Reasonable Doubt (8 page)

Her cell phone rang and jerked her out of her pity party. She recognized the 202 area code and answered on the second ring. “Flores.”

“So, they didn’t get you in the blast.”

Sarah smiled at the sound of Trip’s voice. “Took you long enough to call and find out.”

“Oh, I already knew you were okay.” His signature deep booming laughter echoed through the line. “I know everything and don’t you forget it.”

“Then why do I sense you called me for a favor?”

“I may know everything, but I can’t do everything. A couple of names came across my radar and I wanted to pass them along to someone I trust before I share them elsewhere.”

A surge of electricity flew down Sarah’s spine, and she hunched over the phone and glanced around her desk as if someone might be listening in. “Maybe I should call you back on another line.”

“No need. Be sure to check your mail when you get home. I sent you all that stuff you left behind in your desk.”

“Okay.” Sarah knew he was talking code and all she wanted to do was get off the phone and head home. “Anything else?”

“We miss you, kid. You know if you ever want to come back here, you’ll always have a spot.”

A tug, a small one, pulled at her, but she kept her response casual. “Thanks, pal. Tell everyone I said hello.”

Sarah spent the next few minutes paging through the files on her desk, but she could have been looking at gibberish for all it mattered. Her mind was back on the cagey conversation with Trip and she was consumed with curiosity about whatever he was sending her way.
Focus, Flores, focus.
She stood and took a lap around the offices, ostensibly to get a donut, but she walked until her head was clear. When she sat back down at her desk, she reopened the bank files for Welcome Home International and started combing through the entries in earnest. Before long she started noticing a disturbing pattern and she began scribbling notes on a legal pad.

“Hey, Flores, you want to join us for lunch?”

Sarah looked up to see Liz and Sam, one of the other agents, standing by her desk. She glanced at the time on her computer, surprised to see it was almost one o’clock. She pointed at the files on her desk. “I think I’m going to stick with this.”

“Really?” Liz asked. “My stack was a big bunch of nothing. Come on, we’re going to Pappasito’s.”

“Thanks, but I may need to head out a little early today. I’ve got some stuff coming into the apartment—the last of my move from D.C.”

The tiny lie slid off her tongue with ease and the group trooped out without her. Sarah waited until she was sure they’d left before gathering up the files on her desk and making her way over to Beverly’s desk. “Hey, Bev, call me crazy, but I prefer to look through documents on the computer.” She hefted the stack of files. “Any chance I can scan these?”

“You could.” Bev paused and smiled. “Or you could look at the set that’s already scanned.”

Sarah let loose a big smile. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“They’re on the network drive.” She wrote a note and handed it over. “Here’s the location.”

Sarah took the note. “Thanks a million. Hey, any reason Liz has all the boxes on her desk?”

“What can I say? She likes paper.”

“That makes one of us.” Sarah started to walk away, but then paused. “Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you that I need to head out early this afternoon, but you can reach me on my cell if you need anything.”

“No problem. I’m sure if anyone needs anything it can wait until tomorrow.”

The comment made Sarah think of the call from Trip and how this new job was the polar opposite of her last one where she’d been on call twenty-four seven and nothing could wait until the next day. She’d thought she’d grown to hate the constant interference in her life, but now she wondered if the boredom in her new position was just the other extreme. She thought about the entries she’d flagged in the bank records and considered whether she was making too much out of them, just for the sake of having some level of excitement in her life. It was clear she wasn’t getting excitement in any other way. The only time she’d been out since she’d come to town was the night of the reception at the W when her chances with a hot woman had been thwarted by the woman’s date and some terrorists. Not a great track record for her new lease on life and not much appeared to be changing since she was transferring all the bank records for WHI onto a flash drive to review at home. Right now, the only thing she had to look forward to was a potential lead in a case that would probably be snatched from her if it turned out to be viable.

Trip’s offer echoed in her head. Maybe she should go back to her old unit. The nightmares and viciousness she confronted on a daily basis might be a fair trade off for feeling like she was really accomplishing something.

