by Eva Hudson
Ingrid wandered back to her own desk and looked again at her unread emails. There were now seventy-nine of them. She scrolled her mouse and clicked on the one from Libby. She had compiled the list of people who had attended the gala event at Mojito Joe’s. Based on reports from other newspapers and gossip magazines, Libby had come up with a list of twenty-three named attendees, mostly a meaningless tally of British TV celebrities and international businessmen with wealth and influence. The names that stood out were Karlos and Serena Ivanov, the owner of the Evening News and his wife. According to Libby’s research, the nightclub was a venture of their playboy son, Alexei. It explained why the newspaper had written about the event, but not why Mulroony had photographed it. Tomorrow she would ask Libby for more than just the names of the people at the gala. She wanted their full biographies, who they worked for, who they socialized with, who they had dirt on.
Ingrid returned to Libby’s desk and placed her forefinger on the photo of the newspaper article. She moved it in small circles, like an attendee of a séance might move the upturned glass. Did it belong with the collection images that related to the Hawking Review? The Russian connection was enough. She pushed it over to join the growing cluster.
Her cell rang on her desk, making her jump. Her hand jerked, flicking a photo away from its allocated position, as she scooted over to her desk. She looked at the phone. A Minnesota number, but not Svetlana’s. Maybe her mom was at Kathleen’s? Ingrid mentally calculated the time difference and swiped to take the call.
“Mom? Is that you?”
All she could hear was transatlantic static. “May I speak with Miss Ingrid Skyberg please?”
Miss? Ingrid’s blood turned to ice. Was her mom in the ER? “This is Special Agent Ingrid Skyberg.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. “Who is this?”
“Good afternoon. My name is Xander J. Carroll. I work for Leander and Spicer in Minneapolis.”
Ingrid held her breath as she waited for him to explain why he was calling.
“I am working with James Jones’s team in Jackson.”
Ingrid placed a hand on the back of her chair for support. She felt like she might collapse.
“Miss Skyberg, would you be willing to testify?”
Ingrid still hadn’t recovered from the thought her mom was in danger. “I, er—” she struggled to find the words. “I mean… You’re not from the DA’s office?”
“No, Miss. Leander and Spice are defending Mr. Jones.”
Ingrid’s thoughts slammed into a brick wall. “I, ah, I.” She thumped the chair.
“Miss, did you hear me? I am calling to ask if you would be willing to testify.”
Ingrid’s vision blurred. The room softened at the edges. She needed the chair to steady herself. “I can’t,” she managed. “I mean, I couldn’t. I could never look my mom in the eye. I could never look at Kathleen Avery without dissolving into a pool of…” Ingrid’s jaw hung loose. “I… I can’t be a witness for the defense. I could never go home.”
Carroll didn’t miss a beat. “Miss, I appreciate you were not expecting me to call—”
“I thought the DA might. But I never for one second thought the defense would. I mean, why would you?” She knew damn well why. The same reason the prosecution hadn’t listed her to testify. It was dark. It was a long time ago. She was young. If the prosecution can make an FBI agent sound unsure about what she’d seen, it was a damn good way to create reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. “No, no I won’t do it.”
“Miss, you are an FBI agent. You spend your life in the pursuit of justice.” He sounded like he was smiling. “James Jones deserves your service as much as any other citizen.”
“He killed twelve women!”
“Miss, as I am sure you are aware, he has only admitted to nine counts of murder.”
Ingrid’s hand was shaking. “He killed my best friend.”
“He denies the murder of Megan Avery.”
Ingrid breathed heavily, audibly. She knew what would happen next. She understood the legal process, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. “My answer is no.”
“Miss, you will be aware that you will be subpoenaed and you will be obligated to testify.” Xander Carroll had a laid-back Southern lilt to his voice, like a New Orleans bartender.
