery said, typing on his phone.

  Sam could feel Nick’s eyes boring holes in her head and was afraid to glance in his direction. There’d be hell to pay for this, of that she had no doubt. But whatever. The trip to Knoxville would allow her to participate in the case while suspended. She wasn’t passing up that opportunity, no matter how angry it made her husband. “What else do we have?”

  “We’re speaking to the witness who saw someone running from Hamilton’s house again today,” Dominguez said. “We’re hoping to get something more we can use.”

  The front door opened to admit Lieutenant Archelotta. “Had a feeling I’d find y’all here,” he said with a grin.

  Once again Sam was grateful that she’d never mentioned her brief fling years ago with the IT lieutenant to her husband. She could only imagine how that information would add to his current ire.

  “What did you get from Hamilton’s phone?” Sam asked.

  “A
whole lot of nothing. No calls in or out after he issued the statement about his son being off his medication.”

  “How is that possible?” Malone asked. “The MPD is looking for his son. He takes the time to issue a statement, and no one calls him about that?”

  “I thought it was weird too,” Archie said, “so I checked to see if he might have a second phone and hit pay dirt. The one we dumped is his FBI-issued phone. The second one is his personal phone, and that’s where all the action was yesterday.”

  He handed out stapled pages to each of the detectives.

  “We’ll go through this today,” McBride said.

  “We’ll help you,” Carlucci added.

  “Can we talk about Courtney Hamilton?” Malone asked. “She told us she spoke to her husband in the afternoon. She was very nonchalant about that call, which was made at a time when her son was technically missing, and her husband had issued a public statement about the son that we’ve since learned was misleading. To our knowledge, Josh Hamilton is not on any medication that would affect his behavior.”

  “In general, I thought her behavior was odd,” Avery said. “Remember how she referred to Hamilton as the man who raised Josh? Isn’t that a bizarre way to refer to her son’s father, even if the child was adopted? Would you guys ever refer to yourselves as the people who raised Scotty?”

  Seeing that question had infuriated Nick, Sam answered for them both. “Never. We’d describe ourselves as his parents. What do we know about her?”

  “I looked into her background last night,” Avery said. “She’s from a wealthy Connecticut family. Her maternal grandfather was the governor of New York in the sixties. The family is well regarded. She met Hamilton at a dance on Long Island the summer between her junior and senior years at Vassar. They were married one week after she graduated from college. He had just joined the Bureau and was on the rise. They lived for a time in the San Francisco Bay area, where they had a son, Mark, and a daughter, Maura, eighteen months apart. Mark is a board-certified neurosurgeon in Chicago. Maura is a partner in a Boston law firm. Their son Josh was born five years after Maura, at the end of Hamilton’s tour in Knoxville. Courtney told us he was adopted. She said he was the son of the administrative assistant in the Knoxville office, and they’d taken him in because she couldn’t afford to care for him on her own.”

  “In the time I spent with him, he never said anything to me about being adopted nor did he mention it to Detective Cruz, who would’ve passed that along,” Sam said. “In fact, Josh made a point of telling me he’d never fit into his accomplished family.

  “Courtney told us Troy didn’t want Josh to know he was adopted, so they never told him.”

  Sam shook her head in disbelief. “The poor guy. They kept him in the dark about everything.”

  “So we’re operating under the assumption that Hamilton’s murder and the son’s kidnapping-adoption-abduction are related?” Tyrone asked.

  “How can they not be?” Sam said. “The timing is not coincidental.” She thought for a second and came to a decision. “I want everyone looking for Josh Hamilton. As far as we know he’s still alive, so he’s the priority. Talk to his coworkers, his friends, his neighbors, dig into every corner of his life. If we find him, we may find whoever killed his father too.”

  “I agree with the lieutenant’s approach,” Malone said.

  The agent working the front door admitted Gonzo and Freddie.

  “Where’d you guys come from?” Sam asked, thrilled to see them, even if Freddie still looked dangerously pale and Gonzo seemed incredibly wired.

  “I apologize for missing the calls last night,” Gonzo said to her and Malone. “Won’t happen again.”

  “You’re authorized and encouraged to take bereavement leave,” Malone said.

  “Not necessary,” Gonzo said. “Other than the required appointments with Trulo, I’m back to work.”

  “Me too.” Freddie wore a bandage over the cut on his forehead. “I got sprung an hour ago. No concussion, so I’m back to full duty. What can we do to help find Josh?”

  Sam and Malone handed out assignments to every member of the squad and sent them on their way with orders to report in hourly.

