Authors: Matt Betts
10
Special Agent Garrett Walters stood within the police-tape perimeter and took in the whole scene. It was easy to focus on the small bits and pieces and miss what the whole area was telling him. The debris field also had spread so far from the blast that it was hard not to step back just to see what exactly had happened.
One of the young officers working the crowd stepped up to him. “Sir, you wanted to see me?”
Garrett nodded. “You were first on the scene?”
“Yes, sir. My partner and I were just around the corner at the light. Another second or two and we would have seen the explosion with our own eyes.” The patrolman pointed toward his cruiser, where another officer was interviewing a witness.
“So as it is, you only heard it?” Garret asked.
“Yep. And kind of saw the flash.”
Garrett sighed. “But not the actual blast?” It would’ve been nice to have a cop’s eye view of the explosion. He lifted his arm and pointed to the crowd, following their faces down the line with his finger. “How ’bout them? How many of them saw it? And I mean
saw
it, not sort of saw it, not looking at the clock in the bank building and turned around when they heard it, not driving in front of the bus and looked in their rearview mirror when it happened. How many had eyes on that bus when it went up?”
The officer held up his notebook and flipped through the pages, checking a couple of notes twice. “Well, so far forty-six claim to have seen the whole thing. But we’ve got a ways to go yet.”
“How many of them have mentioned this in their statements?” He nodded to the dark green ambulance on the opposite side from the crowd where they’d found the shooting victim. Evidence techs were swarming over it like ants looking for a crumb.
The patrolman shook his head. “None that I’ve interviewed. I can check with the others,” he said.
“Do that. Thanks.” Garrett watched the patrolman walk away.
“Want some good news?” Beth Pelligrino, one of Garrett’s team, walked up from the side. “Well, potentially good news?”
Garrett admitted to himself that he needed a little cheering up. The case was only a few hours old and it was already giving him a headache; a blown up bus with nine dead passengers, three hanging on in intensive care; a man shot dead in a nearby ambulance—an ambulance whose registration didn’t exist; and dozens of city officials who already wanted answers. “Sure, Pel, that’d be great.”
Pel pointed upward to the roof of the bodega behind Garrett.
Garrett looked at it and shrugged. It wasn’t pointed at the bus or the ambulance. Maybe it caught someone in passing, but certainly nothing regarding the explosion. “So?”
“I got a quick look at the footage before I grabbed it. The thing was trained on that alleyway over there, right?”
“Get on with it,” Garrett said. He wasn’t in the mood to play guessing games.
“Nothing during the explosion, obviously. But some time later, this huge guy with a nice suit comes wondering out of the darkness. No big deal, I guess. A minute or two later he comes back with a woman and they disappear back the way he came.” Pel smiled.
Garrett looked at her for a moment. True, it could be something, but no reason to get as excited as Pel was. “Is there more? Or do you think my requirements for good news have dropped considerably in the last few hours?”
“Oh. Did I not mention that the woman was pulling off what appeared to be a jumpsuit as she hit the alleyway? Possibly the type of coveralls worn by paramedics?” Pel smiled as she held up a baggie with a video tape in it. “My bad.”
Garrett was tempted to take it from the woman, run back to the office and watch it, but he knew it would be a long while before he’d be able to leave the scene. It was tempting, though. “Log it into evidence, and start watching it as soon as you can. Don’t hang around here to do anything else, just go. Print out pictures of the two in the alley, start trying to match them in the database and bring me a print-out when you get a chance.”
“I could email a copy to you on your phone,” Pel smiled. “Be a lot easier than bringing a physical copy.”
Garrett shook his head emphatically. “Stupid thing is broken. Won’t turn on.”
“Did you remember to charge it today? When’s the last time you plugged it in?” Pel’s smile grew wider.
“Fuck you, I charged it.” He hadn’t. “Just go back to the office and get to work.” His hatred for electronics and handheld devices was legendary, which was probably why they teamed Garrett with the tech-savvy junior agent.
Pel started off, but paused. “Oh. On my way over, one of the officers said they think that our ambulance was the first on the scene,” she said.
“That’s something.” Garrett looked at the ambulance again and discovered Pel was staring at it as well. “Are you waiting for a fist bump or something?”
Pel shook her head and disappeared into the crowd of police and fire officials.
At least that’s something, two somethings really.
Garrett thought.
And those are my only somethings at this point.
