Shakedown

Chapter Forty-five

“Tell me what’s going on with Wendy,” Kate said.

“She didn’t go to work today. She doesn’t answer her phone. Joy and I went to her apartment. It looks like she left in a hurry.”

“She’s an adult. She can do that. It doesn’t mean anything has happened to her.”

“Her boyfriend, Colby Hudson, has disappeared too, and he left behind some stuff he’s going to have a hard time explaining.”

“Like what?”

“Like drugs and cash. Not the sort of thing an FBI agent should leave lying around in plain sight especially when two agents come looking for him to find out why he isn’t answering his phone and why he didn’t show up to take a polygraph.”

Kate set the bottle of wine and the grocery bag on the front stoop, folded her arms across her chest, and stared at the street, lost in thought. She picked up the wine, marched back to her car, left the wine on the front seat, and retrieved an overnight bag.

“Change of plans,” she said, when she came back.

The front door was wide open. Ruby found us and jumped on Kate, who picked her up and traded kisses with her.

“You really got a dog. I don’t believe it.”

“It was your idea.”

Ruby spied the grocery bag and squirmed until Kate let her down so she could sniff at the contents.

“Chilean sea bass,” Kate said, rescuing our dinner from the dog. “I don’t cook, but I do buy.”

I took her hand. “I’ve got to find Wendy and I need all the help I can get.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. Besides, you’ve got a dog now.”

A black sedan turned down my street before we could go inside. I recognized the government plates before it stopped in front of my house.

“Why can’t people just return my phone calls?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you later. Take the dinner inside. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Troy Clark stepped out from the passenger side and waited. Ammara Iverson was his driver. She joined him, leaning against the front corner of the car, the three of us forming a triangle. I took my time walking to the curb.

“I know about Colby and Thomas Rice,” Troy said. “What I don’t know is why you knew before I did. So tell me.”

There was no reason to leave anything out except my conversations with Ammara. She didn’t need the aggravation. And the more Troy knew, the better Wendy’s chances were, even if she wasn’t his first priority. I explained all of it, starting with the man I thought I’d seen running from Marcellus’s house. I described my unplanned meeting with Marty Grisnik and how I had learned about Oleta Phillips’s disappearance from her brother.

“That’s when you called Ammara and told her to check the fingerprints on the cash you found in Marcellus’s backyard against Oleta’s fingerprints.”

Ammara looked at me, nodding. “It’s okay, Jack. He knows.”

I took a breath and told Troy about almost having dinner with Wendy and Colby and that Colby had told me that he was buying Rice’s house and car.

“That’s the first you knew about it?” Troy asked, his head cocked to one side, his eyes narrowed as if he expected me to lie.

“Absolutely. Why?”

“Colby was dating your daughter. It was pretty serious from what I understand. Buying a house is the kind of thing a guy talks to his girlfriend about. You being the girlfriend’s father and Colby’s squad leader, seems logical that she would have told you about it.”

Troy’s questions reminded me of a lesson in interrogation that I’d failed to follow. The first thing to come out of your mouth was usually the one thing you’d thought the least about and was, therefore, the one thing that was most likely to bite you in the ass.

In fact, I did know about the house before I talked with Colby. Wendy had told me the day before that she couldn’t have dinner with me because Colby wanted her to see the house he was buying. It was a little thing but now I had to recant and explain, backfilling against my eroding credibility.

“The day before I talked to Colby, Wendy told me he was buying a house, but she didn’t say anything about it being Thomas Rice’s house.”

Troy nodded, satisfied that he’d made his point. “Good. Now tell me the rest of it.”

I told him that I’d gone back to Marcellus’s neighborhood again hoping to find a witness who might have also seen someone running away immediately after the murders. I told him about my conversation with Latrell Kelly and about the dog Latrell had given me.

I told him that I’d talked Marty Grisnik into letting me impersonate a KCK detective named Funkhouser when I visited Thomas Rice, that Rice had been scared and nervous when I asked him about the house but that he hadn’t mentioned Colby. I told him that I’d used the same phony ID when I talked to Rice’s ex-wife and that her version of the sale of the house didn’t match Colby’s.

