Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (5 page)

In front of the shaving mirror
, over weak coffee of my own making, weaving through early morning traffic on my way downtown, I keep trying to convince myself that a summons from Special Agent Bea Kuykendahl might be a good thing. Maybe my case is already in the air, arcing toward the end zone, and all I have to do is make the catch. Bascombe’s already waiting for me in the garage, and I imagine he’s going through a similar thought process in his mind.

“I’ll drive,” he says, motioning me toward the passenger door of his car.

“This might turn out to be positive, you know.”

Bascombe’s long arms and six-foot-four frame hunch behind the wheel. His knees barely fit under the console. He sighs. “Anything can happen.”

The reality is, I’ve never put a request into the system and gotten a phone call from the
FBI
. That’s not how it works.

What I’m anticipating is something like this: a bunch of Feds in dark suits lined up on one side of a conference table, a lot of bureaucratic doublespeak passing for interagency cooperation leading up to an assertion of jurisdiction. Bridger’s hunch about the Mexican mafia comes back to me, along with what Lorenz said about al-Qaeda cells.

“This is a homicide,” I say. “The body’s on our patch. If they have something to offer, fine, but that’s where I’m drawing the line.”

“Hey, if we
could
unload this on ’em, I’d be more than happy to. It’s not like we’re making any progress. Unfortunately.”

“Yeah, I know.”

To reach the field office, we have to take I-10 to the Loop, then drive up the Northwest Freeway to 1 Justice Park Drive. As we approach, there’s a run-down looking donut shop on W. 43rd, so I suggest stopping off to pick up a box for our
FBI
colleagues. The lieutenant just shakes his head. “You’re always trying to win friends and influence people, aren’t you?”

Bascombe uncoils himself and we check through security, joining a crowd of arriving government workers at the elevators. My stomach rumbles—donuts don’t sound half bad at the moment—but thanks to a random assortment of over-the-counter painkillers I found in the medicine cabinet this morning, my bum leg feels pleasantly numb. The doors slide open and we shoulder our way in. Just as the elevator closes, a voice calls from outside.

“Lieutenant Bascombe, is that you?”

“Hold the door,” he says.

We push our way back out, ignoring grunts of frustration from our fellow passengers. Outside, a serious-looking blonde, maybe five-foot-two without her heels, in jeans and a fatigue jacket, extends a hand to the lieutenant. Her rolled-up sleeve reveals a man’s diver watch, worn backward with the face inside the wrist.
FBI
credentials dangle around her neck.

“I’m Bea Kuykendahl,” she says.

The lieutenant introduces himself, then turns to me.

“I’m familiar with your work,” she tells me. “I did a little digging when your name cropped up.”

“Okay.”

She pats my arm. “Don’t worry, it was mostly good.”

“That’s a relief. Should we go up?”

She looks us both over, as if making a decision. “No, actually, we’re heading somewhere else. I have something to show you.”

Bascombe and I exchange a look.

“Lead the way,” he tells her.

At first it looks like she’s taking us back outside, but before we reach the security scrim, Bea Kuykendahl guides me toward a secure door, using a key card to pass through. A flight of concrete stairs leads down to another door, then into a long, bare corridor. She keeps a few feet ahead, her heels clicking on the hard tile. My stereotype of
FBI
women includes pinstripes, pearls, and law degrees. They’re well put together, with a bit of attitude to go with it. To be honest, my wife Charlotte fits the mold.

Bea Kuykendahl, by contrast, has a short-haired, gamine look—half butch, half kid—her side arm jutting incongruously from her hip. Pale skin, fair hair, blue-gray eyes, and broad cheeks. She has more earrings in her ear than I thought the G-Man rulebook allows. She can’t be much older than thirty, and she dresses like an undercover agent on
TV
.

“Where exactly are you taking us, Agent Kuykendahl?” I ask.

“You’ve never been down in the basement before? This is where they keep the troublemakers. And call me Bea.”

We round a corner into another hallway, this one lined with doors. Bea uses her card again, ushering through an unmarked entry into a separate office suite.

