by Mary Stone
With a shrug, Bobby looked over to Winter. “Shouldn’t take too long. You good to hold down the fort, Agent Black?”
Her smile was sudden and bright. “Of course. Good luck. Hope you guys find something.”
The ease with which she spoke was more than enough to drive away any of Bobby’s remaining doubts.
They were about to find something.
As soon as she had been satisfied that Bobby and the two detectives were gone, Winter had wasted no time using the evidence tape to collect the fibers and dust particles from Detective Johansson’s coat. She’d just been glad the man hadn’t taken it with him.
Soon after, she and Bobby made their hasty goodbyes, then contacted Marie Judd to ask her to assign an agent to track Detective Johansson’s movements. They needed to keep an eye on the good detective until they had a chance to obtain a search warrant.
The tape was taken directly to Naomi Clanahan, and she confirmed that the metallic particles on Detective Johansson’s coat were microscopically similar to those found on Drew Hansford’s clothes.
Detective Tony Johansson was the third person present at Agent Hansford’s murder.
SAC Judd had contacted a friend of hers—a Baltimore county judge—and presented the evidence to obtain a search warrant for Johansson’s residence.
Winter glanced down to the digital clock in the center console and then over to where Bobby Weyrick sat in the driver’s seat. At just past six, they’d arrived with an entire crew of FBI employees. There were crime scene techs, special agents, tactical responders, and then there was Bobby and Winter. Baltimore may not have been their city, but this was their case as much as it was theirs.
As Bobby snapped out of whatever haze had enveloped him, he shifted his attention to Winter. “I don’t know how you did that, but whatever in the hell it was, good work.”
Swallowing in an effort to return some of the moisture to her mouth, she nodded. “Thanks. Like I said, just connected a few dots. Seemed like it fit with everything we were looking for. One of those hunches, you know? The ones you can’t ignore.”
He offered her a slight smile, but he was reminded of all the times Agent Sun Ming had spoken about Winter and her spooky “hunches” while they’d laid in bed after a satisfying bout of sex. Hunches. Nosebleeds. Blackouts. Yes, there was something going on with the young agent, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was.
He smiled at Winter. “Yeah, I know the type. All right, come on, it looks like they’re getting ready to breach the door.”
With another nod, Winter shoved open her door and stepped into the early evening. The temperature, though still relatively mild, was much cooler than the balmy fall air to which she’d grown accustomed. Zipping up the front of her navy blue jacket—the jacket with block lettering on the back that read FEDERAL AGENT, that never seemed to keep her warm when she was cold but always made her sweat during the summer—Winter followed Bobby up to the two-story house.
The black clad man at the head of the procession beat his fist against the beige door. “Open up, Mr. Johansson! This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have a warrant to search the premises.”
Winter and Bobby exchanged nervous glances.
According to the agent that Marie Judd had assigned to Tony Johansson, the man hadn’t left since he arrived home an hour earlier.
In tandem, she and Bobby retrieved their respective service weapons.
As he stepped to the side of the door, the tactical response agent looked to the pair of similarly dressed men that held a cylindrical battering ram.
In the midst of the quiet neighborhood, the blow to the door sounded out like a gunshot. Automatic rifles leading the way, another pair of agents hurried into the house, followed by the two who’d held the battering ram, and then their apparent leader.
Had they all just run into a trap? Or would they find Tony Johansson dead by his own hand?
As Winter and Bobby stood on the covered porch beside a couple crime scene techs, they remained silent. Winter’s heart hammered a rapid cadence in her chest as she pictured a litany of worst-case scenarios. Seconds turned to minutes, and the minutes felt like hours.
Though faint, the occasional shout of “clear!” filtered down to them as the tactical team swept the area. If it hadn’t been for the reassurance of the team calling out to one another, she would have been tempted to barge into the house herself to back them up.
Contrary to what was often displayed on television or in popular media, unless they had experience working together, field agents rarely joined the tactical team in the initial sweep of a place. Even in Richmond, she was inclined to let the men and women of the specialized FBI response team do their job. If she tried to help them, chances were good she’d only get in their way.
The creak of the wooden floor drew her attention back to the open door and the space beyond.
Scratching the side of his scruffy face, the tactical team’s apparent leader shook his head as he approached. “It’s all clear, Agents. No sign of Johansson anywhere. He must’ve gotten away.”
At Winter’s side, Bobby groaned. “Dammit,” he spat.
Winter raised a hand to cut off whatever complaint the man was about to make. “Hold on. He left the precinct an hour ago, and we know for sure he came back here. We don’t know when he disappeared after that, but either way we’re looking at a window of under an hour, not a week. He can’t have gotten far.”
Bobby leveled an appreciative index finger at her. “That’s true. We need to put out an all-points bulletin for Tony Johansson.”
With a staticky hiss, the tactical agent rattled off Johansson’s information to the radio attached to his Kevlar vest.
Bobby’s amber eyes flicked over to Winter. “Where do you think he went?”
Airport.
