Justice

by Karen Robards

As she had expected, the sixth floor—indeed, the whole building—was as busy when she got there as it was on any weekday. In broad daylight, with so many people around and so much bustle and activity going on, Jess felt pretty secure in assuming she was perfectly safe. Which was a good thing, because having Mark dog her every footstep was sure to give rise to the kind of speculation she most wanted to avoid. In fact, having Mark dog her every footstep was not going to work for her, and so she told him. They agreed that just having him in the building was protection enough, and he left her at the elevator bank with no more than a warning not to leave the building without him. Knowing that she was liable to turn crimson if questioned by her colleagues about why she was so late, Jess hurried straight to her office as soon as she got off the elevator with no more than a brief wave for Lenore, who was on the phone at her desk. The rest of the team was presumably working hard somewhere out of sight, which she was thankful for. With any luck, given the fact that there were no 8:30 a.m. team meetings on Saturday, maybe nobody besides Lenore would know she was just getting in.

  The first thing she meant to do was check with Pearse to see if he needed help with anything else having to do with Flores. Then she was way behind on the background checks for Jameson. And …

  Frowning as she went over her to-do list, Jess opened the door to her office and walked inside while still deep in thought.

  And in the gloom that existed before she turned on the light, she caught just a glimpse, the merest hint, of something. A shadow, maybe. Or a shimmering shape that she didn’t even really see before she hit the switch and the light came on and it was gone.

  She stopped dead. Her heart lurched. For a moment she stared fixedly at the place where whatever she had seen had been, which was, of course, in front of the plant and the window. She looked at the plant, the window, the absolutely ordinary, empty section of carpet in front of both and the wall on either side.

  Nothing was there. Of course nothing was there.

  Her heart pounded like she’d been running.

  Allison.

  Maybe it was a stupid thought, proving how credulous and superstitious she really was, but she was increasingly convinced that Allison, or whatever spiritual spark remained of Allison, was there in that office.

  Which meant Allison was dead.

  Jess took a deep breath and closed the door.

  “I’m going to find you,” Jess said aloud. “Dead, alive, whatever, I’m going to find you, I promise.”

  She said it as if she were making a vow.

  Then, feeling vaguely foolish, she sat down at her desk and got to work. Only she didn’t make the call to Pearse about Flores, and she didn’t start cross-checking information on the Jameson witnesses. The sense of urgency she felt about finding Allison was too strong.

  It was almost as if there were a voice in her ear whispering, Do it now.

  What she did first was check her voice mail and e-mail for any response from either Allison or Tiffany—nada—and look at their Facebook pages for new postings, which neither had made. Then, deciding to start at the beginning, which as far as she knew was with Allison, Jess methodically began to put together a profile of her predecessor. Drawing on all her computer expertise—which was quite considerable, and one of the reasons she’d been originally offered a job at Ellis Hayes—Jess started delving into Allison’s life. She was a whizz at bypassing access codes and divining passwords—the one Allison used most was easy; Jess had guessed Clementine on almost the first try—and worming her way into various data systems. Working diligently, she amassed Allison’s phone records, her banking records, her credit card records, and her various membership accounts (YMCA, Weight Watchers Online, library, Book-of-the-Month Club, Sam’s Club, grocery club, that kind of thing). She did a background check. What turned up on Allison surprised her: she’d been a former foster child with parents who’d been long gone by the time she was ten, which made the “Hey, Mom” phone call to Lucy’s phone even more of a mystery. Jess did a credit check, and even pulled Allison’s motor vehicle records and tax returns from the IRS files to confirm that her only income source was her work at Ellis Hayes and she didn’t moonlight as something that could have gotten her into trouble. Finally Jess combed the Ellis Hayes computer system for what Allison had been working on just before she’d left for that business trip—the Phillips trial, as expected—and even pulled up her browsing history: a lot of eBay. When Jess was done, she had so much material that just contemplating the sheer volume of it was daunting.

