Deadly Little Secrets (27 page)

“Therefore, Agent Burton,” the executive agent intoned, a hint of a smile playing about his lips. Had he figured out she was working? Did he care? “In the matter of Fifteen February, we, the Panel of Inquiry, do hereby absolve you of any wrongdoing or fault. The matter, while noted in your record, will not be assigned as a reason for demotion or delay of benefit or placement.”

Reese made a noise that was probably triumph, well muffled since the panel was still in session. Despite her distraction, or maybe because of it, Ana got the socked-in-the-gut feeling that goes with either great upset or great relief. Having her thoughts keyed into the art case had distracted her from being a sweaty, nervous wreck for the panel. Thank God.

“Oh, God. Thank you,” she whispered, letting it sink in. She was not at fault. Not at fault.
Thank you, TJ.
She would never balk over doing a translation or favor for him, ever again. Ever.

“Is there anything you would like to say, Agent?”

She took a bracing sip of water before she spoke, knowing her voice was going to be shaky, no matter what. “Thank you to the Panel of Inquiry for your hard work, and for this verdict.”

There, she'd gotten it out. The members of the panel nodded, closing folders and in all but one case, the executive agent, sitting back in their chairs.

“Agent Burton, I have been instructed to inform you that while your current assignment is ongoing, a number of urgent openings await you when you can wrap up your part of the investigation in progress.” He looked down at his notes. “Five teams have requested either a person of your capabilities or you, personally.” He smiled at her openly now. “These include several international postings, as well as a domestic case or two. While we, the panel, only felt it necessary to read three or four recommendations into record, I want you to know that there were at least twenty-seven letters of varying length that lent support to your skills and dedication to the Agency, and the security of the United States on a global basis.”

“Yes sir, thank you, sir.” Ana was stunned by the fact that so many people had taken time to post something positive. In her experience, more people were apt to focus on the negative, especially within the Agency.

“Very good. Unless my fellow panelists have anything further to add?” He looked up and down the line. “No? Very well, this Panel of Inquiry is dismissed at—” He checked his watch, stated the time, and brought down a gavel on the tabletop. “Good luck, Agent Burton.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, standing in respect as the panelists filed out. The last panelist detoured to drop a fat manila envelope on the table in front of her.

“Some of those potential postings,” she said, tapping the C
ONFIDENTIAL
seal. “Handle with care.” The woman nodded to Ana and to Reese, then left through the same door the others had used, leaving her alone with Reese.

“Congratulations,” he said, offering a handshake. “You're cleared for return to serious duty,” he nodded at the envelope. “Any idea where you want to go?”

She shook her head, which was swimming with all her ideas, hunches, and thoughts on the current case. “I haven't dared consider anything. I'll look at everything later, but my mind is pretty full of the case I'm working right now.”

Reese frowned. “It's a cold case,” he said dismissively. “Pass it off to someone else and get yourself out of there.”

“No, I need to finish it out, wrap it up if I can.”

Reese shook that off. “You heard the executive agent. He didn't say finish it; he said wrap up your part of it. Move on, Ana. The less time on your record in the dead zone, the better.” He gathered his notepad, settled it in the pocket of his briefcase. “By the way, the pay-grade shift and increase that was frozen will be reinstated and paid retroactive to the freeze. Expect a nice bonus in your check this month.”

He waited expectantly for her to get her own belongings, walked out to the main part of the building with her. “Good luck, Agent,” he said, holding out his hand to shake hers in parting. “It's been a pleasure to assist you in clearing this matter off your record.”

Ana stood a moment, watching him walk away, stroll down the sidewalk in the bright DC April sunshine.
All is forgiven, all is forgotten?
She wondered about that, wondered about the fraud case and her San Francisco colleagues all through the ride back to the hotel. The fat envelope full of options weighed heavy on her mind, but she didn't open it.

She didn't want to go there quite yet.

Kicking off her shoes, she lay on the bed, thinking. What was the connection she was missing? Where did all the pieces fit?

She was still wondering when she fell asleep.

 

Hours later, she woke in darkness. Her mouth was dry, her head hurt, and all she wanted to do was go back to sleep. Her dreams had been a welter of images, from Gates's face in the mirror behind her, passionate and loving, to the grisly visual of Beverly Stanley's burned and broken body on the cold steel in the morgue in Rome.

Superimposed over all the images were the photos of the tortures in New York, and the executions in San Francisco.

“Ugh,” she grunted, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face. She had to book a flight to New York, follow Davis's lead to the shipper there. “What is it about that that's bothering me?” She puzzled over that as she went online, booked her flight for the next morning. “What, what, what?”

She paced the floor for a few minutes. “Only two centers of killing,” she said, finally getting a handle on one thing that was bothering her. “But two different methods.”

She opened her connection to her office e-mail and felt her heart rate pick up at the multiple pings of incoming e-mail.

A frisson of excitement hit her in the gut when she saw the subject line,
SEARCH RESULTS.
That was the first e-mail she opened.

Ana skipped through all the legalese to get to the results listed three paragraphs down and got a hard shock.

Whose case? She scanned further down, saw TJ's name and stopped cold. What the hell? TJ?

It
was
connected.

She grabbed her phone, found TJ's number.

“Come on, answer, damn it,” she muttered, opening the other e-mails one by one. The data was still incoming, but as the searches overlapped, the shipper came up sixty-one percent of the time in relation to the numbers called before and after the art fraud was discovered. Ana was not surprised when a second shipper came up in San Francisco.

“Two of them. Two shippers. Same fraud. Two different killers. Separate but equal, damn it,” she said, continuing to pace as the phone rang and rang. “Answer the damn phone, TJ.”

