The Entity Game: An Aurora Donati Novel

by Lisa Shearin

  Now, it was just another tool we used to do our jobs. No one could spot a fake like Grandad. One touch could tell him how old a piece really was, and occasionally even the identity of the forger who’d painted it. Forgers with Old Master-level talent were few and far between. Grandad knew them all. I relied more on the emotional residuals that thieves left at the scene of their crime. Whatever they’d touched, wherever they’d stood, I could pick up flashes of thought or images of what—or who—they’d seen. Few thieves worked alone. A thief’s glance at a partner’s face could give me a description. The mention or thought of a name or place could give me their identity or the stolen art’s location. The big challenge for me was to convey what I found to police in a way that didn’t out me as the psychometric I was.

  I scanned my inbox. There wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait.

  Then came the ping of an incoming text.

  About time you landed.

  My friend and frequent colleague, Berta Pike.

  FBI Special Agent Alberta Pike, to be exact.

  She’d known I was going to Vegas, but on the way back I’d changed flights for one that’d left two hours earlier than originally planned.

  I grinned and started texting. The FBI sees all, knows all.

  Damn straight. You got extra luggage?

  Just carry-on.

  Good. I’m waiting at the gate.

  I didn’t have to ask if anything was wrong. Berta Pike hadn’t shown up at Dulles at nearly one o’clock in the morning to give me a hug and a ride home. She didn’t have any active cases that I was involved in. It must be something new and urgent.

  So much for sleep.

  These days, in order to get to a gate, you have to be a federal agent on government business doing some serious badge-flashing, though it usually means someone is about to be arrested. We mere mortals used to be able to wait at the gate for friends and family to arrive. No arrests, just hugs. Terrorism put a stop to that.

  Once the plane stopped, the man across the aisle stood to get his bag out of the overhead. I steeled myself, slid over to the aisle seat to do the same.

  I wanted confirmation.

  I reached for the overhead so my shoulder brushed his. The images flooded in.

  “Sorry!” I gave him an apologetic smile. “Gotta get my land legs back.”

  He nodded once without looking at me.

  He’d gone to Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party. He thought he could resist the temptation. He was wrong. Three and a half years of progress gone. His wife loved him. He knew that, but how could she possibly love him now? He’d gambled. He’d lost. A lot. More than they could spare. She would hate him. He hated himself.

  He was halfway up the jet bridge when I caught up to him.

  “Tell your wife everything,” I said. “You didn’t mean for it to happen. It was too much for you to handle.”

  He stopped, his face gone pale. “Excuse me?”

  I wasn’t about to explain how I knew. That’d just open a can of weirdness neither one of us wanted.

  “Talk to her,” I told him. “She’ll want you to. She’ll understand. You know she will. Then promise her you’ll get more help so you don’t do it again.”

  I kept going up the jet bridge and didn’t look back. I didn’t need to. He’d still be standing there, stunned. I’d been there and induced that often enough to know.

  Special Agent Berta Pike was waiting for me.

  She was wearing a dark suit and an equally dark disposition that didn’t scream Fed as much as it solemnly stated it. She wore her hair short and natural. I’d seen a couple of pre-FBI photos where she had shoulder-length braids that she’d artfully spun into a tight bun that accented her flawless cheekbones. When I’d first met her, I thought she’d gone short to prevent giving a hold to a suspect should an apprehension go south. I was wrong. No suspect or FBI workout partner regardless of size or speed had ever gotten close enough to Alberta Pike to get a good hold on anything. She was five inches taller than me, slender and solid, and in my opinion, was badassness personified. Before joining the FBI, she’d done two tours with the Army in Afghanistan.

  Berta may have been here on business, but I still got that hug.

  And I didn’t try to read her when she did. A friend didn’t read a friend’s thoughts without permission. Though the tension she was feeling was obvious and in all caps.

  “How’d the tournament go?” she asked.

  I mustered a grin. “I won just enough for the bike, and a little extra for a suite and some room service. Laurence promised he’d get it finished and have it to me by next Wednesday.”

  Berta cracked a smile. “Amazing how it worked out like that.”

  “Isn’t it though?” I pulled the strap of my messenger bag higher on my shoulder. “Now, how’d I warrant an FBI Uber at oh-dark-thirty?”

  Berta’s smile vanished. “Not here.”

  I’d have to be satisfied with small talk until we got to the car.

  I saw the man again in the baggage claim area.

  He was with his wife. Both had tears in their eyes, but they were the good kind. They kissed, then stopped, talking quickly, faces close together, their eyes seeing nothing but each other. Then the man tightly hugged his wife. She was his love and his lifeline.

  He must have sensed me as Berta and I passed. His eyes opened and met mine.

  I gave him a wink and a small smile.

  His lips barely moved, forming two words, but I got the message.

  I accepted his thanks with a single nod.

  From time to time, what I did really was a gift.

  CHAPTER 2

  Berta didn’t say a word until we got into the car.

  It had to be bad.

  It was.

  “Senator Julian Pierce and his senior aide, Alan Coe, were found dead in the senator’s office a couple hours ago.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry,” Berta said. “There’s never an easy way to—”

  I waved her off. “I know, it’s just that…”

  “When will your grandad be back home?” she asked quietly.