“This is the bullpen,” she says, waving her hand to encompass a large open space with a long table at the center. On the walls, banks of computer terminals, maps, and a couple of whiteboards covered in scrawls of various colors. “We coordinate operations from here. You won’t be meeting the rest of the team, I’m afraid. I thought it would be better to keep things simple.”

She takes us through the open room pretty quick, like she doesn’t want us paying too much attention to the papers lying around. In back, there are several glass partition walls separating individual offices from the main area. She shoves open the one on the end, motioning us inside. The lights come on automatically, motion sensitive.

Bascombe sits in the available guest chair and I move to the corner. Bea grabs a rolling chair from outside and scoots it my way, then goes around the desk. In front of her, there’s an inch-thick stack of paper hidden inside a report cover. She drops it into a drawer, then edges her chair forward, clasping her hands in the empty space where the papers had been.

“Well,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”

Bascombe nods.

“You’re probably wondering what this is all about.”

Neither of us replies.

“Okay, let’s get the tough stuff out of the way first. As you can see, I’m not making you jump through any hoops. I could’ve made this hard, but that’s not my style. There aren’t any supervisors here to get in the way. No liaison officers or anything like that. I could’ve done this the usual way, but to be honest, I don’t think there’s time. I wanted to talk face-to-face, to lay all my cards out on the table. This seemed like the best way.”

She waits for a reply.

“Maybe you should start by putting us in the picture,” I say.

“All right.”

She opens another drawer, pauses, then shuts it. Then she rolls her chair to the side like she’s going to reach for something in the stack of files on her credenza. But she doesn’t.

“The thing is . . . Let me go back a little. . . .”

Under the fluorescent light, her face seems impossibly unlined, the skin taut as a child’s.

“Early yesterday morning,” she begins, “I got some unfortunate news. Your department submitted
DNA
samples to
NCIC
and they came back with a hit—”

“That’s news to us.”

She holds up her hand. “Bear with me. I delayed the results. I wasn’t sure what to do. What you have to realize is, the person you got a match for wasn’t dead.”

“I have a headless body in the morgue that begs to differ.”

“Yes,
all right
,” she snaps, her hands clasping again. A vein appears in her smooth forehead. “I understand that. But at the time, I wasn’t aware that he was dead.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out. “I knew your victim, Detective March. He worked for me.”

“What?” Bascombe says. “You mean, here?”

“He wasn’t an
FBI
employee, Lieutenant. He was an asset. He was working undercover as part of this operation. The last contact we had with him was two weeks ago, and at that time everything was fine. So you can imagine my surprise when your test results popped up.”

“So you
can
identify my victim?” I ask.

The implications are electrifying. My John Doe not only has a name, but his death has a context. Under the circumstances, the
FBI
might be able to name not just the victim but his likely killer.

“I can identify him, yes.”

“Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming?” Bascombe asks, creaking forward in his chair.

She responds with a pained smile. It dawns on me that Bea has more than a name to give. She knew this man. She felt responsible for him, at the very least. To her, this is more than just a case to solve.

“I’m sorry if I was a little blunt before,” I say. “I realize what a shock this must be. But you’re in a position to help. Not only can you identify the victim, but I’m guessing you might have a good idea what happened to him—and where. If we’re putting all our cards on the table, the fact is, we don’t have much to go on.”

“I figured as much,” she says. “There’s a problem, though, and that’s why you’re here. Like I said, I could identify him . . . but I can’t.”

“You don’t really have a choice. You can’t obstruct a homicide investigation.”

“If I don’t,” she says, “then you’ll have another homicide on your hands.”

I start to answer, but Bascombe puts a hand on my arm. “Let her explain, March. Stop interrupting.”

Another deep breath. “Like I said, he was working undercover. It seems obvious that something went wrong, that somehow his cover was blown. If you release his identity to the media and start investigating his murder, then we’ll be confirming to the people who killed him that they were right.”

“Does that matter at this point?”

“It does,” she says. “He’s not the only person we have undercover. Someone had to vouch for him, and if his cover was blown, that someone is in a lot of danger.”

After a pause, Bascombe edges forward a bit more. “If they killed one, what makes you think the other isn’t already dead?”

