The Bone Chamber (8 page)

“Yeah. Like the eye on the pyramid. And the Star of David that points to the word MASON. He just got all into it. Found his kindred spirit, he says. Hope you don’t mind, but it’s fate, he says. Fate that he forgets to give me his half of the rent money, and the utility bill. I have no power, no phone, and I got evicted when I couldn’t come up with the rent. And then maybe two weeks ago, he calls up and says they’re in trouble. That they want to borrow my car again, because he’s got to get to the airport, and he thinks they’ve been following him and her both.”

“Who was following them?”

“He didn’t say.”

“This girl, she have a name?”

“Hell if I know. I never actually met her. She was an assistant to some professor in Xavier’s history or archeology class at UVA.”

“You know the professor’s name?”

“Woods, I think. Anyway, Xavier started meeting her for coffee, just like he used to take me. Only with her, he became twice as paranoid. He actually believed this crap.” She sat down on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “I know it’s stupid, and I even used to agree with him, but once he met her, all that stuff he spouted just sounded…annoying. Like a cop-out. Everything that went wrong in his life, he blamed on the government. The fact we got evicted from this apartment? Government plot. His checks kept bouncing, because his deposit was lost? Government plot. All of it proved his point that they were going to take over world banking. At one point he had tinfoil on every window and wouldn’t talk without the water running. He let them turn off the phones, because they were tapped. I swear he had escape routes planned,” she said, sweeping her hand around the room to point up into the closet, now emptied. “The attic, the bathroom. I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s one thing to rail against the government over coffee, but at some point you still have to pay your rent.”

She shrugged, tried to smile, and added, “So I kicked his ass out, got the landlord to give me an extra two weeks to get the rent money together, and what good did that do? Nothing, because I had to use my rent money to get my car out of hock, because that son of a bitch sweet-talked me into borrowing it, then left it parked in a construction zone after he ran off with his new girlfriend. It got towed.”

Syd was tempted to tell the woman she was better off without the guy and was almost glad when her cell phone vibrated. Whatever Penny and her boyfriend were about, it wasn’t related to her case. “Excuse me,” she said, when she saw it was Scotty.

“You ready for dinner?” he asked. “I thought we could meet at King Yen’s.”

“Can I call you back in a few?” she said, moving away toward the window for a bit of privacy.

“I’ve already made the reservations.”

He’d proposed to her there and, no doubt, had chosen that spot for tonight in hopes that they could discuss their relationship. Her fault, she supposed, for not squelching the dinner thing. That didn’t mean she wanted to hurt him, give him any ideas. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the time or place to discuss it. “Give me five minutes. I’ll call you right back.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

She disconnected, was just tucking her phone on her belt when she noticed a man in a long overcoat looking into the window of Scotty’s Jeep parked just down the street. “You get a lot of car thefts in this area?” she asked Penny.

“Don’t even get me started on this crappy neighborhood.”

The man straightened, started walking up the sidewalk. He was white, clean-shaven, too healthy-looking to match the profile of some dirtbag hoping to smash a car window for a stereo. Even so, Sydney kept her eye on him, then noticed a second man across the street, also in an overcoat, paralleling the first man. The second man started across the street, and she noticed a vertical ridge running down the length of his coat. A ridge about the length of a long barrel of an assault weapon hidden beneath. The momentary thought that these were the missing bank robbers fled when she realized Scotty would not have called her for dinner if the robbers were still out there.

Her gaze flew to the man on this side of the street. The one walking toward Penny Dearborn’s front door.

Syd glanced at Penny. “Where’s your phone?”

“Downstairs. But it was shut off.”

Every telephone in the U.S. was supposed to have 911 access, even if it was shut off for nonpayment, and 911 access meant instant address relayed to the cops, far superior to using a cell phone. “Please tell me you have a phone up here?” she asked, looking around.

“Packed,” she said, pointing at all the boxes. “Somewhere.”

Syd drew her weapon, stepped back from the window, then pulled out her cell phone. “This paranoid boyfriend of yours,” she said to Penny. “He happen to show you any of these escape routes?”

“Damn it, Tex!” Zach Griffin paced his office as far as
his landline would allow without pulling the phone from the outlet. “You were supposed to be tailing her.”

“We were. She left the Smithsonian. Archer was on her like white on rice.”

