Mortal Sin

by Allison Brennan

  She needed to get a grip. How could she be an FBI agent when a news article could send her into a tailspin?

  Focus.

  Prenter was robbed. D.C. was a violent city. How many murders last year? Two hundred? More than one every other day. One forcible rape each day. Robbery and assault was astronomical, dozens every day.

  Club 10.

  Why was he at Club 10 when he was supposed to be in Fairfax meeting her fictitious cyber-ego? By 9:45 when he was killed, he should have been on his way to jail. What happened?

  Cody would have told her had he known, wouldn’t he? He was a D.C. cop; how could he not know?

  But he didn’t work homicides specifically. He was patrol, so even if he’d heard about the robbery he’d have no reason to ask about the victim’s identity.

  She had to talk to him, but she needed more information about the murder.

  Lucy dressed quickly and left. She needed answers. Though it was Saturday, the morgue was still open to employees, and often the autopsy file included a copy of the police report. Having a plan settled her stomach and gave her the determination she needed to get through the rest of the day.

  And, despite her alarm, she was more than happy to have something to focus on other than Roger Morton and what Kate found—or didn’t find—on his computer.

  Noah Armstrong wasn’t surprised that Kate Donovan beat him to Quantico Saturday morning. She hadn’t wanted to leave last night, but he’d convinced her that if she didn’t get a couple of hours’ sleep, she’d be no good to him. By the time they had all the material transported to Quantico, logged into evidence, and processed it had been nearly two a.m. Now was not the time to cut corners. If Morton had indeed been working with a partner and that partner was setting up an illegal porn site, if they didn’t preserve the chain of evidence, some creep might walk on a technicality. Nothing they found in these files would be admissible if they screwed up the basics.

  Kate understood that, even though it obviously frustrated her.

  “When did you get here?” He put his briefcase down on the small worktable in the corner of the windowless cave where Kate worked. The room was large but packed with electronics and computers, some working, some not, all taking up space. Noah would go stir-crazy down here; Kate seemed in her element.

  “Seven,” she replied, fixated on the screen in front of her. It was running through numbers and letters at a great speed; she couldn’t possibly be reading anything.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Breaking Morton’s code. It’s not a complex one; I have a program that will have it soon—it’s only been running for ten minutes. I copied the drive first, so I’m not even working off the original data in case he has a Trojan set up to erase data. But he was never that smart back then. Trask was the brains.”

  “Trask?”

  “Adam Scott. He went by the name Trask.”

  “What about the disks?” Noah asked. “Do you want me to get started on them?”

  “I set Hans up next door.”

  “Dr. Hans Vigo?”

  “Yeah—that’s okay, right? You said you were working with him.”

  Noah didn’t have a specific problem. “You could have asked me first.”

  “I should have. I’m sorry.” She glanced at him. “Really. But this case—I made a huge mistake six years ago when I was part of the plea agreement. I have to find these answers, for Lucy. I’m not taking over, and I’ll try not to step on your toes, but Hans is one of the few people I know who can view the data on multiple levels—risk assessment of the victims, legal or illegal porn, child endangerment. Plus he knows the players from the years I was tracking Adam Scott and Roger Morton before Paige was killed.”

  “I understand.” He sat down in a metal chair next to Kate. “I need to follow up on something today, but I need to know for sure that I can trust you.”

  She looked at him. “If you didn’t trust me, why did you let me work the data?”

  “Because I heard you were the best.”

  Her lips curved up slightly. “True.”

  “So I need you, but I also know you have a history with Morton and a relationship with his victim. Whatever you find, I want to know. Everything.”

