The Prince of Risk

14

Alex stood beside Jim Malloy at the door of 1254 Windermere. “Ready to go?”

Malloy nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Alex rapped twice on the door, then stepped back so that the keyholder could see her. She pushed her shoulders back and lifted her chin. She liked this moment best. The moment before the real job began. She never knew what she might find out, what crime she might discover, what threat she might mitigate. Too much of her job involved waiting, analyzing, convincing, and cajoling. This is what she had joined the Bureau for. Catching bad guys.

The house was a two-story clapboard with a shingle roof built in the early ’40s. A fringe of lawn out front needed mowing. An American flag hung limply next to the door. The owner was one Maxim Ustinov, an immigrant from Russia like Irene Turner, the neighbor who had called in the report, but Ustinov was just the landlord. The tenant, or in FBI parlance “the keyholder,” was a thirty-one-year-old male named Randall Shepherd. According to the owner, Shepherd was a model tenant. He had moved in on June 1 on a twelve-month lease. A cashier’s check in the amount of $9,000 had covered the security deposit as well as the first three months’ rent.

Alex had established twenty-four-hour watch on the house two days earlier. During that time there had been no sightings of Shepherd coming or going. To verify that no one was inside, she’d conducted a pretext, sending Malloy and Mara to the front door, posing as activists canvassing the area for signatures. No one had answered, and readings from the infrared scanner programmed to detect warmth emitted by human beings came back negative.

She was raising her hand to knock again when the door swung open.

“Hello.” The man was tall and fit, with dark hair cut to the scalp. He wore a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. His eyes were blue and steady. Alex couldn’t tell if he had a nice behind or not. He did, however, have arms like a weightlifter, his biceps bursting from the sleeves. Alex felt a pinch between her shoulder blades, a twinge, nothing more. It was her sixth sense, and it said, “Trouble.”

“Mr. Randall Shepherd?”

“Yes?” The response was tentative, as the man looked at the two agents, both attired in dark suits, both wearing sunglasses.

Alex badged him. “I’m Special Agent Forza with the FBI. This is Special Agent Malloy. We were wondering if we might have a word.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Not yet.” Alex smiled as she removed her sunglasses. “May we come in?”

“I’m happy to answer any questions out here.”

Alex detected a hint of a foreign accent. The h in happy was too soft, more ’appy. A background search on Shepherd had come up close to empty. He had no credit cards, didn’t subscribe to cable TV, and neither the IRS nor Social Security had heard from him in years. The Texas driver’s license number he’d given on his rental application was valid, though she hadn’t been able to pull up the picture. And of course there was the matter of the cashier’s check. No one paid three months’ rent in advance. To Alex’s eye, he was a straw man.

“We’d prefer to come inside,” said Malloy. “We can get a warrant if you’d like.”

Shepherd shrugged and his blue eyes softened. “Come in, then. The place is a mess. Don’t want to give the FBI the wrong impression.”

Shepherd swung open the door. Alex followed Malloy inside. The home was cheaply furnished and smelled of smoke and stale beer. There was a sagging couch, a beat-up armchair, and a coffee table scarred with cigarette burns. Copies of New York, Time Out, This Week in New York, and, more interestingly, Guns and Ammo lay arranged messily on one end. At the other, Alex noted a residue of spilled coffee or tea, not in a puddle but shaped very clearly at a right angle, as if it had been spilled next to a magazine. A magazine that had been hastily hidden.

“You like guns?” she asked.

“I’m from Texas,” Shepherd volunteered. “I hunt.”

“Whereabouts?” asked Malloy.

“Where do I come from or where do I hunt?”

“Both,” said Alex.

“I come from Houston, but we used to hunt in East Texas. A place called Nacogdoches, near the Louisiana border.”

“Where in Houston?” asked Malloy. “I’m from Dallas myself.”

Alex said nothing. Malloy was born and raised in Seattle, but she liked his tactic to keep the pressure on Shepherd.

“Sugarland.”

Malloy nodded, then asked offhandedly, “Who’s mayor down there?”

“No idea,” said Shepherd. “I haven’t lived there in years. Who’s the mayor of Dallas?”

Malloy stumbled and Alex picked up the baton. “You don’t sound like you’re from Houston,” she said. “Are you in this country illegally?”

