Дэвид Балдаччи - The Fix

As she drove off, he opened the file and started to read. Every word he took in was permanently imprinted onto his memory. The file wasn’t long, but it was instructive.

“She had passed a background check, which meant there was no criminal history for the woman.” He shuffled through some pages. “Okay, we couldn’t find anything for her from over ten years ago, but the file says she has her teacher’s certificate. And it also showed that she held undergraduate and master’s degrees from Virginia Tech.”

“So we know she has a past, then.”

“Well, yeah. But why couldn’t Bogart find it when he did his search? I have to believe the FBI has a few more resources than a Catholic high scho— Wait a minute.”

“What?”

He held up a page. “The file lists her name as Ann Berkshire.”

“Okay.”

“Her driver’s license, which was used to run her background check, lists her as Anne with an e on the end.”

“Wouldn’t someone have noticed that?”

“Apparently they didn’t. Lots of people wouldn’t, in fact. Her Social Security number is on here. We’ll have to check it with the one that Bogart came up with. Since he couldn’t find her educational history on his search I have to assume that something’s off. Driver’s licenses in Virginia don’t use the Social Security number as the ID number anymore. Probably no state does. Yet it should have brought up all the stuff in this file from some database. But it didn’t.”

“So is the background in that file even hers, then? Or someone else’s?”

“I don’t know, but the degrees listed are in engineering. Computer engineering.”

“Is that important?”

“I have no idea. It also says she worked for twelve years at Ravens Consulting.” He got on his phone and did a quick search. “Okay, Ravens is now defunct. Ten years back.”

“Lots of companies go belly up.”

“And why do I think if we try to check on that we’ll find no one from Ravens Consulting who will confirm that she worked there?”

“This is so weird.”

“So her past is an enigma. And maybe a fake one. But she’s apparently fifty-nine, obviously rich, and also a part-time volunteer for hospice patients and a substitute teacher at a Catholic school even though she doesn’t need the money.” He glanced at Jamison. “What does that suggest to you?”

“That she lucked out somewhere, maybe in her business career, and is now giving back?”

“Close, but not quite how I see it,” said Decker thoughtfully.

“Well then, how do you see it?”

But Decker had gone back to reading and didn’t answer her.

They pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant. Decker kept reading the file as he and Jamison walked into the place. They sat at a table near a window. While Jamison gazed out, Decker closed his eyes and began whirring through frames in his memory vault. When he opened them, Jamison was tapping keys on her phone.

“Something from Bogart?” asked Decker, glancing at her phone.

She shook her head. “The apartment building.”

“What apartment building?”

“The one we live in, Decker. I do manage it.”

“Do you really think you can do that and work at the FBI too?”

“Yes, I can. And I want to very much, so I’m going to make it work. I don’t want to spend my entire life chasing a paycheck. I like working at the FBI because we’re helping people who need it. But most, if not all, of them are already dead. I’m trying to be a little more proactive with what I’m doing with the building. You try to help people so they never need the FBI in the first place.”

He picked up the menu, looked longingly at all the fat-laden pages of food, and then glanced up to see Jamison staring at him.

“You’re looking so much healthier, Decker.”

“Yeah, so you keep telling me.”

She gave him an impish grin.

When the waitress came he ordered unsweetened iced tea, a Greek salad with oil and vinegar dressing on the side, and a bowl of vegetable soup.

“Good boy,” said Jamison with a smirk.

When the food came, Decker said suddenly, “Honda.”

“What?”

“The principal at the school said Berkshire had a beat-up Honda.”

Jamison lowered her fork. “That’s right. She did.”

“Berkshire has a Mercedes convertible sitting in the underground parking garage of her condo building. She’s barely driven it.”

“So she must have another car, this Honda.”

“No. It wasn’t listed in her information at the condo building, just the Benz. She was only assigned one parking space because she only had one car. With the size of her condo she could have had two spaces, but she required only the one.”

“That’s odd.”

“Apparently, everything about the woman is odd.”

“So maybe it wasn’t a random shooting. Maybe Dabney did kill her for a specific reason.”

“Oh, I believe he did. But I have a hunch it’s for a reason none of us are thinking of right now.”

“It would have made things so much easier if Berkshire had been the woman on the video with Dabney at the bank,” she said wistfully.

Decker gave her a dubious look. “If you want easy, Alex, I think you picked the wrong profession.”

Six in the morning. The capital city was blessed by a crisp breeze. The sky was cloudy and the promise of rain was in every air molecule.

Decker was sitting on the front steps of his apartment building drinking his first cup of morning coffee. He had risen especially early, showered, and dressed in faded jeans and his Ohio State pullover. His scraggly hair was still damp. He sipped his coffee and occasionally closed his eyes, letting his perfect memory roll back over the last few days, looking for something that would give him traction on this case.

But each time, he opened his eyes with the firm conclusion that his memory was actually perfectly imperfect, because nothing had occurred to him.

The door opened behind him and two people stepped out.

Tomas Amaya had on his work clothes: corduroy pants, heavy work boots, and a denim shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. A San Diego Chargers football cap was on his head, his curly brown hair poking out from under it. His hard hat was in his right hand.

Danny had on jeans and a navy blue sweater. His school bag was over his shoulder. He looked sleepy and his chin drooped against his slender chest. As Decker moved aside to let them pass, Danny yawned deeply.

Tomas nodded at Decker and then glanced quickly away. Decker watched as the pair headed to the old car with the garbage bag windows. Danny put his bag in the backseat as Tomas opened the driver’s side door.

Decker heard a car coming fast and turned his attention to the right.

Tomas evidently heard it too, because he called out to Danny in Spanish. The little boy jumped into the passenger seat while his father pulled out his keys and slid into the driver’s seat. He hadn’t even managed to close his door before a Camaro slid to a stop in front of the beat-up car. Two men climbed out, one large and one small. Pistols were in their waistbands. The large man was white, the small one Hispanic. The small man had on a suit with a vest but no tie. His dress shirt was buttoned all the way to the top. The large man had on cammie pants, a long-sleeved compression shirt outlining an impressive physique, and what looked like combat boots.

The small man walked over to the driver’s side while his partner stood in front of the car, his hand on top of his pistol.

A string of spoken Spanish made Tomas Amaya get out of the car. He stood there staring at his feet.

The small man coolly appraised him, cocking his head from side to side and then smiling. Then he called the other man over.