by LENA DIAZ,
Donna was too shocked and angry to speak. Thankfully Blake was the calm, measured one this time. He smoothly explained that after his altercation with Dillon, he left, and that Donna left her team shortly after because she was upset over what had happened. He detailed what had happened at the bar, and him trying to call Dillon and the team later on, before finally stopping at her house. The only time she had to jump in was to explain the time gap after she left the woods to when she found Blake at the bar. She’d been home, alone, showering, changing and trying to talk herself out of going after him. Which meant she might or might not have an alibi, depending on when Randy was killed.
“Well?” she asked, when she and Blake were finished. “I’m assuming if you’re asking for alibis that you’ve already read the autopsy report, even though neither of us has seen it yet. What was the time of death?”
“I prefer not to disclose that information until after we check out your claims—just in case you remember something else and change your stories.”
Her mouth literally fell open. She couldn’t believe he was acting this way. “You do realize that we can call Doc Brookes ourselves and ask him the T.O.D., don’t you?”
“What I realize is that if you do, it could seriously jeopardize the investigation into your alibis. I strongly suggest that you not speak to anyone about the autopsy until you’re cleared. If you’re cleared.”
She exchanged another stunned look with Blake. “Cleared? Really? We invited you here, thinking you could help us find the killer and bring back our team. But if you’re going to waste your time going after us, consider yourself fired. You and your team can go back to Knoxville. We’ll handle this on our own.” She jumped up and headed toward the door.
“Donna,” Blake called out. “Wait.”
She stiffened, her hand on the doorknob. “Why? He’s wasting our time.”
“We invited him here to help us,” Blake said. “You and I don’t have experience with kidnappings and ransom demands. Like it or not, we need to work together and park our hurt feelings at the door to get the job done.” He waved toward the chair. “Please.”
Grant clicked open the briefcase sitting on his desk. “Excellent points. But I’m afraid there’s a lot more to it than that, Detectives. You’ve asked what took us so long to get here.” He pulled some papers out of the briefcase and plopped them in front of him. “I think you’ll both want to stick around and find out the answer to that question.”
She turned and leaned back against the door, arms crossed. She refused to look at Blake. She didn’t want to see the disappointment that was probably on his face. The professionalism she normally prided herself on had disintegrated long ago, probably around the twenty-hour mark of being up with no sleep.
Everything she was saying would probably come back to haunt her later. But at the moment, she just couldn’t bring herself to care. She was too angry, too upset over Randy and the others, to bother with diplomacy at this point. And she wasn’t sure they did need the help from the feds. The state police were happy to help them. And they’d worked kidnappings before. She was starting to understand why Chief Thornton disliked the FBI so much.
“Go ahead.” She waved toward the papers in front of him. “Enlighten us. What took you close to seven hours to get here even though your field office is, what, forty-five minutes away? Go ahead. Explain. I’m all ears.”
His brows rose. “Other than the fact that my immediate team and I were in the middle of the prosecution of an important, multi-year, multi-million-dollar case and had to wake a judge to postpone the trial so we could help save your teammates? Is that what you mean about delays? I’m sure you’ve heard of the Sanchez case.”
Scorn dripped from his every word, and Donna couldn’t help feeling chagrined. She had heard of the Sanchez case. Who hadn’t? Sanchez was a reputed Colombian drug lord with a stranglehold over organized crime from Knoxville to Nashville. But she couldn’t pull back on what she’d said now. She’d stepped in this with both feet. The only way out was to go forward. So she kept her mouth shut.
He shuffled through the papers as if searching for one in particular. Then he turned one facedown on top of the rest. “As I said before, due to our history, I was wary about working with the Destiny police. So I took some necessary protective precautions, just in case things didn’t pass the smell test when I got here.”
“What kind of precautions?” Blake asked.
Donna didn’t ask. She’d glimpsed the letterhead on the paper he’d turned over. She already knew exactly what was coming. The only reason she didn’t jump up right now and storm out was the off chance that she could be wrong.
She really, really hoped she was wrong.
“I’ll answer that question with another. With your chief of police missing, who do you both report to?”
Blake looked at Donna, perhaps surprised she wasn’t saying anything. “I imagine the mayor will have to appoint a temporary chief.”
Grant nodded. “Correct. I stopped at his home on the way in to settle that issue.” He flipped the paper over. “He was upset that no one had notified him about the murder and the kidnapping, or told him the FBI had been called in.”
“Yes, well.” Donna cleared her throat. “Honestly, I didn’t even think about calling him. I’m sure I would have, sometime today, maybe after a nap to clear my head.” She really was embarrassed that she hadn’t notified the mayor. That should have been the first thing she did after returning to the station from the crime scene. But the chief was the one who always talked to the mayor. It hadn’t even occurred to her.
“I’m sure you would have.” Grant sounded as if he believed her on that score, at least. “But when we discussed who in the department should become the acting chief, imagine my surprise when he made me acting chief, even though Detective Waters was available and has nearly fifteen years on the force.” He frowned. “By the way, the mayor’s wife said to send you her regards. Is that significant for some reason?”
