The King Tides

Chapter 26 Daniels

The blare of a car horn snapped him awake.

It took him a moment to get his bearings. He was still in a chair on the balcony, and it was pitch black outside. The lack of city lights suggested early morning. His empty glass sat by his feet; beside it, his cell phone. By glancing at the screen, he could tell if he’d gotten any calls while asleep. There were none.

Special Agent Daniels hadn’t called him back. He would have bet money that she was going to. His batting average was poor when predicting women’s behavior, and he guessed that was why he was still single.

He heard the horn again. His unit faced the front of the building, and he went to the railing and looked down. A car was parked by the guardhouse, trying to get in. The apartment had twenty-four-hour security, but at night the guard often went inside to drink coffee with the cleaning people.

The guard came out of the building and trotted toward the guardhouse. Instead of going inside, he walked around the security gate and greeted the visitor. It was a woman, and she hung out of the open driver’s window and flashed her credentials. They had a brief conversation, then the guard punched a code into a keypad and the gate rose. The visitor pulled in and found a parking space and got out. The guard met her at the entrance to the building, and used a key card to gain entry. She went in and the guard started to follow, only to be rebuffed. She didn’t want his help. The guard looked uncomfortable with this, but said nothing. The visitor entered, and the front door closed behind her.

The building had two hundred residents, and the visitor could have been here to visit anyone, but his gut told him it was Daniels, come to pay him a visit. He’d worked with the FBI doing jobs for Team Adam, and he knew that they kept a fleet of private jets at an airport in DC that agents could hop on when a case broke wide open.

He went inside and brushed his teeth and ran a washcloth over his face. Then he unlocked the front door to his apartment and went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. He pulled a carton of half-and-half out of the fridge and saw that it had expired. As he poured it down the drain he heard the front door open.

“Hello. I’m in the kitchen making coffee. Come on back.”

No response. He cleared his throat.

“I’d offer you something to eat, but I’m afraid all I’ve got is cheese and crackers and a couple of slices of cold pizza.”

Still no answer. Daniels was definitely not the friendly type. He took a pair of mugs out of the cabinet and set them on the counter.

“How do you like your coffee? I’ve got sugar and sweetener.”

Daniels stepped into the kitchen. She was slight of build and maybe five six in her bare feet. Her resemblance to Nicki was uncanny, right down to the center part in her jet-black hair. She wore a dark-green pantsuit and had a badge pinned to the jacket lapel. Clutched in her hands was a .40-caliber Glock that was pointed at his chest.

“FBI. Put your arms in the air.”

“Is that a no on the coffee?”

“Do it!”

He played cool and stuck his arms in the air. She made him walk into the dining room and had him sit in a chair. He’d bought a dining room set to fill out the apartment and didn’t think he’d used it once, preferring to eat on the balcony or while watching TV in the living room. The chair creaked under his weight.

“Put your hands behind the chair,” she ordered him.

“Is this necessary? I called you, remember? And I unlocked the door.”

“It could be a trap.”

“If you thought it was a trap, you would have brought backup.”

“Stop arguing with me.”

She was on edge, her voice high-pitched. Squeezing a trigger was easier when the shooter was under duress. Not wanting to get shot, he stuck his arms behind his back. She handcuffed his wrists and used a plastic tie to secure the cuffs to a rung in the back of the chair. Then she came around the chair and stood in front of him. The Glock was returned to its jacket holster. She crossed her arms and gave him a stern look.

“You can make this hard, or you can make this easy,” she said.

“Easy sounds better,” he said.

“Tell me where you stored the Cassandra videos.”

“They were on a cell phone that I purchased, but they were erased.”

“You’re saying you don’t have them.”

“If you don’t believe me, you can check. My laptop is in my study. The password is ‘jimmybuffett,’ all lowercase. My cell phone is on the balcony on the floor. The second cell phone that had the Cassandra videos is next to it.”

“Why do you own two cell phones?”

“I’m working a job. I bought the second one using a false identity so I could look at data that a guy had stored on it.”

“That’s against the law.”