He turned just in time to see several men in ridiculously expensive suits cross under the yellow crime scene tape. Garrett knew two of them from the mayor’s office. The others were new, but he figured them for one of the other government agencies that would be interested in this madness. In his job with the FBI’s special teams, he’d come to know everyone else there, but the new guys could easily be CIA or DEA or any number of letter collections in the alphabet soup. He straightened his tie and started walking toward them, all the while wondering how much time his interaction would take away from the investigation.
11
“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Kevin asked.
Deena had been half asleep with her head propped on her hand. “Huh?” She thought maybe she was dreaming, the haze of sleep in her eyes made the young man look angelic in the light from the window. It was nearly dark and Deena had drifted off while waiting on Avi to come back and trying to come up with a better plan.
“Your phone. It’s ringing.”
The sounds of a generic ble
ating ringtone emanated from somewhere inside the pockets of Deena’s backpack. “Wow. Uh, thanks. I really spaced out there,” she said. She unzipped the bag and dug through the junk inside. The phone was familiar in her hands, but she couldn’t remember her number or anyone else’s for that matter. Luckily, the caller ID showed the incoming call as “SIS”, saving Deena from wondering who it was for too long. She flipped it open. “Hello, Harper? I’ve been trying to call you all day.”
She was not greeted by the voice she expected. “Not Harper.”
“Marsh.”
“You remember me. Good. I was thinking you forgot,” Marsh said on the other end of the phone. It was what he typically said when she was late checking in with him. “Seeing how our call went earlier today, I was sure that you’d forgotten how to talk to me politely.”
“Why do you have Harper’s phone?”
Marsh laughed. “Did you not think there would be consequences to walking away from me? What sort of childish notion did you get in your head that made you believe that would be all right with me?”
“Where’s Harper?” Deena believed her sister would have had time to get out before Marsh decided to do anything drastic, but Marsh was right–it was a dumb move. Since the break from her former self, everything seemed urgent. Like if she didn’t do the things she wanted to do, right away, they wouldn’t happen and she would slip back to what she was without taking advantage of her window of time.
“Your sister is right here. She’s fine. For now. Say hello.”
Harper’s voice came through the speaker. “Deena? What the hell is going on? They have my hands tied.”
“Everything will be fine. Just don’t worry,” Deena said. “I’m sorry. This will all work out.”
Harper’s voice abruptly stopped, replaced by Marsh’s. “Yes. It will be just fine.
If
you do what I tell you.”
“What do you want?”
“Your sister has messed up yet again. She’d made a spectacle of my business and I’m afraid it will cause me undue attention. I have no use for her,” Marsh said. “If you want her to continue living, you’ll come back here. You’ll do another job for me and I’ll let her go free to live her life. And you’ll continue working for me without incident. If you don’t agree, I’ll kill her now. And then I’ll kill you. Simple. You want your sister to continue to be in good health, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll see you soon.” Marsh ended the call.
As she tossed the phone into the backpack, Deena watched Avi walk into the coffee shop and calmly order something. After a minute, he returned to the table, stirring coffee in a pale ceramic mug. He didn’t look surprised as she relayed the contents of the call. “He’ll kill you both. You know that.”
Of course Deena realized that, but for whatever reason, she hadn’t considered it would come down to that. She really believed she could walk away and start anew. “But it keeps my sister alive until I get there.”
“Maybe.”
“You should go back in. Call them and say you lost me. He’ll leave you alone, then.” Deena took another long drink of the minty concoction in front of her. “I don’t want your life to get fucked up as well.”
Avi stood up and pushed his seat back in behind him. “I dropped my car at a movie theater parking lot down the street. It had a tracer in it that Marsh’s people could have used to track the car.”
“What was showing?”
Avi paused. “What? At the movies? Why do you want to know?”
Deena shrugged. “Just curious.”
“I don’t know. Some stupid shit romantic comedy. Can we get back to the plan?”
“They could have found us right away in your car?”
“They’re actually probably on their way. Marsh has local muscle he could call in to pick you up.”
“So where are they?”
“I’m hoping at the movies, watching some stupid shit romcom. But I doubt it,”
Avi said. “I also ditched my phone and grabbed one in a superstore nearby,” Avi took out his phone and grabbed Deena’s. “I’m programming this new number into your phone.”
“Shouldn’t I ditch mine? Can’t they follow me with it?”
“Not if we leave it turned off until we need to use it.” Avi slid it across the table towards her.
She stared at it for a minute, realizing it was her only link to her sister now.
Avi grabbed her arm and tugged her to her feet. “Train station is just across town. Let’s go. Pick it up.”
12
Deena at 15 the first time around
“Pick up the controller.”
“No.”
Deena grinned. “Quitting again?”
