Malicious Pursuit

by KG MacGregor

  "That’s much better," Ruth agreed. "So all you have to do is put this in Elena’s hands, right?"

  "Right. I guess I need to go back over to Viv’s and do these edits first."

  "What if you sent it to the newspaper?"

  "I thought about that. Hell, I thought about calling them last weekend. I thought it might protect me if I made it all public, because they wouldn’t dare do anything with all of that attention on me. But the problem with that is that they’d get to the evidence and destroy it. If I can’t prove they did it, they’ll find a way to make it look like I did. And Henry’s killers will go free."

  "So is there anyone else you can give it to that can pass it on to Elena? Any of her friends?"

  "Nobody I can think of, but I’m still working on it." Spencer scooped up her papers and set them aside. "And I think there’s something else we should do."

  "What?"

  "I think we should tell Elena all about you and Jessie."

  "Oh, no. I don’t think so." No way was she going to confess to being a fugitive to a federal agent.

  "If anyone can help you — if anyone will help you — it’s Elena Diaz."

  "Why would she help me? She doesn’t know me from Hedda’s house cat."

  "But she knows me. And she’d help you because I asked her to."

  "I think you’re forgetting one very important fact here, Spencer. I’m guilty of a felony. I kidnapped my child and fled across state lines. The feds are looking for me now too. And if she finds out, she may have to turn me in, whether she wants to or not."

  "No, she won’t. Elena cuts deals with criminals all the time to get a bigger fish. She has the authority to do things like that. She wouldn’t turn you in if I asked her not to." Spencer needed to make her see that Elena could fix this. She might be able to look into some things, lean on a few people, throw a little weight around. Ruth shouldn’t have to be on the run. She’d done nothing to deserve the way the system had treated her, and that needed to be fixed.

  "Fine, I’ll do it under one condition."

  "What?" Anything.

  "You let me take it to her." The brunette started to speak, but Ruth put up her hand. "That’s the only way I’ll agree to do it."

  Spencer was over a barrel and she knew it. If she didn’t give in, her hands were tied as far as helping Ruth set things right. She couldn’t just go to Elena about the mother and daughter unless Ruth gave her all the information. She needed names, and circumstances, and theories about who might be able to help Ruth back in Maine. If it could be done, Elena Diaz would make it happen.

  * * *

  "Something stinks here, Chad." Agent Diaz slumped uninvited into the leather chair across from her boss’s desk, her hands clutching a manila folder. All of their conversations about the Spencer Rollins case took place in his office because hers was bugged by the FBI.

  "I sympathize, but what can I do? She’s called you twice already." Chad Merke had been none too happy with the FBI’s request to monitor his agent’s communications, and he was downright pissed about the van outside that shadowed her every move. But his hands were tied thanks to a favor he owed the Bureau when he’d convinced them last year to trade a collar for testimony in a drug case.

  "No, I mean really stinks. It’s bad enough that they probably listen to me pee, but I think there’s more to this than just a fugitive on the run."

  In the eleven years they’d worked together, the supervisor had learned to trust this woman’s instincts. She was dogged when it came to investigation, and she had a nose for sniffing out trouble. "You got something in that folder?"

  "Yeah," she admitted. "I’ve been doing some digging on my own, and I came across something pretty interesting for one Special Agent Michael Pollard." That was the agent who had approached her boss.

  "What are you doing poking around in Pollard’s business? Just because he’s working this case? We don’t do things like that, Agent Diaz. You know better," he scolded.

  Yes, she did know better, but something about this case wasn’t right, and it wasn’t just because Spencer was their prey. "Chad, this is not a case of me abusing my authority. It’s about me having my own suspicions. Isn’t that what you pay me for, to play my hunches and catch the bad guys?"

  "You’re stretching it, Elena." He folded his arms defiantly across his chest. "So what have you got?"

