Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (12 page)

“You bet. Military Intelligence and Treasury are about as divorced from each other as it’s possible to get and still be in government service. He was killed in the line of duty. As a Treasury agent. Cremated. Ashes scattered in Margrave, Georgia. Which is weird.”

“I know,” Gaspar said. “He was a veteran. Why wasn’t he buried at Arlington?”

“That’s not what’s weird. What’s weird is how a treasury agent gets killed in the line of duty in a sleepy little town like Margrave, Georgia, in September 1997? How would that happen? Why was he even there?”

“Were you even born in 1997?” Gaspar asked.

“There’s no death certificate online. This is nuts. We’re the FBI. The most sophisticated and best equipped and most comprehensive agency in the world. And we can’t get any information from our own sources on an active investigation?”

“Welcome under the radar, baby. If it was easy, they wouldn’t need high-octane talent like us, now would they?” He closed his laptop and began packing up.

“I’m calling Roscoe.”

“Good luck with that.”

She picked up her phone and pressed the call back button.

Gaspar stretched and limped around the room, limbering up. She noticed the limp and knew he was shaking it off. The list of things she intended to discuss with him was already long, but maybe that one should be moved to the top. She put the call on speaker while she shoved cords into her bag and pulled the zippers. Roscoe’s cell rang ten times, twelve, fifteen. Then Roscoe’s angry voice filled the room. It said: “You better tell me your ass is back in Margrave and you have Sylvia Black with you.”

Gaspar tapped his wrist with his finger to show her time was ticking. Kim said, “Chief Roscoe, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Save it, Agent Otto. I’ve got the guy’s card right here in front of me. L. Mark Newton,
Esquire.
From Washington, D.C. He had a Federal Marshal with him, for God’s sake. You sent them down here to pick up Sylvia. In the middle of the night when I wasn’t here to stop them. You know it. I know it. And I want her back. Whatever it is you want with her, you can get in the damn line behind me.”

“We don’t have her.”

“Save it,” Roscoe said again. “Just get her back here, or I’ll make you sorry. Are we clear?”

“Look, we don’t have her. But we’re on our way. See you before noon.”

The call died.

Gaspar said, “There’s one truly major flaw in that story.”

“Which is?”

“L. Mark Newton died last year,” he said.

“I know. I was at the funeral.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Halfway to the departure gate Kim felt the boss’s cell phone vibrate in her front trouser pocket. She shifted her bags around to free one hand and tried to fish the phone out without slowing her stride. She couldn’t do it. The phone buzzed on. It felt alive, wriggling against her abdomen. She’d have to stop. But she couldn’t. The jet way door at their gate was already closed. She saw the plane through the plate glass window, still parked outside. But passengers could not be boarded after the doors were closed. Technically, the plane was gone. They’d missed the flight.

“We have to board,” Kim told the gate agent, breathless.

“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” the gate agent said without looking up. She was working the final documents to get the plane in the air.

Kim felt the cell phone buzz on. She’d never failed to answer the boss. She never planned to. She kept her voice calm. She said, “I need you to open the door.” She put her hand in her pocket. To get the cell phone. But the gate agent misinterpreted. Her left hand darted under the counter. She hit the panic button.

Kim gave up on the cell phone and kept both hands in plain sight. She stood stock still. Where the hell was Gaspar?

He showed up three paces behind two TSA personnel. They had guns drawn. Kim kept her hands in view and said, “FBI,” as calmly as possible. She reached slowly across her body with her left hand and opened her jacket to reveal her badge, clipped to her waistband.

Gaspar came up behind her and flashed his badge, too.

“What’s the problem?” he said.

Kim held her breath while the agents looked them both over. In the corner of her eye she saw the plane begin to move.

“You’re too late,” one of the TSA guys said.

“Let’s pretend we’re not,” Kim replied.

The phone was still buzzing.

Time stood still.

Then the first agent said, “OK, hurry.”

Agent two opened the departure door wide enough to slip through. Kim ran. Gaspar followed. The door sucked shut behind them. The boss’s phone bounced against Kim’s hip as she ran. She turned the final corner and saw the jet way separating from the plane’s open door. She stopped at the widening gap. Cold November air blew into the tunnel. The flight attendant was on the phone in the cabin. To the gate agent, presumably. She called out to the jet way engineer. The jet way stopped moving. The plane stopped moving.

Four feet of empty space.

Maybe five.

The stewardess said, “You can make it. I’ve done it lots of times.”

Kim lifted her computer bag off the travel bag and telescoped its handle down. She grabbed one heavy bag in each hand, swung both, and tossed them over the void. The stewardess set them out of the way. Kim breathed in, breathed out, rocked back and forth like a varsity high jumper, and leapt across the empty black hole into the plane. The stewardess caught her by the arm and then they both moved out of the way to let Gaspar follow.

Gaspar had a problem.

He was right-handed. Therefore he would want to push off from his right leg. But his right leg was the one with the limp. And even if he could push off with his left, would his right leg be sturdy enough to stick his landing?

“Can’t we go back?” Kim asked.

“You don’t want to know what would happen if we did that,” the stewardess said.

So Kim braced her foot at the raised edge of the bulkhead doorframe. She grasped the molded handle on the inside frame with her left hand and leaned her body outside, into the frosty abyss, jutting her right arm toward him as far as she could reach.

“
Now,
Gaspar,” she called.

