Reasonable Doubt

by Carsen Taite

  Four more pieces. Karen had scheduled an event showcasing up-and-coming designers, and when she’d seen this new work, she’d insisted that Ellery participate. The additional pieces would round out the collection and Ellery had plenty of ideas. She didn’t know whether she should be happy or sad that a national tragedy had spurred her creativity to new heights.

  She shrugged. It wasn’t fair, but then nothing really was. You lived your life, did your best, and hoped for the best in return, but everyone present that night had learned nothing was certain. The most important thing was to have no regrets, which was one of the reasons for abruptly breaking things off with April. The moments before the explosion she’d shared with Sarah Flores made it clear she was done dating women like April, but apparently, it had taken a monumental tragedy to get her to act on her impulse.

  Sarah Flores. Special Agent Sarah Flores. She’d lost track of Sarah in the crowd that night. Had she saved lives? Had she been hurt doing so? In what distinct ways had the bomb changed her life? If she’d had her number, she liked to think she would call her to ask these questions, but the truth was solitude seemed to be her best friend right now. Still, a lingering desire to know more about Sarah edged closer into her consciousness with every passing day.

  She probably hasn’t become a hermit. Ellery laughed at her self-chiding inner voice. Going off-grid was so against her nature that it had taken days to get used to it, but now that she had would she be the same person when she emerged? Maybe tomorrow she would start her reentry into the real world with a phone call. She could let Karen know she was close to being done, set a time for her to come by and see the rest of her work. Maybe she would call her parents and check in or join Leo on his front porch for an afternoon beer. Maybe.

  *

  Sarah walked through the office, nodding to the support staff. She’d brought donuts that morning which meant she was everyone’s hero. Things sure had changed over the past couple of weeks, and she knew it wasn’t just the donuts.

  “Hey, Flores, got something you should take a look at.”

  She looked over to see Liz sitting at her desk with a couple of the other agents hunched over her shoulder. Since the night of the bombing, when they’d worked side by side, Liz, and by extension, the rest of the group, no longer treated her like an interloper. She smiled at them, happy to be part of a team again. “Be right there.” She handed the donuts to Beverly, the secretary they shared. “Save me one apple fritter, okay?”

  Bev smiled. “You got it.”

  She strode over to Liz’s desk and the rest of the group made space for her. “What’s up?”

  “We got in a bunch of records for nonprofits with foreign ties. I just started looking at them this morning, but look at this one.” She pointed to the screen.

  Sarah followed her finger and saw the name Welcome Home International, WHI. According to their website, they had formed in 2011 and were headquartered in Dallas. Established for the purpose of aiding refugees who entered the US from the Middle East to assist with basic needs and education. Sounded innocuous enough, except for the Muslim stigma. “Okay, I’ll bite. Something funny going on with their financing?”

  “Maybe. I’ve just started looking, but they don’t appear to have much in the way of assets. They operate out of a local mosque. One of their board members is Amir Khan, who just happens to be a relative of Sadeem Jafari, who happens to be on a CIA watch list. I’m wondering if we should pass this along to them or Homeland Security.”

  Sarah took a moment to consider. Everyone in law enforcement was frustrated by the fact that two weeks out they weren’t even close to making an arrest in the bombing case. No one had claimed responsibility, and if the CIA or Homeland Security had any viable leads, they weren’t talking. She had more invested in catching the assholes who’d bombed the arena than most. The images of the dead and broken bodies she’d helped pull from the wreckage were forever etched in her mind, but she also knew the minute they handed over this information to another agency, they’d be shut out. No matter what anyone said about the improvement of interdisciplinary relations since 9/11, relationships between the agencies had slipped back into a natural state of competition. She shook her head. “Let’s dig a little deeper into the financials and then talk to Mason before making that call. Deal?”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. I’ll start digging through the bank records.” She motioned to the stack of boxes on the other side of her desk.

  “Great. Mind if I take a box?”

  “You got it.”

  Sarah hefted one of the bankers’ boxes and hauled it over to her desk. She opened it, randomly selected a bulging file, and started poring over the bank account entries. She still loathed this part of the job, but she’d gotten used to the monotony. The day of the explosion was, sadly, the most excitement she’d had in a long time. She should feel bad about that, but she attributed part of the excitement of that day to seeing Ellery at the reception.

  Tall, handsome Ellery. Who was apparently attached. Sarah had asked Danny about the woman who’d shown up to claim Ellery moments before the explosion occurred, but all Danny had been able to tell her was that Dr. April Landing was a cardiac surgeon, one of the more successful alums of the Alpha Nus. Well, la di da. She hadn’t liked the way April had claimed Ellery, mostly because she’d wanted to do some claiming of her own.

