Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  “It won’t be our failure if it ‘accidentally leaks’ that it was your failure to come clean that caused his death.” Nick used his fingers to punctuate the accidental leak, but Dunbar didn’t flinch this time.

  “Not only do you have no proof, but your father almost certainly would sue both you and the FBI for defamation of character. What headlines that would make.” Dunbar was back to his usual smooth-talking litigator self, even though his gray face was glistening with sweat.

  “Are you sure my father would support you if the media coverage got too hot for him?” Nick was honestly perplexed that someone else would trust his father when he, himself, didn’t trust him an inch.

  Dunbar’s demeanor faltered just a fraction.

  Right. Maybe now...

  As if Jennifer had read his mind, she entered the room with a cellophane-wrapped sandwich and a hot coffee from the canteen. “Agent Delano, I think you’ve done enough damage already, don’t you?” She’d put her hair up into some kind of official-looking roll at the back of her head, and had assumed a haughty attitude that made him feel as if she were his boss, instead of vice versa.

  Dunbar smirked a little at her takedown, and Nick bowed his head, playing his part. They’d see how this worked. He gave Jennifer a dirty look and left the room. He waited in the viewing room to see how it played out.

  “I’m sorry. His boss told him not to talk to you because of your close family connection, but clearly while I was getting you lunch, he took matters into his own hands. I apologize.” She pushed the sandwich toward him.

  She smiled a smile that few men could resist. “I know it probably isn’t what you would normally eat, but I was sure that with all the unpleasantness since you found the USB drive, you probably hadn’t had time for lunch.” She leaned forward and patted his arm. “You have to keep your strength up—it could turn out to be a long day.”

  Dunbar pushed the sandwich back with a smile. “Actually, I think I’m going to go now. I’ve done my civic duty—against my better judgment—and now I must return to my office.” He pushed his chair back and stood up.

  “Oh, dear. I’m sure... Well, I really wouldn’t do that Mr. Dunbar.” Jennifer sat back in her chair in a nonthreatening way. “It’s just that this man—” she shrugged slightly “—he knows where you live, and knows where you work. And if he sees he’s not getting any traction with you, I’m sure he’ll just come straight after you. I mean, that’s what I’d probably do.” She shrugged again. Her smile was so warm and innocent, it could have come from Nick’s second-grade teacher—Sister Agnes. Damn, Jennifer was good. How hadn’t he noticed how good she was?

  Dunbar hesitated, hands on the back of the chair. “Surely there’s no evidence to suggest that this is any more than a clumsy blackmail attempt?”

  Nick could tell that somewhere in Dunbar’s brain he knew this wasn’t a simple blackmail case.

  “Well, you could be right of course,” Jennifer started with a smile. “But the truth is...” She tapped her cell phone and raised her gaze to the ceiling as if she were adding numbers up by counting beyond the number of fingers she had. “This man has already killed over a hundred people. With—” she counted again “—thirty-five victims still in the hospital.”

  Dunbar literally started to shake.

  “So you see, we have no reason to believe he wouldn’t just kill you for not doing what he wanted.” She leaned forward and gently pushed the sandwich and coffee back toward him. “You should stay here with me. Just for your safety. You understand.”

  He nodded and retook his seat.

  “I mean, it shouldn’t take too long. I’m sure my team is running down all the leads you gave them. I’m sure they’ll find either the victim or the perpetrator soon.” She gave him another Sister Agnes smile and nodded at the food. “Eat. I’ll be right back.”

  Jennifer left the room and entered the viewing room. Nick gave her a quiet, slow clap. “You were awesome in there.”

  But her attitude had fallen as soon as she exited the room. He could see that she wasn’t necessarily happy with her performance, or something.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, itching to know how Dunbar was reacting inside.

  “Nothing. I’m fine. What do you think? Did I go over the line telling him how many people this guy had killed?” she said, watching Dunbar through the glass.

  “You were pitch perfect. To be honest, I’m not sure we need him here, but if we can crack him and get him to release even some of the information to the New York Times, we may save a life, if we don’t find Selfie Guy ourselves first.” Nick said, although if Dunbar was anything like his father—and he was—he would never say anything that could be used against him.

  “I’ll do my best,” Jennifer said.

  “I know you will,” he replied to her back as she returned to the room.

  Chapter Two

  By four o’clock, they’d all scattered in different directions except Jennifer, who was slowly putting the pressure on Dunbar, and Christina, who was deconstructing the USB drive in the vain hope that there would be something on there the Whisperer had missed. Not even Lara thought it likely. Not with someone as tech-savvy as this guy. But leave no stone unshot at.

  When Nick returned, he and Lara headed to Selfie—Ben’s house in Greenpoint. Lara had to remind herself that he had a name and probably a family. Regardless of how macabre his website was, he was a real live human in need of her help. Nick drove.

  “How are you holding up?” Nick asked, giving her a fraction of a glance. He wasn’t one to take his eyes off the traffic.

  “I’m fine. Why would you think I wasn’t?” It rankled her that he might think she was vulnerable to something, unnerved by something.