The thought was sudden and unbidden, like an object that had materialized out of thin air. “He might’ve gone to the airport,” she said, ignoring Bobby when he gave her a questioning look. “Or the bus station,” she added lamely.
Nodding, Bobby started for the short set of steps to the sidewalk. “You’re right. Well, even if you’re not, there aren’t a lot of other places we can check, are there?”
Winter jogged down the steps. “No, not really. I think we’d have a hell of a time checking the interstate routes out of the city. We’ll leave that to the Baltimore PD.”
With a grin, Bobby pulled open the driver’s side door. “Let’s go see if we can’t interrupt Mr. Johansson’s flight plan.”
For Natalie and Jon Falkner’s sakes, they’d better do just that.
35
Even though I’d spotted the federal agent the bureau sent to tail me more than an hour and a half ago, I was still sure I’d beaten them to the so-called punch. With a fake passport and a ticket to Panama, all I had to do was make it past the security checkpoint. They might have put an alert out for Tony Johansson, but they hadn’t notified the authorities to look for Brendan Sellers.
And right now, I was Brendan Jonathan Sellers.
In the short span of time, it was unlikely that my likeness would have been filtered all the way to the TSA. To be sure, the TSA was thorough, but being thorough still took time. And time was one luxury I made sure the FBI didn’t have.
My bag had been packed and ready well before I returned home from the bizarre meeting with Detective Vinson and the two Feds. While some of the agents’ behavior struck me as odd, they would have arrested me right then and there if they had anything solid. When I walked out the front doors of the precinct, I was sure I was about to be in the clear.
Glancing up from my passport—from Brendan’s passport—to the line of travelers waiting to make their way past the x-ray scans, I swallowed an irritable sigh.
The pace of the people in front of me was agonizingly casual. Each time someone was asked to remove the items from their pockets, to keep their boarding pass and their identification in hand, I had to bite back a string of fou
r-letter words.
Breaking my gaze away from the frustrating sight, I looked around the area behind me. When I spotted the same man seated at a bench against the wall, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Though the man pretended to observe his phone, it was clear that his interest lay elsewhere.
Did he work for the TSA, or was he here for me?
As I swallowed down the bile in the back of my throat, I spotted another suspicious person. A blonde woman, and like the man by the wall, she was engrossed in the screen in her hands.
The TSA might have had one plainclothes security official, but I doubted they’d have two.
And if there were two cops, there was no doubt there were more nearby.
Kneeling down to unzip my travel bag, I kept my movements as measured and even as I could manage. If I escaped the airport with no money and no way to obtain money, the effort would be pointless. I’d already been forced to leave my weapons behind. I wasn’t about to take off with no money, either.
My hand settled on an envelope, and then a small bag I’d stuffed with prepaid cards. Between those two items and the documents I already had in my wallet, I would be able to lay low outside the city until the heat died down.
I cast one more glance to the man and woman. I hoped they’d be gone, or that they would have convened with their family or friends.
But they hadn’t.
They were still there. In fact, they had moved closer. The man no longer sat at his bench—he had started his nonchalant advance to where I stood.
I clenched my jaw and rose back to my full height.
And then, I ran.
Bobby watched Tony Johansson’s body language from the video feed on his phone’s screen. Even though Bobby was certain Tony never saw him enter the airport, something had spooked the man. Bobby could see it in the way Tony’s shoulders had tensed, his facial expression as he took everything in.
It wouldn’t have been Winter. He knew she was being just as careful as he was. But still…
Pressing down on the button to the microphone clipped to his jacket, he kept his eyes on the screen as he crept closer to the security gate. “He’s spooked. We should just take him down now.”
As the crooked detective stood, Bobby hardly heard Winter’s staticky response. With one last paranoid glance, he leapt over one of the bands that was used to create a single winding path to the security checkpoint. Bobby burst from around the corner he’d hidden behind, but to his chagrin, Detective Johansson was already sprinting toward the entrance to a skywalk.
The elevated hall led to a massive parking garage, at the bottom of which was a route to exit the airport grounds.
Almost as an afterthought, Bobby clicked the microphone as he took off after Tony. “He’s headed to the parking garage.”
“Okay, I’m heading down to try to cut him off.” Winter’s tone was calm and determined.
As Bobby’s footsteps echoed over the polished floor, he lamented his neglect to change to a pair of shoes more conducive to foot pursuit of a suspect. He zigzagged through a throng of puzzled travelers, a handful of gasps left in his wake. The block text on the back of his jacket would tell them all they needed to know.
When he sprinted to the start of the skywalk, he looked into the distance and the shadowy entrance to the parking garage. The instant he spotted a fast-moving man among the group of otherwise slow-moving patrons, he ran to the set of glass doors as fast as his legs could carry him. There were fewer people to dodge here, but Bobby wasn’t above shoving them out of his way if they didn’t clear a damn path.
The stench of car exhaust greeted him like an unwanted embrace as he pushed his way to the veritable concrete fortress. He snapped his gaze left, then right.
With hardly a pause, Tony Johansson planted both hands on a concrete barrier between two sections of the same downward sloping road. As he leapt, Bobby took in a deep breath and sprinted after him. There were a handful of confused shouts from the civilians at his back, but he ignored them.
