Brock turned the lock on the heavy steel door of the basement panic room, hidden from view behind a bookcase mounted on a hinge, which itself opened and closed like a door. He and Sam were sealed in, protected first by concealment and then by three inches of solid steel.
He was pretty sure the room’s reinforced concrete walls and ceiling could survive another bomb attack, but he was also sure that the rest of the house would not.
Sam watched intently through the video monitors as the cop – at least he was dressed like a cop – walked up the entryway steps and toward the broken front door of her house. The man passed close by the video camera hidden in the porch light, and Sam got a good look at his face. It was definitely the same guy who had emerged from the bushes at the scene of John Abrams’ death.
Not a coincidence, she concluded.
She had just ended the call with her deputy, Dan Gable, charging him with figuring out where the DHS security detail had gone, and who the hell the “cop” walking into her house with a drawn weapon might be.
Her face tightened as she watched the video feed, and she subconsciously felt the grip of her holstered Kimber .45, wondering whether to charge out of the panic room and take matters into her own hands. She hated the idea of hiding in the basement shelter while some goon strolled through her home upstairs.
On the other hand, she didn’t want to get ambushed by an unseen accomplice. And she still wasn’t sure if the guy was a real cop or some sort of impostor. She stayed put, eyes glued to the video monitors as the man strode through her broken front door, his pistol drawn.
The man took three paces into the entryway, then stopped. His head turned as if he was summoned from outside, and Sam switched views to the driveway camera to see what the intruder in police garb might be responding to.
It didn’t take long for her to figure it out. The camera showed another police officer on her driveway, standing in the Weaver firing stance with his own service pistol trained in the direction of her front door. This could get interesting, she thought.
She commanded a split-screen view of both the entryway and driveway cameras, which gave her a ringside seat for what was beginning to look very much like a standoff between two uniformed police officers.
With his pistol pointed at the floor, the man in her house turned to face the policeman on her driveway. She saw them talking to each other, but cursed herself for not having installed audio surveillance equipment. She couldn’t read lips, so she had no idea what the conversation might be about, but their body language was decidedly unfriendly.
Brock voiced the obvious question, “What the hell are these guys doing?”
“No idea,” Sam replied, “but it’s safe to say that it’s not standard procedure for cops to point guns at each other.”
Out on the driveway, another man in a suit sidled up and also settled into a firing position, aiming what could only be described as a small cannon at the man standing in Sam’s entryway. “It’s a party now,” Brock observed.
Suddenly, a blur of motion erupted on the screen as the interloper raised his sidearm to fire. The pop-pop-pop of gunfire was barely audible through the thick cement walls of the basement panic room. Sam counted at least half a dozen shots before the exchange ended, leaving the man in her entryway lying motionless on the hardwood in a growing pool of crimson around his head.
“Holy shit!” Brock exclaimed. “They smoked that dude!”
Sam’s reply was interrupted by her ringing cell phone. “Hi, Dan,” she answered. “You’re missing quite a party at my house this morning.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m missing it,” Dan replied. “Anyway, I have it on good authority that there’s a dead guy in your entryway.”
“Who told you?”
“Ekman.”
“How the hell did he know?”
“I don’t know, but it seemed awful quick to me, too.”
“I suppose he’s on his way?” Sam asked. Despite his shortcomings, their boss did care about his employees. And explosions and shootouts certainly justified a visit from one’s supervisor.
“He is. He also told me that our guys had been following your cop for a while. Over a year in fact. He’s a real cop.”
“Was a real cop,” Sam corrected. “That’ll be a messy situation for Metro.”
“It gets messier. His name is – was – Everett Cooper, and he was part of a group of about five Metro guys who picked up some moonlighting work that got a little, well, involved shall we say.”
“Involved how?” Sam asked.
“Well, DC Metro’s Internal Affairs guys obviously caught wind of it, and they had a money laundering and evidence tampering file going. But someone over in our financial crimes division sniffed out a national security angle.”
“Homeland’s involved too? Interesting. Anybody we’re tracking?” Sam ran the Department of Homeland Security’s counterintelligence division, a small but well-funded group of spooks and quasi-spooks who were trained to catch other spooks. She was surprised she hadn’t heard about the investigation into the Metro police department.
“Ekman was pretty tight-lipped on that subject,” Dan said. “It had that ‘embarrassing to the department’ vibe about it. You know how he is.” Ekman had well-tuned political whiskers, and he almost never spoke out of turn.
