Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  11

  Brian

  Wednesday p.m.

  The Panther Force door cracked open, and Lynx leaned in. “I had a few minutes, so I wanted to poke my head in and see how Sophia is doing.”

  “We were about to go over today’s events,” Brian said. “Do you have a few minutes? It would be great if you could give us your input.”

  Lynx stood out in the war room like a red balloon in a black-and-white photo. Her job with their fellow Iniquus team, Strike Force, included an array of hats she wore. From what Brian had seen, her main duty was to shock the system. The Iniquus environment was constructed of rigid lines and industrial chrome. The operatives and support staff wore shades of black and gray. The men in their compression shirts were able-bodied and hard, while Lynx went out of her way to look soft and pliable. Lynx wore reds and pinks in decidedly female styles. Brian had seen her work time and time again. The person who was being interrogated would be steeled against most of their tactics, then Lynx would walk in, sit down, and smile. She’d chat with the person; and soon there would be a font of information being shared.

  Lynx was as capable in mind and body as any of the force operatives—she was the Iniquus wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. And she got away with it because she was, in fact, genuinely kind.

  While they waited for Thorn to show up, Brian took a minute to lay out the basics of what they knew about Sophia, and why they thought she might be the one they needed to target in the case.

  Nutsbe moved to pour yet another of the ubiquitous cups of coffee that fueled Iniquus. “Anyone?”

  “Yes, please. Cream and sugar,” Lynx said. When Nutsbe turned his back, she leaned over to talk under her breath. “This can’t be easy,” she reached for Brian’s hands. “I saw how you looked at her. I know how affected you were by her seizure. You had a relationship with her in the past?”

  Brian reached for an impassive response. Gripped it. Forced it into place.

  “Brian, we were in the middle of a crisis, and you responded naturally. This isn’t censure, I’m checking in on you, that’s all.”

  Brian tried to brush it off. He liked that Lynx was tuned in when she was developing a case. Having her skills turned on him felt intrusive. “Sophia and I met one night months ago. It was a fun evening. She’s a lovely woman. Yeah, I’ll admit finding out she was the subject of an FBI investigation rocked me. I thought my instincts about people were pretty solid.”

  “I always trust my instincts.” Lynx’s voice was pure conviction. “That first impression is everything. Things can happen thirty seconds later that work to change your mind, but that first visceral emotion, that first understanding, that’s the one that will bear itself out, even if someone plays a charade for years.” Lynx paused. “From what I saw when the curtain was pulled back, that must have been one hell of a first impression.”

  Brian swallowed. Yeah, seeing Sophia walk into the hotel bar had pretty much rocked his world. His first impression was that she was his. His first thought was, “Well, it’s about time.” He hadn’t stopped to examine that thought in the moment. It felt like he’d been waiting for her to show up, and boom there she was. Easy. Natural. A done deal.

  Nutsbe put a mug with a trigger handle in front of Lynx that read, “Keep Calm and Squeeze Gently.” He winked at her.

  “You could try,” Lynx said.

  Nutsbe laughed as he took his seat. “No thanks, I like the fact that my spine’s intact.”

  They turned as Thorn made his way into the room. “Sorry. I stopped by forensics on my way here and the tech got chatty. What have we got going on? This whole tire deal is from bizarro land.” Thorn tossed a file onto the table and took a seat in their circle.

  “I have a theory,” Lynx said.

  Nutsbe took a gulp from his mug. “I thought you might.”

  “Gaslighting.”

  Brian leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

  “Let’s start with the PTSD first. It’s significant. Sophia and Nadia were kidnapped, gone for days. Sophia developed PTSD where Nadia did not. I’m wondering if in the FBI file there’s any more information about the women’s experiences, how they were treated, if they were kept together. Not to say that all people come out of a traumatic experience in the same way, but I’m wondering if, as a the younger of the two, or for some other reason not readily obvious, Sophia was singled out to get information from her or possibly to be turned.” Lynx pinched at her bottom lip, her attention turned inward. “I would guess that Nadia recovered from the experience because she was given the opportunity to. Sophia went from the kidnapping to her father’s debilitating health crisis, to her brother’s motorcycle accident, to an unplanned pregnancy, to her boyfriend’s head injury, to the marriage, to violence at home, to a new baby. She was overwhelmed in a very short time, and those crisis events seemed to present themselves on some kind of horrible continuum. Sure, her system went haywire this morning. Who’s wouldn’t?”