It was Alex’s practice to go at a suspect head-on. She believed that confrontation yielded the greatest results, both immediate and in the long term. You had to shake the tree to see if any fruit might drop to the ground. She liked to shake it hard.

“I’m American,” said Shepherd. “Last I checked, that gives me the right to be here.”

“Do you have a passport?”

“Okay, enough,” said Shepherd, holding up his hands. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”

“I’m sure you know.”

Shepherd didn’t respond, and Alex saw his eyes narrow, a current of anger rustle the calm façade.

“We want to know where you are keeping the machine guns,” she added.

“Pardon me?”

“I believe they are AK-47s.”

Shepherd’s eyes widened, and he laughed as if a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. “AK-47s? Here? You’re serious? At least now I know you’re at the wrong house. You had me worried.”

Alex assessed Shepherd’s body language. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His eyes held hers. The laugh was rich and easy. There was no fidgeting, no playing with his hands, no delaying or prevaricating or any of the giveaways typically found in a person who had something to hide. Everything indicated that he was telling the truth. The twinge had lessened, but it was still there.

“We had a report that you were unloading a crate with Russian markings at three a.m. a few days ago,” she said.

“That?” Shepherd chuckled, showing a set of straight white teeth: just a big ole Texas boy. “Can you stay here a second? I show you.”

I show you. Odd, thought Alex. “We’d rather come with you.”

“Suit yourself.” Shepherd led the way through the kitchen and into the attached garage, where a late-model Ford pickup was parked. He skirted the truck and stopped, pointing at the ground. “There’s your crate,” he said. “I like to play paintball. That’s our ammo.”

Alex rifled through the crate, sifting the bags of paint balls. Malloy picked up a bag, then dropped it, disappointed. He looked at Alex and sighed. Case over. One more false alarm. Alex couldn’t read Cyrillic, but she could make out AK-47 well enough. She ran a hand inside the crate; her fingers came away slick with paint. She rose, and the three walked back through the kitchen.

“That’s some load of groceries,” said Alex. “Expecting someone?”

“Family,” said Shepherd. “Barbecue tonight.”

“They in from Texas?”

“All over, actually,” said Shepherd. “You’re welcome to stop by and see for yourself. We’re firing up the grill around seven.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Malloy.

Alex slowed, eyeing the groceries on the counter. There was milk and orange juice, bread and peanut butter, and bags of beef jerky. To one side were amassed a dozen small bottles of five-hour energy drink. Above the fridge sat two cartons of Marlboro Reds, but she knew Shepherd didn’t smoke. His fingers were clean, with no nicotine stains between the index and middle fingers. And there were those white teeth. She didn’t see any chicken or steaks or ground beef: staples of a summer barbecue. Of course, he could have already put it away. She looked at the refrigerator, then thought better of it.

She and Malloy stopped at the front door. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Shepherd,” she said. “We’re sorry to have intruded on your day.”

“It is no problem.”

Alex smiled as the twinge in her back turned into a dagger. There it was again. The clumsy syntax. The faintest of accents, turning it into eet. She didn’t know exactly where he was from, but it wasn’t Houston, Texas.

She rubbed her fingers together and found them as slippery as a few minutes before. Not paint but grease. The kind of grease that keeps rust from gun barrels. And all the while she kept her eyes locked on Mr. Randall Shepherd.

You bastard, she thought. You goddamned, Oscar-winning bastard.

Shepherd stared back, eyes steady, unblinking. He ran a hand over his scalp, and Alex observed two rivulets of sweat at his temple beginning to roll toward his jaw.

“Au revoir,” she said, as lightly as her thundering heart would permit.

“Au revoir,” said Shepherd. The response was immediate and unrehearsed. It was French French, not her clumsy American variant. She knew it, and he knew she knew it. Shepherd shook his head, chuckling to himself. “Mais merde.”

“Hands against the wall,” said Alex. “You’re under arrest.”

“What is it?” asked Malloy. “Did I miss something?”

But by then the man who called himself Randall Shepherd was bringing a large semiautomatic pistol to bear and Alex was pushing Malloy aside as she cleared her Glock.

“Drop it!”

She was a second late.