Unfortunately, it seemed everyone else had different ideas, her ex being one of them. “You need to go home,” Scotty told Sydney, hours later, after the cops, if that’s who they really were, finally let Scotty come pick her up and take her to his apartment.
“You’re the one who told me I shouldn’t sleep alone after the shooting.”
“I don’t mean your apartment, I mean San Francisco. You’re supposed to be on vacation, on your way to Thanksgiving at your mom’s place, and after tonight, you need it.”
“How can I possibly go home without answers?”
“Answers to what?” Scotty dropped a pillow and blankets on the coffee table, since she refused his offer to share his bed, insisting on the couch instead. “Go back to your mom’s. Don’t put your career in jeopardy by being stubborn.”
“Jeopardy? For what? Not rushing home to finish my scheduled two-week vacation? Are you saying that someone is ordering me home?”
“No, but if this is another federal agency, as you claim, you know that they’ll pull strings and have you moved to where they see fit.”
“Last I heard, it was my business where I spent my vacation time, not the Bureau’s or any other agency out there.”
“No one’s ordering anything. All I’m saying is that before you get all fired up to investigate, remember what happened the last time you got involved. The reason you jumped on the Quantico position to begin with…”
He let that hang in the air, and she suddenly doubted herself, wondered how it was she’d even contemplated looking into Tasha’s death, because, in a way, he was right. This was out of her league. She came back to Quantico to regroup. She didn’t need this sort of trouble…
Syd leaned back on Scotty’s couch, closed her eyes. It had been a long night of intense questioning by her interrogators. Suspect number two was nowhere to be found, which was part of the reason she had no desire to sleep in her empty apartment. Suspect number one was DOA, and determined
That part she believed, that he wasn’t a guard. It was the rest of the story that didn’t fit, and she was having a hard time letting it go. “Don’t you find their theory that this guy stole his security guard uniform so he could rob unsuspecting victims in a series of home invasions a little too pat?”
“No.”
“Well, I do.”
Scotty picked up the TV remote and flicked through the channels until he found the late night news, which was when Sydney noticed something else odd. Their shooting hadn’t even made it to the media yet.
“He targeted me,” she continued. “No doubt once I’d walked onto the Smithsonian grounds and began asking questions, I was marked. Was probably marked from the moment I started that forensic sketch.”
“I checked into it,” he said, his gaze fixed on the TV. “You’re way off base.”
“Meaning what?”
“This drawing. It’s being kept quiet because they think the victim might be a foreign diplomat’s daughter. If it gets out, the press will turn it into an international scandal.”
“They happen to mention this victim’s name?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. If they’d wanted me to know, they’d tell me.”
She watched the TV in silence for a few moments, thinking that there were still too many unanswered questions, even if it was some diplomat’s daughter. And what about this “guard”? Had he stolen the uniform and stationed himself at the Smithsonian in order to see who might come poking around in the Jane Doe murder? Unfortunately, she couldn’t very well voice her suspicions to Scotty, since she wasn’t supposed to be working on the case at all. She could, however, voice her suspicions about the shooting that she was involved in. “Don’t you find it strange that the cops were there so fast?”
“Someone probably heard the shots. They were close by.”
“I heard sirens before the guy hit the floor, Scotty.”
Scotty turned off the TV, tossed the remote onto the coffee table, then looked over at her. She couldn’t quite make out his expression in the now darkened room. She didn’t need to, though, because she could hear the disapproval in his voice. “What’s up is your overactive imagination. You’re making a federal case out of something the locals need to handle. They think this guy has targeted others the same way. The unsuspecting come into the Smithsonian, he follows them home, he robs them. The last thing they need to do is advertise that the Smithsonian has turned into a crime-infested blight. Tourism is down enough as it is.”
“Fine. You’re right, I’m wrong. I’ll go home. Be a good girl.”
Scotty stood, leaned over, kissed the top of her head, gentling his tone, as if that would make up for his disbelief in her whacked-out theory. “You’re doing the right thing. Get some rest, quit worrying. You have a long flight in the morning.”
“Good night,” she said, then sat there for several minutes in the dark, long after he’d disappeared into his bedroom and shut the door. Doing the right thing…That was what she was all about these days. The prudent thing would be to go home, let the authorities here handle it, forget about everything-everything but Tasha…Besides, why couldn’t it be a home invasion robbery, as the “locals” called it?
Because for one, regardless of what Scotty thought, it was clear the locals weren’t handling it. This shadow agency, whoever they were, was. And two, home
Too many connections to other seemingly unassociated matters. Her secret sketch sanctioned by the CIA, or OGA, her discovery of the Smithsonian grounds as the crime scene, the “phone company” showing up at Scotty’s, the towed car leading to the missing paranoid boyfriend who thought people were following him, never mind his unaccounted-for paramour, and the now dead Smithsonian security guard. She still wasn’t sure what all the connections meant, only that her hunch on the possibility of a towed car leading her to a potential victim had landed her here. These were not the sort of coincidences Sydney believed in. And if it wasn’t coincidence then what the hell was it, and what did it have to do with the forensic sketch? Was there any connection to this foreign diplomat’s missing daughter?
She got up, walked to the window, looked out to the street below, wondered if she was being watched at this very moment, figured she probably was. If there was one thing she had faith in, it was the various U.S. intelligence agencies’ methods of surveillance. After all, the FBI shared a number of those techniques. She’d been trained in some of them, and certainly been a part of them in the past-the very recent past. If one of these other government agencies had been following her, it explained why the cops had arrived so fast. What it didn’t explain was why two armed men were allowed to get that close to her in the first place.
Unless a mistake had been made somewhere along the way?
She wasn’t supposed to look into the case, and the CIA/OGA had suspected she might, which was why they’d taken the steps they had when she’d left Quantico. But the CIA, if they were following her, had lost her. The bad guys, whoever they were, had definitely followed her. But if they were ready to take
Then again, maybe they had ignored Penny, assumed she wasn’t a threat, because her only connection to her missing boyfriend and his new girl had been the loan of her car, and that had merely been left in a construction zone, towed, and subsequently returned…They might not have even realized there was a connection to Penny, via her boyfriend, until Syd had stepped in, followed up on the lead herself.
Clearly no one had suspected that a lowly domestic FBI agent would connect the dots and stumble onto the Smithsonian and right into the lap of one of the players…
She closed her eyes, because that was, in essence, what she’d done. Stumbled across them. That was not how she liked to operate. She needed control. Today had not been a controlled situation, and she’d almost gotten killed as a result.
She was not about to let that happen again, and that begged the question of what to do next.