  "Agent Pollard is pulling down about $115 thousand a year, but he and his wife are pretty extended. They’ve got four kids in private school, and a mortgage on a five-bedroom house in McLean."

  "So?"

  "So they just bought a vacation home in Eastern Shore, about $150 thousand…for cash."

  "Cash?"

  Elena nodded.

  "So this Pollard, he’s still working this case?"

  "Yes, he is. In fact, I think he’s sitting out in the van. You want me to go get him so we can ask him how he got his hands on that much money?"

  Merke leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands, intrigued by the information she offered, but stopping short of considering it as evidence. "So I gather that you think his new house and his interest in Spencer Rollins are related?"

  Elena sighed, closing the folder and tapping it rhythmically on her knee. "I know it’s a stretch, Chad, but hear me out. First of all, Spencer didn’t kill Henry. They were best friends, but even if she had hated his guts, Spencer wouldn’t have done something like that. I know her, and you know what I just said is the absolute truth. Second, she tried to call me twice to tell me what was going on. Both times, the calls were cut off, like whoever was pulling the strings didn’t want me to hear her side of the story. That’s pretty desperate if you ask me, and it happened before those assholes ever got a warrant to tap my phone. Third, if she didn’t kill him, who did and why? You know as well as I do that the answer in a case like this usually comes back to one thing: greed. And I don’t like it that one of the agents who wants her caught, who wants to keep her from talking, just paid cash for a vacation home."

  * * *

  Ruth and Spencer managed to get through the evening without talking about the code, about Elena, or about Ruth’s running away with Jessie. The words were just beneath the surface, but without a resolution, there was no need to keep beating a dead horse. Spencer stridently refused to allow the young mother to make the delivery unless she came up with a foolproof plan for getting her in and out without risk of being caught.

  When the dinner dishes were done, Jessie brought out her new dinosaur puzzle and spread the pieces on the floor. Since Ruth was doing the laundry tonight, Spencer sat down in the floor to help. "Helping" a four-year-old with a puzzle meant grouping pieces by color and giving lots of hints. Ultimately, Jessie would be the one to place each piece.

  It was a wonderful feeling for Ruth to see her child nurtured by someone else. Neither Skip, nor his parents, nor her own had ever spent much meaningful time playing with Jessie, reading to her, or teaching her things. It suddenly washed over Ruth just how much she liked Spencer, and how much she enjoyed having her around.

  When the puzzle was finished, Jessie was ushered to bed. Ruth returned to the living room to find the programmer scribbling into her tablet.

  "So what’s next?"

  Spencer shook her head and sighed. "Would you take me to the Franconia-Springfield station tomorrow morning?"

  "You’re going to see Elena." It was a statement, but she hoped her friend would deny it.

  Instead, she nodded. "Yeah, if she isn’t expecting me, maybe they won’t be either."

  "You’re just going to walk into her office?"

  "Yeah…you know, I was thinking that maybe I should do what you said and write a letter to the Washington Post and leave it with you. And if you don’t hear from me again, you should drop it in the mail or something."

  "I don’t believe this! Do you hear how ridiculous that is? A letter to the paper isn’t going to mean a goddamn thing if something happens to you. It’s too dangerous for you to g
o. I’ll take it."

  "No! I’m not going to let you do that."

  "But they aren’t looking for me. Not these guys, anyway. I bet they couldn’t care less about Karen Oliver."

  Spencer shook her head in frustration. "She wouldn’t even bother to see you unless you–" Spencer stopped herself, her mind racing with a new idea, "unless you told her you had information on Roscone. That would get her attention."

  "Who’s Roscone?"

  CHAPTER 19

  ELENA DIAZ RESISTED the urge to make an obscene gesture, waving instead toward the gray panel truck, parked illegally on Constitution Avenue for the last five days. The boys inside had been watching her building and monitoring her phone and internet account all week. Despite her outrage at the intrusion, she was stuck with the surveillance, as the FBI was almost certain that Spencer would contact her again.

