The 3rd Victim

by Sydney Bauer

  ‘Which meant that in your role as Esther Wallace, you could only do so much,’ continued Sara.

  ‘Yes,’ Loxley nodded. ‘In short I was nowhere near close enough. We needed to get closer to the victims and the only way to do that was to –’

  ‘To win one over – to bring a so-called victim over to your side,’ said Sara.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Loxley.

  ‘And you were that victim,’ said Sara, now looking at Sienna.

  Sienna managed a smile. ‘Quite a brave choice on their part, don't you think – approaching the wife of the very man they were targeting?’ She looked at David. ‘You want to know why I agreed to it.’

  David nodded. ‘You said you loved your husband.’

  ‘And yet I believed them when they told me what he was capable of.’

  David nodded again. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they predicted the future – not literally, of course, but sadly for me, close enough.’

  *

  ‘It was Special Agent Carlson who approached me,’ said Sienna after taking a sip of her water. ‘We were at a corporate dinner, one of those high-profile black-tie do's where men such as my husband go to network. My husband was very good at it, you see – making friends, impressing clients – and on this particular night this included asking the CEO of Biogen Idec – a woman named Gayle Casablancas – to dance.’

  ‘He was on the dance floor when Special Agent Carlson approached you?’ asked David, struck by the brazenness – or rather the riskiness – of it all.

  ‘Yes. Jim was dancing with Gloria Casablancas so Special Agent Carlson – who I knew as Daniel Hunt – asked me to dance.’

  Sara looked at David before turning to Sienna. ‘He told you while you were dancing mere feet from your husband?’

  Sienna nodded.

  ‘It was a window,’ said Carlson, finally chiming in. ‘We had to be careful. Walker was smart. I could not risk meeting with his wife at a separate location. All I wanted to do at that point was get her to listen and promise not to share what I had to tell her with her husband. I talked. She listened. I may not have convinced her but I told her enough to get her thinking and to receive her assurance that she would contact me the following day for further information. I would have liked to brief her in more detail but at that point her husband cut in.’

  ‘Your husband cut in?’ repeated Sara, incredulous.

  Sienna nodded. ‘Perhaps it is my British heritage, but I managed to hold it together. I danced, and smiled, and did not tell him a word of it.’

  ‘But why not?’ asked Sara, still unable to understand it. ‘He was your husband and Daniel Hunt was just …?’

  ‘Special Agent Carlson's last words to me hit home,’ said Sienna. ‘He told me the FBI believed that Jim and Dick would use me too. He said they knew that we had had fertility tests at Dick Davenport's surgery and that it would be most likely that we would be told that we were unable to conceive naturally. And he told me that this would be a lie, and that there was a chance they would use this lie to harvest my eggs for manufacture, and that the FBI had already acquired intelligence that suggested there might be an order for a child containing my superior DNA. He said that if things continued as the FBI suspected they would, I would lose control of my rights as a mother, of holding on to any child my eggs were used to conceive.’

  ‘And you believed him?’ asked Sara. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ replied Sienna, her eyes now meeting Sara's, ‘I had no choice.’

  Sara saw it. ‘They'd already told you that you were infertile?’ she said. ‘That if you wanted to have children, you had no choice but use IVF?’

  Sienna nodded. ‘Dick called to tell us earlier that evening. He said that while the news was a blow, he would not rest until we held our own child in our arms. He made us a promise, a professional and personal vow, and I was so grateful … no, not just grateful, I was excited.’ She swallowed. ‘It was the best and worst night of my life.’

  The conversation fell away then as everyone in the room took a breath. David could see it taking shape – the investigation that one moment they felt on top of, and the next had run away from them with such speed that it had left their heads spinning.

  He found himself angry at their using Sienna as they had, and while he knew that her relationship with Walker had set her on a course toward destruction the moment that it was formed, he also wondered what might have happened if the FBI had not intervened, if Sienna might have come out of this wounded, but with her daughter in her arms.

