by Blake Pierce
Apparently, being so close to a sense of failure really brought partners together.
***
Edgebrook Financial looked like a totally different building in the light of day with its parking lot nearly filled to capacity. When they entered the building, even the lobby looked completely different, Natural light flooded the area, spilling in from large glass panes over the doors, each pane standing about twenty feet tall. People were filing in and out of the lobby, out of doors, down hallways, and into elevators.
The guard behind the front desk area was a different one from the night before. Being business hours, they didn’t stop by the desk but ventured deeper into the lobby and headed to the elevators again. When they arrived on the fourth floor, it was more of the same from the lobby; a hallway that had been darkened and dead the night before was suddenly alive with activity.
They stopped by the receptionist’s area they had passed by the night before. A beautiful twenty-something woman sat behind the desk, looking like she had been specifically crafted for the job.
“Hello there, ladies,” the receptionist said in a rehearsed tone. “Can I help you?”
Chloe subtly flashed her ID, not wanting to cause a stir. “I’m Agent Fine, with the FBI. I was hoping I could speak to someone who had worked closely with Mark Fairchild sometime during the last several weeks.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “Is everything okay? We noticed he hadn’t come in today. He tried for a few days but we figured he still hadn’t quite healed.”
“I honestly can’t discuss it,” Chloe said. “Does anyone come to mind?”
“Certainly. If you head down the hall and stop at the second door on the right, that’s Jason Earhart’s office. They were working on a finding project for some sort of nuclear decommissioning project up until Jessie was killed.”
“Was there a working relationship before that?”
“Yes. The police have spoken to him already. Jason and Mark were sort of the perfect tag-team. Whenever there was a big job to knock out, they were the ones to nail it down.”
“Thanks,” Chloe said a she turned away and headed to the right.
“You recall Jason Earhart’s name from any of the reports?” Rhodes asked.
“No. But I do think I heard the name in passing within the department—maybe between Nolan and Clifton. I’m not sure.”
They came to Earhart’s door and knocked, though it was halfway open. A tired but loud response came at once: “Yeah, it’s open!”
Chloe and Rhodes stepped in. The office they stepped into was roughly the same size as Mark’s, though not quite as tidy. His desk was also much more basic—presumably because he did not need hideaway drawers. The man sitting behind the desk looked to be a little younger than Mark. He was slightly heavyset and wore his hair in a style that made it apparent he cared nothing for the way he looked at the office. It hung down across his brow, nearly touching his eyebrows.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Chloe stepped forward, showing her ID. As she did, Rhodes nonchalantly closed the door behind them.
“We need to ask you some questions about Mark Fairchild.”
“The police have already asked me a ton,” he said. He did not sound irritated, though. If anything, he sounded bored.
“Have you, by chance, gotten a call from him today? Or maybe even about him?”
“No. Why? Is something wrong?”
“It will be public knowledge soon enough, so there’s no harm in letting you know. But as of about three hours ago, Mark is in some very bad trouble. He’s been placed under arrest for various counts of financial fraud and possible involvement in the murder of his wife.”
Earhart looked legitimately confused, almost comically so. He then let out a nervous laugh and shook his head. “With all due respect, I call bullshit. There’s no way. That’s just not the sort of man Mark is.”
“We’ve got a stream of growing evidence that says it is,” Rhodes said.
“He’s also confirmed some of it to us with his own mouth,” Chloe added.
Earhart was visibly shaken. He leaned back in his chair, his face going pale. He swept some of the hair off of his brow, making him look much older somehow.
“Mr. Earhart, I need you to think hard about something. I want you to think about Mark’s demeanor over the last few weeks. Was there anything at all about the way he acted or even in the way he carried himself here at work that you found the least bit strange? I don’t care how small it might have seemed. I need to know anything you can think of.”
Earhart sighed, sat forward, and placed his elbows on his desk. He looked like a child sitting at attention. When he spoke, Chloe thought he might start crying.
“Mark was never really one to close his door. He was all about being available. He’d close it if he was in an important meeting or on a heated phone call, but that’s about it. These last few weeks, though…it seemed like he had it shut more often than usual. I never even consider it as odd until just now…when you asked the question.”
“He was here in the morning Jessie was killed, right?” Rhodes asked.
“He was.”
“Anything out of the ordinary that morning?”
“Not really. It was a Friday, so there was an all-hands meeting—but he showed up late. Again, no big deal. A few people straggle in late for those meetings. But not Mark. He was usually among the first. He always joked he got to those meetings early to snag the best donuts.”
“Did you speak to him at all that morning?”
“Yeah, about this project he and I had been working on. And you know…”
He trailed off here, his eyes wandering as he collected his thoughts.
“What is it, Mr. Earhart?”
“He did seem sort of distracted. I had to sort of rein him in a few times. He was forgetting names and figures—which he rarely does. Again, it was nothing huge. I work closely with him a lot. Anyone else would have probably not even noticed.”
“Can you recall what you were doing when he got the call from the police?” Chloe asked.
