Full Disclosure (10 page)

“It wouldn't have happened without you working the wreck until it gave up its secrets. I thought it deserved at least hot chocolate. Treasury will have their own thanks, I'm sure, once they finish their happy dance celebration over getting their guy.”

She smiled at his description. “The hot chocolate will be fully appreciated.”

“We've also identified the two guys who were tailing you looking for the other day planners. They are freelancers who worked for the thief. The tail wasn't coming at you because of the lady shooter.”

“That closes an open question for me. The other day planners?”

“Burned, unfortunately. They found the damaged briefcase
and remnants of the day planners. On better news, the middleman is Gordon Whitcliff. We've located his home, and now have his phone records and bank records. We don't have a name for the lady shooter yet, but we've got a lot of material to review. I'm hopeful.”

“I wish you good hunting.”

“I tracked you down to a small town in Nebraska. Working a case?”

She felt her smile fade. “A sixteen-year-old girl got shot in the back, probably by another teenager. I'm helping sort through it.”

“I'm sorry for it, Ann. For the family and for you.”

“I could feel the grief just walking through town tonight. No matter the answer at the bottom of this, the tragedy has devastated this small town. The officer who called has a girl the same age. I'm glad he pulled me in. He needs a sounding board that isn't someone who lives here.” She nodded back to the thermos. “That was nicely timed; I've got some reading to do.”

“I won't keep you then, as you've got work and still need some sleep. Thanks for the call back, Ann.”

“'Night, Paul.”

She closed the link, puzzled that he'd made it such a brief call. Then she tasted the chocolate, and was glad he had left her to enjoy it uninterrupted. “Thanks for arranging this. I was a bit chilled,” she murmured softly. She retrieved the murder book. The death had been violent, near the girl's home, and the dad had called it in. She drank the rest of the hot chocolate in the thermos as she read, and pondered what she found there.

Paul saved the conference video with Ann to his personal files, then played it back. He pressed pause when she turned toward the screen with a smile. He hit the print button. A photo of her scanned to the image printer. It was raining there, for her hair was curling and damp around her face. She was dressed tonight as she had been when she came through Chicago, a comfortable
shirt and jeans, with a jacket covering her side arm. She had expressive eyes, that was what he had noticed that first day when she sat in his office and told him the story. He paused the video again as she spoke of the case that had sent her to Nebraska. Those pretty eyes were blue and, tonight, sad. The murder of a young girl wasn't going to easily be put away, even when it was solved. He'd heard it in her voice, the weight of it, and could see it in her face, the pain of it. It bothered him in a way that he couldn't explain, that she was in a hotel room tonight with a murder book and alone. “She could use your help, God. To find the truth and clear the innocent, to name the guilty, but more, to just get through this.”

He played the video through again, then closed down his work and left the home office to turn in for the night.

He was still mulling over the call when he stopped, struck by a thought. Ann hadn't really been alone in that motel room. If the books she wrote were any indication of what her relationship with God was like, she knew God intimately. She hadn't been alone. And quick behind it came another truth. God knew her. The inside Ann where she thought about people and books and pieced together murder cases. God knew Ann like no one else did. Paul wondered what it would be like to know her that well. What he knew so far interested him, and it looked like it barely skimmed the surface.

P
aul could feel the hooks and jabs he landed on the heavy bag rippling back into his body rather than forcing Sam to lean into the bag to hold it steady. Years ago it would be Sam with his eyes narrowed and sweating, trying to take the assault. Now Sam was practically taking a nap on the other side of the bag. Paul attacked it until his blood was pounding and his breath coming in gasps. He was getting old, and the case was getting cold. He could feel the lady shooter case slipping back into a block of ice and couldn't figure out a way to heat it up again. She was “Miss L.S.” and still as much a vapor as before.

