Doom with a View (17 page)

“No,” Lovelace said, his voice suddenly cautious.

“Was there anything that happened at that event that was perhaps controversial?”

“Well, yeah,” Lovelace said. “I mean, whenever you get a group of politicians that large in one hotel, there’s bound to be some controversy.”

“Does anyone at all stand out in your mind that maybe you thought twice about or who seemed off to you?”

The line was silent for so long that I thought we’d dropped the call, but finally Lovelace said softly, “There was one man.”

“Who?” Candice and I asked together.

“During a committee meeting that I chaired on the downward spiral of our Midwestern economy, a gentleman who identified himself from my state got up and disrupted the meeting. He claimed to have been a former assembly-line worker and accused us of doing too little, too late to help the auto industry recover from the slide of recent years. He became so disruptive that he was eventually removed by hotel security.”

“Did he make any overt threats?”

Again, Lovelace was silent for a few seconds. “He did,” he said. “He said we’d all be sorry.”

“Who was on that committee?” I asked.

“There were several representatives,” Lovelace said. “I can’t remember all of them, but I have a copy of the minutes from that meeting somewhere. Can I dig it up and call you back?”

“Absolutely,” Candice said. “Please call us back as soon as possible.”

“Will do,” he said.

Candice and I waited twenty anxious minutes, but finally Lovelace called. “I’ve got the list,” he said.

“Shoot,” Candice commanded.

“The attendees were Representative Witlow, from Chicago; Representative Bentley, from Ohio; Senator Newhouse, also from Ohio; Representative Coyle, from Wisconsin—”

“Stop!” I nearly shouted, interrupting the representative, aware that I was bound by Gaston not to reveal any details of the other teens’ disappearance. “Mr. Lovelace, we’ll have to call you back.”

Candice clicked off from what had to be a rather stunned Lovelace and turned to me with a curious look in her eyes. “What’re you thinking?” she asked.

“We can’t hold on to this by ourselves,” I said. “We’ve got to go to the big guns and tell them about the connection.”

“Gaston?” she suggested.

I shook my head. “I think we should go to Dutch first, because if he finds out from Gaston that we’ve been working the case behind his back, he’ll be pissed.”

“Good point,” she said, handing me the phone.

My hands shook a little as I dialed his number. He hated when I went off on my own without telling him. “Ms. Fusco,” Dutch’s rich baritone said into my ear. “What’s up?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Abs?”

“Yeah.”

“What sticky situation are you in now?”

I frowned. He knew me too well. “Don’t be mad,” I began.

Dutch sighed deliberately. “Great,” he said. “This is bound to be bad. Okay, out with it, Edgar.”

I swallowed, encouraged that he’d used his pet name for me at least, so I got on with it. “You know how Gaston kinda hinted that we needed to butt out of the Lovelace murder?”

Another sigh, then a groan sounded in my ear.

“Well, we didn’t
exactly
listen to instructions.” There was a long pause, so I said, “Dutch?”

“I’m here,” he said. “And I’m not surprised. What did you two come up with?”

“We found the connection between the kids and we think we have a lead on the killer.”

There was a low chuckle. “Oh, is that all?” he deadpanned.

The tension left my shoulders. “Pretty much.”

“Have you called Gaston yet?”

“We thought we’d start with you.”

“Nice of you.”

“I
know
, right?”

That got me another chuckle. “Okay, hang on, I just saw Gaston a few minutes ago. Let me go find him and tell him you’re on the line.”

Dutch put me on hold and I switched to speakerphone. We waited with the hold music filling the car for maybe three minutes before the line was picked up again. “Ms. Cooper?”

“Good afternoon, Agent Gaston,” I said. “I’m here with Candice and we’re just coming back from a quick visit to OSU.”

“Yes, Dutch filled me in on the fact that you’ve been doing a bit of investigating on your own.”

“Sir,” said Candice, “we were actually working it legitimately. Representative Lovelace hired us to look into his daughter’s death.”

“Yes,” said Gaston calmly. “He did that on my recommendation.”

Candice and I shared an astonished look. “Really?” I asked.

