when the call came for Harry. He took it in Jackson’s office and left the door open. He listened, nodding. “Thank you for coming up here, Doctor,” he said finally, then hung up. He came back to the table and sat down heavily. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, probably from fists. Ligature marks on both wrists and ankles. All her ribs were broken, massive internal injuries. First, they raped her…every orifice.”
“Was the doctor able to collect any sperm samples?” Holly asked.
Harry nodded. “The samples will be in Washington by noon. The lab will pull out all the stops—we don’t lose an agent all that often.”
They were quiet for a while.
“Maybe you’d better call the judge,” Holly said.
Harry nodded and stood up. “I’ve got to call Rita’s father first,” he said. He went to Jackson’s office and closed the door behind him.
Holly and Jackson drank coffee, saying nothing.
Half an hour passed, and Harry came out of the office and sat down. “Jackson,” he said, “I need a place to marshal my people. A big place—warehouse, theater, something.”
“What time of day?”
“After dark, until morning.”
“The community college has a gymnasium that’s also used as an auditorium. It’s separated from the rest of the school by a stand of woods, and there’s a big parking lot.”
“You know anybody there?”
Jackson wrote down a name and handed it to Harry. “That’s the president,” he said.
Harry went back into Jackson’s office and closed the door.
The phone rang, and Holly picked it up.
“Chief, it’s the dispatcher. You had a call from a Barney Noble.”
Holly dialed the number and asked for Barney.
“Hi, Holly. You asked me to call if Rita Garcia didn’t show up for work this morning. She didn’t. We called her home number, but there was no answer.”
She wanted to scream at him, but instead, she said, “Thanks, Barney.”
“Has her mother heard anything?” Noble asked.
“No.”
“Let me know if you hear anything. Maintenance will want to find a substitute if she’s not coming back.”
“I’ll let you know, Barney.” She hung up. “I wish I could just go out there and shoot him right now.”
“I’d help,” Jackson said.
Harry finally came out of the office. “Okay,” he said, “we’re set. I’ve got over three hundred men coming— FBI, DEA, ATF—every federal agent we could muster. They’ll be arriving at the community college after dark in vans and cars, and they’ll be heavily equipped.” He sat down. “Holly, there’s not going to be a lot in this for you—not even Barney Noble.”
“I had a feeling,” Holly said.
“Killing an FBI agent is a federal crime. I want him for that. If we can’t put together the evidence to support the charge, then you can have him on the falsification-of-records business, and you can have whoever did the work for him at the capitol, if the state doesn’t take it away from you.”
“What I want most is the murderers of Chet Marley and Hank Doherty,” Holly said. “Can I have that, if you take Barney?”
“Sure, you can. I’ll talk to the federal prosecutor for you.”
“I’m going to have to get a confession, or somebody to finger them, so I’ll need interrogation time.”
“You’ll have it, I promise. In the meantime, I think you’d better go to work, keep everything as normal as you possibly can. You and Jackson can come out to the gym tonight around nine. I’ll leave word with the sentries that you’re to be admitted. I want your input on how we go about this. Ham’s, too, of course. He’s the only one with any hard information about what we’re up against.”
“Sure,” Holly replied.
Harry looked out over the sea, and he seemed far away. “This is not going to be an easy one,” he said.
CHAPTER
There was a rap at the door, and she looked up. Bob Hurst, the homicide detective, was standing in her doorway. “Morning, Bob,” she said.
Hurst looked red-faced, angry. “Why didn’t you call me on the homicide last night?” he demanded.
“Sorry, Bob,” she said. “I had it covered.”
“Don’t you think that when an FBI agent gets killed in this jurisdiction that I ought to be in on it?” he demanded.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “nobody from this department is in on it. It’s a federal matter, and the FBI are handling it.”
“Even when it’s on our turf?”
“The United States of America is their turf, Bob, and when an FBI agent gets killed, the FBI investigates.”
“What was the FBI doing up here, anyway?”
“They wouldn’t tell me—some sort of investigation, I guess. They asked me to put out an APB for their missing agent yesterday, and I did. Apparently, she was working out at Palmetto Gardens on something. She checked out of there at three yesterday afternoon and disappeared. A fisherman found her car early this morning, and I called the agent in charge and went out there with him, as a courtesy.”
“How was she killed?”
“The FBI handled the autopsy; they didn’t share the results with me.”
Hurst looked at the floor.
“Bob, if it had been my call, I would have involved you, but it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry if I got huffy. You think this has anything to do with Marley and Doherty?”
Holly wrinkled her brow. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Why do you connect the two incidents?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. You think anybody at Palmetto Gardens had anything to do with the woman?”
He’s fishing, Holly thought. “I talked to Barney Noble. He checked his lists and said she left work around three P.M. with all the other domestic help. I’ve no reason to doubt him. If you want my take on this, she went for a drink somewhere after work and met the wrong guy.”
“You don’t think it was connected with what she was investigating?”
“I don’t know what she was investigating, so I can’t make that judgment.”
“Thanks, Chief,” he said, and went back to his desk.
Holly sat, wondering why Hurst had done that. He’d surely heard from the two patrolmen last night that the corpse was that of an FBI agent, and he’d known that another agent had been present and had ordered the autopsy. She dug Hurst’s personnel file out of the pile and opened it. She’d been through it a few days before, but she wanted a closer look now.
There was a new document in the file, one that hadn’t been there the last time Holly had seen it. Bob Hurst had gotten married, and he had filled out a form requesting that his new wife be added to his health insurance. The