  “A few days,” I heard myself say. “I’ll have to call him.”

  Julian Pierce was Grandad’s best friend.

  My grandfather didn’t include politicians in his inner circle of friends, which was small by choice. Julian Pierce was the sole exception. Grandad wasn’t a political animal, and neither was Julian Pierce—at least not around us. His passion for art and its recovery nearly matched Grandad’s. I’d first met him at a National Gallery of Art fundraiser. It’d been July and the event had been casual. It would’ve looked odd for me to be wearing gloves. My smile that night as I had shaken hands when introduced to various people had been more like a gritting of teeth, but I’d gotten through it. With politicians, an entire conversation, albeit brief, could be contained in a single handshake. It invariably involved more than one hand. Hand on hand, hand on shoulder or upper arm. Or just bring the whole body into it and yank the opponent/constituent toward them. In a city full of alpha male—and often creepy—politicians, it was no wonder I hated shaking hands.

  My initial impression of Julian Pierce had been that of a truly good man, sincere in his feelings, a man who cared deeply about the people he represented and was honest in his dealings—all of which was a rarity in Washington. He was the kind of man I didn’t mind shaking hands with. As I’d gotten to know him better, I’d been struck by his wisdom, his humor, and his humility and compassion. Whenever I read or heard the term “elder statesman,” I immediately thought of Julian Pierce.

  I had only spoken with Alan Coe a few times at social gatherings at the senator’s McLean, Virginia, home. He was young and earnest and fiercely devoted to Julian Pierce and the causes he championed. I remembered that Alan and Tina, his wife of only two years, ran marathons together.

  Now both he and his boss were gone.

&nb
sp; “How?” I managed.

  “It looks like heart attacks, but the ME says she won’t know for—”

  “Both?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Says you, me, Rees, and everyone else. We’re treating this as if it were murder.”

  Special Agent Samuel Rees was Berta’s partner, the Sherlock to her warrior Watson. Other agents considered Rees more of a Mulder. When a crime took a turn for the weird, the FBI turned to Samuel Rees.

  And more often than I liked, Samuel Rees turned to me.

  I’d met him ten months ago. The owner of an art gallery near Dupont Circle was suspected of having a side business trafficking stolen and fraudulent art. The owner turned up dead hours before a planned FBI raid, and the FBI called us. Grandad was in New York. I went to the gallery in his stead.

  I knew most of the agents in the Art Crime unit. I didn’t recognize the man crouched by the dead woman’s body. I had an uneasy feeling. Not because of the dead body; I’d seen those before. It was the intensity of the agent’s stare, as if he were willing the woman to open her eyes and tell him who had killed her. The other agents went about their business, giving the man plenty of space as he carried out his silent interrogation. I hadn’t moved, and I didn’t think he had seen me come in.

  “Ms. Donati,” he said without turning. “Please join me. I would like your opinion.” He stood and walked to the back of the gallery.

  I followed.

  He introduced himself and opened the plastic evidence bag containing the dead woman’s phone and held it out for me to take. “Please tell me what happened to her.”

  He knew about me.

  There were a handful of people in the FBI whom Grandad trusted enough to let in on his secret.

  Special Agent Samuel Rees was one of them, but Grandad hadn’t told him about me; Rees had instinctively known what I was when I’d walked into that gallery. He had an ability of his own. He called it recognizing talent.

  Rees was in a small department in the FBI that had only two official employees—himself and Special Agent Alberta Pike. I didn’t want anyone in the intelligence community to know what I could do. Samuel Rees and Berta Pike had become the exceptions. The murdered gallery owner had been a friend of his late wife.

  As I’d taken the phone, a mild electric current had run up my arm from fingertips to elbow. I’d learned to recognize that as the residual of strong emotion such as rage, betrayal, or terror. The gallery owner had experienced all of those. While the sensations were disturbing, I wasn’t the one being killed. I’d learned to compartmentalize. It really cut down on the nightmares and kept me from getting PTSD from trauma that I hadn’t experienced myself. Try explaining that to a therapist.

  Unfortunately, even objects as personal as phones didn’t give me a movie version of what had happened. Instead, I got flashes of images, impressions, and emotions. It was up to me to piece it together.

  We eventually got to the truth. She had been killed by her business partner, who had been secretly moving stolen art and forgeries through the gallery.

  A police car siren jarred me back to the present.

  “Is Rees at the scene?” It felt surreal, calling Julian Pierce’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building a crime scene.

  Berta nodded. “Waiting on you. He won’t let them take the bodies until you’ve had a chance to…” She didn’t need to say it, and I really didn’t want her to.

  I’d never worked a crime scene where I knew the victims.

  I swallowed on a dry mouth. “I don’t have my go-bag. Do you have some gloves I can doctor?”

  “There’s a pair of pre-cut gloves in the glove box. I did them myself.”

  “Did you—”

  “I wore gloves while I did it, and when I put them in the zippy bag for you, so there’s no Alberta Pike mojo for you to wade through this time.”