“Apparently not close enough.”

“Close enough to hear the security guard telling her that there was some fight between lovers, maybe that was the assault she was asking about. He wanted her to talk to some other security guard, but she left, went straight from there to the police department. She was getting reports on towed cars. That was when we lost her. Delivery truck got between us and her car, and Archer lost the point.”

He had to figure out Fitzpatrick’s logic if he was to have any hope of finding her. “The police have been kept out of the loop, she’s got to know that by now, so why go there at all?”

“Because she’s thinking like a cop, a Fed, not a spy.”

Zach paced in the other direction, but the phone cord stopped him from moving farther. “A cop…Towed vehicles…”

Hindsight forced him to see the consequences of letting Fitzpatrick believe she had recommended Tasha for the job, all because he didn’t want Tasha’s connection to his agency known. But as a result, Fitzpatrick believed she was responsible for recommending Tasha for the drawing, which meant guilt over her death. And if a by-the-book FBI agent wanted to allay that guilt?

Bring the killer to justice.

By looking up towed cars…? For what?

She used to be a cop, so think like one…

She had reason to believe Tasha’s murder was connected to the drawing. If so, she’d realize she needed to identify her Jane Doe—Alessandra—to determine if there was a connection. But his agency had taken over the investigation, had kept it from the local police once they realized the connection and what it could do to their operation. In essence, there were no records of the case at the police department.

Unless they’d overlooked something…

But what?

Towed cars…

Hell. “Get back to MPDC. Run an audit on every towed car that clerk ran.”

“What kind of connection could she possibly make?”

“If Alessandra was in a car before she went missing, that car might very well have ended up towed, because she never got back to it.”

“But Alessandra didn’t own a car.”

“No, but she certainly could have borrowed one. And who the hell knows what happened to the person she borrowed it from. Maybe they’re watching that person now, to see who comes calling.”

“I’m on it.”

He stared out the window watching the bright headlights zip down Twelfth Street. No doubt they’d been hasty when they’d chosen Fitzpatrick, even though she had been the logical choice because of her preoccupation with her father’s killer in San Quentin. Once she completed the sketch, he’d firmly believed that she’d want to get back to San Francisco and her family for Thanksgiving, which
meant she probably wouldn’t give the sketch more than a passing thought.

Her former relationship with Special Agent Scott Ryan was another factor. The guy was heading to the top of the administration ladder, liked to do things by the book, and liked his women the same, just what Zach needed for this op. Administration says jump, subordinate says how high. Tasha had led him to believe that Sydney Fitzpatrick had been cut from the same cloth as Scott Ryan.

Apparently she was wrong.

And now, because of this miscalculation, Sydney Fitzpatrick was out there, God knew where, playing cop in a game that was out of her league. A game that had one rule: Kill or be killed.

The only escape route Penny’s ex had ever truly planned was the attic. Penny, however, refused to go up there by herself. So Plan B it was, and Sydney hated Plan B. It was such a misnomer, like one had some other plan waiting, ready to go. She stood just inside the slatted closet door, peering out, cell phone in one hand, weapon in the other, hoping this didn’t get them killed, because there wasn’t enough time to think of something else. Before someone even answered the 911 call on her cell phone, the front door crashed open downstairs. After that, the only thing Syd heard was the pounding of her heart. Cops announced their arrival. These guys weren’t cops.

And no one was answering the damned 911 call on her cell.

She looked between the crack in the closet door, to the stack of boxes, the bulky figure—a decoy—covered by a blanket behind the boxes. She prayed Penny would keep quiet.

Someone moved downstairs. She heard the opening of doors. One man or two?

And then the quiet footfall. Someone ascending the steps. The squeak of a floorboard down the hallway. Closer. Now outside the bedroom. On the threshold.

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

The voice sounded like a loudspeaker. Unable to talk, she shut the phone, aimed her gun.

She peered through the closet door slats. Saw the man take a step in, knife in one hand, assault rifle in the other. He spied the thick bundle behind the boxes, brought the rifle up, then suddenly swung it toward the closet.

Syd fired through the slats. Wood splintered, the blast deafened. The man hung in the air, then crumpled to the floor as Penny screamed.

“Quiet,” Syd ordered. She used her foot to push open the closet door, kept her gun trained on the body.