  Start with the most recent activity and work backward.

  Allison had left on the business trip from which she had never returned in July. The first thing to do, then, was see if there had been any transactions recorded on any of her accounts in August.

  Bank records indicated that Allison’s rent, utilities, and car payment had all been paid the first week in August, when she’d presumably been on her honeymoon. Jess would have taken that as a positive sign, except the payments had been set up as automatic withdrawals that would have happened without any need for current authorization from Allison.

  There had been some texting activity on her cell phone, but no actual outgoing calls.

  No credit card charges were posted to any of her accounts in August except, again, for automatic payments.

  Looking at the picture presented by the data, Jess started to feel cold all over. Before, all she’d had had been a bad feeling about Allison and a maybe-it-didn’t-even-really-happen sighting of Allison in her/their office. Now she had concrete evidence that something had happened. How could Allison survive without accessing her bank account or using any of her credit cards?

  There was likewise no activity on any of the membership accounts, except one. Allison’s Quik-Stop preferred customer card showed daily transactions for the month of August up until two days ago.

  That made Jess sit up and take notice.

  Frowning, she looked at the data. The transactions were not purchases. They indicated the redemption of complimentary good-customer rewards, which were recorded by a swipe of a preferred customer card at the time of the transaction. Exactly what the reward was wasn’t part of the record, which showed only that it was redeemed and the card was swiped. Which meant that an individual had been present to present the card. Most of the redemption activity had occurred at a single Quik-Stop in College Park. But the latest, and last, transaction had been recorded on Thursday morning at a Quik-Stop on M Street. Jess double-checked the address: it was near DuPont Circle, which was nearby.

  Her heart started to beat faster. What the data meant Jess didn’t know, but there the transactions were with no possibility of mistake. Printing out the address of the Quik-Stop, then a picture of Allison that she got from the copy of her driver’s license, which was on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles, Jess called Mark.

  “I’m coming down,” she said when he answered. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  She disconnected before he could reply.

  “We’re going out,” she told him without preamble when she walked into his office. He was seated behind his desk with his jacket off doing something on his computer. Seeing Mark pecking away at a keyboard struck her as vaguely amusing, so she smiled. Besides his shoulder holster provided a nice counterpoint to his red tie as it nestled against one of those typical businessman/Secret Service agent white shirts that he rocked the crap out of. He looked handsome and competent and just a little out of place behind a desk, as if he more properly belonged out on the sun-drenched sidewalk she could see through his tinted windows. His office was more modern than hers—metal desk, no plant—and not as luxurious, but it was about the same size. Looking up from what he was doing as she entered and closed the door behind her, he lifted his eyebrows at her questioningly.

  “Somebody’s been using Allison’s preferred customer card at a Quik-Stop on M Street,” she burst out, waving the picture of Allison at him. “I want to show this to the people working there an
d see if they recognize her. It’s the only activity I can find on any of her accounts this entire month. So grab your jacket and come on.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to give the information to me and let me pass it on to the professionals to investigate?” Clearly he knew the answer to that, because he was already on his feet reaching for his jacket. Pulling it on, looking hot as usual in his charcoal suit, he came toward her to drop a quick, hard kiss on her mouth. Momentarily dazzled—being back on with Mark even in the provisional capacity they had agreed to was something she hadn’t totally gotten her head around yet, but it definitely felt good—she had to blink a couple of times to refocus.

  “And take the chance that they’ll maybe get to it in a week or two if they don’t get sidetracked? No way.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Mark opened the door for her, and she stayed a brisk step ahead of him as they walked down the hall toward the elevator that serviced the underground garage. She was wearing black ballet flats with snug black pants, a white tee, and a short gray blazer—the flats made it her version of business-casual Saturday—with her purse slung over her shoulder. There were a number of people about, some interns whose status she knew because they were wearing laminated badges with the word INTERN in big black letters, a few lawyer types, half a dozen or so blue-uniformed security guards. There were so many wandering that particular area because, Jess saw as they passed it, the security staff office took up an entire section at the rear of the first floor. Just being reminded that all those guards worked in the building was reassuring.