As Bobby approached the cement divider, he slowed his gait to a jog. Grasping the top of the four-foot wall with both hands, he used the momentum from his sprint to haul him over to the other side. He hit the ground running, and he noted with some satisfaction that the gap between him and Tony Johansson had narrowed a bit.
But unless Winter had found a quicker route to the ground floor, Bobby needed to close the rest of the distance. Gritting his teeth against the burn in his side, he forced his tired legs to move faster. He wasn’t in the same shape he’d maintained during his time in the Special Forces, but Bobby still worked to maintain a level of physical fitness that far surpassed the average Joe.
Apparently, so did Tony Johansson.
Rather than continue down the sloping concrete, Johansson took a sharp turn to the set of glass and metal doors that led to the stairwell. As Bobby followed the man’s path, he pinched the mic. “He’s headed down the stairwell. The southeast corner.”
“Shit,” Winter spat. “All right, I’m on my way. I’m on the main floor. I’m at the northwest corner, though. I’ll get there as quickly as I can.”
Bobby didn’t bother to offer a response.
He needed what little precious air he could pull into his lungs. His feet pounded against the concrete as he closed the distance to the stairwell, each jolt a pointed reminder that he wasn’t the twenty-two-year-old soldier he’d been during his second tour of Afghanistan.
Flinging open the nearest door, he launched himself toward the staircase. Though faint, he could hear the echo of Johansson’s steps as the man desperately tried to stay ahead of his pursuer.
With one hand, Bobby brushed the railing as he took the stairs down two at a time. He thought to shout at Johansson to stop, but he knew better than to think the man would heed his command. Tony Johansson had gone all or nothing. He either escaped, or he was caught and imprisoned. No caveat, no gray area.
Do or die. Sink or swim.
As he dared a glance over the side of the railing, he noted that there was a gap of less than a floor between them. The impact of his feet on the concrete steps was just as jarring, if not more so, than the sprint across flat asphalt.
The stairwell was a square, and if Bobby could close a little more of the distance between them, he might be able to use his higher position to his advantage. He looked over to a large plaque with the number two printed in the center.
Whatever he was going to do, he had to do it soon.
His side was on fire, and his breathing came in short, desperate gasps. He needed to catch this bastard soon, or he’d be liable to collapse into a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
Screw it all, he thought.
Clamping both hands down on the metal railing, he leapt off the fifth or sixth step and swung himself down to the landing. A few more steps, and then he took hold of the rail again. This time, however, he hauled himself over the corner of empty space between the landing and the next set of stairs.
There were a million and one different ways he could have messed up the maneuver and gone ass for appetite down the concrete stairwell, but even if he wasn’t in the same shape he’d been during his tenure in the military, Bobby’s reflexes were just as sharp as ever.
His feet had only just met the stairs as Johansson stepped onto the next landing. The disgraced detective snapped his wide-eyed stare to Bobby, though only for a split-second.
A split-second was all Bobby needed.
As Bobby took hold of the railing with his vice-like grip and lifted himself onto the metal handhold, he almost felt like he was a kid about to slide down the banister to hurry to the dining room for breakfast.
Only for this trip, he didn’t have eggs or waffles waiting. All he had at the figurative finish line was a dirty cop who’d sold out Drew Hansford and led the FBI agent to his death.
When Bobby was halfway down his descent of the handrail, Johansson finally thought to continue his descent to the main floor, to his supposed s
alvation.
But the decision came too late.
Bobby had him.
Rather than ride the railing to the landing, Bobby made use of his leftover momentum as he shoved himself away with both hands. If Tony Johansson hadn’t been at the edge of the landing, Bobby would have catapulted facefirst into the damn floor.
To his relief, Tony broke his fall.
The impact was at least ten times as jarring as the jolts that went through his legs while he’d sprinted down the stairs. Johansson’s face smashed into the arm he’d only just managed to throw in front of himself as he crumpled to the cement below.
Before the descent of the tackle had even finished, Bobby wrenched the man’s other arm behind his back. Still gasping for breath, he reached to his back to produce a pair of silver handcuffs. The sickly yellow light of the garage glinted off the polished metal as he closed one cuff around Tony’s wrist.
Jamming one knee into the center of the man’s back, he propped himself up and reached for the arm that had barely prevented Tony’s face from colliding with the landing. As he closed the second cuff to bind both the traitorous bastard’s hands behind his back, he took a deep breath.
“Tony Johansson.” He had to pause for another desperate gulp of air. “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent, as anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, and if you can’t afford one, one will be provided to you. Do you understand these rights as I have read them?”
Amidst Johansson’s labored breathing, the man grunted. “Yes.”
With one more breath, Bobby pressed the button on the microphone. “I’ve got him. Southeast stairwell, first level.”
Winter’s breathing was almost as labored as Bobby’s. “I’m on my way.”
Glancing down to the back of Tony’s head, Bobby ran a hand through his sweat-dampened hair.
The foot pursuit had been the easy part.