I told him that Joy and I had gone to Wendy’s apartment after Ammara told me that she had been unable to reach Wendy and that I hadn’t found anything there that indicated where Wendy might have gone. I told him about Joy’s conversation with Wendy’s coworker and the scuttlebutt Grisnik had heard that someone in law enforcement had put a hit on Thomas Rice, letting Troy fill in Colby’s name on the line that said suspect.

I told it in linear, chronological fashion without editorial comment or any effort to justify what I’d done. I was all about the facts and I got through it without a ripple, none of which impressed Troy.

“You’re on leave, Jack, because you’ve got a medical problem no one has figured out. That’s why I told you to stay out of this.”

“The Bureau can tell me to go home and I have to go home. But you telling me what to do on my own time doesn’t mean shit.”

Troy’s square jaw, already tight, ratcheted down even tighter. His eyes?ared and he straightened his shoulders, ready to hit me head-on.

“How about obstruction of justice? You think that doesn’t mean shit? You withheld information about an ongoing investigation. You impersonated a police officer. You entered your daughter’s apartment knowing it might be a crime scene and risked contaminating the evidence that we might need to convict her….”

He stopped in midsentence, breaking eye contact, his head of steam evaporated.

“Convict her? Convict her of what?” I asked him. “Of having a boyfriend who’s an FBI agent who may have crossed the line? Do you really think I’m going to sit on my hands while you try to build a case against my daughter when it’s more likely that she’s a victim in all of this instead of an accessory?”

Troy found his voice again, swallowing hard, slowing his pace, and lowering his voice to regain control.

“I’ve got to follow the case wherever it goes, Jack. I can’t ignore Wendy’s history. You know that. It’s still obstruction of justice.”

Wendy’s drug use had not been a secret. Things like that never stay under wraps. I had talked about it openly, proud that she was doing so well in recovery. Troy was twisting my pride into his suspicion.

“You want to talk obstruction of justice? How about wasting everyone’s time trying to prove that someone on my squad tipped off whoever killed Marcellus and his people instead of working the hard facts of the case and finding my daughter?”

I had five inches and twenty pounds on Troy, but I’d managed to set him off again. He stepped up, getting in my face, biting off his questions.

“Is that what you think I’m doing? You think we haven’t run every bullet through ballistics, and every fingerprint, hair, fiber, blood sample, and scrap of DNA through the lab? You think we haven’t run down everyone who was a witness or could have been a witness? Do really think all I’ve been doing is sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for you to call Ammara to tell her what we should do next while you implicate Colby Hudson in a murder and your daughter goes missing?”

I knew all that but none of it mattered. He had to see the whole picture. I didn’t. All I had to see was that my daughter was dragged into something not of her making. It didn’t matter why or how. The only thing that mattered was what I was going to do about it.

“Then you know I haven’t gotten in your way and you know that I’m going to keep looking for my daughter.”

Troy walked around me, hands on his hips, stopping in the middle of my yard. I turned, watching him.

“Damnit, Jack. You’ve done this long enough to know better. I’ve got enough to do without looking over my shoulder for you. I don’t know what’s going on with Colby, but I’m not going to crucify him based on secondhand jailhouse rumors. And, if Wendy is in trouble, we’ll find her. If she’s mixed up with Colby and Colby’s in trouble, well, then she could be in trouble, too, and we’ll have to let the chips fall on that one. Don’t make it worse.”

I would have made the same speech if our positions were reversed. The difference is I would have expected him to do the same things I had and he expected me to be a good civilian and sit by the phone waiting for it to ring with news good or bad. I had to back off him even if I wasn’t going to do what he wanted me to do.

“Okay, I’ll stay out of your way but you’ve at least got to keep me in the loop. Let Ammara tell me what’s going on. I’m entitled to that much.”

Troy thought for a minute, nodded, and let out a long breath. “That’s fair. Everyone on the squad who took the polygraph passed. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a dead issue except for Colby. The U.S. Attorney is looking at his purchase of Rice’s car and house. The warden at Leavenworth said Rice’s death was a suicide, but I agree with you that the timing with your visit is a little too neat. I’ll see what the warden says about a cop calling in a favor. That’s it. That’s where we are.”