  When she and Mark were in the Suburban on the way to M Street Jess gave him a quick rundown on everything she had discovered so far.

  “Could be her new husband’s picking up the tab,” Mark suggested as an explanation for the lack of financial activity on any of Allison’s accounts.

  “She hasn’t even used a credit card. Or made a phone call,” Jess argued.

  “Maybe something was going on in her life that made her decide to deliberately disappear.”

  That was a possibility Jess hadn’t considered. Frowning, she mulled it over and came to the conclusion that, regardless of her gut feeling to the contrary, it wasn’t a theory she could entirely discount.

  “Maybe. But she would still have to have money, wouldn’t she?” Jess said at last, reasoning it through. “If that’s the case, there should be some fairly substantial withdrawals in the weeks and months leading up to the time she left.”

  “You would think,” Mark agreed. “Unless for some reason she had to leave in a hurry.”

  Then they were pulling into a parking spot near the Quik-Stop. Jess took a quick look around as they got out into the steamy afternoon heat. Lots of pedestrians, lots of traffic, lots of noise. A bus, putting out tons of smelly exhaust, loading passengers on the other side of the intersection. A Chase bank branch, a Tom’s deli, a Chinese takeout place, a Laundromat. And, on the corner, glass walls covered with advertisements looking out onto both streets, the Quik-Stop.

  Neither the clerks nor the manager remembered Allison. Producing her picture netted nothing but a few shrugs and a lot of head shaking. As for her preferred customer transactions, well, they had a lot of preferred customers. It was impossible to remember every one.

  Jess’s one hope was the security camera mounted so that it monitored the cash register. If Allison had been there, the swipe of her customer card would have happened at the register. The camera should have recorded her.

  The manager wasn’t talking about the camera. At least, he wasn’t until Mark flashed his badge and went all Secret Service on him. Then he was suddenly cooperative.

  “It’s a seven-day loop,” the manager, who turned out to be a forty-year-old former car salesman named Bobby Lutz, told them as he took them back into his private office, which was tiny, shared space with boxes of snack-sized potato chips apparently waiting to be shelved. From the intermittent flushes that could clearly be heard, it also shared a wall with the store restroom. “Every week the memory gets recycled, and everything from the previous week gets recorded over.”

  “When does the week start?” Mark asked as Lutz reached up on a shelf to turn on a black-and-white monitor. On a shelf below it sat a computer hard drive, and the cables running between the two indicated they were attached.

  “Sunday night, six p.m. I hit reset before I go home.” He hit a button on the hard drive, and suddenly blurry images started appearing on the monitor. Jess stared, but they were moving so fast that it was impossible to really see anything. “You’re looking for Thursday, right? What time?”

  He was, Jess realized as she consulted her printout, fast-forwarding through the pictures, which weren’t actually video but a series of stills.

  “Six forty-three a.m.”

  “Hmm.”

  “This is low-end equipment. The camera takes a picture like every thirty seconds.” He flashed forward some more. “Okay, here’s Thursday morning. Let’s see …”

  Flashing forward a little more slowly now, he stopped the reel with a quick stab of a button.

  “There you go,” he said.

  Jess looked at the picture on the screen. The time was stamped on it, in white letters high in the left corner: 6:43:15. For a moment she stared at it, disappointed. Whoever was nibbling the doughnut while the clerk swiped her card certainly wasn’t Allison.

  “Next one,” Mark said, and Lutz obediently advanced the tape: 6:43:45.

  This time the customer was turning away from the register. She was holding coffee in one hand, the doughnut in the other, and Jess could clearly see her face—and her frizzy red hair.