At least he had credited her with knowing the law. “I’m not in Minnesota. I’m not even in the States.” She thought of the months of planning for the Tilbury drugs bust. “I can’t just drop everything and cross the Atlantic.”
“We can swear you in via video link, that is not a problem.” Ingrid could picture the smirk on his face.
“You will have to list me as a hostile witness.”
“We are aware of that, Miss.” She did not like being called ‘miss’, ergo she did not like Xander Carroll with the pretentious middle initial.
Ingrid’s lower lip trembled. The floor beneath her feet softened. She felt it would not support her weight. Ingrid leaned forward over her chair. Her empty stomach convulsed.
“Do you still need me to subpoena you?”
Her nostrils flared. “Hell, yes. I won’t talk unless you make me.”
Ingrid dropped the phone onto her desk and when she saw that Xander J. Carroll had ended the call, she let out a small, soft howl. How could they do that to her? The cruelty of it slammed into her chest and made it hard to breathe. Megan’s abduction was the most painful event in her life. Not only was the firm of Leander and Spicer trying to deny her the justice she needed—the justice she had craved and fought for—but they were going to use her own testimony to do it.
Ingrid paced the room. She knew she couldn’t lie under oath, and she knew her testimony would not help secure James Jones’ conviction. All the defense had to do was ask her, ‘Was this the man you saw’ and the seed of doubt would be sown. The words they would force her to say would inflict so much pain on Kathleen Avery that she may as well aim a gun at the woman’s heart.
Ingrid’s phone illuminated on her desk, but she didn’t even bother to see if it was her mom. She knew she had to be the one to tell Svetlana she was being forced to testify, but she also knew she would never make her mom understand.
“Oh, God.”
It dawned on Ingrid that her mom would see it as such a betrayal she could even cut off contact. Svetlana wasn’t known for her shades of gray or understanding of nuance. Even with the subpoena, she would expect Ingrid to remain silent on the stand, or to lie. Kathleen was not a well woman, and all her mom wanted was for Kathleen to live to see justice for Megan. Ingrid yearned for that too, so much so that her swollen heart pressed against her ribcage, making its anguish felt.
“Always better to rip off the Band-Aid,” Ingrid said out loud. Delaying talking to Svetlana would only make the next few hours even more unbearable. She marched over to her phone and brushed against Libby’s desk, sending several photos over the edge. She watched as they tumbled, then bent to pick them up.
“Oh.” Ingrid shifted from the balls of her feet onto her knees. “Oh, my.”
She stared at the photos for many seconds, her heart pulsing violently as she assessed what she was looking at. The phone continued to trill. The photo of the arrows on the notepad had overlapped one of the birthday cake photos. The three arrows clustered at one side of the notepad pointed to Jen and the other women holding the cake. The fourth, heavier, arrow at the other end of the pad, pointed to a figure in the background.
Shaking slightly as her phone kept demanding her attention, Ingrid picked up both photos and examined them more closely. Then she looked at the other birthday cake photos with the three women awkwardly positioned at the edge of the frame. She thought about what Jen had told her, how Mulroony had brought in the fake cake, only to take these bizarre images. The phone went to voicemail and Ingrid winced: not answering would only anger Svetlana further.
Inside the plastic photo wallet were the strips of negatives. With trembling fingers, Ingrid held them up to the light. She
swallowed several times to lubricate her mouth. The photograph of the arrows came straight after the birthday cake snaps. It was as if Mulroony had captured the image he needed, and immediately sketched out the positions of the people in the photo. The reason he had taken three photos of the cake was because he was waiting for the right person to be in shot behind Jen and the other women.
Ingrid put the negatives down and inhaled hard. Her nose tingled and she pressed her lips together. After another deep breath, she walked over to the window and looked down at Grosvenor Square where coworkers and sweethearts gathered in groups on the grass. Her cell bleeped to tell her she had a new message. She realized she was shaking her head.
Was that really what Mulroony had intended?