Any guilt she’d had over not being truthful with him evaporated. He obviously knew exactly what the significance was, or at least had to suspect the woman held a grudge against Donna. She was so angry right now, her whole body had tensed up. Her hands were balled into fists at her sides, and she was actually wondering what the penalties might be if she punched SSA Grant, and whether the satisfaction would be worth it.
“Good to know we’ve got you to take care of all the administrative stuff,” Blake said hurriedly, as if to cut off anything she might say, or do. “That leaves us to do what we do best, investigate. Come on, Donna. Let’s get back to work.” He jumped up from his chair and motioned for her to go with him.
“Not so fast. Did I mention that the mayor was familiar with the training exercises you do up there on Hawkins Ridge? Apparently he had to approve the extra expense of paying three civilians to help in the exercise. He gave me their names and phone numbers so I could get their statements about what they saw up there. One of them lives one street over from the mayor. In the interest of getting as much information as I could, as quickly as possible, we stopped and spoke to him. Any guesses as to what the gentleman named Tim Nealy said really happened in the altercation with Dillon Gray? You know, as opposed to what you both told me?”
He pulled another piece of paper from the stack. It was a typed statement, with Tim’s signature boldly scrawled across the bottom.
Donna’s stomach seemed to drop to her feet as she glanced at Blake. He was standing stock-still, his face red, his mouth drawn into a tight line. But he wasn’t looking at the agent. He was staring at her. Because of the lies she’d made him tell. It was collapsing all around them. And it was all her fault.
“SSA Grant,” she said. “I can explain—”
“Explain what? That SWAT team leader and senior detective Dillon Gray fired Detective Sullivan, and yet he’s still here, pretending to be employed, workin
g an active investigation? Or explain that you both lied about it to cover it up? Not exactly the ethical actions I’d expect of a police officer. Then again...” He waved his hands as if to encompass the entire station. “This is the Destiny Police Department. Color me not surprised.”
She took a step toward the desk.
Blake grabbed her. “Don’t. He’s not worth it.”
His gravelly voice had her looking at him in surprise. He was livid, but not at her. His anger was now directed at the agent.
“Go on.” Grant motioned toward the door. “You’re both fired. Hand over any remaining files or access codes my team needs. Then get out. I’ll be generous and give you ten minutes. If you’re still in the station after that, I’ll have you both arrested.”
Blake had to practically drag Donna out of the office. She couldn’t seem to make her feet move. She was vacillating between anger and disbelief and horror that her actions were responsible for both her and Blake being dismissed, banned from the case. It was her worst nightmare come true—her friends were in trouble, but she had no way to help them.
Blake pulled the door shut behind them. “Breathe,” he whispered in her ear. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“I can’t believe that just happened. I’ve ruined everything. How are we going to save them now?”
“The same way we were going to save them in the first place. With solid detective work. We’re just going to have to do it without anyone else’s help.” He motioned to the big round clock on the wall above the front door. “We’ve got nine minutes left. We need to get as much information from his team as we can before our time is up. I say we hit up his leads for whatever intel they can share. They don’t know we’re off the case yet. They’ve got no reason not to be straight with us. I’ll take the guys—Special Agents Joel Lawrence and Colin Lopez.” He waved toward the first row of desks, where the two agents were both talking to another agent. “You take the woman—Special Agent Stacy Bell.”
Stacy was sitting at a desk in the back row. She smiled at them, oblivious of the drama that had just happened with her boss.
Donna smiled back.
“Go.” Blake gave her a little push toward Stacy as he headed toward Joel and Colin.
Donna was breathless by the time she and Blake hopped into his truck and shut the doors. She plopped a thin folder onto the bench seat between them, and Blake added two more folders to the stack, equally thin.
“You first,” he said.
“I spoke to Officer Lynch before I left. He’s going to try to feed us information, keep us updated without letting anyone else know.”
“Good thinking.”
“I thought so. I also put my gloves in an evidence bag and slipped them to Lynch. I asked him if he could send them to a private lab to get DNA profiles on my dime, no questions asked. But that he needed to run those profiles against CODIS to see if we get a match on anyone’s DNA in the system. If so, he’s to call me immediately.”
“Go, you,” he said. “I forgot about the gloves. Hopefully it will pan out. What else?”
“Doc Brookes didn’t conduct the autopsy. An M.E. from Maryville did, with Brookes assisting. That’s fine and good. But other than to give a time of death—which is exactly when you and I were in the bar, thankfully, so we’re in the clear there—the report is sketchy on details. I got a copy.” She tapped the stack of folders. “I figure if we have questions, we can at least call Brookes. He won’t care if we’re fired or not. He’ll see through that as bull. Cause of death is the obvious—gunshot. But get this. All of the samples taken during the autopsy were sent to the FBI lab, not our state lab. Seems to me that will take way more time and could delay the investigation.”