  She shook off the distracting thoughts. They’d been working overtime since the explosion, part of an interagency effort to track down the people responsible. Because no one had claimed credit it seemed more likely the bombing had been a homegrown incident rather than a foreign terrorist plot, but every lead had to be pursued, no matter how unlikely. Part of her wanted to be out in the field, interviewing witnesses, assessing possible suspects, not sheets of paper. She was used to getting her information in the flesh, not reading between the lines on a bank ledger. Daily, she had to remind herself she’d chosen this path for a reason—so she could have a life outside the job. But she was working as hard as ever, just as affected by the tragedy of it all, but without the same level of satisfaction she used to have from tracking a real life suspect rather than running down fuzzy accounting. To top it all off, she was never going to meet an Ellery if she spent every waking moment behind this desk.

  Her cell phone rang and jerked her out of her pity party. She recognized the 202 area code and answered on the second ring. “Flores.”

  “So, they didn’t get you in the blast.”

  Sarah smiled at the sound of Trip’s voice. “Took you long enough to call and find out.”

  “Oh, I already knew you were okay.” His signature deep booming laughter echoed through the line. “I know everything and don’t you forget it.”

  “Then why do I sense you called me for a favor?”

  “I may know everything, but I can’t do everything. A couple of names came across my radar and I wanted to pass them along to someone I trust before I share them elsewhere.”

  A surge of electricity flew down Sarah’s spine, and she hunched over the phone and glanced around her desk as if someone might be listening in. “Maybe I should call you back on another line.”

  “No need. Be sure to check your mail when you get home. I sent you all that stuff you left behind in your desk.”

  “Okay.” Sarah knew he was talking code and all she wanted to do was get off the phone and head home. “Anything else?”

  “We miss you, kid. You know if you ever want to come back here, you’ll always have a spot.”

  A tug, a small one, pulled at her, but she kept her response casual. “Thanks, pal. Tell everyone I said hello.”

  Sarah spent the next few minutes paging through the files on her desk, but she could have been looking at gibberish for all it mattered. Her mind was back on the cagey conversation with Trip and she was consumed with curiosity about whatever he was sending her way. Focus, Flores, focus. She stood and took a lap around the offices, ostensibly to get a donut, but she walked until her
head was clear. When she sat back down at her desk, she reopened the bank files for Welcome Home International and started combing through the entries in earnest. Before long she started noticing a disturbing pattern and she began scribbling notes on a legal pad.

  “Hey, Flores, you want to join us for lunch?”

  Sarah looked up to see Liz and Sam, one of the other agents, standing by her desk. She glanced at the time on her computer, surprised to see it was almost one o’clock. She pointed at the files on her desk. “I think I’m going to stick with this.”

  “Really?” Liz asked. “My stack was a big bunch of nothing. Come on, we’re going to Pappasito’s.”

  “Thanks, but I may need to head out a little early today. I’ve got some stuff coming into the apartment—the last of my move from D.C.”

  The tiny lie slid off her tongue with ease and the group trooped out without her. Sarah waited until she was sure they’d left before gathering up the files on her desk and making her way over to Beverly’s desk. “Hey, Bev, call me crazy, but I prefer to look through documents on the computer.” She hefted the stack of files. “Any chance I can scan these?”

  “You could.” Bev paused and smiled. “Or you could look at the set that’s already scanned.”

  Sarah let loose a big smile. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “They’re on the network drive.” She wrote a note and handed it over. “Here’s the location.”

  Sarah took the note. “Thanks a million. Hey, any reason Liz has all the boxes on her desk?”

  “What can I say? She likes paper.”

  “That makes one of us.” Sarah started to walk away, but then paused. “Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you that I need to head out early this afternoon, but you can reach me on my cell if you need anything.”

  “No problem. I’m sure if anyone needs anything it can wait until tomorrow.”

  The comment made Sarah think of the call from Trip and how this new job was the polar opposite of her last one where she’d been on call twenty-four seven and nothing could wait until the next day. She’d thought she’d grown to hate the constant interference in her life, but now she wondered if the boredom in her new position was just the other extreme. She thought about the entries she’d flagged in the bank records and considered whether she was making too much out of them, just for the sake of having some level of excitement in her life. It was clear she wasn’t getting excitement in any other way. The only time she’d been out since she’d come to town was the night of the reception at the W when her chances with a hot woman had been thwarted by the woman’s date and some terrorists. Not a great track record for her new lease on life and not much appeared to be changing since she was transferring all the bank records for WHI onto a flash drive to review at home. Right now, the only thing she had to look forward to was a potential lead in a case that would probably be snatched from her if it turned out to be viable.

  Trip’s offer echoed in her head. Maybe she should go back to her old unit. The nightmares and viciousness she confronted on a daily basis might be a fair trade off for feeling like she was really accomplishing something.

  She spent the rest of the drive home mulling over her life choices, decidedly unsettled by the time she reached her apartment. She’d leased a place in Uptown, close to Danny and Ellen and close to the gayborhood. She’d been to the local bars a couple of times since she’d been back in town, but they were the same as bars everywhere—full of women looking for something for the night, but not necessarily any longer than that. If she wanted more, she was going to have to find it elsewhere, but the thought of getting involved in something other than her job was a foreign concept and required a level of commitment she wasn’t sure she possessed. She flashed back to the evening of the reception. Politics. The only thing about that event that had been palatable was the promise of lots of eligible, desirable women, but the one she’d settled on had been taken.