“I’ll wring him out when he gets here,” Sam said. “Did you find anything in those multi-spectral photos I took at Abrams’ house?”
“Strange you should ask. I found another one of those ultraviolet beacons in the bushes.”
“There’s got to be a connection,” Sam observed.
“I tend to think you’re right,” Dan agreed. “Those are unusual items. But that’s not all I found. One of your photos imaged our friend, the late cop, hiding in the bushes. He stood out like a sore thumb in the infrared picture because of his body heat.”
“That’s not unexpected,” Sam said. “I took the photos right before I got in the car, which was right before he jumped out of the bushes.”
“Right. But what is unexpected is that he was standing over a corpse.”
“Wow,” Sam said. “It was a big night. But are you sure the second person in the photo was dead?”
Dan chuckled. “If he’s not dead, he’s the coldest living human on the planet. Judging by the color differences in the IR photo, the second guy’s body temp was a good ten degrees lower than the cop’s. He’d been dead for a while.”
Sam let out a low whistle. “This is turning into a serious ball of yarn. I assume you called back over to the crime scene to let them know what you found in the photo, yes?”
“No, this is my first day on the job,” Dan deadpanned. “Yes, of course I called them. But this is where things get seriously freaky. Want to guess what they found when they checked the bushes?”
“A stiff.”
“Wrong. No stiff, no signs of a stiff, and no signs of a struggle, either. At least that’s what they’re claiming.”
“My head hurts.”
“Mine too,” Dan said. “And Sara is bitching at me to get back home. As much fun as this is on a Sunday morning, I need to go mow the lawn and try to stay married.”
“Sure thing. Thanks again, Dan. I don’t tell you this enough, but you’re one hell of an asset.”
“You’re right. You don’t tell me that enough. But you can make it up to me with a pay raise.”
Sam laughed, then hung up.
Motion caught her eye on the video monitors, and she turned to see the two officers on her driveway move in to the house to examine Everett Cooper’s dead body. As she squinted for a look at the two men’s faces, the driveway camera diverted her attention. Francis Ekman’s SUV pulled into the drive, and she instantly recognized the improbably curly mane of dark hair as Ekman got out of the truck and made his way toward the door.
She turned to Brock. “Want to hang out with my boss for a while? He showed up unannounced.”
“Sure,” Brock said, twisting the deadbolts and opening the heavy steel door that led out from the panic room and into the basement. “It’s always entertaining to watch him make doe eyes at you.”
**********
Sam poured coffee for Brock, Ekman, and the two officers who had shot Everett Cooper just minutes before. Two separate forensics teams – one for the bomb that exploded in her lawn, and one for the policeman lying dead in her entryway – worked busily but noiselessly on their respective crime scenes in the other room.
The two shooters, one a beat cop and the other an Internal Affairs officer, took their coffee into the next room to join the forensics investigators.
Sam and Brock were quarantined to the kitchen, forbidden from traversing either scene for fear of contaminating or destroying evidence. Ekman stayed with them, and the three of them sat down at the kitchen table.
Brock noticed the same dynamic he always noticed when Ekman and Sam spent time together. Ekman stared intently at Sam when she wasn’t looking directly at him, but he glanced quickly away whenever her eyes landed on him. It was obvious to Brock that Sam’s boss was afraid of her, and he also wanted to sleep with her.
Poor guy, Brock thought. He certainly understood Ekman’s attraction – even after having been up all night, Sam was strikingly beautiful with her fire-red hair and blazing green eyes. Not to mention, she had the figure of a porn star. And she fucks like one, too, Brock thought with an inward smile.
Ekman started talking in his slow, steady, bureaucratic cadence, but Sam’s mind wandered even as she watched his mouth move. She was tired and strung out, having had no sleep over the past twenty-four hours, and her mind was reeling as she tried to put the wild series of events into some semblance of order.
An awkward silence brought her back into the present. It appeared that Ekman had asked her something. “I’m sorry, Francis, what did you say?”
“I just asked if you wouldn’t mind recounting the events leading up to right now.”
“Sure thing. Brock and I had just finished having sex when you called last night.” She watched Ekman’s cheeks turn red. Brock chuckled. Sam smiled. She enjoyed making her boss feel uncomfortable.
Ekman’s blush faded. “I’m not sure I needed to know that. Go on, please.”
“After you called,” Sam said, “I put on yesterday’s underwear and went to the residence of the late John Abrams. He was a CIA agent and, if I’m a betting girl, a double. I worked the scene with Phil Quartermain—“
“Isn’t that the guy who got booted from the FBI?” Ekman interrupted.
