Shakedown

by Joel Goldman

  Wendy wasn’t the only complication. The anticipation of being with Kate butted heads with my confused feelings for Joy, who’d reappeared, not as the woman I’d fallen in love with or the one whom I’d stopped loving, but as someone else, someone who’d come back to me when I needed her, reborn and not asking for anything in return.

  I called Wendy, hoping she would answer, tell me she was fine, and make fun of me for my fears. I’d find a way to tease her in return and apologize for my gaffe with Kate. We’d both laugh and I would stop shaking.

  Wendy didn’t answer and neither did any of the others. The messages I left were like a net I’d thrown into the water. It was wet and empty when I hauled it in.

  Ruby was glad to see me, shaking her short tail faster than I shook on a bad day. I let her in the car and rolled my window down. She parked herself in my lap, front paws on the door, nose in the wind. Of all the things I needed at the moment, a dog that I had to drop off and pick up at day care wasn’t on the list. But she imposed a normalcy on my life, making me responsible for her, forcing me to adjust my needs to accommodate hers.

  I had never done that with Joy and Wendy. They always had to adapt to me, the city where I was assigned, the hours I kept, the things I couldn’t tell them about what I did. I could explain all of that to them and they would acquiesce, but Ruby was not impressed. She wanted to eat, play, and sleep and not necessarily in that order. It was my job to jump through her hoops and I had to admit that even with everything else that had fallen in my lap this week, I liked my new job.

  Marty Grisnik was parked in front of my house when I got home. He got out of his car and followed me into the garage just as I had followed Jill Rice into hers. For a moment I had a hollow feeling in my gut that he was going to tell me Wendy was dead the same way I had told Jill about her husband. I started breathing again when he didn’t.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Grisnik said.

  “I left you a message at your office.”

  “I’ve been out.”

  “You hear from Troy yet?”

  “From him and Special Agent in Charge Ben Yates and that jackleg U.S. Attorney Josh Ziegler and my chief. The only person I haven’t heard from is the pope and that’s probably only because my line has been busy and there’s not enough of my ass left to chew out to make it worth His Holiness’s while.”

  “I’m really sorry. How bad is the fallout?”

  Grisnik shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. I’ve got broad shoulders. The chief will yank my chain. I may end up with a nastygram in my personnel file, maybe get a few days unpaid vacation, but that’s it. I know where too many bodies are buried for them to bust my chops too bad.”

  “You’re a standup guy, Grisnik. I appreciate it.”

  He raised his hands. “Don’t appreciate so much. I did what you told me. I gave you up in a heartbeat, told them it was all your idea. My chief will give me some cover even if he has to take his shots at me in public, but you’ve got no friends on your side of the aisle.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “Yeah. Figured it wouldn’t come as any surprise to you but I wanted to give you a heads-up anyway.”

  “I appreciate that, too, but you didn’t have to drive all the way out here.”

  “I like the drive. Lets me clear my head. See what I’m missing out here in cupcake land. I did some nosing around with some people I know up at Leavenworth. Word is Tommy Rice was done as a favor.”

  “Who asked for the favor?”

  “I didn’t get a name, only that it went with a badge. Sounds like your runaway agent has a long reach.”

  “The guy who did it, he’s been charged?”

  Grisnik snorted. “What, are you kidding? They don’t know who did it. They only know why it happened. It’s going down as a suicide. Plain and simple.”

  Jill Rice was right. Her husband wouldn’t have killed himself. She wouldn’t be comforted with the knowledge that Colby had orchestrated his murder. If Colby had Wendy, she was in greater danger than I had thought possible. Knowing who your enemy is gives you a chance. She wouldn’t see Colby’s betrayal until it was too late. I shook Grisnik’s hand.

  “Thanks.”

  “You keep saying that, you’re going to wear it out. Anything new on your daughter?”

  “Nothing. I don’t even know where to look.”

  “What about your agent?”

  “Same story.”

  “I’ve got a few people I can tap. Maybe I’ll come up with something. Make my day to find your girl and collar a dirty FBI agent all in the same day. Go feed your dog. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  I had just finished feeding Ruby when the doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. It was six fifty-five. Walking from the kitchen through the entry hall toward the front door, I could see the driveway through the dining room windows. Joy had parked her car there and was ringing my doorbell. I quickened my pace, wondering why she was here, figuring that if she had news about Wendy, she would have called.

  I checked my watch again. It was six fifty-six. Kate was astoundingly punctual. She would be here in less than 240 seconds. I had already screwed up my introduction of Kate to Wendy and was on the verge of repeating my mistake with Joy.

  I couldn’t escape the ?ushed feeling sweeping across my face. I was about to get caught cheating on my wife even though I told myself I couldn’t be cheating if the divorce she had asked for was going to be final in five days and if I’d put my romantic plans on the shelf until I found Wendy. My logic didn’t explain the heat under my collar.

