The Path of Silence (27 page)

“It’s different, Meg, that’s for sure.” His frown broke up and he ended up smiling—at Brenda. I wasn’t worthy of such adoration.

I didn’t think it was that different. There was more cushioning tissue on the female chest but that should have made it easier to conceal the implant. Then again, these days, women checked their breast tissue a lot more regularly than they used to and might notice a lump, no matter how small. Men didn’t have to perform such rituals. Perhaps that was the underlying reason why only male subjects had been targeted. Field’s list of the Tavistock team members in Baltimore had contained one female name but she was gone now. She was one of the two who surrendered their story to the tabloids and retired to a warmer climate.

Joe was probably right. Patricia didn’t have an implant. She was held in Mongrove, just like Kane had said, a hostage more than a patient. Morris and Patterson were her overseers—and Brick’s.

Brick knew she was there. Part of his cooperation could have even been because of that. She had loved him enough to make a fool of herself four times, when she reported him missing. He in turn, loved her enough to spend four years in slavery. A hard knot formed in my throat. It took two glasses of water to get rid of it.

I spent the rest of the lunch cautioning Joe not to precipitate another confrontation with a colleague in Hopkins and steer clear of Paxton Morris. I didn’t mention Patterson again. We parted after lunch.

“Tell Ken to give me a call after five. I might have to work an extra shift,” Brenda said, touching my arm, smiling.

“We’ll be working too, at my house,” I told her. I watched them walk down the wide aisle that looked like any other offshoot in a busy mall, though in reality it was still a hospital corridor. Joe’s shoulders were in a perfect “T,” with his head slightly bowed as he listened to Brenda. I didn’t know why I kept watching them but when Joe’s hand sneaked around and settled on Brenda’s waist, I knew what it was that made me linger. I just didn’t know when the other shoe was going to drop.

I called home. Mrs. Tavalho was busy preparing dinner—for a team—as she tactfully put it.

“Do you think you might be needing me tonight?” she asked.

Strangely enough, I understood. “I hope we’re not going to have another one of those long nights.” I sighed. “But if we do, I’ll just ask Mrs. Devon to look in on Jazz.”

“I know how hard your work is on you these days,” she said. “But we’ve been planning this outing for a while and I’m in charge, so I wouldn’t want to disappoint the other church members.”

I assured her that she was free to enjoy her night out with her church group, acknowledging that she deserved it.

“I told the driver to pick me up last, to give you as much time as I can. He’ll be here just after seven o’clock. Is that all right with you?”

I smiled widely to show her it was. “Where are you going?” I asked, more out of politeness than curiosity.

She laughed, a little self-consciously, I thought. “A charity casino in Udelman. Fifteen of us are going, like I said, the church group.”

I wished her tons of luck.

I called Ken. He was at Marco’s, getting a haircut. My eyes tightened with discomfort as I gave him Brenda’s message. “I’ll see you at my house,” I told him when the silence grew sticky. He said okay and hung up, then I called Field.

“This should be in Patricia’s file, so we must have missed it and will have to go over the material in detail but she was admitted to Hopkins two years go. The surgeon who operated on her hiatal hernia is Dr. Paxton Morris. He’s a social maverick and a thorn in the Directors’ ass but capable and solid.” I gave him my report as crisply as a military review. I didn’t give him my feelings and suspicions about Dr. Morris because it wasn’t the sort of thing to discuss over the phone.

“How are you?” He decided to be a maverick too.

“Fine. Anything on the Washington armored cars?”

“I’ll see you in a while, at home.”

“Whose?”

“Ours.”

“Come next year, I’ll still be driving around, looking for it.”

He laughed. “Courtney came up with a new angle—corporate limo services, in-house. It would be worthwhile to check those too. There might be a company in Washington that has recently hired a new provider for this perk.”

I didn’t think Creeslow would have gone the corporate route. It would have meant giving up their independent status. Corporations, or any other company, would insist on following rules—their own. It was not what Creeslow would want. Amalgamating with one of the existing services would hide them but at the same time leave them as a quasi-independent partner.

“Very well. We’ll look into that possibility,” I agreed without enthusiasm.