She went back to Libby’s desk and stared at the photos. The arrows lined up with the four figures almost perfectly. She was sure it wasn’t a coincidence. She was certain Mulroony wanted anyone who saw these photos to look at the man in the background that the thicker arrowed pointed to. That man was Jacob DeWalt.
Was he Skylark? Had he framed Mulroony?
22
Ingrid couldn’t stop checking her cell. She knew looking at it wouldn’t make it ring, but Sol had promised he would call her back within the hour, and that was over ninety minutes ago.
She’d had no choice but to call him. She needed help, and if DeWalt was Skylark there was no one in the bureau she could trust. He had promised to make some calls and get back to her.
Ingrid also called her old buddy from Quantico, Mike Stiller. He’d moved from Washington, DC, to Washington State since they’d last spoken and now worked as a case agent in Seattle. That was fortunate, because it meant that although it was midnight in London, Mike would still be at his desk on the West Coast for another few hours. There was still plenty of time for him to come good on his promise of intel.
The TV on the wall of her hotel room silently showed a report about identical triplets getting identical grades. Ingrid’s eyes glazed as she stared at the establishing shots of their high school, sending her mind in the direction of last time she’d looked at an image of a US school. She thought about Dennis Mulroony Snr and his lone kidney, and then about his wife who no longer took her Afghan hound to dog shows. What did they think had happened to their son?
She closed her eyes. She pictured the Black Dolphin prison, her mind swarming with visions of rats and fleas and cockroaches and excrement. And blood. It was a violent cesspit where murderers learned new skills from each other. Ingrid didn’t know if Mulroony even spoke Russian. She could barely imagine the hell he had endured. It would be one thing to be in the Black Dolphin as a guilty man, but as someone who had been framed? She let out an involuntary gasp. The FBI was a family, and one of her brothers needed her. Acid swirled under her tongue. Her head nodded slowly. If DeWalt really had put him there, she was not only going to bring him to justice; she was going to punish him. She checked her cell again. Still nothing from Sol.
The phone on the nightstand rang. “Hello?”
“Good evening, this is Jerome on reception.”
Hairs rose on the back of Ingrid’s neck. “Yes?” Why the heck was reception calling her room at half past midnight?
“We have received a fax for you.”
“A fax?” Had she time traveled to the nineties?
“I would like to bring it to your room, but the night shift is short staffed tonight.”
“No, that’s fine. I’ll come down.”
Ingrid pulled on some sweat pants and jogged down to the lobby. When she collected the sheaf of paper from the bemused Jerome, she smiled. She needn’t have been nervous: the handwritten note on the cover sheet read Beachfront Properties available from June onwards. The fax was from Mike: he had spent the first ten minutes of their phone call telling her she should move to Seattle. On her way back to her room, she detoured to the ice machine to stock up on London’s most in demand commodity.
In amongst the real estate details Mike had hastily printed off from the web were the documents she’d asked him to send over. Worried that her own searches might be monitored by DeWalt, she had delegated the task of pulling up DeWalt’s personnel file to the ever-faithful Mike. As she propped herself up on her bed, Ingrid had to admit she was a little impressed with Mike’s ingenuity. She couldn’t remember the last time she had traced contact between two perps via fax, and the fact that he hadn’t emailed the findings meant their communication was unlikely to be traced. It was building to building contact, not person to person. She made a mental note to look for fax links between suspects in all future investigations.
Ingrid scanned DeWalt’s record, looking for any cases or any postings that hinted at a connection to Russia. His file showed that before joining the bureau, Jacob DeWalt had worked for AT&T designing automated call center systems. He was an electrical engineer by training and had joined the bureau at twenty-eight. He was married with two kids who were now twelve and fifteen and had a solid case to conviction ratio. No commendations or medals, but no warnings or reprimands either in his seventeen years of service. Ingrid suddenly understood why he had gotten the promotion to SSA: DeWalt was a diligent, hardworking, white, straight, middle-aged male who had never pissed anyone off. It was the magic formula for success in an organization like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The blandness of his resumé indicated one of two things. One, this all-American sitcom dad figure was the least likely man on the payroll to be a Russian asset. Or two, it was a genius cover for a spy who planned to rise high and go deep within the organization.
