One Perfect Lie

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Evan!” Chris rushed to the figure’s side, kneeling and holstering his weapon. But the figure wasn’t Evan. It was Courtney’s husband, Doug, lying on his back. Blood soaked his T-shirt and the rug around his body, filling the air with its characteristic metallic odor.

  “Doug!” Chris palpated under Doug’s chin to feel for a pulse, but there wasn’t any. The man’s flesh felt cool, and his body remained still.

  Chris began CPR, pressing down on Doug’s chest, but there was no hope. The vast darkening stain on the rug showed that Doug had sustained a catastrophic loss of blood.

  Chris kept compressing Doug’s chest, but it practically caved in from the pressure. He could feel that Doug’s sternum had been shattered and his ribs splintered, so there must have been two or three gunshots. Blood squeezed between Chris’s fingers as he pressed down, and he glanced around to assess whether someone else was in the house, either dead or alive. He was taking a chance that he could be ambushed but he sensed he was alone and he had to give Doug every chance to survive.

  “Come on, Doug,” Chris said, trying to massage the man’s heart back to life, but it wasn’t happening. He finally stopped the compressions, feeling as if he were abusing a corpse.

  Chris rose, wiped his hands quickly on his jacket, reached for his weapon, and began his walk-through. Courtney could be lying dead somewhere in the house, and so could Evan. He crossed the living room to the kitchen and scanned the room, but it was empty, its red pinpoint lights from the dishwasher, coffeemaker, and microwave clock glowing like a suburban constellation.

  Chris hustled back into the living room and spotted a stairwell at the far left, so he went to it and climbed upstairs, looking around. There was a bathroom at the head of the stair, but it was empty, then he advanced down the hallway, ducking into the first room on his left, a master bedroom. Moonlight spilled through its two windows, and he could see there was no one else in the bedroom, which looked in order, not showing signs of struggle or ransacking, as if from a burglary.

  Chris ducked out of the first bedroom and went to the second, evidently a spare bedroom with a single bed in the corner, and there was no activity or disturbance in there either.

  So far, so good, Chris thought, relieved to see that Evan wasn’t dead and neither was Courtney, at least not at this location. He left the bedroom, hurried back down the hall, and descended the stairwell. He spotted a side door, so he hurried inside, and down a set of stairs. He found himself in a finished basement with a bar, big-screen TV, and framed football jerseys on the wall. It was undisturbed, and there was no exit.

  Chris ran upstairs and returned to the living room, where he saw Doug’s body, and he looked down at the fallen man with a stab of anguish. Now two men had been murdered, and there would be more lives lost if he didn’t succeed. He couldn’t bring himself to even think the word, fail. Suddenly he heard the sound of sirens a few blocks away. The local police were en route.

  Chris walked to the front door and switched on the light switch with his elbow, illuminating the room to signal that he was inside. The locals must have reached the block because the sirens became earsplitting, and he spotted another light switch next to the door, for the exterior fixture. He flicked it on with his elbow too, casting a yellowish cone around the front door.

  Flashing red-and-white lights chased each other around the walls of the living room, accompanied by the blare of sirens, and Chris realized his hands were covered with Doug’s blood. He raised his hands palms up, standard procedure in case the locals hadn’t gotten the message that he was on the scene, an occupational hazard for undercover agents. He knew of a case where two undercover agents almost killed each other, each believing the other was the criminal.

  Chris positioned himself in full view as three police cruisers, with their distinctive brown-and-yellow Central Valley emblems, pulled up in front of the house and braked, their car doors opening immediately. Uniformed police officers jogged toward the house.

  “I’m Special Agent Curt Abbott, ATF,” Chris shouted, as loudly as possible to be heard over the sirens.

  “Copy that! Everybody, stand down!” shouted the police officer who took the lead, and none of the locals drew their weapons, so Chris opened the front door and stepped outside, meeting the lead cop at the front step. He seemed stocky in his brown uniform, in his fifties.

  “Hello. Special Agent Curt Abbott, ATF,” Chris said, in case they hadn’t heard him. “I’d shake your hand, but mine are bloody.”

