IF SHE RAN

by Blake Pierce

  “Absolutely not. You’re already in enough trouble because of her as it is.”

  “You’re right. But you know how interrogations work. Who is she going to get more defensive with? Who is she most likely to accidentally let something slip with? A woman she loathes or a brand new agent that she’s barely spoken to?”

  There was a moment of silence—a moment in which DeMarco gave her a pained look. She could sense where this was headed. She could sense that this case, in a few moments, would no longer be hers to run.

  “You’re right,” he said. “But for right now, let DeMarco and this Detective Pritchard fellow tackle it. You can stay there for now as support only. But I’m not sending you in there unless it’s an absolute last resort.”

  “Okay,” she said. She was surprised and a little deflated; she had been certain Duran would allow her to speak with Jennifer. Or maybe you’re just thinking a little too highly of yourself, she thought.

  She ended the call and looked to DeMarco. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I couldn’t let this go. It wasn’t because I didn’t think you could handle it…I just—”

  “I know. It still isn’t the best feeling.” She sighed and nodded toward the door. “Detective Pritchard is in the conference room with some of the cops. I’m sure they’d appreciate the help.”

  It was a blow to her ego but she said nothing about it. She simply nodded and took her leave, locating the conference room. Before she could step inside, though, Pritchard was heading out.

  “Agent Wise,” he said, “I’ll skip the pleasantries and just say that I’m sorry to hear about the hot water you’re in.”

  “Yeah, me too. Is there anything I can do to help while Jennifer Nobilini is being interrogated?”

  “I’m on the way out to the school to get her computer right now. You’re welcome to ride along. Things here are going to get a little heated. Nobilini has already reached out to her lawyer—and she’s got a good one. So honestly, unless we can prove something in the next day or so, she’s not only going to walk, but she’s also talking about suing you and the bureau as well. And if we can’t find anything on the computer, she may be able to walk as soon as this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, then let’s go get that computer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  It was obvious that Pritchard felt a little awkward to have her riding along with him. They both tried to break the ice with both small talk and pertinent details about the case, but it all fell flat. It then occurred to her that because of her inability to let things go, she had placed herself and the bureau in a fairly bad situation. And now she was left with about a day—if that—to clean up her mess.

  When they arrived at the school to pick the laptop up, things had resumed as normal. The art exhibit was finishing up. Parents were leaving the school with art pieces proudly tucked under their arms. Kids had all gone back to their classes and the office was business as usual.

  When they got back out to the car, Pritchard walked toward the passenger side. “You mind driving? There’s not much I can pull off of this thing without certain software, but I might be able to find a few things.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  She got behind the wheel and, for the second time that morning, exited the Ashton Elementary parking lot. As she got onto the main road, she kept track of what Pritchard was doing. She watched from the corner of her eye as he went into his phone’s settings, cut on the feature to use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot, and then used it to get Jennifer’s laptop online.

  He did the same thing Kate had done, going to the internet history and looking around. “Well, if she was up to something, she’s not very stealthy about it. There’s at least three weeks of internet history right here.”

  He located the ad she had found and read it out loud. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. But what I don’t get…well, her husband died eight years ago. Why is she talking about her husband in this ad?”

  Kate almost said I don’t know. But she was starting to have a good idea. Not one that she was quite willing to share just yet, though.

  A few minutes later, Pritchard let out a small hmmm sound. “She went to a banking website a day later. And there’s no other occurrence within this three-week span that she visited the site. So she’s not big on online banking apparently. Just this one occurrence, right after the ad.”

  “Could we call the bank and get her information?” Kate asked. “I could but, as you know, I don’t really have those privileges right now.”

  “I’ll call Agent DeMarco. I’d let the PD handle it but when it comes to banking and getting people’s personal info, us lowly detectives and cops don’t have the same pull as FBI agents. Depending on who you speak with, they may ask for a warrant.”

  “Then let’s get it. As quickly as possible.”

  He did it right there and then, calling up DeMarco while Kate drove. It made her feel useless but she also knew that she should really just be glad that Duran hadn’t completely yanked her off of the case this morning. He’d had every right to do so—a fact that made her wonder if she was taking advantage of his good graces.

  He ended the call less than a minute later. “She’s on it. She’s calling the bank and is going to start the warrant process right away. I think it might be a good idea if we just swing by the local branch on the way back to the precinct. What do you say? I know your privileges have been somewhat revoked, but you still know how to flash that ID, right?”

  “I do.” And it wasn’t like it would be the first time she’d used it when she wasn’t supposed to. She’d done it a handful of times since picking her career back up post-retirement.

  He continued to search around her browsing history but the only other comment he made between their and the local banking branch Jennifer used was: “Damn, this woman loves Pinterest.”

  “You know the NYPD better than I do,” Kate said. “How long on that warrant?”

  “With the FBI pushing for it, I’d guess two or three hours.”

  “Not bad. I wonder if there’s anything we can do at the station until it comes through.”

  “There’s always digging through research,” Pritchard joked.

  But that was perfectly fine with Kate. In fact, anything she could do to help in that moment would be welcome.