“Really,” he confirmed, and in the background I could swear I heard Dutch’s soft laughter.

“Er . . . thank you, sir,” I said.

“So what do you have for me?”

I filled him in on what I thought I’d picked up at OSU and Candice told him about the phone call to Representative Lovelace. When we finished, there were several seconds of silence, but then Agent Gaston said, “Very good work, ladies, and I mean that. I’m going to contact Representative Lovelace directly and bring the task force up to speed. Can I reach you at this number later?”

“Yes,” Candice and I said in unison.

“Excellent. Thank you and we’ll be in touch.”

Gaston clicked off and Candice and I traded high fives. “We rock,” she said smugly.

“Can you imagine what Harrison is going to say when Gaston tells him what we’ve found?”

Candice’s face turned down in a scowl. “Who cares what that asshole thinks?” she said with a wave of her hand.

I nodded, but then thought back to the week before when Harrison had paid his respects at her grandmother’s funeral. “Aw, maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all?” She looked at me as if I’d just told her that communism was good for the economy. “I’m serious,” I insisted. “He came to pay his respects last week at your grandmother’s funeral and I think that says more about him than how he reacts to people like me.”

Candice rolled her eyes. She wasn’t buying it. “Gaston couldn’t attend,” she pointed out. “So he probably forced Harrison to go in his place.”

I sighed. This was an argument I wasn’t going to win, so I let it drop.

We drove for the next hour in companionable silence when Candice’s phone rang. “Hello, Agent Gaston,” Candice said, putting us back on speaker.

“Ms. Fusco,” Gaston said warmly. “I’m here with Agent Harrison. Is Ms. Cooper still with you?”

“I’m here,” I sang.

“Excellent. We’ve spoken to Representative Lovelace and we’d like to ask for the two of you to join us tomorrow morning if you’re available.”

“Works for me,” I said, looking expectantly at Candice.

She looked frustrated and I didn’t understand why, but she grudgingly said, “We’ll be there.”

“Shall we say nine a.m. here at the bureau?” asked Gaston.

“That’s fine,” she said.

“Excellent. Have a good evening and we’ll see you in the morning.”

When we’d clicked off, I said, “You don’t look happy.”

Candice squared her shoulders and squinted in the dimming light at the road ahead. “I don’t want to work with Harrison again.”

“Who said anything about working with him?”

“What do you think they’re calling us in for, Abs? A cup of coffee and a chat about the weather?”

“You think they want us officially back on the case?”

“I do.”

That stumped me. I had kind of thought they’d bring us back in just to verify the information we’d gathered. I hadn’t made the leap that maybe they’d want us back on the case. “But the politics,” I said after I’d thought about it. “Wouldn’t bringing us back on be a big no-no?”

“Not if we’d made further headway than Harrison had without us,” Candice reasoned. “And my gut says we leaped him by a mile.”

“So you think he’ll be forced to work with us again.”

“Yep. And if we blow it or step out of line, he’ll blame Gaston and probably Dutch, and trust me on this, heads will roll.”

“That hardly seems fair,” I said. “I mean, why wouldn’t he just blame you and me?”

“Because we don’t work for the bureau,” she said simply. “We’re merely the pawns in this game. An experiment.”

I leaned back in my seat feeling tired and irritated with myself for saying yes to their offer before I’d had a chance to talk it over with Candice. “I totally walked into that one, didn’t I?”

Candice nudged me with her elbow. “It might not be so bad. Let’s just go in there, hear the ground rules, and see if we can play by them. If not, we can always say no to the offer and walk away clean.”

“But that might be bad for Leslie,” I said with a nagging feeling I couldn’t shake that she was running out of time.

“It could be, yes.”

“I’m willing to take the political risk, then,” I said firmly. “If it might save her life, it’s worth it. I’ll talk it over with Dutch tonight, though, just to make sure he doesn’t mind me playing fast and loose with his career.”

“Good plan.”

“By the way, are you sure you don’t want to stay over one more night?”

Candice’s expression became melancholy and she reached over and squeezed my hand. “Thanks, Sundance, but it’s time for this cowgirl to get back to her own place and give you and Dutch a little alone time.”

