“I—I don’t use drugs,” he tried bluffing, but Angelo didn’t have time for the bullshit. He was interested in bigger fish.
“Don’t waste my time. Who’s Mr. C? I’m guessing you feed Mr. C the tips on who’s hard-up for cash and likely to cave to his offer of a loan.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said, crossing his arms and trying to look defiant when in fact, he looked ready to wet himself.
Angelo glanced at Grace. “I think we might have a terrorist threat, don’t you?”
“Yes, I believe this man may be a threat to national security. I suppose we ought to haul him in and give him a standard AC1 interrogation.”
“AC1? What’s that mean? I’m no terrorist,” he protested, as he continued to slide his tongue over chapped lips. “You can’t do this…this is a sovereign nation…you’ve got no power here.”
“A threat to America supersedes all. You can thank the Patriot Act for that.” Angelo smiled and it caused the man to quail a little. And just because he was annoyed at the piece of scum for trying to bluff him, he poured it on a little thick in the hopes that the drug addict would start to babble. “I think the strip search is the worst part, but then again, the waterboarding isn’t a cakewalk, either.”
“Oh, yeah,” Grace agreed, shaking her head. “When it comes to terrorists, it’s as if the Geneva Convention was never enacted. It’s like carte blanche. Frankly, the stuff they do as standard protocol in an AC1 turns my stomach, and I’ve served two tours in the U.S. military on foreign soil.”
“But I’m not a terrorist,” the meth addict exclaimed as a rivulet of sweat slid down his cheek.
“Says who?” Grace’s congenial manner slipped away and there was nothing kind or soft in her demeanor. “You tell us what we want to know or we’ll see to it that your insides are turned upside down and backward until you won’t know if you’re supposed to piss or spit. You think your biggest problem is saving your butt from getting canned? Or protecting this loan shark, Mr. C? Oh no, let me educate you. Those will be the least of your worries once the U.S. Government gets a hold of your sweating, meth-soaked ass. And the best part? It’s all legal. Well, most of it. Now talk, I’m losing patience and I’m hungry.”
“I—I have a phone number that I call when I’ve got someone who fits the criteria,” he said, shaking so much his words were running together.
“What’s his real name?”
“I don’t know. All’s I got is a number.”
Grace looked to Angelo, who shrugged. “Guess it’ll do.” He stared at the man. “Call him. Tell him you have a winner. I want to have a chat with the man.”
The man pulled his cell phone from his pocket and speed-dialed a contact. “I’ve got a juicy one, dumb and glum,” he said into the phone, then hung up. Obviously the statement was some kind of code.
“Now we wait. How long does it usually take?” Angelo asked.
“Not long. A few minutes or so.”
“Damn, not enough time to grab a sandwich,” Grace grumbled, seemingly forgetting about the meth head until he tried slinking away. She slapped her palm against the wall by his head and he jumped. “Going somewhere? We’ll need you for introductions. What’s your name anyway?”
He swallowed. “Gage.”
“Well, Gage—nice name by the way—we’re going to need you to set us up with your friend Mr. C. Think you can do that?” Grace asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, great. Thanks. You’re a doll.”
“He’ll kill me,” Gage pleaded, begging even. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Where do you usually send his prospective clients?” Angelo asked.
“They meet at the bar. I always put them on the second stool nearest to the bathroom. And then he takes it from there.”
“Classy. What do you get out of it?” Grace asked.
“A small bump.”
“Which is?” Grace prompted.
“Ten percent of whatever he’s borrowing.”
“How much did you make off Byron Hicks?”
“Who?”
Angelo growled. “The federal agent whose death we’re investigating.”
“Oh man, I didn’t have nothing to do with that. I don’t remember how much I made. My brain isn’t working great. You’ve got me all freaked out,” Gage complained with a whine that grated on Angelo’s ears. He gestured to Grace who let up the pressure, moving away from the man before he wet himself. “Is that all you want?”