“One and the same. Probably the best crime scene guy in the district, but apparently it’s still 1962 in the Bureau. Gayness isn’t kosher.”
“No comment,” Ekman said.
“Lighten up, Francis,” Sam chided. “You’re not running for office just yet. You can have an opinion.” Brock sniggered again.
“Go on, Sam. We have a lot to cover, and I have a long day ahead.” Ekman looked impatient and uncomfortable.
“Poor thing,” Sam said. “I guess I’m lucky. All I have on my agenda is a little housecleaning. You know, a hole in the front wall, a dozen broken windows, a corpse on the floor. . . Nothing big.”
“I’m sorry,” Ekman said. “I’m just due at the deputy director’s office in an hour and I want to have my stuff together.”
“In that case, you should be taking notes,” Sam said. Ekman started to reply, then simply grabbed a notebook from his jacket pocket and began scrawling.
When he looked up at her, Sam continued. “So the Abrams scene is possibly the worst staged-suicide I’ve ever seen. It’s like they were doing some sort of parody on the whole staged-suicide thing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ekman.
“They didn’t just slit his wrists. They dug trenches down almost the whole length of both forearms. I don’t care how despondent or stoned Abrams might have been. There’s no way he would have done that to himself. And then they scrawled some bullshit note that looked like it was written by a fourth grader.”
Ekman wrote on his notepad, Brock listened, and Sam took a sip of coffee. “Abrams was sitting on some sort of a key,” she said after a few seconds. “Quartermain thought it belonged to a music box or something similar. Not a very specific clue, because the same key opens multiple locks of the same design. And it was just attached to a chain, with nothing else to identify it.”
Ekman nodded, but didn’t say anything. When he stopped writing, Sam continued. “I walked the house while Phil worked forensics around the body. The place didn’t have a safe house vibe to it. It was more like a sex pad. The downstairs was decorated in early douchebag, and there were way too many of Abrams’ personal items. The black light confirmed my suspicions. DNA everywhere.”
“Tell me about the notepad with your name and address on it,” Ekman said.
What the fuck? Sam was taken aback. She had only told Dan Gable about the notepad on John Abrams’ nightstand, and she had sworn Dan to secrecy. She had no idea how Ekman found out about it.
She made a mental note to revisit that little riddle, then considered how she should answer Ekman in light of what his question revealed. He obviously knew more about the situation than he was letting on, and Sam wasn’t sure she was comfortable with that.
But she wasn’t about to lie to him, particularly since it was the note on the dead spy’s nightstand with her name on it that had catapulted her into the ridiculous car chase with the local cops, which Ekman had undoubtedly also heard about.
So she played it straight. “Yeah, that definitely got my attention,” she said. “That’s when I started to think that the scene might still be live.”
“So you called Gable and me,” Ekman said.
“Yeah. After I called Brock.”
“Why did you call Brock?”
Sam noticed that the conversation had changed from Ekman listening to her explain the evening’s events, to Ekman interviewing her as if she were a suspect or person of interest. It was an unwritten rule that you didn’t interrogate your colleagues, even when you were squeezing them for information. She didn’t like the sudden change in the temperature of the conversation. “Umm, I don’t know, Francis. What would you do if you thought someone might be on their way to your place with guns and sharp objects?”
Ekman didn’t answer.
“Oh, that’s right - you’re not banging anybody,” Sam said. Ekman flushed again. Brock chuckled under his breath.
“But if you were banging somebody, wouldn’t you call and warn them?” she asked.
“Yes, Sam, I would call home,” Ekman said, a little sheepishly. Her inappropriately personal comment had had the desired effect. Ekman was no longer on the offensive, and he was no longer in charge of the conversation.
Sam sipped her coffee, then continued. “I left the scene when I discovered the note. I assessed that it was possibly still an active scene, and that I might have been a target.”
“And that’s when you ran into Cooper?” Ekman asked.
“Yes. I was getting into my car, and he scared the living shit out of me. He came out of the bushes. No flashlight, no radio squawking, nothing.”
“What did you do?” Ekman asked.
“I squealed my tires backing out of the driveway, like some scared rookie. But like I said, he scared me to death.”
“Did you see that he was a cop?”
“Before he came out of the bushes? No,” Sam said pointedly. “After that? Yes.”
“So why did you drive off like a perp?” Ekman asked.