She spent the rest of the drive home mulling over her life choices, decidedly unsettled by the time she reached her apartment. She’d leased a place in Uptown, close to Danny and Ellen and close to the gayborhood. She’d been to the local bars a couple of times since she’d been back in town, but they were the same as bars everywhere—full of women looking for something for the night, but not necessarily any longer than that. If she wanted more, she was going to have to find it elsewhere, but the thought of getting involved in something other than her job was a foreign concept and required a level of commitment she wasn’t sure she possessed. She flashed back to the evening of the reception. Politics. The only thing about that event that had been palatable was the promise of lots of eligible, desirable women, but the one she’d settled on had been taken.

Get over it, Flores. Ellery Durant isn’t the only woman in this city and you shouldn’t have expected your love life in a new city to just fall into place.
Once the furor from the bombing abated, there would be lots more events and many opportunities to meet someone.
Just because you’ve decided to settle down doesn’t mean women are going to line up for the opportunity to be Mrs. Sarah Flores.

She laughed at the realization that the singular focus she applied in her work didn’t necessarily translate to her personal life. Trip had always been on her ass about her impatient nature, telling her she couldn’t force things to happen. He was right, of course, but knowing it didn’t necessarily make it easier to wait it out.

She thought of Trip again as she checked her mail. Just as he had said, there was a plain brown envelope in her box. She was dying to know what was inside, but waited until she was in her apartment and the door was locked before sitting down at her dining room table and peeling back the seal.

She shook out a single piece of paper with a few lines of typewritten names: Sadeem Jafari, Hashid Kamal, Abdul Kamal. She recognized the first name. Liz had mentioned him in relation to Amir Khan and said Jafari was on a CIA watch list. No surprise that Trip had also heard the name. She turned the paper over, but the rest of the page was blank. She flipped it back over and repeated the names to herself as she opened her laptop and started a Google search. Hashid and Abdul Kamal, aka Michael and Brian Barstow, were brothers, in their early twenties, and they were both listed on a Homeland Security terrorist watch list, which she verified by signing in to the agency’s official database. Neither of them had a criminal conviction, but they’d been flagged as supporters of ISIS as a result of postings they’d made to several blog sites.

Sadeem, on the other hand, was a bit of a mystery. He wasn’t in the FBI database and Google searches showed only a successful local business leader whose philanthropic interests were well known throughout the DFW Muslim community. She could understand why Hashid’s and Abdul’s names had come across Trip’s radar, but Sadeem was a mystery. She searched for another half hour, but nothing she found led her to believe Sadeem was either connected to the other two men in any way or that he had any big secrets of his own to hide. If he was really on a CIA watch list, they were keeping the reason a secret from their sister agency.

She circled back through her searches and started looking at the names of the charities he supported. His primary interest appeared to be the Global Enterprise Alliance, which didn’t ring a bell. She switched to the LexisNexis database and started digging. GEA was a US based Muslim charity whose stated primary purpose was assisting refugees from Middle Eastern Arab countries adjusting to life in the United States. As she read the mission statement, the words sparked a memory. She’d read a similar statement, earlier that day in fact.

Sarah dug the flash drive with the WHI records out of her bag and plugged it into her computer. She’d expected to find a copy of the WHI charter and IRS application for 501(c)(3) non-profit status along with the bank records, but neither of those documents was included in the file. Chalking it up to a careless scan job by one of the clerks at the office, she took to the Internet. One quick search netted what she was looking for. There it was, right there on the WHI website, virtually the same statement about purpose as that listed on the GEA site, but she checked her excitement. It could mean anything. Two charities with the same purpose wasn’t unusual, but what if there was another connection? She started another search, but her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered anyway, thinking it might be Trip. “Flores.”

“Hey, it’s your good pal, Soto.”

“Hey, Danny. What are you up to?”

“Probably the same as you. Working. I know you think you guys are having all the fun, but our office has been pretty busy since the bombing.”

“I imagine. Anything I should know about?”