The lady shooter was a careful planner. She tailed her quarry to decide where to make the kill. Maybe there was a witness out there. Maybe someone who had hired her, and knew she was out there, had seen her trailing her victim as she planned the murder. Maybe someone remembered seeing her and could describe her. Maybe.

And he knew he was grasping at straws.

Paul tossed a final jab at the bag and stepped away. He leaned over, his gloved hands on his knees, and lowered his head to get his breath back.

Sam let the bag go and shook his head. “You want to go for a run next?”

Paul looked up at his friend, shook his head. Trust Sam to rub it in. He couldn't get a breath deep enough to answer. “It's going cold, Sam,” he gasped out.

Sam hugged the bag and considered Paul's statement. “Our problem is the fact the case never fully got hot. We profiled her as working alone, arranging her own travel, doing her own surveillance and planning for the murder, using the same weapon. Now we know she dealt with the same middleman for every one of the murders, and he handled the client and the money. He's dead. And we're cold. There are no more ways in.”

Sam stepped back and tossed a couple of open-handed hits at the bag. “The only way forward now is if she generates it. If she makes a mistake, or makes a new move. Maybe someone finds the weapon. Maybe she commits a new murder. Maybe she tries to blackmail one of the people who hired her. But short of her walking into an FBI office and confessing, there may not be another thread that can reach her if she stays quiet and keeps her head down.”

Paul knew Sam was right all the way down the line. It was possible she'd never be found. The thought burned. They had been working the paper they had brought back from the middleman's home for two weeks now, and the case was stalling out.

“Want to hit the bag some more?” Sam asked, considering him.

Paul waved him toward it, took a few more shots.

Paul blocked the sunlight coming across the monitor with his hand while scanning messages which had come in overnight. He mentally sorted what he could push off and what he would prioritize in on his list. He had learned early in his career that the first half hour at his desk was about the only slot he could expect to control—the job was simply too responsive to events. There were a lot of other cases climbing up to demand his attention.

Sam tapped on the door, held up a tape. “You want to watch it here or upstairs?”

“Here. I heard it's long.”

Sam settled into one of the guest chairs. “Four hours plus. Lincoln said we'd find it worth the time.”

Paul pulled out an orange juice from the refrigerator and passed it over, then got one for himself. He popped the tape into the machine and pressed play. “Let's see what the currency thief has to say.”

The Treasury guys were thorough, that was clear within the first thirty minutes. Paul listened to the interview and forced his mind to stay focused on it so he wouldn't have to listen to it again. An hour into the tape, he sat up straighter. The thief was talking, his voice low but clear.

“He would call you; say he had work if you wanted it. If you said yes, he would play you the tape of what the buyer wanted. The tape was his insurance that the buyer would honor the terms of the deal. You did the job; he paid you and gave you the tape. Now it was your insurance in case the buyer ever tried to put the crime back on you. You had proof he had paid to have it done. I liked it. No one could welsh on you, and they had equal risk. It kept things quiet. He was always professional about business.

“So was I. I never took a job where I didn't already have a buyer for the currency, and someone else paying all the expenses for a big crew and a lot of planning. I'd take thirty percent as my payment. Washing the cash was someone else's problem. My job was to steal it clean and neat, and in big enough quantities that made the job worth the effort.”

The interview concluded at four hours twenty-two minutes.

“I wonder if Miss L.S. kept her tapes,” Sam pondered.

“We find her, we can ask her.” Paul ejected the tape. “The suspect, in his own voice, giving the name of who to kill and
the price he would pay. Thirty murders, lined up in a neat row. That's a set of tapes I would love to have.”

“They're a death sentence for our lady shooter if their existence becomes known. Thirty people, with motive to kill her who already have demonstrated they have substantial financial means and the will. What are the odds this thief's interview gets leaked? Or the fact the middleman had taping equipment on his phones gets leaked?”

“It will eventually leak because it is news. The question is, do we have our lady shooter before then.”

“She's going to have to want to be found. We're running on fumes here.”