  “Our flight is at two,” Avery said as he put on his coat. “The first return flight we could get was at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon, so pack a bag. I’ll meet you at Reagan?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Let me know what you find out,” Malone said as he took his leave.

  “Seriously?” Nick said when they were alone—or as alone as they ever were these days.

  “Let’s go upstairs to have this fight in private.” Sam headed up the stairs, prepared to do battle if necessary. In their bedroom, she turned to face him, watching as he closed the door that had played a pivotal role in last night’s activities. Though his posture was casual as he leaned against the door, looks could be deceiving.

  “There’s no need for you to go on this trip.”

  “There’s every need for me to go. This is our case.”

  “You’re suspended, Sam!”

  “Exactly! And this is something I can do to help out while I’m suspended.”

  “Avery can handle it on his own.”

  “And when he gets a big break, do you think he’ll call us or his own people first?”

  “I don’t want you spending a night away with that guy.”

  Infuriated by the insinuation, she approached him, stopping when she was a few inches from him. “What do you think will happen, Nick? Are you worried that I’m going to sleep with him or something? Is our relationship so fragile that you’d actually be worried about such a thing? Do you have so little trust in me?”

  “He’s the one I don’t trust, and no, our relationship is not fragile.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like that Melinda stares at your ass when she’s supposed to be watching all of you. I don’t like that she’s wondering how big your dick is every time she looks at you! Guess what? There’s nothing I can do about it. He’s a colleague and my friend’s fiancé. That’s all he’ll ever be to me. I don’t know how many times or ways I have to say that to get it through your thick skull that I am not interested in him!”

  “Melinda doesn’t wonder how big my dick is.”

  “Figures that’s all you heard. You don’t think so?”

  “She’s a professional.”

  “She’s a woman who knows a hot guy when she sees one.”

  “And Avery is a man who knows a hot woman when he sees one, and he wants you. I don’t care what you or anyone else says. He wants you, and you’re handing him a golden opportunity.”

  “For what? To have me? Fuck you.” She pushed him off the door and went across the hallway to pack for the night away.

  The closet door slammed shut, and she spun around to find him advancing on her, a look of fury on his face. “Fuck me? Really? Is that how we fight now?”

  “That’s how we fight when you insinuate that I’m unable to spend a night out of town with a colleague without being unfaithful to you.”

  Even with his hands on his hips and his mouth set in a mulish expression, he was still the most gorgeous man she’d ever laid eyes on. Even if she currently wanted to punch his lights out. He stared at her for a long, charged moment before the starch seemed to leave his spine as he exhaled. “I trust you.”

  “Then we don’t have a problem.” She packed a clean pair of jeans, a sweater to wear tomorrow, underwear, pajamas and socks into an overnight bag. Then she changed into a pair of black dress pants and a silk blouse to wear to the White House.

  “Why’re you getting dressed up to go on a trip with him?”

  “I’m getting dressed up to go to the W
hite House, you ass.”

  “I don’t want you to go with him.”

  “I don’t want you to go to Iran.” Sam brushed by him as she left the closet and crossed the hall to the bathroom to pack a small cosmetic bag. When she was finished, she went into the bedroom where he was sitting on the bed watching her. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “I guess you will.”

  She didn’t want to leave it like this, but she was as mad at him as she’d ever been. “Tell Scotty I’ll call him tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  Apparently, he was mad too, or he would’ve told her to be careful. He would’ve said he loved her. But he didn’t say anything and neither did she. Checking the time on her phone, she saw that she had thirty minutes to kill before the pickup for the meeting with her White House staff—a meeting she wished she could cancel in light of her argument with the vice president.

  After unlocking her bedside drawer to retrieve her weapon, badge and cuffs, she went downstairs, put on her coat and left the house with a heavy heart. She and Nick didn’t fight like that. Ever. Her eyes burned, and she blinked back tears that she attributed to the cold.

  She took the ramp to her dad’s house and went in without knocking. “Hello?”

  “In here, honey,” Celia called from the kitchen.

  Sam entered the kitchen where Celia hurriedly gathered up paperwork that had been spread out on the table. Since this was the second time she’d come upon them obviously trying to hide something, she said, “What gives?”

  “Nothing,” Skip said gruffly.

  “Are you guys having financial issues? Tell me the truth.”

  The look that Celia gave her father confirmed it for Sam.

  “What’s going on?” Since she had time and didn’t want to be at home, she took a seat at the table.

  “We’re handling it,” Skip said.

  “Skip—”

  “We’re handling it, Celia. That’s the end of it.”

  “That’s not the end of it.” To Sam, Celia said, “Insurance only covered a portion of your father’s surgery. We owe the rest.”