James Swain - The King Tides

He hoped she was right. In his experience, two criminals working as a team could go for years without getting caught. One member of the team committed the crime, while his partner cleaned up the incriminating evidence.

They waited for Washington to get back to Daniels. She wasn’t very talkative and continued to search the contents of Rusty’s laptop. He sat down on the bed and rubbed his wrists. They were still chafed from Daniels’s handcuffs.

“I’ve got some extra-strength ibuprofen if you need it,” she said.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID and answered it.

“What have you got for me?” she said, unable to hide her excitement. She listened, and her face crashed. “There’s no record? How can that be?”

She got her answer and ended the call.

“God damn it,” she swore. “There’s no record of the email address in any of these ISP databases. It’s as if it never existed.”

“How does that work?”

“The hell I know.”

There was a knock on the door, and Lancaster went and answered it. The Pakistani desk manager and a team of FBI agents wearing hazmat suits stood in the hallway. He turned and spoke to Daniels.

“Your boys are here,” he said.

Back in the car, Lancaster decided to play his hand. Daniels had refused to share any meaningful information with him except by accident, and he thought he knew why. She still didn’t completely trust him. Her distrust had little to do with him, and was a byproduct of her investigation.

“Tell me how to get back to your place,” she said.

“Are we done?” he asked.

“Yes, Jon, we’re done. Thanks for your help.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee? I’d like to talk with you.”

“About what?”

“Your niece. These stalkers aren’t going away. One is going to get his hands on her, and Nicki’s going to get hurt or killed. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

“I’ll deal with Nicki’s situation in due time. Meanwhile, you can keep protecting her. My sister and her husband have plenty of money, and can afford your services.”

“That’s pretty callous.”

Her jaw tightened, and she stared at the road. “Don’t judge me without knowing all the facts.” The rental sped up. She was itching to get rid of him. It was time.

“Creepie’s a cop, isn’t he?” he said.

Daniels pulled onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes, then turned in her seat to stare at him. “How the hell did you know that?” she asked.

“The way you handcuffed me gave you away.”

“Why? I always handcuff suspects.”

“You left them on for too long. Your sister told you that she’d hired me, yet you didn’t make a move to release me. You were still suspicious.”

“That’s pretty flimsy reasoning,” she said.

“I’ll agree with you. It was flimsy reasoning until we questioned Rusty and you took the cuffs off him in the interrogation room. Rusty was a pervert, yet you didn’t feel threatened by him. You knew Rusty wasn’t Creepie because you ran a background check and saw that he’d never been a cop.”

“That’s still flimsy reasoning.”

“There’s more.”

“Keep talking.”

“Creepie and his partner are the same pair that tried to abduct you at Dartmouth College. I read The Hanover Killers before I called you. The book’s author said that every male in Dartmouth submitted to DNA testing and it didn’t do any good. In the book’s epilogue, the author speculated who the killers might be. One theory was that it was two cops from a nearby town, since the cops never submitted to DNA testing. Well, those cops are still abducting young girls and killing them, and you’re chasing them.”

“That’s very good, Jon. I’m impressed.”

Her opinion of him had changed. He could see it in her face and especially in her eyes. He’d demonstrated enough deductive reasoning to put them on equal footing.

“Come on, let me buy you dinner,” he said. “There’s a place nearby called Country Walk that serves really good food. We can talk in private there.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’ve got to get back to DC.”

“But I want to help you.”

Daniels shook her head. She was as stubborn as a mule, and he decided to play the last card in his hand. “If I told you that I have a video of Creepie and his partner trying to abduct your niece, would you change your mind?”

Her eyes grew wide. “What are you talking about?”

“Did your sister tell you about what happened at Galleria mall?”

“Melanie said two men tried to grab Nicki, but Nolan stopped them.”

“I have a surveillance video taken at the mall. Let me show it to you, and explain why I think it was them. You can judge for yourself.”

“All right. But I need to pay for my own dinner. Bureau rules.”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

She asked her phone for directions to Country Walk, and an automated voice gave her instructions. Then she merged into traffic and got back on the road.

“I want to be straight with you about something,” Daniels said as she pulled into a parking space at Country Walk and silenced the engine. “I had no idea how identical Nicki looked to Cassandra. Had I known, I would never have posted the videos.”

Her voice was riddled with guilt. Lancaster had worked stings as a cop and never liked them. There were often unintended consequences to setting a trap that no one ever saw coming. As he started to get out, she grabbed his wrist.

“You believe me, don’t you?”

“I don’t think you’d do anything to hurt your niece,” he said. “But you must have realized that another teenage girl might bear a resemblance to Cassandra. And that by posting those videos, you’d put that girl in harm’s way.”

Her lower lip began to tremble.

“That never occurred to me,” she said.

“I find that hard to accept,” he said.

He was roasting without the AC and tried to get out. She kept holding his wrist.

“Please believe me,” she said.

“But I don’t,” he said. “If you were an ordinary cop, that would be another story. But you’re an FBI agent and you also went to Dartmouth, which is Ivy League. You’ve got to be pretty smart to get into that place. The sting you created had the potential to hurt an innocent girl. You knew that, but you still went full steam ahead.”

A single tear ran down her cheek. She wiped it away and took a deep breath.

“All right. I knew there was a risk, and so did my superiors,” she said. “But we took it anyway. We didn’t really have a choice, considering the circumstances.”

“You’ve lost me. What circumstances?”

“If I tell you, you have to promise you won’t talk about it.”

“You have my word.”

She reached into the back seat and grabbed her briefcase. Holding it in her lap, she unzipped an inside compartment and removed a large manila envelope with a drawstring, which she spent a moment undoing. From within came a handful of old-fashioned square photographs that was an inch thick. She passed the stack to him, and he thumbed through them. They were a collection of different young women taken before and after their lives were extinguished. In the before photos, the women were clothed and had smiles on their faces and looked either high or drunk. In the after photos, they were naked and tied up, their lifeless faces etched with anguish and pain. Unable to process anymore, he handed the photos back to her.

“That’s beyond horrible,” he said.

“Welcome to my world,” she said.

Dinner no longer sounded appealing. She found a Starbucks, and he went inside and bought two grande cups of Pike Place and brought them out to the car. He placed a handful of sugar packets and artificial sweetener on the seat between them, along with a pastry.