  She nodded, but Noah couldn’t read her blank expression to discern if she would hold to their agreement. “I can tell you from looking at the physical files that he was copying disks manually onto his computer. He had a system that is very straightforward—after he viewed the disk and presumably imported it, he marked it with a code. ‘X’ is straight, soft-core porn. ‘XX’ is straight, hard-core. ‘XXX’ is violent hard-core, possibly nonconsensual. ‘WC’ is webcam, probably hidden webcam or homemade sex tapes. The ‘WC’ is rated by the fetish—up-skirt, hidden videos, et cetera. It’s become all the rage now for teenagers to record themselves having sex and post the tapes on the Internet.” She shook her head. “They really don’t understand what they’re doing with their future.”

  She handed Noah a sheet. “Hans wrote that when he got here a few hours ago. It gives us a cheat sheet of priorities.”

  “What’s ‘P’ stand for and why is it in red?”

  “Anything with a ‘P’ means a minor likely under the age of fourteen is involved. Hans sent those immediately to our child pornography task force. They can run them through their offender database, which will save us a lot of time and give us a better chance to save some of them. However, Morton wasn’t creating these files. He was creatng a clearinghouse of sorts, which makes tracing the evidence to the source next to impossible.”

  Very little riled Noah; crimes against children was one of the few things that made him see red. While the FBI and local law enforcement had made great strides in investigating and prosecuting child pornography, the sheer number of cases was staggering. If they couldn’t identify the victim or the offender, there was little they could do except put the images in their database in case they popped up again. Working cybercrimes against children was emotionally the hardest job in the Bureau, hands down, and one of the few squads that agents could transfer out of without difficulty.

  Kate said, “I’m not going to do anything stupid, Noah. I understand the trust you’ve placed in me, and believe me that I want to stop whoever Morton was working with as much as you do. The legal way.”

  Noah stood. “I hope to be back before long. When Abigail went to the motel yesterday, the part-time clerk was there. Today the manager is back, and he’s the one who checked Morton in. I hope he has more information, but yesterday we got squat.”

  Though Lucy’s internship was part-time Monday through Friday, most full-time morgue staff rotated shifts, so she knew nearly everyone who worked there. She always made it a point to talk to everyone, even though her position wasn’t permanent. She found that she could learn far more about a job, the real job, if she befriended people.

  She also learned that no one cared about the details of why she wanted to look at files, so when she walked into the intake room to pull the file on Brad Prenter no one questioned her. If someone had, she’d have come up with something plausible—such as making sure she’d filled out forms right. But no one questioned what she did.

  The autopsy had been done yesterday afternoon, and she was correct—the body was scheduled for pickup by a local funeral home on Monday morning. Because it was a homicide, all evidence was in the evidence room. Clothing and other contents on Prenter’s body were still in the drying chamber. They had to dry the clothing and then comb it for any trace blood evidence. The articles would be packaged for possible trial.

  Crime scene photos and the corpses that surrounded Lucy when she worked at the morgue didn’t bother her, but this was different: in a weird way, she had known Brad Prenter. He’d been out Thursday night because he thought he was meeting her alter ego, Tanya. A chill went through her body, causing the hair at the base of her skull to rise as she opened the file and saw a picture of his body on the autopsy table. A DVD was attached to the file—
homicide autopsies were routinely recorded.

  She couldn’t view the DVD without breaking the evidence seal, so she put that aside and read the report. Three entry wounds to the abdomen fired from two to four feet away. No exit wounds. Bullets had been sent to the laboratory, standard procedure for ballistics testing. They’d also go to the FBI to add to their database and run against other ballistic reports to determine whether the gun had been used in a previous crime—solved or unsolved.

  According to the pathologist, the wounds to the torso were fatal—the liver had been hit, a lung, and the stomach—but the killer had also shot Prenter in the back of the head at an angle that would have had Prenter on his knees. He died instantly from that final shot.

  Three bullets to the front, then one in the back. Lucy closed her eyes to picture a possible scenario. Killer faces Prenter—either Prenter knew him and didn’t try to run, or the killer startled him and shot him without giving Prenter the chance to run. Prenter falls to his knees, suggesting a low-caliber bullet. Higher-caliber bullets would most likely force the victim back, not down.

