Keeper

by Greg Rucka

  “We’re being crowded,” Sella said. “But we’ll manage.”

  “I want a general briefing for eight-thirty in the morning,” I told Trent. “Where we can make introductions, set up the pecking order, so on. Can you arrange that?”

  He nodded and made another note on his pad. “I already discussed the importance of a briefing with Ms. Selby, so she’s prepared for the eventuality.”

  I got up and started walking around the room. “This is the only place Dr. Romero will speak solo,” I said. “If there’s a try, my instinct is it’ll be here.”

  Trent pointed to a door in the comer. “That leads to the kitchen. No refreshments are being served, so we’ll lock it down before her talk begins.”

  About five feet from the doors into the room were a series of switches mounted on the wall, sliders and buttons. One of the buttons was square and red, and I pressed it.

  All the lights went out, and the room was completely dark.

  “Well, that’s definitely not good,” I heard Bridgett say. I pressed it again.

  “We need to cover this up,” I said, when the lights came back on.

  Trent made another note. “Anything else you can think of, Atticus?” he asked.

  “Couple more things. First of all, I want a designated watcher outside each event Dr. Romero attends. Make sure that person has photographs of Barry, Rich, and Crowell, and make sure the only job they have is to look for those faces. I want to know if they show.

  “Second, at each event Romero attends, nobody carries anything in. They check their bags, purses, whatever. Additionally, I want all attendees run through a metal detector.”

  “We’ll be doing spot searches at the registration desk,’’ Trent said. “That’s where the metal detector will be set up.”

  “Then get somebody with a hand-held,” I said. “No way I want anything snuck into a room where Romero is speaking.”

  “We can’t demand that people check their bags,” he objected. “Too much flack.”

  “I don’t give a shit about flack, Elliot.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. But how we look does matter. My agency is the marquee name here.”

  “Listen. I don’t give a shit,” I said again. “It’s my principal.”

  “We should be certain,” Sella told Trent.

  “We can search bags,” Trent said. “But we cannot check them. Logistically, that’s more than we can handle.”

  “Thorough searches,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. He checked his watch and then looked at me. “Is that all?”

  “One last thing. I want a room for Romero to stay in while she’s not speaking. Nothing fancy, just someplace she can be comfortable until she’s on.”

  Sella smiled. “We’ve already taken care of that. The command post is in a large suite, and one of the adjoining rooms has already been designated for Dr. Romero.”

  “Then that’s it,” I said to Trent. “I’ll have Natalie phone you tonight with any additions and details on Romero’s transport.”

  Trent closed his leather portfolio and rose, rebuttoning his jacket. “We’ll see you tomorrow, then. The apartment should be clear by now, so if you want to move the doctor, go right ahead.”

  “We will. Thanks for the loan.”

  Trent nodded. He knew he was doing me a favor; we both knew eventually I’d be asked to pay it back.

  Sella got up and we shook once more, then he took Bridgett’s hand and crooned, “I hope we’ll be seeing each other again.”

  “I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow,” Bridgett said.

  He released her hand, saying, “Until then.”

  We watched them go. She was paying, it seemed to me, particular attention to Sella as he departed.

  “Cute ass on that one,” she said to me after the door shut.

  “Tomorrow you can ask for a close-up.”

  “Tomorrow maybe I will.”

  We headed out of the room, taking the stairs down to the lobby. “What’s the deal with the camera?” I asked.

  “Sentinel was hired to protect an oil exec,” Bridgett told me. “Agra and Donnovan was hired by said exec’s wife shortly thereafter to prove the gentleman was engaging in extramarital recreation. This was at the end of my apprenticeship, before I got licensed, about a year ago. Anyway, I got pictures of this fellow romping with a brunette at a hotel in Boston.”

  “You beat Sentinel security?” I asked.

  “It took time and money and me dressing up in a maid’s uniform, but yes. Rigged a couple of distractions and managed to get in and click away. And on my way out I ran into Natalie and another guard.”