“Yeah, get out of here. But if I find out that you’ve tipped him off I’ll come find you,” Grace promised, eliciting a jerky nod of understanding from Gage before he scuttled away from them. “You want to be the client or do you want me to?”
“I’ll take it. You can come rescue me. I know how you love being the hero,” he said dryly, causing Grace to cackle in laughter.
“That I do.”
Within ten minutes, a man stepped up to the bar and ordered a cocktail, taking his time before saying to Angelo, who appeared to be nursing a beer, “I heard you were down on your luck.”
Angelo smirked, then turned to the man, gauging him to be in his late forties, saying, “Actually, I think my luck just changed. Special Agent Angelo Tucker.” He flashed his badge and the man moved as if to walk away, but Grace peeled away from the wall where she’d been stationed and boxed him in. “As I was saying, my name is Special Agent Tucker…I have a few questions for you. What’s your name?”
“Howard Odgerson,” he said warily, settling back on his stool. “What can I do for you, Agent Tucker?”
“Well, for one, you can tell me if you recognize this man.” He produced Hicks’s picture and placed it on the bar. “And two, you can tell me if you provided him with a loan.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Odgerson said. “And I don’t know the man.”
“Grace?” Angelo motioned and she produced a hand-held fingerprint machine. “This will just take a minute. Place your index finger on the flat spot, please.”
“Why?”
“To take your fingerprint. That much should be obvious.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Nope. Just need to make sure you are who you say you are, Howie,” Angelo said, deliberately baiting him. If he was shady he wouldn’t want to put his finger on that machine. Chances were his name wasn’t Howard, either. Angelo was also willing to bet that whoever he truly was, he was logged in the system. “But we’re investigating a murder and right now we find you of interest. Word has it you’re in the business of providing funds to poor saps who can’t seem to find it through regular channels.”
“Who told you that?” Howard asked, shifting his gaze away from the machine, plainly uncomfortable.
“Never mind the who. Did you know this man?”
“I said no.”
“Look again,” Angelo suggested in a tone that told the man it wasn’t an option to refuse.
Howard reluctantly grabbed the photo and peered at it more closely. After a long moment, he shrugged and shook his head. “No. I don’t recognize the man. I’ve never done business with him.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Angelo asked, nodding to Grace who moved forward and thrust the machine toward Howard. “Your finger, please.”
“I got rights,” Howard said, sweat starting to bead on his upper lip.
“And I don’t have patience. Either give up what you know or put your damn finger on that machine and we’ll play match the felon to the identity. Trust me, in that game, I win.”
Howard muttered an expletive under his breath and glowered at both Grace and Angelo but finally relented. “All right, I gave him some cash, but he already paid the debt.”
“So why didn’t you just say that up front?” Grace asked.
“That’s my business, not yours,” he snapped, which Grace didn’t appreciate at all. Her expression hardened and he realized he must’ve screwed with the wrong agent. “Listen, I run a legitimate bu
siness—”
“There’s a reason loan shark isn’t something you put on the résumé. It’s not legit,” Angelo countered, yet he was troubled by the dead end. “So, he paid in full?”
“Yeah.” Howard nodded. “Surprised me, too. Here I thought the guy was a good lead and then he up and paid off the debt with minimal interest factored in.”
He and Grace shared a look of disappointment. Howie might be scum preying on gambling addicts, but he wasn’t their guy—at least not today.
“Keep your nose clean, Howie. We’re watching you,” Angelo said as Grace pocketed her machine. “And I might think of getting out of the loan-shark business if you want to stay out of prison. Mr. C is closing up shop in this place. Understand?”
“Or what?” he dared to ask.
Grace stepped up with a hard-edged smile. “Or else you and I get to know each other real well. And I’m not a nice, gentle kind of person.”
“She’s crazy,” Howard said, not quite sure what to make of Grace’s threat, but the uncertainty in his stare told Angelo he took her seriously.
