The Discarded

CHAPTER 27

There was no missing the somber mood when Gloria returned to McCrillis headquarters at 9:15 a.m. First the news of Ethan Boyer dying in a house fire, and then the discovery of Perry Davis in his office, collapsed over his desk, dead from an apparent heart attack.

Gloria felt a tinge of guilt about the secretary who’d found him, but that was the way it had to happen to sell the scene.

She exchanged a word or two here and there with people she knew, but avoided any lengthy conversations as she made her way to see Toby Martinez, assistant deputy head of research and her main contact in the department. He was on the phone when she walked into his office, but he waved her in and motioned for her to take a seat.

“Yeah, right…okay. Got it. Give me at least an hour. Two would be better….Thanks.” He was smiling as he talked, but as soon as he hung up, it seemed as if the weight of the world had just fallen on his shoulders. “You heard the news, right?”

“I heard.”

“Man, two people in one night. What are the odds? And both VPs, too.” He looked at her with a start. “Crap. Boyer was your boss. I’m really sorry.”

“Me, too. He was a good guy.”

“Fire. What a way to go.”

Though she had not seen the true reports yet, she was positive fire was not the way her boss had gone. She said nothing.

Martinez shook his head and leaned back. “So you’re here about the stuff in the suitcase?”

“Yeah.”

He clicked around his computer for a moment, and then turned the screen so she could read the report he’d brought up.

“Sorry,” he said. “They were all clean. Nothing hidden.”

That was disappointing.

Becker had been keeping information somewhere, she was sure of it.

“Well, thanks for taking a look. E-mail me a copy when you get a chance.”

She started to get up.

“Hold on,” he said. “You don’t want to know about the phone number?”

“Phone number?” she asked, lowering herself again.

He stared at her as if she might be crazy. “You put in a request to look into any calls Becker made or received before he fled.”

“Right,” she said, remembering. It had been a routine request, and not high priority after Becker was in her custody.

Martinez hit a few more keys and a new report came up listing six phone numbers.

“This is his call log for the twenty-four-hour period you asked about,” he said. “Not a big talker, apparently. Most recent first, with outgoing in green and incoming in red.”

Becker had placed four calls and received two.

He pointed at the top number, an outgoing call that occurred at 12:41 p.m. the afternoon he left town. “This number is for his office. We used a contact to check the records and apparently he’d called in sick.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“It is.” He pointed at the second number on the list, another outgoing that occurred at 12:03 p.m. the same day. “With the exception of this one, all the calls were from the previous day. The two incoming calls were from his doctor and the Red Cross blood donation line — and before you ask, the number’s confirmed. One of the outgoing was also his doctor, and the other to a Chinese place around dinnertime. Again, that number has been confirmed. This is the interesting one.” He pointed once more at the second from the top. “It’s a dummy. No number exists, and yet he was on the line for two minutes.” He looked at her. “Talks to someone at a nonexistent number, thirty minutes later he calls in sick, and then he leaves town? My opinion, whoever he talked to on this call”—he tapped the number again—“warned him to get out of town.”

Exactly the way she saw it.

Finally, a real break. Whoever warned Becker had to know about the girl. It was likely the person knew more than the late analyst. “I need to know where that call came from,” she said.

“Without a number, it would be extremely difficult.”

“But not impossible.”

He hemmed and hawed for a moment before he smiled. “Nothing’s ever impossible. My boys are already working on it. In fact, they’ve gotten a partial trace already.”

Martinez loved to make a problem seem insurmountable before giving a solution. She’d learned long ago it was easier to play into this than fight it. “That’s fantastic,” she said. “Please extend my thanks to your team. So, what have they learned?”

“Well, there were a lot of bounces and reroutes, but they’ve narrowed down the location to this.” He opened a map on his screen.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“Here. This’ll help.”

He widened the map, and water appeared at one edge of the land, and then at another and another until she finally recognized the area.

“That’s Hawaii.”

“Specifically a four-hundred-square-mile area of Oahu,” he clarified.

“I think your guys must have made a mistake. This is a perfect bounce location. It must go somewhere else.”

“I thought the same thing, but it’s not a bounce. They’ve checked it a dozen times. This is where the signal ended.”

“Hawaii.”

“Oahu.”

She was having trouble buying it, but in the years she’d worked for McCrillis, Martinez had never let her down.

“Four hundred square miles? Any chance of narrowing that down?” she asked.

“Possible, but it’s going to take a bit of time.”

“Send me everything you have so far and keep me updated via e-mail.” She stood up and held out her hand. “I’m counting on you guys, Toby. This could be big for the both of us, so the sooner you can pinpoint a location, the better.”

The gleam in Martinez’s eyes as they shook hands told her that her request had just moved to the top of his to-do list.

“As soon as we know, you’ll know,” he said.

“Excellent,” she said. “There is one other thing I need you to look into for me. But I’d appreciate it if you kept it on the down low. Kind of a personal matter.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.

“I need to find out everything you can about an operative who goes by the name of Quinn.”