Conspiracy (30 page)

 

LIA HEARD ABOUT
the hair sample from Mandarin at roughly the same time Jackson did. She was packing in her hotel room, getting ready to go back to Crypto City. Now that the Vietnam connection appeared to be a bust, Rubens had ordered her home.

“So Amanda Rauci was with Forester when he killed himself?” Lia asked Mandarin when he told her about the hair.

“Whoa, hold on,” said Mandarin. “A strand or two of hair could
easily
have been on his clothes without her being there. They were having an affair, remember?”

“I remember.”

“No way she killed him. No way.”

Lia thought of Amanda Rauci the day she and Jackson had spoken to her. Could she have killed her lover?

No.

What if he'd told her he was going back to his wife?

Lia didn't think so even then.

“I was hoping you might do me a favor,” said Mandarin.

“What's that?”

“She used her credit card at an animal hospital and veterinary clinic a few miles from Danbury on the New York and Connecticut border the other day. We want to check it out in person, but most of my people have already left with McSweeney. The soonest I can get someone up there will be late tomorrow afternoon.”

“Animal hospital? Did she have a pet?”

“No idea. We're wondering why she's up here in the first place. It may be a glitch—possibly she made the charge when she was here with Forester and they only put it through now. But I'd like to check it sooner rather than later.”

“Sure, I'll do it,” said Lia.

“Good. I'll fax you a copy of the transaction.”

 

IT WAS GOING
on six o'clock when Lia finally got to the animal hospital. The only one left in the office was a pimple-faced geek who started breathing hard as soon as she walked in the door.

Which really annoyed her, though she tried to ignore it.

“I'm looking for a woman named Amanda Rauci, who may have been in here yesterday,” Lia told him after she flashed her federal marshal credentials. “She hasn't been seen since then. She's a Secret Service agent, and we're worried about her.”

“Secret Service?”

“That's right.”

“She was a Secret Service agent. Wow. Wow.”

“Let's make sure we have the right person,” said Lia, taking out her PDA. She tapped on a program and brought up a photo of Amanda Rauci. “Is this her?”

The young man reached for the handheld computer.

“We look with our eyes,” Lia told him. “Only I touch my computer.”

“Oh yeah, that's Ms. Rauci. She came in right about now. I was just about to close. Rauci is her divorced name, though. She has another name.”

“What was it?”

“Hold on; let me think. It would be on the chart. That oughta be in the replace pile.” The kid went over to a large wire basket and began sorting through the files.

“What sort of pet did she have?” Lia asked.

“Dog. She needed something because she was going on a trip and it barfed in the car.”

“Lovely,” said Lia.

 

THE NAME AMANDA
had given the vet's assistant was Stevens, but the woman at the house had never heard of her. A check by the Desk Three people found no link, either.

“Probably she was driving north and her dog started giving her trouble,” suggested Rockman. “She stopped off and got something for him at a place she'd seen when she was there with Forester.”

“Why is that the only transaction she's had in the past week?” Lia asked.

It had started to rain lightly. She flipped her windshield wipers on and pulled out of the driveway, starting back in the direction of Danbury.

“Maybe she doesn't use the card that much because she prefers cash,” said Rockman.

“Or maybe she's out of cash,” said Lia, answering her own question. “And this was important enough to risk using the card for.”

“You're assuming she's running away,” said Telach.

“Or doesn't want to be found,” said Lia.

“My dog was the same way,” said Rockman. “Carsick.”

“You have a dog?”

“Had to give him away because of work. I'm not home much. Not fair to the dog.”

Good point, thought Lia. She didn't remember Rauci having a dog.

Did Forester have a dog? Lia couldn't remember seeing one at his ex-wife's house.

“Rockman, see if you can find out if Forester had a dog. Maybe he had a house or something up here and she's feeding it,” said Lia. “I'm going to get something to eat.”

Lia spotted a restaurant on the other side of the road, but it was too late to stop. She pulled off the side of the road into a short dirt driveway. As she started to back up to turn
around, she realized she was at the entrance to a junkyard. There were wrecked cars nearby, and a chain-link fence. A black Doberman pinscher bared its teeth as she began her three-point turn.

“Oh!” she said out loud, realizing why Amanda had bought the dog medicine.

 

DEAN HAD JUST
gotten out of bed when the sat phone buzzed with a call from the Art Room. He held the phone to his ear and lay back down. The mattress was so thin he could feel the knots in the rope that held it up.

“Charlie, we want you to check on a Dr. Vuong who works in town,” said Marie Telach. “He's the doctor who was present when the body of a Sergeant Tolong was exhumed a few years ago. See what details you can get from him.”

“You think he'd tell me if they found money?” asked Dean.

“Let's just cover the bases, Charlie. Stand by for directions to Dr. Vuong's office.”

 

QUI WAS ALREADY
waiting in the breakfast room when Dean came down.

“I have a change in plans,” he told her. “I want to speak to one of the doctors here. He assisted when a Marine was disinterred a few years ago and sent back to the States. I want to talk to him about it. It shouldn't take long. We'll leave after that.”

“Would you like me to come?”

“This is another case where I think you'd be better off waiting outside.”

“Who do you really work for, Mr. Dean?”

“I'm a do-gooder, just like you.”

She smiled faintly.

“Let's have some breakfast,” Dean told her. “Come on.”

