“Any new ideas for your book?” she asked, standing on her toes and erasing the boards. She’d grown accustomed to their routines after class and had started really enjoying their conversations. She couldn’t explain why since it was supposed to be a punishment.
“Yeah,” he grinned, not looking up from his papers at his desk.
“Well, spill,” she said, putting the right colored caps on the markers as she noticed the delight on his face.
“Oh, I can’t,” he said with a laugh.
“Why?”
“You don’t want to know, but your suggestion helped me write a little funny side-story.”
“See? Funny is good,” she smiled.
“It certainly is,” he agreed, still chuckling.
George frowned. She knew that face and she knew that certain tenor in someone’s voice. She was just too good at her job not to recognize that sort of thing. He knew something.
She walked over to his desk. “What’s so funny?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, looking up from his papers. He really did have a great smile.
She shook that thought to the back of her mind and continued. “There’s something you aren’t telling me,” she said, her interrogation skills kicking in.
“Like I said, you don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, leaning over and trying to look at his eyes. They were darting around the room, averting hers. Oh yeah, he was lying.
Something suddenly occurred to her.
The reason the DEA didn’t notify the school that they were coming in was because they suspected an administrator or professor might be dealing. What if Dr. Thomas was dealing? It was entirely possible, and he did charm her into liking him—a lot. She squinted as she watched him.
Was he really a bad guy? He couldn’t be. He just couldn’t. Or maybe she just didn’t want him to be.
“Jane, are you all right?” he asked, staring at her. She was looking at him very strangely.
“I don’t know, am I?” she asked, watching his pupils. The liar was trying to act concerned about her. Classic villain.
He quickly turned his eyes away and sighed heavily. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth, but you won’t like it.”
A confession? She hardly had any time to torture it out of him. She cleared her throat as she waited. Maybe she’d be out of there by the week’s end and be able to go on with her life. Then she could forget about this man. This charming, handsome, brilliant, strong, kind man.
This would be a pretty good bust. Too bad her guns and her handcuffs were in her room. She should start to carry spares.
“It’s nothing, really,” he continued, pushing his chair away from her anyway. She’d probably be a little angry he was spying on her. There it was again. Observing, he was just observing his students. His sister would still be mad at him, anyway.
George opened her arms wide and then let them slap at her sides as she waited impatiently. He suddenly pulled a touch-screen cell phone out of his pocket and poked at it a couple of times, then turned it towards her.
“Oh my God,” she muttered, watching with her mouth hanging open. He’d seen her jam session and had filmed it? She looked utterly ridiculous with that guitar. She turned her eyes back to Dr. Thomas. He was grinning.
“You’re very talented.”
Now he was just patronizing her. It was even more humiliating than having him bend her over his lap, flip her skirt up, and spank her over her underwear.
“Oh, you just love this, don’t you?” she snapped, humiliated as she slammed the phone down.
“Love what?” he asked, putting his phone away.
“Watching me—watching me humiliate myself!” she exclaimed, getting angrier. “It’s all fodder for your stupid book! Well you could have said something! You could have told us you were coming to watch!”
He rubbed his eyes and held up his hand. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I am. I’ve just seen everyone else’s tennis matches and football games. I wanted to see you play music.”
“If memory serves you’ve already seen me play music,” she growled, putting her coat on and grabbing her backpack. She was so mortified that she was afraid of what she might do if she stuck around. It wouldn’t be good—or legal.
“Jane,” he began, standing up. He hadn’t meant to embarrass her. He actually was trying to build her confidence a little bit. She was very good at playing instruments and she was really cute. She just needed to see it for herself. That was why he’d filmed her.
She turned and looked at him like she had a million things to say, then exhaled loudly and left the classroom. She was thankful it was a Friday so that she wouldn’t have to see that spying bastard again until Monday. She was the kind of person who had to count to ten in order to get her temper under control. An entire weekend of counting was a sufficient cushion for how she was feeling at the moment.
She was mad at him for spying on her, but what made her even angrier was that she really wanted him to come running after her and ask her to stay. He did that a lot, but not that day. He let her go.
Damn, it kind of hurt her feelings.
Bella and Cricket joined her for dinner, two good distractions, and afterwards she confined herself to her room, trying to discover some kind of connection between the supplier and Whitman, or the professors, or the administration. Work. Work was the only way she ever got her mind out of angry mode.
She checked everything, from records at previous schools to people Whitman had been held with in jail. Everything checked out, so she let her fingers slide around the papers spread out on her hardwood floor until she came to Conrad Thomas’s rap sheet.
He had a record? Honestly, it wasn’t much of a rap sheet, more like a one-time-only-misdemeanor sheet for public intoxication in New Haven, Connecticut, right at about the time he was a freshman at Yale. Hardly enough evidence to bring him in on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute, but she thought that if it came down to it she could make it stick in court. Not that she wanted to see him in trouble—she just wanted to make him sweat for once in his pampered life.