  ‘So you agreed to help them?’ said David after a time.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sienna. ‘After the banquet we met several times in discreet locations. I was introduced to Special Agent in Charge King and to Senior Officer Loxley. My job was to stick close to Jim, to listen, to learn. But my real worth was not in my investigatory skills, but in my genetics.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Sara.

  Sienna went to answer, but Catherine Loxley held up a hand.

  ‘In all fairness to Sienna, I feel this question should fall to me as this is where my culpability began. I underestimated Walker's ego, you see. I suspected he would want to combine Sienna's reproductive cells with a complementary male genetic equal but Davenport had not scheduled any simultaneous seminal extractions from any of the male patients on his books. I could map them, via his procedural appointments, but as I said, I underestimated Walker. I did not realise he had decided upon himself as the supplier of the superior genetic material to produce the son ordered by a couple demanding genetic excellence – a son Agent Carlson had tracked through his investigations into Walker's activities at Hunt and Associates.’ Loxley swallowed.

  ‘By the time I knew about Walker's genetic involvement it was too late. Davenport had created his embryos. Sienna had already been implanted with the embryo. This took us by complete surprise as we never dreamed he would actually allow Sienna to be implanted with a product with such profit potential, even if the embryo was a girl. But in the end, given there was no order for a female child. Walker obviously saw the embryo as a concession. The girl was excess created while Davenport was trying to produce his male, and allowing Sienna to have her was Walker's way of keeping the wife happy and, I might add, in the dark.’

  The room fell silent once again as David, Sara and Joe took this in.

  ‘So the plan was to wait until a sperm sample had been extracted and combined with Sienna's eggs illegally – at which point you could prove her cells were being fertilised without her permission,’ said David.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Loxley.

  ‘But they had been combined – but with your husband's,’ continued Sara, now focusing on Sienna.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So from an evidentiary sense, you were left with nothing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that was when things started to come apart,’ said Sara.

  Sienna swallowed. ‘Yes,’ she said, before taking a breath and repeating, ‘Yes.’

  *

  If they had been in court this was where the Judge would have called for a recess. This was hard going – professionally, emotionally. While they were discussing the logistics of a criminal investigation with an intelligent woman and experienced agents, they were also talking about the brutal murder of a child – and not just any child, the child of the woman now swallowing back tears across from them. It was true, Eliza was essentially killed because of a series of mistakes that were made, and David tried to imagine how this must have felt – not just for Sienna, but for the man who now met his eye across the table, the man who up until recently David had hated more than any other – Eliza's biological father, FBI Special Agent Michael Carlson, alias ‘Daniel Hunt’.

  ‘My turn,’ said Carlson, perhaps sensing that if he and Sienna were going to make it through this briefing, they needed to stay on track.

  David nodded, indicating for Carlson to go on.

  ‘From the very beginnin
g we knew that if we had any chance of building a case against Winter and Cameron, we needed to infiltrate their business from the profit end. And this wasn't just because we wanted Winter and Cameron, it was also because we wanted to issue a mass indictment against their clients. When we went into this thing, we were pretty sure that most of the clients were aware that the children they ordered were created without parental consent, and when I infiltrated Walker's communication system, we were able to prove it.’

  But David was shaking his head. ‘Hold up. Before we get into his connection with his clients, we need to know how in the hell you fooled Walker in the first place. The media were all over you as Hunt. You were the golden kid, the new financial wunderkind. You took over two floors of a Financial District office building, for god's sakes. You had employees, operating systems.’

  Carlson looked at King who nodded in consent for Carlson to go on.

  ‘It's not like we hadn't done similar things before, David,’ he said. ‘Do you know how many boiler rooms the FBI infiltrated in the eighties? The Bureau has become quite practised in the skill of deception.’

  ‘Maybe,’ argued David, ‘but in Walker's case, didn't he think it was odd that you fired all his colleagues, that he was the only man left standing when …?’