Harper leaned back on the couch and folded her arms.
“Baby.” Deena pressed reset and the game started again. She guided her Samurai Super Warrior up the stairs and through the door, breaking everything in the little animated fighter’s path on the television. She loved the game. It was all so delicious, the swords and the knives the blood. It was all fake, but she loved it. She had strategy, when she needed it, but mostly, it was brute force, not finesse that got her through.
She was getting tired of whupping on her sister all the time, but no one else would play with her anymore. The neighbors weren’t her age and didn’t want to come around to play with the little weird neighbor girl. Her parents sucked at all the games, but they never wanted to play anyway.
“Come on, one more game. You can even use cheat codes. And you can have the good controller.” Deena held up the illuminated blue game controller.
“No.” Harper grabbed a magazine from the pile next to the couch and started leafing through it. Deena turned back to her game.
The clicking of Deena’s fingers on the controllers became a rhythm that got faster and faster. The images she saw on the screen became more and more indistinct and she began to react to shapes and colors, sounds and eventually to instincts and feelings. She didn’t think about it, much. She usually just let whatever was happening happen. All she knew was that when the game was over, she was sad. She felt an unbearable weight descend upon her chest and she wanted to play again. She wanted to run, jump, fight and slash with a sword of her own.
“Christ. You need to get a life,” Harper said. She tossed her magazine on the table and walked out of the room. Deena could hear the back door swing shut as her sister walked out of the house.
Deena didn’t look away from the screen. “What the hell are you doing with yours?”
Whenever Deena found herself alone with nothing else to do, she would look at the dot on her arm and try to decide whether it had changed, or if she was just imagining it. It seemed bigger some days and others it appeared to have moved a little to the right or left. She could never be positive, and she hated talking to her sister about it. Harper had gone to their dad and told him about it. He suggested they needed to make an appointment with a dermatologist to have it looked at, but he never pursued it.
When she finally put the controller down, Deena noticed the little blemish sort of looked like the yellow button on the game controller that she pressed to shoot at things in some games and swing her sword in others. It was still round and black, but it seemed to have a raised ‘X’ in the middle.
It faded quickly, and Deena decided to keep that to herself.
13
Two men in ill-fitting suits intercepted Pel and Garrett as they got closer to the mayor’s people. “We need two minutes,” the larger of the two said.
Pel started to point to the group they were headed to talk to.
“Just two minutes,” the other man said. He nodded his head toward the mayor. “Those guys aren’t going anywhere.”
“We’ve got…” Garrett began.
“We could be done talking by now.” The men were adamant about Garrett coming with them for a talk and confident that everyone else could wait.
“What can I do for you?” Garrett looked around the men to make sure the mayor wasn’t, in fact, going anywhere.
“Step over here,” the large one pointed to a nearby car and walked over to it. He opened a door and waited for Pel and Garrett to get in.
“Seriously? Is this necessary?” Pel asked.
“Two minutes,” the shorter one said as he opened a back door for them.
In the comfort of their incredibly non-descript sedan, the tall one behind the driver’s seat spoke first. “I’m Agent Rice, this is Agent Rivers. We just want to talk to you about the crime scene.”
“Agents of which agency?” Garrett asked.
“One of the less flashy subdivisions of the Bureau,” Rivers said without missing a beat. “Reports put this event as beginning at 6:13 p.m. That’s about four hours ago.”
“Give or take.” Garrett didn’t look at his watch.
Rice shifted uncomfortably in his seat to get a better look at Garrett who was sitting directly behind him in the back seat of the car. “So, what do we know so far?”
Garrett didn’t like the sound of that. The way the ‘we’ just snuck into the sentence was subtle and was, in Garrett’s experience, a prelude to someone horning in where they didn’t belong. “Unfortunately, not a lot. The explosion took out quite a bit of the evidence. As I’m sure you know, it’ll take quite a while to reconstruct the device for any clues it might give us.” He gave them the general overview that could have been easily gleaned from looking at the scene. Garrett wasn’t about to spill anything to some guys that wouldn’t fully identify themselves.
“
Right.
Tell us about the ambulance.” Rivers looked tired to Garrett, but then he supposed that could be the agent’s normal expression.
“Not much to talk about there yet. We’re running the plates and numbers on the ambulance to see where it came from. The company name on the side isn’t from around here, we know that much already. No ID on the victim, but we’re looking into him.” Again, nothing but surface-level stuff.
Rice shifted again, awkwardly pulling a file folder from between the seats. He opened it and handed a picture back to him. “That your guy?”
