David Baldacci - True Blue

Need to focus in on A-

That was the message she’d sent to Kingman that he claimed not to understand. Was that the whole message or had it been cut off? She might have been interrupted. If so, by whom at that late hour? But she’d been alive on Monday morning. Beth frowned as she thought about her sister hanging around Kingman. Could he crack a brain stem? Yeah, he probably could.

There were other messages Diane had sent over the course of the weekend, all from home. Just routine ones to various friends, and she’d ordered some items for her home from two vendors. Her BMW 735 was in the parking garage in her normal space, and the gate record showed she’d accessed the garage at six a.m. on the dot. Her car had been searched without revealing anything of use.

Tolliver’s purse had not been found, so robbery couldn’t be ruled out. Yet she’d been raped; that might have been the primary motivation. And then killed to prevent her from fingering who’d done it. No one at Shilling & Murdoch had come into the office over the weekend, including Diane Tolliver.

From what Beth had learned, Tolliver usually got in around nine. So why had she come to the office so early on Monday? They were interviewing everyone who worked at the law firm to verify where they were on Monday morning. However, Beth was really counting on getting a database hit on the sperm.

They could find no one who’d talked to Diane over the weekend. One neighbor reported that he saw her drive off in a hurry on Sunday around nine in the morning but did not speak to her. She lived in an end-unit town house with a garage. She could come and go without interacting with anyone, as she apparently had the weekend before she’d been killed.

There were dirty dishes in the dishwasher and trash that indicated she had eaten in over the weekend. She had a cleaning service that came three times a week, but not over the weekend. Her home phone records showed no calls going out, and the only messages on her voice mail had been from solicitors. She, like many people, apparently used her cell phone to communicate most of the time.

They couldn’t find her iPhone because it had presumably been in her purse. But they had requested the phone records from her carrier. She’d made many calls on her cell phone over the weekend. None of them had been to friends or coworkers, though. These were all normal things that one did during a weekend. Tolliver had not known, of course, that it would be the last weekend of her life.

The previous Friday, her last full day at the office, had been spent in meetings with various clients. Three of them were local and had been interviewed, but had told them nothing of interest. Tolliver had seemed perfectly normal to them. Two of her client meetings had been with men from overseas. Both men had flown out Friday night and were now in the Middle East. Neither was obviously her killer.

Her cell phone chirped.

“Hello?”

“You working late?” said Mace’s voice.

“Had a community outreach event but it got canceled. What are you offering?”

“Dinner, on me. Pick a nice place. I mean really nice, where you actually have to wear shoes and everything.”

“Did Altman give you an advance on your salary?”

“No, I just cleaned out my bank account.”

“Mace, what about your creditors?”

“I’ll start paying them off with my first paycheck. Let’s just have a nice meal.”

“Mom was that bad?”

“She’s still alive and so am I, so how bad could it be?”

“Okay. How about eight-thirty? I’ll call you with the place.”

Mace clicked off and Beth went back to her notes.

Her office phone rang.

She picked it up and listened for two minutes.

There’d been another murder.

And this one had cut close to home. A U.S. attorney was dead. Mona Danforth wasn’t the one killed. Beth managed to avoid tacking “unfortunately” onto the end of this thought. But they had just discovered Jamie Meldon’s body in a Dumpster in northwest Washington.

ON THE DRIVE over Beth spent the time thinking about the dead man. Jamie Meldon was one of Mona Danforth’s top assistants and was as unlike his boss as it was possible to be. He was a fine, diligent lawyer who’d made enemies in the criminal world as all good prosecutors did. And one of those enemies might have murdered him. She obviously was not going to make dinner with Mace. But if there was one thing her sister would understand it was that in their line of work the job trumped everything else.

When she got to the crime scene she was not surprised to see the FBI there along with her people. Meldon was a U.S. attorney and thus his murder was a federal crime. What did shock her was seeing her police and forensics personnel packing their stuff up to leave.

“What’s going on?” she asked the officer in charge.

“We’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this is a federal investigation and we are persona non grata.”

“Like we’ve never worked a homicide with the Bureau. Where’s the SAIC?” she asked, referring to the special agent in charge.

He pointed to a man in a suit near the Dumpster.

Beth marched over with two of her district homicide detectives in tow. “Can I ask what’s going on?”

The man turned around to look at her. “Hello, Beth.”

Beth recognized him as soon as she saw his face. “Steve? I didn’t think the AD came out to homicides.”

Steve Lanier, the assistant director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office and a man Beth worked with closely, said, “Well, I can’t say the same about you because I know you come to every one.”

“Did you know Jamie Meldon?”

“No.”

“So why are you here, then?”

He glanced over at a group of men in suits. “Do you know who they are?”

“No, should I?”

“They will be coming over here shortly and informing you that national security interests are at stake and the police will not be involved in this investigation.”

“What does national security have to do with a prosecutor’s murder?”

“Well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out.”

“ We ? They might be able to pull the rug out from under us, but you’re the FBI.”

“In ordinary circumstances that would be true.”

“So what’s extraordinary about this?”

“All I can tell you is that it came straight from Pennsylvania.”

“The White House?”

“And don’t bother asking who they are. They won’t tell you.”

Beth looked puzzled. “CIA? Langley has no law enforcement jurisdiction. Hell, they can’t even operate domestically.”

“It may not be the CIA.”

“Steve, are you saying you don’t even know which agency they’re from?”

“That’s right.”

“Then how the hell did they get access to a restricted crime scene?”

Lanier smiled glumly. “They showed their driver’s licenses.”

“Are you shitting me! Their driver’s licenses?”

“The FBI director himself told me that they would be here, what their names were, and that they should have unfettered access to the crime scene, because they were taking over the investigation. So they didn’t have to show me their creds.”

“This is unbelievable.”

“Yes it is.”

“Chief Perry?” said one man in his forties and who was the apparent leader of this little group of unknowns.

“Yeah?” Beth said in a stern tone.

“Perhaps the assistant director here has filled you in on… things?”

“That you’re trumping my jurisdiction based solely on your legal right to drive a motor vehicle? Yep, he mentioned it, but maybe you can run me through it with particulars, including your names and the agency you work for.”