  Flashing her ID to the guard at the desk, the towering woman bypassed the elevator in favor of the steps, just as she did every day. Three flights of stairs were nothing given her usual exercise routine. Each day, the 37-year-old agent pushed herself to her physical limit, and then pushed a little more, always reaching to be stronger, faster, better. She was as tough as any field agent at the IRS, and to her infinite delight, she was often taken too lightly, adding to her advantage.

  "Morning, Elena."

  "Hi, Thomas." No one was more underestimated than Special Agent Thomas Fennimore, her bespectacled assistant of the last three years. It took Elena almost a year to realize that Thomas’s bumbling demeanor was but part of his incredible savvy, and she eagerly took him on when other senior agents balked at what they perceived as ineptitude.

  "I found something I think you’re going to like," he offered, following her into the windowed office. He waited in the doorway expectantly until she bought a clue and followed him back out.

  "I could use some good news." Automatically, the two exited the office area and went back into the stairwell where they could talk without fear of being overheard.

  "It’s about Pollard and that other guy, Agent Akers. I ran a little query on work logs, and they were the agents assigned to do the background checks for the Kryfex contract."

  "The what?"

  "Kryfex. Margadon developed it for the Dawa virus, and the US is shipping it to Ethiopia in return for an air base. And since it’s a big contract, they did background checks."

  "Do you know who they talked to? Did they ever talk to Spencer?"

  "I don’t have that list yet. I can start pulling it today, though. I doubt Spencer would have been interviewed. They usually only do the higher-ups."

  "That’s good work, Thomas. Go ahead and follow up. Did you find a money trail for Akers?"

  "Not yet, but I’m working on that too."

  * * *

  "So what was the judge’s name?" Spencer was typing the story of how Ruth and Jessie had come to be on the run.

  "The judge’s name? You really think that’s relevant?"

  "I don’t know what’s relevant. I just want to give Elena as much information as possible. Maybe she can talk to him about the facts."

  "What facts?" Ruth grumbled. "His name was Howard…Malcolm Howard."

  Spencer typed that into the account and reread the whole document aloud from the screen.

  "Is that everything?"

  "As far as I know."

  "Okay, here it comes." She hit the print key. "Are you ready to go call?"

  They had agreed that it would be best for Ruth to go alone and place the call from a payphone somewhere in Reston. Calling from Manassas might raise a few eyebrows, especially since they’d found Spencer’s bike in the woods.

  "Ready as I’ll ever be."

  * * *

  Without a word, Thomas dropped a fresh folder on his supervisor’s desk. His cocky grin told her that he’d gotten some dirt, and the tab read "Special Agent Calvin Akers."

  The report documented plane tickets to Las Vegas, hotels in Atlantic City, even a trip to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. Calvin Akers had a gambling habit. That’s why there was no money to be found. Cool!

  The phone interrupted Elena’s joy, and her eyes went at once to the digital display: a payphone in Reston. A lot of her information came from payphones because tipsters liked their anonymity, but every call she got these days made her think of her friend on the run.

  With no small measure of sarcasm, she announced, "There’s the phone, boys. Got your tapes in? Ready…set…go! Hello, this is Special Agent Elena Diaz with the Internal Revenue Service. How may I help you?"

  "Uh…Agent Diaz…I…uh…."

  "Yes?" It wasn’t Spencer, she realized with a mixture of relief and regret.

  "I was wondering if you were still interested in information about George Roscone."

  Roscone? Yes, she was interested. Hell, yes!

  "Who am I speaking to?" George Roscone was the District’s DA, and he’d scuttled a very big case against two drug dealing brothers a couple of years ago by leaking her investigation to the press. She was certain he’d been bought off, and set out to prove it by trying to locate the money. After eight months of finding nothing out of the ordinary, she’d reluctantly let it go when Chad not-so-subtly suggested that she redirect her budget to something that would bear fruit.