  ***

  When Kate parked in the bank lot, she felt the pressure of the day on her. She could almost hear the ticking of a clock, counting down not only the moments until Jennifer Nobilini would be released, but the moments until her likely removal from the bureau and any legal damages that might come about as a result of Jennifer’s hasty and public arrest.

  When they walked into the bank, Kate carried the warrant with her. It had taken two hours and twenty minutes to get it in her hands—nothing short of a miracle based on some of the experiences Kate had seen in the past.

  They discreetly share their business with a woman at the front cashier’s window and were then asked to wait one moment. It was a quick moment, no more than twenty seconds, before they were greeted by an older man who came from somewhere in the back of the bank.

  “Are you the agents asking about a client’s accounts?” the man asked. His name tag identified him as Ray Kirby.

  “Yes,” Kate said, showing her ID and cringing internally as she did so. “I’m Agent Kate Wise and this is my local assist, Detective Pritchard. We were told Agent DeMarco called ahead for us.”

  “She did. Come on into my office and let me see what I can do to help you.”

  He walked quickly, whether out of the excitement of a break in his daily monotony or out of the desire to get a federal agent out of his bank right away, Kate wasn’t sure. He led them down a small hallway behind the primary cashier windows and into a large office. He invited them to have a seat in the chairs on the front end of his desk while he sat down behind it.

  “I already took the liberty of pulling up Mrs. Nobilini’s account information based on what Agent DeMarco told me,” he said.r />
  He turned his desktop monitor at an angle where all three of them could see it. “As you can see, most of her transactions are rather large, though there aren’t many. But we’ve tracked this one transaction you see over and over again, and it is to pay off her credit card every month. It seems she puts all expenditures on the cards and pays it off regularly. What I have here on the screen goes back eighteen months and the largest is for a little over three thousand dollars. However, there is one large transaction right here,” he said, pointing to a transaction from two days before Jack Tucker’s death. “And I can’t make heads nor tails of where this money was sent. A private account, perhaps.”

  Kate looked at the transaction. It was a transfer of twenty thousand dollars. Then, below that, there was another transaction, a transfer to the same sender, this one for two thousand dollars.

  “What would we need to find out where those transfers were sent?” Kate asked.

  “We can try it from here, but it might take a while,” Kirby said.

  Kate had known this would be the answer; she hated the fact that she knew it would take only a single call to the bureau to get someone started on figuring this out. It might take a day or two to get it cracked, but it would get done. It was just another task she’d have to ask DeMarco to handle, in light of her new designation.

  She then looked to Pritchard as one of the strands of her theory started to thrum. “Do you still have Beringer’s laptop in your possession?”

  “It’s stored away in Evidence at the precinct.”

  And as he said it, he seemed to pick up on her train of thought. He stood up quickly, thanked Ray Kirby for his time, and then hurried out. Kate did the same, loving the thrill of the hunt but wishing she had more time.

  ***

  Within an hour, Kate was back at the precinct, in a conference room with Pritchard, DeMarco, and a few cops who had been assigned to help as needed. Pritchard was working closely with the precinct’s top tech guy to figure out where the twenty-thousand-dollar transfer was sent while Kate looked over a printout of all of Jennifer Nobilini’s transactions dating all the way back to the year Frank had been killed. It had been waiting for them when they arrived at the station, sent on behalf of Ray Kirby from the bank.

  Meanwhile, Jennifer Nobilini’s lawyer had showed up. She was practically demanding to speak with Kate, but Kate ignored her. She even had DeMarco threaten to press charges against her if she continued to be so domineering and trying to interrupt the investigation. Kate could actually hear them speaking loudly outside the conference room door as Pritchard knocked on the table’s surface in celebration of a discovery.

  “We did find something else,” he said. “Not where all of that money went, but a Wikihow page. She was looking into how to purchase a large amount of Bitcoin between the time she posted that ad and Jack Tucker was killed. It looks like it might have actually been the same day that Zeus Beringer showed up at Ashton Elementary.”

  “I know what Bitcoin is but I’m not as cool as I look,” Kate said. “Can you explain the relevance?”

  “Bitcoin is the basic preferred currency on the dark web. Drugs, prostitution, child pornography, weapons, all of it. About eighty percent of all transactions on the dark web are conducted in Bitcoin.”

  “Is that what she spent the twenty thousand on?”

  “I don’t think so. Not unless she was buying them from someone that really went all out on being private. But based on the fact that she wasn’t even smart enough to erase her browsing history, I highly doubt it. No…if this money was sent to someone, I think it was a wire transfer and nothing more. But whoever she sent it to directed it to an account that is incredibly difficult to trace. Maybe on offshore account or some sort of encrypted cash-related site on the dark web.”

  It wasn’t the information they were looking for, but it spurred Kate on. They were defiantly on to something…now it just came down to making all of the pieces fit and finding that one last piece that would make it all make sense.

  A few moments later, Kate heard a little murmur of excitement from Pritchard and the tech guy as they apparently figured out how to access her history beyond the point of the last time she had cleaned it out.