  “That’s Lucy,” she said, surprised.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “There’s a connection between them. See there?” Jess was so wired with excitement that she could hardly sit still as they headed back to Ellis Hayes with a copy of the video tucked safely into the console between them. Mark had already told her of his intention to turn the DVD over to a guy he knew to see what else—such as, possibly, a glimpse of Allison—turned up.

  “Allison Howard knew Lucy Peel through Shelter House.” Mark’s voice was thoughtful as he pulled into the underground garage. “Lucy’s missing. Allison is missing. Maybe they’re together. Maybe they’ve got some kind of thing going on, and that’s why Allison decided to disappear. It wouldn’t be the first time an adult mentor took off with a kid.”

  “That’s sick.” Jess glared at him.

  He shrugged. “If you’re going to investigate, you’ve got to cover all the bases.”

  In her heart Jess was sure Allison had not absconded with Lucy, but, as Mark said, it was smart to cover all the bases. So when she got back to her office—which took a little while, because this time she ran into Andrew and had to field his inquiries into her well-being—she went back into the computer to check Allison’s bank accounts for a pattern of withdrawals that would support the theory that Allison had simply chosen to disappear.

  What she found surprised her.

  Looking for the last week during which she knew Allison had been alive, Jess found that Allison had spent it in Nassau. Then Jess checked the Bahamas for a bank account in Allison’s name, reasoning that Allison might have moved some money offshore if she’d been planning to disappear. Sure enough, she hit pay dirt. Allison had opened an account in the First Bank of the Bahamas on the very day she’d arrived on the island. Five hundred dollars had been the initial deposit amount. But four days later, a wire transfer had upped the balance considerably: to three million dollars.

  Jess’s eyes popped at the amount. Knowing Allison’s background as she now did, and her work history and salary as well, it seemed inconceivable that Allison could have legally obtained that amount of money. But there it was.

  Jess trolled through the account data and discovered that the entire amount had been withdrawn by a wire transfer the following week.

  On a Monday, to be precise. Allison’s other financ
ial transactions had ceased a day and a half before, on the previous Saturday night.

  Of course, three million dollars was more than enough to go into hiding on.

  “What did you get involved in?” Jess demanded aloud of the presence in her office, which she was starting to think might not be any more than a figment of her imagination after all. Because if Allison wasn’t dead, if she had simply taken that truly enormous amount of money and run, then she wasn’t a ghost and thus could not be haunting their mutual space.

  Of course, that amount of money could also get somebody killed.

  Frowning thoughtfully, Jess looked through the files Allison had been working on at the time of her disappearance. Standard stuff that as far as she could tell was all about the Phillips case.

  Then Jess had a thought. Allison almost certainly had her own laptop. What if the files Jess was looking for were too sensitive to be kept on the company computer network, which, in a pinch, just about anybody with a modicum of tech savvy could access? What if she’d kept the personal stuff, the important stuff, on her private computer?

  Jess didn’t have Allison’s computer, but she did have a way in. Because Allison had downloaded files onto the company computer network from a personal computer Jess suspected had to have been her laptop, Jess could follow the trail back and remotely link with that computer. All she needed was Allison’s password.

  Clementine.

  Bingo. She was in.

  The first thing she did was a little tricky, but then, she was good: she remotely turned on the laptop’s camera. Now whatever the computer saw, she could see, too.

  Unfortunately, all the computer was seeing was a whole lot of black.

  The computer wasn’t destroyed, the camera was operational, and she was now seeing what it saw. That was the good news.

  The bad news was, it was seeing precisely nothing.

  Disappointed, Jess started calling up Allison’s files. Half an hour or so later, she sat back in her seat, sighing with discouragement. Allison’s computer files contained nothing of interest at all. Some recipes, a Wall Street Journal subscription, hundreds of pictures, most of which seemed to be of Clementine. Information related to the Phillips trial, all pretty much identical to that which was in the files Jess had already seen on the company computer. It added up to not much. Certainly none of it explained where three million dollars had come from.