Paul had grown philosophical about it over the last few days. “We know the price she was paid for each murder, the initials L.S., T.M., and G.N., and the name of the middleman. It's more than we knew last month. We'll have to make it enough. The individual murders will give us something, or we'll have another idea. We always do.”

Paul wished he had a way to conjure up the tapes the lady shooter had pocketed for the thirty murders. Knowing good solid evidence was out there that he couldn't access bugged him. He walked into his home, planning for a ball game and a pizza, and the phone started ringing. For a brief moment Paul considered ignoring it. He answered in the kitchen and quietly set his briefcase on the counter as he listened to the news. “Thanks for the heads up, Lincoln.”

Paul stood motionless for a minute, phone in hand. The Treasury Department was about to give Ann an award for the capture of the currency thief. A large award. The bits of information he knew about Ann said he should warn her it was coming. It was well deserved, she had earned it, but she wouldn't see it as a good thing if it came as a surprise.

He needed to alert her, in person if that was possible. They
would find her and call her tomorrow with the news. So he had to get to her tonight. Where was she? Still in Nebraska? He hoped she was on the ground right now. If she was in the air, by the time she got on the ground to answer a call, he might not have time to tell her in person. This was one conversation he didn't want to have over the phone, even a video conference call.

He balanced the receiver on his shoulder as he checked his cash and pulled out fixings for a sandwich he could eat on the road. “Dave, can you find Ann for me, where she's at now and for the next twelve hours? And can you do it without telling her I'm the one asking?”

Dave had found her in Davenport, Iowa. It was shortly after ten p.m. when Paul walked into the Hyatt Hotel, headed to the reservation desk, and showed his ID. “I need Ann Silver's room number.”

“May I see that ID again, please? Yes, we were told to expect you, Mr. Falcon. There's a note for you.” He retrieved it and passed it across.

Paul opened it, read it, and nodded his thanks to the desk clerk. He headed outside.

He walked across the hotel parking lot to the empty mall parking lot and started scanning the moonlit darkness.

“Falcon, over here.”

He spotted the motion and moved to join her. Ann Silver was sitting in a folding chair with a pair of binoculars, a book, and a sandwich all laid out on a foldout tray beside her. There was also a second chair.

“Not the place I expected to find you,” Paul said.

“I like to stargaze at night. It's my way to decompress.”

He wondered if she also had a rule about guys and hotel rooms that was part of this but didn't mind the results. They could talk without interruption or chance of being overheard out on this massive piece of empty asphalt.

He held up what he carried. “I brought the hot chocolate.”

Ann smiled. “I like this visit already.”

He handed her one of the two mugs, opened the thermos, and poured for them both before he sat down.

“What was so important you had Dave tracking me down tonight? Don't tell me you were just in the area.”

“A four-hour drive put me in the area. Dave was to keep quiet the fact it was me asking.”

“I asked Kate. She said Paul.” Ann shrugged. “A puzzle, but I figured you would tell me why. I thought you would be calling, not arriving. The note at the desk was just in case. As was the chair. There's a problem with the lady shooter case?”

He settled back and set the thermos on the pavement beside him. “Nothing beyond an upcoming budget fight on my part. I spent the day filling out travel requisitions for one hundred twenty-three interviews in sixty-four cities. We know how much the lady shooter was paid for each murder. It lets us narrow down the suspect list in each murder to just a few names. We're going to go re-interview, see if anyone reacts to a photo of the middleman and the amount of the hit. It won't get us to the lady shooter directly, but it will close individual murders and maybe give us new information to pursue.”

“A good plan.”

“Costly. Sam thinks I'll get about ten approved a month, I'm betting about twenty-five, and then things begin to stall. It's an important case, but it's a cold case. If we close the individual murders, if we catch the lady shooter, and we do it this month or it takes until next year, it isn't going to make a lot of difference when it has been on our board for twenty-two years. So I spent my day on paperwork hoping to be persuasive.”