  “And she took the camera?”

  “No, the other one did. Stomped it to pieces. Took the whole thing very personally, unlike Natalie, who thought it was funny. I don’t think she liked the client.” We were at the garage and she handed the attendant our parking stub. He disappeared to find the car.

  “How much money were you out?”

  Bridgett laughed. “We weren’t. It was all expenses, and we got a bonus for completion.”

  “You lost the pictures.”

  She popped a Life Saver into her mouth. “Who said there was only one camera, stud?”

  Dale drove us to the safe apartment, with Rubin in the front seat and Felice sandwiched in her Kevlar between Natalie and myself. The drive took thirty minutes, with Dale winding his way along the streets. The apartment was in the Upper West Side, only two blocks from where Alison lived. When I thought about that, I felt the emptiness again, and felt too the rage that had possessed me to smash a phone against a wall.

  Bridgett and I had returned to her place shortly after five. We’d found Dr. Romero ready to go.

  “You’re coming along, aren’t you?” Felice asked me.

  “I’ll be riding with you.”

  Romero gathered her stuff together and Natalie gave me an I-told-you-so look. I shrugged, then arranged to meet Bridgett back at her place before eight.

  The apartment was on the ground floor on a quiet street, and we were met by a Sentinel employee who handed Natalie the keys and showed her how to disarm the alarm. It was nicely furnished inside, classic styling that oozed money and power, designed to make Sentinel’s clients feel as if they were at their new home-away-from-home. The air had a slightly antiseptic tang from the rushed cleaning it had gotten before being turned over to us.

  All five of us made a quick walk-through. The kitchen was fully outfitted, all the cupboards crammed with canned goods and other foodstuffs. The two bedrooms were small, each decorated with classic prints of English country foxhunts. We ended our tour in the living room. It wasn’t particularly spacious, but it was certainly comfortable, and there were no bloodstains on the carpet. Dr. Romero sat at the desk there and went back to her papers. Dale asked, “We’re all sleeping here?”

  “You three and Felice will,” I said. “I’ll be back here early tomorrow before the transport.”

  “I’ll need to go home before then,” he told me. “Get a change of clothes and some stuff.”

  Rubin said, “I’d like some clean underwear myself.”

  I looked at Natalie and said, “You willing to go down to just two for a while tonight?”

  “That’s our minimum,” she said. “We’re good here. The glass is bulletproof, the doors are almost unbreachable, and we’ve got everything we could want.”

  “Dale, you go home, get what you need, and get back here by ten tonight,” I said. “Rubin’ll go after you get back.” I asked Natalie what she wanted to do about herself.

  “What time are you planning on getting here tomorrow morning?” she asked.

  “I was thinking seven or so.”

  “Make it six and I’ll run home, then meet you back here.”

  “Deal,” I said. “One other thing before I go. Give your father a call, see if we can get Dr. Romero a Kevlar dress shirt for tomorrow.”

  Felice looked up from where she was writing. “I do
n’t want to wear the vest at the conference.”

  “This’ll look and feel mostly like an ordinary shirt,” I told her.

  “Mostly?”

  “Well, it’s not silk, let’s put it that way.”

  She stared at me, unsmiling, and said, “If you think that’s best.”

  “Will white be okay?” Natalie asked her.

  “I have a choice?”

  “A rainbow of colors to choose from,” she said. “White will be fine, thank you.”

  Natalie looked at me and said, “They actually do a nice blouse, believe it or not. I’ll have some options brought by for her to look at.”

  “Fashion show,” Rubin snorted.

  I noted the phone number of the apartment, told everyone I’d see them tomorrow, and left.

  Bridgett said, “The thing is, I can’t find anything to tie these directly to Crowell.”

  I looked at her over the coffee table in her living room, then looked back at the pile of letters she had set there. Yellow tabs of Post-Its stuck out from various letters, and she had filled several pages of a college rule notebook with her notes on what she had found. The apartment was dark now, and the only light came from a lamp in the comer. “Then we’re just not seeing it,” I said.