She rubbed her eyes and sipped her beer, wondering what she was missing in this stack of files and chronicles of everyone’s lives. Where was the connection to the cartels? She held Whitman’s folder in front of her again, then pulled one of her three laptops over and found the number of an acquaintance at the Virginia Department of Transportation.
She immediately began texting.
JOG - What’s up, Ryder? R U busy?
Lowryder - Yeah, busy with a date if U know what I mean!
JOG - Sorry, just need a quick feed into the DOT cams to see if they recognize a plate.
Lowryder - Sounds like an illegal invasion of privacy.
JOG - Yeah. I’m calling in that favor.
Lowryder - Give me two seconds, U bitch.
JOG - Set it up and e-mail the IP address.
Lowryder - And then we’re even.
George grabbed another beer as she waited. She wanted to see where Christian Whitman was going if and when he left campus. Her e-mail chimed and she opened up the link, with black and white Department of Transportation pictures of the Mercedes license plate speeding through intersections and a street map of where he’d been and on which days.
She grinned as she copied the maps to her phone. She had him.
* * *
“Where did you learn to cook like this, Dr. Thomas, oh, I mean, Conrad?”
He poked his head around the corner of the kitchen and smiled at the blonde math intern from Georgetown. She was nice and pretty. Just because she hadn’t read anything in four years, he didn’t want to be a snob and hold it against her. So, he invited her over for a quiet Friday night dinner at his place and made beef tenderloin and scalloped potatoes.
“My mom cooked us practically every meal every day growing up,” he said, sitting next to her on the floor by the fireplace and picking at his salad. “Uncommon for a Connec
ticut stay-at-home-mom, I know, but she insisted. I guess I picked up a few things.”
“You guess? This is amazing,” she sighed, savoring each bite. “You can’t get anything this good on campus.”
“Good,” he grinned, continuing to eat. “So, before, you were saying?”
“Hm,” she nodded, wiping her mouth and turning towards him. “So, I told you about my roommate and the story she’s working on.”
“She’s in the School of Journalism,” he nodded, trying to keep up and stay focused.
“Yeah, and so she’s trying to expose the president of the student body for using his position to get girls into compromising, well, you know, positions, and she sets up a camera, and catches him using the same line like, five times right before, you know…”
“Busted,” Dr. Thomas nodded, sipping his wine and trying to act more interested than he really was. He only briefly shifted his concentration to the thought of Jane sitting in front of him telling the story, red hair flipping and blue eyes rolling, and then he quickly readjusted his attention. That was dangerous territory. She was a student and very vulnerable. He mostly wanted to keep other guys away from her, actually.
“You’d think!” she squealed, holding out her hands. “But yesterday the police break through our door, grabbing all of our computers and papers and saying that she got the story illegally and used a camera to spy illegally and if she typed one word of the story the president of the student body was going to press charges! It was way intense and so covered up!”
Dr. Thomas widened his eyes and shook his head as he finished the wine in his glass, wondering why that sounded so familiar to him. He couldn’t place it, but he’d heard something like it before.
They chatted as they continued eating and had a couple of drinks, but it just wasn’t there.
Like a gentleman, he said goodnight at twelve and offered to drive her home. She looked disappointed as she told him her car was there, so he walked her back to it, quickly kissed her goodbye, and slowly strolled through the snow back home. He was racking his brain as snowflakes began to fall and was just as stuck when he reached the warmth of his house and turned out the lights. It was going to drive him absolutely crazy.
The following morning as he was driving his dark gray Land Cruiser to meet with his editor again, it all suddenly dawned on him. Everything unexpectedly clicked, and he felt incredibly stupid for not figuring it out earlier. It all made so much sense.
He pressed down on the gas pedal.
* * *
“Answer your damn cell phone!” George muttered in the early morning, pacing back and forth in the parking lot in her jeans and tennis shoes. The snow had stopped but it didn’t keep her lower half from getting freezing wet.
Director Nelson wasn’t answering her phone. She needed her to call and get her off campus so that she could follow the lead she’d discovered the night before. She lit a cigarette as she circled the back of the parking lot, leaving another hostile message and jamming her phone back into her coat pocket.
Christian Whitman’s plates had been photographed going to and coming from the same building for months. She’d cross checked it with the Department of Justice’s records and found the place to be a hot bed of illegal activity. There’d been so many busts in the past year the abandoned building had been set for demolition before Christmas by the municipality.
Her phone suddenly rang and she quickly answered. “Nelson?”
“Hey, George, it’s Cramer.”
“Cramer! Get Nelson on the phone!”
“Well, she’s been in meetings for two days.”
“I don’t care, I need to get away and check out a lead I found last night.”
“I can do it for you,” he offered, a little too eagerly.
George exhaled a long stream of smoke and threw her cigarette into the snow. “No, Cramer, I need to do it.”
“I can help.”
“Then call St. Patrick’s and get me a pass for the day!” she ordered, walking back to her dorm. She was being a little rude, but she was actually kind of mad at him since he’d gotten to be in on the FARC raid. She’d gathered the intelligence. She’d lost the partner. It was supposed to be her there.
