Authors: David Baldacci
She looked down at the one interesting item on Diane Tolliver’s work computer. The e-mail she’d sent to Roy Kingman Friday night. The missive was cryptic and she was hoping that Kingman could explain it, but when interviewed by her detectives over the phone he claimed to have no idea what it meant or why it had been sent to him.
They also knew from the electronic records from the garage that Tolliver had left the office Friday night at two minutes before seven and returned at a little before ten, leaving again around ten-forty. The cleaning crew had come in at seven-thirty and left around nine-thirty. They had seen nothing unusual.
What did people do for a few hours on a Friday evening? They had dinner. The fact that she had driven showed it was too far to walk. They were accessing the woman’s credit card records to see what restaurant she’d gone to. That would only work if she had paid the bill, of course, but it was a viable lead.
Need to focus in on A-
That was the message she’d sent to Kingman that he claimed not to understand. Was that the whole message or had it been cut off? She might have been interrupted. If so, by whom at that late hour? But she’d been alive on Monday morning. Beth frowned as she thought about her sister hanging around Kingman. Could he crack a brain stem? Yeah, he probably could.
There were other messages Diane had sent over the course of the weekend, all from home. Just routine ones to various friends, and she’d ordered some items for her home from two vendors. Her BMW 735 was in the parking garage in her normal space, and the gate record showed she’d accessed the garage at six a.m. on the dot. Her car had been searched without revealing anything of use.
Tolliver’s purse had not been found, so robbery couldn’t be ruled out. Yet she’d been raped; that might have been the primary motivation. And then killed to prevent her from fingering who’d done it. No one at Shilling & Murdoch had come into the office over the weekend, including Diane Tolliver.
From what Beth had learned, Tolliver usually got in around nine. So why had she come to the office so early on Monday? They were interviewing everyone who worked at the law firm to verify where they were on Monday morning. However, Beth was really counting on getting a database hit on the sperm.
They could find no one who’d talked to Diane over the weekend. One neighbor reported that he saw her drive off in a hurry on Sunday around nine in the morning but did not speak to her. She lived in an end-unit town house with a garage. She could come and go without interacting with anyone, as she apparently had the weekend before she’d been killed.
There were dirty dishes in the dishwasher and trash that indicated she had eaten in over the weekend. She had a cleaning service that came three times a week, but not over the weekend. Her home phone records showed no calls going out, and the only messages on her voice mail had been from solicitors. She, like many people, apparently used her cell phone to communicate most of the time.
They couldn’t find her iPhone because it had presumably been in her purse. But they had requested the phone records from her carrier. She’d made many calls on her cell phone over the weekend. None of them had been to friends or coworkers, though. These were all normal things that one did during a weekend. Tolliver had not known, of course, that it would be the last weekend of her life.
The previous Friday, her last full day at the office, had been spent in meetings with various clients. Three of them were local and had been interviewed, but had told them nothing of interest. Tolliver had seemed perfectly normal to them. Two of her client meetings had been with men from overseas. Both men had flown out Friday night and were now in the Middle East. Neither was obviously her killer.
Her cell phone chirped.
“Hello?”
“You working late?” said Mace’s voice.
“Had a community outreach event but it got canceled. What are you offering?”
“Dinner, on me. Pick a nice place. I mean really nice, where you actually have to wear shoes and everything.”
“Did Altman give you an advance on your salary?”
“No, I just cleaned out my bank account.”
“Mace, what about your creditors?”
“I’ll start paying them off with my first paycheck. Let’s just have a nice meal.”
“Mom was that bad?”
“She’s still alive and so am I, so how bad could it be?”
“Okay. How about eight-thirty? I’ll call you with the place.”
Mace clicked off and Beth went back to her notes.
Her office phone rang.
She picked it up and listened for two minutes.
There’d been another murder.
And this one had cut close to home. A U.S. attorney was dead. Mona Danforth wasn’t the one killed. Beth managed to avoid tacking “unfortunately” onto the end of this thought. But they had just discovered Jamie Meldon’s body in a Dumpster in northwest Washington.
“What’s going on?” she asked the officer in charge.
“We’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this is a federal investigation and we are persona non grata.”
“Like we’ve never worked a homicide with the Bureau. Where’s the SAIC?” she asked, referring to the special agent in charge.
He pointed to a man in a suit near the Dumpster.
Beth marched over with two of her district homicide detectives in tow. “Can I ask what’s going on?”
The man turned around to look at her. “Hello, Beth.”
Beth recognized him as soon as she saw his face. “Steve? I didn’t think the AD came out to homicides.”
Steve Lanier, the assistant director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office and a man Beth worked with closely, said, “Well, I can’t say the same about you because I know you come to every one.”
“Did you know Jamie Meldon?”
“No.”
“So why are you here, then?”
He glanced over at a group of men in suits. “Do you know who they are?”
“No, should I?”
“They will be coming over here shortly and informing you that national security interests are at stake and the police will not be involved in this investigation.”
“What does national security have to do with a prosecutor’s murder?”
