Chapter 20 #2
I thought back to that day Vero had interrogated Aimee in Macy’s, when she’d pretended to be a cop.
Then the night Nick was shot and Vero had called for an ambulance, claiming to be a police officer, reciting some ridiculous lines she’d probably heard while watching an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine .
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wished I was on the right side of the law.
“There is such a thing as forensic accounting,” I suggested.
Vero choked on her liquor. I patted her back as she recovered. I didn’t think it was such a far-fetched idea. She was young and fit, stubborn, and intelligent, teetering between fearless and confident to a fault. She’d be a great investigator.
“I’m pretty sure they’re looking for candidates that haven’t committed felonies.”
“It’s not like there’s a warrant out for any of them.” At least, not yet.
She took the bottle and refilled our mugs. “Speaking of hot pursuits,” she said, deftly changing the subject, “are you going to spill the beans about where you and Nick disappeared to after class?”
“Are you going to tell me why the letter J is tattooed on your ass? And don’t tell me it has nothing to do with Javi.
” She gasped as if I’d revealed a state secret.
But she wore crop tops and low-riding pajama bottoms to bed, and she had a habit of throwing her covers off when she got hot in the middle of the night.
I’d seen the top half of the letter peeking out of her waistband, high on her left butt cheek, just before she’d rolled out of bed for the crime scene exercise tonight.
She hiccupped and leveled a finger at me.
“For your information, a lot of people’s names start with the letter J, like…
Jimmy Fallon. And Jesus. And Jack Daniel’s,” she said, holding up her mug.
“Don’t look at me like that. I was eighteen and stupid when I got that tattoo, and my stingy boss doesn’t pay me enough to have it lasered off. ”
It was my turn to gasp. “Or maybe you just don’t want to.”
“Puh-lease.”
Voices carried through the door from the cafeteria.
Vero snapped off her flashlight and scrambled under the tablecloth with our cookies and mugs, remembering the bottle of whisky as the lounge door opened and the room flooded with light.
I reached under the drape, dragging it under the table with us a second before a pair of shoes and a cane rounded it toward the coffeepot.
“Then who sent it?” Nick’s voice was tense. A cabinet door slammed.
“No idea,” Joey answered. “When Georgia, Roddy, and I staged the crime scene after dinner, the dummy was in one piece, no markings on it. I talked to every instructor after the exercise. No one copped to it. They all said they had no idea how it got that way.”
“But someone dug it up, dismembered it, and emailed a photo of it to Feliks Zhirov. And you know this how?”
“One of my CIs was screwing around trying to find a back door into Zhirov’s network. He claims he saw an email with an attachment.”
“Jesus, not Cam.” I could practically hear Nick shaking his head. “And you believe him?”
“He described the crime scene to a T, Nick. He even knew the name written on the dummy. He gave me the time, subject line, and the email address of the sender. It came from a Google account registered under a bullshit ID. Tell Nick what you told me, Sam.”
Vero and I glanced at each other. Samara had been so quiet, neither of us had realized there’d been another person in the room.
“I called in a favor from a friend at Google. The CI’s story checks out. An email was sent to Feliks’s address from the same Gmail account the CI gave us. I asked her to verify the contents of the attachment, but my contact refused to open it without a warrant.”
“And we have no idea who sent it?” Nick asked.
“No,” Samara answered. “All we know for sure is that it was sent from an IP address in our network.”
“Here? You’re telling me this was an inside job?”
“Or someone who had access to the campus’s Wi-Fi. It’s not bulletproof,” she admitted, “but it’s locked down pretty tight. Whoever it was, they were definitely here on campus when they sent that email. I have no reason to believe our network was hacked.”
“Did you check the arrival and departure logs at the gate?” Nick asked.
Joey answered. “No one signed in today who wasn’t supposed to be here.”
Nick’s cane tapped an agitated beat against the floor. “What did the email say? Anything other than the photo?”
“Sam printed a copy.”
Paper rustled. Nick read aloud, “You’re taking too long and you know what I want. Pay up before I give them all your buried secrets.”
“Any idea what it means?” Samara asked.
“Someone’s blackmailing Zhirov,” Nick said thoughtfully, as if he was working through a puzzle. “Sounds like they’re threatening to turn over evidence if he doesn’t comply with their demands. But evidence of what?”