  “Officer Mike Dunleavy,” said the lead cop, his expression grim under the patent bill of his cap.

  “We have a gunshot victim dead in the living room, name Doug Wheeler. I believe this is his residence. I performed CPR but it’s too late and—”

  “A murder?” Officer Dunleavy interrupted, shocked. “I don’t think we have two murders in Central Valley in a year.”

  “I also did a cursory walk-through and found no other bodies, dead or alive. Your guys may want to double-check. I didn’t have time to check the backyard.”

  “We’ll follow up. But a murder. What’s this about, do you know?”

  “Sorry, Officer Dunleavy, I can’t share that with you.”

  “You got any suspects?”

  “I can’t share that with you, either.”

  “Jeez, was it a bomb, guns, or something like that? I figure, since you’re ATF—”

  “Sorry, I can’t explain further.”

  “I get it, if you tell me you have to kill me.” Office Dunleavy chuckled, without mirth. Behind him, cops were shutting off the sirens, setting up a perimeter with yellow caution tape, and putting on gloves and booties. Lights went on in the other houses on the street, and heads appeared at windows.

  “Officer Dunleavy, have your boss call my boss and they’ll fill you in. They’ll complete whatever reports you need.” Chris motioned to Evan’s car. “Before I go, I need to check inside the BMW’s trunk.”

  “Let me go back to my cruiser, I got a crowbar.” Officer Dunleavy jogged off, while neighbors began to file out of their houses to watch, their coats draped over their bathrobes and pajamas on the chilly night.

  Chris kept his face down and walked over to Evan’s car. He prayed Evan wasn’t dead in the trunk and he bent over and checked underneath to see if anything was dripping, just in case the trunk’s seal wasn’t perfect. The driveway underneath the BMW remained dry.

  Chris straightened up, coming eye level with the license plate, then he did a double-take. The license plate read RET-7819, but that wasn’t Evan’s license plate, unless Chris remembered it wrong. He slid out his phone, thumbed to the text function, and scanned through the photos. He found the one of Evan’s BMW that he’d just sent to the Rabbi. The license plate was PZR-4720.

  Chris pressed redial to call the Rabbi, who picked up after one ring. “Rabbi, I got good news and bad news.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “Don’t you want the good news first? Everybody wants the good news first.”

  “Not Jews. We’re tough. Give it to me straight.”

  “I found Courtney Wheeler’s husband, Doug Wheeler, murdered in the house, three gunshot wounds to the chest. I tried to revive him but I couldn’t.”

  The Rabbi groaned. “Okay, that’s bad news. What’s the good news?”

  “I’m looking at Evan’s black BMW, but it doesn’t have the right tag. Evan’s tag is PZR-4720, as in the picture, but now it’s RET-7819.”

  “So they switched the plates.”

  “Exactly. You need to find the vehicle with Evan’s old tag. My bet is it’s on a van, and you know what I’m thinking.” Chris didn’t elaborate because a local cop was within earshot, unrolling crime-scene tape.

  “The van is a bomb on wheels,” the Rabbi answered, finishing the thought.

  “Bingo. If you run the plate I’m looking at, it’ll tell you the make and model of the van.”

  “And it’ll turn out to be a stolen vehicle.”

 
; “Agree. I think I’m done here. Where’s my ride?”

  “In the air, ten minutes away. Where do you want him?”

  “The baseball field at the high school, southeast of the main building. That will jerk Alek’s chain.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Only a little bit. And tell the pilot not to mess up the clay on the baselines. My boys just raked it.”

  The Rabbi chuckled. “Don’t push it.”

  “Did you learn anything new? Or do I have to do all the work around here?”

  “We’re on our way to the farmstead now. Evidently the Shank family is well-known to the locals. Everybody knows everybody up here.”

  “Tell me what you got.”

  “The mother died a long time ago, and father about six months ago, heart attack. Two older sons, David and Jim, both barroom brawlers. The Shank brothers, everybody calls them. No neo-Nazi, biker, Christian Identity, or alt-right affiliations. No college degree, no criminal record. Anti-frackers. Write letters to the editor of the local paper. Go to the rallies. Courtney is the only one who graduated college, the youngest of three. She’s the one who got away.”