“I think I knew that.”

She retrieved the laptop and placed it on the dining room table so he could watch her look through it. “What am I going to find on here?” she asked.

“Mostly bootleg concert videos of Jimmy Buffett that I shot on my cell phone,” he said. “There’s also a video of me fishing with a buddy of mine.”

“No kiddie porn?”

“No, ma’am. Would you like me to explain what’s going on, or do you prefer stumbling around in the dark?”

She shot him a pair of daggers. “Watch your mouth.”

“Just trying to help.”

She took her time reviewing the videos stored on his laptop. Finding nothing illegal, she went onto the balcony and got the two cell phones, and reviewed their contents while he watched. It was an old interrogation trick. She was hoping he would twitch when she got close to finding what she was looking for. When the cell phones turned up empty, she marched into his bedroom and began pulling open drawers and dumping their contents onto the floor.

“There’s nothing to find,” he called out to her.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she replied.

She returned to the dining room and opened the drawers on the china cabinet he’d taken from his parents’ house after they’d passed away. Each item she pulled out of the cabinet was given a cursory examination before being placed aside. His grandmother’s porcelain serving ladle slipped out of her grasp and shattered on the floor.

“Are you trying to provoke me?” he asked. “Because if you are, it won’t work.”

She did not apologize for the breakage. She was filled with hostility, her rage simmering just below the surface, and he imagined her in the trunk of the Hanover killers’ car, facing certain death. It was the kind of experience that most people never got over.

“You’re wasting your time,” he said. “I don’t have any kiddie porn. I’m a private investigator on a job.”

“Keep talking, and I’ll put a gag in your mouth.”

The kitchen was next. He craned his neck and watched her pull out the silverware drawer and turn it upside down. Then she attacked the cabinet stocked with canned goods. She was going to wreck the place if he didn’t stop her.

“You’re the girl in the Cassandra videos, aren’t you?” he said.

The commotion came to a halt. She returned to the dining room and stood in front of his chair. The blood had drained from her face, her cheeks white.

“What did you just say?” she said.

“You’re Cassandra,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. I just figured it out. The FBI decided to create the Cassandra videos and posted them on the internet to draw out sexual predators. It was a clever idea, except for one thing. You couldn’t use a real underage girl to make the videos without breaking the law, so you volunteered, and a company of video magicians age-regressed your face and body and Cassandra was born.”

Daniels looked like she wanted to strangle him. She had spent a lot of the FBI’s money creating the Cassandra videos and hadn’t expected anyone to figure out the deception. He rattled his handcuffs and she glared at him.

“Are you going to let me go? I can help you.”

“Not until I finish searching your place.”

“What are you expecting to find?”

“Evidence. I’m not buying your story. You’re a pedophile, and pedophiles keep libraries. Once I find your library of videos and images, I’m going to arrest you, and throw your sorry ass in jail.”

“You’re wrong. I’m working a case and found the Cassandra videos stored on a guy’s cell phone.”

“And then you erased them.”

“I didn’t erase them. The guy did. He found out what I’d done, so he used a computer to go to his account and erase the videos.”

“Your story sounds like bullshit. Sit tight. I won’t be long.”

He was growing angry. He hadn’t done anything wrong, yet she refused to hear him out. It was time to show his hand. “What if I told you that I was working a job for your sister and brother-in-law, and that it led me to you?”

“Nice try. My sister lives on the other side of the world with her family.”

She finished wrecking his kitchen and then moved to his study. The wall in the study was covered with framed photographs of him as a SEAL and as a detective, and he wondered if she noticed them or cared that he’d once been a cop.

She came out of his study looking pissed. Her eyes canvassed the dining room, and fell upon the hall clothes closet. It was the one place she hadn’t checked, and she marched over to it and yanked open the flimsy door. On the top shelf was a cardboard box containing his collection of bootleg recordings of the Jimmy Buffett concerts he’d attended. She pulled the box down and started to rummage through it. Finding the CDs, she grabbed a handful and waved them in the air.

“Gotcha,” she said.