“I could ask you the same thing, but I doubt you’d tell me anything.”

“Not fair.”

“I know. The boss has me on another task force. He can’t stand to be shut out of the biggest crime event to hit Dallas ever, so we have to act like we’re working on the bombing while handling all our other cases. I haven’t been home for dinner in two weeks and the wife’s about to shoot me.”

“I kinda doubt that, but I know how you feel. The fraud unit definitely isn’t taking the lead on any of this, but we’re spending all our time working leads that go nowhere.”

“But you have some free time, right?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“No tricks, only treats. A friend of ours has a gallery opening Friday night and I promised a certain someone I would invite you.”

“Let me guess. Lots of eligible, worthy bachelorettes?”

“So she says.”

“I’m not much into the art scene. I mean, I know what I like, but making conversation with a bunch of connoisseurs isn’t really my thing.”

“No worries. It’s not that kind of art. It’s a big warehouse in the Design District and the exhibits are all practical art pieces, furniture, pottery, that kind of thing. If you sit in chairs or eat off plates, you’ll have plenty to say. In fact, you’ve met one of the artists. You remember Ellery Durant, she’s the attorney who—”

“Who’s involved with a top flight cardiac surgeon? You think continuing to throw me together with unavailable women is the way to welcome me to your fine city?” Despite her protest, Sarah warmed to the idea of seeing Ellery again.

“It’s your city now and who said Ellery was unavailable? I saw April Landing canoodling with some other woman just last week.”

“Please tell me you did not just say canoodling.” Sarah hoped her teasing tone hid her excitement at the prospect that Ellery Durant was back on the market.

“Are you going to come with us or not?”

Sarah forced calm into her voice. “Sure, why not? Am I supposed to show up with you or solo?”

“Well, that was easier than I thought it would be,” Danny said with a hint of mischief in her tone. “Come over here and we’ll ride together. It’ll be fun.”

“Can’t wait.” And she meant it.

Distracted from her work, Sarah realized she was starving. Her fridge was bare. Even after this much time away from her old job, she still wasn’t used to a regular schedule that allowed her to keep her fridge stocked without having to worry about last-minute out of town trips causing everything to spoil. She sorted through her stand-by stack of delivery menus and settled on Thai. While she waited for the order to arrive, she poured a glass of red wine and returned to her laptop. By the time her food arrived, she was armed with enough facts to start connecting some of the dots. GEA was a sister organization of WHI. While their stated purpose was nearly identical, WHI had been formed several years before GEA. Neither organization shared board members, but Amir Khan and Sadeem Jafari were cousins. Sarah spent another hour searching for connections between these two men and their organizations to the other names Trip had given her, but she came up with nothing.

Tired of trying to cipher out some meaning to what she had found, she took her searches in a completely different direction while she ate. It didn’t take long to find out more about Ellery Durant. She’d been a hotshot criminal defense lawyer for over a decade, having worked on several high profile trials with her father, Gordon Durant, while she was still in law school. She’d graduated at the top of her class and probably had a host of offers from prominent big law firms in Dallas, but she’d gone into practice with her father and, though she’d dabbled in various areas of the law, she’d excelled at criminal defense, winning a big victory in a murder case shortly before she retired from practice. A courtroom artist’s rendering of Ellery during a particularly heated federal trial showed her confident and commanding, almost fierce, in the courtroom. Sarah had testified in many trials, but based on the accounts she read, she shuddered to think about being on the other end of an Ellery Durant cross-examination.

Social sites shared a glimpse into Ellery’s love life, featuring photos from various events, but she rarely appeared with the same date. Sarah typed in April’s name and was pleased to see that she too showed up to many functions with a different woman on her arm, leading her to believe it was unlikely she and Ellery were anything more than casual. That would explain why April had moved on because who would walk away from a hunk like Ellery? One picture of them together showed what a strikingly hot couple they made. Maybe Ellery had only been seeing April for sex. The very idea was painful and she shelved it. Better she get back to work, which, while boring, wasn’t as dangerous as wanting something she couldn’t have.