Edge of Danger (Edge Security Series Book 3)

by Loye, Trish

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do these things.” His voice rose as he spoke.

  “Mr. Hajjar, I need you to stay calm,” the agent interrogating him said. “If you’re not calm, then I’ll have to leave and your side of the story won’t get told. Remember, I’m here for you. I need you to cooperate with me and tell me the truth.”

  Alyssa rolled her shoulders as she kept watching. Within minutes, Hajjar had sweat rolling down his face. A sign of guilt according to the interrogator, who asked him to just tell the truth, but never actually let him speak.

  “They’re using the Reid technique on him,” she said, shaking her head.

  “I know,” Zach said quietly. It was a type of interrogation where the investigator presumed guilt and used loaded questions as well as imagined justifications for the accused’s behavior, all the while speaking almost non-stop. He’d used it himself. It could be effective, but also could lead to false confessions unless the investigator was careful.

  “It could narrow our investigation at this stage,” Alyssa said.

  “He is the main suspect,” Zach said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Bu—”

  He held up his hands. “I agree with you, Firecracker. This is too important a case to leave in the hands of one investigator.” He pointed at the door. “Let’s go find more evidence.”

  She smiled and his heart clenched at the sight of it. He scowled after she’d walked off. What was this woman doing to him?

  Moments later, Zach stood with Alyssa, Marc, Riley, and Drew in the Global Intelligence room.

  “We need to find Beth Reynolds,” Zach said. “She’s also a teacher at the Language Learning Center with Hajjar, but she didn’t report in to work today. We believe she might be Fadi Hajjar’s girlfriend. He might have done something to her after she called Detective Harrison.”

  “She’s our missing link,” Alyssa said.

  “We’ve got DAS on it,” Drew said. “The parameters being a five-foot-seven Caucasian female. Blonde hair. Blue eyes.”

  Zach hadn’t remembered the color of her eyes from meeting her at the shelter. But then, she’d avoided his gaze. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Next move?” he asked the room in general.

  Alyssa stopped. “DAS might be able to track her, but until then we need to get all the information on her we can.” She grabbed her coat from the back of a chair and headed to the door. She looked over her shoulder at him. “You coming, partner?”

  Well, at least she was finally admitting it.

  * * *

  Captain Marin blocked Alyssa’s path before she got to the entrance of the CTB. He frowned at Zach and Marc, who flanked her. “I assume you’re headed home, Alyssa.”

  She purposefully kept her voice and face calm. “No sir, I’m going to do some background research on Beth Reynolds. I suspect she’s Hajjar’s girlfriend and she might be willing to talk to us.”

  “You’re on medical leave.”

  “Sir, this case is too important. All hands are needed. I am only trying to exhaust all avenues of investigation.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his scowl fierce. Then he sighed. “Fine. You’re one of our best and we need you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He held up a hand to stop her from continuing. “You will not engage or confront any suspect. You will call for backup.”

  Zach stepped forward. “She has us.”

  Captain Marin’s gaze searched Zach’s face before he nodded and focused back on Alyssa. “Find me proof that Hajjar is our guy.”

  “I’m on it, sir.”

  * * *

  It turned out that Beth Reynolds lived in a brownstone building not far from the shelter. Alyssa, Zach, and Marc followed the apartment manager up the stairs to the second floor of the five-story walk-up. Beth lived in apartment 206.

  They entered the hall in silence. Alyssa’s head ached with the tension. She felt ragged and on edge. Not enough sleep. She blinked.

  Time to focus, Alyssa.

  Zach knocked on the door. “Beth Reynolds, this is the police. Open up.”

  No answer.

  He pounded on the door and then nodded at the manager, who unlocked it. Zach and Alyssa both pulled their weapons and went in silently, leaving Marc to deal with the manager before following.

  The door opened into a small, sparsely furnished living room with a galley kitchen.

  No one.

  “Clear,” she said.

  Zach stalked into the bedroom off the living room. “Clear,” he growled.

  Marc checked the bathroom and came out shaking his head.