  "I’d rather not say. I want to be anonymous, for now, anyway. Can I do that?"

  "My office will work with you to maintain confidentiality. But before I can guarantee that, I’m going to need to know what kind of information you have, and how you acquired it."

  "Okay…," Ruth needed to make all of this believable, so she’d practiced in the car on the way to Reston. She wanted to come off as nervous and uptight, and that was easy enough if she just borrowed from her recent experiences. "I used to work in a bank in the city and you subpoenaed all of Mr. Roscone’s statements. Right after that, my boss asked me to keep an eye on his account and see if anything happened?"

  "So did something happen?" God, she really wanted Roscone.

  "Well, not exactly. See, I got laid off not long after that. But I moved out to Virginia and a couple of weeks ago, I started work at another bank."

  Sometimes, it was like pulling teeth to get people to talk. "And what does this have to do with George Roscone?"

  "He came into my new bank the other day. He has an account there. I know it was him because…well, I always thought he was really handsome." Spencer had told her to put that in because Elena used to go on and on about what a "pretty boy" Roscone was.

  This was definitely the kind of tip Diaz was interested in, but if he had another account, she really didn’t need this witness. All she had to do was launch a new query and watch it come up. It took a lot of resources to track accounts and transactions, but it was easier when she knew in advance what to look for.

  "But the thing is, he doesn’t go by George Roscone. He goes by another name on this account."

  Holy shit! Diaz nearly fell out of her chair. This was the best news she’d had in a year.

  "Can you give me the name that he uses, and the name of the bank and the branch where you work?"

  "I…well…."

  "What is it?"

  "It’s just that I’ve been laid off for awhile, and I was wondering if maybe there was a reward or something."

  Elena was used to requests like this, especially from tipsters on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. A few thousand dollars meant a lot to somebody who lived from hand to mouth, and it was nothing compared to the costs of 24/7 surveillance of suspects and round-the-clock audits. Thank god her boss saw the advantage of a few dollars wisely spent.

  "I might be able to swing a small reward of some sort, maybe as a whistleblower, since this has to do with your work. It’s all going to depend on what kind of information you have and what we’re able to prove in court."

  "I have copies of his statements for the past two years. And he’s just started making big deposits and withdrawals again."

  Elena
was practically salivating. She spun around to look at the clock. It was a quarter after five on Friday evening.

  "I’d be very interested in having a look at those. If you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll come pick them up tonight."

  "No, I think I’d prefer to meet you somewhere and show you what I have. Really, I want to do the right thing, but if there isn’t a reward, I don’t want to be involved." She hesitated for effect. "I could get in a lot of trouble for this at work, probably even lose my job."

  "I know, and I really appreciate you coming forward with this. Can you meet me somewhere tonight?"

  "Tomorrow would be better. I’m on my way home and I have things I have to do tonight."

  Great! Wouldn’t want to interfere with a Friday night date when justice was as stake.

  "Okay." A situation like this called for kissing ass, and Elena could do that when she had to. "Can you come into the city, or would you like to meet somewhere else?"

  "What about somewhere on the mall, say near the Metro stop at the Smithsonian?"

  That would work very well, Elena thought. The Smithsonian was across the mall from her building.

  "How’s nine a.m. tomorrow morning?"

  "I can be there then, I think." She didn’t want to appear too eager. "If I can’t make it, is there a number I can call?"

  Elena quickly rattled off her cell phone. "How will I find you?"

  "I’ll put all my copies in a blue folder."

  "Okay, then. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. This is a good thing you’re doing. I wish more people would take their civic duty as seriously as you." That was the standard speech Elena gave when people provided her with information. She hoped the woman would take it to heart.

  "Just see if you can get me some reward money. I really need it."

  * * *

  "So what do you think?" Agent Pollard, who had spent the last nine hours inside the surveillance van, turned off the recorder to talk to his boss on the other phone.