She stopped long enough to scribble her thoughts on her yellow pad. “Time for a new warrant,” she muttered, sending an e-mail to Pretzky as she waited for TJ's voice mail to pick up. They needed all the data on that shipping company.

An e-mail popped up from TJ. She hung up the phone just as the message picked up.

She quickly wrote back.

She paused, trying to think how to carefully let him know what was going on without saying it straight out.

She waited for ten minutes, checking the e-mail over and over, but there was nothing from TJ.

She continued pacing. Should she call Gates, let him know what the search had turned up? Odd how quickly she'd come to think of him as a kind of partner, an equal. She'd never had—or let—anyone be in that position before.

“If I hadn't slept with him, if he hadn't treated me the way he did, would I call him?”

Before she could decide, her phone rang. She checked the number: Pretzky.

“Burton,” she said by way of greeting.

“Pretzky here, how'd it go?”

Warmed by the interest, Ana smiled. “It went okay, thanks. I'm clear.”

“Good. You deserved no less.”

“Thank you for all you did,” Ana said, wanting to say more, but unsure how to do it. Relief was coursing through her in a delayed reaction. Talking to Pretzky brought it home. She was free. She was reinstated. She had jobs waiting.

“Never mind the thanks,” Pretzky replied, oblivious to Ana's relief. “I'm calling because we've had another incident.” Pretzky sounded pissed, now. “We've also got another body in the building. Probably isn't related, but no one from this division's died in,” she paused, to count, “the four years I've been here, except one guy who got hit by a bus. This was a hit.”

“Who was it?” Ana gripped the desk, willing it to be a fluke, unrelated.

“Guy named Perkins from IT. He's been dead a few days. Probably killed soon after our computers got hit and you had that deep search. They found him with crack cocaine. He's got some tracks, but the ME's saying they're probably post mortem. Nothing about it adds up. It was an execution-style hit, rather than an OD. Bullet to the back of the head.”

“Just like the others in California, in the art fraud case.”

“Exactly. Ties in with another like-crime in Vegas as well.”

Excitement flared in her gut. She remembered Perkins now. He'd been up on their floor, right after the hacking incident. She reminded Pretzky. “Remember? It was weird because he said he'd come up to help, but he was up on our floor, not down with Monroe and Talmadge, the IT guys that got us shut down. I think it's connected.” Ana was sure, and her tone reflected it. “Besides that, we got another complication. I got three case-connection warnings via e-mail on our art-fraud case, intersecting in some searches and warrants on another case.” She read the file number to Pretzky; her boss returned the favor with the case number from Vegas. Also cold, also unsolved. “I'm positive mine's a cross with a case from my colleague in Rome, TJ Michaels. Problem is, he won't answer my calls.”

“I'll check from here, let you know. There's something else, though. You put all the files and notes from this case in the locked filing cabinet, right?”

“Of course. We agreed on that as a safety measure.”

“They're gone.”

“Wait, did you say ‘gone'?” Ana's voice rose to a stressed squeak. “As in missing, totally not there?”

“Exactly. It had to be an inside job because no one can get in here without authorization, even the cleaning people. I've got Pearson reviewing the surveillance tapes and the visitor logs, but so far we've got nothing.”

Ana opened the files on her laptop. “I've got a lot of the data scanned into my computer, including the old case notes from Agents McGuire and Hines. Should I contact them?”

“I think you'd better, see if they kept copies. Also, I got Agent TJ Michaels's boss on the phone—he claims Michaels is off on sabbatical, not on a case.”

“The Inquiry Panel said he was pursuing leads on the Rome case, on his own recognizance, but that he'd gotten sanction to pursue.”

“Have you discussed that data from Davis, the info on your shipper, with any of the victims?” Pretzky asked now.

“Not yet. I was working on a flight to White Plains, and got the e-mails about the case crossovers. Then you called.” Ana didn't say she'd been trying to decide if she could call Gates.

“I see. You hear anything from Davis?”

“Davis? No, should I have?”

She heard the worry in Pretzky's voice when her boss replied. “He was supposed to contact you, let you know that he'd found two more victims who used the shipper you're checking on. What the hell is the name of it? I hate calling it ‘the shipper.'”

“Ark Shipping Inc.” Ana read the data. “There's a probable sub-corp, D'Or Shipping.”

“D'Or? That means gold. Gold shipping? That's original,” Pretzky scoffed. “Ark? That's weird too. Not like they're moving paintings or anything else two-by-two.”

Ana hadn't put it together that way, but Ark was a biblical reference. Gold. Gold Ark. It was worth a try. She pulled up her favorite search engines and entered
gold ark
in one search field,
gold ship,
and then
gold box
in the others and hit S
EARCH
.

“What else?” she asked Pretzky. “You don't sound like you're finished.”

“I'm not,” Pretzky said. “We got word from Berlin that Pratch's remains may have turned up.”

“You're kidding, right? Why now, I wonder?”

She heard the phone ring on Pretzky's end, and her boss said, “Hey, gotta go. Call you later.”

Pretzky hung up so fast there was no time for Ana to say good-bye.

Nothing obvious pulled up on her search, so she checked e-mail again, but there was nothing from TJ. Checking the time, she called McGuire in New Orleans. He answered on the fifth ring.

“Hello?” The gruff voice was hard, insistent. “Who is this?”

“Agent McGuire, it's Agent Burton. I'm calling about the cold case again, the art fraud—”

He cut her off. “Yeah, yeah. I know. You've hit on something, for sure, Burton. I've had visitors.”

“Visitors?” She'd been afraid of something like this.

“Couple of thugs, aiming to rough me up, or worse.”

“Oh, my God. Are you okay?”