Valley of Spies

by Keith Yocum

  A weary Keating nodded.

  “But I have a question,” Dennis said. “Why are you going through all this trouble—and personal expense—of hiding this stuff from the agency? You can’t be discriminated against because of a medical condition. You were seeing Dr. Forrester already, and they were aware of that. Why all this cloak and dagger around Charlottesville?”

  “I think you’re being naïve about how the agency really works,” Keating said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if half the employees in this building are in therapy of some kind. But hospitalizations are not looked on the same way. They can say what they want in human resources, but my career is over as head of the Iran desk if this got out.”

  “Mmm,” Dennis said standing up.

  “I’m tired of this thing,” Dennis said, hunched over the bar in the hotel and holding the cell phone tight to his ear. “Some guy freaked out today. Felt bad for the bastard. I thought he was going to jump off a ledge.”

  “What did you say to him?” Judy said.

  “Oh, the usual stuff. Caught him in a lie, though I thought it was a bigger lie than it turned out to be. To be fair, it was a big lie to him, but not a big one for me.”

  “Your life as an investigator is different from my life as an investigator. At least you don’t have to look at spreadsheets.”

  “You’re looking at spreadsheets? Don’t they have forensic accountants to do that?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later. When are you coming back to Perth? How much time do you have left?”

  “Tomorrow I have four days left. I can barely hear you, Judy. Where are you?”

  “At a pub. Getting rid of a headache.”

  “With Cilla?”

  “No, a mate from work. He’s the new partner I told you about.”

  “Is work going alright? You seem a little tired too.”

  “No, work is going badly. I hate it now. I’m investigating spreadsheets.”

  “Well, don’t do anything rash,” Dennis said.

  “Like what?” she said.

  “Like quitting.”

  “Oh that. Not likely.”

  “I have to go, Dennis. Ta. Come home soon.”

  Dennis put the phone down and stared at the TV set behind the bar. There was a baseball game on, and he could not identify either team by their uniforms.

  His agency cell phone vibrated, and he answered without looking at the number.

  “Yeah?”

  “Cunningham?”

  “Yeah.”

  “McCarthy here from NZSIS. How are you?”

  “Fine. What’s up? Do you have results from the autopsy?”

  “That’s why I’m calling, actually. Thought you might be coming here directly, but it appears you’re still in Washington.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, the report says that Forrester died from two bullets to the back of her head.”

  Dennis lifted his eyes up off the bar and looked at the TV screen and squinted in concentration.

  “What type of bullet?”

  “Type?”

  “Yes, caliber.”

  “Let me look. It says a .32 caliber. Is that important?”

  “Maybe. Anything else?”

  “Actually, there is. It seems that her body had been moved.”

  “Come again?”

  “Her body. If you remember we received a tip that her body was buried near a beach. They found the body using sniffer dogs.”

  “OK, I remember.”

  “The assumption was, given the decomposition of the body, that she had been buried there after she was killed. But the autopsy report stated besides sand, her body had soil on it. The soil is not consistent with the sand she was found in. The coroner’s conclusion is that she was buried somewhere else, then moved and reburied in the sand.”

  “Well, that’s odd.”

  “Right. That’s what we think.”

  “Was there any DNA evidence on her body or her clothes? Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “No evidence of that. And no DNA from under her fingernails and places like that. But there does appear to be a fracture of three fingers on her left hand.”

  “Broken fingers? Wonder what that’s about?”

  “Could have happened after she was killed.”

  “And why would someone move her body, then call in a tip to the new burial site?”

  “We thought you could help us on that. Are you coming back here?”

  “I’m not sure. Have you released the body to the family yet?”

  “Not yet. We needed to ensure you were satisfied. Should we release her body?”

  “How’s her husband reacting to all of this?”

  “Mr. Forrester? I’ve had no contact with him. Rangi contacted him. Are you coming or not?”

  Dennis looked at the TV again and watched a player strike out and slam his bat onto the ground in frustration.

  “Feel free to release the body. And can you send me the autopsy report?”

  “Right.”

  Chapter 12

  Dennis was adamant that the end never justifies the means.

  Well, most of the time, that is.

  There were circumstances in his career where he bent his own standards into a pretzel of questionable morality. Today was one of those days when the straight line was going to be bent into a completely distorted shape.

  It was a Saturday morning, and he told Mr. Forrester the prior night that he needed to speak to him immediately about his wife’s disappearance. Forrester sounded agitated and complained that New Zealand authorities were not releasing his wife’s body for transport back to the states for burial. Dennis reassured him they would release the body, but he insisted they meet the following morning.

  He parked his rental car in front of Forrester’s house and had a moment of déjà vu, conjuring up the times his gut tightened with anxiety before parking in the same spot for a fifty-minute session with the deceased psychologist.

  Forrester opened the door before Dennis could push the buzzer.

  “Come in, please,” he said.

