David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

“Agreed,” Yorkton said. “But Department Thirty is not culpable in her death, and Senator McDermott must be persuaded to stop acting as if we are.”

“Yes,” the Attorney General said. “What about your other cases?”

“All secure,” Yorkton said quickly. “Our budget is off the books, and there’s no way any of our other cases will be affected.”

The attorney general stood up. Yorkton took his cue and started for the door.

When he’d put his hand on the ornate doorknob of the huge wooden door, the attorney general stopped him and said, “You understand that any information you use with McDermott did not come from me.”

“Of course I understand. I do know how the game is played.” Far better than you do, he thought.

“Good. I’ll get the evidence to you later today.”

Yorkton nodded to him and left the office. In half an hour he was out of Washington and back in the rolling Virginia hills.

Of course, Yorkton hadn’t told the attorney general everything. He never did. He only revealed to his superior as much as he needed to know to help Yorkton accomplish what had to be done. Otherwise, there could be trouble. A superior who knew too much of day-to-day operations could be very dangerous, far more dangerous than Senator McDermott or his late daughter.

He hadn’t told the AG about Sean Kelly being the one who brought Daryn McDermott to the department. Faith had been forthright with him about her brother’s involvement, and in return Yorkton protected his officer.

And her brother as well, he thought as he rolled westward on Interstate 66.

But Yorkton thought he knew Faith Kelly well enough by now to understand how she would react to all of this. He already knew she had concerns about her brother-specifically, Sean Kelly’s alcohol addiction. The unspoken words had been there, in both the calls she’d placed to him about this case. Her brother’s involvement was a puzzle to her, something she couldn’t quite grasp yet.

He’d told her quite emphatically to go to ground, to assume her emergency identity. She would, but if Yorkton knew Faith Kelly like he thought he did, she wouldn’t be sitting around in a hotel room waiting for the storm to blow over. She would use the new identity to cover herself as she delved deeper into what had happened. And she wouldn’t stop until she had the truth, even if the truth was personally painful for her. Faith Kelly was funny that way.

An irritating quality for Department Thirty, Yorkton thought.

But even Yorkton had to admit that it was occasionally a useful quality to have.

Faith’s hands hadn’t stopped trembling since she’d left Hendler’s condo. She was amazed she’d been able to hold the big Suburban on the road. The way her hands shook reminded her eerily of Sean when he was either too drunk or “not drunk enough.”

But her mind was in fast-forward. If Sean had killed both Daryn and Hendler, he didn’t have much of a head start. The sickening realization came to her that she was now proceeding as if she knew her brother had killed two people, one of whom was her lover. She wasn’t viewing it through a prism of doubt any longer. She knew Sean’s frame of mind in the time leading up to Daryn’s murder. His behaviors were classic obsession, the “if I can’t have her, no one can” syndrome that so often arose in crimes of passion.

But she’d told Hendler that Daryn’s killing didn’t look like a crime of passion. It was more of a message, a point being made.

Then again, that had been when Hendler was still alive. Before he’d discovered new evidence implicating Sean. Before Faith’s entire world had shifted under her feet. Before she’d found Hendler’s body, she’d been relatively sure of certain things, even if she inhabited the insane gray world of Department Thirty.

Now she was sure of nothing.

Nothing but the fact that she would find her brother.

And then what, Faith?

She stuffed that thought way down. It led to places she wasn’t sure she could go.

Coming from the north, she drove down May Avenue through The Village. When she passed her street, she glanced down the block eastward and counted four news units in front of her house. She grimaced.

She drove two blocks south on May, turned into the residential area, and drove two blocks farther. Then she backtracked north until she was a block north of her house, having given her own block a wide berth.

She parked the Suburban-at least that fits in this neighborhood, she thought wryly-exactly one block north of her house, got out, and locked it. She jogged across the street, trying to remember which of the homes on this street had the dog in the backyard. She caught a flash of memory-out for her predawn run one bitter cold winter morning three years ago, she’d been chased through this neighborhood by the man she knew as Dean Yorkton. It was her first exposure to him.

She walked up the driveway to the nearest house. The dog was two houses down, or so she thought. She unlatched the wooden gate and carefully entered the backyard. She knew the family who lived here was named Robertson, the husband was in sales, the wife was an obstetrics nurse, and they had two daughters. They were rarely home, either being at work or on the go with the girls’ various activities. There were no cars in the driveway.

She climbed the wooden fence, feeling splinters digging into her hands, then dropped into her own backyard on all fours. Her house had privacy fencing, so even if the news people were standing right at the fence, they wouldn’t be able to see her unless they were on stilts. Faith wouldn’t have put it past some of them, but she saw no sign that any of them were staking out the backyard.

She stayed in a crouch all the way to the back door, reached up and unlocked it, then crawled inside, just in case they were close to her windows and could feel the movement inside. Moving with agonizing slowness, she crept down the hallway to her bedroom.

Her computer was already on. She logged into her e-mail, then navigated to her “Sean” folder. She’d saved her brother’s e-mails over the last few years. There weren’t many, so she’d saved what little communication she’d had with him.

If she was going to get inside her brother’s head, try to track him, she had to know him better. She had to think like him, to feel the way he felt, to know what he knew. Before the days of Department Thirty, Faith had been a deputy U.S. Marshal, albeit for a short time. But one of the Marshals Service’s mandates was tracking fugitives. She’d had a couple of spectacular successes, even helping to apprehend one of the nation’s most notorious counterfeiters a couple of years ago, after he’d been at large for more than fifteen years.

She began to read the few short e-mails, committing passages to memory:

…my best buddy here in Tucson, a geeky little guy named A. J. Helms. Reminds me of that guy back in high school, Norm Delton. Remember him?

…my SAC here, big guy named Weller. You’d appreciate him, sister. He’s completely no-nonsense…

…moonlight in the desert, down by the border. You can see for miles. Sure ain’t Chicago, where all you can see is the next building over…

What did you think of the tiger’s eye? Got it in a little town called Arivaca, about 20 mi. from the border. An old hippie couple sells them. I got to see the guy bend the wires around the gem and then put it on a string. “How much?” I ask him. “Three bucks,” he says. Three bucks! I’m cheap but not free…

…there’s this cantina in Sasabe, half a mile from the port of entry. I never go in there unarmed. But the Jack is cheap and the beer is cold and the bartender’s wife makes the best flour tortillas you’ve never tasted. Sure as hell ain’t Chicago.