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.” Penny stared through the closet door in horror, sank to the ground, started rocking back and forth.

“Shut up…
please
,” Syd added, figuring no matter how paranoid the girl’s boyfriend had been, killing someone in their apartment was probably never part of their discussions. To Penny’s credit, she clamped her mouth shut, stifled the sobs, and Syd listened to the house. Tried to. There were no other footsteps, no sounds coming from below, but off in the distance, she heard a siren from an emergency vehicle, figured it was too soon to be related to their shooting.

Syd stepped from the closet, kept her gun trained on the man she hoped was dead. She moved closer, caught sight of his face, his lifeless eyes. The uniform beneath his overcoat.

The security guard from the Smithsonian.

Amazing how quickly MPDC officers swooped down
on that apartment. And amazing how quickly Sydney and Penny were separated, and Sydney hustled away by some “detective” to an interrogation room at some “outstation” that didn’t look remotely like it belonged to the MPDC cops at all. She thought of Zachary Griffin’s cover and resources that allowed him to walk into Quantico without any problems. Whoever he worked for could certainly pull off something like this. The guys who brought her in definitely had that federal feel, as did the questioning. It was enough to make a girl think that not only was this related to Tasha’s hit-and-run, but something bigger was going on.

And definitely enough to make a girl think that she wasn’t leaving this area until she found it.

Unfortunately, it seemed everyone else had different ideas, her ex being one of them. “You need to go home,” Scotty told Sydney, hours later, after the cops, if that’s who they really were, finally let Scotty come pick her up and take her to his apartment.

“You’re the one who told me I shouldn’t sleep alone after the shooting.”

“I don’t mean your apartment, I mean San Francisco. You’re supposed to be on vacation, on your way to Thanksgiving at your mom’s place, and after tonight, you need it.”

“How can I possibly go home without answers?”

“Answers to what?” Scotty dropped a pillow and blankets on the coffee table, since she refused his offer to share his bed, insisting on the couch instead. “Go back to your mom’s. Don’t put your career in jeopardy by being stubborn.”

“Jeopardy? For what? Not rushing home to finish my scheduled two-week vacation? Are you saying that someone is ordering me home?”

“No, but if this is another federal agency, as you claim, you know that they’ll pull strings and have you moved to where they see fit.”

“Last I heard, it was my business where I spent my vacation time, not the Bureau’s or any other agency out there.”

“No one’s ordering anything. All I’m saying is that before you get all fired up to investigate, remember what happened the last time you got involved. The reason you jumped on the Quantico position to begin with…”

He let that hang in the air, and she suddenly doubted herself, wondered how it was she’d even contemplated looking into Tasha’s death, because, in a way, he was right. This was out of her league. She came back to Quantico to regroup. She didn’t need this sort of trouble…

Syd leaned back on Scotty’s couch, closed her eyes. It had been a long night of intense questioning by her interrogators. Suspect number two was nowhere to be found, which was part of the reason she had no desire to sleep in her empty apartment. Suspect number one was DOA, and determined
not
to be a security guard at the Smithsonian at all.

That part she believed, that he wasn’t a guard. It was the rest of the story that didn’t fit, and she was having a hard time letting it go. “Don’t you find their theory that this guy stole his security guard uniform so he could rob unsuspecting victims in a series of home invasions a little too pat?”

“No.”

“Well, I do.”

Scotty picked up the TV remote and flicked through the channels until he found the late night news, which was when Sydney noticed something else odd. Their shooting hadn’t even made it to the media yet.

“He targeted me,” she continued. “No doubt once I’d walked onto the Smithsonian grounds and began asking questions, I was marked. Was probably marked from the moment I started that forensic sketch.”

“I checked into it,” he said, his gaze fixed on the TV. “You’re way off base.”

“Meaning what?”

“This drawing. It’s being kept quiet because they think the victim might be a foreign diplomat’s daughter. If it gets out, the press will turn it into an international scandal.”

“They happen to mention this victim’s name?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. If they’d wanted me to know, they’d tell me.”

