Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (75 page)

“Since early afternoon.”

His gentle eyes met hers and held her gaze. “You drifted in and out of sleep. I didn’t want to leave in case you woke up.”

A lump rose in her throat. And then she remembered. “Joe and Mrs. Chang. Are they—?”

“They’re both going to be fine. He … your husband … has a burn on his shoulder, but it’ll heal fine. The doctors want to keep Mrs. Chang for observation. She inhaled a lot of smoke, and her condition was probably a little bit iffy in the first place, after being held captive for a week and a half. They set her broken fingers and tried to feed her some soup.” He grinned.

“Tried to?”

“Apparently that’s all she had to eat the entire time she was in the cabin. She sent her son out to find her a cheesesteak. And a beer.”

Aroostine laughed a scratchy, dry laugh.

“They checked you out pretty thoroughly, too. Although I think they had you sedated for a while because you kept pulling off the oxygen mask. You’re lucky you didn’t suffer more smoke inhalation.”

Her laugh faded but her throat hurt. “I know.”

“How’d you know about the Underground Railroad?”

“The what?”

“According to the locals, that cabin was once owned by an avowed abolitionist. It’s been rumored for years that it was a stop on the Underground Railroad, but no one ever found that tunnel system. You just stumbled on it?”

“Oh. The tunnel … rabbits.” She didn’t have the energy to explain in greater detail.

He fixed her with a look.

“It’s a long story. What happened at court?”

“I told Rosie what you wanted her to do, so she didn’t go to court. Judge Hernandez is apparently a big fan of the ten-minute rule. At 9:40 exactly, he declared a mistrial because no one from Justice had appeared. He didn’t have his deputy call over or anything—just issued the order. It showed up on the docket a few minutes later, and Sid went ballistic.”

“But, he had to know it was just Judge Hernandez being petty. He can refile—”

“I don’t think it even bothered Rosie. She was too worried about you. She knew you wouldn’t just blow off court, even if you were deathly ill. She was hounding me to tell her what was really going on. While I was trying to put her off, your boy Franklin called and told me you found the place where the guy stashed his mom and your husband. He said to hold tight and he’d be back in touch.”

She smiled. Franklin had come through.

Mitchell continued, “But, since I didn’t actually have anything concrete to tell Rosie all morning, I just kept saying you were really sick. Finally, she’d had enough and said she was calling the Metropolitan Police and the FBI to report an officer of the court was missing. I begged her not to and told her to just keep working on tracking down the venture capital group. And, what do you know, she found your guy.”

“She
did
?”

He nodded. “She did. Adan Tereshchenko.”

“That’s him? The investor?”

“Nope. The venture capital group was nothing more than a shell. She tracked down the ‘lawyer’ who met with Franklin. That guy was a hired actor, by the way, but he gave her
his
contact, who rolled on Tereshchenko.”

“She did all that today?”

“She said she had to do something to keep herself busy. She’s really concerned about you.”

“So, who’s Tereshchenko?”

“We’re still tying it down, but it looks like he’s tied to Eastern European organized crime.”

“Like, mobsters?”

“Something like that.”

“Why?”

“Why were they so interested in your case, you mean?”

She nodded her head.

“It was the reference to the Ukrainian ballbuster on the tapes. This outfit used the venture capital group as a front to get in with SystemSource. Can you imagine how much power they might have had? The RemoteControl system has been sold to the governments of eleven countries. Just in the U.S., it controls the U.S. Mint, our offices, large chunks of the financial systems—including the NASDAQ. For crying out loud, it controls the operating rooms at Walter Reed and the kitchen in the White House.”

“It does?”

“Yeah, think about that for a minute. It could have been an absolute disaster, but they couldn’t get in through Franklin’s backdoor.”

She smiled. “Really?”

“Really. Apparently four different hackers accepted a challenge posted on Silk Road to break in. Each of the four failed to get in. And all four were unceremoniously shot point-blank for failing. The whole mistrial was just supposed to cause a delay long enough for them to figure out a way in.”

Her smile vanished. She was suddenly cold. She tried to pull the blanket more tightly around her even though she knew the chill was coming from within.

“If he’s willing to kill, why didn’t he just kill Womback and Sheely?”

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“If he didn’t want the tapes to get out, wouldn’t the surefire way to prevent it be to kill the defendants? No defendants, no trial.”

“You’re frightening, you know that?”

She blinked up at him and waited for him to go on.

“That was Plan A, as it happens. He posted a job on Silk Road looking for an assassin. The CIA heard the chatter and had the Marshals scoop up Womback and Sheely and their families weeks ago.”

“They’ve been in protective custody this whole time?”

“Yeah, and Sid was not happy that nobody bothered to tell him.”

She could only imagine. There was no turf war like an interagency turf war.

“Okay, he couldn’t get to the defendants. Then why didn’t he kill me outright? Or keep Mrs. Chang indefinitely and just have Franklin do whatever he needed done going forward?” The questions chilled her, but she had to know the answer.

“He’s not really a street thug. He’s in middle management or its criminal enterprise equivalent. He just wanted a way into the system. He didn’t want to get his hands any dirtier than had to, and he’s smart enough to know subcontracting wet work is an excellent way to get dimed out as part of a bigger deal somewhere.”

