Long Road to Mercy

Chapter 13

Pine drove to her office and entered the underground parking garage. There was a guy on duty there, and after hours the overhead door would come down, requiring key card access.

This level of security was not because of Pine’s presence.

It was because of the other law enforcement agency located here.

ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Today, it was more known for immigration enforcement. And they were very active in Arizona, rounding up and deporting masses of people. It had become a political football, really.

Because of that there had been threats made. And the building might be a target. Hence the security guy and the overhead door with key card access.

Pine routinely saw some of the ICE guys in and around the building. She knew all the agents there, but didn’t really hang with them very often, because they kept to themselves. She was FBI, under the Justice Department. ICE was under the Department of Homeland Security. There was a bit of a federal rivalry there, but their work almost never overlapped. But they were fellow feds and she would always have their backs if they needed it.

The underground garage kept the sun off the cars during the day. It was actually a necessity here, especially during the summer. Otherwise, she would have let her truck run without her in it for a few minutes with the AC cranked to max. And she’d still sweat when she got in.

She parked next to a vehicle with a cover over it.

This car had once belonged to a veteran FBI agent named Frank Stark, who had been a mentor of hers during Pine’s second field assignment. Every FBI agent got their creds, badge, and first assignment upon graduating from Quantico. The first-year assignment was done as a probationary agent, to see if you could cut it in the field. After a year’s time, you were no longer a probie and were transferred to your next assignment.

Pine’s had been Cleveland, sometimes referred to in FBI circles as the “mistake on the lake.”

It was there that she had met Stark.

She lifted the cover off and stared down at the 1967 Ford Mustang convertible, with parchment interior and matching top, and an iconic frost turquoise exterior. It had been meticulously restored by Stark, with the aid of the junior fibbie Pine.

The car restoration had been a project conducted in Stark’s workshop/garage behind his 1950s-era house set in a neighborhood of homes that looked identical to each other running as far as the eye could see.

When Stark had asked if she wanted to help, Pine’s first inclination was to say no. This was Stark’s last posting, everyone knew that. He was biding his time to collect his pension. And he had this hobby of restoring old cars. But something in the man’s request struck a chord in Pine, and she volunteered to help. At least for a bit.

They had started out disassembling the car fore to aft, keeping a record of all parts and putting them in labeled boxes. Some they had reused, others they had discarded. They had taken a lot of photos of the process to refer back to. Stripping the car down to its metal bones, they’d used walnut shell and glass beads media blasting to remove all the paint, because those materials wouldn’t peen the metal. There were special tools you needed to strip the car, although they had improvised some, even using a bottle opener to remove the drip-rail molding. They’d done a rear floor pan reinforcement, so they could convert the single exhaust to a dual output.

The chassis had been fully refinished and painted with a specialized silver undercoating. The exterior had been reinstalled after having been sanded down and repaired, or, where restoration was impossible, new metal panels had been precisely tooled to the car’s original specs by a local company that Stark had found. Then the exterior had been painted the exact same shade of frost turquoise as the original. They’d also reworked all the electrical, and either purchased new screws and bolts or restored what they had.

After all the painting was complete they’d installed Dynamat, which kept the noise and exhaust heat under the car, where it should remain. The original engine had been the 289 V-8, of which only a few hundred were put in this model. But 1967 also had brought the first major redesign of the Mustang and had offered a larger engine option. So they’d dropped in a big block 390, which had been in the vast majority of the Mustangs built that year. That had necessitated the dual exhaust, since the 390 couldn’t efficiently run off the single pipe. The 390 V-8 mustered 320 horsepower, plenty of muscle for a car that size.

The convertible top was beyond repair, but Stark had located a company that did replacements, and Pine had worked side by side with Stark to install it. Then there were new tires and rims, chrome front and back bumpers, new lights all around, refurbished grille and dashboard, parchment leather seats back and front, and a ton of elbow grease and more money than Stark really wanted to spend. However, Pine felt that the vet agent, a widower and childless, just wanted to do something to fill in a life that had become permanently lonely and would become infinitely more so once he handed in his badge. Since Pine had been equally lonely, it had been a good match. They could work together for hours and even days without saying much more than, “Will you pass me that wrench?” or “Grab me a cold beer.”

The initial bit of volunteerism had stretched into nearly two years. Stark had retired a month after they completed the project, and Pine was being reassigned at the same time. But before she left they had taken a long ride in the fully restored Mustang. Stark had let her take the wheel on the way back and she had opened it up on the highway, letting the four carbs of the big block ooze power all over the asphalt as they shot like a rocket down the road.

They had already decided that if they were stopped by the cops, they would use their FBI badges to get off. The federal agents decided they were entitled to one get-out-of-jail-free card.

With the top down and the wind ripping through her hair and the speedometer at nearly 120, it had been the best feeling Pine had had in years. She’d truly felt wonderful. If Stark hadn’t been thirty years her senior and crotchety as hell, she might have, in her euphoria, planted a kiss on him.

Unfortunately, a month after Pine had left for her new assignment Stark had died from a heart attack. He’d been found in his garage, slumped over in a chair, a socket wrench on the floor, apparently where it had dropped from his hand when he died.

Pine had been stunned to learn that in his will Stark had left her the title to the car. She had gone to retrieve it, and the Mustang had traveled with her to every assignment thereafter.

When she’d relocated, she’d driven it out west. Rather than keep it at her apartment when she was transferred to Shattered Rock, she’d kept it here, where it was protected from the sun and certain predators on two legs. She still had nightmares about somebody carjacking the vintage ride and then rolling it.

It was the only thing really that she had ever owned. Every time she drove it, she realized how much work had gone into restoring it. This represented two years of her life. It was the longest personal commitment she had ever made. Far longer than she had ever committed to a personal relationship.

She ran her hand along one fender and thought back to Stark, who was wise beyond his years, no doubt yearning for a daughter he would never have, until Pine had shown up for work one day only a year removed from busting her butt at Quantico.

He’d been a good friend, maybe the only true one she’d made at the Bureau, or maybe anywhere else.

He’d told her once, as they were installing the single Holley four-barrel carburetor, that the Bureau had really been his life. Except for restoring old cars.

He’d wiped his hands on an old rag, taken a sip of beer from a plastic cup, and eyed her from under tufted white brows. “Don’t make that mistake, Pine,” he’d growled. “Don’t let this be it for you.”

She’d ratcheted down the last bolt on the carb and glanced up at him.

“How do you know it was a mistake?” she’d asked.

“If you have to ask, you haven’t learned shit from this whole thing.”

As if restoring the Mustang was a whole thing other than simply putting an old car back together.

And maybe it was. And maybe Pine had gotten it. But that didn’t mean she would ever do anything about it.

She put the cover back on the car and was heading up the stairs to her office when her phone buzzed.

It was her IT buddy in Salt Lake City.

“You got anything?” she asked as she emerged in the hallway leading to her office.

“I do, but it’s strange.”

“This whole case is strange. What do you have?”

“There have been lots of people who accessed that website over the last few months. I couldn’t track them all down, but there was one that stood out.”

“Which one?”

“I recognized one of the IP addresses” was his surprising reply.

“How could you have done that?” she asked.

“Because it was yours, Atlee.”

“I know that,” she said impatiently. “I went on the site recently to check it out. So did my assistant. She’s the one who told me about it.”

“I knew that was your address from when you contacted me. But when I checked out things further, I noticed some funny lines of code in the mix, so you might want to have the FBI geek squad check your computers.”

“Why?”

“Because I think you might have been hacked.”