The Fix

Chapter 14

“She was very good. Quiet, but everyone respected her. And she was an excellent teacher.”

Decker and Jamison were sitting across from Virginia Cole, the principal of the Catholic school where Berkshire had been a substitute teacher. It was in Fairfax County, in an old brick building. But Decker had noted the new-looking surveillance cameras as they pulled into the parking lot.

They had signed in at the front office, gotten visitor badges, and been escorted to the principal’s office.

Cole was in her fifties, with glasses on a chain and bleached blonde hair. She sat back and looked out the window of her office. “I really can’t believe she’s dead.”

“And Berkshire had worked here four years?” asked Jamison.

“Yes, that’s right,” replied Cole.

“I assume she needed to have a background check and possess a teacher’s certificate,” said Decker.

“Of course. The Diocese is very strict on that. We ran a background check. That’s standard. And she had a teacher’s certificate. Her résumé was all in order. She had excellent credentials. We were lucky to have her.”

“So her résumé went back farther than ten years?” asked Decker.

Cole looked at him confusedly. “What? Well, of course, we needed to see that she had graduated from college. And had the requisite teaching experience.”

Decker glanced at Jamison. “We’ll need to see all that,” he said.

“I’ll get you a copy of the file.”

“Did you know Berkshire well?”

“I wouldn’t say well. I never saw her outside of school. But I’ve talked to her a number of times within these walls.”

“Did you know that she was rich?” asked Decker.

“Rich?” Cole once more looked confused.

“She lived in a penthouse in Reston worth two million dollars.”

Cole looked stunned. “No, I never knew that. I’ve never been to her home. I saw her drive into work one day. I think it was a rather beat-up Honda.”

“Did she ever talk about her past? Where she came from? What she did?”

“No. But as I said, her background checked out fine. Nothing of interest, no red flags.”

“Did she have any friends here? Someone she might have confided in?”

“I’m not sure. I can check. She might have socialized with some of the other teachers.”

Jamison said, “That would be great. Here’s a number you can reach us at.” She handed across a card.

Cole took it and glanced at Decker. “If you had asked me before all this happened, I would have said that Anne Berkshire was the last person on earth to be involved in something like this.”

“Well, maybe that was intentional on her part,” said Decker.

“You mean it was all a façade?” asked Cole.

“I mean if she had a secret past, she would have every incentive to keep it secret. But then again, she might have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, that happens far too often.”

They were given a copy of Berkshire’s employment file before they left. Decker tucked it under his arm. On their way back to their car his phone buzzed. It was Faye Thompson, Walter Dabney’s partner.

“Our travel department did not schedule that trip for him,” said Thompson. “And he didn’t use the corporate card for any travel. He might have used his personal card.”

“We’ll check that,” said Decker. “And did you find out what happens to the firm now that Dabney is dead?”

“Yes. I spoke with our in-house counsel. Walter’s partnership interest goes half to Mrs. Dabney and half to the four children, in equal amounts.”

“So together they control the company?”

“Yes.”

“We have a video of a woman with Dabney at his bank. I’ll send it to you. I want you and the people at your office to look at it and tell us if you recognize her.”

“At Walter’s bank?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Does this have to do with what happened?”

“I can’t tell you. I’m just in collecting-stuff mode.”

“Agent Decker, do you know if a memorial service has been planned for Walter?”

“No, I don’t know. You might want to check with his wife for that.”

“It’s just that I wasn’t sure if they would want to do one, what with the circumstances of his... You know, the papers are going to have a field day as it is. We’ve already gotten calls from the Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and a slew of others. I don’t know what to tell them.”

“Then don’t return their calls.”

“But then they’ll write the story anyway, and without our input it might be pretty bad. We have tons of government contracts. With Walter doing what he did, there’s the possibility the Feds might terminate some or all of them.”

“Sorry, that’s not my department.” He clicked off and looked at Jamison.

“Anything?” she asked.

“Other than her worrying far more about the firm’s ass than her really good friend shooting someone and then killing himself, not really. Dabney booked this mysterious trip on his own. And his wife and kids share his partnership interest. So they control the company.”

“That would be a good motive to kill him, if he hadn’t killed himself,” said Jamison.

“What would drive a seemingly rock-solid guy like Dabney to murder someone and then shoot himself? I get that he was terminal, but that’s a little much.”

“Someone must have been holding a sword over his head. The woman on the video probably indicates that.”

“Maybe,” said Decker, though he didn’t look convinced.

“What are we going to do now?”

