Path of Secrets

by D. F. Hart

  “Thanks, Thelma. I’ll be right down.”

  He stopped at the conference room’s doorway to tell Lizzie.

  “Joe and Trish are here. I’m going to go get them. Be back shortly.”

  She nodded, her stomach knotting a bit.

  Usually when Joe, Nathan and I are together, it’s because we’re on the same side of a case, working together to solve it. But this... this involves Joe’s family. This couldn’t be more different.

  And I really hope all this doesn’t screw up anybody’s friendship. I mean, maybe it won’t. Joe’s a professional and so is Nathan.

  But still.

  She sighed aloud into an empty conference room, and waited, and as she did, she sent up a silent prayer.

  ***

  A few minutes later Joe came striding into the conference room with Trish by his side.

  “Hey, guys,” Lizzie said as she hugged them both. Probably a dumb question, but are you okay?”

  “No, Lizzie, I’m not. That kid doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body,” Trish stated, her eyes misty as she took a seat. “Not one. Never has had. I think someone is going to great lengths to frame him. What I don’t know is why.”

  “Talk to me, Trish,” Nathan prodded gently. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I saw a young man earlier this week that looked so much like Grant it stopped me in my tracks,” she said matter-of-factly. “At the time I didn’t think much about it, especially once I realized that it wasn’t Grant after all. But now that Grant’s been arrested, I believe it’s a vital piece of the puzzle you’re working on.”

  “When and where did you see him?”

  “On Wednesday, at an Italian place two blocks from work. We’d called in a lunch order and I went to pick it up. As I was leaving, I happened to glance over at some tables, and he was sitting there eating. Nathan, this guy looked so much like my nephew I almost called out to him. Then I saw what he was eating, and I knew it couldn’t be Grant.”

  “What he was eating?” Nathan was confused. “I’m afraid I’m not following. How could you know he wasn’t who you thought he was based only on his food?”

  “Because this man was eating shrimp alfredo,” she answered. “And Grant would never, ever order that. He’s allergic to shellfish - to the point he has to carry around an Epi Pen everywhere he goes.”

  “Wait a minute, I saw...” Lizzie’s voice trailed off as she started shuffling through Grant’s receipts.

  “Trish,” she called out. “What time did you see this guy?”

  “Hang on, I’ve still got the lunch receipt in my wallet,” Trish answered as she opened her purse. “I haven’t had a chance to fill out my expense report yet.”

  She pulled it out. “My receipt is time-stamped twelve-forty-seven.”

  “Wait, wait...” Lizzie muttered, then exclaimed, “Hah! Found it.”

  “Found what?”

  “A receipt of Grant’s,” she answered as she waved it in the air. “He bought a cheeseburger, tater tots, and a large iced tea from the Sonic in Jacksboro, Texas. On Wednesday. At one-twenty-two p.m.”

  Nathan’s face lit up.

  “That’s brilliant!” he said. “Grant was buying a cheeseburger in a town that’s ninety minutes away from here, and thirty minutes before that you saw someone in downtown Fort Worth who so closely resembles him that even you, Grant’s aunt, thought he was Grant Forrester. Do you know what this means?”

  Joe smiled. “I do. Adds weight to the ‘someone else is behind all this’ theory.”

  “At the very least, it raises doubts about Grant’s involvement. But I need to get irrefutable evidence to back up that theory... Trish, do you know if that restaurant has security cameras?” Nathan asked as he made notes on the tablet in front of him.

  “I’ve been going there at least once a week since they opened twelve years ago. I know for a fact they have an excellent security setup. Talk to Romano, the owner. Sweet man. He’ll be more than happy to get you whatever you need.”

  “What are you going to do next? I’d love to come in on this case, but since Grant’s family, I need to stand down,” Joe said.

  He turned and looked at Trish and reached for her hand. “And so do you, honey. You and I need to focus our efforts on keeping Grant’s morale up right now. I have every confidence Nathan will get to the bottom of this.”

