Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

She swung it open, but before Gage had a chance to identify himself, she said, “My mother doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”

Her features were too soft for the hard look she tried to use to wall Gage off, but he didn’t try to break through it with a smile, for it seemed to be part of an honest attempt to protect her mother.

Reaching out with his business card, Gage said, “I’m a private investigator-“

“For who?” Her voice went from protective to demanding. “Who sent you?”

“Someone who was worried about your father before he died.”

She didn’t accept the card. He lowered it. Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the door.

“You mean, before he was murdered.”

Gage didn’t yet know whether that was true, but he neither wanted to challenge her nor agree with her and thereby set up a future betrayal if it wasn’t.

“That’s what the man who hired me suspected,” Gage said, “and asked me to find out.”

An older female voice called out from the interior: “Who’s at the door?”

The young woman glanced behind her and said, “A man.”

The voice rose, the tone of an exasperated mother. “What man?”

Footsteps thumped on the hardwood floor, becoming louder as they approached.

The woman who appeared at the door matched the school librarian that Alex Z had described in his e-mail. Slim. Short. Red hair tied back. She looked at Gage, then at her daughter.

“You’re right, Vicky. It’s a man.”

Vicky reddened. “I was just trying to-“

“And she did it very well,” Gage said. He smiled and handed her his card. “I may want to hire her to protect me.”

Elaine examined it as her daughter backed away. “You came all the way out here from California to talk to me?”

“Actually, I came all the way out here to talk to someone who wanted me to talk to you.”

“Who was that?”

“I’d rather not say right away.”

Reaching out to return the card, she said, “I’ve had enough mysteries already.”

Gage held up his hands. “How about this? I’ll explain to you why I’m here, and then you decide whether it makes any difference who hired me.”

Elaine stared up at him for a few moments, and then turned away from the door and said, “Come on in.”

As Gage stamped his feet to knock off the snow that had collected on his shoes as he walked from his car, she looked back and smiled and said, “Nice try with shivering-in-the-cold gimmick. My husband used to use that one, too. He knew all of the tricks.” Her smiled died. “A lot of good it did him in the end.”

I only divorced him so he couldn’t spend all of our savings trying to find Ibrahim,” Elaine said, as they sat across the kitchen table from each other. She gestured toward the 1950s knotty-pine cabinets, the Formica countertops, and the lime green refrigerator. “He spent our kitchen remodeling money chasing him across Eastern Europe.” She exhaled, shaking her head. “Assuming Ibrahim was even in Eastern Europe.”

Lying between them were online newspaper articles about Gage that Vicky had printed out. He was sure that she’d searched for them hoping to find something that would convince her mother not to talk to him. But they had the opposite effect, and he respected her courage in bringing them down to her mother anyway.

Elaine spun one around and faced it toward Gage. It was about Gage’s capture of a fugitive in Budapest who’d stolen five hundred million dollars from a Russian-U.S. oil production joint venture.

“Since you found this guy,” Elaine said, “maybe you can locate Ibrahim and figure out what happened to Michael. And why.” Her gaze settled on the article. “I suspect that if Michael had been worth half a billion dollars, too, there’d have been more people interested in finding out.”

Elaine’s hands shook as she took a sip of tea. Gage wasn’t sure whether it was from anger or fatigue. Her gray-framed eyes and errant strands of hair suggested the latter.

“What was driving him?” Gage asked.

“You mean, why was he obsessed?”

Gage shook his head. “I don’t know enough about him or what happened to say that.” He smiled. “It may be that after a few weeks working on this, people will say the same thing about me.”

She stared at him for a moment, and then smiled back.

“I think I like you,” she said. “Most investigators I’ve met, especially FBI, have been assholes. Pricks with badges.” She flushed. “Sorry for the body part analogies. I learned them from my kids.” She pointed at the church events calendar held to the refrigerator by an apple-shaped magnet. “It’s hard for a preacher’s daughter to admit, but ‘asshole’ is the most exquisite and versatile word in the English language.”

Elaine’s eyes went vacant as though images of those to whom the word applied were passing through her mind, then she blinked and said, “It really wasn’t an obsession. People who collect stamps and who pull slot machine handles in twelve-hour shifts are obsessed. For Michael it was a moral crusade, one that I’m afraid I didn’t understand. And because I didn’t understand it, I didn’t support it.” She raised her teacup to take another sip, but then set it back down. “That’s not right. I couldn’t find a way to support it. And I tried. I really did.”

“You mean you don’t think Ibrahim was framed?”

“I never saw anything that showed he wasn’t guilty.” She glanced upward. “I even searched Michael’s office when he wasn’t home, trying to find out. All I ever got from him was, ‘You don’t understand,’ and ‘It’s too dangerous for you to know,’ or ‘I can’t violate Bureau policy. I know they’ll take me back once I prove I’m right.’ “

“You mean he was concerned that he might violate FBI policy by disclosing what he’d learned when he was an agent? “

Elaine nodded.

“Which means that whatever he learned, he learned while he was still with the agency.”

She nodded again.

“Did he leave anything behind?”

She hesitated for a moment, and then said, “The FBI came and took everything, including his safe, which they weren’t able to open while they were here.”

“Did they have a search warrant?”

“You mean, did they see him as a suspect, rather than as a victim? “

Gage shrugged. “I guess you could say that’s the flip side of the question.”

“They said they needed it in order to investigate his death, so I signed a consent form. They may have had a search warrant with them just in case, but they didn’t show it. They said they’d send me a receipt once they had inventoried everything.”

“Have they?”

“No. And it’s been a week.” She sighed. “I wonder if I made a mistake by making it so easy for them.”

“If they hadn’t brought a warrant, they could’ve easily gotten one just based on the suspicion that he took FBI records with him when he left the Bureau.”

She shook her head. “I think it was less a theft and more that he failed to return the files. He’d started on his crusade about eight years ago and when he wouldn’t let it go, they fired him.”

Elaine paused, the memory seeming to well up in her. “Devastating. It was devastating. For the first few months he sat in his office just staring out of the window, then something happened, I don’t know what, and he went manic over the thing again.”

Gage pointed up toward her husband’s office. “You mind if I look at what’s left? Maybe it’ll help me understand him.”

“Then you’ll know a lot more than I did, and I was married to him for almost twenty years.”

Elaine led him up the oak staircase they’d passed on the way to the kitchen, then down a carpeted hallway to a converted bedroom.