He held up the file. “You’re going to drive to someplace we can get some food, and I’m going to read.”

Decker wedged himself into the front seat of Jamison’s subcompact; he had to push the seat as far back as it would go, but his knees were still uncomfortably close to the dash.

As she drove off, he opened the file and started to read. Every word he took in was permanently imprinted onto his memory. The file wasn’t long, but it was instructive.

“She had passed a background check, which meant there was no criminal history for the woman.” He shuffled through some pages. “Okay, we couldn’t find anything for her from over ten years ago, but the file says she has her teacher’s certificate. And it also showed that she held undergraduate and master’s degrees from Virginia Tech.”

“So we know she has a past, then.”

“Well, yeah. But why couldn’t Bogart find it when he did his search? I have to believe the FBI has a few more resources than a Catholic high scho— Wait a minute.”

“What?”

He held up a page. “The file lists her name as Ann Berkshire.”

“Okay.”

“Her driver’s license, which was used to run her background check, lists her as Anne with an e on the end.”

“Wouldn’t someone have noticed that?”

“Apparently they didn’t. Lots of people wouldn’t, in fact. Her Social Security number is on here. We’ll have to check it with the one that Bogart came up with. Since he couldn’t find her educational history on his search I have to assume that something’s off. Driver’s licenses in Virginia don’t use the Social Security number as the ID number anymore. Probably no state does. Yet it should have brought up all the stuff in this file from some database. But it didn’t.”

“So is the background in that file even hers, then? Or someone else’s?”

“I don’t know, but the degrees listed are in engineering. Computer engineering.”

“Is that important?”

“I have no idea. It also says she worked for twelve years at Ravens Consulting.” He got on his phone and did a quick search. “Okay, Ravens is now defunct. Ten years back.”

“Lots of companies go belly up.”

“And why do I think if we try to check on that we’ll find no one from Ravens Consulting who will confirm that she worked there?”

“This is so weird.”

“So her past is an enigma. And maybe a fake one. But she’s apparently fifty-nine, obviously rich, and also a part-time volunteer for hospice patients and a substitute teacher at a Catholic school even though she doesn’t need the money.” He glanced at Jamison. “What does that suggest to you?”

“That she lucked out somewhere, maybe in her business career, and is now giving back?”

“Close, but not quite how I see it,” said Decker thoughtfully.

“Well then, how do you see it?”

But Decker had gone back to reading and didn’t answer her.

They pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant. Decker kept reading the file as he and Jamison walked into the place. They sat at a table near a window. While Jamison gazed out, Decker closed his eyes and began whirring through frames in his memory vault. When he opened them, Jamison was tapping keys on her phone.

“Something from Bogart?” asked Decker, glancing at her phone.

She shook her head. “The apartment building.”

“What apartment building?”

“The one we live in, Decker. I do manage it.”

“Do you really think you can do that and work at the FBI too?”

“Yes, I can. And I want to very much, so I’m going to make it work. I don’t want to spend my entire life chasing a paycheck. I like working at the FBI because we’re helping people who need it. But most, if not all, of them are already dead. I’m trying to be a little more proactive with what I’m doing with the building. You try to help people so they never need the FBI in the first place.”

He picked up the menu, looked longingly at all the fat-laden pages of food, and then glanced up to see Jamison staring at him.

“You’re looking so much healthier, Decker.”

“Yeah, so you keep telling me.”

She gave him an impish grin.

When the waitress came he ordered unsweetened iced tea, a Greek salad with oil and vinegar dressing on the side, and a bowl of vegetable soup.

“Good boy,” said Jamison with a smirk.

When the food came, Decker said suddenly, “Honda.”

“What?”

“The principal at the school said Berkshire had a beat-up Honda.”

Jamison lowered her fork. “That’s right. She did.”

“Berkshire has a Mercedes convertible sitting in the underground parking garage of her condo building. She’s barely driven it.”

“So she must have another car, this Honda.”

“No. It wasn’t listed in her information at the condo building, just the Benz. She was only assigned one parking space because she only had one car. With the size of her condo she could have had two spaces, but she required only the one.”

“That’s odd.”

“Apparently, everything about the woman is odd.”

“So maybe it wasn’t a random shooting. Maybe Dabney did kill her for a specific reason.”

“Oh, I believe he did. But I have a hunch it’s for a reason none of us are thinking of right now.”

“It would have made things so much easier if Berkshire had been the woman on the video with Dabney at the bank,” she said wistfully.

Decker gave her a dubious look. “If you want easy, Alex, I think you picked the wrong profession.”