  “Good to know.” Chris noticed Officer Dunleavy returning with a crowbar. “I’m about to break into the BMW to make sure there’s nothing in the trunk.”

  “Attaboy. Stay in touch.”

  “Will do. Good-bye.” Chris hung up, and Officer Dunleavy reached him, extending the crowbar.

  “Special Agent, you want to do the honors?”

  “No, have at it. The anti-theft system is going to give you a headache.”

  “All in a day’s work.” Officer Dunleavy wedged the crowbar under the lid of the trunk, pressed down, and popped the lid. The car alarm went off instantly, beeping in a night already abuzz with activity. Neighbors lined the sidewalk, watching, talking, and smoking cigarettes.

  Officer Dunleavy pulled a flashlight from his utility belt and shined it inside the trunk, and Chris looked. There was nothing inside but a baseball glove and a blue Musketeers ball cap.

  Chris swallowed hard at the sight. “Thanks, I gotta go,” he said, jogging toward his Jeep.

  Chapter Fifty

  Chris flew northward in the helo, an older Black Hawk UH-60 on loan from DEA, which was being piloted by a Tony Arroyo, an African-American subcontractor who’d served two tours in Iraq. A dizzying array of dials, levers, and controls filled the dashboard in the all-glass cockpit, glowing an array of colors in the darkness, and though the big rotors whirred noisily over head, the helo barely shuddered in Tony’s experienced hands.

  Chris kept his head to the window, his thoughts racing. The bomb plot was being rushed and that was when criminals started taking bigger risks—which made them even more dangerous. If the Shanks had killed Doug, they hadn’t bothered to disguise the murder as a suicide or a home invasion. They could be setting Evan up as the fall guy. They had left Evan’s car in the driveway, and the switching of the license plates would point to Evan’s guilt. Maybe the scenario they were trying to sell was that Evan had killed Courtney’s husband in a jealous rage.

  Chris tried the theory on for size, and it worked. Reasoning backwards, that meant that the stolen vehicle, presumably a van, had probably come from the Central Valley area, because it would be a location to which Evan had access, not the Shanks.

  Chris mulled it over as he looked at the land below. They were flying roughly along Route 81 to 476. The sky was dark, and they passed Allentown and were coming up on Hazleton, due north. The terrain below turned wooded, then rural, signified by vast dark spaces with only intermittent houses, towns, or signs of civilization. The moon shone brightly on the left side of the sky, and Chris found himself checking it as they flew farther north, knowing that its incremental sinking meant it was getting later. Soon the sun would rise, and it would be Monday morning.

  Chris shuddered to imagine people going to work with their cups of coffee, phones, and newspapers, boarding trains and buses to get themselves to a city, to a building, and finally to a desk to start the workday. They wouldn’t know that their lives and the lives of everyone around them were about to end in a violent death.

  Chris thought back to the Oklahoma City bombing, the WTC bombing on 9/11, and a string of other deadly bombings that made him want justice for the victims and their families. It was his job to never let it happen again.

  He clenched his jaw as the helo zoomed north, heading toward the Shank farmstead in Susquehanna County, and ten minutes later, he could see the change in the terrain. Bright white lights twinkled below in a regular grid pattern, like a box of connect-the-dots in the dark night.

  “What’s that, over there?” Chris asked Tony, speaking into the microphone in his headset.

  “Drilling wells for natural gas. We’re coming up on the Marcellus Shale.”

  “Tell me about it, would you?” Chris should know, but didn’t.

  “The Marcellus Shale runs under the Appalachian basin and includes seven states, like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey.” Tony pointed left. “Over there, that’s the fairway, where the shale’s deep enough to extract.”

  “What’s shale exactly?”

  “Sedimentary rock that traps oil and gas in the layers. In the old days, they tried to locate where the gas was and drill for it, but now they frack for it.” Tony pointed again. “I fly over this all the time, doing VIP pickups. It changes every year. More well pads and more drills.”

  Chris absorbed the information without judgment. He knew fracking was a political hot button, but he’d always been apolitical. His job was to save lives, and he couldn’t be distracted or people died.