  “She’s gone,” Zach said from the bedroom doorway, nodding at something inside.

  Alyssa looked into the room. The dresser drawers hung open and empty. The closet was also empty.

  “She’s not just gone,” Alyssa said. “She ran.”

  Zach nodded. “The question is, who is she running from, us or Fadi Hajjar?”

  Alyssa pulled on a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket and went back into the main room. “Let’s see if she left us any clues.”

  “I’d guess she lived alone,” Zach called from the bedroom. “Only one side of the bed has been used.”

  In the living room, Alyssa scanned the waist-high bookshelf under the main window. Three shelves, but only the top one held books—all the basic book-club titles. Boring. Alyssa would take a romance over a literary book any day. The middle shelf was empty, but the bottom shelf had a small rolled mat.

  She flipped it out onto the floor. Not a mat but a carpet, a small one about a yard long. The intricate pattern of blues and reds reminded her of Middle Eastern designs. Maybe something Beth Reynolds had picked up in her travels. A black silk scarf lay on top of the bookshelf.

  Alyssa frowned and looked out the window. Just an eastern view of another old brick building.

  She strode into the kitchen and opened the fridge.

  “Hungry?” Marc asked from where he checked the sofa cushions.

  She pulled a package of meat out. “It’s halal chicken.”

  “Halal?” Zach asked. He stood blocking the doorway, overwhelming the tiny kitchen. “You sure?”

  Alyssa showed him the package, with the label indicating the meat had been slaughtered a certain way and then blessed. She picked through the rest of the food. “It’s mostly halal,” she said.

  Zach looked back at the small rug Alyssa had unrolled in the middle of the living room and then looked back at her. “That would mean…”

  Alyssa nodded. “That Beth Reynolds is Muslim.”

  “I got something, guys,” Marc called from the bedroom. He came out holding a pile of letters held together with an elastic band. “These letters haven’t been sent.”

  Alyssa frowned. “What?”

  Marc held them up. “There’s no address or return address.” He pulled the letter out of one envelope. “But there are full letters in each one.” He handed one each to Zach and Alyssa.

  Written in Arabic, the letters were to her husband and son.

  “Nasir,” both she and Zach said at the same time.

  “Holy shit,” Alyssa said. “Beth Reynolds is Nasir’s mother.”

  Zach held up his letter signed with an E. “Elizabeth Reynolds.”

  “Like the letter that Rob took. He took it from her. But why? Was it among Hajjar’s things by accident?”

  “From the sounds of these letters, she’s planning on a suicide mission.”

  Marc eyed them both. “Are you two super-cops going to tell me what’s going on, or do I have to guess?”

  “You know I’m Qatil Atfaal,” Zach said. Marc nodded. “The little boy I killed had blue eyes and was named—”

  “Nasir,” Marc finished. “Holy shit is right. What does it mean?”

  “It means,” Alyssa said, “that Beth Reynolds is working for Al Shabah.”

  * * *

  Alyssa paced before the main screen in the Global Intel
ligence room while the latest message from Al Shabah played.

  She looked over the information she’d gotten on Reynolds. The woman was Brainiac smart, and had gone to London to get a chemical engineering degree. She’d married Omar Khoury not long after and then moved to the Middle East with him. That would explain why a woman from upstate New York converted to Islam.

  What Alyssa couldn’t find out was where Khoury was now, and why Reynolds would be dating Hajjar.

  “So does this mean Hajjar really is Al Shabah?” Drew asked.

  “Maybe,” Alyssa said. She frowned. “But where would they have met? He’s been in the United States for twenty years. We need to find their connection.”

  “I’ve got something,” Riley called from his monitor.

  “Big screen,” Zach said.

  Grainy black-and-white footage of a street scene appeared on the monitor. People walked back and forth in front of a two-table patio which held one older gentleman drinking from a mug.

  “What am I looking at, Riley?” Alyssa asked.

  “This is a coffee shop security camera,” he said, “hooked into DAS. One block from the subway. Thirty seconds before detonation.”

