Payback, page 15
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Justin said. When Gin rolled her eyes, so did he. “Or,” he continued loudly enough the sound bounced around the interior of the car. “We get the Iowa sheriff’s department to do all the official pulling of any records or information we need, and I call a buddy of mine to do the boots-on-the-ground legwork.” At Gin’s skeptical look, he reached over and laid a hand on her arm. “He goes by Twiz, and he’s good. He’s also got enough skeletons in his own closet that he knows how to be discreet.” He reached over and gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “Trust me on this one, Gin. It will work out.”
“Let me think on it,” she said just as her cell phone went off. She took it out of her pocket, and seeing Trey’s name on the screen, connected the call. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Plenty,” her partner replied. “How soon can you get back to the office?”
Gin looked at her watch and then out the window. “In about thirty minutes.”
“Good. That’s where I am, so I’ll wait for you here. We’ve got something hot.”
“We’re on our way.” Even after she’d disconnected the call, Gin stared at her phone for a long moment. Coming to a decision, she tucked it away, then turned her upper body to squarely face Justin. “Call your friend.”
Chapter Thirteen
When they walked into the CCU headquarters, Trey was standing in front of the TV with the murder board lit up and his cell phone held to his ear. He greeted them with a silent nod. “They just walked in. We’ll wait for you to begin the briefing.”
Gin grabbed the back of a folding chair, turned it to face the TV, and sat down. “Briefing on what?”
“We’ve got another link between the men.” When Gin’s eyebrows winged up in surprise, Trey nodded in response. “And it’s a good one. I was just talking to Stephen. He wants to be in on our discussion, too, so he’s on his way. In the meantime, I haven’t paid a visit to that disgruntled building owner yet, or made it over to Durham’s condo. But I did put in a call to Durham, and he’s absolutely positive that Worthy wasn’t paying any kind of blackmail money to anyone. The only payment he’s ever seen go out since he and Worthy hooked up is to Yahoo Number Two, and that’s only been in the last two years.” He inclined his head toward the TV screen. “We’ve already identified him as Kevin Amlin.” Trey moved closer to the screen and used his index finger to follow one of the lines radiating out from the newest name on the board. “And established that Amlin knew the Santa Fe victim, Casey Harding.”
“Except there is no Casey Harding.” Stephen stood in the opening into the CCU’s homicide unit. “The only place he exists is on paper, and not much of a trail of that either. There’s nothing going back farther on him then when he was first issued a New Mexico driver’s license. The social security number belongs to a man who died almost forty years ago, and nothing else matches up from the rental applications for his business or his apartment. He did, however, have a nice chunk of money in a market CD at a local bank, and we followed some wire transfers from it to a bank in the Cayman Islands. We don’t know how much is stashed away there, but probably more than what he has in the market CD since the transfers go back over a decade. They started about six months after he arrived in Santa Fe.”
“Casey Harding is a fake ID?” Gin’s gaze swiveled from Stephen to Trey. “Didn’t Amlin’s girlfriend tell us he said that was the name of his old friend? The one that went back to his childhood?”
“Yeah, she did,” Trey confirmed.
“So unless Casey Harding was using a fake ID as a child, Amlin had to know that wasn’t his real name.” Gin tapped her index finger against her lower lip. “Maybe the reason Harding was using a fake name was the same reason he was giving Kevin money. To keep him quiet.”
Trey walked over to stand by Gin’s chair. “Makes sense. The girlfriend also said that Kevin told her the money was going to stop, but he knew how to replace it. That was right after the phone call from Harding two years ago.”
Justin let out a low whistle. “Which is when Harding burned up in that car fire in Santa Fe, with the metal plate left behind saying that ‘all must pay’. This smells like whatever had caused Harding to assume a fake name caught up with him and he ended up dead.”
“Blackmail.” Gin stood up and crossed her arms over her chest. “Harding was blackmailing someone and using a fake ID to cover his tracks. He was being paid off, and then he paid off Kevin. So Kevin must have known whatever Harding did.”
Stephen moved in closer until he was lined up with Trey and Gin in front of the murder board. “You’re suggesting that Harding was blackmailing someone who caught up with him and killed him rather than pay any more money?”
Gin leaned back in her chair and tapped a finger against her chin. “Yeah. And he told Kevin he had to move and didn’t know when he’d be in touch again. That sounds like whoever was being blackmailed had found him, so the fake Casey Harding was going on the run again. And as far as Kevin goes, when that cash supply ended with Harding’s death, he turned to another old friend, Mark Worthy, for money.”
Stephen’s eyes narrowed as he stared back at her. “So how does Worthy fit into all this? Was he collateral damage, and it was really Kevin Amlin who was the killer’s target?”
“It’s possible,” Gin said, but it didn’t sit right with her. That piece didn’t quite fit. “If Worthy wasn’t also a target, then why the handcuffs? The killer brought a chain, shackles, and handcuffs with him. Why bother with the handcuffs unless the message applied to both men and he intended for them to die together?” Her gaze narrowed as she stared at the screen. “And it can’t be a coincidence that Worthy hired a bodyguard two years ago. Durham called him a houseman, but that guy is built like a Mack Truck and carries a gun.” She dropped her arms and stuck her hands into the pockets of her lightweight jacket. “We can follow up with Durham and ask if that so-called houseman had a predecessor, but I’m betting he didn’t. Worthy went out and acquired some protection right after Cody, or whoever he really was, burned to death.”