“Agreed. That’s odd. Did Stacy say why they did that?”
“Grant’s orders, something about needing to cross every t and dot every i for this one because officers are the victims in this case.”
“It’s also a kidnapping case, with speed more important than anything else.” Blake shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Me either. I have a copy of the crime scene report, too. It was pretty thorough. They found footprints that seemed inconsistent with the kinds of boots our team wears. And a ton of fingerprints in the barn. It’ll take a while to see whether any of those prints belong to a viable suspect, though. They took blood samples from the body and inside the barn. But, again, instead of sending them to our lab, they’re on their way to Quantico. Yet another delay. What did the guys tell you?”
“They were concerned about notifying the families of the deceased and the kidnap victims. I told them the contact information is all in that spreadsheet you put together, but that we’d already notified Randy’s mom. They appreciated that. I didn’t tell them that the wives were on a cruise.”
She blinked in surprise. “You withheld information?”
“Yeah, well. Once you start down the path...” He shrugged. “I was going to tell them, but one of the other agents came up to ask a question, a really simple question. And it got me talking to Colin Lopez about the team that came in with him. He admitted that other than him, Special Agent Joel Lawrence and SA Stacy Bell, the others are pretty green, without a lot of experience. He said, normally, on a case like this, he would have expected more senior agents to be brought along. But they were all stretched pretty thin by this Sanchez thing. Even with a court delay, a lot of them were told to remain in Knoxville to try to gather more evidence to strengthen the case. Even though the case is supposed to be locked up tight. Seems strange to me.”
“So, let me get this straight,” she said. “The top investigator thinks our kidnapping is so important that he postpones a major case to lend us his expertise. He brings his top three leads, who were all working the Sanchez case before this. But then he chooses green new recruits for the rest of his team? We got the A team at the top and the D team at the bottom. That doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree. Without saying it that way, I did hint around about Grant being uptight. One of the agents, Lawrence, laughed and said they’d all noticed the same thing and were walking on eggshells around him this morning. Normally, he’s supposedly this polite, nice guy, who’s super family-oriented and a great person to work with. For the past few weeks, he’s been a real bear. None of them seemed to understand why.”
“Did you ask if it was the pressure of the Sanchez case?” she asked.
“I did. But they said the case has been going on for years. There hasn’t been anything recently that would explain it. His wife and kids headed off on vacation last week—without him. They figure that might be it. That maybe he and his wife had a fight or something and she left him. He hasn’t said one word about his family since.”
She nodded. “Trouble at home could explain a lot, not that I want to give the jerk an excuse for how he’s acting. So what do we do now? We have to get some sleep. Willpower alone isn’t going to keep my eyes open. But I hate the thought of not doing something to keep the investigation moving forward. Trusting Grant to take care of it doesn’t sit well with me. But what bothers me more than anything is the idea of him notifying Ashley and the others about what has happened. I sure wish we could talk to them before any feds do.”
“Maybe we can. When does the ship dock again?”
“Today, about five o’clock, in Miami. The feds have a field office there. I guarantee they’ll send some agents to interview them. All I know to do is try to call Ashley once they dock and hope I reach her before the feds. I hate telling her news like that over the phone, though.”
“I agree. And I want to interview all of them, anyway, to augment your timeline and look for any evidence that any of this is personal—that maybe one member of the SWAT team, or even the chief, was targeted. That’s hard to do over the phone.”
She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t see what choice we have.�
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He tapped the steering wheel, as if deep in thought. “Too bad we don’t have access to a private plane. We could skip security, avoid the wait for a scheduled flight and go straight to Miami without any stops in between. We could sleep on the way and make it to the port long before the agents felt they needed to be at the dock, giving us a chance to, I don’t know, get in position somewhere and somehow intercept the wives before the agents locate them.”
He shook his head again. “I don’t even know how we’d manage that, even if we did have access to a private plane. I don’t know anyone with enough money to own one, let alone have a pilot available to fly it even if they’d agree to take us.”
“I do.”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“The Carroll family. Remember, we saved their daughter from drowning last summer? They were tourists, taking the scenic route home to Nashville, passing through Maryville after vacationing in the Smoky Mountains. Remember?”
He slowly nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I do. We were investigating a robbery, and it led us to a hotel in Maryville. We were walking by the pool, and their little girl had somehow gotten out of their hotel room and jumped in the water. She couldn’t swim, and you saved her life.”
“Well, we both saved her is how I remember it. I dragged her out, and you gave her CPR. Regardless, the father is a commercial pilot, and the mom is one of those society ladies, comes from money. They have private planes in airports all over Tennessee. And they flat-out told us if we ever needed anything to give them a call. I can’t personally think of anything I’ve needed more right this minute.”
“Me either. And the worst they can do is say no. Let’s do it.”
Chapter Ten
Donna glared at the two FBI agents waiting at the other end of the terminal, right where the cruise ship passengers were about to disembark.
