Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  “Something happened in the alleyway opposite, he needed the tapes to see if they could see anything. I have a sweeper outside, you see.” Lara had clocked the sweeping camera as they came in, but generally they were more of a deterrent than actually useful. Most often they weren’t even taping anything. But no police knew what had happened that morning. Except for Snoring Guy and Phone Guy. She really should have paid attention to their names.

  She looked at Nick. Had their perp taken the footage?

  “How did you know he was a policeman?” he asked.

  “He said he was. No one goes around pretending to be a cop in this neighborhood, especially when it’s still practically dark outside.” The clerk was getting a little OTT on the attitude.

  “Dial it down, Mr....?” Nick said.

  “Smith.”

  Lara gave him a look. Really?

  “No. Swear to God. Dan Smith. Daniel Smith. Are you saying that guy wasn’t a cop? My boss is going to kill me.”

  Nick didn’t answer. “Why is everything on tape? Why not just hold the footage digitally?”

  “The boss bought the whole security system in the 90s. He refuses to upgrade while this one still works.”

  Fair enough. “And you gave this ‘cop’ the tape from the machine this morning?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Can you tell us what he looked like? Height, hair color, eye color?”

  “He looked like an undercover cop.”

  She wanted to shake him. “Which is...like what exactly?”

  “Medium height—about your height—” he gestured to Lara “—short, dark-blondish hair, jeans, a windbreaker, sunglasses, baseball hat...” He shrugged. “Just normal.”

  “Old? Young?” Nick asked, obviously only just holding on to his patience.

  “Younger than you two anyways,” he said with a shrug.

  “Did he tell you what he wanted the tape for?”

  “I told you. He said someone had been kidnapped and that he needed all the footage from the street. He asked if I knew of anyone else with security cameras on the street, or anyone who may have been out and about around five this morning.”

  Nick put his hand on the guy’s shoulder to get his attention. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. It’s not my business to get anyone else involved.”

  Lara released a breath. At least he hadn’t put anyone else in this lunatic’s crosshairs. “If he comes back, please call us.” She handed him a card.

  Dan nodded.

  “Hey, if I get a sketch artist out here, will you try to remember what he looked like?” Lara asked as they opened the door to leave.

  Dan looked up from the counter and shrugged. “I guess.”

  As soon as they got outside, Lara exploded. “Dammit. Just when I think we’re going to get a break. Just one break. Come on.” If she’d been alone, she was sure that she’d have stamped her feet.

  “We’ll get there,” Nick said, looking appraisingly at the gas station a block away.

  Lara looked back through the shop door to Dan. He was rolling a joint. Tongue sticking out to one side in concentration as his gaze fixed upon what he was doing. Awesome. She hesitated a second, tempted to go in and bust him. But no good would come of that. The only thing it would do would be to make him uncooperative.

  “Will we?” She turned back to Nick. “Admit it. At this stage in a case, we have had at least two or three breaks—even small ones. We’ve had nothing. He’s touched people close to us, and we can’t get a fix on him.” She stalked off toward the gas station.

  Nick easily fell in stride next to her, his long legs covering ground faster than she could. It pissed her off for some reason. Mind you, practically everything was pissing her off right then.

  Malik Kahil, the owner and operator of the gas station wanted to help, but his security system was one for show, rather than one for actual security. “Seriously, it would be worth our while to upgrade everyone’s security CCTV ourselves, the number of times we have to look at grainy video,” she said.

  “It’s a good idea, but I’m pretty sure people would think that we were going to spy on them with our spooky government equipment.” Nick smiled as they went back to claim the car.

  “Depressing, but true,” Lara replied. “Let’s get back to the office. See if anyone has anything at all to update.” God, please let someone have something to update.

  At that second, her phone rang. Xander.

  “I think I have something. But I want a second opinion on it,” he said.

  “Since when do you need a second opinion?” Lara pulled a face toward Nick, who shrugged.

  “Since we’re on a clock. Since I don’t want to take everyone down the wrong hole when every second counts.” He sounded annoyed to be questioned, but gave her his address.

  “He’s in Williamsburg.” She strained against the seat belt to plug in the address on the GPS, as Nick braked and made an uncharacteristically illegal turn.

  Chapter Three

  They arrived a long twenty minutes later and found Xander pacing up and down in front of a warehouse. “You are the slowest driver in the unit,” he said to Lara as they walked toward him.

  Lara just smiled, allowing Nick to take the burn silently.

  “Sorry, I had to stop to get my nails done.” She swept past him into the open doors of the building. “So what have you got?”

  “Dylan McCann. He used to work in the HR department at BrainWave. He left a year or so ago to start work here as the HR director. It’s a start-up that searches every social media outlet for comments, or posts, as kind of a background check service. If a prospective employee fills out an application online, the company can grab his IP address and see everything that’s been posted. They then go through it filtering for warning signs that the company selects. Don’t want people who support a particular political party, they can weed them out. Don’t want someone who plays a lot of My Farm Life? They can reject their initial application. Want someone—”

  “Well that’s all fascinating—and disturbing—but why are we here?” Nick asked.