Stephen sighed and ran a hand over the top of his jet-black hair. “If that’s true, the three of them are connected to the possible blackmail.”
“Well, shit,” Justin swore softly under his breath. “This is one big clusterfuck.”
“But one that we now have another solid link, this time between Seattle and Louisiana.” When all eyes turned in his direction, Trey walked over to Gin’s desk and picked up a sheet of paper covered with printed notes. “I ran this off from the document I used to jot everything down that the detective from Seattle told me.” He looked at Gin and wiggled his eyebrows. “Before we got into the details of his investigation, I asked him why they reopened it after declaring the fire on that floating residence an accident. He said their chief got a call from some reporter, who said she’d noticed that the same sign had been noted in both our accident report, and in a homicide the year before in Santa Fe. It sounds like the reporter threatened to write an article about poor investigative work on Seattle’s part, so the chief reopened the case.”
“Convenient,” Gin drawled. “And extraordinary work on the part of that reporter to pick up on that from two incidents that happened a good four or five states apart. Did this researching wonder have a name?”
Trey shook his head. “The detective didn’t know it, but he agreed to ask his chief to send the name to me.” Still carrying the piece of paper, he walked over to the small desk holding the computer that was hooked up to the TV. Not bothering with the spindly-looking task chair next to the desk, he bent over and started working the keyboard. A photograph of a badly burned bookshelf with several knickknacks still occupying it, came up on the screen. Trey straightened up and faced his small audience. “The detective said that they were confident in reclassifying the fire as arson, and the victim’s death as a homicide. The sign that was found at the scene of all the other homicides was also found at this one, at the bottom of the kitchen sink.”
“This looks like a bookcase, not a kitchen sink,” Stephen pointed out. “What is the significance here?”
The agent turned back to the computer and enlarged the picture, zeroing in on a small, blackened trophy. “This is what caught my eye. It’s made of metal, so it survived the fire in fairly decent shape.”
“A trophy? For what?” Gin asked.
“Baseball. From a high school.”
Gin’s mouth opened slightly, and she felt that familiar zing of anticipation shoot up her arms. “Which one?”
Trey grinned. “That was my first thought too.” He enlarged the picture even more, bringing up some blurry writing etched into the base of the trophy. “It took me a couple of minutes to work it out, but it’s the name of a school.” He tapped on the words displayed on the screen. “I looked it up. It’s a high school located in New Bern, North Carolina.”
Gin took an automatic step forward as she stared hard at the screen. “New Bern? That’s where Larry Brown and his sister grew up.”
“Yep.” There was a clear note of satisfaction in Trey’s voice. “The Louisiana vic and the Seattle vic spent some time in the same town on the other side of the country.”
Reaching over, Gin gave Trey a firm slap on the back. “That’s good work. What do you want to bet that old school chums Kevin and Casey also spent time in New Bern?”
“Which leaves Mark Worthy,” Stephen cut in. “He graduated from a high school in Chicago, so unless you think he and the others started blackmailing someone we haven’t identified yet while they were still in middle school, then he definitely does not fit the pattern.”
“If you believe what his mother said, then yes, he doesn’t fit the pattern. But she didn’t state that he spent all four years of high school at that pricey academy in Chicago. Just that he graduated from there,” Gin said almost absently, her attention centered on visualizing the pieces beginning to fit together. Not all of them had a place in her mental picture yet, but enough to form an outline. The five men knew each other from a prior life, and something had happened not only to drive them from that life, but at least for one of them to try his hand at blackmail. “There could have been a sixth.” Her voice was quiet, but it was enough for the room to go silent.
“A sixth guy,” Justin repeated. “You’re thinking a sixth guy might be the one they were blackmailing?”
“I don’t know,” Gin admitted, then nodded at Stephen. “Do we have the background runs on any of the victims besides Worthy?”
The senior agent pulled out his phone. “They’re slow in coming because these guys bounced around a lot. The only two who were easy to trace were Worthy and Littleton, the guy from Seattle. I sent what we found to all of your emails.”
“I’ve got the report on Littleton right here,” Trey said as he pulled it up on the screen. “We’ve already gone over most of it. He was born in Newport, Virginia.” Trey frowned. “That’s close to the North Carolina border, but the history here doesn’t mention anything else prior to him turning eighteen. And the rest of it you’ve already heard. He went to college at Penn State, then moved to Seattle, Washington fourteen years ago. His sister was already living in a town just outside of Seattle. Littleton earned respectable money at a marketing job with a tech company and bought his floating home in Eastlake, on the north side of Seattle.” He looked up from the computer screen. “We could run financials on him, but given the pay scale for his job, he could afford the home he bought. Still, he might have been getting money from another source and banking it.”
“I’ll put in a request for a search on his teenage years, and get a financial run on all five victims,” Stephen said. “Maybe you need to talk to Lauren Worthy again and pin her down on all the schools her son attended.”