  “You know I will,” Nathan assured them. “One last thing.”

  Trish raised an eyebrow.

  “Tell us more about forging fingerprints. How would someone do that? And what would we need to look for, exactly, to determine a real one from a forged one?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By late afternoon the following day Lizzie and Nathan were down in the computer lab.

  “Ready?”

  “Roll it.”

  They started the Wednesday video from eleven a.m., when the restaurant opened.

  At twelve-eighteen, they spotted the man they were looking for as he walked into the restaurant. They watched him follow the hostess to a table, interact with the waiter, then pick up his drink.

  “Wow,” Lizzie breathed. “Trish wasn’t kidding. He could almost be Grant’s double, except for... Hey, stop. Can we roll that back about three seconds?”

  “Sure,” the tech said.

  “Okay, play, and... pause,” Lizzie said. “Can you zoom in?”

  “There,” she said excitedly, and pointed at the enlarged view. “Right there. See it?”

  “What?”

  “Right there,” she said again. “He has a scar just under his jawline on the right side. When he tilts his head back to drink. That’s when you can see it. It’s faint, but it’s there. Grant Forrester doesn’t have a scar like that.”

  “I’ll be damned. Good eye, Lizzie.”

  “Thanks,” she grinned. “The question we have to answer now is – how did he get that scar? An accident? Or perhaps plastic surgery?”

  “I have no idea, but we’re gonna find out,” Nathan confirmed, and turned to the tech. “See if you can’t zoom in a little more and enhance the quality. Then print me some copies, please.”

  ***

  They’d just returned to the eighth floor when Nathan’s cell phone rang.

  “You’re going to want to come down here, Agent Thomas. I have some very interesting news to tell you,” he was told.

  “On my way.”

  He hung up and looked at Lizzie.

  “Let’s head to the garage,” he said. “Evidently they’ve found something of interest in Grant’s car.”

  Intrigued, they made their way to the sub-basement where another tech met them, and both Lizzie and Nathan were puzzled when he motioned for them to step almost twenty feet away from the vehicle.

  “It’s been bugged,” the man said quietly and without preamble. “Like, almost secret-agent level equipment. We found a listening device wired into the Bluetooth system, a small video camera embedded in the rear-view mirror, and a tracking device on the underside of the car. All top of the line, all not readily available to the public.”

  “Did you remove them or leave them in place?”

  “So far we’ve just taken pictures to document their locations but have not removed them. None of them seem to be active right now but the moment we saw them we opted to act as if they were and kept our conversations benign. I wanted to let you know about them before we went any further.”

  “Leave them where they are, for now. Any way to jam those things, or at least cause interference? I don’t want whoever planted this stuff to know that the car’s in our possession.”

  “I bet I can rig something up.”

  ***

  “That would explain the close timing,” Lizzie observed as they traveled upstairs again. “Stella Williams was killed not even thirty minutes after Grant said he left her place. Now we know how the killer did it. He had eyes and ears on Grant, and a beacon to follow.”

  “I’m going to ask if Rick is available to hel
p. If he is, I’m going to have him dive more deeply into the computers,” Nathan decided as he pulled out his cell phone to make the call. “If Grant’s car was that well staked out, it’s a good bet his home computer, laptop and cell phone were, too. I’ve got good people on staff here, but Rick? Man, he’s just on a whole other level. Not only is he a master codebreaker, he should be able to trace any hack that happened back to its source for us.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then, we go on the hunt,” Nathan replied, his smile almost feral.

  ***

  The source of the hack still had to be careful with lifting anything, but his last checkup had gone well. His ribs and sternum were slowly healing.

  But he was still bored out of his skull. He’d been sidelined from work – doctor’s orders – and with Grant seemingly spending all his time in Jacksboro, nothing even remotely exciting had happened in days.

  He smiled as he re-read the article about Fort McKavett again.