Garrett saw the man in the photo and cringed a little. It was a picture of the victim, minus the bullet holes. “Yes, that’s
our
guy.”
“Federal witness in an organized crime case. Tom Jessup. We’ll give you his stats and whatnot.”
“You think he was supposed to be on the bus?”
“That’s a possibility,” Rice said.
“What was he doing roaming around free if he was in danger?” Pel asked.
“How the hell should I know? Wasn’t our case,” Rivers said.
It all fell into place for Garrett. The hit man went to the extreme of bombing an entire bus to make sure the witness didn’t get off. It was overkill, but hits like this often were, just to make a point. Unfortunately, the mark never got on the bus to begin with. “So, this was a mob hit? Great. Are you guys going to take it off my hands?”
“I’m sure someone will come along and help you with that aspect,” Rivers said. “What else you got?”
Garrett wondered again how much they knew and wanted him to tell them. “Nothing.” He waited to see their reaction. “Seriously nothing.”
Rivers handed Pel a small laptop. “How ’bout we both take a look at what’s on the tape?”
Pel looked at Garrett for guidance and the senior agent nodded affirmative.
“Wow. This is a great little piece of hardware,” Pel said as she attached the drive to the USB port. “Hendica? They’re not even distributing in America yet. Nice.”
Everyone in the car tried to shift to get a view of the screen. The men in the front leaned over the seats, hanging halfway into the back. Pel tried to turn the laptop around and work the video controls from behind until she discovered the screen itself swiveled, enabling her to work the keys while the others got a decent view of the screen. It would’ve been comical, if not for the fact they were at a crime scene.
They all watched exactly what Pel had described to Garrett earlier, culminating with the woman walking off into the alley next to the large black man.
“Can you freeze it on a good view of the woman?” Rice asked.
Pel paused the video, and then toggled it backward a bit until she settled on a relatively clear view of the side of the face. She zoomed in a little and copied a grainy close-up of the woman’s face and left it up in the corner of the larger picture. “Best I can do. Dark alley, poor quality video. Give me some time back in the lab and I can do much better.”
The men looked at each other and then back at Garrett and Pel. “OK. Thanks.” They both turned and faced forward, Rice’s hands moved to the steering wheel. They all sat in silence for a moment and Garrett couldn’t believe that was the end of the conversation.
Rice revved the engine.
“All right. What the hell?” Garrett asked. “You pump us for information then you don’t reciprocate? Not going to happen. Let’s go, make with the story.”
“Yeah,” Pel said. “Squid pro quo.”
Garrett never knew when Pel was being purposely funny or blissfully ignorant. He wasn’t going to ask.
“Guys, I’m sorry. This isn’t something you need to know. We’ve told you what’s pertinent.” Rivers threw his hands up. “You have the victim’s name, a good motive. I’d say we’ve been more than helpful.”
Garrett leaned forward. “How about a little more on the motive? Who was he going to testify against? Why weren’t your people protecting him if he was such an important witness?”
“He wasn’t scheduled to testify against anyone, therefore, he wasn’t under anyone’s protection. It was who he
could’ve
testified against.” To Garrett, Rice didn’t seem all that focused on the story.
“Who are we talking about?” Garrett asked.
Rivers and Rice looked at each other again and their expressions didn’t change. “We need some good people on our team for this investigation, maybe even on a permanent basis,” Rice said. “You’ve got as much info as anyone. Maybe we could ask you to be assigned to a detail with us.”
Garrett was astounded. They dragged him into a car, gave him bullshit info and now wanted to offer him a job.
“What exactly are you looking for?”
Rivers continued: “Specifically a new field tech person and a lead investigator who can follow instructions and get results for us.”
Garrett turned to Pel and saw the woman looked as incredulous as he felt. “Are you guys seriously offering us jobs? Here?”
No one answered him.
“Tell you what,” Garrett started fumbling through his pockets. He had a crime scene to get back to that wasn’t getting any fresher. He’d wasted his time just long enough with these clowns to ensure everyone at the scene had tromped over evidence and then promptly put their thumbs up their asses. “I’ll give you my card, when you’re ready to talk about this thing seriously, give me a…”
He was interrupted as Rivers leaned back and handed him a different business card. Garrett looked at it carefully, and found his own name on it. Garrett Walters, Lead Field Agent—it said. The phone number wasn’t his. The office address wasn’t from his building on Hudson, rather on the west side, a Newell address on the 3rd floor. Below it were the initials FEI Garrett looked at it closely, wondering if the letter E was just a faded B.
