“I’ll bet. You knew she didn’t drown.”
“I knew.”
“Did you help her arrange for her car to be found?” Abby’s Honda, registered in her Hollister ID, had turned up in the drainage system.
Tess shook her head. “It wasn’t arranged. It was… providential, I guess you’d say. It was just how things worked out.”
“So who is she, Tess?”
“You’d be better off not knowing.” She caught his mistrustful glance and added, “I mean that. Really. The less you know, the more deniability you retain.”
“Deniability? I saw her. I got her tag number. I’m already deeply into this thing.”
She hesitated, fearing to ask the next question. “Does anyone else know?”
“You mean, have I told Michaelson? Have I put it in my official report?” Crandall made a brief noise like a stifled laugh. “Do you think you’d be sitting here with me if I had? The ADIC would have had you in a detention cell by now.”
“That’s a slight exaggeration.”
“No, it isn’t. He’s been gunning for you for years. Ever since Mobius. You managed to piss him off. Frankly, you’ve managed to piss off most of the personnel in this office.”
“So no one knows?” She failed to keep the relief out of her voice.
“No one. I’m covering for you.”
“Thank you for your discretion.”
“For participating in the cover-up, you mean? Yeah, I’m real proud of myself.”
“It was a difficult situation, Rick. There were tradeoffs. Abby helped me, and I helped her. It was against procedure-”
“No shit.”
“-but it got the job done. We stopped Kolb.”
“And you took all the credit. Nice.”
“I didn’t care about the credit. I got out of town as soon as the case was closed. I didn’t exploit it.” She hated sounding defensive.
“How about Mobius? Did your secret friend help you on that one, too?”
“I didn’t know her then. She had nothing to do with Mobius.”
“And MEDEA? It can’t be a coincidence that you’re here today after she visited Andrea Lowry last night.”
“No, Rick. It’s not a coincidence.”
“Jesus.” Crandall looked away, disgusted. “You’re out of control, Tess. You’re off the reservation.”
“If it means anything, I never wanted it to go this far.”
“You know what? It doesn’t mean anything. Not to me.” Crandall stood up. “Come on. You’ve got a briefing with the case agent.”
“Not with Michaelson?”
Crandall shook his head. “He’s limiting his contact with you. Can’t say I blame him.”
That was a cheap shot. Tess didn’t respond. She followed Crandall out of the break room, aware that she had lost her only ally in the building. She was now officially alone in L.A.
Except for Abby, of course. And Abby was the exception that proved the rule.
13
Crandall led her to the squad room, where rows of desks sat nearly empty, only a few agents working the phones or reviewing notes on yellow legal pads. She saw one agent going over a stack of files in the brown and white folders used by all Bureau offices, with a few of the older tan folders from an earlier era. The tan ones presumably related to the original MEDEA investigation twenty years ago. On another desk she saw blue documents, color-coded to signify urgency.
She followed Crandall to the rear of the bullpen, where a secretary gave them permission to enter the office of the squad supervisor.
His name was Hauser, and Tess pegged him instantly as an ex-Marine. He was a tall, no-nonsense hard case with a gray crew cut, and he looked to be pushing the Bureau’s mandatory retirement age
Shell-shocked after her conversation with Crandall, she expected only more hostility and mistrust. She was surprised when Hauser proved friendly.
“Agent McCallum,” he said as his big hand wrapped itself around hers, “I’ve heard a lot about you. You have a reputation for getting things done.”
“My reputation is probably a bit overblown.”
“I’ve looked at the cases you worked-the big ones, anyway. Mobius, STORMKIL… You impress the hell out of me, I have to say.”
“I’ve been lucky in L.A.”
“Yeah, luck.” He winked at her. “Funny how some people have all the luck, and some don’t. Anyhow, we need all the help we can get. We’ve opened a genuine can of worms, which is a lot less fun than a barrel of monkeys.”
“I read the case report. But it wasn’t very detailed. How exactly did you find the woman, anyway?”
“Wasn’t easy. She did a pretty good job of dry-cleaning herself. We knew she must have gone underground, and she’d probably done it eight years ago, shortly after her release. It was likely she’d used somebody who was active in the Los Angeles area, probably somebody well known, because she wasn’t a person with a lot of criminal contacts. We found a guy who matched the description serving a ten-year sentence in federal prison. Fellow by the name of Rodriguez, who used to run a little identity-swapping operation out of Studio City. Couple of our people visited him in lockup and asked whether our subject had ever been one of his clients. There was the usual bargaining-he wanted to be moved to a less life-threatening part of the facility, which we arranged-and he gave her up. Told us what name she was using now. Once we had the name, we tracked her down easily.”
“But not until last week,” Crandall said. “The GPS surveillance is a recent development.”
Hauser looked at Tess. “How much has Crandall told you about that?”
“Just that you instituted it.”
“Then he left out the most important part. Last night Andrea Lowry drove her car to a political event in Orange County hosted by none other than Congressman Jack Reynolds.”
“Did she?”
“Global positioning does not lie. We know every place that car has been and what time it was there, and one of those places was the high school where Reynolds was addressing his constituents.”
“She’s stalking him?” Tess frowned. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, under the circumstances.”
“You don’t think she’d have a desire for revenge?”
“If she did, wouldn’t she have taken action years ago?”
Hauser shrugged. Clearly the mysteries of human motivation were of little interest to him. “Sometimes it takes a while for a person to get up the nerve. And you know what they say, revenge is a dish best served cold.”
“After twenty years I’d say it would be ice cold.”
“Well, maybe she has some other motive for going there. Maybe she’s trying to renew her contact with Reynolds. Or just trying to spook him, shake him up a little. Or she wants hush money. It’s campaign season, you know.”
He didn’t have to say more. If the updated section of the MEDEA report was accurate, Reynolds couldn’t afford to have Andrea Lowry talk.
Of course, it was possible that Reynolds was innocent, his misconduct purely a fantasy in a disturbed woman’s mind. The ambiguity was what made the case so radioactive. If word of the accusation got out and was later found to be baseless, there would be many kinds of hell to pay. A sitting congressman would not take kindly to