  “Do you think she could be guilty?” Brian measured his tone carefully.

  “From what little I’ve seen and read in her file, all the ingredients for the stew are in the pot. Possible? Absolutely. She’s a woman in crisis, and where that crisis would cause her to react one way as an individual—as a mother of two small children, the only family they have, she would have to feel desperate. Is her guilt probable? I just don’t know. I wouldn’t think so—but people with their necks under the guillotine will do improbable things to extricate themselves.”

  Brian flashed back to the garage when he’d offered his car for Sophia to use to pick up Chance. She’d said, “Desperate times mean desperate measures” like it was her mantra.

  “I’m surprised the woman can walk and talk, let alone be so high-functioning. As you’re working through this case, your team needs to be aware of how fragile she is.” Lynx pulled out a printed list and laid it where the men could get eyes on. “When I got back to Iniquus this morning, Nutsbe let me peek at the intake file he’s compiling. I was looking for stressors to apply to the Holmes and Rahe stress scale. That’s a scale put together after they studied about five thousand medical files, trying to pinpoint a correlation between illness and life events. They developed a chart with forty-three stressors—some could be read as positive, like a new job, or a pregnancy, others are obviously devastating, like the death of a spouse. The forty-three stressors were each given a numeric weight. The death of a close family member, for example, is worth sixty-three points. It turned out that if a patient scored over three-hundred on their table in a year’s time, it was predictive of a serious illness.”

  Brian scanned down the list while he listened. Change in financial status, thirty-eight points, housing issues, thirty, troubles with in-laws, twenty-nine, end of school, twenty-six, change of living conditions, twenty-five, change in residence, twenty, change in sleeping habits, sixteen… Five-fifty-five plus. He put his finger on the total. “What happens when you get to five-fifty-five plus?”

  “She has a much higher number than that. I was getting depressed just tabulating it. First, you should know that that number happened over the last five years, between 2011 and 2016. I didn’t try to break it down to individual years, because stress is accumulative. Also, PTSD and NEAD seizures have their own physical and mental impact. What I wanted you to see here is that your client, who is also the subject of your investigation, is walking a tightrope. She could lose her balance and fall at any time.”

  Brian’s physical reaction to that statement surprised the hell out of him. It was as if he grew and expanded, his nostrils flared, and he wanted to race forward, smashing and destroying anything and everything that put Sophia and her boys in harm’s way. He squashed those feelings down when Lynx turned her perceptive gaze on him. He needed to stay in this game, and the truth about his feelings for Sophia could easily get him sidelined. “You used the word gaslighting before.”

  “I’m curious about her series of flat tires. It is certainly a weird way to
try to kill someone, but think about the impact. Right off the top, there’s the cost of replacements, the inconvenience. Dig deeper, and there’s the sense that whenever you drive there’s the additional threat of losing control of your car, your safety, the safety of the children, the chance that you’ll hurt others and incur more significant costs. June of last year, the family was in a car accident.”

  “It totaled the car,” Nutsbe said. “The mother-in-law, Jane Campbell, sustained injuries that led to her death six months later. Sophia incurred hospital bills for herself and the boys.” Nutsbe rubbed his thumb across his chin. “The thought of a car accident would have a specific and significant impact on her, since she survived one.”

  “It also led to her moving to the high-stress neighborhood.” Thorn tapped the file he’d brought in. “Forensics concludes that the metal found in Sophia’s tires on Monday and those found today are from the same source. They sent an investigator to follow the route that Sophia took from the time the mechanics put the GPS tracker on her car. The team couldn’t find anything that would pose a threat. There’s no construction on that route. Forensics was able to lift fingerprints from all three pieces, and they are all the same. There are no matching prints in the database.”

