No Good Deed (9 page)

That darkness inside scared her. Especially now, especially when she’d finally found peace in her life. Because it was still there. The dark threatened her hard-earned peace.

“She had to turn sometime,” Brad said. “Five years ago? Longer? Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Lucy said without hesitation. “I need to see that video. It’ll help me get into her head.”

Brad scowled. “I don’t want to understand her. I want to find her.”

“We’ll never find her if we don’t understand her,” Lucy countered. “She’s too smart, too calculating. She’s not your average drug dealer. She’s ruthless, seasoned, and she knows our playbook. She’s been a federal agent for fifteen years, in nine different offices. Why? She knows not only how we do things, but how
you
do things. How Sam does things. That’s why I need to see that tape. Was that the first or a repeat? Killing a man in cold blood isn’t easy—how did she do it? Did she hesitate? Have a conversation with him first? Was it an accident? An assassination?”

“Assassination,” Brad mumbled. “Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know, but after the cold-blooded murder of two DEA agents and three guards today, assassination popped into my head. We also need to talk—you, me, Sam Archer.”

“I need to get out in the field and find her.”

“The marshals are doing everything they can, and they’re the best. But even so, they need more information. Were they able to trace Nicole after the helicopter landed?”

Brad shook his head.

“Do we have an ID on any of the men who helped her escape?”

Again, Brad shook his head.

“I also want to talk to her brother, Chris. He’s stationed out of Fort Hood. I don’t know if he’s deployed or on base. I’m going to ask Nate to help—he spent ten years in the army and was stationed at Fort Hood. He’ll know people there, who to talk to, to get me to Chris Rollins faster. And I want to go to her house.”

“Her house?”

“According to the file, she owned a house in San Antonio that’s currently secured by the DEA under asset forfeiture laws. But I don’t have any information about her belongings—computer, paperwork, personal effects.”

“Well, fuck. All that was destroyed when Tobias planted the bomb in our evidence locker.”

Lucy froze. “
All
her personal effects were destroyed?”

“I don’t know exactly what was there, but we seized her phones, electronics, date books, anything that was potential evidence.”

Lucy stared at the file. “What’s the conventional wisdom on why Tobias wanted to destroy the evidence locker?”

“The initial reason still makes sense—that there was something in evidence that implicated him, and we didn’t know about it. But another school of thought, which I lean toward, is that he simply wanted to fuck with us—we’re scrambling with all the cases we had pending. Evidence is gone. Some bastards are going to get off. The AUSA has already dismissed three cases because we no longer have the evidence—which leads us to the third school of thought. That Tobias wanted someone specific to be released.” He narrowed his eyes. “Not Nicole—not only do we have copies of most of the evidence we lost, like the disk, but we have her confession that she was being blackmailed by Vasco Trejo. What we lost was only physical evidence.”

“But you had some of the things from her house and desk in that evidence lockup.”

“Of course.”

She mulled it over. It made sense. It was the only thing that
did
make sense. “During your conversation with her two weeks ago, when she implied that Tobias had set up the hit on his own people, you came away with the thought that she may have known him, but more likely knew him by reputation.”

“She was questioned extensively about Tobias and said she’d never seen him.”

“She’s a liar. We can’t believe anything she says.”

“She was interrogated by our best people. And her plea agreement was predicated on providing truthful information. If we caught her in a lie, the agreement was null and void.”

Lucy clearly saw the truth; why couldn’t Brad?

“Brad, she never intended to fulfill her end of the agreement. It didn’t matter if she lied, because she was already planning the escape. The only thing that makes sense is that she’s been working with Tobias all along. She knew the protocol for drug evidence. She knew that you’d lock it in evidence prior to being sent to the lab for testing, so the risk that anyone would find the bomb was slim. Plant the bomb, wait until the evidence is secure, blow the locker. There was something you had in there that she didn’t want us to know about.”

“That’s a long stretch. And those drugs were worth a million dollars on the street.”

“Were they? You did a field test, but didn’t test for potency or test all the bricks, correct?”