  But Carlson was shaking his head. ‘Why would he? He was the best. He had the top end clients and the ego to match. He believed I was as narcissistic as he was, and bottom line I was giving him a chance to continue his business. In the end, as clever as these criminals are, David, they often see what they want to see.’

  David understood what Carlson was saying – Hunt was indeed a gift horse for Walker who, at that stage, had no reason to suspect the FBI were onto him. ‘So who were these agents you manned your fake company with?’ he asked then.

  ‘They were FBI technicians skilled in cyber crime,’ replied Carlson. ‘They were the ones who managed to hack into Walker's complex client communications system. It took time, but in the end they managed to crack Walker's order codes – codes for product specifics like intellect, creative talents, physical attributes, cultural heritage – disguised in complicated spreadsheets and graphs tabling everything from futures trades, equity acquisitions, stock purchases and sales, market fluctuation tracking, CPI index predictions and so forth.’

  ‘And this is how you identified Markus Dudek and Judge Baker?’ asked Sara.

  Carlson nodded. ‘We saw this as a major breakthrough, except we still had a problem when it came to proving that the aforementioned financial data was indeed code for the order of genetically manufactured children. In other words, what we had was a theory and we needed something concrete to back it up.’

  ‘Like Sienna's DNA combined with another of Davenport's unwitting male patients?’ said Sara, piecing it together.

  Carlson nodded again. ‘We needed the physical evidence,’ he said, before taking a sip of his water and shifting in his seat as he waited for David to fire off his next question.

  ‘How did Walker find out that somebody was on to him?’ asked David then.

  Carlson's brow furrowed. ‘We don't know,’ admitted Carlson. ‘And this is where we hit a major problem. You see, we suspected they were onto us being onto them when Davenport started blocking Special Officer Loxley, as Esther Wallace, from his computer patient lists. And while that told us they may have been onto Special Officer Loxley, it did not tell us whether or not they knew about myself as Hunt, or Sienna.’

  ‘So you two had to continue with the charade,’ said David.

  ‘Yes, that was vital. We were close to nabbing them from my end, so we needed to string it out.’

  But Sara was shaking her head. ‘Wasn't that incredibly dangerous? I mean, if you suspected Walker and Davenport were onto you …’ She bit her lip as she tried to put her argument into words. ‘Jim Walker's faking his own death – that was proof they knew they were being investigated, right?’

  ‘Right,’ replied Carlson.

  ‘But his supposed death still didn't tell you whether or not you and Sienna were under suspicion.’

  ‘Right again.’

  ‘So what did you expect to happen after Walker's disappearance?’ continued Sara. ‘That Davenport would run also?’

  ‘It was their obvious next move. But it never happened and we guessed this was because there were a few deals to wrap up before they made a run for it. Admittedly, by this stage our situation was precarious given Special Officer Loxley was still working in Davenport's office under very strained conditions, and Sienna was close to giving birth, and I still didn't have quite enough evidence to tie Walker to Judge Baker and Markus Dudek.’ Carlson took a breath. ‘So when Walker staged his own death we went into damage control – mainly because there were no other options left to us.’

  ‘Your evidence was close but not close enough,’ said David.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you had to contain the situation by continuing with your charades and controlling others who became part of this investigation by default – people like Marco De Lorenzo.’

  Carlson nodded. ‘The information the truck driver held had to be contained. In many ways we got lucky in the way it all went down given that De Lorenzo confirmed our suspicions that the death was a fake and that he was working illegally, and as such could disappear and leave his brother to cover his tracks.’

  ‘Two more lives you could screw,’ said Joe, unable to help himself.

  Carlson let that go, perhaps sensing Joe needed to vent.

  ‘Susan Leigh helped me find De Lorenzo,’ continued Joe when Carlson did not bite. ‘Was she in on this too?’

  David looked at Joe. He knew how close Joe and Susan were and sensed her involvement would sting. But David knew Susan also, and as such guessed that she had been in the dark as much as they had.