  “Wow, Grant. Have to hand it to you, you’re a great writer,” he said with a chuckle, gazing at the picture of his nemesis standing next to the grand sign – and beside a stunning blonde with a great smile.

  “She’s a babe, no question,” he murmured to himself as he leered at her. “I get all healed up, I might decide to take steps to have her all to myself, buddy boy.”

  ***

  At seven-forty-seven p.m. Ben and Annie called to let Nathan know they’d had car trouble on their drive back to Dallas.

  “Not a deer, I swear,” Ben said preemptively. “Blew a tire out in the middle of freaking nowhere. It bent the rim. We’d have called sooner but we had crappy cell reception out here.”

  Nathan sighed. “All right. How far out are you?”

  “We just got a tow into Stephenville,” Ben replied.

  “Spend the night, drive back in the morning.”

  “You sure? There might still be a place open around here that sells rims...”

  “Ben. Spend the night. See you guys tomorrow.”

  Nathan hung up and looked at Lizzie.

  “Go home.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sending myself home, too. There’s nothing more we can do without those hospital records. We’ve already looked at everything else.”

  ***

  “Daddy!” Charlie squealed as he ran to meet Nathan at the front door.

  “Hey buddy!” Nathan said as he scooped up his son. “I missed you. Did you have a good day?”

  “Yep,” the toddler said and giggled before jabbering with excitement.

  “Hi, honey,” Bella said as she closed the distance between them. “You look tired but triumphant. Good day?”

  “We’ve found some evidence that points toward my gut being right after all,” he shared. “Couple more pieces and we’ll be on track to catch this guy.”

  “But, what else?” Bella narrowed her eyes. “Something else happened today, didn’t it?”

  “How do you do that?”

  She shrugged. “You’re not the only one who gets gut feelings, Agent Thomas.”

  Nathan laughed and walked beside her to the kitchen.

  “Actually, the guy in custody? He’s Joe’s nephew by marriage.”

  “Wow. That makes things delicate, I guess.”

  “At first, I was afraid it might. Joe and Trish came to see me, and let me tell you, to say Trish was upset is a severe understatement. But like I said, we’ve uncovered some things that point away from Grant Forrester.”

  “I know that look you’ve got on your face. I’ve seen it before, when you decided to goad Mikel into making a move,” she observed. “You’re not going to use yourself as bait again, are you?”

  “No,” he replied firmly. “But you’re not wrong. I’m working on how the trap should be built as we speak.”

  “Well, set it aside for now, and come eat,” she told him. “And you’re on bath duty tonight. Charlie threw a fit earlier and kept asking for you.”

  “He did, huh,” Nathan looked at his child. “Hey, buddy. Daddy’s going to eat and then we’ll put you in the bath. How does that sound?”

  Charlie clapped his hands together and smiled, then threw his arms around Nathan’s neck and laid his head on his father’s chest.

  ***

  “Man, that’s good,” Lizzie sighed with satisfaction as she took another bite of her home-cooked bacon cheeseburger. “I am so keeping you, Donny Atherton. You are pure magic in the kitchen.”

  He chuckled, leaned over, and kissed her cheek.

  “I like spoiling you, and you’re the only woman I wanna be kept by, so that works out pretty well all the way around,” he answered.

  “How was your day?”

  “I had four new clients referred to me. The Thompsons must be really happy with me because they’re telling all their friends to come see me for the best coverage and rates.”

  “That’s great!”

  He winked. “I thought so, too. How was yours?”

  She chewed and swallowed.

  “Off the record?”

  “Always.”

  “Couple of really stressful moments,” she confessed. “That Forrester kid? Turns out Trish Wallace is his aunt.”

  “Holy cow!” Donny’s eyebrows winged skyward.

  “I know, right?” she agreed. “Joe and Trish came to the office, and at first they both looked like they wanted to punch Nathan right in the face.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Joe and Nathan have worked together before, and Joe is very well aware that Nathan doesn’t think Grant is the killer.”

  “So, what happens next?”

  “Some strong evidence came in that supports Nathan’s belief, and we’re digging into it.”