He hesitated. “I see what you’re saying, but—”

“She planned a complex and dangerous escape while in solitary confinement, which meant either her lawyer was helping her or one of the guards. She may have made plans before she was ever captured, in case her duplicity was discovered. The surviving guard, Isaac Harris, said she was privy to information about the escape that she only could have known had she been part of the planning.”

“You give her a lot of credit for being smart.”

“Nicole Rollins
is
smart. She is willing to do anything necessary to secure her freedom, though what her endgame is, I’m not sure. But I’m positive
she
knows. She does have a plan, and she started the ball rolling the minute she was arrested. I need to get into her house, then talk to her brother.”

“When we first arrested Nicole, Chris Rollins was deployed. I don’t remember where off the top of my head, but he was overseas. Sam talked to him, then someone from the DOJ. He claims that he and Nicole hadn’t spoken in years, that they were estranged.”

“But no one was asking about who Nicole was as a kid while they were growing up. What she did, who she socialized with, how she handled setbacks or disappointment. All that is important to develop a reliable profile.”

“I still think it’s a huge waste of time to dig around in her psyche when that isn’t going to guarantee we’ll find her.”

Brad was getting frustrated, but so was Lucy.

“What is it you want to do now? The marshals are leading the manhunt, so what now?”

“Don’t you have to stay here and work on that?” he said with disdain.

Lucy was used to the skepticism of many cops about using psychology as a tool. Not because she had experienced it—she wasn’t officially a profiler—but because her older brother Dillon was a forensic psychiatrist and she’d lived with him and his wife, Kate, for seven years. She thought that after years of successful criminal profiling that led to the arrest of killers, more cops would understand it was a valuable tool.

“I can do this while you drive.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He said, “I’d really like to wring her attorney’s neck, but the marshals are all over the guy. So far, he hasn’t given up anything, but we have a lot of latitude. One shred of proof that the lawyer aided and abetted her escape, and he’s toast. Disbarment, potential jail time.”

Lucy thought back to only two weeks ago, when Tobias’s people had held a woman and her children hostage to force a white-collar criminal to transfer funds into their account. If her theory that Tobias and Nicole were truly connected held, that meant that anyone working with Tobias was also connected, in some way, to Nicole.

Elise Hansen. Tobias’s much younger sister.

“Brad—I need to talk to Elise.”

“She fucked with you last time you went to see her, you can’t do that again.”

“Don’t coddle me,” Lucy snapped. “I’ve faced far more dangerous psychopaths than Elise Hansen. And she
tried
to get under my skin, but failed.”
Mostly.
“She must know about Nicole. Elise still claims she’s Tobias’s little sister.” Lucy was skeptical about that. Tobias was in his forties. Elise was sixteen. It was possible they were brother and sister, but it seemed too much of a stretch. Still, Elise knew him, she’d talked to him, she’d seen him. They had substantive proof that she’d acted on Tobias’s orders when she killed Congresswoman Worthington’s husband. She could very well know something of Nicole Rollins’s plans—at least as much as Tobias himself knew.

“I’m not coddling you, Lucy.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair. “Maybe, just a bit. You push yourself to the edge.”

“And it’s warranted, especially now. Nicole was party to the murder of five cops. She’ll kill more if she gets the chance. She has a deep loathing of law enforcement, and the DEA in particular. We need to push ourselves. Find out more about Elise and her relationship with Tobias. More about Nicole and how she hooked up with him. And really—why did Tobias help Nicole escape and not his own sister? It wouldn’t be as difficult to free her as this elaborate breakout this morning.” She shook her head. “That part doesn’t make sense. Yet.”

“We don’t know that Tobias had a hand in Nicole’s escape.”

“We might not be able to prove it, but he was part of it. She couldn’t do it alone, she had to have someone on the outside with substantial resources. If not Tobias, who?”

Brad didn’t have a response.

Nicole needed money and resources. A safe house. The helicopter, the men, the vehicles, the access to Saint Catherine’s bus—all that required time and money. Lots of money. The DEA had frozen Nicole’s accounts, but she could have had money the DEA hadn’t found. Cash in safety deposit boxes, private storage units, under false names and identification. Tobias had a substantial pool of money, even though the FBI had seized the accounts Congresswoman Reyes-Worthington had used to launder Tobias’s illegal money.