“On my way,” he called back.

In one fluid motion, as if they’d choreographed the move and practiced for decades, he backed off ten feet, and transferred his heavier bag to his left hand, and slung his computer bag over his back, and came in at a run. He got his bags swinging for momentum, he got his feet in place, and he pushed off with his right leg.

His right leg didn’t hold.

No elegant arcing trajectory.

The weight of his bags jerked him onward while gravity pulled him down. Kim lunged and grabbed his left forearm in her right hand and she pulled with all her ninety-seven pounds of body weight and hauled him in. His left foot landed inside the bulkhead frame. He sprawled on the galley floor. She thought he might have said, “Thanks,” with something very vulnerable in his voice. Something she didn’t want to be there. Not now. Not ever. For her sake, as well as his.

But whatever, they were on the plane.

Not that being on another plane was a good thing, Kim felt.

Gaspar struggled to his feet, breathing hard, and he said, “Thanks,” again.

Kim said, “From now on, we’ll answer to Karl and Helen.”

“What?”

“You know the Flying Wallendas are Germans, right?”

She got the grin she’d hoped for. He said, “Yeah, Gertrude. I know.”

She felt better, as if equilibrium had been restored. She watched the flight attendant secure the hatch. If the hatch failed, the plane would crash. She couldn’t move until the hatch was securely closed.

Her cell phone was still ringing.

She watched the attendant lock the door lever and test it. Then she moved.

Seat 1A was open.

She hated 1A.

Too much open space around 1A.

From 1A, she could see the galley and the door to the flight deck. She could hear the flight attendants talking among themselves or on the phone with the cockpit crew.

In 1A she’d be the first to know when something went wrong.

No.

She glanced back. “You take 1A,” she told Gaspar, before she hurried back to 3D.

She shoved her computer bag under the seat in front of her and left her larger bag in the aisle for the attendant to heave into the overhead. She belted herself in as tightly as possible and grabbed both armrests and closed her eyes and prayed.

The cell phone had stopped ringing.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Atlanta, Georgia

November 2

7:45 a.m.

Gaspar picked a full sized sedan at the rental counter in Atlanta. A black Crown Vic. The kind of car Kim hated because it was too big, and too low to the ground. She’d have to pull the seat all the way up to reach the pedals. Even then, she couldn’t see the road beyond the long front hood. Not that she needed to worry. Gaspar wouldn’t let her drive anyway.

“Much better,” he said. “This is the kind of car G-men ought to drive, Tila Tequila.”

“Absolutely. Unless the airbag deploys and suffocates me, the most serious problem is a seatbelt that scrapes my neck and cuts my head off.”

He looked over at her scowling face and laughed. “Should I go back for a booster seat?”

She bent at the waist and scooted forward to reach her travel bag in the foot-well, and rooted around to find what she needed.

“Seriously?” Gaspar asked. “Do you want me to get a different vehicle? I’m glad to do it, but now’s the time to say so.”

“Not necessary.” She pulled the seatbelt slack, and anchored the small alligator clamp from her bag onto the belt webbing immediately below the retractor. She settled into the seat and checked her adjustments. The shoulder harness now snugged across her body instead of her throat. She left the clamp’s wings up to be sure it would fly off in a collision and allow the retractor to do its job.

“German engineering at its finest,” he said.

“Precisely,” she said. She tested the harness again, flattened her hand, chopped her forearm from the elbow straight ahead, and said, “Engage.”

They stopped at a drive-through for coffee and greasy egg wraps, and then they joined the interstate traffic heading south. Sixty-six miles to the Margrave exit, according to the first road sign Kim noticed. The coffee was bad and the food was worse, but they were both hungry.

Gaspar chewed his eggs a while and flushed them down with the coffee before he asked, “Tell me again what Roscoe said about Sylvia Black.”

“She said a U.S. Marshal and a lawyer showed up at the jail around midnight with a federal court order. The desk guy released Sylvia into their custody. Now, they can’t find Sylvia, the lawyer’s office doesn’t answer the phone, and the Marshal’s office said no order ever existed.”

“So we got a dead lawyer, a phony Marshal, and a fake order, right?”

“Exactly.”

“I know these small town departments don’t always put the brightest bulb on the desk at night, but Brent seemed a lot savvier than that to me. He must have believed the two strangers, right? So we must be missing something.”

“I’m not sure Brent was on duty. Remember he’d worked the night before and then straight through Harry Black’s shift, too. Once Brent took Sylvia back to the station and finished her intake, Roscoe might have sent him home.”

“What kind of court order was it?”

“Roscoe was a little irrational during the phone call, remember,” she said.

Gaspar shook his head, as if to clear out the cobwebs. “Doesn’t make any sense. The desk guy’s maybe new on the job, and yet he didn’t call Roscoe first? Before letting a couple of strangers take his one and only inmate?”

Early morning sunlight bathed the countryside in pink and blue. Fall harvests were finished. Red dirt fields were wet mud saturated by yesterday’s rainstorm. “I don’t get it, either. We’ll have an opportunity to ask Roscoe shortly, I’m sure.”

They came up behind a grandpa poking along in an ancient wood-paneled truck loaded heavy with hogs. He was having trouble holding the truck in his lane. Maybe the truck was overloaded or maybe Gramps was just a bad driver. Regardless, his cargo’s stench was unavoidable.