  She fussed with her nose ring, then sat back in the easy chair. “Well, stud, I’m open to suggestions.”

  I looked at the piles. “How are these arranged?”

  “The big pile, those are from organizations other than SOS. Anything that claimed affiliation with some right-to-life group. Not necessarily threats in the SOS sense, but possibly dangerous. The second one, medium there, that’s SOS.”

  I looked at the pile she meant. It was easily three hundred pages. “All of it?”

  “If it had the emblem, you know, that cross and barbed-wire thing, or the letterhead, or mention of either Crowell or the organization, it went into that pile.” She arched her hips in the chair, pulling the tin of Altoids from her back pocket and then relaxing again. She dropped three of them in her mouth, one after the other. “Last pile, that’s just the letters that didn’t have any clear association.”

  “And the latest ones, those are in that pile?”

  “Bingo.”

  I picked up that pile, found the handwritten transcript of the letter Fowler had read to me, then the two others of the same style and read them again, in the order received. ‘Dear Butcher Bitch, two down, one to go. Not twins, not triplets. Murdered babies, punished mothers. I will have Justice.’ The only SOS connection was in the letter writer’s desire for justice, a sentiment Crowell had shared with the crowd outside of the clinic.

  And in that crowd, anybody could have written these letters, I thought.

  The answer clicked fast and solid and I knew, intuitively knew, the answer was correct. At the same time, I realized exactly how much trouble we were in, all of us, me, the squad, and most of all, Felice Romero.

  “What? What are you thinking?” Bridgett asked.

  “It’s not Crowell,” I said. “We’ve been blind, we’ve been focusing on him because he’s big and he’s using the conference, and we haven’t even considered that the threats could be coming from somebody who doesn’t care about Common Ground at all.”

  “Then why try to kill Felice?”

  “You’re assuming that Katie’s murder was an accident. What if it wasn’t, what if somebody was gunning for her specifically?”

  “But killing Katie serves only one purpose, stud; it keeps Romero from attending Common Ground.”

  “But it doesn’t,” I said. “1 mean, look, Katie’s dead and Felice is still going.”

  “Then what’s the motive?”

  “Revenge.” I handed her the letters. “We’re looking for a man who knows a woman who had an abortion. This is all about revenge. Why else kill Katie?”

  Bridgett read the letters, marking them with her black felt-tip pen. For five minutes we didn’t speak, me thinking of the possibilities, and Bridgett trying to find a hole in my logic. She set down the pen finally, took a handful of her hair, and tugged, saying, “Fuck a duck.”

  “No Crowell,” I said.

  “This doesn’t rule him out,” Bridgett objected. “He could still be connected to this.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s got to be some guy who’s wife or girlfriend or mother or whoever had an abortion.”

  “That doesn’t absolve SOS or Crowell,” Bridgett said, and her voice climbed slightly, pressing her point.

  “Look at the letters,” I said. “There’s no reference to the organization. On these other ones,” and I pointed at the medium-sized pile, “you said there was the SOS emblem, some sort of signifier. But on these new ones, nothing.”

  She pushed her hair back into place, then began gnawing on her bottom lip. “It explains the letter at the clinic yesterday,” she conceded. “The writer was shooting at Katie, not Romero, so he knew Romero would get the letter.”

  “Makes the writer and the shooter one and the same,” I said. “And that goes to revenge. He’s telling Felice what he’s doing, because if she doesn’t know why he killed Katie, why he’s going to kill her, there’s no point. He writes these letters to let her know.”

  “But they’re obtuse, stud. I mean, if that’s what this guy wants, why not just say, ‘Dr. Romero, you killed my wife’s baby, and I’m going to kill you’?”

  “He wants her to suffer. Why else kill Katie?”

  “You murdered my child, I’ll murder yours?” she said. “Yes.”

  Once again, she reread the letters. “So you’re saying that we’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” I pulled my glasses off and rubbed my eyes.