“They knew each other,” Gin stated in a hard, flat voice. “They’ve all been kicking around in different parts of the country since high school if we make some minor assumptions about that timeline for Kevin, Casey, and Larry down in Louisiana. And they would all be thirty-six now, which strongly suggests they were in the same grade. We know that two of the vics were in New Bern during their school-age years, and that Larry was there until he left sometime in his senior year, so it stands to reason that all the vics were in New Bern together at some point.” She shrugged when Stephen lifted an eyebrow. “Lauren Worthy’s account of her son’s school history aside, of course. It’s a good bet that whatever bound them together in the killer’s eyes also drove them out of New Bern. Larry Burns made his exit right after his eighteenth birthday at his parents request. His sister told us that. The background report on Seth Littleton confirms that he left for college eighteen years ago, which would have been right after high school, and moved to Seattle four years later. So he never returned to North Carolina. If you take into account that Casey lived in Santa Fe for a decade, and kicked around for years before that, then it’s logical to assume he also left home right after high school, or close to it.” She paused and cocked her head to the side as she studied the screen. “I think they were all in New Bern and something happened there that not only rose to the level of blackmail but drove them all out at the same time.”
Stephen took up a position beside Gin. “We can do an online search of any news from in and around that area, but it might take time. Not everything was digitized eighteen years ago, especially in the smaller towns. Maybe I can speed things up by asking for two local agents to pay a visit to the local paper’s archives and do some other sniffing around.”
It only took Gin two seconds to reject the idea. “We have five dead bodies, and there might be more we still aren’t aware of. I’d rather have our team asking the questions in New Bern. We have a better feel for the case and might be able to recognize a connection that those other agents would miss.”
“No objections to that,” Stephen said. “If I can find someone that would be an immediate help, I’ll send him or her along.” When Gin’s eyes narrowed, he shrugged. “An extra pair or hands and eyes could be helpful if you don’t have to babysit them. In the meantime, how many of you will be going?” He left the question hanging as his eyes cut briefly over to Justin.
Gin followed the direction of his gaze. When it came down to it, Justin was only temporarily assigned to the homicide team, and it was a temptation to leave him in Colorado to spearhead the search for Cap. But she had no idea what they were looking for in New Bern, and an extra pair of hands and ears would be very useful. “All three of us should go. It will take at least that many to retrace the steps of four, and possibly five, people from eighteen years ago.”
Stephen smiled as he walked toward the doorway. “That’s a good move. I’ll be sure the arrangements are made.” He turned his head to look over his shoulder. “And don’t forget to check in with the local police chief. Let’s not step on any toes without a damn good reason.”
Knowing most of the time that was easier said than done, Gin took one last look at the murder board before facing the two men who were staring at her. “We need to find out what happened in New Bern when all those guys were in high school, and then track down anyone else who might have been involved and make sure they’re still breathing.”
“Or not flying across the country killing old classmates,” Justin pointed out.
“Yeah,” Gin agreed. “That too.”
Chapter Fourteen
“How many airports do you think you’ve visited since joining the Bureau?” Justin asked. It was late afternoon, and the three agents had just entered the passenger area of the small, single terminal airport located several miles south of New Bern.
“Enough to give me mega points in a couple of frequent flyer programs.” Gin took in the line of plastic chairs hooked together right outside the door leading from the jetway. The Coastal Carolina Regional Airport, with its beige walls and three boarding gates, looked like a dozen other small airports she’d flown in and out of over the previous ten years. She adjusted the strap of her backpack slung over one shoulder and trailed after the rest of the passengers walking toward the ticketing and baggage areas.
Justin walked next to her, matching the length of his stride to hers. “How about here? Have you ever been to this one?”
She gave him a sideways look but kept walking. “Nope. So what’s the fixation you have on this airport?”
“Just making conversation.” When she rolled her eyes, he flashed his I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin that he’d never learned to control around her. “You never can tell what’s going to happen on these small-town assignments.”
Justin’s cryptic comment and smug smile told her louder than a public announcement that something was up, and she wanted to know what it was. Quick as a snake strike, she dropped her backpack and shot a hand to the side, latching it on to Justin’s arm just above his elbow. Her free hand went straight for the upper arm muscle attached to his shoulder. When she stopped in her tracks, his arm jerked backwards, forcing him to pivot around to face her or risk having his arm pulled out of its socket.
From the grimace followed by the wary look on his face, Gin was satisfied Justin was painfully aware that she knew the exact angle and how much force it would take to dislocate his arm. She wouldn’t do that to a fellow agent, but it was good that there was a part of him that thought she might.
“What are you doing?” he demanded in a low, rough voice.
Ignoring the remaining passengers, who were openly staring as they streamed around the two agents, Gin heard the unspoken warning in Justin’s voice that said she was treading on dangerous ground. Not wanting to test the limits of his restraint, she slowly released his arm. “I know that tone, and I know that look. What kind of things do you think are going to happen on this assignment, Justin?”
Trey stood behind Gin and added his stare to hers. “I’d be interested in hearing that myself.”