  Then the killer walked around and shot Prenter in the back of the head. To ensure he was dead.

  But Prenter would have died anyway. Probably in minutes. Had Prenter known his killer and the killer feared he’d say his name? Was the overkill to make sure he died before his body was found?

  A copy of the evidence log was in the file, including the whereabouts of each piece recovered. Items found on Prenter’s body were here at the morgue or the lab, though from experience Lucy knew that some personal effects and drugs would be separated and sent to the laboratory or evidence room. Vials found in his pants had been sent to the lab for analysis, but the results weren’t back yet. Blood samples—they’d done a standard tox screen in the autopsy room and already had his alcohol content, just barely legally drunk, low enough that he shouldn’t have been grossly intoxicated.

  A copy of the initial police report was included, but not any of the follow-up investigation. Damn, she really wanted to see the rest of the police report and hoped Cody would get it for her. Was it asking too much? She hoped not; she didn’t want to abuse their friendship, but she had to know what had happened with Prenter.

  Something felt very wrong, and until she knew the circumstances surrounding his murder she wouldn’t let it go.

  THIRTEEN

  Sean left the city early Saturday morning and drove an hour to an assisted living facility in Baltimore to meet Dustin Fong, another former employee of Trask Enterprises, who had been with the company longer than any other employee.

  Fong could barely remember his own name let alone who Roger Morton was. The staff nurse said he’d been shot in the head and left for dead four years ago. He had no memories and while he could function on a minimal level, he had the attention span of a five-year-old. His only visitor was his sister, who came the first weekend of every month from her home in Maine. She’d been there on Sunday, January 2, and before that Saturday, December 4.

  Sean crossed him off his list—he’d been promising on paper, but if he had any valuable information, it had been destroyed by the bullet. Roger couldn’t have gotten anything from him. Had the sister been in D.C. during the window of time Morton was there, Sean would have tracked her down, but it didn’t seem likely. He sent Jayne at RCK West an email to check out Danielle Fong Clements and her husband, Bruce, just to cover his bases, but neither name had come up as a possible associate of Morton or Scott, then or now.

  Sean drove back toward the city, stopping at a club in Silver Spring owned by Sergey Yuran, a known trafficker. Yuran brought in whatever was in demand from Russia: prostitutes, drugs, or weapons.

  Sean’s brother Duke would never have let him talk to Sergey alone. But one thing Sean had that Duke didn’t was the ability to hide his emotions and play the game. Duke wouldn’t have been able to disguise his loathing of the criminal. Though the club didn’t open for another couple hours, the door was unlocked. Sean walked in, face blank, leaving his judgment at the door.

  He assessed the club within seconds; five booths were occupied, but the scarred, good-looking blond man in the back sitting with an illegal Russian—Sean could tell simply by how she responded to a stranger walking in—was Sergey Yuran.

  There were four bodyguards in the room at every entrance and one next to Yuran. Overkill, in Sean’s opinion, but it would give Yuran the sense of complete control in any situation because he had multiple shields. It also told Sean that Yuran was paranoid. He tucked that tidbit away for future use as he approached the largest of the four and handed him a business card. “Sean Rogan to see Mr. Yuran.”

  The bodyguard told him to stay, and Sean obeyed. Now wasn’t the time for sudden movements or disagreements.

  He didn’t make any pretenses of ignoring the exchange, but watched the bodyguard approach Sergey Yuran and hand him Sean’s business card. Yuran had a poker face, but his feet gave him away. They went from crossed at the ankles to flat-footed under the table. No other part of his body registered a reaction. He spoke low, in Russian, and the bodyguard returned.

  “Mr. Yuran asked if you have a death wish.”

  “No sir, I do not.” He didn’t elaborate, and instead waited for the bodyguard to ask the next question.

  “What business do you have with Mr. Yuran?”

  “Personal,” Sean said.

  The bodyguard stared and didn’t move. This game could go on all day, and usually Sean would enjoy the challenge, but he didn’t have the time.