  ‘Agent Leigh was not privy to our investigations into Winter and Cameron.’ This came from Leo.

  ‘Did you know she was helping us?’

  Simba swallowed. ‘We knew you two were close. We kept an eye on her.’

  ‘So now you are spying on your own people?’ said Joe. He placed his palms on the table and flexed his fingers as if trying to push through the wood.

  ‘As Special Agent Carlson said, Joe, it was imperative the investigation be contained.’

  ‘Contained?’ said Joe, the irony of Simba's words apparent to all in the room. ‘Contained, Leo?’ he repeated. ‘Seriously, do you hear what you are saying? Your investigation was so far out of control that you depended on the three of us to do it for you. All this cloak and dagger bullshit, all this “with or without you” crap you have been dishing out for over six months.’ Joe shook his head. ‘Marco De Lorenzo is a case in point. If you wanted us to learn the truth, why in the hell did you hide him from us? He knew that car was empty, he understood that Walker wasn't dead … and you needed us to work this out also, for David's investigation to blossom into something all clean and shiny and new. So why hold the man back, why have us running around like headless chickens with nothing better to do than chase shadows around the coop?’

  ‘Oh come on, Joe,’ said Simba then, his voice now tinged with frustration. ‘You know it wasn't as simple as all that. We held Marco De Lorenzo back for a myriad of reasons – because we feared if he talked he might put his life in danger, because we needed time to investigate the collision and confirm the presence of accelerants that obliterated any chance of us identifying any human DNA.’

  ‘That wasn't in the police report,’ said Joe.

  Leo rolled his eyes and held out his hands in a gesture that said, Well, fancy that! ‘We're the FB fucking I, Joe. We get to pull rank if we want to. And you're forgetting one important fact, my friend, that even if you had interviewed De Lorenzo earlier, even if you had worked out that Walker wasn't in that car, wouldn't you still have concluded that Walker was dead but that Hunt had killed him elsewhere and covered up his murder by staging the head-on collision? Wouldn't you just have used De Loren
zo's eyewitness report to confirm your estimation of Hunt as the true culprit in all of this?’

  David looked at Joe. Leo was right.

  ‘We're sorry for how that played out, Joe,’ Simba continued. ‘We're sorry for what this mess did to Marco De Lorenzo and his brother. But it was Walker, not the FBI, who pulled them into this case in the first place.’ Leo's eyes flicked toward the clock in the corner. ‘But if you want to use what's left of our time here to beat me up then …’

  Joe shook his head, his cheeks still flushed with resentment. But then he dragged his hands from the table and sat back in his chair, the gesture signalling to David that it was okay to move on.

  David turned back to Carlson. ‘So Walker was dead, which meant you faced even bigger problems, because after that, you and Sienna couldn't keep track of his movements.’

  ‘We were facing off against a ghost, yes.’ Carlson resettled into the story. ‘So we were left with no choice but to bide our time until Walker made his next move, which we believed would be his and Davenport's attempt to exit the country.’

  ‘So you put the airports on high alert,’ said Sara.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And kept Special Officer Loxley in her post at Davenport's surgery despite the fact you thought her cover had been compromised.’

  Carlson took a breath. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But they weren't about to run, at least not yet,’ she said.

  Carlson did not answer.

  ‘And that was one of your biggest mistakes, because you underestimated how far Walker was willing to go to protect himself, and exact revenge on those stupid enough to cross him.’

  Carlson hesitated before agreeing. ‘As we have explained, we seriously underestimated them.’

  ‘And the next thing you knew, Eliza was dead and Sienna was arrested …’

  Carlson took a breath. ‘We had no choice but to bring you guys in to finish the job for us,’ Carlson finally admitted before looking at David. ‘It wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, we suspected we'd need help before Eliza was murdered, which is why I introduced myself to you that night at the banquet.’ He ran his fingers through his short brown hair. ‘Believe me, we thought on it long and hard – if there had been any other way …’