“I’ll be there around five,” he said. I acknowledged his comment and cancelled the call.

Chapter 32

E
very company in Washington with more than three hundred employees appeared to have an in-house limo service. If this were true, there couldn’t be any open parking spaces in Washington, since a limo would necessarily take up at least three regular spaces.

“Something else, something else, some other service,” I kept mumbling, shaking my head over the long list of Washington companies that Agent Gould had managed to compile.

“None of the eleven armored car services are newly established businesses,” Field told me. “None have amalgamated with any other car service or taken on new partners.”

“It’ll come to me,” I told him peevishly.

“When it does, we’ll go after the product of that brainstorm. Until then, we’ll check out the in-house limo services.”

“You’re not in charge of this investigation,” I flared.

“Yes I am,” he returned pleasantly but with a great deal of inflexibility.

“It’s homicide. It’s Baltimore and it’s our turf.”

“It’s an issue of national security as reflected in destabilizing our banking system. That’s FBI’s jurisdiction.”

“Then go sit in the boardroom, watch the clouds and stabilize the banking system. We’ll do the work on the ground level, where the bodies were found.”

“I met with Commissioner Walton today. He leans toward passing this investigation exclusively to the FBI, no police involvement, local or otherwise.”

“Fine.” I picked up Patricia’s file and flapped it down in front of him, on the floor. “Here’s my endorsement of that sentiment. Have fun.” I rose like a spring and would have marched out of my living room if not for Ken’s hand that fastened around my ankle. He sat on the floor and wisely didn’t lift his head to participate in the conflict but obviously he didn’t want me to leave it on a cliffhanger.

“Meg, sit down,” Ken murmured.

“We have a ton of cold cases to work on, back in our office,” I told him. “It’s time to clean up my living room.”

“I told the Commissioner that removing police staff from the investigation would not be a good idea,” Field said.

“Then call him back and tell him you’ve changed your mind,” I said, unyielding. I glared down at Ken, telling him to let go of my foot.

“We would have to bring the Federal Marshall’s staff into it because we don’t have the field staff to spare,” Field observed in a musing voice.

“Fine. Bring in the Marshall. You have five minutes to clear out of my house.”

“I’m talking to you as a colleague, Meg. Calm down.”

“I’m talking to you as a citizen, Inspector. As a colleague, I would have drawn my gun. That’s the way most government officials, who are not welcome in my house, end up leaving.” I knew I sounded not just stressed-out but harsh, however I’ve spent ten years being rational and calm, hiding from emotions. Now that my protective walls had all but collapsed, I found I didn’t have the necessary coping skills to juggle my work and my personal life.

“What would you like me to assign to Agent Gould?” Field asked, lifting his head. His expression had changed. The look on his face was hard and impersonal. It was as if he was living for me the example of what I should learn to do. He was looking at me as a colleague, not as a woman.

As a colleague, I didn’t have an answer. As a woman, I couldn’t give it.

“It’s not my place to make suggestions. As you pointed out, you’re in charge, you’re her boss.” Ken had finally let go of my foot and I walked out of the room.

“Meg, dammit! Come back!” Field’s frustrated voice vibrated after me. “What is it you don’t like about checking out the corporate limo services?”

I didn’t care so much about the corporate limo services. I didn’t like Agent Gould but that was one issue I couldn’t air here now. I wasn’t used to these kinds of reactions. I wasn’t used to caring, one way or the other, period.

I walked back in and threw my hands up. “I’m done here. I don’t know where else to go with this investigation or why.”

Ken’s forehead tightened. I knew he had never seen me like this and would worry. “Would you like me to escort the Inspector outside?” he asked, placing his hand on his gun.

I ignored his attempt at humor with a grimace, when suddenly Nancy Bassiano’s voice sounded in my head, “He was very embarrassed the first time the limo came with a built-in travel companion but he got used to it.”