“Well, I didn’t even know about it until about fifteen minutes later. I was on a call and Kaitlin, the receptionist, knocked on my door. I sternly shooed her away because the call I was on was a very important one. When I was off of the call, I went out to see what she wanted. Most of the entire floor was sort of morose, very quiet. Kaitlin told me that the police had called, looking for Mark. They told him over the phone that his wife had been killed. From what I understand, there was a police escort downstairs for him.”
“Do you know if he spoke to anyone after receiving the call?”
“I asked around—as did the police—but apparently, Kaitlin was the only one. And she said he was sort of blank. Processing it, you know? He told her in an almost dry fashion: My wife is dead, and headed for the elevators. Someone down in the lobby—a guy that works on the second floor, said when Mark got off of the elevators, he hit his knees and started wailing. The police escort helped him out of the building and then he was gone.”
“And that’s all you know?”
“It is. I just…I just have to say that if Mark did have something to do with his wife’s murder, I would be absolutely shocked.”
“And the financial stuff?” Rhodes asked.
“I’d be shocked, but it might be easier to convince me. Mark liked making money. He liked taking care of his wife. He’d brag all of the time about being able to spoil her.”
Chloe and Rhodes exchanged a look of frustration. Nothing new had come out of this, other than finding out that Mark liked to spoil Jessie—which they’d already surmised. Still, the idea that Mark had seemed nervous and distracted the morning of his wife’s death…did that mean he’d known it was going to happen? Were all of those closed-door calls he made related to her eventual murder?
These were questions that were not going to be answered by Jason Earhart or anyone else in the Edgebrook offices. If there were any answer
s to be had, they’d come from interrogation rooms back in DC later this afternoon.
“Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Earhart,” Chloe said.
He nodded and looked as if he wanted to say something else but kept quiet in the end. “Of course,” he said. “Let me know if there is anything else I can do.”
Chloe and Rhodes walked out of the office and back down the hallway. In the elevator, Chloe leaned back against the wall and tilted her head up with a sigh. “The more information we have, the less this is making sense,” she said.
“I can’t help but wonder if Mark pissed someone off,” Rhodes said. “If his wife’s murder was some sort of retaliation.”
“I thought that, too. But he came to work that day. And even with all of this financial trouble going on the background, he was willingly giving over information. It just makes zero sense to me.”
“The loose ends will get tied up this afternoon,” Rhodes said. There was hope in her voice, but not much. Chloe could tell this was started to take its toll on her as well.
“Let’s just do what Johnson suggested,” Chloe said. “Get back to DC and wait for Alejos to show up. Maybe they’ll have some more info on Mitchell Beck by then.”
“Feels like too many threads. Too many ways to get sidetracked.”
“Or all those threads will tie up into one neat little bow,” Chloe pointed out.
Rhodes chuckled. “You’ve sort of done a one-eighty on me since yesterday. Anything you want to share?”
Chloe smiled and said, “Maybe one day. For now, though, let’s keep my skeletons in their closet and go dig up Mark Fairchild’s.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Director Johnson looked like he had been running a marathon when Chloe and Rhodes stepped into his office at 11:45 that morning. He looked worn out and quite excited, especially when he sat down behind his desk mere moments after Chloe and Rhodes took the two seats on the opposite side of the desk. He took a moment to sink into his chair and then leaned forward with a weary smile on his face.
“This thing is moving faster than we expected,” he said. “First of all, good job on getting the ball rolling. I know it might have been an accidental discovery, but this little discovery has also inadvertently given us enough intel to finally get Julio Alejos into custody.”
“So where are we now?”
“The latest update—and it could be different by now because things are coming in so quickly—is that Julio Alejos was absolutely talking to Mark Fairchild. We still aren’t quite sure why. We also know that Mitchell Beck was speaking with Fairchild, but there isn’t quite enough evidence. There are a lot of dead ends there and I honestly don’t even know if we’ll have enough to pin Beck down. It’s been tried before but the man is like a magician when it comes to lawyers and loopholes.”
“And we’re happy to help with those threads any way we can,” Chloe said. “But at the end of the day, I’m still looking for Jessie Fairchild’s killer.”
“I understand that,” Johnson said. “It’s one of many layers to this onion. And I’ve already talked it over with the team that was responsible for apprehending Alejos and bringing him in. You two have first dibs on him when he gets here. As bad as it sounds, the murder of Jessie Fairchild is on the lower end of the potential things we can pin on Alejos and his drug cartel.”
“So what can we do now?” Rhodes asked. “I can’t bear to just sit around and wait.”
“And you won’t have to,” he said. He slid a sheet of paper over to them, moving quickly and with purpose even in something so simple. “Here are call records from a burner phone we found in Alejos’s house. It’s been deactivated for about three days. There was another one, but he destroyed it before we could get him into custody.”
Rhodes took the paper and Chloe looked at it as they scanned it together. There were about thirty calls in all, most made to the same few numbers over and over again.
“Have these been checked yet?” Chloe asked.
“No. We just got this list together about half an hour ago and I wanted the two of you on it. We do already know that one of the numbers on there is a direct line to Mark Fairchild’s office.”