Was Tobias planning on letting Elise rot? She was sixteen, she could be tried as an adult, particularly since she had been involved in serious felonies. Lucy’s partner in the Worthington case, Barry Crawford, had been working closely with the AUSA on Elise’s case, because it was a sensitive investigation. So much of the evidence they had against her—for murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, and more—was circumstantial. Last she’d heard, before Barry left on his vacation, the AUSA was working on a plea deal, but Elise wasn’t budging. She was holding firm to her statement that she didn’t know what was going on, that she only did what she was told because she was scared, and that her brother Tobias would kill her if she said anything.

That last part may have been true—whether or not Tobias was truly her biological brother. But Lucy could see that Elise wasn’t scared of anything. She had no fear, no remorse, no thought for anyone. She didn’t fear death, and she didn’t fear imprisonment. It was a game to her, pure and simple. She looked at the cards each day and made her decisions, with the end goal always to finish ahead of everyone else. She’d change tactics midstream if it benefited her, and if she was caught lying she’d switch tactics again.

Lucy had to find a way to manipulate the game. To manipulate Elise into revealing the game plan, without Elise realizing Lucy was manipulating her. And someone like Elise would be extremely hard to trick. How could someone so young be such an accomplished con artist and liar?

It would also take time to set up. It was midafternoon, and there was no way they could get in to see her today. Lucy would much rather have Hans there as well—if not in the room with her, then observing.

In fact, Lucy suspected that if Hans were in the room, Elise wouldn’t talk at all. She didn’t respect men. She saw them as a means to an end, weak through sex, easily manipulated.

But observing, Hans might see something Lucy couldn’t, because of his experience and distance from the case. She wanted to talk to Barry first. She sent him a text message to call her as soon as he returned from vacation. He would have the most up-to-date information on Elise’s case.

“Brad,” she said, “I’m going to talk to Elise tomorrow. I’d like you to observe as well.”

Brad sighed. “If you really think this is important, fine.”

“I appreciate your faith, Brad. I can’t do this without you. You know Nicole better than anyone, even Sam.”

“Then why couldn’t I see her for who she really was?” Brad said quietly.

“Brad, two years ago I was working for a nonprofit company that tracked repeat sex offenders. We’d compile information and evidence for law enforcement, and helped take hundreds of child predators off the streets and put them back in prison. I was obsessed with the program. It was run by a former FBI agent—a woman who’d become something of my mentor. She’d been one of the first female FBI agents, was well respected, and after retirement she committed her life to rooting out these vicious people.” Lucy paused, unsure exactly how much she should tell Brad. “I had total faith in her. Blind faith, really, because she was using me to identify parolees for the purpose of killing them.”

“A vigilante?”

She nodded. “I identified parolees online, set them up to meet—ostensibly—with a minor, and I assumed that the men were subsequently arrested. I trusted her when she told me they were. I prepared reports and transcripts that I thought were being used in their trials or hearings, even though I was never called on to testify. I didn’t think anything of it—because most of these guys were on probation, and there was no trial necessary to put them back in prison for violating parole. I later learned that I was setting them up to be assassinated. The system I believed in had failed by releasing these predators early, but I still believed in it. I thought we were putting them back in prison, where they belonged. Instead they were dead.”

“I wouldn’t lose sleep over it,” he said.

She paused. “She used me, Brad. And because of what this woman did, one of my closest friends was killed. He wasn’t a predator, but a cop who thought I was part of the conspiracy. He was investigating it to protect me and he ended up dead. What I’m saying is, I should have seen the truth earlier. I knew all the information, I just didn’t put it together fast enough. I saw what I wanted to see—a noble, self-sacrificing retired FBI agent who gave me a cause to believe in, something to work
for
. But when the layers were peeled away, I saw her for who she was: a ruthless businesswoman whose business was murder.” Lucy had to stop there. She was still disturbed about what had happened eighteen months ago. Maybe she didn’t lose sleep over the dead sex offenders, but the repercussions from that bout of vigilante justice still haunted her.