I spun around, pointing at Ken, then Field. “Escort services,” I said. “Legal and otherwise. There are plenty of those in Washington and they all use limos—with tinted windows.” They kept looking at me. “You said that there is a lot of human nature hiding underneath the polished exterior or our politicians. Escort services target nothing but human nature. That would be a perfect new operation. The kind of customers you’d want to drive around would come to you. A Senator’s aide, a member of a House committee, a Chief of Staff, a security advisor—you name it.”

Half an hour later, we were sitting down to dinner. Jazz was on her best behavior and Mrs. Tavalho was tidying up, making sure Jazz’s lunch was in the fridge and all unnecessary lights and appliances had been turned off.

We kept the conversation light, casual, no work issues. The phone rang. It was one of my daughter’s friends, asking for permission to come over. For once, it suited me just fine. If Jazz were busy, she wouldn’t be tempted to interrupt our work group. She finished her dinner and asked if she could go on the porch, to wait for her friends.

A few moments later, she came back inside.

“Mom, I’m not listening in on your work stuff, you know, but your voice is loud and I heard you talking about limos.”

We looked at each other, unsure of what to say.

“You’re into limos, right?” She thrust her head forward, prompting me to acknowledge.

“Right,” I said, lifting my hand to indicate that this was not a desirable topic.

“Well, you’ve got one sitting in our driveway right now,” she said.

“Oh dear, it can’t be my church group yet. They’re early,” Mrs. Tavalho exclaimed, walking for the door, shaking her head.

It wasn’t the church group.

It was an awfully bold move. One I wouldn’t have expected from him. Then again, we had established a business tie. He could always excuse it in those terms and I couldn’t object. He came in a black Benz limo, not as stretched out as the one that came five minutes later, to pick up Mrs. Tavalho.

For some reason my stomach tightened when the second limo arrived, white with three sets of doors and tinted windows.

“Where did your church group get the limo?” I asked Mrs. Tavalho.

She laughed. “We shopped around, we had a budget but we found a reasonable rate. Arrowmain Limousine Service is just around the corner from our church.”

“Ah! Herman.” I reeled back to Endless Tours and the spelling-bee winner. Mrs. Tavalho gave me a strange look. I shook my head and told her to have a good time. I watched her burrow her way into what looked like a crowded bus.

I introduced my daughter to her grandfather, omitting the crucial blood-tie detail and once again felt as if someone who wrote for the new X-Files was scripting my lines. We went inside.

“I’ve been in touch with a few key people in the State Department,” he said, when he availed himself of my hospitality and found a place to sit in my living room that wasn’t cluttered with work. “I’ve spoken with your boss,” he nodded at Field. “He agreed that we must proceed with utmost care. The last thing we want is to alarm Blank. We don’t want him to destroy the evidence and who knows what else in the process of covering up his tracks. It probably won’t be possible to trace his ties and pipelines, though it would be logical to assume they come from Latin American countries, quite a few of them, if his connections are taken into account. Here is a list of more than three hundred accounts that have been opened at various Tavistock banks and subsidiaries in the last eighteen months. Almost all are corporate accounts and difficult to trace to the actual beneficiary. I’ve spoken with the Justice Department and Conroy Marsh in the Federal Treasury. We’re moving to freeze the assets in these accounts. This is your copy,” he said, handing a sheet of paper to Field. “Maybe a name or two on that list will ring a bell. Some might prove to be bona fide corporate assets. In that case, we’ll apologize and offer them a better rate of return for the inconvenience but I think the majority are laundering operations.”

“It might not have been such a good idea to freeze those assets just yet,” I spoke up.

He gave me a heavy nod, in agreement. “Perhaps not but we’re in the electronic age. Those funds can disappear, literally in seconds when transfer codes are entered. We don’t have anything in place that would refuse such transactions simply because it would have to be a laterally applied measure. Meaning, it would affect all bona fide accounts. It’s being done as we speak. I’m sure there are more than these,” he said, motioning at the list. “This is just what the banks were able to eyeball, so to speak, when I asked to run a quick check.”

“They’ll find out quickly those assets have been frozen,” I said.

“Of course. If Bishop Blank is a part of this, they probably already know.”

“You might have forced their hand.”

“Perhaps. But I gave orders to release sensitive information into unsecured channels. I’m retaliating for what happened at the penthouse.”