  “Victoria going, Mercer pitting us against each other...” He trailed off.

  “What? I don’t feel ‘pitted’ against you at all. As for Victoria—I can’t stress about things I can’t do anything about. It’s a waste of time.” Well, that was true at least. But her worst trait was thinking everything was in her control, apparently. According to Dr. Oliviero, at least, who she wasn’t sure she believed. But she’d realized her sessions after the Moretti situation would be over the sooner she agreed with his prognosis. So she’d agreed out loud and often with him. She’d finished her sessions ahead of schedule.

  One thing she did know about herself: she’d do whatever it took to get the job done.

  “Well you certainly seem angry.” He calmly used his turn signal and merged into the lane for the bridge.

  “I’m not.” Yes she was. But it wasn’t anything unusual...it was always there, simmering underneath her life, and job, ebbing and flowing like a lava field. Maybe it was a little closer to the surface when they were at the stage in each case where she felt as if they were trying to run in quicksand. When the perp was so far ahead of them all they could see was a dust trail. Maybe it was her mother’s case that she’d promised not to work on again. Maybe it was just her. Maybe she just had to live with it.

  “Okay, then. It should be just coming up here on the right...ah, yes. Our unsuspecting surveillance team is still in action. Or inaction.” He nodded to a carpool sedan. Chip packs, soda cans and sandwich wrappers littered the dashboard. Two guys were in the car. One looking at his phone, the other asleep with his mouth open.

  “That just makes me hungry,” Lara said.

  Nick snorted. “We’ll see if they can spare you something from the detritus,” he said, getting out of the car. “New York’s finest, all right.”

  He bent down and rapped on the window of the surveillance car. Phone Guy jerked up and opened the window. Lara and Nick both flipped their badges. Phone Guy nudged Snoring Guy.

  “What’s up? He hasn’t left his house yet.” Phone Guy smirked and tucked his phone in his jacket pocket.

 
“That’s where you’re wrong, buddy. Come on, get out.” He opened the door for him and both he and Lara stepped back.

  They both got out of the car; Snoring Guy stretched. “What’s up?”

  “You lost your subject,” Lara said, eyeing the McMuffin wrapper she saw in the car. Her stomach rumbled. Damn not having time for breakfast or lunch.

  “No we didn’t. He’s in his apartment. There is no other way out, unless he went down the fire escape...but we were told we were only here for surveillance.”

  “Someone kidnapped him,” she said as she leaned against their car.

  That snapped them both to attention. “Kidnapped? No way, man.”

  “Yes. The kidnapper sent us a proof-of-life video this morning. He must have been gone for a good ten hours already. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Last...last night, we just figured he had a day off or something. He has weird shifts,” Snoring Guy said with a distinct air of defensiveness about him. “Shit. What can we do?”

  That was the right question at last. She cut him some slack. “Let’s get into his apartment and see what the kidnapper left behind.” She nodded in the direction of the duplex and cast one more lingering look at the half-eaten food in the car.

  “I’ll feed you as soon as we’re done. I promise,” Nick said.

  “I’m going to hold you to that. In return I’ll try not to be too ragey,” she said, referring back to the conversation they’d had in the car.

  “Deal.”

  Snoring Guy had brought a crow bar with him and to his credit made short work of the apartment door. “Maybe when we get him back we can assign him a crime prevention consultant. Way too easy to get in here,” she said.

  “I like your optimism,” Nick said grimly.

  The apartment was small, and pretty grubby in that bachelor-who-only-does-his-laundry-when-told-to kind of a way. The air was stale, the food was old—but still edible, Lara noticed—and the carpet was dirty.

  “What do you mean?” Lara leafed through a bundle of unsorted “final reminder” letters, and then threw them back on the rickety entry table where they came from.

  “I mean what do you think the odds are that we actually find him in time?” He was standing in the middle of the room doing his usual eyeball of the scene.

  Lara put her hands on her hips. “Look. We can’t both be pessimistic at the same time. One of us has to be glass-half-full, otherwise we’ll both just spend the day in the bar lamenting all the wrongs in the world.”

  “True,” he said. “So how did this go down?”

  Lara was already in the bedroom—such as it was. “He was dragged from bed.” Bedclothes were strewn on the floor, although to be fair, that could be just how he left the apartment every day. “Fire escape.” She nudged open the torn dirty gray curtain with her pen because it was entirely too close to the bed not to have been used for wipe-off duty at some stage, she was sure. The window was open, and it looked like a laptop had been taken, leaving the charging cable in the socket. She pulled some white latex-free gloves from her pocket and snapped them on. “We need crime scene here. I’m thinking the perp might not be quite as skilled at keeping his physical body untraceable as he is his online presence.”

  “I’ll call it in.”

  Lara nosed around the debris on the floor with the toe of her boot. A linen handkerchief lay on a pile of books. She tipped her head to one side. Selfie Guy didn’t seem the type to have it together enough to have a box of tissues, let alone a proper linen handkerchief. She took a photo of its location with her cell phone. They were on the clock and she couldn’t afford to wait for the lab techs to get there.