  “I want to know if Mr. Yuran had Roger Morton killed last Friday night. If so, I’d like to shake his hand and thank him. If not, I’d like to know who did, so I can shake their hand.”

  His blunt response had the bodyguard show a rare, albeit brief, look of surprise. He left Sean again, though two guards moved in to flank him.

  When the big guy returned, he ordered Sean to turn around and submit to a search. Sean complied. He wouldn’t get near Sergey Yuran with a weapon. “As long as I get them back,” he said.

  “If you live, you will,” Big Guy said.

  Fair enough.

  Sean was relieved of his .45 and his backup .22. When the guy was done, Sean said loud enough for Yuran to hear, “You missed the H&K blade. Inside right pocket of the jacket.”

  He couldn’t help himself, but it cost him. He was searched again, then a fist connected with his right kidney. He winced and closed his eyes a moment for the pain to pass.

  The bodyguard led Sean to Yuran’s table. The Russian girl was gone. Whatever papers Yuran had been reading had also disappeared.

  “You have balls, Mr. Rogan,” Yuran said in a heavy but understandable Russian accent. Sean knew it was fake. Yuran was Russian, but he’d been born and bred in the U.S.A.

  “So I’ve been told.” He didn’t sit until the bodyguard motioned for him to do so. When he did, the guard moved to prevent him from suddenly leaving.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “More or less.”

  Yuran said, “Your brother put a hit out on me ten years ago.”

  “You must have come to an agreement. You’re still alive.”

  Sean had no idea which brother Sergey Yuran was talking about. It could have been Liam, since Liam was in Europe, but Liam wouldn’t have put out the hit. He’d most likely have killed Sergey himself, if he felt strongly about it, but Liam didn’t feel strongly about much of anything. He didn’t see Duke putting a hit out on anyone, even a cold criminal like Yuran, but Duke had surprised him in the past. Kane? The most likely.

  But Sean didn’t ask. He knew whom to get the answer from later.

  “Why do you come to speak to me?”

  “Roger Morton was killed last week in Alexandria. Friday night, around midnight, take or leave.”

  “If I had killed Mr. Morton, there would be no body to find.”

  “I have no doubt. I didn’t think you killed him. He was in D.C. to meet with someone regarding a special busine
ss opportunity, similar to the business he ran with his dead partner, Adam Scott. You might know him as Trask.”

  Sergey laughed heartily. “Ahh, Trask. He let women control him. Just because you kill a woman doesn’t make you a man. I suppose it was—what do those God people say? Divine providence? Fate?—that had one of his girls killing him in cold blood.”

  Sean had to use every ounce of control not to react to Yuran calling Lucy one of Scott’s “girls.” Whether Yuran knew anything about Lucy or not, Sean didn’t know, but he didn’t want her on his radar. Yuran was watching Sean like a hawk while pretending to be more interested in the scantily clad female bartender working behind the bar.

  “Why you come to me?” Yuran asked, sipping his drink. “Why risk your life? I could kill you and no one would find your body. It would be extremely satisfactory to send your head overseas.”

  It had been Liam. What was he up to? Ten years ago? But that was a story for another day, because Sean had to focus on finding Morton’s killer and making sure that Lucy wasn’t in danger.

  “Your name popped up as a former associate of Trask Enterprises. I’m not interested in your business. I’m only interested in finding out who Morton was meeting in D.C.”

  Yuran was quiet, assessing Sean with a blatant interest, running through every possible scenario in his head. Sean knew because he often did the same thing.

  “I have no reason to help you, Mr. Rogan.”

  “Of course you do. It’ll be your good deed for the year.”

  “I don’t do good deeds.”

  “Might as well start now.”

  He knew something. Sean felt it in his bones. Yuran stared at him for over a minute, then said, “I didn’t kill Roger. He wasn’t worth a bullet. But I did hear about a new venture. It wasn’t Roger asking, however.”