  I opened the door. Joy had cleaned up. Her hair was down, her lips shined with fresh gloss, and she was wearing a perfume that was as intoxicating as one of those umbrella drinks that went down easy and packed a wallop you didn’t feel until it was too late. She was wearing cocoa-colored linen slacks and a creamy scoop-neck camisole with a matching sweater tied around her neck that showed off new definition in her arms. She was holding a bag of Chinese carryout in one hand and a dog leash in the other. I pointed to the dog on the other end of the leash.

  “Roxy?”

  “I thought the girls should meet.”

  Roxy saw Ruby and bolted from Joy’s grasp before I could answer. They sniffed, bonded, and raced through the house, tangling in the leash, tumbling across the ?oor, and scrambling to their feet to do it again.

  “Mission accomplished,” I said.

  “I couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening with Wendy. I thought you might have heard something,” Joy said.

  “You’re the first person I would have called if I had heard anything. Actually, I did call you to find out if you’d talked with her girlfriend at work. What was her name? Julie?”

  “I was on my way here when I picked up your message. I finally reached Julie late this afternoon. She said that Wendy was at work yesterday and didn’t say anything to her about going away or about Colby or anything else that seemed unusual and that she hasn’t heard from her since.”

  Julie’s lack of information confirmed my belief that Wendy had left her apartment unexpectedly and probably involuntarily. It was one more piece of bad news, but I didn’t want to add to Joy’s worry.

  “You never know. Wendy might call her. Did you get Julie’s home and cell phone numbers?”

  Joy reached into her pocket and handed me a slip of paper. “I learned a few things about investigating a case from living with you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll check back with her.”

  She looked around and past me into the house. “Are you going to invite me in?”

  I took a deep breath before answering and held it when I saw Kate pull up at the curb. Joy turned around. Kate got out of her car. I shook, a quick shimmy like I was warming up for a Michael Jackson moonwalk.

  Joy covered her face with her free hand. “I am such an idiot. I should have called first.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She waved
her hand. “Don’t be silly. I’m the one who should be sorry. Here we are not knowing where our daughter is and I’m acting like a jealous schoolgirl.”

  She may have been acting like a jealous schoolgirl, but her comment made me feel like Louse of the Year for having a date instead of beating the streets to find Wendy. I retreated to my comfort zone of half-truths.

  “That’s why Kate is here.”

  Joy looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Kate’s helping me with this case. She’s an expert in something called the Facial Action Coding System. It’s a way of telling whether someone is lying. She’s going to help me analyze the evidence.”

  It was the truth even if it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It wouldn’t help to explain that Kate and I had planned to screw our brains out all weekend but that, under the circumstances, I had sel?essly decided to delay that indulgence.

  Kate was standing next to her car sizing up the situation before entering the zone of danger. Joy looked at her again and then at me, embarrassment giving way to rising anger.

  “Is that why she’s wearing that slinky black dress and carrying a bottle of wine and that grocery bag from Dean & DeLuca?”

  Kate was wearing a slinky black dress. She was carrying a bottle of wine and there was a French baguette sticking out of the Dean & DeLuca bag.

  “She probably came straight from her office. We’re going to work through dinner.”

  “That’s what she wears at the office?”

  “It’s not her fault. We made these plans before I knew about Wendy. She still doesn’t know. I haven’t talked to her in a couple of days.”

  There it was. I had admitted making plans with Kate, redefining the term as a synonym for getting laid. Kate’s slinky black dress illustrated my meaning in case Joy had any lingering doubts.

  Joy spit out her response. “You could have called her.”

  “I did. I left her a message. I left you a message. I left messages for half the civilized world. No one answered. Instead they’re all showing up on my doorstep.”

  Joy covered her face again. “Oh my God. I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation. Look at me. I brought my dog and Chinese. She brought wine and bread and God knows what else.”

  Kate began walking toward us. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Stay. We’ll have potluck.”

  Joy tightened her shoulders, held her arms rigidly against her sides, and balled her hands into fists. “You must be kidding! Where’s my damn dog?”

  She elbowed past me into the house, scooped up Roxy, and came out as Kate reached the front steps. Joy’s face had morphed into a ?at, cool, closed-mouth smile. She extended her hand.

  “I’m Jack’s wife, Joy.”

  Kate smiled in turn, accepting her hand. “I’m Kate Scranton.”

  “I hope you can help my husband and me get our daughter back.”

  Kate, her eyebrows raised, looked at me for a clue, then back at Joy. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’m certain you will, but as Jack will tell you, that’s not always good enough.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  “Tell me what’s going on with Wendy,” Kate said.

  “She didn’t go to work today. She doesn’t answer her phone. Joy and I went to her apartment. It looks like she left in a hurry.”

  “She’s an adult. She can do that. It doesn’t mean anything has happened to her.”

  “Her boyfriend, Colby Hudson, has disappeared too, and he left behind some stuff he’s going to have a hard time explaining.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like drugs and cash. Not the sort of thing an FBI agent should leave lying around in plain sight especially when two agents come looking for him to find out why he isn’t answering his phone and why he didn’t show up to take a polygraph.”