  As she picked it up, a strong smell of something wafted in front of her. She sniffed it and instantly felt light-headed. Whoa. She was about to sit on the bed when she decided against it for health and safety reasons. Also, she didn’t want to stick to the sheets. She shivered to herself.

  “Some kind of chloroform was involved. Probably he just shoved him out of the window.”

  Nick entered the room and grimaced. She half wanted to ask him to smell the cloth just to see if he reeled the same way she had. She refrained, but waved it at him.

  “Someone will know the evaporation point of chloroform, I guess. It’s still pretty strong. Might give us an accurate snatch time,” she said.

  Nick joined her at the window. The apartment was on the first floor, the fire escape was small, but close enough to the ground that the perp could have just rolled Benjamin down. The alleyway dead-ended to the left and opened out to McGuinness Blvd on the right.

  Lara climbed out onto the escape and Nick joined her. In any other lifetime, they could be lovers, or friends out on the fire escape taking in the view. But not in this life. “I can see a convenience store.” She shrugged. “The neighborhood probably has enough crime to warrant a security cam.”

  “Worth looking at.”

  They went back into the apartment and asked Snoring Guy about the commercial businesses nearby.

  “There’s a bank a block away. A gas station where McGuinness meets Hombolt, and a Dunkin Donuts halfway down the block in the opposite direction.”

  Nick bit back a smile, but Snoring Guy had heard it all before. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever. You try and stay excited for two days in a street that like five people walk down a day. Sometimes only a cruller will do, you know?”

  Lara’s stomach rumbled again. She did know. She held up her hands. “Okay. No judgments here. We’re going to canvas the stores for surveillance cameras. Can you secure the apartment until crime scene gets here? I’ll bring you back a donut.” She turned on her most appealing face, stopping short of batting her eyelashes.

  The surveillance officer knew when to fold. “No problem. I feel responsible, you know?”

  Nick clapped him on the back. “It’s not your fault.”

  Lara averted her eyes as she headed to the door. She didn’t want Nick to see the softness that she could feel infiltrating her expression at his words. Not many agents would bother to try to make a police officer feel better about his error. And it was one that could cost Benjamin his life. Not securing a rear access point was a rookie mistake. One he obviously wouldn’t be making again.

  They walked to the corner of Benjamin’s road and Nick pointed at the convenience store first. “Bars on the windows. I’ll bet they have some kind of security cameras. Assuming they actually record something.”

  It was a sad truth that there were more fake security cameras than real ones in New York. “Agreed.” Lara examined every business and shop front they passed, looking for hours of business, or anyone who may have been already at work at around 6:00 a.m., until they reached the Open All Hours Convenience Store. Amusingly, the illuminated sign was flickering, so every couple of seconds the “venience” part of the sign disappeared. She hoped it wasn’t an omen.

  She hesitated as they entered, eyeing the display of packaged junk food. Nick went straight to the clerk and flipped his badge. The guy with straggly hair behind the counter rolled his eyes. “What now?”

  “You see FBI agents a lot around here?” Nick asked, tucking his badge back in his jeans pocket.

  “The cops have just been here, man. I’ve got nothing to hide. I swear.” Nevertheless, he started to sweat. Was that the sweet smell of pot Lara could practically taste?

  Nick grinned. “What did they want? Donuts?” He was obviously trying to build a rapport with the clerk. Well, that or he was trying to give the clerk the munchies. “So tell me. Do your security cameras actually work?” Nick leaned on the counter as if he had all day to chat.

  “Of course they do. They record 24/7 and my manager has me store them in the safe.” He opened the cash drawer as if he was going to get a key, but then closed it again and started restocking the cigarettes behind him. />
  “Can we see them?”

  “I guess.” He placed the last of the Marlboro Lights in the Perspex shelf and nodded into the back room. “This way.”

  Excitement pumped through her as she followed him into the room. They had to catch a break. They were due one. So far they’d had zero breaks. Freaking zero.

  The clerk bent to open the safe, then checked himself and looked meaningfully at them. Lara caught Nick’s incredulous expression and tried not to laugh. She grabbed his arm and turned him around. “Security first,” she said.

  While their backs were turned, she heard the clicks of the safe being unlocked, not mentioning that she could clearly see the combination in the black-speckled mirror over the desk. A soon as the door opened, she turned around. There were hundreds of small tapes lining the safe. She’d never seen a convenience store place so much care and attention on their security recording before. Strange. But a break.

  Maybe finally they’d get a look at a vehicle, even the driver?

  “What date are you looking for?” the clerk asked, running his finger over the tiny spines of the tapes. Tapes? Who used tapes anymore?

  “This morning. Between, say, four and six?” Nick said.

  “Oh.” The clerk slammed the door to the safe shut. “The police took that.”

  Lara swallowed hard, trying to quash the sudden feeling of dread. “Which police?”

  “I told you. The one that got here before you.”

  “What exactly did he ask for?” Lara asked, suddenly not hungry any more.

  “My CCTV footage. I gave him everything I had from this morning. I got nothing now.”

  A finger of dread ferreted its way up Lara’s spine. “What did he say he needed it for?”