Victoria stared at James for several long moments and then slowly nodded her head. “All right, you can help with the investigation into your brother’s life and activities. You’re a natural insider, but you’ll pair up with Lara. You’ll share everything with her—and I mean everything.”
James’s lips tightened and his eyes flared with anger. He obviously didn’t want to be on a leash.
“Accept the conditions or you’re off the case,” Victoria said softly.
He hesitated a moment and then gave a curt nod and the briefing continued. When it was finished Lara headed to the break room to get a cup of coffee and Nick trailed after her.
“Be careful, Lara.”
She poured her coffee and then turned to look at him in surprise. “Be careful about what?”
His gaze was dark and troubled. “You know as well as anyone that family connections can blur even the best police work.”
“Do you really think James would try to cover something up?” she asked, keeping her voice low even though they were the only two people in the room.
“Not consciously, but maybe subconsciously. I don’t know, but all I’m saying is that the need to protect family can sometimes distort things.”
“Thanks, Nick,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
When he left the break room she remained behind, for a moment overwhelmed with memories of Cassandra McDonner. It had been Cass’s grief over her murdered sister that had twisted her allegiance away from the team and more specifically away from Lara. Grief had warped Cass’s allegiance and she’d lost track of who were the good guys and who were the bad.
Still, Lara couldn’t imagine James losing his perspective so badly that he would attempt to tamper with or withhold evidence. The stakes were too high now, with William being tied somehow to the bombing. The whole city waited for answers about the bomber and if William was guilty there was nothing anyone would be able to do to contain the fallout.
She was just about to leave the break room when Victoria came barreling in. “Lara, we just got a call from a cleaning lady who found her boss dead of an apparent suicide. I need you and James to get over there.”
Lara frowned. “What does this have to do with the current case?”
“It’s David Larsen. Apparently he went home last night after you and Nick interviewed him and swallowed a handful of pills.”
Chapter Three
“What the fuck is going on?” James exclaimed in angry bewilderment when he and Lara were alone in the car and headed for David’s Brooklyn address. “First William and now David. What in the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, James, but we need to find out.” Lara’s attention alternated between maneuvering the heavy morning traffic and the new questions that whirled around in her head.
“Did you know David Larsen?” she asked.
“Of course I did. He was not only a good friend of my brother’s, but he was also guiding William in his political career.”
“Did you like him?”
“Sure, he was a nice guy.”
“Did Elisabetta like him?” Lara asked.
“I guess so. She and I never talked about David. Elisabetta and I weren’t overly tight.” Without warning James leaned forward and punched the dash with his fist. “Goddammit! If William was in some kind of trouble then why didn’t he come to me? I could have helped him, but he took the coward’s way out.”
“You need to control the rage, James. I know you’re angry and you’re grieving, but if you’re going to help me figure all this out, then you need to be as clearheaded as possible. You can’t let your emotions get in the way of this investigation.” Lara spoke firmly, with Nick’s warning ringing in her ears. “I have to know that I can trust you, James.”
“Of course you can trust me.” He leaned back in the seat and expelled a deep sigh. “I’ll go wherever this investigation takes us. I just want to get to the truth.”
They were the right words, but Lara intended to keep a keen eye on him anyway. She knew better than anyone how not having a tight rein on emotions could lead to disaster.
The fact that when she’d been undercover she’d lost her way and slept with Moretti, the fact that she’d believed at the time she was falling in love with him, proved that point. Emotions could not only be messy, but they could also be deadly.
“James, I know Victoria spoke to you at length yesterday, but since then have you thought of anything your brother and David could have been involved in that might explain their suicides?”
“Nothing. I’ve racked my brain, but I can’t imagine anything. I still say this has to be some sort of a blackmail scheme. It will take a lot of hard evidence for me to ever believe that William was the bomber.”
“Then we need to find the hard evidence that he wasn’t.”
They spoke no more until they reached David Larsen’s apartment building. A single patrol car was parked at the curb. Before leaving the car Lara checked her text messages, where Christina had sent information they needed.
“David Larsen, forty years old,” she read aloud. “His parents are dead and he had no siblings. He’s lived at this address for the past fifteen years. Juanita Gomez lives in the one-bedroom next door. She’s sixty years old and is the one who found him this morning. She said they share keys, because she would take his paper for him when he went out of town on vacation or business.” She tucked her phone back into her windbreaker pocket and together they got out of the car.
Officer Frank Bellows met them at the front door. He and his partner, Carlos Rodriguez, had responded to the 911 call. Carlos was with Juanita in the hallway and David was in the master bedroom. The medical examiner was on the way.
A cursory walk-through of the large, airy apartment showed no signs of break-in and nothing of real interest. David appeared to have been a neat man with an eclectic taste in reading if the books on his bookshelves in the living room were any indication.
