Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

“Yesterday, at about a quarter to five in the afternoon. We’d been using my car. I dropped her back at the office. She got into her car and drove off.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

McKinsey nodded. “She told me she was going home.”

“Directly home?”

“‘I’m going home, Pete. I’ve had it.’ This is word for word what she said to me.” He spoke neither quickly nor slowly, but his voice was appropriately tight. After all, his partner of six years was missing.

Chief Detective Nona Heroe’s head came up. She had been scribbling in a small spiral-bound pad. “Agent Wilde said, ‘I’ve had it’?”

McKinsey nodded. “Yes.”

Heroe tapped her pen on her notebook. “What did you take that to mean?”

He shrugged. “That she was beat. We both were. We’d been up and working for more than two days.”

“In that time you two never went home?”

“Just to shower and change clothes.”

Heroe marked this down as if it would someday be used as evidence against him. He hated her even more.

She looked up. “Where were you before you arrived at the office?”

“We were following up several leads concerning the trafficking network that brought Arjeta Kraja into the States illegally.”

“And?”

“Unfortunately, they led nowhere.”

“Why were you so interested in Ms. Kraja?”

“That was Naomi’s idea. According to Alli Carson, the Kraja girl was seen with Billy Warren the night he was tortured and killed.”

Heroe processed his tone. “And you didn’t believe Ms. Carson.”

“Let’s put it this way. I’d have liked the opportunity to question the Carson girl more closely.”

“What stopped you?”

McKinsey shrugged. “You know as well as I do. She’s a protected entity.”

Heroe made more notes. “And you never found Ms. Kraja’s body.”

McKinsey sighed heavily and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. “She vanished into thin air.”

“Just like Agent Wilde.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I suppose you could say so, yes.”

Heroe scribbled industriously. She was good at it. Engaging his eyes again, she said, “Agent McKinsey, I’m afraid I have some bad news. We found Agent Wilde’s car. It had gone off the road in rural Maryland. We had the devil’s own time pulling it out of a concrete abutment at the base of the embankment.”

“Did you find her?” Suitably anxious tone. “Did you find Naomi?”

“No.”

He frowned. He was good at it. “What about her handbag, her cell? I’ve been trying to call her for hours.”

“There was nothing in the car,” Heroe said. “The driver’s side door was open and the seat belt hadn’t been engaged when the airbags deployed.”

McKinsey shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us, Agent McKinsey.”

Heroe flipped closed her notebook and stood. McKinsey admired her while she stretched. She was an imposing woman, with a good figure, fine features, and skin the color of bitter sweet chocolate. She seemed to be on the good side of forty, young to be the head of Violent Crimes. Either she had offered herself to all the right people, he thought, or she was very, very smart.

“Why don’t we take a break.” It was not a question. She gestured to a sideboard on which stood some kind of stainless-steel-and-glass apparatus that looked like it belonged in a Starbucks. “Would you like some coffee?”

“As long as it’s not swill.”

Her laugh seemed to him corrosive.

“I make my own. Stumptown.”

That meant nothing to him. While she busied herself, he looked at his hands. Steady as a rock. But he sorely wanted to get the hell out of there. He wasn’t used to being interrogated, and now he regretted his rash action at the bank. But he had had no choice. Naomi had discovered the connection between Middle Bay and Gemini Holdings. He was now in the middle of a shitstorm and he knew that bastard Pawnhill blamed him. He’d tried to warn Naomi away from Middle Bay but, as always, she had been like a dog with a bone. He’d admired that in her. Truth be told, shooting her dead had frazzled his nerves. That was a surprise. Before coming to the Secret Service he’d killed before, more times than he’d like to count, but this kill was different. It was Naomi. Christ, it was like a marriage—in many ways, more intimate. They’d had each other’s back. Until yesterday. Truth be told, he was still in shock. He continued to stare at his hands, wondering when they would begin to shake.

He looked up as Heroe returned with two tiny cups, setting one down in front of him.

“What the hell is this?”

She resumed her seat opposite him. “Haven’t you ever had an espresso?”

“I drink coffee,” he said.

“Espresso is coffee.” She took a sip. “Only better.”

He downed his in one gulp.

“About Agent Wilde’s car,” Heroe said. “I don’t think she was in it when it crashed.”

McKinsey almost choked. “I don’t … I don’t follow.”

“Forensics. No blood, bits of skin, the kind of evidence you’d expect to find somewhere in the interior—the front seat, the headrest, the steering wheel. There was nothing at all.”

Shit, he thought, I was so freaked out I forgot to plant the forensics.

At that moment, when he needed a reprieve the most, he got it. The door opened and Heroe’s boss, Alan Fraine, stuck his head in and signaled. Excusing herself, Heroe rose and went out of the room with him. He had counted off a hundred seconds when she returned, a scowl on her face.

She put her back against the open door. “You’re free to go.”

McKinsey grinned at her as he went out, and couldn’t help saying, “See you around the block.”

AFTER MCKINSEY had left the building, Heroe and Alan Fraine had a sit-down in his office. Unlike most offices, it was fanatically, almost obsessively, neat. Fraine himself was the same way. A man on the downward slope of middle age, balding, with a high, freckled forehead, he had small hands and feet, delicate fingers. His usual outfit was a neatly pressed long-sleeved shirt and suspenders, rather than a belt to keep his pants up over his narrow hips. He sat behind his desk while Heroe pulled over an armchair.

“I still wonder whether my leaking McKinsey’s whereabouts was a good idea,” Fraine said. “I was listening and it seemed to me that you were actually getting somewhere with him.”

Heroe sighed. “It was more important to find out who his rabbi is. So give.”

“You were right, it wasn’t his boss at the Secret Service,” Fraine said. “It was Andrew Gunn of Fortress.”

“Damn, isn’t that something!” Heroe punched the air. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

“You think McKinsey’s dirty?”

“I know it,” Heroe said. “Furthermore, I think Naomi Wilde is dead—not missing, not abducted. I think she was killed because of what she knew or maybe discovered. And Peter McKinsey’s my prime suspect.”

“One federal agent murdering another? Jesus, Heroe, even for you that’s a lot to swallow in one gulp, especially with nothing tangible to back it up.”

“Take as many gulps as you want. The fact is Naomi Wilde’s car went off the road without her in it. Someone else dead-manned it to go off the road precisely where it did. I’m going to go over his alibi with a fine-tooth comb.”

Fraine swung his chair around and looked out the window with his thousand-mile stare. “If she’s dead why wasn’t she in the car?”

“My best guess? Her murder was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and it was messy. Also, if I had to go further, it’s possible that the manner of her death might have led us to suspect McKinsey.”