  “Ten minutes to landing,” Tony said, and Chris checked his watch. It was 4:32 A.M.

  Dawn would be here before he knew it, and the first order of business was to find the target. ATF and the other federal agencies couldn’t shut down every highway, bridge, and tunnel in the Northeast. They couldn’t issue a warning to all federal buildings and state buildings. They had to learn where the disaster was going to strike, so they could avert it.

  The helo began to descend in the night sky, tipping forward.

  Chris felt like a guard dog straining against a leash. He couldn’t wait until they touched down, setting him loose.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chris hustled from the helo toward the staging area, a white tent that had been erected on the front lawn of the Shanks’ farmstead. Bright klieglights flooded the area, illuminating folding tables, chairs, and laptops that had been set up. Federal agents hustled back and forth in blue windbreakers labeled JTTF, FBI, and ATF. The local uniformed police stood at the perimeter around their squad cars.

  Chris looked beyond the staging area to the farm, a compound that struck him as a poor man’s version of Skinny Lane Farm. Its layout was almost identical, with a stone farmhouse behind a pasture, an old barn, and several outbuildings, albeit in disrepair. Faded blue shutters hung askew on the windows, and its clapboard was peeling in patches. The roofs sagged, and the barn had faded to a dried-blood color. The pastures had been overrun by tangled overgrowth of scrubby weeds, and the fences missed boards everywhere. Farm equipment, a truck, and an old car sat rusting on cinder blocks.

  Chris spotted the Rabbi running from the farmhouse to meet him. “Hey, you got anything new?”

  The Rabbi reached him out of breath. “The joint is jumping, and the gang’s all here. Let me brief you before we get inside. We’re on top of each other in there.”

  “Okay.” Chris hated that, too. Neither of them played well with others.

  “Let me show you my phone. I got two videos. Check this out.” The Rabbi held up his phone and pressed PLAY. “We ran the tag you gave us, and it belongs to a pickup, 2014 black Dodge dually, reported stolen from a used car lot outside of Central Valley. The locals sent us a traffic cam video.”

  “Good.” Chris watched the video, in which a dark Ford Ranger pickup pulled up in front of a used-car lo
t and someone got out of the passenger seat wearing a black ski mask, black sweatshirt, and black pants. Unfortunately, the license plate wasn’t in the frame.

  “Now here’s the video from the used-car lot.” The Rabbi began thumbing through his videos, stopping at another one. He pressed PLAY, and the video showed the ski-masked figure breaking into the dually, with its characteristic double tires in the rear for bigger payloads. An old black cap covered its bed. The figure climbed inside and presumably hot-wired the dually, because he drove it out of the used-car lot.

  “So far, so good.”

  “Stay tuned,” the Rabbi said, and on the video, the dually drove away, but one moment later, was followed by the Ford Ranger pickup. The last frame showed the license plate of the Ranger before it slipped out of the frame.

  “So you ran a plate on the Ranger.”

  “Yes, and it’s Jimmy Shank’s. So we got Jimmy on auto theft, and it got us into the farmhouse.”

  “You got anything on the target? And where’s Evan and Courtney?”

  “Nothing on Courtney or Evan, but come in and I’ll brief you. We’ve narrowed possibilities for the target, and we put out a BOLO for auto theft. JTTF doesn’t want to notify the public that we’re talking about a domestic terrorist.” The Rabbi headed for the farmhouse, and Chris fell into step beside him, checking his watch.

  “But it’s almost five o’clock in the morning. People are going to work soon.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Can’t we issue some kind of general warning?”

  “We’re not calling the shots. JTTF is.”

  “But it’s our operation.”

  “We know that but nobody else does.” The Rabbi lowered his voice. “Humor them, Curt. It’s the best way to get along. We divided the labor, and so far, we’re living in harmony.”

  “So what’s the division of labor?” Chris hid his frustration. He hated bureaucratic crap.

  “Their guys searched the farm, and everybody’s gone—the Shank brothers, Courtney, and Evan. We all went through the house, and the FBI found some of the files, and we found some others.”