The furnishings were tasteful, with artwork on the walls and a curio cabinet filled with bronze figurines by a famous artist in the city. Apparently political public service paid better than a Fed’s salary, she thought.
As they turned down the hallway toward the bedrooms, she prepared herself for another suicide scene. The distinctive smell of death greeted them before they even reached the bedroom door.
David Larsen was in his king-sized bed. He had not died easily. Most people thought suicide by pills was an easy death, but it was rarely peaceful and tranquil. The body fought valiantly for survival whether one wanted it to or not. David’s position in the bed showed his body had fought hard. It appeared as if he’d thrashed around in the pale blue sheets and vomit clung to his chin and pooled on the side of the bed. Definitely not an easy death.
Lara pulled on gloves and walked over to the nightstand where three brown prescription bottles sat next to a large, empty drinking glass.
She picked them up and read the ingredients one at a time. “An antidepressant, a muscle relaxer and sleeping pills...all filled four days ago and all now empty.”
“I don’t see any kind of a note,” James said as he walked around the room. “It would have been nice if he’d left something behind that would tell us why he did this. That might have helped shed some light on William’s death.” James’s voice deepened. “Dammit, we need to find some rational answers to all of this.”
Heavy footsteps coming down the hallway signaled the approach of somebody else to the room. Medical Examiner Dr. Ruben Sanders, affectionately known as the Sandman, entered the room. He had a head full of gray hair, a round, wrinkled face and drooping brown eyes that made him look like a Basset hound.
“You...again,” he said to Lara. He’d been the one who had arrived at William’s house the day before.
“Yeah, I’m not too happy to
see your face again so soon, either,” she replied.
“Agent Walsh, again I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said to James as he opened the large black duffel bag that held the tools of his trade.
“Thanks,” James replied gruffly.
“So, what have we got here?” Sandman approached the bed. For the next hour photos were taken, tests were conducted and the M.E.’s wagon arrived.
“Initial indications are that he died sometime last night. According to his body temperature and the state of rigor, I’d say between the hours of nine and midnight,” Sandman said. “It doesn’t appear that he choked to death. Right now I’m leaning toward overdose, but I’ll know more when I do the autopsy.”
“Can you get the results back to us by tomorrow morning?” Lara asked.
“Can you fly me to the moon tonight?” he returned dryly.
“Ruben, this is really important. I know you’re overworked and underpaid—we all are. But this is part of a bigger investigation that I can’t discuss with you, a really important investigation. We need this autopsy and William Walsh’s done as soon as possible,” she said.
Sandman smiled, the gesture raising all of his wrinkles upward. “Is this the famous Special Agent Lara Grant asking me for a favor?”
“Please?” she replied.
He drew a hand through his hair. “All right, I guess tonight my wife will sleep alone while I work long into the night. Unless something crazy happens I’ll get the results for both in by tomorrow morning, but you owe me.”
Lara grinned. “I’ll make sure you have a top shelf bottle of Scotch delivered to your house tomorrow evening.”
“Ah, my heart is warming toward you, Agent Grant,” he replied.
“Ha, that’s just you imagining that expensive Scotch sliding down your throat.” She looked at James. “We need to question Juanita Gomez, but this looks pretty open and shut to me.”
“Except we’re missing the why and we both know my brother’s death and David’s have to be somehow related. To think otherwise would be stupid,” James replied.
“When we get back to the office we’re going to dig deep into everything we have and see if we can find the why.” And if the two men were responsible for the bombings.
People rarely lied in suicide notes, she thought as headed back to the living room. William Walsh had claimed responsibility for the bombing. It had been the last thing he’d written before death.
Had David been a part of it? Had the two somehow gotten radicalized, planted the bomb and then killed themselves? Had they actually become suicide bombers? And what about the 34th Street bombing—were they somehow responsible for that, too? Did these two men have some kind of a connection to the intel Nick had gotten from his informant the other day?
James was no dummy. He had to be having the same kind of horrifying thoughts. She admired the self-control he’d shown so far today, but she also worried that at some point his emotions might blow up and spiral him into a very dark place.
In the living room Officer Carlos Rodriguez sat next to Juanita on an overstuffed floral chair.
Juanita’s long black hair was threaded with beautiful strands of silver and she was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt. Her plump shoulders shook as she wept into a tissue at the sight of Lara and James.
When she finally composed herself Lara began with the questioning. Besides being his neighbor, Juanita cleaned for David biweekly and she always started in the master bedroom, which is how she’d found him that morning. According to Juanita, David was a kind and good man. He lived a quiet life and rarely had visitors.
“I have no idea why he would do something like this,” Juanita exclaimed. “He didn’t act strange or upset about anything over the last couple of weeks. He was sad about his friend dying, but why would he take his own life?”