  To work a crime scene, I needed at least one pair of nitrile gloves with the pads of both index fingers cut out. Skin-to-skin contact with a corpse’s pulse points—even though there was no longer a pulse—could give me impressions of their final moments. The less time that had passed since death the better. My job would be simpler if I could move through a crime scene, touching or picking up any object I needed to read. Crime-scene investigators frowned on that, hence the modified gloves.

  Within the hour, I’d be touching Julian Pierce and Alan Coe. Hopefully at least one of them would be able to give me the help I needed to find their killer.

  Elaine. Oh no.

  Julian’s granddaughter Elaine had been elected in November as one of the youngest members of the House of Representatives and had been sworn in a few short weeks ago. Grandad and I had attended the party in McLean that Julian had thrown for her.

  “Has Elaine Pierce been notified?” I asked.

  “By now she should have been.”

  I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was going through. Before running for the New York congressional seat, Elaine had served on the state level in Albany, and before that had put her law degree to work in the Manhattan DA’s office. She was warm, funny, and scary smart. Julian had been so proud that his granddaughter would be serving on Capitol Hill with him.

  Then there was Grandad. He had no idea what had just happened to the man he loved like a brother.

  “You okay?” Berta asked.

  I gave a tight nod. I was far from okay, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t allow it.

  I wasn’t doing this for the FBI. I sure as hell wasn’t doing it for me. What I was about to do was for Julian Pierce and Alan Coe. This hadn’t been their time to die. If Berta and Rees thought they’d been murdered, that was what had happened. While nothing would bring them back, I could help find their killers, and give Elaine and Tina the small comfort of closure they’d need, and Julian and Alan the justice they deserved.

  I stared out through the windshield as the rotunda of the US Capitol came into view. It was a Thursday in late January. Congress was in session, and next Tuesday would typically be the State of the Union address, but since Catherine Archer had only been sworn in as president for a little over a week, it would just be an address to Congress. Those who usually tried to go home on weekends were staying in town. The weather people were calling for snow on Sunday, which was yet another reason for them to stay put.

  Berta was using the blue light on the dashboard and the siren to get through intersections. There was more traffic in predawn Washington than you’d think, though this morning, a lot of that traffic had flashing lights of their own, and signals were out at most intersections due to the earthquake. It was bad enough now; I didn’t want to imagine what it’d be like in a couple of hours when the sun came up.

  I tried to relax. Tension would cloud any impressions and images I’d be able to glean from Julian and Alan’s bodies, and I couldn’t afford to miss a thing. I had to be at the top of my game, and that meant calm and analytical. I couldn’t let my emotions take control. As with any case I worked, I needed as much pertinent background on the victims as I could get. Most of what I knew about Julian Pierce was from his personal life. He and Alan had been killed in Julian’s office. What I did know of his work in the Senate, I’d seen on the news or read online.

  “Do you know if Senator Pierce made a habit of working this late?” I asked.

  Berta shook her head. “According to the Capitol Police on duty downstairs, he told them he’d be working until at least ten o’clock every night this week.”

  “Who would have access to that information besides Julian’s staff and the Capitol Police?”

  “It was noted in their system for anyone on duty—or who could access it.”

  “In other words, more people could’ve known than were supposed to.”

  I’d heard that a surprising number of senators and congressmen slept in their Capitol Hill offices, but I didn’t think Julian would have been one of
them. The money-saving practice tended to be limited to the younger members, who could function the next day after spending the night on a cot or sleeper sofa.

  “Who found them?”

  “When the quake hit, one of the Capitol Police officers on duty started calling around to the senators known to be working late. Neither Pierce nor Coe answered. Two officers were dispatched to Pierce’s office, where they found both men dead, bodies still warm.”

  “And the last time they were seen alive?” I asked.

  “The custodian responsible for Senator Pierce’s floor said he stopped by his office to empty the trash a little after eight. He said he stayed about five minutes, talking to the senator.”

  “Any security footage to back that up?”

  Berta nodded. “The old guy’s telling the truth. He was on the video at 8:22. But here’s the kicker. The footage shows him coming back at 9:15. Nate Baxter, that’s the custodian, denies being there a second time.”

  “Any witnesses that he was somewhere else?”

  “No. He claimed he was in the breakroom, and left just before ten o’clock. Our people picked him up at his home and brought him in for questioning.”

  “Was anyone in the breakroom with him?”

  “No. He says he was the only one there. If the guy that went to Pierce’s office the second time wasn’t Baxter, it was his twin.”

  “Has he been arrested?”

  “He’s in custody, but hasn’t been charged. They’re waiting on the autopsies.”

  “You said it looked like heart attacks. Is there another theory?”

  “They checked for an airborne toxin first thing,” Berta said. “Nothing happened to the Capitol Police who found them, but no one else was allowed inside until the check was done. All tests were negative. You have to admit, the hearts of two otherwise healthy men failing at the same time…”

  “Yeah. Not very likely.”

  “The security camera shows only three times someone entered or left that office. At 7:17, Alan Coe went downstairs to pick up a Thai food delivery. At 8:22, Nate Baxter emptied the garbage and stayed for five minutes to talk. Then Baxter, or his twin, was there again at 9:15.”