Chapter Nine
Dr. Morganthau arrived twenty-five minutes later, his ruddy cheeks windblown from the time he spent in his garden. His wiry dark gray hair had been rearranged by the gusty spring breeze, and his blue eyes sparkled with the excitement of being called in to assist on a case.
“I got here as quickly as I could. The traffic was uncooperative.”
Sam shook his hand and offered him a seat at the table. “As usual. Thank you so much for coming.”
“It’s a pleasure to see you all. I hope I might get a minute with my friend Deputy Chief McBride while I’m here.”
“We’ll make sure you do, Norm,” the chief said with a warm smile. “Good to see you, old friend.”
“You as well.”
“Now that everyone is here, I’d like to play the recording of the statement Amara Robinson gave earlier today.”
Freddie pressed a button to replay the recording.
The statement was no less powerful the second time. Sam rubbed her hands over her arms, which were covered in goose bumps. Everyone in the room was deeply affected by Amara’s detailed description of her brother’s murder.
“My God,” the chief said softly when the recording ended.
“Now you know why we arrested the parents without further ado,” Sam said.
The chief nodded. “I get it.”
“The new U.S. Attorney, Catherine McDermott, has instructed us to release the parents since we have no additional evidence on the record tying them to the murder.”
“Does there need to be?” Archie asked. “That was pretty damned compelling.”
“In our opinion, no,” Sam said. “In USA McDermott’s, yes. The chief has agreed to run interference with her and gave us twenty-four hours to come up with more. That’s why we asked you all to come in.”
“I left a message for McDermott to call me,” the chief said. “Helen will come get me if she returns the call while we’re in this meeting.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said. “Detective Moran, you were one of the two detectives who investigated King Robinson’s murder. Would you tell us, in your own words, what you recall of the case?”
“Of course,” Moran said. “I remember the day we got that call, because it was my son’s seventeenth birthday.
The case of a dead teenage boy hit me extra hard as the father of one.
Dugal had a twelve-year-old nephew at the time.
We both struggled to maintain our composure when we realized the victim was just a kid.
It took a couple of days to get an ID on him because no one had reported him missing. ”
“I found that to be among the most damning details,” Sam asked. “They didn’t report him missing because they knew where he was. How did they explain that when you eventually talked to them?”
“The stepfather said they’d had an argument and figured he’d run away,” Moran said. “They expected he’d come home when he ran out of money, which seemed somewhat plausible. I mean, it wasn’t the first time either of us had heard about a kid taking off because he or she was pissed with the parents.”
“I hear you on that, but I have a fourteen-year-old son,” Sam said. “Take away the White House and the Secret Service and put us back in an ordinary life. If I don’t know where he is for five minutes, I’m raising holy hell.”
“I felt that way as a father,” Moran said. “But they made it seem like it was a common occurrence for King, that he was always blowing up and taking off.”
“Were you able to talk to his sister at the time?” Sam asked. “I don’t see anything in the report about her.”
“According to the mother, she was refusing to come out of her room after hearing her brother had died. We didn’t want to add to the trauma by forcing her to talk to us. She was only eleven.”
Sam wondered what might’ve been different for Amara and the case if they’d compelled her to give a statement then.
Would she have told the truth or still been too afraid of being removed from her home?
Dealing with kids in these cases was tricky, and she didn’t fault the detectives for making a judgment call.
“How was he identified?” Sam asked.
“We reached out to the middle schools in the city to see if they had a student who’d suddenly stopped coming to school in recent days with no explanation from the parents,” Moran said.
“There were four students who fit the criteria, and we narrowed them down to King. The other three were chronic runaways, all of whom were eventually located.”
“Okay, so now you know who he is, what was the next step?” Sam asked.
“We went to the house, where we were met by parents who acted like everything was fine. At first, we didn’t tell them what we already knew. We wanted to see how they’d play it.”
“Were they nervous around you?” Freddie asked.
“Not at all, which is interesting in light of what we know now. How were they not freaking out when cops showed up at their door?”
“I bet they’d practiced for that possibility,” Sam said. “Role-played it. They were ready.”
“With hindsight,” Moran said, “I think that’s very possible. Once we told them he’d been found dead, the mother was hysterical. The stepfather was more composed but clearly upset.”