“Well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out.”
“
We
? They might be able to pull the rug out from under us, but you’re the FBI.”
“In ordinary circumstances that would be true.”
“So what’s extraordinary about this?”
“All I can tell you is that it came straight from Pennsylvania.”
“The White House?”
“And don’t bother asking who they are. They won’t tell you.”
Beth looked puzzled. “CIA? Langley has no law enforcement jurisdiction. Hell, they can’t even operate domestically.”
“It may not be the CIA.”
“Steve, are you saying you don’t even know which agency they’re from?”
“That’s right.”
“Then how the hell did they get access to a restricted crime scene?”
Lanier smiled glumly. “They showed their driver’s licenses.”
“Are you shitting me! Their driver’s licenses?”
“The FBI director himself told me that they would be here, what their names were, and that they should have unfettered access to the crime scene, because they were taking over the investigation. So they didn’t have to show me their creds.”
“This is unbelievable.”
“Yes it is.”
“Chief Perry?” said one man in his forties and who was the apparent leader of this little group of unknowns.
“Yeah?” Beth said in a stern tone.
“Perhaps the assistant director here has filled you in on… things?”
“That you’re trumping my jurisdiction based solely on your legal right to drive a motor vehicle? Yep, he mentioned it, but maybe you can run me through it with particulars, including your names and the agency you work for.”
“That won’t be happening,” said the man pleasantly. “The mayor should be e-mailing you—”
Beth’s BlackBerry started buzzing.
“Right about now,” said the man, smiling.
Beth checked her device. The mayor was polite and diplomatic but the message was clear. Back off now.
“Can I expect copies of reports?” she asked.
“No.”
“Can I see the body?”
“Same answer,” said the fellow.
“Will you tell me when and if you find the killer?”
“We’ll expect you and your people to be gone in the next two minutes.”
The men turned and left.
Beth looked at Lanier. “Do you hate them as much as I do, Steve?”
Lanier said, “Oh, even more than you do. Trust me.”
“Care to give me their names? I’m assuming you remember them from the driver’s licenses.”
“Sorry, Beth, I got my marching orders too.”
She stalked back to her car. At least she’d be having dinner with her sister tonight after all.
The door opened and a young man dressed in corduroy pants, striped shirt, and a cheap paisley tie stood there holding on to the front bar of a mail cart. It was old-fashioned, but even in the digital age sometimes lawyers still needed materials that were actually contained in books or written on real paper.
“Special delivery,” the young man said.
“Just put it on the desk, Dave.”
Dave came forward clutching the book. “Creepy.”
“What’s creepy?’
“Ms. Tolliver.”
Roy shrugged. “I doubt whoever killed her is going to come back.”
“Not what I meant.”
Dave put the book down on the desk.
Roy leaned back in his chair. “Okay, don’t keep me in suspense.”
Dave tapped the book. “This is from Ms. Tolliver.”
Roy snatched up the book. “When did she put it in the mail room?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? I thought there were procedures.”
“Most of the time folks call and we come and pick up the package. They have a delivery sheet filled out and we put it in the pipeline.”
“So why don’t you know when this book came in?”
“It was just in the mail room with the sheet filled out. She must’ve done it herself. I checked with Ms. Tolliver’s secretary and she didn’t know anything about it.”
“But she was killed Monday morning. It’s now Tuesday afternoon and I’m just getting this?”
“We didn’t deliver the mail yesterday because the police were all over the place. Just getting to it now. I’m sorry.”
Roy examined the cover of the book. It was on contract law, an out-of-date edition. Lawyers never sent old textbooks to each other. What would be the point?
“Did you see it in the mail room on Friday?”
“Don’t think so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Okay, but did you see it in the mail room on Monday morning?”
“Can’t really say. It was so crazy around here. But it had to be there on Monday morning. I mean, she couldn’t have done it after she was dead.”
“If she was the one who put the book in the mail room, Dave. We have no way of telling if she physically did it or not.”
“Oh, right.” Dave looked at him nervously. “Am I in trouble?” Roy sat back, his sudden flame of anger gone. “Probably not. Thanks, Dave. Sorry I got testy. I guess we’re all a little stressed out.”
After Dave closed the door, Roy looked at the mail slip clipped to the book. It was in Diane’s neat handwriting that he’d seen on many documents. The mail form had a date and time-of-day box to show when it had gone into the system; however, Diane had not filled in this information. The form did have his name on it as the recipient, so the book
was
meant for him. There was no reason for her to send it to him. But she had. He flipped through some pages, but it was just an old book.
His phone rang. “Yeah?” His mouth formed a smile when he heard the voice.
Mace said, “You must’ve billed nearly a hundred hours so far today.”
“I told you this is a humane law firm. We don’t have to lie by the hour.”
“You got time to talk?”
“Sure, when?”
“How about now?”
His door opened and Mace waved to him. Roy shook his head and put down his phone. “Are you always this weird?”
“You haven’t begun to see my weird side.”
“That is truly terrifying.”
“I know. I get that a lot.”