  “So you’ve been trying to protect Dr. Romero from a threat that’s coming from a different direction entirely?” I nodded.

  “You’re fucked,” she said softly.

  I nodded again.

  “Okay,” Bridgett said. “Let’s work the problem, right? If it’s revenge, then the abortion in question had to be through the clinic. The author has claimed two bodies, and we know one of them is Katie, so the other is who?”

  “Not Romero,” I said.

  “No, not Romero. Not if your theory is correct, anyway. He won’t claim her until she’s dead. It’s got to be the mother, then, right? The woman who had the abortion. He’s killed the mother for having the abortion, and he’s killed Katie because Romero performed the abortion, to let her know what it felt like.”

  “So it’s a question of finding the man who impregnated a woman who went to the Women’s LifeCare Clinic in the last year or so and who had an abortion,” I said. “That can’t be too hard, right? Only one, maybe two thousand candidates?”

  “No, we’re looking for a dead woman,” Bridgett said. “And these letters started only a couple of weeks ago, so it’s got to be a patient that died fairly recently.” She got up and went to the phone on the kitchen counter. “I’ll call Dr. Faisall, see if I can get access to the patient files.”

  “It may not be worth it,” I said. “Common Ground is tomorrow, Bridgett.”

  Without stopping her dialing, she said, “You’re being awfully defeatist.” Then she was talking to Dr. Faisall, explaining our theory and asking if she could please look at the patient records of the last few months. The inactive records, Bridgett specified, people who were no longer coming in for one reason or another.

  I put my glasses back on and then my pager went off. I silenced it and held it up for Bridgett to see. She nodded, told Dr. Faisall she would be by the clinic in the morning, then hung up and stepped out of the way for me at the phone.

  It was Fowler. There was significant background noise over the phone, multiple voices and what sounded like radios crackling.

  “Atticus, is Romero secure?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “Barry lost his tail,” Fowler said. “He went to see Crowell, left there, and headed to Grand Central. T
ook the shuttle to Times Square. NYPD lost him near Port Authority. We think he’s left the city.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “No, we don’t. A bench warrant’s been issued, and there’s an APB out on him. I interviewed Crowell after we heard Barry had bugged, and he was convincingly surprised. Crowell told me that he had fired Barry.”

  “Hold on,” I said, and relayed the information to Bridgett.

  “Ask Fowler if he knows about Barry’s personal life,” she said.

  I ran that one at him and Scott said, “What? Why?”

  “He ever been married? Have a girlfriend, siblings, anything?”

  “No girlfriend,” Fowler said. “No known acquaintances except Crowell. He’s got two sisters in Tennessee. We think that may be where he’s headed. Look, I’ve got to go, coordinate this thing with NYPD. It’s a monkey-show over here.”

  “Sounds like it was from the beginning. You never should have lost him.”

  “Fuck you,” he said cheerfully, and banged the phone down.

  Bridgett had gone down the hall, and now came back, fastening a shoulder holster into place, a Sig Sauer P220 now riding under her right arm. She reached for her jacket, saying, “Let’s go.”

  “You think we’re going to find Barry?” I said.

  Bridgett shook her head. “But I can think of a good place to start looking.”

  She parked off Fulton, about a block from Romero’s apartment. The streetlights shone on all the people out for a Friday night walk to the South Street Seaport, holding hands or clustered in groups that we had to step around.

  “I want to see the apartment,” Bridgett had said once we were in the Porsche.

  “The police have—”

  “I know,” she said. “But I haven’t.”

  “We don’t know if Barry is the shooter,” I said.

  “I doubt he is. But the shooter backed up the pipes, under our current theory. I want to see if he left anything behind.”

  “Anything that the police and FBI might have missed, you mean,” I said.

  “Do you have a better idea?” she shot back.

  “We could go to Crowell’s and beat him within an inch of his life,” I said.

  “No, we couldn’t. You’d end up in jail, and what would Romero do without you?”