According to the files, DeWalt didn’t speak Russian, or any other language apart from English, and he had never worked in any former Soviet territory. Nothing in his financial records showed unaccountable wealth, and the holidays his kids posted on Instagram were in the range of what an FBI agent on a GS-14 pay grade could afford. His passport had only been used to fly between the UK and the US for the past two years, and his personnel record in London didn’t have any absences for illness or undeclared travel. The very fact that he had just been promoted suggested he had aced all his background checks. If he was a Russian asset, he was damn good at hiding it.
The only red flag—and if she was honest, it was more of a pale pink one—was that Ingrid couldn’t find out much about his wife. She didn’t appear to have any social media accounts, and the only images Ingrid found of her were in the background of her sons’ Instagram photos. Mostly she was too far from the camera, or hiding behind her hands, for Ingrid to perform a reverse image search. The only thing she could surmise about Mrs. DeWalt was that she was Irish, or at least of Irish heritage, judging by the parties the boys attended every March on St. Patrick’s Day. With a name like DeWalt—was that German? South African?—Ingrid was guessing the Celtic connection came from their mom.
Ingrid cracked open a small bottle of vodka from the minibar and took a pull. The sting of the liquor immediately brightened her eyes and suppressed the urge to sleep. She checked her phone in case a glitch meant Sol’s call had gone straight to voicemail.
She returned her attention to the fax printout. The details of a five-bedroom property with a double garage and a home gym caught her eye. It was half the price of her budget for an apartment in London. Ingrid glanced around at her hotel room. Everything she owned didn’t just fit into the 250 square feet of a Hilton mid-range room, it packed down to fit inside two suitcases. She didn’t need a double garage, and she never would.
Enflamed by the vodka, Ingrid looked again at DeWalt’s career history. After Quantico, he’d spent two years in San Diego, then Vermont, then St. Louis before transferring into the Legal Attaché Program where his easy-going personality was well suited to international cooperation. He’d spent a year in Ottawa before moving his family to London.
One of those locations was standing out, and she stared at the list to figure out why. That’s it. In the elevator, DeWalt had gone on about ice cream and extolled the virtues of Ben & Je
rry’s over every other brand. Now she understood: his posting in Vermont had been to the Resident Agency in Burlington. The only thing Ingrid knew about the Vermont capital was that it was famous for being the home of Ben & Jerry’s.
She dialed Mike in Seattle.
“At your service, ma’am,” he said by way of a greeting.
“I have to tell you, Mike,” Ingrid said, taking another sip of vodka, “I thought the fax was a genius move.”
“Why, thank you. Wish I could tell you it was my own idea, but I have to say I kinda borrowed it.”
“Please don’t tell me a drug cartel has been sending faxes undetected for the past couple years.”
“Make it a decade. They’ve been using copy shops to send orders from coast to coast. It was only when one copy shop couldn’t get their fax machine repaired any longer that the whole thing crumbled.”
Ingrid took a beat. “And we work for the finest criminal investigation organization in the world.”
“No wonder so many crooks think the cops are dumb. Sometimes, we are just plain dunces. So, did that stuff I sent have what you need?”
Ingrid finished the bottle. “It was super helpful, thanks.”
“But you need something else?”
“Something real quick. I don’t want to log on to the embassy systems from here. Could you look one thing up for me?”
“Is there any point in me saying I’m too busy, or asking what I’m going to get in return?”
“Is there any point in me answering that?”
“Nope. What is it, Skyberg?”
Ingrid sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers drumming on the nightstand. “Can you look at the database for the RA in Burlington, Vermont?”