  “What’s disturbing is the number of companies who don’t care if their prospective employees are racist or sexist—but I guess that’s another story. McCann thinks he remembers a guy who was ultimately rejected by BrainWave. Talented, but unstable.”

  She should have felt excited, even mildly interested, but they were batting zero on their leads, and in the short time that had passed since her earlier optimism, she was fairly sure this unstable guy would probably turn out to be her bank manager or something. Unstable is in the eye of the beholder. She’d been called unstable when she came back from her undercover operation over a year previously. Her thoughts flickered briefly to the murder board she had in her spare room. A thing that only crazy ex-cops or serial killers tended to have. She mentally shrugged at the visual. Maybe she was unstable. But maybe that was what worked for her.

  Dylan McCann fit right in Williamsburg, that was for sure. Jeans, an old multicolored open-collared shirt and a full-on beard, with long hair.

  “I’m sorry to make you go through this again, but do you mind answering some questions?” Lara asked.

  “Not at all,” he said, although his voice betrayed a sliver of nervousness.

  “What made you think about this particular candidate for BrainWave when Agent Harrington questioned you?” At his gesture to sit down, she found the least fashionable seat to sit on. The rest of the furniture in his office was unrecognizable as furniture. She picked what she was sure was an ottoman, which left Nick’s only option a weird S-shaped something. He perched on it and she took a tiny amount of pleasure that he looked as uncomfortable as she felt. Why do they have to even make chairs difficult now? Chairs shouldn’t be difficult. />
  McCann beckoned Nick to stand up, and somehow bent back the S to actually make a kind of seat. He held the back of it down and nodded Nick back onto it. “To be honest, I’ve never forgotten him. You have to understand, 90 percent of the candidates I saw were nerds. They’d scored high on their admission tests which was all about writing algorithms and finding coding errors, but they generally had their parents’ address on their application, or an MIT dorm address, and came in looking artfully techish.”

  “Techish?” Nick asked as he was typing into his phone.

  “Like all the tech giants at Google and Facebook and everyone who works there. New jeans, black T-shirts, brand new sneakers. Trying to fit a profile, I guess. This guy. There was nothing about him that was like the other candidates. He wore baggy shorts, carried his skateboard. Looked like an interesting kid, until you started talking to him. He was intense beyond his years. Like American Psycho intense. At first, you know, I thought it was an act to seem more adult. But it wasn’t. His whole body radiated fury, but his scores were off the charts. Even entered new code into the test to prevent anyone adding bad code. I knew Beckett would want to see him, so—”

  “Beckett?” Lara interrupted.

  “Beckett Clarke. BrainWave’s HR director. I filtered the best candidates up to him, and rejected the rest. That was the way they wanted the system to work,” he said, tapping a pencil against his desk.

  “Why did you send him up, if you thought he was—” Nick looked back at his notes, even though Lara was sure he didn’t need to “—an American Psycho?”

  “Look, when BrainWave was starting out, they wanted the young, hungry, aggressive types that could push the company boundaries. They wanted the people with a particular vision who would work all day and all night because they wanted to. They wanted them intense, and this guy was the most aggressive, hungry and intense person I ever met. Not just in my job, but in my life. So I gave him the news that he’d been selected to meet the HR director, and he jumped out of his chair, and asked why he hadn’t been interviewed by the director in the first place.

  “I tried to explain about the recruitment process, but he cut me off to ask where his office was. I would have objected, or changed my mind, but frankly I wanted to hand him off to someone else. He scared the crap out of me.”

  “What happened next?” Nick asked, leaning forward in his weird chair.

  “Beckett saw that the crazy ran deep in him, and rejected him. For months after we would joke that we’d wake up one day and find him standing over us in bed with a knife. I didn’t find it funny, to be honest. I could see it happening.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Michael something, I think.”

  “You think? Seems to me that if someone scared you that much, you’d remember his name,” Nick said from his uncomfortable perch.

  McCann looked uncomfortable. “To be honest we talked about him a lot, but we always referred to him as “Crazy Coder.” I’d forgotten his real name a few weeks later. Not very charitable, I know.”

  Frankly, they’d all heard worse from cops and other agents when they met someone who gave them that gut feel of “get away now.” Giving them nicknames was a way of dealing with the insanity that everyone knew was out there.

  “Fair enough. Michael or something like that. Do you remember if he had an Italian last name? Polish? Anglo?” Sometimes thinking about specifics made people remember more than they thought they did.

  “No, nothing jumps out. I’m sorry I can’t be more help. Maybe Beckett can tell you more about him. I think he ended up spending more time with him than I did.”

  “Do you know where we can find him?” Lara asked, getting up.

  “I thought he still worked at BrainWave. No. Maybe someone there knows where he went.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. McCann. We appreciate it.”

  McCann shuffled some pens on his desk. “Do you think he’ll come after me?”

  Lara turned in the doorway. “Why would you think that?”