 

AMANDA RAUCI MOUSED
up to the file command, clearing the history file so that the Web sites she had visited would be erased. She got back to the main browser screen just as the librarian arrived, intending to scold Amanda for going over the library's half-hour-use allotment for a second time that evening.

“Now, miss—” said the librarian, finger raised as if she were about to wag it at a wayward child.

“I'm done,” announced Amanda, jumping from the computer.

“We do have rules, you know.”

“Yup.”

“And there
are
people waiting.”

The librarian had obviously rehearsed her speech for a long time, because she was still sputtering as Amanda left the building.

Three hours of Web surfing had provided several interesting tidbits of information, though not necessarily what Amanda had hoped to find. Her access to her work files and the Service's computers in general had been cut off, which wasn't particularly surprising. She'd made several attempts to guess Forester's password without any luck; she couldn't tell whether his account, too, had been frozen or she was just guessing poorly. It was probably the former, though she wished now that she had tried earlier.

Amanda suspected that neither Pete Goddard nor Gordon Hirt had had anything to do with Forester's investigation.
The police chief had been
too
casual about mentioning their names, she thought; it was a misdirection play if ever she'd seen one.

Her time on the Internet seemed to confirm that. Peter Goddard, the “retired” journalist, was an author of several books on European history; two had been on the best-seller list. According to the profiles of him she'd read—one in the
New York Times
, another in an industry magazine—he spent about half of the year traveling in Europe, where he researched his material. He generally spent spring and the fall there, which meant he'd be there right now.

While Gordon Hirt had only been principal of the high school for a few years, he'd been vice principal of an even larger school two towns away for over fifteen years, according to a recent profile in the area daily. He also happened to be a committeeman in McSweeney's political party. Neither man looked to be a good candidate to have made a death threat against anyone.

Chief Ball, on the other hand, was definitely up to something. Maybe it was just that he didn't like women in law enforcement, but Amanda decided to check his background anyway. She did a general Google search, then paid for an online credit and lien report—once again using her credit card, though at least this time, pinning down her physical location would be hard.

The chief had decent credit and no criminal convictions. Two years before, he had celebrated his thirtieth year as police chief. The online edition of the local newspaper featured several out-of-focus pictures of his party, along with the mayor's comments about how lucky Pine Plains was to have him, yada, yada yada.

How had he come to Pine Plains? The article didn't say. The article claimed he was fifty-two, but the data in the credit report had him at fifty-nine.

Maybe the reporter had made an error, or maybe the chief was simply vain. The story mentioned that he had served in the military and been a part-timer before becoming one of the force's two full-time patrolmen. His first big case had
involved a shoot-out with a bank robbery suspect; Patrolman Ball had bravely confronted the man and ended up shooting him dead, after a state trooper was wounded. That apparently was Ball's ticket to becoming chief, though the newspaper didn't actually say that.

Most police officers, most Secret Service agents for that matter, never fired their guns in anger, let alone shot down a murderer in a do-or-die situation. It seemed incongruous to her—here was a man who had proved his worth in battle, as it were, and yet he had chosen to stay in a small town his entire life. Was the moment of heroism an anomaly? Was the story inflated? But there must be
some
truth to it.

She remembered Jerry Forester brooding about his career. If only he'd been on a detail where he could prove his worth, if only he'd had a chance when he was younger . . .

What would he have done with it?

The library closed at seven. Amanda went out to her car, not sure what to do next. She wanted a drink desperately but knew she didn't dare. One sip and she would fall deeper into the hole she was trying to climb out of. It was too dangerous even to stop at a restaurant that served liquor or beer. She headed toward the Burger King she'd seen up the road.

A police car passed as she pulled in. Amanda didn't think much of it until she came out of the drive-thru line and found the car waiting for her. Chief Ball was sitting in the driver's seat. She rolled down the passenger-side window of her car.

“Hey, were you looking for a notebook?” asked the chief.

“A notebook?”

“One of the investigators mentioned that they were interested in a notebook,” he told her. “Some kids found one off the road on County Highway Nineteen. Stenographer-type pad. Got tire marks, and it's dirty as hell. There are notes in it. Can't make most of them out. You want it?”

“Absolutely,” said Amanda, though she'd been caught off guard.

“All right—well, then, follow me to the station. Unless you want to eat your dinner first.”

“No, it's OK.”

Amanda waited for him to pull ahead. So they
did
know there was another notebook. Maybe she should just keep going, not take it—but then the police chief would call whoever it was who had asked about it and casually mention that she'd been there.

So? What was she running from? Not the Service. From despair. There wasn't anything that they could do to her that they hadn't already done—obviously, her career there was over, at least in a meaningful sense.

Maybe Pine Plains could use a female police officer, she thought to herself as she pulled into the back of the parking lot.

She laughed. As she got out of the car, she realized it was the first time she'd laughed since her lover's death.

 

MINUTES AFTER AMANDA
Rauci used her credit card, a copy of the transaction was forwarded to the Secret Service and, from them, to Desk Three, where it showed up in Robert Gallo's e-mail queue.

The transaction showed the card had been used to pay the American Credit Ch
k Company. American Credit Ch
k was an Internet company whose Web site boasted that it could provide instant credit information over the Internet on any American. While the claims were slightly overblown, the information was in fact fairly complete and very quick, as Gallo found out by ordering his own credit report. It even noted that he just paid off the loan on his Jetta a month before. Gallo recorded the entire query and transaction so he could see how the program worked.