“The way I see it, we now have three important things to build the case on,” Sam said. “One is Amara’s eyewitness testimony. Two, they never reported King missing. Three, they didn’t ask why they were being arrested today.”
“Because they knew,” Moran said, nodding.
“I hope they’ve spent every day of the past six years dreading us showing up,” Freddie said.
“That’s the least of what they deserve,” Sam said. “You mentioned King was found by the waterfall at The Yards. I assume the area was canvassed?”
“Yes,” Moran said. “Extensively. We never found anything that could be tied to him.”
“Do we have phone records from six years ago?” Archie asked.
“I don’t see any mention of that in the file,” Freddie said.
“Was there any effort to track his phone or get the phone records?” Sam kept her tone friendly since Moran had come in to help.
“We tried, but the phone company stonewalled us,” Moran said.
“Can we get them now?” Sam asked Archie.
“Absolutely. Perhaps Amara can tell us the name of their carrier. We can request a warrant for the account. It’ll take a minute because it always does with the phone companies, and the six-year gap will make it more so, but we can get it.”
“Can you please handle that and ask for as much of a rush as you can get?” Sam asked.
“Will do.”
“Let’s face it, though,” Malone said. “We won’t get that data in time to make our deadline.”
“I know,” Sam replied, “but I still want it. If we aren’t able to hold and charge them this time, we can still build the case and charge them later.”
She sure as hell didn’t want to have to tell Amara that her emotional statement wasn’t enough to charge her parents with murder.
“Where are we with finding Ivanov?” Nick asked his stressed-out team more than an hour after they’d been briefed by the FBI, DNI and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security on what they knew about the Russian who’d been paying visits to the vice president at her official residence.
That sentence still felt surreal as it traveled through his mind for the thousandth time since he was first informed.
“No sign of him,” Terry said. “They’re checking all his known locations.”
“So the FBI and Diplomatic Security were aware he was in town and visiting the VP, but didn’t think I should be told?”
“As Director Monroe reported, Gretchen assured them he was an old friend and, for lack of a better phrase, ‘nothing to see here.’”
“Well, thank goodness one Secret Service agent keeps up with current events,” Nick said, “or we might never have known about it.”
“To be fair, Mr. President, it would be wildly irregular for law enforcement to investigate the actions of the sitting vice president. That’d be like starting something with their boss’s boss’s boss. They’d be concerned about it coming back around to haunt them.”
“I get it, but now we have a Russian who may have been plotting the overthrow of the Petrov regime running loose in our country, and no one has any idea where he is.”
“If I may, Mr. President,” Trevor said. “Would the vice president know where to find him?”
The question stopped Nick in his tracks. “Get her in here.”
While they waited, Nick paced the Oval Office like a bear in captivity. He could rarely recall a time in his life when he’d been angrier. Rage filled every cell of his body that she’d be so stupid as to endanger everything he’d been working to achieve by hanging out with a fucking Russian.
“Take a breath, Mr. President,” Terry said quietly.
He didn’t want to, but he did it to try to get himself under control before he faced off with her.
Gretchen arrived with Christina a few minutes later, looking rattled. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, and her hands were trembling so hard that she locked her fingers to try to contain the movement.
“Where is Ivanov?” Nick asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“Where was he staying when he wasn’t shacked up with you?”
“A friend got him a room at the Willard, but that was only for a short time. I’m not sure if he’s still there.”
Nick glanced at Terry, who went to the desk to call the information into the FBI.
“Where else did he spend time?”
“I… I don’t know. He has some other friends from Oxford that he was planning to see.”
“What are their names?”
“I… I don’t know them.”
“Call him.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Call him and find out where he is.”
She retrieved her secure BlackBerry from the inside pocket of her suit coat, and hands still trembling, she made the call.
“Put it on speaker.”
They coexisted in tense silence as the phone rang until voicemail picked up with a message in Russian.
“Tell him to call you immediately.”
Gretchen left the message and ended the call.
“What were his other plans while he was here?” Nick asked.
“To generate support for his coalition.”
“And you never asked him who he was talking to about that?”
“He wouldn’t have told me. Secrecy is critical to his operation. Petrov has people everywhere.”
“And yet, he felt perfectly safe regularly visiting the home of the vice president of the United States?”