  Alyssa’s fists clenched at the thought of what she’d been doing thirty seconds before the explosion.

  “Watch the person in the hoodie entering the screen now,” Riley continued, pointing to a person wearing a hoodie, leggings, and sneakers—as if they were going out for a run, except they weren’t running. They stopped, pulled out their cell phone, tapped some numbers, and then slid their phone away.

  “And the bomb goes off…now,” Riley said. Alyssa’s stomach roiled. Zach stood beside her now, almost shoulder to shoulder, not looking at her but watching the screen, silently offering his support. She took a deep breath and smelled the subtle scent of him. The nausea receded and she could focus again.

  On screen, pedestrians jumped. All looked toward the subway, and one pointed. The hoodie person hadn’t jumped, but had stopped at the edge of the screen. The hood fell back and revealed long blonde hair. Beth Reynolds turned to look where someone else pointed back toward the subway.

  A memory flashed through Alyssa’s mind and she stumbled back. Zach grabbed her arm before she’d taken even one step.

  “I’m so stupid,” she whispered.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his gaze searching hers.

  She held up her hands. “I’m fine. Really,” she said when he didn’t let go of her immediately. “I just remembered something from the day of the…the explosion.” She swallowed hard. She could do this.

  “That morning, on the platform. I saw her. It was just a flash. She looked back at me. I didn’t recognize her, but my brain wasn’t…wasn’t processing properly at the time.”

  “No shit,” Drew said. “Having to save a platform of people from a terrorist’s bomb will do that to a person.”

  Her eyebrows rose in surprise.

  Drew snorted. “What? You think you’re Robocop or something, Al? Shit, woman. Give yourself a break.”

  The muscles in her shoulders loosened at his words, and she nodded.

  “Alright,” Zach said. “Back on point: Beth Reynolds is our bomber and our link to Al Shabah. We need to find her fast. Riley, alert the captain and he can tell the feds who we’re looking for. And if we find her, we find Al Shabah.”

  An idea jolted Alyssa and shock rooted her to the ground. Her hand grabbed Zach’s arm without her even knowing it. “She’s not working for Al Shabah.”

  Zach looked at her. “What do you…” He spun back to the black-and-white image of her on the screen. “Fuck me.”

  “What?” Drew said.

  Alyssa wanted to smack herself. “Al Shabah means ‘the ghost,’” she said. “No one has ever seen the Ghost. I always thought the name was given because the person was elusive. But I now believe it was also given because they had pale skin and hair…”

  “So Al Shabah is…” Drew looked at the still picture of the blonde woman on the screen.

  “Beth Reynolds,” Alyssa said. “It fits with everything we know. And that would be why she could move so freely here in the U.S. She’s an American citizen, as well as a white woman. Who would suspect her?”

  “We need to find her,” Zach said.

  “Get that info out to all the precincts ASAP,” Alyssa told Drew. He nodded and began typing on his keyboard.

  She went to the white board where most of their pertinent information was displayed. “Let’s go over everything again, but now knowing who Al Shabah really is.”

  Zach nodded. “Our tango volunteers at a men’s shelter. Why?”

  Drew and Riley joined them at the board. “So she has access to unsuspecting bomb carriers?” Riley said.

  “Yes,” Alyssa said. “But I think there’s more to it than that.”

  “Proximity to her apartment?” Drew said.

  “We’re still missing something,” Zach said, staring at the board. “Okay, place of employment?”

  Riley checked a paper before handing it to Zach. “The Language Learning Center. She’s a teacher. Middle Eastern languages.”

  “Arabic?” Alyssa asked. Riley nodded and Alyssa stared into space, thinking. Something nudged her memory. Why was the Arabic important?

  Alyssa gasped. “That bitch.” She went to a monitor and pulled up the video she’d saved.