Angelo grinned. “You have no idea. It’s what I like about her.”
They cleared the casino doors and when the valet brought the car around, Grace’s low rumble of laughter followed his incredulous, “AC1? What the hell does that mean? Nice touch.”
“She’s crazy,” Grace mimicked with a grin. “That’s fun. We should terrorize scum buckets more often. It’s a great stress reliever.”
He laughed but sobered quickly when he realized they’d hit a dead end. “You know this means we’re back to square one,” he said.
Grace’s mirth faded away as she sighed. “Yeah. I was hoping to find more to go on with the gambling angle but now it seems not only was Hicks a boring individual in life, he was fairly boring in death, too.”
“That’s harsh,” he said.
Grace shrugged. “I know. Just calling it like I see it. So now what?”
“Back to the wife. Something was definitely missed.”
Chapter 8
Angelo and Grace stepped to the front door of Byron Hicks’s house and while Grace knocked, Angelo took in his surroundings. The place was moderately sized, not new, but in decent shape. No neighbors close by, the trees provided a canopy of privacy that was common to the area, but it was a generally “nice” stretch of property. It was as bland as Hicks’s personnel file, thought Angelo.
The door opened and a short, stout, blonde woman peered at them with red-rimmed eyes. She surmised they were agents by their garb, which didn’t surprise Angelo given her husband’s employment. “I already gave a statement,” she said, sniffing and wiping at her nose with a tissue. “And an agent already picked up his issue effects.”
“We’re sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Hicks,” Angelo said with the gravity the situation required. “But we have some additional questions regarding your husband’s fishing trip to the Hoh reservation.”
At the mention of the reservation her mouth trembled and turned down with obvious disgust. “I told him to drop it. It was none of his business but he wouldn’t listen. That was so like Byron—filled with delusions of grandeur—chasing after a story that’d been long dead and no one cared about.”
Angelo’s ears pricked at the careless clue dropped at their feet and his previous questions about the gambling went stone-cold. “What story? According to your statement, your husband went to the Hoh to fish salmon.”
“And apparently to gamble at nearby casinos,” Grace murmured, unaware of how the woman’s unknowing comment had affected him.
At the mention of the gambling, the wife’s cheeks flushed and she started to say something, but Angelo cut her off, uninterested in that aspect of the man’s life. At this point he couldn’t care less if Hicks had mortgaged the family home to fund his gambling escapades; Angelo wanted to know what the wife meant. “What story? What was your husband working on that no one knew about?”
Her eyes widened as if she’d just realized her mistake but extreme grief and bitterness at her loss ate away at her ability to maintain any semblance of caution, which worked for Angelo perfectly. She wiped at her nose again and gestured for them to follow. He and Grace exchanged looks of interest and stepped over the threshold.
The woman sank into a recliner that was ringed with soiled tissues. After grabbing two fresh tissues, she began with a watery sigh. “I don’t know why I didn’t just come out and admit it when the Bureau asked for my statement…I guess it was force of habit. Byron didn’t want anyone to know what he was digging into. He was paranoid that someone else might come along and take the case from him before he had the chance to crack it…but honestly, at this point, what does it matter? He’s dead because of it and I don’t rightly care. I’m…a…” her eyes welled and she pressed the tissue to her face to catch the tears as they spilled down her cheeks “…widow now. And it’s not fair.”
Angelo felt a modicum of sympathy for Mrs. Hicks, but his eagerness for information overrode all else. “Go on,” he said, earning a look that said Dial it down a notch from Grace. “Take your time,” he tacked on for appearance’s sake, when, in reality, he wanted to shake her and say Get on with it, woman.
“He was a good agent,” Grace said to the woman, encouraging her to continue. “Tell us what he was working on. Maybe we can find out who did this.”