She watched the TV in silence for a few moments, thinking that there were still too many unanswered questions, even if it was some diplomat’s daughter. And what about this “guard”? Had he stolen the uniform and stationed himself at the Smithsonian in order to see who might come poking around in the Jane Doe murder? Unfortunately, she couldn’t very well voice her suspicions to Scotty, since she wasn’t supposed to be working on the case at all. She could, however, voice her suspicions about the shooting that she was involved in. “Don’t you find it strange that the cops were there so fast?”

“Someone probably heard the shots. They were close by.”

“I heard sirens before the guy hit the floor, Scotty.”

Scotty turned off the TV, tossed the remote onto the coffee table, then looked over at her. She couldn’t quite make out his expression in the now darkened room. She didn’t need to, though, because she could hear the disapproval in his voice. “What’s up is your overactive imagination. You’re making a federal case out of something the locals need to handle. They think this guy has targeted others the same way. The unsuspecting come into the Smithsonian, he follows them home, he robs them. The last thing they need to do is adver
tise that the Smithsonian has turned into a crime-infested blight. Tourism is down enough as it is.”

“Fine. You’re right, I’m wrong. I’ll go home. Be a good girl.”

Scotty stood, leaned over, kissed the top of her head, gentling his tone, as if that would make up for his disbelief in her whacked-out theory. “You’re doing the right thing. Get some rest, quit worrying. You have a long flight in the morning.”

“Good night,” she said, then sat there for several minutes in the dark, long after he’d disappeared into his bedroom and shut the door. Doing the right thing…That was what she was all about these days. The prudent thing would be to go home, let the authorities here handle it, forget about everything—everything but Tasha…Besides, why couldn’t it be a home invasion robbery, as the “locals” called it?

Because for one, regardless of what Scotty thought, it was clear the locals weren’t handling it. This shadow agency, whoever they were, was. And two, home
invasion
? It was more like a home
assassination
than some robbery attempt. She pictured the guy looking into Scotty’s car, as though he’d been watching it, probably followed her there. That part she believed, that they’d followed her, probably from the moment she’d left the Smithsonian, but what sort of crook follows a victim, an FBI agent, to the PD and doesn’t back off? Most crooks liked their victims unaware, unassuming, and uninvolved with the police.

Too many connections to other seemingly unassociated matters. Her secret sketch sanctioned by the CIA, or OGA, her discovery of the Smithsonian grounds as the crime scene, the “phone company” showing up at Scotty’s, the towed car leading to the missing paranoid boyfriend who thought people were following him, never mind his unaccounted-for paramour, and the now dead Smithsonian security guard. She still wasn’t sure what all the connections meant, only that her hunch on the possibility of a towed car leading her to a potential victim had landed her here. These were not the sort of coincidences Sydney believed in. And if it wasn’t coincidence then what the hell was it, and what did it have
to do with the forensic sketch? Was there any connection to this foreign diplomat’s missing daughter?

She got up, walked to the window, looked out to the street below, wondered if she was being watched at this very moment, figured she probably was. If there was one thing she had faith in, it was the various U.S. intelligence agencies’ methods of surveillance. After all, the FBI shared a number of those techniques. She’d been trained in some of them, and certainly been a part of them in the past—the very recent past. If one of these other government agencies had been following her, it explained why the cops had arrived so fast. What it didn’t explain was why two armed men were allowed to get that close to her in the first place.

Unless a mistake had been made somewhere along the way?

She wasn’t supposed to look into the case, and the CIA/OGA had suspected she might, which was why they’d taken the steps they had when she’d left Quantico. But the CIA, if they were following her, had lost her. The bad guys, whoever they were, had definitely followed her. But if they were ready to take
her
out that quickly, if they were the ones responsible for Tasha’s hit-and-run, then how was it that Penny had escaped their notice? As whacked out as Penny’s theories had sounded, she certainly had some information that could be considered vital.

Then again, maybe they had ignored Penny, assumed she wasn’t a threat, because her only connection to her missing boyfriend and his new girl had been the loan of her car, and that had merely been left in a construction zone, towed, and subsequently returned…They might not have even realized there was a connection to Penny, via her boyfriend, until Syd had stepped in, followed up on the lead herself.

Clearly no one had suspected that a lowly domestic FBI agent would connect the dots and stumble onto the Smithsonian and right into the lap of one of the players…

She closed her eyes, because that was, in essence, what she’d done. Stumbled across them. That was not how she liked to operate. She needed control. Today had not been
a controlled situation, and she’d almost gotten killed as a result.