  Forrester was dressed in a maroon, short-sleeved polo shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals.

  “Sit down,” Forrester said, pointing to the same wingback chair Dennis sat in before. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Water?” In contrast to the last conversation in his house, Forrester seemed subdued.

  “Nothing, thanks. Just had breakfast.” Dennis smiled. He noticed that Forrester kept glancing at the large manila folder Dennis had in his lap.

  “By the way,” Forrester said, “I received notice that my wife’s body has been released. You were right about that. My son is making arrangements with the airlines. I can’t bring myself to do it.” He sighed, shook his head, and looked at the floor. “How do things like this happen?”

  “I hope this is not too disturbing, but did the New Zealand authorities talk to you about the cause of death?”

  “Yes,” he said, closing his eyes briefly. “Yes, they did.”

  The living room was silent except for the distant humming of an exterior air conditioning compressor.

  “Why would someone do that?” Forrester said. “Why would you just shoot a stranger? Her credit cards were never used, or her ATM. I mean, what’s the point, except madness? Of all things, a madman kills my wife, a woman who tried to help people struggling with madness.”

  Dennis shifted in his chair.

  “What was it that you wanted to talk about today?” Forrester said. “It sounded urgent. I thought you might have some information about her abductor, or, I suppose, her killer.”

  Dennis stood up and walked the two steps between them and handed the envelope to Forrester.

  “What is this?” he said.

  Dennis sat ba
ck down.

  “Can you tell me about the photos in that envelope?”

  Forrester turned his head awkwardly as if attempting to better focus on Dennis.

  “Pictures?”

  “Yes. Can you look at the pictures in that envelope and tell me about them?”

  Forrester slowly opened the unsealed envelope flap and removed five, large, color photos. He looked at the first one for thirty seconds, then slid it to the bottom of the pile. By the time he looked at the third photograph, his cheeks started to redden, and he made small vocal intonations. After finishing, he looked up at Dennis.

  “I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing, but I can’t,” Forrester said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’d like you to tell me about those photos,” Dennis said.

  “What about them?” Forrester said, his cheeks now beet red.

  “Who is the woman in the photos?”

  Forrester closed his eyes and took a measured, deep breath, Dennis guessed, either to control himself or stop himself from passing out.

  “Oh, I see,” he said finally, opening his eyes. “You don’t know. I thought you would have known, but why did I think that? You must have had someone following me, obviously, and they found me staying over at this woman’s house. I see. Mmm.”

  He slid the photos into the envelope, stood up, and returned them to Dennis, shaking his head back and forth slowly.

  “Her name is Becky Cleary,” Forrester said standing in front of Dennis.

  Forrester turned and walked into the kitchen without speaking. Dennis was caught off guard with Forrester’s sudden disappearance from the room. He waited for almost a minute, and when he heard nothing, Dennis stood up and peered into the kitchen. Forrester had disappeared into a room past the kitchen.

  “Hello?” Dennis yelled.

  There was no response.

  “Hello?” he yelled louder.

  He heard a muffled grunt from the far room, and his heartbeat increased. It was never a good idea for someone being confronted to leave the room.

  Forrester emerged from the room with a small, foot-wide box in his hands and asked Dennis to sit down.

  He sat as directed, but only at the front edge of the chair. He felt a thin bead of perspiration gather above his top lip.

  Forrester sat down and looked at Dennis. He tilted his head again as if measuring the distance between them. He opened the box and reached inside.

  Judy was aware that something had changed, because she took an unusually long time to choose what to wear to work; she even tested a new, darker shade of lipstick.

  The prior night she had stayed too long at the pub with Craig. She felt a mixture of guilt and pleasure at the attention Craig paid to her.

  Steady, young lady, she thought, mimicking Cilla’s warning. Don’t do anything stupid. Flirtation is attention without intention.

  When she entered the large meeting room the task force was using, Craig was already there. She wondered whether the prior evening’s flirtations were something he intended or were just the silly male hormones at play.

  “Gidday, Judy,” he beamed as she sat down next to him at her terminal. “Hope I wasn’t too cheeky last night. Feel like I sort of let my hair down.”

  “No worries,” she said laughing. “I enjoyed going out. You were a perfect gentleman.” This was girl-speak for: let’s do it again.

  “Just let me know when you get another headache,” he said.

  “Could happen at any time,” Judy said. She signed in to her desktop computer just as Connester entered the room.

  “Attention, please,” he said, as everyone swiveled to see him. “We’ve received word that Kadlec himself is flying to W.A. today to visit the mining company up north. It’s been decided we need boots on the ground to keep an eye on him. And, given the fact that us tax blokes are not field investigators, Judy, you and Craig drew the short straws.”

  “Really?” she said. “Are we looking to be seen or not? If he’s in the air already, will we even get there in time to follow him?”

  “Good questions, Judy, and we’ll address that with you and Craig in my temporary office. These folks here need to keep crunching the data. Come along.”