“Uh, okay, but—”
“Cramer! This is very important!”
“Okay, but you should know that Nelson is in a budget meeting right now and our division is getting ready to get the ax!”
George was silent for a moment. They were going to cut the Intelligence Division? How would the DEA function then? She breathed into the phone and finally said, “Then we really need this bust, Cramer. Get me off campus.”
“Okay, can you leave in an hour?”
“I can leave in thirty minutes.”
“Are you sure you won’t get in trouble?”
“Not if you say you’re my uncle and demand they give me a pass.”
“Okay, I just don’t want your teacher to have to take you across his knee again.”
George froze as she held the phone out and stared down at it. Oh dear God.
“What did you just say?”
“Nothin’,” he replied with a chuckle.
How? How did he know? Did everyone know? How?
Good grief.
She tried looking surprised when her dorm mother came to her room and told her that her grandmother was in the hospital again and her aunt and uncle wanted her to come and visit. Then she grabbed her gear in two black duffle bags, shoved them in the back of her Tahoe, and took off for DC. She could make it there before lunch and be back before nightfall.
The day was cloudy, cold, and dark. She sailed over the salted roads and followed the maps app through the countryside and into the heart of the city. An abandoned warehouse was about a block from the site, so she parked and geared up. Black Northface with the hood over her head, camera feed on her glasses, receiver on her belt, files with pictures to show the junkies, and of course, a few weapons evenly dispersed throughout her body. Couldn’t be too careful. Not all junkies were dangerous, but most of them were.
She strolled down the snow-covered street, no plow or salt trucks on that side of town, and smoked a cigarette, hoping that this would lead somewhere. She passed a couple of vagrants and entered the darkness of the hollowed-out building.
Ugh. Shooting galleries always smelled like a bad combination of mildew, rotten food, and every kind of human excrement imaginable. She breathed in and out of her mouth as she walked over sleeping or passed out bodies. Nothing on the first floor. She climbed the concrete stairs and tried the second.
More people were awake, but maybe not aware, on that floor. She showed pictures of Christian Whitman and James Clancy, but no one seemed to recognize them. She knew she couldn’t really trust junkies, but she could always tell by a slight change of expression on their faces if they recognized someone.
On the third floor, she got vomited on. On the fourth, a gun was pulled on her. She quickly took it and broke the guy’s arm, sending him in the direction of the nearest hospital and essentially getting him a warm place to stay and a free meal and free drugs.
The fifth floor actually stirred up something interesting. A junkie with a practically brand new coat flicked his eyes to the side as he said he didn’t recognize Christian Whitman’s picture. She placed it back into the folder and set in on the concrete floor next to her.
“What can I call you?” she asked, trying not to smell the odor coming from inside that new coat.
“You can call me Jesus,” he replied in a raspy voice, dark whiskers barely moving as he spoke.
“Jesus, that’s a nice coat. Where’d you get it?”
“I didn’t steal it,” he said, frowning as his eyes closed.
“Stay with me, Jesus,” she said, grabbing his arm and squeezing. “Was it a present? Who gave it to you?”
He looked at her, then jerked his head at the folder on the floor. “His friend.”
She quickly opened it and pulled out her stack of pi
ctures. She pointed at Christian. “His friend? He was here?”
“Yeah, but I never talked to him or nothin’,” he mumbled, his eyes closing.
She jerked his wrist around and his eyes opened as something popped loudly. “Point to his friend.”
The pictures dropped to the floor and she quickly spread them out, knowing that she had less than five minutes if he’d taken a hit right before she got there. The guy’s head bobbed up and down, so she decided to help him out. She held up Dr. Thomas’s picture.
“Him?” she asked. Please say no.
He shook his head as his eyes rolled back, then his entire body slumped over.
“No no no no no.” She huffed, trying to hold his head up as she slapped his cheek. “Come on, Jesus. Come on! Fuck!”
She stood up and folded her hands behind her head as she paced around the large, empty room. He’d recognized Christian and he thought that Christian might have had a friend with him. But who? She sighed and kicked the junkie’s body to the side, reaching around and feeling inside all of his pockets.
A crack pipe, nice. Needles, a thirty-gram bag of heroin, probably a gift from the same person who gave him the coat. A piece of paper with a phone number. She heard footsteps and stuffed the number and pictures back into the file folder, then raced down the stairs and out into the grayish day. She paused as she took off her gear at the back of her Tahoe, thinking that while she should wait to trace the number and get a location, she was just too anxious not to call right that second.
She stared at her cell phone for a few seconds, then sighed and speed dialed Nelson.
“Director…”
“Agent George, not now!”
“But I just need to trace one quick…”
“Jane,” her voice cracked. “If I don’t get back into this meeting, come Monday morning you will be writing parking tickets, do you understand?”
George sighed heavily, agreed, and hung up. She wondered if Nelson missed being in the field because the politics of it all sure seemed to suck.
The Widow: Federal Hellions Book 1 Page 13