  Kate set the bottle of wine and the grocery bag on the front stoop, folded her arms across her chest, and stared at the street, lost in thought. She picked up the wine, marched back to her car, left the wine on the front seat, and retrieved an overnight bag.

  “Change of plans,” she said, when she came back.

  The front door was wide open. Ruby found us and jumped on Kate, who picked her up and traded kisses with her.

  “You really got a dog. I don’t believe it.”

  “It was your idea.”

  Ruby spied the grocery bag and squirmed until Kate let her down so she could sniff at the contents.

  “Chilean sea bass,” Kate said, rescuing our dinner from the dog. “I don’t cook, but I do buy.”

  I took her hand. “I’ve got to find Wendy and I need all the help I can get.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do. Besides, you’ve got a dog now.”

  A black sedan turned down my street before we could go inside. I recognized the government plates before it stopped in front of my house.

  “Why can’t people just return my phone calls?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Take the dinner inside. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Troy Clark stepped out from the passenger side and waited. Ammara Iverson was his driver. She joined him, leaning against the front corner of the car, the three of us forming a triangle. I took my time walking to the curb.

  “I know about Colby and Thomas Rice,” Troy said. “What I don’t know is why you knew before I did. So tell me.”

  There was no reason to leave anything out except my conversations with Ammara. She didn’t need the aggravation. And the more Troy knew, the better Wendy’s chances were, even if she wasn’t his first priority. I explained all of it, starting with the man I thought I’d seen running from Marcellus’s house. I described my unplanned meeting with Marty Grisnik and how I had learned about Oleta Phillips’s disappearance from her brother.

  “That’s when you called Ammara and told her to check the fingerprints on the cash you found in Marcellus’s backyard against Oleta’s fingerprints.”

  Ammara looked at me, nodding. “It’s okay, Jack. He knows.”

  I took a breath and told Troy about almost having dinner with Wendy and Colby and that Colby had told me that he was buying Rice’s house and car.

  “That’s the first you knew about it?” Troy asked, his head cocked to one side, his eyes narrowed as if he expected me to lie.

  “Absolutely. Why?”

  “Colby was dating your daughter. It was pretty serious from what I understand. Buying a house is the kind of thing a guy talks to his girlfriend about. You being the girlfriend’s father and Colby’s squad leader, seems logical that she would have told you about it.”

  Troy’s questions reminded me of a lesson in interrogation that I’d failed to follow. The first thing to come out of your mouth was usually the one thing you’d thought the least about and was, therefore, the one thing that was most likely to bite you in the ass.

  In fact, I did know about the house before I talked with Colby. Wendy had told me the day before that she couldn’t have dinner with me because Colby wanted her to see the house he was buying. It was a little thing but now I had to recant and explain, backfilling against my eroding credibility.

  “The day before I talked to Colby, Wendy told me he was buying a house, but she didn’t say anything about it being Thomas Rice’s house.”

  Troy nodded, satisfied that he’d made his point. “Good. Now tell me the rest of it.”

  I told him that I’d gone back to Marcellus’s neighborhood again hoping to find a witness who might have also seen someone running away immediately after the murders. I told him about my conversation with Latrell Kelly and about the dog Latrell had given me.

  I told him that I’d talked Marty Grisnik into letting me impersonate a KCK detective named Funkhouser when I visited Thomas Rice, that Rice had been scared and nervous when I asked him about the house but that he hadn’t mentioned Colby. I told him that I’d used the same phony ID when I talk
ed to Rice’s ex-wife and that her version of the sale of the house didn’t match Colby’s.

  I told him that Joy and I had gone to Wendy’s apartment after Ammara told me that she had been unable to reach Wendy and that I hadn’t found anything there that indicated where Wendy might have gone. I told him about Joy’s conversation with Wendy’s coworker and the scuttlebutt Grisnik had heard that someone in law enforcement had put a hit on Thomas Rice, letting Troy fill in Colby’s name on the line that said suspect.

  I told it in linear, chronological fashion without editorial comment or any effort to justify what I’d done. I was all about the facts and I got through it without a ripple, none of which impressed Troy.

  “You’re on leave, Jack, because you’ve got a medical problem no one has figured out. That’s why I told you to stay out of this.”

  “The Bureau can tell me to go home and I have to go home. But you telling me what to do on my own time doesn’t mean shit.”

  Troy’s square jaw, already tight, ratcheted down even tighter. His eyes ?ared and he straightened his shoulders, ready to hit me head-on.

  “How about obstruction of justice? You think that doesn’t mean shit? You withheld information about an ongoing investigation. You impersonated a police officer. You entered your daughter’s apartment knowing it might be a crime scene and risked contaminating the evidence that we might need to convict her….”

  He stopped in midsentence, breaking eye contact, his head of steam evaporated.

  “Convict her? Convict her of what?” I asked him. “Of having a boyfriend who’s an FBI agent who may have crossed the line? Do you really think I’m going to sit on my hands while you try to build a case against my daughter when it’s more likely that she’s a victim in all of this instead of an accessory?”