  “Hey,” Dennis said to Forrester. “Take it easy. No need to panic. Just stay calm.”

  “Panic about what?” Forrester said, pulling out a photograph from the box and reaching to hand it to Dennis.

  “Becky’s my daughter from a previous marriage. That photo was taken with my first wife when Becky was in grade school. We divorced many years ago. Becky works in Agriculture. And yes, I did help her get a job there. I’ve been staying with her every now and then because she’s taken out a restraining order on a former boyfriend. She’s scared sometimes, though I don’t personally think the fellow will do anything. I guess you never know. My son has stayed with her several times as well.”

  Forrester handed Dennis two more photographs showing his daughter as a cheerleader and wearing a gown and mortarboard.

  “Becky is your daughter.”

  “Yes, but I’m not completely dense, Mr. Cunningham. I’m putting some pieces together, and I’m guessing you thought I might be complicit in my wife’s disappearance, so you had me investigated. And your intrepid investigators did a negligent job figuring out that Becky was my daughter. They thought I was having an affair.”

  Dennis said nothing. He reached over and returned the photos.

  “It’s humiliating and infuriating that you thought that. On the other hand,” he sighed, “I’m grateful that someone is trying to solve my wife’s death. We feel like no one cares. The New Zealand authorities seem stumped. It’s a nightmare that won’t go away. And now you show up with these sordid accusations. Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dennis said. “I should have pressed harder with the investigator. We could have avoided all this. But the photos I brought were a ploy to force you to show me your wife’s therapy notes. I know how harsh that sounds, but I feel like there’s something in those notes of her agency clients that’s important. And I don’t have the time to go through channels for a search warrant.”

  “My wife’s notes?” Forrester said. “You really think they’re that important?”

  “Yes, I do. The agency gave me the name of the five employees who went through employee assistance to get your wife’s information. But I need to see if there are any hints in those notes that can move me faster in the right direction.”

  “You really think Jane was killed by someone in the agency?” Forrester said. “I don’t find that credible. Why in god’s name would someone she’d been seeing want to kill her? She didn’t see violent patients. And, for the sake of argument, if it was someone from the agency, why do it in New Zealand? I’m sorry. You’re not making sense.”

  “Your wife was killed by two bullets to the back of her head,” Dennis said. “That’s not the work of a random psychopath. It has all the earmarks of a professional killing. She was shot with a small-caliber weapon, which is preferred by intelligence services. A .32-caliber bullet remains in the brain and bounces around for maximum damage; two bullets is one hundred percent fatal. I’m sorry to distress you on these details, but it’s important you know. The current official theory is that a foreign intelligence service abducted and killed her. I’m trying to figure out whether that conclusion is correct.”

  “What do you mean by foreign intelligence service? What would they want with Jane?”

  “If you think about it, you’ll see that there might be perverse motives.”

  “You mean—wait, you’re not suggesting they wanted to know about her patients?”

  “It’s certainly possible; at least one of her patients was a high-ranking agency official. We’re not certain that is what happened, but we have to make sure.”

  “But they would have had to force he
r to provide information—” he stopped. “Jesus, I don’t believe this. Oh god.”

  Forrester grimaced and closed his eyes.

  He opened his eyes and said, “Fine. Come along. You can look at the notes. I don’t know what to believe anymore, but you’re the only person trying to help, or at least I think you are.”

  Dennis followed him through the kitchen, where he put the box down on the granite countertop and picked up a set of keys hanging on a hook. He continued into a hallway, then opened a door that led down a set of carpeted stairs. At the bottom was a finished basement to the left with some exercise equipment and another door to the right that Forrester unlocked.

  The door opened into Dr. Forrester’s office. Dennis had long wondered what was behind that door during his sessions with Forrester; he thought it was a closet and was vaguely amused that the door led to a fitness area.

  Forrester walked past the two upholstered chairs that Dennis remembered well from his sessions. He sat at his wife’s desk against the wall. Forrester unlocked and pulled open the center desk drawer. Inside he lifted a long horizontal drawer that held pens, push pins, and paper clips. Underneath was a small sticky note with several numbers on it.

  “She was given strict rules for how to secure the notes of her agency patients,” he said. “She had a background check, and we found out two of our neighbors were visited by FBI agents. If we’d known what was involved in this CIA crap, she’d never had done it.”

  “It’s just a theory about her disappearance, but we need to pursue it, so please try to withhold judgment until we get some clarity,” Dennis said. “Where did she keep the notes?”

  “First,” he said holding up the sticky note and replacing the drawer container, “I don’t want you to mention this to the agency. She was not supposed to write down her combination and leave it around. Jane showed me and said I might need it one day.”

  He walked across the room and removed a large Monet print of an Impressionist exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. Behind the frame was a thick, shiny green safe with a number dial. Forrester followed the directions. At the end of the combination, he pulled down a lever and opened the safe.