“No honor among thieves,” she muttered.

“Exactly. He knew he could exploit Franklin, so he decided to handle it himself. But he also couldn’t hold Mrs. Chang prisoner forever. He just needed a temporary fix. You should be glad he didn’t post another job on Silk Road.”

“You keep talking about Silk Road. I assume it’s not a reference to the Chinese trade routes from the Han Dynasty.”

He shook his head. “Where’ve you been? It’s an Internet black market. We keep shutting it down; it keeps popping up again. Mainly it’s a place to buy and sell drugs, but a little murder-for-hire or prostitution isn’t unheard of.”

Prostitution
. She wondered fleetingly exactly how Tereshchenko had gotten to Joe at the bar. She pushed it from her mind

“Rosie figured this all out?”

“Some of it. But the rest is coming straight from the horse’s mouth. The local cops around here are no joke. They had blockades set up faster than even we could have done it. They nabbed Tereshchenko coming out of the forest. He’s in custody and
very
interested in cutting a deal.”

“He’s talking? Won’t his bosses kill him?”

“Probably, but he’s a dead man either way. He’s facing a list of charges in the Ukraine. If we extradite him, he’ll be killed before he’s out of the airport and he knows it.”

“So we got him.”

“You got him.”

“Um—does that mean Sid’s not mad anymore?”

Mitchell bit his lip. Then he said, “He’ll calm down, but he’s not going to let it go, Aroostine. You failed to appear in court. He’s already placed you on unpaid leave for conduct unbecoming an attorney.”

“Conduct unbecoming? No exception for extenuating circumstances?” She blinked up at him. Was he joking?

He looked away. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes and tried to focus on all the good news. Joe was alive. Mrs. Chang was alive.
She
was alive. A truly evil man was in custody. But the news of her suspension still stung.

“Aroostine?” he asked in a gentle voice.

She opened her eyes. “Yeah?”

“For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing.”

He moved closer to the bed and lifted her hand from the sheet.

His hand was warm on hers. And his eyes bored into hers with an intensity that made her heart race.

“That’s worth a lot.”

He rubbed her palm with his thumb.

Her breath hitched in her throat.

“I’m glad,” he said, leaning close.

She breathed in, gathering herself, and then exhaled slowly. She kept her voice soft. “I love my husband.”

Pain flashed in his eyes, but he didn’t release her hand. “I know.”

“Okay.” She looked pointedly at his hand.

“You still need friends, though,” he said in a careful voice.

He smiled down at her, and she grinned back at him.

“That’s true.”

Then she felt someone watching her from the hallway. Her door was propped open, and Joe stood on the other side, dressed in his smoke-blackened street clothes. A bandage peeked out through his shirt collar.

They locked eyes for a long moment, and then he turned wordlessly and walked away.

“Uh-oh,” Mitchell said, following her gaze and dropping her hand. “I’ll go talk to him.”

She shook her head. “Don’t. It’s okay.”

She might still be in love with Joe, but he’d made his feelings clear when he filed for divorce.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

He frowned at that, but after a few seconds, he settled back into his chair. She leaned her head back against the hard pillow. She’d worry about Joe later.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Two days later

Aroostine pedaled her bike along the trail to Mt. Vernon. She locked it up and hiked to the rock overlooking the Potomac River in the pre-dawn light and settled in with her thermos of tea to await the sunrise and a new day.

She didn’t know exactly how long she’d been sitting there when the shadow fell across her rock.

After all, she wasn’t there to keep track of time. She was there to track the flight path of the birds overhead, the way a blade of dry grass wavered in the wind, the telltale gravel disturbance that a rabbit left behind when it ran through the brush.

She shielded her eyes against the sun that had climbed high in the cloudless sky and turned toward the shadow, expecting to see a park ranger wanting to make sure she was all right, or maybe a hiker in need of directions.

It was Joe.

And time, which had expanded and slowed its pace while she’d sat there, suddenly increased its tempo to keep up with her racing heart.

She found her voice and said, “How did you find me?”

Joe smiled the knowing half-grin of a husband who knew every inch of his wife’s body and every corner of her soul.

“Piece of cake. When you came out here over the summer to interview for the job, we hiked up here the morning before we left. Don’t you remember?”

She hadn’t, actually. The long weekend they’d spent together—the first and last time Joe’d spent any time in the city with her—seemed like a lifetime ago. And, if she was being honest, she’d stuffed the memory out of mind because it was too painful to address.

But now that he was standing there, two feet away, it came rushing back. Their hand-in-hand walk along the National Mall, stopping to ride the carousel with all the sun-kissed toddlers; dinner at a tiny noodle shop where the steaming bowls of pho were both fragrant and filling and the tables were so close together that her legs brushed up against the woman sitting at the next table when she stood up to leave.

And the picnic. The simple lunch they’d shared on a boulder very much like this one, followed by the surprise that Joe had produced from the picnic basket—a bottle of champagne and two plastic flutes. He’d toasted her future—
their
future—in halting, heartfelt words that had left her giddy and flush with excitement at the new chapter in their life together.