The doors unlocked unexpectedly. Garrett wasn’t even aware they’d been locked. Garrett opened the door immediately and Pel followed suit.
As they both slammed the doors simultaneously, one of the men inside the car called out, “Be seeing you.”
Pel joined Garrett and they walked toward the scene together. “What the hell? I told you to go straight to the office and check that tape out.”
“An agent stopped me and said you were looking for me.”
“I would have called you.
“Sorry. It’s a fucked up night.”
Garrett sighed. “True. You got me there.”
The mayor’s people were standing around talking to Garrett’s bosses, Division Chief Harris among them. They didn’t look happy at all. Several more unfamiliar faces had joined the group.
Harris waved Garrett over. “Walters, this is Marty Tan, he’s with the anti-terrorism taskforce.” He pointed to the man next to him in jeans and a windbreaker. “And this is Kara Lanford, she’s with the ATF. Marty and his people will be taking the lead on this one, Kara will be helping out. I need you to fill them in on anything you’ve got so far and hand over any notes that might be helpful.”
Garrett looked closely at his boss’s face to see what he could read there. He wondered if Harris had any say in the decision to take the case away or if it was something forced on him. He couldn’t discern anything by looking, but he guessed the latter. “Are you kidding? I’ve been on this scene since the beginning. I’ve watched them carry the bodies, and bits of bodies out of the wreckage.” He moved closer to Harris until his face was a foot away. “And you’re going to just let them take me off this?”
Harris pulled Garrett away from the group and talked to him low. “Jesus, Walters. What do you want me to do? This falls into their jurisdiction. It’s not like it’s a quiet little crime where we can stand and argue about who gets what. This is big, you know that.” He nodded around to all the camera crews that were set up around the scene. “I’m sorry, but let it go. This is obviously something we need the terrorism team in on.”
Garrett pulled his arm away from Harris. He didn’t lower his voice like his boss. “Terrorism. Shit, this has nothing to do with terrorism. This is a mob hit, a plain old everyday mob hit.”
The group of people they’d walked away from looked over, very interested in what was being discussed. Garrett nodded at them.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Harris asked in his low tone. “Where did you get that idea from? Jesus, look around you. Where’s that coming from? Did you find something that might point to a hit?”
Garrett tried to identify the car they’d sat in, but it was obscured by a crowd of onlookers and an emergency vehicle. “Some agents gave me a heads up.”
“What fucking agents? WHOSE fucking agents?”
Garrett wanted to kick himself for not following up with their claims of where they were from. “The FEI?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Did they show you any evidence, or are you just going on the say so of some guys you’ve never met?”
“Pretty much just their word, sir.”
“So you’re shouting crazy, unsupported theories for everyone to hear based on nothing whatsoever? That right?”
“Yeah.”
Harris stared at Garrett hard for a minute. “I think maybe you need to get back to the office and help coordinate things there. And you’ll cover anything else that comes in. The next case is yours and you’re out the door, your involvement in this ends at that moment. Got it?”
Garrett thought hard about what to say. This was a new side of his supervisor that he’d never seen. They worked well together because they could bounce ideas off each other and collaborate in helpful ways. “Yeah.” He turned and started toward the yellow police-tape perimeter. His route took him past Marty Tan.
“Don’t forget to leave your notes,” Harris called.
Garrett took his notebook out of his coat pocket and handed it to Tan as he passed. “Good luck reading this, my handwriting sucks.” He didn’t wait for a reply.
“You don’t use your tablet for notes?”
Pel laughed and fell in step behind him.
“They didn’t banish
you
,” Garrett said. “Just me.”
“I’m not hanging around to work with those assholes,” Pel said.
“You don’t even know them, I’m sure they’re lovely people.”
“Right.”
They ducked under the tape and pressed through the crowd. As they rounded a police van, they came to where Rivers and Rice had been sitting in their car. The two agents and the car were gone.
“Great. I had a question or two for them.” Garrett felt tired. The weight of the day caught up with him quickly.
“Well, at least now we’ll have time to polish up our resumes before we see them again,” Pel said. “Let’s just go back and look at that video and see what else we can see, maybe copy it before we give it to the terrorism guys.”
Garrett walked a few feet before he discovered the woman wasn’t following anymore. He turned and saw Pel just standing there with her face scrunched up. “You didn’t take the disk out of the laptop when we left the car, did you?” Pel asked.
Garrett had to shake his head no. “It crossed my mind, it really did, but… I had no idea how to do it.”
“You’re the most technologically challenged federal agent I know.”
“I’m taking classes,” Garrett said.
“They’re not helping.”