  ***

  It was almost ten a.m. before Ben and Annie made it back to the office.

  “Glad to see you’re back safely,” Nathan observed dryly as they walked into the conference room with a green folder.

  “Boss, you should have seen it,” Ben crowed. “We were traveling about seventy miles an hour. Annie was driving when that tire blew. She handled it like a professional stunt driver. She didn’t freak out at all – hell, she didn’t even say a word. She just wrestled that beast into submission and got us safely parked on the side of the road.”

  Beside him, Annie grinned. “My favorite part of training at Quantico was the tactical driving techniques.”

  “And it showed. I’ll say it again, that was amazing.”

  Ben’s telling of events earned Annie a fist-bump and a ‘nice work!’ from Lizzie before everyone took their seats.

  The phone in the center of the table rang, and Nathan listened then said, “I’ll be right down.”

  “I’ve asked Rick Connor to join us on this. He’s downstairs. Lizzie, would you go get him, please?”

  “Sure, be right back.”

  ***

  A few minutes later they heard “Good morning, everyone,” as Rick Connor followed Lizzie into the room.

  Nathan introduced him to Ben and Annie and explained, “He’s a codebreaker, quite frankly the best I’ve ever even heard of, much less worked with. I think his assistance here will be very, very useful.”

  “Thomas, you just made the top of my Christmas list,” Rick joked as they all settled in at the table.

  "Okay, here’s where we are,” Nathan began, starting with a general overview for Rick’s benefit. Next, he recounted everything that had happened since Ben and Annie had left to travel to Junction.

  Ben’s jaw dropped open. “All that happened while we were gone? Man. Okay, what comes next?”

  Nathan gestured at the folder Ben held in his right hand.

  “Now we review all the evidence that’s been collected to date, including the data in that medical file, and compare it against the timeline that Lizzie built from Grant’s receipts. But we’re going to start from the date that’s on those
hospital records, since that’s our newest piece of evidence. Ben, you’re going to read that file’s contents out loud. Lizzie, you’re going to identify and call out points in Grant’s timeline that dovetail with Ben’s file. Annie, you’re going to list those common points on the whiteboard. Once that’s done, we will start at the beginning of the timeline and review it all chronologically and see if we can’t find more common points.”

  “What about me, Nathan? How can I help?” Rick piped up.

  Nathan grinned. “So glad you asked. I want you to go meet my garage techs and my lab techs and have them show you what we’ve found. Then, dig into Grant’s electronics and pull those threads, find out where they lead.”

  Rick’s eyes sparkled in anticipation. “This is going to be epic. I’d like to start with the car, if you don’t mind.”

  Nathan called for an agent to escort Rick down to the garage. “But stop by the front desk first. I’m going to call down and ask Thelma to upgrade his badge from ‘visitor’ to ‘consultant’,” Nathan told the man.

  The agent nodded. “Right this way, please.”

  “See you guys in a while,” Rick announced, and left the room.

  “Let’s get started,” Nathan said to his team once he’d talked to the receptionist.

  ***

  “Forrester,” the guard said. “Come on, man. Come with me. You’ve got a visitor.”

  Grant rose and moved to the front of the cell, then slowly stepped forward and held out his wrists so the guard could put the handcuffs back on.

  He walked Grant down the dingy hallway and through one fortified door, then turned and guided him left to the third door on the right.

  The guard swung the door open and Grant stepped through. When he saw who was waiting, tears filled his eyes.

  “Are we allowed to hug him?” Bernice asked, and Kelly, standing two steps behind her and to his lawyer’s left, nodded and added, “Please?”

  ***

  “Wait, back up,” Lizzie said. “What time did you say?”

  “The discharge papers are time-stamped eight-fifty-one a.m. on May twenty-second,” Ben repeated.

  “Bingo,” Lizzie said. “Grant and Kelly’s breakfast together in Menard. May the twenty-second, eight-fifteen a.m.”