Good question, Lara thought. Where in the hell were some answers?
When they finally left the apartment building to go back to headquarters a headache banged across Lara’s temples. She didn’t like things that didn’t make sense, and nothing about these two suicides made any sense at all.
Granted William had been not only David’s boss, but a friend as well, but she couldn’t imagine David taking his own life because William was gone. That just wasn’t something rational, adult people did.
“Hopefully Christina will have gathered your brother’s financial statements and we can get David’s, as well,” she said once they were back in the car.
“This has to have something to do with a business deal or something political,” James said. “I still maintain the two of them were being blackmailed about something. Somehow William and David got into something way over their heads.”
“But, why would William leave a note claiming responsibility for the bombing?”
“I don’t know. Somebody must have made him say that and the only reason he might do that is if he was protecting somebody.” James blew out a sigh. “All I have right now to sustain me is my gut instinct, and it’s telling me that my brother had nothing to do with the bombing.”
“Never dismiss that instinct, James. That’s what makes the difference between good cops and great cops...great cops listen to their gut.” She rubbed a hand across her tight forehead.
That was especially true when love and emotions got involved. Lara’s gut instinct had screamed at her during the time she was undercover.
It had told her to keep her distance from the handsome gun trafficker she later discovered was the notorious Moretti. But she’d ignored her gut and led her with heart and it had been the worst mistake of her life.
She would never say it out loud, but as much as she didn’t want James to be hurt, she half hoped William and David were responsible for the bombs because that meant there wouldn’t be any more. But she had a nagging suspicion that there was still a bomber out there somewhere...plotting...planning his next target. And that the clock had begun to tick once again.
The only question was, where and when would it blow?
Chapter Four
A mountain of paperwork sat on the table in the small conference room awaiting James and Lara when they returned to headquarters.
“I’ve got William’s bank and credit card statements, financial reports and tax returns for the past four years,” Christina said as the other two agents sat. “The agents that followed up this morning still didn’t find his personal laptop. His wife said she has no idea where it might be. Ty and Jennifer went to his office this morning to see if any of the people in the office had found it, but nobody knows where it is. I’m working on getting everything I can on David Larsen now.”
“Thanks, Christina,” Lara replied and eyed the pile of papers with a touch of dread. “I think we have enough here to keep us busy for the rest of the day.”
This was the part of an investigation Lara abhorred. She’d rather be out on the streets, kicking down doors and chasing bad guys. But this grunt work was necessary and hopefully they would find a clue to the why of William’s suicide in the papers in front of them.
“Why don’t you start looking over his personal bank statements and I’ll start with the credit cards,” Lara suggested.
“Sounds like a plan,” James agreed.
They separated the paperwork and then got busy, looking for something, anything that might be questionable. William had used several personal credit cards and then he had one for his expense account per his position as president of the Brooklyn Borough. Lara started with the personal credit cards.
William and his wife lived a fairly lavish lifestyle as told by his credit card statements, but it was nothing she wouldn’t have expected. There were dinners out and clothing purchases at some of the best stores. There were also charges at an upscale beauty shop and spa...charges Lara assumed Elisabetta m
ade.
They worked until noon and then knocked off to eat sandwiches they ordered in from a nearby deli. With lunch consumed they then returned to the meticulous work.
“I don’t see anything screwy in the bank records,” James said with a sigh of frustration. It was just after two o’clock. “I’ve been over six months’ worth and there’s nothing unusual. No cash deposits or odd checks to raise any eyebrows.”
“Then you can go through this credit card and I’ll start on the business expenses.” Lara shuffled more paperwork in his direction.
James pulled the paperwork in front of him and gazed at Lara, his eyes dark and tortured. “This is kind of like picking over his bones.”
She studied him for a long moment. “James, if this is too much for you, I’m sure Victoria would give you another assignment. There are plenty of other things you could be doing to help.”
“No,” he protested. “I need to do this. I want to find the reason. It’s just...”
“Hard,” Lara said and he nodded. “I know.” And she did. She’d been picking over the bones of her parents’ lives for years, desperate to make sense of her mother’s murder.
They got back to work and it didn’t take long of Lara checking the expense credit transactions for her to see a pattern she found interesting.
“The weekend before the bomb explosion your brother checked into a hotel called The Mountain Cove. And it looks like that wasn’t the first time he was there. Is there anything in his itinerary records that would explain his staying there?”
James pulled out the papers William’s office had supplied them of his official calendar. He scanned to the appropriate weekend and shook his head. “No, he’s got nothing official on the calendar for that date.”
Lara frowned down at the expense account records. Why had William checked into that hotel several times and charged it to his expense account when his calendar showed nothing he had to attend in his official capacity?
Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set Page 12