“I’ll get on this right now,” Rhodes said. “We worked with a woman named Kim Moxley on the numbers we found in Mark’s office. Can I use her as a resource?”
“Please do. There’s a big stirring of excitement around here. Use anything and anyone you need. If we can bring this guy down, it will unravel one of the biggest drug cartels on the East Coast.”
“In other words, no pressure, right?” Chloe said.
It garnered a laugh from Johnson, but there was very little joy behind it.
***
For the next hour and a half, Chloe and Rhodes sat in a small basement office with Kim Moxley. Moxley was, for lack of a better word, interesting. She had short cropped hair that had been dyed raven black, the blonde roots unapologetically showing. She was a rail-thin specimen of a woman but though she was small in stature, she was enormous in personality. Her voice was loud and her laugh was even louder. Chloe decided she liked the woman right away. In a strange way, she reminded her a bit of Danielle.
She was doing little more than entering each of the numbers from Julio Alejos’s burner phone into a piece of software that Chloe was not familiar with. Apparently, because the phone had been deactivated, it was a bit harder to connect the numbers and the calls with the phone. She had to make a few calls to verify the authenticity of the phone, right down to which Walgreens in Albany, New York, it had been purchased from.
They were not at all surprised to see that two of the numbers were exactly the same as numbers that had been pulled from Mark Fairchild’s phone: the one to the offshore bank and the unknown and unlisted one that had been pinned to Mitchell Beck. The others were to a man that was listed in the FBI database as Julio’s brother and then a personal line to a man named Luca Valenz. Valenz was one of the names Julio had offered up and was currently being held in a holding cell in upstate New York. A known drug dealer and convicted rapist, he had enough of a record for any involvement with a drug cartel to put him away for a very long time.
The last number they inserted into the software turned out to be another unlisted number. The three women seemed to sigh all together, coming to this roadblock.
“How long did it take to pin the other unlisted number to Beck?” Chloe asked.
“About three hours.”
“Same for this one?”
“Probably. Though we can apply some of the things we learned last night and maybe get some clues while we’re waiting.”
“How’s that?” Chloe asked.
“The number he called might be an unlisted one, but we can find out where the phone was located when Alejos called it.”
“Yeah, that could help,” Chloe said.
“It’d be a long shot,” Rhodes agreed. “But yeah, we may as well give it a go.”
“One second,” Moxley said. She inputted something into her system and slurped down what seemed like half of a mug of coffee while she waited. “Results are coming in,” she said several seconds later. “He called the number seven times within the last month. Four times, the recipient phone was located in New York. A fifth and sixth, it was in Boston.”
New York, Chloe thought. Makes sense, because that’s Alejos’s stomping grounds. Boston…can’t be a coincidence that’s where the Fairchilds moved from. If the next listing is…
“Seventh call came from New York City, and the recipient phone was in Falls Church, Virginia.”
“Got a date on that?” Chloe asked, a chill riding sharply down her spine.
“Hold one sec,” Moxley said, the excitement also apparent in her voice. She then smiled and gave them a smile and a nod. “Holy shit. The call to Falls Church was made last Friday at nine-oh-five.”
Chloe got to her feet. She had nowhere to go at the moment, but the realization tis brought to her would not let her sit still.
“That’s got to be the killer. We have to find out who that unlisted number is.”
“I’ll push it to the top of the priorities pile,” Moxley said.
Chloe’s phone buzzed in her pocket. When she saw that it was Johnson, she sensed that this was it. This was the call that was going to push them toward the end of the case. Selfishly, she only hoped it would be an ending that actually felt like an ending. Despite the huge revelations with Alejos, Beck, and Fairchild, Chloe could not help but feel that she owed it to Jessie Fairchild to find her killer.
“This is Fine,” she answered.
“Head up to Interrogation Room Three,” Johnson said. “Alejos is here.”
***
Director Johnson, Assistant Director Garcia, and two agents Chloe had never met were standing outside of Interrogation Room Three. She assumed the other two agents were the men from New York who had taken Alejos in. As she and Rhodes approached, all four men looked in their direction.
“Agent Fine, Agent Rhodes, this is Agent Keller and Agent Labitski out of New York. You can thank them for bringing out guest right to our front door.”
“And as far as I’m concerned, you can keep him,” the one named Keller said. “He’s quiet, but he’s an ass about it. He’s bad news. I know it sounds cliché, and I’m sorry.”
“Anything we need to watch out for?” Rhodes asked.
“He gets under your skin. The ride down here was a long one. Two times, I thought I was going to pull over and shoot him in the head.”
“Did he say anything that might point towards his guilt?”
“No,” Labitski said. “Not in the money laundering stuff or a murder.”
“I will let you know that he said he was looking forward to see what corrupted DC agent would be sent in to handle him,” Keller said.
“Then let’s show him,” Chloe said. She looked at Johnson and asked: “May we?”
“Yes. But listen…you heard Keller. This guy will try to rile you up, to piss you off. If either of you feel yourselves losing your cool, you step out. Understood?”