  There it was: The security footage from the night Rob died. The others crowded around the screen with her. A slight figure in a hoodie helped Rob to the edge of the platform, then stepped away. Rob wobbled for a moment and then fell onto the tracks. The figure did nothing to help him, but just looked around and walked away. Rob struggled to rise, making it to his hands and knees before collapsing again. He didn’t get up again, though his one hand stretched out as if searching for help.

  Alyssa’s throat tightened as they watched him die. His movements became feebler until they stopped altogether.

  “You think Reynolds killed Rob?” Drew asked.

  “I know it. The Language Learning Center is in my neighborhood. I think Rob saw Reynolds and followed her there.” She cursed softly as she remembered. “A couple of days before he died, he mentioned he’d seen someone who’d been there on the day his friends died. He must have meant Reynolds. He’d seen her in Iraq. At the same bombing that killed my friends. He took papers from her desk hoping to find something to show who she was. He couldn’t read Arabic and so wouldn’t have known that what he’d taken was only teaching material.”

  “Except for the letter,” Zach said.

  She nodded. “Except for the letter. She must have found out and killed him.” She cursed. “And then she broke into my apartment looking for it.”

  Zach closed his eyes for a brief second. “Fuck,” he said. “You have been too close to death too many times this past week, Firecracker.”

  She squeezed his arm briefly before going to her desk to retrieve the envelope with the papers Rob had taken.

  She spread them out, cataloguing them. “Learn-to-read Arabic stories. An Arabic poem. Receipt for a deli. A sheet of Arabic numbers.” She slapped the last one down. “Receipt for Sentinel Storage.”

  Drew typed furiously into his laptop. “A storage rental place in East Harlem.”

  Alyssa nodded at her team. “That’s where we’re headed next.”

  20

  They sent Riley and Drew to check out the Language Learning Center. They needed as much information as possible, as fast as possible, if they were going to figure out what Reynolds had planned next. Alyssa had no doubt that the woman wasn’t done yet.

  Sentinel Storage was a bright orange building jammed between a deli and a hardware depot. Inside, the teenage clerk behind the counter watched a Big Brother episode on his laptop. He barely glanced at them as he chewed a massive smoked meat sandwich, giving a good impression of a cow chewing cud.

  “Number?” he said.

  Alyssa held up a picture of Reynolds and her badge.
“We want to know the locker for Elizabeth Reynolds.”

  The clerk’s jaw hung open. Apparently he liked mustard on his meat. “Umph?”

  Zach leaned close to him, his face stony, and his voice deep with a dangerous edge. “Tell us her locker number now.”

  The clerk dropped his sandwich on the counter and flipped through the pages of a binder. “33, sir. Down the hall. Turn right.”

  Zach nodded, still in scary mode, and turned away. Alyssa pressed her lips together to stop her smile as she followed him. Once they’d turned the corner, she snorted. “I thought that kid was going to piss his pants when you spoke to him.”

  “Sometimes it’s fun to be scary looking,” he said with a grin.

  “You’re not that scary,” she said. “Just tall with lots of muscles.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You like my muscles?”

  Her face heated. “I didn’t say that.” She started looking at the numbers on the lockers. 17. 18.

  “Not with words,” he murmured.

  She heard him, but didn’t respond. She lengthened her stride. “It should be just up here.”

  “Are you trying to ignore me again, Alyssa?”

  She glared at him. “I’m trying to be professional. You should be, too.” She stopped in front of a ten-foot-wide roll-up door. A lock secured it to the floor. She knelt and examined the lock. “It’s one of those combination locks that uses letters. I have bolt cutters in the car, but if we don’t have a warrant that might cause issues later.”

  “How many letters?” Zach crouched beside her.

  “Five,” she said. The answer popped into her head. She met his gaze and smiled just as he did.

  “Nasir,” they said at the same time.

  She quickly spun the letters and the lock popped open. They pulled the door up together and before it was fully open the acrid scent of chemicals assaulted her nose. Ammonia, sulfur, and charcoal were the main scents she could identify. The room was about fifteen feet long. Reynolds had set up a work table with a lamp and chair. A shelving unit stood behind, but nothing else was left.