“I wondered the same thing,” Joey said. “A body in a shallow grave could be a reference to Zhirov’s upcoming trial, but none of those bodies were hacked up like that dummy.”
“What about the name… Carl?” Nick asked.
“I did a quick search of the files from Zhirov’s investigation,” Joey said. “The name Carl only yielded one hit—Carl Westover, Theresa Hall’s stepfather. According to public records, he died last year. Stage four cancer. He was buried at home on a family plot.”
Vero squeezed my hand. Only part of that was true. Carl was presently buried at his home on a family plot—or at least, most of him was—but it hadn’t been his cancer that killed him. And one very large piece of him was still buried on my ex-husband’s farm.
The paper rustled again. My skin prickled at the renewed sense of urgency in Nick’s voice. “You think this message to Feliks has something to do with him?”
“Only one way to know for sure,” Joey said. “It’s a long shot, but if there’s something in that man’s grave that could implicate Zhirov—something big enough to be worth blackmailing him over—it might be worth checking out.”
Vero covered her mouth to stifle a gasp.
“We’ll never get a warrant to exhume him on a hunch,” Nick said. “We need something solid we can take to a judge.”
“What about his wife?” Joey asked. “You think Barbara Westover would mind if we poked around her property?”
“She hates Feliks Zhirov almost as much as I do,” Nick said.
“It’s worth a try. Classes don’t start until ten tomorrow.
I can head to the Westovers’ first thing in the morning and be back before the mock trial.
Sam, can you go back through our network traffic and see if there were any other outgoing emails to that same address? It’s possible this wasn’t the first.”
“I’m on it.”
“Want me to do a search of the area where we buried the dummy?” Joey asked. “See if I can find anything?”
“Don’t bother,” Nick said. “Whoever staged that photo was smart. They knew dozens of students would be tromping all over those woods tonight. You’d be better off picking through the clues the students found. See if anything jumps out that wasn’t part of the exercise.”
I touched the hardware receipt in my pocket as the door to the faculty lounge shut behind them.
“This is not good,” Vero said.
“We have to get to Mrs. Westover before Nick does. If they dig up that grave and find Carl in pieces, they’ll open an investigation into his death.
That will lead them straight to Barbara Westover and her daughter, and Theresa will lead them straight to us.
” Feliks had been responsible for murdering Carl, but we’d all had a hand in covering it up. “Come on, we have to go.”
“Go where?” Vero whispered, chasing me out of the lounge through the dark cafeteria. “We can’t go anywhere. We don’t have a car!”
“We need Barbara Westover to move her husband’s body, and we can’t call her from here.”
I threw open the exit door and paced under the awning, shaking out my hands.
It had begun to rain, a nasty wet mix of icy, slushy drops.
I ran a hand down my face, willing myself to sober as the reflection of the parking lot beyond the fence blurred against the pavement.
We couldn’t sign ourselves out; there would be a record of us leaving the campus.
Somehow, we had to slip past the duty officer at the gate and find a car.
“What if we sneak out and ask Javi to meet us near the road?” Vero suggested.
“You said he’s meeting with his buyers about the Aston tonight.” Besides, Javi already knew too much. We’d have to do this on our own.
An unmarked police car turned into the parking lot. The officer on duty waved it past the security booth. The sedan didn’t even have to come to a full stop before entering the gate.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and hunched over the screen.
“What are you doing?” Vero asked.
“Texting my sister.”
You awake? I typed.
Three chat dots appeared, then, What’s up?
Need to run to the pharmacy for tissues and cold medicine. Can I borrow your car? Georgia was practically a germophobe. There was no way she would offer to drive me.
Sorry. Had an emergency. I’ll be back in the morning. See if Nick can take you.
My laugh was almost hysterical, and probably a little drunk.
I shielded my face from the rain with my sleeve, pushing up on my toes to peer out over the parking lot.
Sure enough, my sister’s car was nowhere in sight.
My arm fell away from my face as I did a double take at the rows of retired police cars.
The training cruisers… Wade kept the keys in his top right desk drawer.
“I think I can get us a car,” I said. “Can you find us a uniform? You know, like the sweatshirts and hats the instructors have been wearing?”
“Where am I supposed to find one of those?” Vero asked.
“Try the locker room or the laundry. We just need something official. Something a cop here would wear. And make sure it’s warm,” I said as she turned to go. I had a feeling it was going to be a very long night.