  “Here’s something else,” Pritchard said. “A little over a month ago, she visited a site that offers dark web software. It spends most of the time describing Tor. But we’ve already checked her computer for things like that and there’s nothing. Maybe she read up on it and got scared.”

  “Which begs the question why someone like Jennifer Nobilini would even want to access the dark web,” Kate said. “Or want any sort of anonymous browsing.”

  She turned back to the printouts of Jennifer’s bank history. She had made her way down to the year of Frank’s death. It was the last page of fifteen and it was there that a large number jumped up, springing out of nowhere.

  “This might be it,” Kate said, pointing to the entry. “Pritchard, look at this. March, eight years ago—a month before Frank was killed. There are three transfers, to an undisclosed recipient.”

  They all looked to the entries in question: three transfers of twelve thousand dollars, all within a span of four days.

  “How did her husband not figure this out?” the tech guy said.

  “Because it’s a personal account,” Kate said. “They might have seemed like a perfect couple to everyone else, but they apparently didn’t trust one another with their money.”

  “So,” Pritchard said, “a few days before Frank Nobilini is killed, there are these three transfers from her bank account. Fast forward eight years and there’s a twenty-thousand-dollar one and a smaller one to go along with it, just a few days before Jack Tucker is killed. That’s not just coincidence.”

  A knock on the door interrupted them as DeMarco stepped in. “Kate, this lawyer is going to end up pissing me off. Can you just talk to her? Just to shut her up, if nothing else.”

  “Not yet,” Kate said. “DeMarco…look at this. I think we’ve got her.”

  DeMarco stepped inside and took a seat at the table. Kate and Pritchard filled her in on the discoveries they’d made since confiscating Jennifer’s laptop from the school. A look of something close to fascination came over DeMarco’s face as she leaned back in her chair and let out a deep breath.

  “That’s one hundred percent better than anything I’ve gotten out of her all morning. She has admitted to the affair. But she won’t give a name. But with all of this,” she said, indicating the laptop and the bank printouts, “the affair seems like small potatoes.”

  “I want to speak to her,” Kate said. “Would you risk calling Duran for me?”

  DeMarco hesitated for a moment and then nodded. “Sure,” she finally said. “It’s not like my head is on the line.” She then looked to Pritchard and the officer apologetically. “Can we have the room, guys?”

  The men nodded and got up without any argument. Pritchard gave Kate a little smile as he walked through the doorway and closed the door behind him.

  “This makes no sense to me,” DeMarco said. “Sure, I can see where all of these revelations lead, but it makes no sense.”

  “Not at first,” Kate said. “But there’s something there, buried under it all.” She then took a few seconds to explain her theory to DeMarco—how they had all of the answers and, more importantly, the right person in custody.

  DeMarco rubbed at her head in frustration and then pulled out her cell phone. She called Duran, looking back and forth between Kate and the bank printouts. Kate listened as DeMarco filled him in on these new discoveries. She also detected the waver in DeMarco’s voice as the conversation reached its end.

  “All of this came from Agent Wise,” DeMarco said. “And with all due respect, sir, I think she was right earlier. I think the heat between her and Jennifer can work in our favor—especially in light of these new discoveries.”

  There were a few seconds where Kate could only hear the murmurs of Duran’s voice. DeMarco then slow
ly handed the phone to Kate with a mock look of fright. “He wants to speak to you,” she said.

  Kate took the phone. She knew that if there was any chance of redeeming herself and potentially salvaging her reputation with the bureau, it rested on this call and anything that came after it.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes to speak with her,” Duran said, short and straight to the point. “If noting comes of it, I want you out of New York right away. If I have to, I’ll immediately fire you and have you escorted out of the city by the police. Please don’t make me do that, Kate.”

  “I won’t. Thank you, sir.”

  She ended the call and handed the phone back to DeMarco. An uncomfortable silence hung between them for a moment before DeMarco broke it. “Be careful,” she said. “I honestly hate you a little bit for stealing the show from me, but that doesn’t mean I want you to go in there and totally ruin your second career run.”

  Kate smiled. Second career run. Is that what this is?

  “Thanks, DeMarco. You want to come in with me?”

  “No. I’m good watching from the observation room.” She opened the door for Kate and said: “Good work. I…well, I never get tired of being surprised by you.”

  “I could say the same for you.”

  DeMarco smiled and headed out. “Let me make it easier for you. Give me two minutes and I’ll have a few of the policemen take the lawyer in another room, pretending to care about what Jennifer is claiming as her side of the story.”

  “Duran would not approve of that,” Kate pointed out with her own smile.

  DeMarco only shrugged as she started down the hall.

  And with that, Kate left the conference room and headed down the hall to speak with Jennifer Nobilini one last time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  When Kate was sure that DeMarco had occupied the lawyer with a few poor policemen, she entered the interrogation room. Jennifer sat up straight in her chair behind the basic interrogation table. She looked like a tiger had entered the room, not a fifty-six-year-old woman. She looked beyond Kate, to the door as it closed, as if hoping someone else would be entering as well.