  Get over it, Flores. Ellery Durant isn’t the only woman in this city and you shouldn’t have expected your love life in a new city to just fall into place. Once the furor from the bombing abated, there would be lots more events and many opportunities to meet someone. Just because you’ve decided to settle down doesn’t mean women are going to line up for the opportunity to be Mrs. Sarah Flores.

  She laughed at the realization that the singular focus she applied in her work didn’t necessarily translate to her personal life. Trip had always been on her ass about her impatient nature, telling her she couldn’t force things to happen. He was right, of course, but knowing it didn’t necessarily make it easier to wait it out.

  She thought of Trip again as she checked her mail. Just as he had said, there was a plain brown envelope in her box. She was dying to know what was inside, but waited until she was in her apartment and the door was locked before sitting down at her dining room table and peeling back the seal.

  She shook out a single piece of paper with a few lines of typewritten names: Sadeem Jafari, Hashid Kamal, Abdul Kamal. She recognized the first name. Liz had mentioned him in relation to Amir Khan and said Jafari was on a CIA watch list. No surprise that Trip had also heard the name. She turned the paper over, but the rest of the page was blank. She flipped it back over and repeated the names to herself as she opened her laptop and started a Google search. Hashid and Abdul Kamal, aka Michael and Brian Barstow, were brothers, in their early twenties, and they were both listed on a Homeland Security terrorist watch list, which she verified by signing in to the agency’s official database. Neither of them had a criminal conviction, but they’d been flagged as supporters of ISIS as a result of postings they’d made to several blog sites.

  Sadeem, on the other hand, was a bit of a mystery. He wasn’t in the FBI database and Google searches showed only a successful local business leader whose philanthropic interests were well known throughout the DFW Muslim community. She could understand why Hashid’s and Abdul’s names had come across Trip’s radar, but Sadeem was a mystery. She searched for another half hour, but nothing she found led her to believe Sadeem was either connected to the other two men in any way or that he had any big secrets of his own to hide. If he was really on a CIA watch list, they were keeping the reason a secret from their sister agency.

  She circled back through her searches and started looking at the names of the charities he supported. His primary interest appeared to be the Global Enterprise Alliance, which didn’t ring a bell. She switched to the LexisNexis database and started digging. GEA was a US based Muslim charity whose stated primary purpose was assisting refugees from Middle Eastern Arab countries adjusting to life in the United States. As she read the mission statement, the words sparked a memory. She’d read a similar statement, earlier that day in fact.

  Sarah dug the flash drive with the WHI records out of her bag and plugged it into her computer. She’d expected to find a copy of the WHI charter and IRS application for 501(c)(3) non-profit status along with the bank records, but neither of those documents was included in the file. Chalking it up to a careless scan job by one of the clerks at the office, she took to the Internet. One quick search netted what she was looking for. There it was, right there on the WHI website, virtually the same statement about purpose as that listed on the GEA site, but she checked her excitement. It could mean anything. Two charities with the same purpose wasn’t unusual, but what if there was another connection? She started another search, but her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered anyway, thinking it might be Trip. “Flores.”

  “Hey, it’s your good pal, Soto.”

  “Hey, Danny. What are you up to?”

  “Probably the same as you. Working. I know you think you guys are having all the fun, but our office has been pretty busy since the bombing.”

  “I imagine. Anything I should know about?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, but I doubt you’d tell me anything.”

  “Not fair.”

  “I know. The bos
s has me on another task force. He can’t stand to be shut out of the biggest crime event to hit Dallas ever, so we have to act like we’re working on the bombing while handling all our other cases. I haven’t been home for dinner in two weeks and the wife’s about to shoot me.”

  “I kinda doubt that, but I know how you feel. The fraud unit definitely isn’t taking the lead on any of this, but we’re spending all our time working leads that go nowhere.”

  “But you have some free time, right?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “No tricks, only treats. A friend of ours has a gallery opening Friday night and I promised a certain someone I would invite you.”

  “Let me guess. Lots of eligible, worthy bachelorettes?”

  “So she says.”

  “I’m not much into the art scene. I mean, I know what I like, but making conversation with a bunch of connoisseurs isn’t really my thing.”

  “No worries. It’s not that kind of art. It’s a big warehouse in the Design District and the exhibits are all practical art pieces, furniture, pottery, that kind of thing. If you sit in chairs or eat off plates, you’ll have plenty to say. In fact, you’ve met one of the artists. You remember Ellery Durant, she’s the attorney who—”

  “Who’s involved with a top flight cardiac surgeon? You think continuing to throw me together with unavailable women is the way to welcome me to your fine city?” Despite her protest, Sarah warmed to the idea of seeing Ellery again.

  “It’s your city now and who said Ellery was unavailable? I saw April Landing canoodling with some other woman just last week.”

  “Please tell me you did not just say canoodling.” Sarah hoped her teasing tone hid her excitement at the prospect that Ellery Durant was back on the market.