The woman shrugged, her gaze darting, as if she were unsure what to share and what to hold back. Angelo jumped in, pressing. “I know you want justice for your husband. We’re on your side. He was a fellow agent and we don’t take his death lightly. Someone needs to pay. We can’t make sure that they do without your help. You have to be his voice,” he said, holding her stare with his own. He could feel her wavering. He just needed a little more pressure and she’d crack. “If you know something, it’s your duty to tell us, but forget all that…do it for Byron.”
Her breath hitched in her throat and her eyes welled. “It was a cold case,” she shared, her voice small and grief-stricken. “Something about a kid who was killed on the reservation more than fifteen years ago.”
Cold shock washed over him. Only one kid had been killed on the reservation, and the culprit never found. His throat tightened as if someone had wrapped their fingers around it and squeezed. “Go on,” he said, his nerves tensing.
The woman dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t know a lot,” she said apologetically. “Byron didn’t like to share too much about his work. He said it was against protocol to share details about cases and I respected that so I didn’t ask too many questions. But he was so worked up about this case and I never understood why. I mean I felt bad for the kid—he was only sixteen when he died—but really, it wasn’t our problem and I didn’t know why he cared so much.”
“What was the name of the kid?” Grace asked, shooting Angelo a dark look. “Do you remember that?”
She nodded, shrinking a little from the intense stare Angelo was giving her. “I told him to drop it,” she said defensively. “I knew it was going to be nothing but trouble—”
“The name,” Angelo cut in, barely able to breathe. “What was the name?”
“Waylon Tucker,” she answered in a small voice, glancing at Grace for help. “He was sure that if he broke the cold case he’d be promoted and then we could afford to leave Beaver and move closer to Seattle. But I told him to leave it be. He didn’t listen,” she added mournfully. “And now I’m a widow.”
“Why that case?” Angelo asked, surprised his voice didn’t waver.
“Well, he came across the case when he started going up there to fish and once he started poking around, he was hooked. It gave him a thrill, I think, to be doing something that mattered. He was always being passed over for promotions and he wanted to prove that he could be a good investigator.”
“That case wasn’t FBI jurisdiction,” Angelo said, mostly to Grace. He returned to the woman. “Did he mention any contacts he’d made while on the case?”
She shook
her head. “But he seemed excited about something he’d found, which was why he wanted to spend more time on the reservation. He wasted a week’s worth of vacation that we were going to use to go to see my mother in Utah, spending it chasing after ghosts.”
More specifically, the ghost of Angelo’s little brother.
He needed air. He mumbled something that sounded like his thanks and then bolted for the door. Once outside, he drew a deep lungful of cold air, his hands bracketing his hips as he fought for clarity of mind, but Waylon as he’d last seen him kept battering his calm.
Sixteen was too young to die. Some coward had ended his little brother’s life and had never been held accountable.
Now a stranger had tried to find justice for Waylon, only to die as well.
He rubbed his forehead, not surprised when he heard the door opening and closing. Within seconds Grace was by his side.
“Sounds like this case just got personal,” she surmised, open surprise in her tone.
“Yeah,” he agreed grimly.
“You okay?”
He gave her a look. “No.”
“If you’d said yes, I’d have called bullshit on you. So what now?”
Angelo closed his eyes, saw Waylon lying on the metal slab, his young body punctured by a bullet, his young life ended.
Anger, fresh and raw, choked out his ability to remain cool. He’d tried to find answers when Waylon had died but he’d come up empty, not that a nineteen-year-old kid had much to draw from, resource-wise.
Nothing—and everything—had changed.
“What’s next?” Grace peered at him, waiting for his direction in light of the development. For all her tough appearance, Grace had a soft spot and apparently he’d found it. Maybe his face showed the shock he couldn’t hide. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and Grace offered a crooked smile. “Probably never saw that coming, huh?”
“Not by a mile,” he admitted. Shake it off, focus. “Looks like we’re going to need to spend a few more days with the tribe. You okay with that?”
Grace peered at him, her brown eyes knowing. “It’s fine with me. The question is…is it fine with you?”
Cold Case Reunion Page 6