What Lies Behind

by J. T. Ellison

  Threats were still lingering in the air, the Teterboro cops glaring and bristling. When the state police arrived, they would make the call. Xander had a feeling he knew how this was going to go down—the cuffs would go back on, he’d be transported, arraigned, bail set. He would have to call Sam to come get him; Chalk didn’t have the means to spring him, not yet.

  Not how he wanted things to go today.

  Finally, Xander and Chalk were escorted to Denon’s isolated room; the door closed quickly behind them. Denon shot a hard glance at the handle as the lock thunked home, but shrugged and took a deep breath. He was a handsome man, foppish blond hair, fit and trim, very British schoolboy grows up and does well for himself. He was charming and smart and, despite the attempt on his life, was pale but composed. Xander thought he was handling the attempted assassination with a great deal of calm.

  Denon pointed to the ceiling, then deliberately turned his back to the camera. They joined him in the middle of the room, a scrum against the digital intrusion. “Who was the shooter?” he asked quietly.

  Xander shook his head. “We don’t know yet. There will be an investigation, obviously, which is out of our hands now. We’ll try to keep it quiet, but there’s no telling how the airport police will work with the New Jersey cops. This could be all over the news in twenty minutes.”

  “It’s already leaking out.” Denon showed them a tweet from a local account, someone who’d been at Teterboro and took pictures of the dead man dangling off the roof. “It’s only a matter of time before they connect this with me.”

  Xander straightened, put his arms behind his back, parade rest. “I apologize, sir. I know you wanted to keep your visit and our involvement quiet. This isn’t what we had in mind. I am fully prepared to take responsibility for the situation and keep your name out of it, if at all possible.”

  Denon gave him an incredulous look. “You just saved my life, and you’re apologizing and offering to take the fall? Bloody hell, man, you’re my hero. If you hadn’t acted so quickly, I’d be on that tarmac with a bullet in me.” He clapped Xander on the shoulder. “Thank you. Both of you. You acted in my best interest, and I refuse to let them prosecute you, in my name, or in yours. We’ll get this situation straightened, you have my word.”

  Xander nodded. “Thank you, sir. Mr. Worthington will get you back on track here shortly. I’m sure the police will need a statement from you, so I’m assuming it will be at least an hour before you’ll be able to leave.”

  Denon’s schoolboy face split into a winning grin, and Xander felt a measure of relief when he said, “To be honest, Mr. Whitfield, I think I’d rather stick by your side for the time being. I don’t want to see you get railroaded for doing your job. And I want to know who the hell just tried to kill me.”

  Chapter 13

  Georgetown

  O Street

  Thomas Cattafi’s apartment

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the big guns to arrive, wearing their space-age polymer suits, hooked into oxygen. Sam and Fletcher were taken through a portable decontamination unit, had blood samples drawn and were told to stay put. Phones, her purse, shoes, everything, was taken away.

  Sam had an awful sense of déjà vu; she’d been through something similar a few months back, when a crazed man had used a homegrown biological weapon to gas the Foggy Bottom Metro station and she’d been sitting at ground zero at the George Washington University Hospital waiting to be cleared to go home.

  She pushed the thought away. No sense revisiting the past until she knew what she was dealing with. Or whom.

  Thomas Cattafi. She didn’t know the name—no reason she should, really, if he was a fourth-year M.D./Ph.D. student. Two years of med school, four years of specialized research, then back to the med school side to finish the clinical rotations. A hellish tract, one few students wanted, and fewer survived. Sam was only working with the first-year forensic pathology students, the dewy-eyed youngsters who thought everything about med school was cool. Soon enough, they’d become hardened and cynical, like everyone else.

  What in the hell was a student doing with a refrigerator full of pathogens? Even if he was an M.D./Ph.D. candidate, there was no reason to have the items at his home. They belonged in a lab. Cattafi was involved in something bad, that was for sure. Something this woman, Amanda Souleyret, had brought to his door?

  And what about the scene felt so familiar?

  Since she had a few moments of leisure, she thought back to the Hometown Killer files, the autopsy photos, ran everything through her head. Two of the women in the series had been stabbed—Terri Snow from Topeka and Jan Tovey from San Francisco. Blood everywhere, the women’s bodies found in the bedroom. The Snow crime scene was the one that struck her as familiar.

  You’re reaching, Samantha.

  She wanted to call Baldwin, demand a briefing, but he was on a plane. There was nothing he could do for her right now. She’d shot him an email before they took her phone, told him to get back to her the moment he landed. She had a problem, and he needed to be secure before he reached out. The last thing she needed was someone capturing the message and leaking this to the press. Hopefully they’d be cleared before he started burning up the wires.

  She watched the HAZMAT team move about, smelled the intense scent of rain coming. Worried, but just a little, about whether she’d been exposed to something horrible. The refrigerator had been empty of wine and unplugged, so the pathogens weren’t at the right temperature, nor were they specially packaged. It was almost as if Cattafi had been working on something, been interrupted and hurriedly shut the pathogens away in the refrigerator. Forgotten to plug it in.

  Or someone had purposely unplugged it.