  “So she’s been targeted,” Nutsbe said.

  “But why?” Lynx opened the file and scanned through the information. “Gaslighting happens when someone uses psychological means to make you question your sanity. It’s not the perfect definition for this particular circumstance. What the tires are doing—along with her lights going off and on for three hours straight—is keep Sophia in a chronic state of fight or flight. Adrenaline, cortisol—it’s like living in a war zone, but there are no bombs dropping, so she keeps trying to convince herself everything’s fine…normal. It isn’t. This creates cognitive dissonance—her internal and external cues are in conflict, which in turn lights up her limbic system, makes her body respond as if her life were on the line.”

  “I had a hard time convincing her that someone was popping her tires on purpose. She said she was jinxed,” Brian said.

  “Exactly my point, her brain can’t process with clarity and dispassion. Flat tires being bad luck she can handle, flat tires being caused by someone who might have the power to hurt her or her children? Crazy-making.”

  They all sat silently, processing the information.

  Lynx picked up a pen and drew a dollar sign on the corner of her paper. “Nutsbe said Sophia ran up an almost four-thousand-dollar bill with the police department when someone rattled her door at exactly the same time each night.”

  “You’d think after a few nights the duty cop would catch a clue and set himself up to see who it was,” Thorn said.

  “Why? They knew they were making easy money for the department,” Nutsbe scoffed.

  “That’s damned cynical.” Thorn pointed at Lynx. “But to your point, a single young mother, home alone, not counting all the other stressors that put her over the five-hundred mark, thinking your home might not be secure, that you can’t afford to have the alarm connected to the police, feeling vulnerable? If I were Sophia, I’d want to get myself out of that situation, STAT.”

  “I would guess that the only thing holding her back from moving to a safer place is money. And again, as a single mom of two kids under four years old, that’s got to play into her every choice,” Thorn said.

  “She’s in survival mode.” Brian was staring at the floor between his feet. He needed to find a way to get things calmer in Sophia’s life. Give her a chance to think and make better decisions. Maybe they could turn her into an asset and keep her out of jail. That was if she was guilty. Even though the narrative continued to build against her, even if this psychological war she was fighting did give her motive, Brian couldn’t believe that Sophia would do anything that supported terror. “Would Sophia really help to fund ISIS? They’re bombing cities and killing little kids like hers every day. Would she help Assad do that? It seemed antithetical to her life’s mission.”

  “If she’s culpable, and that’s a big if, I’d imagine she’s in it for self-preservation. I’m not getting a good read on her—her body language, her facial expressions, her macro and micro tells. To be honest, her limbic system is lit up so bright, it’s hard to get a good assessment.”

  “Nadia said Sophia hadn’t had a seizure in over a year. That must mean that her mental and physical systems were faltering this morning,” Brian said.

  “If I’d been riding that shitstorm for as long as she has, I’d do whatever it took to get myself out of that mess. I can’t say that the idea of some quick money wouldn’t be too enticing to let pass by,” Nutsbe offered as if that scenario was a done deal.

  “I’m thinking about my teammate Jack and his fiancée Suz right now,” Lynx said. “In February, they got caught up in an Eastern European terror plot when a senator was the victim of a tiger kidnapping, where a family is kidnapped and one of the parents, for example, is forced to take some horrible action to save their children. Whereas people might have the fortitude to allow themselves to be hurt or killed rather than go against their moral compass, it’s quite another thing when your loved ones are the ones who would suffer the repercussions. Do you remember when that London delivery driver whose van was filled with explosives rammed into a police department because the kidnapers had his family? The driver ran before the bomb detonated, only to find out his family had been murdered as soon as the task was accomplished. My point here being, this everyday Joe was willing to kill and maim dozens of people because the kidnappers had the speakerphone on when they broke his son’s knees. Those screams, knowing his daughter was next—all reason went out the window.” Lynx raised her brows and tilted her head.

  “They’d need some kind of pressure, something that gave them leverage over her,” Brian said.