That was a weird way to phrase things, Sam thought. It definitely felt as though Ekman had her under the microscope. Does he think I’m culpable for something?
She decided to take the offensive again. “Listen, Francis, I’m not sure I like the direction you’re heading. If you have something to say, work up the balls to say it. Otherwise, let’s be on the same team, shall we?”
“Sam, I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
“Funny, it sounds to me like you think you already know what happened,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I just want to make sure I have your version straight.”
“How many other versions are there?” she asked, her agitation evident.
“Don’t bust my chops, Sam. You know I have to get the facts together.”
“Then shut the fuck up and write,” Sam said. “I’m telling you the facts.”
Brock broke the tension: “More coffee, Francis?”
“I would love another cup of coffee. Thank you, Brock. And I actually prefer to be called Frank. Sam knows that, but she likes to aggravate me.”
“Listen, I’m tired and hungry,” Sam said, “and I’m only going to make one pass through the rest of this. So write fast.”
Sam told him how Everett Cooper, the cop who jumped out of the bushes, had reached for his Taser as he approached her car in front of the John Abrams murder scene. She explained how she drove off in a heightened state of awareness – “fucking freaked out,” as she described it – and picked up a police tail within a couple of blocks of Abrams’ place.
She recounted how the emergency dispatcher couldn’t get in touch with the officer in the police cruiser behind her, which made her wonder whether it was a real cop, a real-but-crooked cop, or an impostor pretending to be a cop, chasing after her.
She also relayed how a second police cruiser appeared behind her and rammed her car into a spin, after which she decided to stand on the accelerator and let the twin turbo boosters save the day.
“One-sixty, for your report,” she said. Ekman looked puzzled.
“One hundred and sixty miles an hour,” Sam clarified. “That’s how fast I was going when I lost them.” Ekman shook his head and wrote it down.
“Meanwhile, back at the homestead,” Brock interjected, “someone in a police uniform wouldn’t stop ringing our doorbell.”
“Did you answer?” Ekman asked.
“Hell no. I always obey my better half,” Brock said. “She has a vicious uppercut.”
“So you didn’t answer the door when a police officer rang the bell?” Ekman asked again, eyebrows raised.
“That’s what he said,” Sam said.
“Why did you tell him not to answer the door for the police?” Ekman asked Sam.
“Are you fucking retarded?” Sam asked. “Have you listened to anything I’ve told you?”
“I’m sorry, I just want to make sure I have it all straight, that’s all.”
“You’re about to get it straight – up your ass!” Sam said. “Now stop being difficult, Francis.” She watched Ekman’s eye twitch. He really did dislike being called by his given name. And he really did put up with too much shit from her, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself sometimes. Few things annoyed her like bureaucracy and officiousness.
“Then what happened?” Ekman asked, after a deep breath bolstered his composure.
“A real Metro patrolman showed up and escorted me home,” Sam said. “Davis was his name. I verified his badge number with the Homeland dispatcher. When we got here, the other cop, the guy who kept ringing the doorbell, was already gone. Brock and I were trying to piece together what the hell had happened when the explosion went off in the front yard.”
She left off the part about the Homeland team disappearing moments before the bomb went off. Even though he had a right to know that extremely important detail, she didn’t trust Ekman enough to share it with him, particularly given the interrogation-like vibe Sam was picking up from him.
“A couple of minutes later,” Sam continued while Ekman took notes, “Everett Cooper showed up here. And another minute after that, those two gentlemen in the other room splattered Cooper’s brains on my Monet knock-off.”
Ekman scrawled on his notepad for a while, then stopped. He looked pensively into the distance as if formulating a question, opened his mouth to speak, then abruptly stopped, thinking better of it. “Thank you, Sam,” he finally said. “Please stay available. I have to go see the deputy director, and I’ll call you if he asks me anything I can’t answer.”
Sam looked at him for a long moment, thinking things through. The tenor of the conversation led her to believe that Ekman suspected her of something. And even if he didn’t suspect her of wrongdoing, the tone of his questions made her feel as though he certainly wouldn’t stand up for her in case the deputy director decided he might want to discipline her for leaving a scene prematurely, or running from police cruisers at ludicrous speeds.
“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t I go with you? That way, if the boss has questions, he’ll get his answers straight from the source.”
Ekman started to argue, but decided against resisting her. “Okay,” he said. “Against my better judgment, and only if you agree not to speak unless spoken to,” he added.
“Deal,” Sam lied.