  When and for how long it had been turned off was anyone’s guess—it had its own power source, so they’d have to track all that down, too.

  She hadn’t touched anything, and all the discs and vials she’d seen looked like they’d been properly handled and were sealed, except for the one that was cracked, leaking and smelling awful. But one never knew. A list of hemorrhagic diseases ran through her mind, countdowns, worried doctors, isolation chambers, right into visions of blood gushing from various orifices, leaking from fissures cracking open in her porcelain skin, until she shook her head to physically stop the thoughts.

  There was nothing to be done right now. Everyone who’d come in contact with Cattafi for the past few weeks would have to be examined, all the crime scene investigators tested. This was a mess of epic proportion.

  The autopsy of Amanda Souleyret was postponed, her body in isolation, until they knew more about what was happening. There was no sense infecting the morgue if it could be avoided.

  She soothed herself with a single thought—if Cattafi had been symptomatic, they’d have already heard from the hospital. Went back to worrying about a more immediate problem.

  The pack of vials and discs had seemed undisturbed, but she’d noticed there was a single spot in the tray of vials that was empty. She hoped like hell there wasn’t something missing, something the killer had taken.

  And with that thought, the scene began to make more sense.

  She was wrong. There was nothing familiar here. Cattafi had been targeted because someone knew about his little lab.

  She watched the HAZMAT team work, moving slowly, like they were underwater. Felt a bit like she was underwater herself, isolated and alone, though Fletcher was with her.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  “Mmm-hmm. Annoyed more than anything.”

  “This is turning into something more than it first seemed.”

  He gave her a sharp glance. “With you, it always does.” But there was humor in his voice. “Entertain me. I’m bored.”

  “You’re joking, right? What do you want me to do, tell you a bedtime story?”

  “While that ha
s its own compelling set of responses, I was thinking more along the lines of what sort of work Amanda Souleyret might be doing that’s drawn the attention of the FBI.”

  “Oh, it’s speculation you want. I’m good at that.” She settled herself more comfortably on the table they’d been given to sit on. “All right. You’ll find out soon enough. Souleyret is undercover FBI.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She was working for a company called Helix.”

  “Explain.”

  “Helix is a huge European firm with offices in several countries that run all kinds of private investigations, from industrial espionage to pharmaceutical investigations. They also work on pharmaceutical espionage. Trademark infringements, ripping off formularies, passing off generics as the real thing. There’s a more...physical component to what they do, as well. An entire division of close protection, K and R—kidnap and ransom—the whole gamut. It’s like what Xander and his buddy are doing, only on a much bigger scale.”

  “Like the Pinkertons?”

  She smiled, imagining Xander and Chalk in suits and fedoras. “Something like that. Perhaps a little less gunplay, a little more computer-driven research. But yes. They’re essentially detectives, and protectors of the realm.”

  “And whichever realm pays the best gets their undying loyalty?”

  “For the term of the contract.”

  “So what’s an FBI asset doing there?”

  “It’s a great place for her, really. They have unlimited funds and unlimited access all across Europe. Until we know exactly what project she was working on, we won’t know how they benefited her, but until she got herself dead, she had it good. Xander and Chalk, they’re just starting out. Competing with a behemoth company like Helix is hard.”

  “And yet they’re going to try.”

  “Some people want more discreet protection. That’s going to be their niche.”

  “You’re good with that? Him being all heroic and stuff?”

  She hesitated before answering, and he nodded, touched her knee. “Don’t worry. You don’t need to tell me. I can see you’re worried about it, though.”

  “Close protection is dangerous, especially if they start working overseas. I don’t necessarily want to see him go back into Iraq or Afghanistan. Everything that happened with Eddie Donovan, the fratricide, it messed him up. That’s all.”

  “Then we should make sure to find him work here. I’ll put the word out, if you like.”

  She gave him that heartbreaking smile of hers. “Thank you, Fletcher. I appreciate that.”

  Jesus, no matter how much in love, in lust or whatever he was with another woman, the sight of Samantha Owens at full wattage still made his gonads clench. He decided he liked the reaction. To hell with it not being proper for friends to get those feelings.

  He cleared his throat. “All right. Another question. Did Souleyret bring the pathogens into the country with her? And if so, how the hell would she transport them? If she worked in France, she had to go through customs somewhere when she got over here. How in the world could they miss this?”

  “Maybe a private flight to a private airport? The last time I traveled overseas, security sent the bags through the scanner as usual, with no special scrutiny on my personal stuff, even though I had a bottle of vitamins in there. It wouldn’t be hard to package these as some sort of medicine and slip them through. You can take anything on a flight if you have a prescription for it, or it looks like it belongs. We’re sort of on an honor system.”

  “Her bags would still have to be checked at the private airports, but you have a point. The question is, where did she come in, and when?”

  She grinned at him again, teeth flashing white. “I guess that’s what you’re going to have to figure out, aren’t you? Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  “And you’re not going to help at all, are you?”

  “Hey, I’m not Nancy Drew. I’m the mind of reason here. I do the science. The mystery is yours to sort out.”