  “Well, I might not be as smart as the guys out there—” he nodded toward the team outside his office “—but I know that three FBI special agents don’t do regular background checks on people. And I read the newspapers. Is he the bomber?”

  She had to quell that rumor before it got out of control. She could see McCann calling his old BrainWave friends and colleagues, telling them that Crazy Coder was New York’s bomber. “Oh, no. It’s nothing to do with that case,” she said casually. “But he is someone we’d like to talk to in regard to a different matter. But hey, either way, he can’t be mad at you. You didn’t reject him. You passed him through to the HR director.” As she articulated the excuse, she realized that maybe this Beckett guy may well be in danger. Her smile didn’t waver, though. “If you think of anything else, please call Agent Harrington.”

  He nodded and the three of them walked past the workers, whose hands flew over their keyboards. They said nothing until they got in the elevator. As Xander opened his mouth to speak, Lara interrupted. “The weather’s been pretty cool for September, don’t you think? Nick and I were thinking about going to the park to watch the NYPD team play soccer against the fire department. You in?”

  Xander’s mouth opened in surprise. He looked at Nick who smiled and shrugged.

  “Uh, yeah. Sure.” He cleared his throat. “As long as I can put money on the PD losing. Their team is crap this year.”

  “It’s on,” Lara said. “Nick’s taking the bets.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. The doors sprang open at the first floor and they exited the building.

  “Sorry about that. I don’t know, I just felt that a company with that kind of business prying into people’s lives, probably wouldn’t have much compunction about viewing elevator footage.” She looked back up at the building. “Good job, Xander. I think you may be on to something. Do you want to give Christina the heads-up on this guy and go back to the office and see what she can come up with?”

  “Sure, I’ll call her on the way back.” Xander looked just a little stoked. Lara or Nick could have called it in, but Lara thought it was good that the other members of the team saw that other members and not just Lara and Nick came up with good leads.

  “We’ll see you back there in ten,” Lara said.

  “You’d make a good chief of section, you know,” Nick said as he got in the driver seat.

  “What, because I let him take credit for a lead he came up with? Maybe that makes me a human, but it doesn’t necessarily make me chief material.” She fastened her seat belt. “Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

  “Maybe not. But not because I want to take credit for his lead, there’s a pretty good chance I just wouldn’t have thought to ensure he got the credit.” He pulled out into the stream of traffic.

  Lara pondered his words. Maybe it was the mother in her. Her stomach clenched when she thought of the baby she’d given up for adoption. As it always did.

  “Are you okay?” Nick said with a frown.

  “Sure, why?”

  “You’re rubbing your arm where your Moretti tattoo used to be.”

  She snatched her hand away. “I’m fine.” Except her body and heart were clearly missing her daughter. She kept telling herself that she’d done the right thing. Given her up to kind people who would raise her in witness protection, keeping her safe from her sociopath of a father. Her mind started to spiral again, as it always did. If she didn’t snatch it back, she’d start thinking about her lack of judgment when it came to men. That a terrifying criminal had made her believe he was a nice guy.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in, pushing out the frenzied self-critical thoughts. She visualized them as a red smoke, and blew it away with her exhale.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked, completely unaware of the dark turn her
thoughts had taken in a nanosecond.

  “Peachy. Remind me to make sure the guys are also looking for Beckett. As soon as McCann asked if he was in danger—”

  “I know. I thought the same thing. Beckett did reject him. We should find him and get some kind of protection on him,” Nick said.

  Lara nodded, watching the river beneath the bridge. “Force it on him if you have to. I don’t want tomorrow morning to bring a dead Ben and a missing Beckett.”

  “I concur. Assuming we really have as long as he said we do. Victoria is our only litmus test. And she went public hours before the cutoff time.”

  “True. Dammit. I just wish we had more information to go on. We seem to be getting tiny threads of leads that go nowhere. I just want even a thread that gets us somewhere. I don’t care if it’s not a full-fledged lead, I just need something to convince me that we’re not just spinning our wheels.”

  “Lara, relax. This is what always happens. No leads until we get our first lead.”

  “I know, I’m just thinking of Ben’s face. I hope his heart doesn’t give out before we get something.”

  Nick pulled into the underground parking at FBI headquarters around 7:00 p.m., swiped his card across the security screen and slipped into the parking space labeled SAC V. Russo.

  Lara gave him a look.

  “Come on. She’s not using it, and it’ll save us from cruising the floors looking for someone about to pull out.”

  Yeah, yeah. It was just a little too soon for Lara.

  The office was buzzing when they got in. “What have you got?” Nick asked loudly to the room in general.

  Christina stood up. “First the bad news. No one with the name of Michael fits the profile of the Whisperer. Or the person that McCann describes. One Michael died in a vehicle accident six months ago—before you ask, yes, I’m sure he’s dead—one is now a programmer in Silicon Valley, one went to school and is currently working the labs in MIT, and the last now works for the government. None of them have any documented mental history, and none have any warning flags whatsoever. So, that’s the bad news.”