I nodded, glad she was feeling strong enough to get on with her life, but worried about her nonetheless.

That night over dinner, Dutch and I discussed the pros and cons of Candice and me getting reinvolved with the missing teens. It aggravated me that there were more cons than pros. For the most part, Dutch completely agreed with Candice. We were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t, but at least he was okay with becoming a possible scapegoat if things got bad and the bureau needed someone to blame. “You seem pretty relaxed for someone who could lose his job if this thing goes south,” I noted.

Dutch shrugged. “I’ve still got the security business,” he said. “We’ll live.”

I smirked. Dutch made a whole lot more money managing his side business than he did as an FBI agent. “Still, I’d hate to see Gaston take the hit for this.”

“Abs,” he said patiently. “Don’t you think Gaston is aware of the risks?”

“Why’s he pushing so hard on our behalf?” I wondered.

“Because he’s an outsider,” Dutch explained. “He came into this deal with lots of ideas that were unconventional and ran into a culture that has always rigidly followed the rule book. He’s pushing for the bureau as a whole to think differently, to experiment and try out new investigative techniques. It’s what his old culture—the CIA—is renowned for.”

“They experiment a lot over at the CIA?”

Dutch smiled and nodded. “That they do,” he said. “Those guys are famous for pushing the envelope and they’ll try
anything
, which is what has made them so successful over the years.”

“And so scary,” I said.

“That too.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “We’ll give it our best shot and hope we don’t screw it up.”

Dutch tilted his chin and let out a laugh. When I demanded to know what was so funny, he said, “Oh, you’ll screw up all right. The only question is by how much.”

I gave him a level look. “You have no faith.” But deep down I thought he might be right.

The next morning Candice picked me up at eight and we shared a quick breakfast at the Bagel Factory before heading to the local bureau office. On the way there Candice did her best to pump up my confidence. “Just be yourself,” she advised.

“Who else would I be?”

“You know what I mean,” she said with an impatient wave of her hand. “Don’t let those bastards rattle you. After all, you’re the one that came up with the new lead. You’re the one that has them finally going in the right direction. You’re the one that linked in with Bianca and found her body. You’re the one—”

“Candice?” I interrupted.

“Yeah?”

“You’re making my stomach hurt.”

She eyed me from the driver’s seat. “Okay,” she said. “No more pep talk.”

“Thanks.”

We parked the car and headed inside. I noticed that we were five minutes early as we took our seats. I didn’t really have a chance to get settled, as, just like in D.C., a female agent came to retrieve us from the lobby and invited us to follow her. We were then escorted to a conference room and told to wait. I fidgeted in my chair, trying not to be nervous as I told myself over and over that I’d been through this before, so how bad could it really get?

The door opened and in walked Agent Gaston, Agent Harrison, and an older gentleman I didn’t recognize, but who practically oozed power from every pore. I also noticed immediately the man had a strong resemblance to Agent Harrison. “Ladies,” Gaston said pleasantly.

“Good morning, sir,” we both mumbled.

“Thank you for joining us. You remember Agent Harrison?”

We both nodded and Harrison nodded back, his stony eyes hard.

“And this is Regional Director of Special Investigations, Agent Harrison Senior, who is also Agent Brice Harrison’s uncle.”

Candice stood slightly to shake the older man’s hand. “Sir,” she said.

“Ms. Fusco,” he replied before turning to me.

I extended my hand and he shook it once, then sat back in his chair to stare at us bemusedly. “I understand that you two have come across some information that is relevant to this investigation,” he began.

Candice and I nodded again.

“And I understand that Ms. Cooper here claims to have some psychic ability?”

I smiled. “Guilty as charged,” I said.

He smiled back at me and asked, “Might I see a demonstration?”

I blinked at him in confusion as my heartbeat picked up a notch. “Sir?”

“I would like to see this ability if I may. That is,
if
you don’t mind?”

The way he said it left little doubt that he would definitely mind if I turned his request down. But I still wasn’t sure what he was asking me. “Who specifically would you like me to demonstrate on, sir?” I asked.