  “And sort it I will. Look who’s here at last.” He waved to Lonnie Hart, who pulled his black Caprice to the curb and waved back. Fletcher was glad to see him. Hart had been his partner for years. They’d been detectives together for almost eight, partners for six. Hart had a keen mind, a laconic attitude and an ongoing love affair with his weight bench. When Fletcher moved up the ladder, he’d brought Hart along with him. Hart’s promotion was Fletcher’s only stipulation to accepting the lieutenant position.

  Hart gave them an ironic salute and went to find the head of the HAZMAT team, a buxom woman named Sophie Lewis. They talked together for a moment, then he gave Fletcher a thumbs-up.

  Sam knocked into his shoulder. “That looks like good news.”

  And it was.

  Chapter 14

  DISASTER AVERTED, PROBABLY, at least for the time being. Field tests were negative for live, dangerous pathogens, but they were asked to stay in isolation for the time being. People would stop by every once in a while to update them. Feeding time at the zoo. Fletcher was going mad just sitting here, watching. He wanted to help. Even with a tentative all clear, he needed to do something to take his mind off the idea of tiny invisible razorlike creatures multiplying in his bloodstream, inching him toward a slow and certain death.

  The list of pathogens grew as the morning wore on, bacteria and viruses and diseases that were deadly and transmissible, all mixed together unsecured in the Georgetown apartment. There were names Fletcher was familiar with, or at least could puzzle out: Clostridium botulinum, Salmonella enteritidis, diarrheagenic Escherichia coli, SARS coronavirus, HIV. And a few he couldn’t, specifically something Sam said was a generic hemorrhagic flavivirus—as if there was anything generic about hemorrhagic viruses—plus a mosquito-borne alphavirus called chikungunya, and something in a nasty pink solution with a handwritten label: Gransef. No one had heard of that one before.

  Fletcher was livid. How his crime scene techs had missed the refrigerator of doom, as he’d mentally dubbed it, was lost on him. It had taken Sam all of ten minutes to find it. There was going to be a shitstorm back at headquarters. In the meantime, he needed to find out what the hell Thomas Cattafi was doing with all these pathogens in his hidden refrigerator, and why he and Amanda Souleyret had been attacked.

  And what vial, if any, was missing from the lot. The vials were in a plastic carrier, and one slot was open. When Sam had pointed it out, his stomach dropped to his knees. That lone emptiness freaked him out more than anything.

  The meeting at State had been pushed back to noon. Sam had the day off but asked a crime scene tech to relay a message to her TA, Stephanie, to handle anything that might come up during the afternoon. Though unable to return to work, her insatiable curiosity was keeping her mood buoyed. He could see she was starting to chafe at being left out, like him, as the HAZMAT team began retrieving the pathogens from Cattafi’s apartment, but she watched the proceedings with bright eyes.

  She’d never last at Georgetown. He’d been surprised when she accepted the position in the first place, surprised she’d agreed to upend her life and move to D.C. If there was ever a woman who should have a badge, a lifeline into investigations, it was her. Her passion for the job was clear, and while he had no doubt she was passionate about teaching, too, he couldn’t imagine it could be nearly as fun as what they’d stumbled into this morning.

  At least Baldwin had talked her into consulting for the FBI. She had a gift, and Fletcher was happy someone was going to be able to use it.

  Towering clouds were gathering briskly over the Potomac. With heart-stopping suddenness, the sun disappeared. He could hear gentle rumbles of thunder in the distance. Watching the curtain rise on the show, he understood how the ancients looked at storms as a form of the gods arguing. He could do with a little divine interference himself
.

  He needed to get cleared so he could go over to George Washington University Hospital and see how Thomas Cattafi was faring. The folks at GW had been warned to treat him as a HAZMAT, though by now, with all the people who’d come into contact with him, if he’d fucked up and mishandled any of the pathogens in his apartment, they were all screwed. The same went for Souleyret’s body—the morgue had been cautioned to treat her autopsy with the utmost of care.

  Always something, Fletcher thought.

  A tech came with their phones, handed them off. They were still wrapped in plastic. “They’re ringing off the hook. Deal with it.”

  Sam immediately grabbed hers and started listening to messages. Fletcher did the same—a call from Armstrong, chewing his ass out for getting exposed to this shit and tying up the investigation, and by the way, I hope you’re okay; Hart, on his way over; Jordan, his I think I can safely call her my girlfriend, wanting to know if he was free for lunch on Friday, when she arrived back in town; and oddly, his ex-wife, Felicia, who rarely reached out, asking if he could take Tad this weekend.

  Nothing that helped the case.

  When he finished, he saw Sam was on the phone, eyes averted. She glanced his way, then hung up. He leaned over to her. “Who are you talking to? No, let me guess. Xander.”

  She gave him a crooked grin. “If you must know, that was Amado. He was going to post the woman in an hour. I asked if I could stop by and watch. He agreed to wait until we finish the meeting at the State Department first. It will take them a while to set up the precautions, anyway. They’ve done some preliminary blood work to see if anything stands out. So far, she’s showing clean.”

  Fletcher sighed in relief. “Good. Hopefully she hadn’t gotten into anything. I’ll go with you. I want both our eyes on this.”