  Lynx nodded. As she thought, her lips pursed and she wiggled her mouth from side to side. “This could be the convergence of multiple stressors in some kind of perfect storm. It could be that someone’s running Sophia and knows exactly what they’re doing, keeping the heat turned up to the boiling point. It could also be that the looks are deceiving, and Sophia has nothing at all to do with the sale of antiquities to fund terror.” She stood. “It’s an interesting puzzle. I hope you’ll keep me in the loop.” Looking around at the men, she said, “I’m going to tell you right now though, Sophia’s in danger. Her seizure was a major warning sign.” She turned to focus on Brian. “I’d watch for any sudden shifts in behavior. She could be at risk of hurting herself, and maybe even the boys.”

  Brian’s brow drew tight. “Wait. Are you saying she might be suicidal?”

  Lynx laid a hand on his arm, and Brian felt warmth spreading out, radiating toward his shoulder; it had an instant calming effect. “I’m not a psychologist. It might be a good idea to run this by our psych department. I’m just saying that she has a known diagnosis. One of the risks of PTSD is suicide. And if someone you know commits suicide, like her husband attempted, the chances go up multifold. Do what you can to take her stress level down. Try to make her feel she has a better level of security. Something has to give, or you’re at risk of losing a major player in this case.”

  “You’re serious.” Brian’s scalp prickled, sending a line of cold down his spine.

  “Oh, absolutely.” She lifted her eyebrows for emphasis. “I’m sorry, I have to head out now, I’m expected in a meeting.” She stood. “Good luck. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” She turned and walked out.

  “Huh,” Nutsbe grunted, his eye fixed on the door as it swung closed. He turned his attention back to his teammates. “Have you ever known Lynx to be wrong?”

  Brian ran his tongue over his teeth. “Nope.”

  “Here’s a question,” Thorn said. “Let’s assume for a minute, Sophia is culpable—that someone has some kind of control over her and is exploiting her personal situation—do you think we could turn her? I mean, it seems to me that So
phia is a small fish. Beyond making her an example and trying to scare private buyers, why would the FBI be investing this much money in taking down an archaeologist? Are they going after AACP, do you think? My opinion is that we don’t have the whole picture.”

  “We need to keep our eyes open. Lynx is right, though. I think one way or another we have to shake some of the monkeys off Sophia’s back,” Brian said, glad that it was Thorn who had brought up making Sophia an asset. “Thorn, can you call Nadia and take her and Sophia out to dinner? I want to get some more equipment in place. Especially an infrared alarm on Sophia’s perimeter that will signal me whenever someone moves onto the property. I need to get the thermal cameras in place outside. It won’t take me long, but I need Sophia off property. I can join you later at the restaurant.”

  “I’d need an excuse.”

  “We got word from AACP that the Peru expedition is set for some time in mid-July,” Nutsbe said. “Tell them you want to gather some basic information about what they’ve got going on down there.”

  “All right.” Thorn pulled his phone from his thigh pocket and flicked through his contacts. “Maybe we can also talk to Sophia about alternative housing choices. Maybe suggest she spend a few nights at a hotel.”

  “Yep. But if we can’t convince her to do that, I’m going to stay the night at her place, at least for tonight.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Nutsbe said. “But what if she says no?”

  12

  Sophia

  Wednesday p.m.

  “Four, please.” Thorn told the hostess. “We have someone joining us later.”

  The group trailed their way to a booth toward the back of the restaurant. Sophia was glad to be out of her house and to have a chance to unwind a bit. Lana, a sister of the heart if not biology, had taken the boys for a few days. Actually, Nadia and Lana had ganged up on her, refusing to let her keep her boys overnight until they thought she’d rested enough not to be at risk of another seizure. Sophia didn’t like the idea of her sons being away from her, but pragmatism won out. She needed to take medication and sleep. Nadia was right; two or three nights of deep sleep might restore her. The seizures were too dangerous. They’d sometimes trigger with a thought, a smell, a movement, and they left her babies completely unsupervised. What if she were cooking and she started a fire, or they were in the bath alone?