Joel Goldman - Shakedown

“They could be sisters,” Joy said, pointing at the dogs as she picked up Ruby’s leash.

I scratched both of them behind the ears, stood, and studied my wife for signs of things she and Wendy had hidden from me. Joy gathered her end of the dogs’ leashes to her chest.

“You’ve got your Bureau face on, Jack. What is it? Have they found Wendy?”

“No, but I think she’s alive.”

Her arms fell to her sides. “Oh, thank God! What makes you think so?”

“I ran into Colby last night. He told me.”

“Colby? Where? How?”

“We were on the same playground.”

Joy balled her fists, a leash in each hand, the dogs lying patiently in the grass. “Damnit, Jack! I don’t have time for your games. We’re talking about our daughter. Tell me what’s going on!”

“I came here to ask you the same thing.”

Her face tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Colby went too far undercover and got involved with the people we were investigating. He stole money from these people and now he’s on the run. I caught up to him last night long enough to get the gist of things. He doesn’t know where Wendy is, but he thinks that she’s alive. He made it sound like she went along for the ride.”

“I can’t believe he would do something like that to Wendy.”

“Why? Because they’re married?”

Her jaw dropped. I could have knocked her over with a wave of my hand.

“How did you find out?”

“I didn’t until just now, at least not for certain. You remember that I copied the hard drive on Wendy’s computer onto the?ash drive you gave me. I looked through some of her files this morning. She owns an interest in a partnership that paid her over four hundred thousand dollars last year. It’s all on her tax return.”

“A partnership? What kind of partnership? I don’t believe it. She would have told me.”

“Why? Because she told you that she and Colby had gotten married?”

Joy crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head away. “Yes, because she told me. After all, I’m her mother.”

“And I’m her father.”

“Is that what this is about? That she told me and didn’t tell you? You’ve known since last night that she’s alive and you didn’t bother to tell me, and the only reason you’re telling me now is because you’re angry that Wendy didn’t tell you she’d gotten married.”

“You should have told me.”

“This isn’t about you or me, Jack. It’s about her. Wendy told Colby she wouldn’t marry him if he stayed at the Bureau, not after what had happened to us. He promised her he was getting out. That was good enough for her, but she didn’t want you to know they’d gotten married until after he resigned. She knew how protective you were and how you felt about Colby. She was afraid to tell you, afraid that you’d go ballistic and take it out on him.”

“I hope that’s true, but it doesn’t square with what I know. You should have told me. The fact that Wendy and Colby are married changes everything. It makes it look like she was a willing participant in whatever Colby was doing.”

“You can’t possibly believe that about your own daughter.”

My vocal cords twisted and froze when I tried to speak. Joy watched me, clutching her throat with one hand as if she felt my struggle. I tried to talk through my tremor-induced stutter, but that made it worse, forcing me to start and stop a couple of times before I could respond. When the words finally came out, they were choppy, like a dog’s bark.

“The facts are the only thing that matter, not what I believe. Wendy didn’t have money to invest in a partnership, not from legitimate sources. Neither did Colby. This partnership was probably used to launder drug money. The least bad explanation is that Colby convinced her the partnership was legitimate and told her that he was putting it in her name as proof that he intended to leave the Bureau.”

“If he had all that money last year, why didn’t he quit then?”

“Everybody in a deal has to bring something of value to the table. Colby worked undercover. He brought information to the table. If he quit his day job, he’d have nothing to offer his partners. I doubt they would have let him quit even if he wanted out.”

“You said Wendy is part of this. How do you know that?”

“Colby said as much. His partners are using Wendy as leverage to get back what he took from them.”

“But if Colby is on the run, he can’t be of any more use to them. And that means Wendy…” She collapsed to her knees without finishing her sentence, weeping and covering her face with her hands. “Oh my God, Jack! Not again!”

I headed north on Tomahawk Creek Parkway to College Boulevard, then east to State Line Road, and north again into Kansas City, Missouri, no destination in mind, satisfying my need to keep moving as if that was progress.

Kansas City weather had more mood swings than a teenage girl. Today was cool and getting cooler, the sky a salty seabed, the air tasting like copper rain. A few of the trees had given up, their leaves already brown. I’d blinked and missed the color.

I was used to working out the kinks in a case with my team, sometimes brainstorming until someone shouted out something that made the pieces fit. We’d sit in the center of the war room, surrounded by whiteboards filled with names and dates, questions and answers. Maps, photographs of the crime scene and other physical evidence, forensic reports, and witness statements would be pinned to the walls or spread out on the tables. When we got stuck, we’d walk around the room like we were taking a tour of the murder display at the Museum of Crime, a place that existed only in our minds to catalog the grim work people practiced on one another.

We would challenge each other with theories, shredding some, elevating others to the realm of the possible, even likely. Eventually, patterns would emerge. Explanations that couldn’t possibly make sense would become obvious and inevitable.

For me, it was a team sport. I didn’t claim to be the best and the brightest, but I prided myself on recruiting a team that was just that and I needed them now.

I was?opping around, bogged down in a quicksand of emotions about my wife and daughter that proved that Ben Yates and Troy Clark were correct in kicking me off this case because it was too personal. It didn’t help that I might be falling in love with a woman whom I had almost gotten killed when I let my professional judgment become clouded by my personal feelings or, as my father would have said, when I was too busy thinking with my little head instead of my big head. Toss in an undiagnosed but undeniable movement disorder that could make me collapse quicker than the old Boston Red Sox in September, and I was a mess.

This much I knew. Colby Hudson and Thomas Rice were in business together and they had used the same method of protecting their wives from the risks of their criminal enterprise. That didn’t mean their wives were innocent of what was going on. Jill Rice admitted that she knew her husband was dealing drugs. It only meant that their husbands had insured them against that risk.

I had to stop at that. Thinking of Colby and Wendy as coconspirators, let alone husband and wife, was too disorienting. But there it was. I hung on to to the unlikely prospect that Wendy had been too naive, too in love, or too stupid to have known what Colby was doing.

Thomas Rice had supposedly given up his sources as part of his plea bargain. It looked like the U.S. Attorney had made a bad deal, because Rice plainly hadn’t given up his real supplier. It was likely that Rice, Javy Ordonez, and Marcellus Pearson worked for the same person or persons unknown. He, she, or they had been the real target of my investigation of Marcellus and when I got close enough to shake their tree, bodies started falling out.