She was not about to let that happen again, and that begged the question of what to do next.

The smart thing—the right thing—to do would be to go home as ordered, let the big boys handle it, the Mr. Federals of the world. And she might have, but for two things. One, she was somewhat responsible for her friend’s death, since she was the one who’d recommended Tasha for the job. Two, she’d killed someone tonight, someone who no doubt meant to kill her.

Hard not to take that personally, especially knowing that there had been
two
men approaching Penny’s apartment. Which meant there was someone else out there, someone she couldn’t identify, who probably had the same agenda: kill her.

She’d given her card to that security guard. That meant they knew who she was. One up on her, since she still didn’t know who they were, and if she went home to San Francisco, they could very well follow her there. She’d be doing exactly what she’d swore she’d never do, never allow to happen again. Dragging danger to her family’s doorstep.
Never
, she thought, turning away from the window, unable to see if anyone was sitting in any of the darkened cars parked below.

Grabbing her blanket and pillow, she settled on the couch. She’d never been very good at the whole let-sleeping-dogs-lie thing. No, she liked her dogs up and barking, the better to find out which were the vicious ones.

There were going to be some upset males come morning. Scotty for one, but also the alleged Special Agent Zachary Griffin, and this last thought made her smile. Served him right.

“Might want to work on those point-counterpoint surveillance techniques tomorrow,” she said, just in case they were listening. “Oh, and FYI, my favorite red is cabernet. California cab.”

The same as Tasha liked…

A shaft of light spilled into the hallway when Scotty opened the bedroom door. “You say something?” he called out.

“Just talking to myself.”

At eight the next morning, Scotty unlocked his Bureau car and held the door open for Syd. She slid in, and he stood there a moment, smiling. “I think this is the right decision you’re making, Syd. Go home, let the locals deal with it.”

“I’m stubborn. Not stupid.” When he got in, started up the car, she added, “Since we’ve got a few hours to kill, mind if we make a quick stop before we head to my place and then the airport?”

“Where to?”

“UVA.”

Scotty threw her a strange glance. “The university?”

“Old professor friend I haven’t seen in a while. Just want to drop in, say hi. See if he remembers me.”

He glanced at his watch, then shrugged. “Guess we have time.”

“Thanks.”

Syd leaned back in the car, checked the side view mirror. A Dodge pickup pulled out after them, but turned off a block later. She hoped the fact it was broad daylight would keep suspect number two from coming after her for the moment, and her right elbow automatically pressed against her side. She felt the hard edges of her temporary replacement sidearm the FBI had issued her. The minions who had interrogated her last night had taken her weapon, allegedly to book it into evidence for the requisite testing after the shooting.

Scotty was also armed, always a plus, since two guns were better than one, she thought, stifling a yawn. Scotty caught it, said, “We should stop for coffee first,” and she didn’t argue. She hadn’t slept well, tossing and turning over the whole affair, thinking about what she might have missed, then coming up with today’s battle plan, not saying anything
inside Scotty’s apartment for fear that not only would he try to talk her out of it, but Griffin would swoop in and physically escort her to that damned plane himself.

When they got to the university, she asked Scotty to wait in the car while she checked with the administration staff to locate the professor.

“I’ll go in with you,” he said.

She didn’t want Scotty to see her pulling out her credentials and making this an official visit, since that sort of ruined the whole “old friend” scenario she’d woven for him, especially when she didn’t know what department or what class. “It’ll only take me a second to see if he’s in. If he’s not, I’ll be right out and we’re off to breakfast.”

Scotty leaned back in his seat, gave her his best “hurry up” look, and she was off. There was only one Professor Woods who taught at the university, Denise Woods, and apparently
she
had a nine
A.M
. class and was presently in her office. Maybe Scotty wouldn’t notice Sydney’s slip-up on the professor’s gender. The girl at the counter gave Sydney a map of the campus, pointing out a parking lot closer to the professor’s building.

Five minutes later, she was knocking at the professor’s office door, with Scotty at her side. The professor opened the door, and Syd eyed the very beautiful, petite blond-haired woman, and smiled. “Professor Denise Woods? I’m Sydney Fitzpatrick. I’ll bet you don’t recognize me.”