J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“This doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?”

He smiles. “It does now. Look-are you hungry? ’Cause I’m starving. I skipped lunch coming out here.”

“Jerry, will you stop and think a minute? I need your help putting all this together. This Agent Kuykendahl, my gut tells me she’s trying to hide something big.”

“Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. I can’t do this on an empty stomach. Lemme run down the street and pick us something up, okay? I think there’s a Five Guys-”

“Not again.”

“Come on,” he says. “You can choose the next place.”

There’s no chance of getting him to focus, so I let him go. He promises not to take long, and I can hear him chuckling to himself as he heads down the hall. Like he’s happy to get away. It occurs to me he hasn’t had a sit-down with Hedges yet. He doesn’t know there’s already a cloud over the day.

The door shuts behind him and I get down to work. I left my briefcase at the office, so I have to use my new phone to take pictures of the wall. They come out good, better than my three-year-old point-and-shoot, in fact. Maybe it’s time to upgrade.

With that done, I start pulling the clippings down one at a time. I read through the content, especially where Ford underlined and highlighted things, then stack pieces on the desk. Lorenz had called this a psycho wall, but it’s really a mind map, a visual scheme illustrating Brandon Ford’s obsession. Or to be more precise, his investigation. He was compiling information about the Nesbitt shooting, about the man’s alleged background-but why? Whatever his motives, this inquiry of his must have led to his death. Which means that if I can understand the wall, it might lead me to his killer or killers.

Once the wall is dismantled and stacked, I go to the computer. We have an excellent forensic computer specialist named Hanford, and he’d probably want me to leave this to him. I take a look anyway. The screen comes to life with a shake of the mouse. In Ford’s email inbox, there are more than fifty unopened messages. I scan them quickly. Mostly junk. Nothing from Bea Kuykendahl.

There is, however, an email from Sam Dearborn, sent after my visit to him, asking Ford to give him a call. Strange, since he already knew that Ford was dead. Reviewing the conversation in my head, though, I realize I never made my interest in Ford clear to Dearborn. A sign of my misgivings about the case? Perhaps.

The door opens down the hall.

I check my watch and call out: “I thought you were coming right back.”

Silence.

I wheel around in Brandon Ford’s chair, my hand moving to my holster.

“Don’t,” a voice says.

The only things visible in the doorframe are part of a man’s head-mostly hidden by a black balaclava, only an eye showing-and the barrel of a pump shotgun.

“Draw that gun and you’re dead,” he says.

My hand wants to move. My heart’s racing, my vision tunneling, my aim fixing on him. The voice in my head saying Go, go, go .

But he’s holding that shotgun steady, using cover like he knows what he’s doing. I will my hand to relax. I move it away from my side arm.

He leans further into the doorway. The fluorescents raise a shine on his synthetic mask.

“Stay calm,” he says. “Lift your hands. Put them flat on the desk in front of you.”

As he speaks, a second man crosses behind him and enters the room. He levels a black pistol in my face, circling to my left so as to leave the shotgun’s line of fire open. If I drew now, there’d be no way of taking them both, assuming I could beat the twelve-gauge in the first place, which is unlikely.

“I’m a cop,” I say.

“Do what I tell you and you’ll still be a cop when we walk out of here.”

“You’re in charge.”

“Good. Now, keep your hands flat on the desk, and without lifting them I want you to stand up. If you lift your hands, you’re dead.”

He delivers the instructions calmly with just the hint of an accent-East Texas, maybe, or Louisiana. The man with the pistol says nothing. He just stands in the corner of the room, covering me. I glance his way, trying to burn the details into my memory. He wears a tight balaclava, too, and a gray T-shirt that leaves his nut-brown arms bare. There’s a gold ring on his left middle finger. A metallic skull with red stone eyes. Jeans and tan lace-up boots. I catch a smell of musky cologne on the air, the scent intensified by his stress.

“Don’t sit there all day,” the man at the door says. “Get up.”

Keeping my hands flat, I rise into a crouch. The pain in my leg flares up. I try to ignore the sensation. It feels wet, like if I put my fingers to my thigh, they’d come away bloody.

“Okay. Now you’re going to stay like that while my associate takes your gun. This is for our safety and yours. If you try anything, I won’t hesitate.”

“I won’t try anything.”

The second man lowers his gun and tucks it into his waistband behind his hip. He approaches obliquely, removing my SIG from its holster in a practiced motion. Then he rests the muzzle against my back while his free hand roams over me.

“Where is it?”

“Left ankle,” I say, my throat tight.

He stoops slightly, tugs my pants leg up, and slides the.40 caliber Kahr out of my molded ankle holster. A tremor runs up my spine. My skin feels clammy with sweat.

Once he has both guns, the man fades back into the corner. The one with the shotgun finally reveals himself. He steps toward me, bringing the muzzle almost to my face. All I can see is that gaping hole, but I get the impression of a broad chest and thick forearms all blurred behind it.

“We understand each other,” he says. “Now here’s what we’re gonna do. I want you to come around the desk and go over to that corkboard. I want your nose in that corner and your hands on the wall. When I say go, you lift your hands over your head and do it.”

A drop of sweat runs down the side of my nose, hitting the desk.

“Go.”

I lift my hands off the desk. They leave damp prints. I raise them and straighten up, ignoring the needles in my hip and back. Unsteady on my feet, I shuffle around the desk, past the stack of clippings to the bare corkboard. In the corner I rest my hands on the two walls, staring into the crevice where they meet.

“This is a mistake-”

“Don’t bother with the speech,” he says. “We’re taking what we came for, then getting out of here. If you don’t move, everything will be fine. If you do. .”

The second man, the one with the skull ring, sniggers.

“Shut up,” the Shotgun says. “Open the desk and find a folder or something to put all this stuff in.”

I hear them moving behind me, gathering the clippings and putting them away. Then there’s a sound of moving furniture, metal scraping metal.

“Are we taking this whole thing?” Skull Ring asks.

“Just pop it open and take out the hard drive.”

“You got a screwdriver?”

“Just do it, okay?”

A sudden crash makes me jump.

“Don’t you move!” Shotgun yells.

More crashes-they’re banging the computer on something, trying to break open the housing. Skull Ring huffs with the effort, but finally wrenches away the metal and starts digging inside. My shirt sticks to my chest. All I can think about is not moving, keeping calm, storing every detail away in my head. Not the sound of a trigger pull, not the explosion, the stench of blood, the darkness, the death and the nothing.

Live to fight another day. Live to fight another-

“Keep your hands on the wall. Don’t try to follow us.”

I hear them backing into the hallway.

“Leave my guns,” I say.

“Yeah, right. You’re keeping your life. Be content with that.”