“I know for a fact he isn’t. We’ve been in communication.”

“And he said he was in danger?”

“That’s why we’re here,” she says. “Let me spell it out. I can’t let you have an
ID
on your victim, because it would put the life of my last remaining asset in jeopardy.”

“So what are you asking me to do? Leave him in the freezer?”

She blinks. “I’m not asking more than that. You’re not going to like this, Detective, but I don’t see that you have any choice. Not unless you want to be responsible for a man’s death.”

“Go on.”

Bea’s hand goes back to the files, removing one from the top of the stack. She hands it across the desk to me. Inside, there’s a glossy photo of a Caucasian male in his mid-thirties, a curly-haired man with thick eyebrows and the hint of laugh lines on either side of the mouth. There are also photocopies of a Texas driver’s license, a
CHL
, and a U.S. passport. Behind a stapled stack of typed pages, there’s also a Federal Firearms License—an
FFL
, required for gun dealers.

The name on all the documentation is the same:
BRANDON FORD
.

“This is him?” I ask. “Brandon Ford.”

“It is as far as you’re concerned.”

Bascombe snatches the file. “Let me see that.” He flips through the pages quickly. “This is his cover, is that what you’re saying?”

“Correct.”

“What we’re looking for is a positive identification. This doesn’t do it. Brandon Ford doesn’t exist. We’re not in the business of investigating people who don’t exist.”

“Well, you are now.”

They stare each other down, the big lieutenant and the slender, slight
FBI
agent. Her eyes shine with—what? Anger? Determination? At least it’s obvious now why she didn’t bring in a bunch of supervisors and liaisons. She doesn’t have any institutional authority to assert. She knows what she’s doing is, at best, unorthodox, probably unethical, and possibly illegal. Not that things like this don’t happen. They just don’t happen officially. The only authority she can call on here is moral. Work with me or you’ll get somebody killed.

“It’s not that I don’t want to help you,” I begin.

“Detective, here’s what I want. You have to leave here determined to investigate the murder of Brandon Ford. He’s a licensed gun dealer, he’s underwater on his mortgage and in danger of foreclosure, he’s got an ex-wife and two kids who need support every month, and he’s desperate for cash. So desperate that he’d be happy to supply anyone who asks with any quantity of AK-47s they require. That’s who’s in your morgue, and that’s what you have to tell the media. When you do, the people responsible for . . . Brandon’s death will second-guess themselves. They’ll think their suspicions were wrong.”

“With all due respect,” I say, “this man wasn’t just executed. He was tortured. Presumably they were trying to make him talk—”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Don’t you think, under the circumstances, that you’d be better off pulling out your other asset? There’s no way of predicting what might happen.”

She glares at me, stony-faced. “That’s not an option, I’m afraid.”

Though she may look young, though she may look like a pushover, Bea Kuykendahl has a spine. She’s not about to give ground, which means we’re at an impasse. I can feel it, and so must Bascombe. He shifts uncomfortably, not too pleased with the choice before him.

“I can take this?” I ask, rising to my feet with the file in hand.

She waves her hand in permission.

“Ready, sir?” I ask.

I’m afraid he’ll say something. Afraid he’ll commit us to a course of action. I want more than anything to get him out of the room before that happens.

“Listen—” he says to her.

“We need to think this over,” I say.

Bea squeezes her clasped hands. “Fine. Just remember what I told you. You’re playing with a man’s life, Detective.”

She doesn’t move to escort us out. As we leave the bullpen, the door opens and a couple of agents who look as young and disheveled as their boss file in. They lock eyes with us, clearly knowing our purpose here. I push past them, ignoring the hard looks.

Bascombe and I don’t talk until we’re outside, back in the car, sitting with the engine running and waiting for the air-conditioning to cool us down.

“That’s not what I was expecting,” I say. “I don’t know what she expects me to do.”

“You know exactly what she wants.”

“Yeah, I just don’t know how to go about doing it. How do you investigate someone who doesn’t exist? Leaving him on the slab is one thing—that’s bad enough—but going through the motions, pretending I’m on the case. That’s just a waste of time.”