Now, Investigate Theresa
Now, Investigate
Theresa
Two days after the Locke murders and the day after the attempt on Brooklyn’s life at the hospital in Atlanta, having gotten exactly nowhere, Theresa flies up to Quantico to see Drake.
Walking through Hartsfield, she is on alert, as if Andrew might appear out of thin air and present himself to her.
He has managed to disappear entirely. And there’s been nothing more from the stranger.
It feels like the world is holding its breath, waiting for her next move.
Brooklyn has been successfully moved to Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she was under round-the-clock security.
No one knew for sure what happened, but the sudden cardiac arrest, the strange man fleeing the room, and the cameras being shut off certainly pointed to an attempt on her life.
Another attempt, if the SUV hadn’t been a terrible accident.
The autopsies of the Lockes had been completed, and Theresa’s initial assumptions were correct—Andy was alive when he was hanged.
Worse, his wife’s finger was found in his pocket.
She could imagine that scene only too well, the threats that must have occurred, the fear and terror they must have experienced.
The house was searched for evidence, and they’d gathered plenty, but processing was going to take time.
The only DNA identified so far belonged to the Lockes.
The only suspect they had was Andrew, and that was based on his passport being found at the scene.
That, and the lone blond hair. It didn’t have a follicle, so getting nuclear DNA from the shaft was tricky.
It was also coated in Lucy Locke’s blood, which degraded it further.
GBI had sent it to a cutting-edge genomics laboratory in New Orleans with very specialized equipment.
It would be at least a week before they had answers, if at all.
A blond hair, though. Like the man at the airport, and the man at Theresa’s kitchen table. But that wasn’t enough. Not yet. She had been motivated to find Andrew before, but now she wasn’t going to rest until he turned up.
She gets a rental car at Reagan National and drives the forty-five minutes to Quantico using the directions Drake provided.
She meets him at the Globe and Laurel restaurant.
Inside is a tribute to the military, the walls covered in memorabilia.
There is a crackling fire and cheerful servers.
It feels like a cozy pub, warm and safe.
A bummer that it will be closing soon. All that history, lost.
Drake is waiting by the front door, still wearing his suede car coat.
He pulls her into a long, very unprofessional hug, and she lets him.
Enjoys it, even. They get a table near the fire, and she begins to thaw out.
They chat about nothing important while perusing the menu, both ordering Quantico burgers and truffle fries.
He’s keeping it light, and she’s happy to do so.
There’s enough darkness ahead for them both.
He puts his iPad on the table. “I have news. I wanted to wait until we knew for sure.”
“Tell me.”
“We got the footage from Brooklyn Locke’s accident. There were several cameras in the area, as you know. The video feeds were just forwarded to us. There’s something you need to see.”
He hits play, and she sees a car’s headlights flick on, then the car starts moving. It’s a dark SUV. It draws closer to the camera and the video stops, then zooms in on the driver. The face is blurry, but if she’s pushed, she would say it looks male.
“Is this who hit Brooklyn outside Eden’s house?” she asks, getting excited.
“Watch,” Drake says. She does. It goes frame by frame—the lights flicking on, the approach, the blurry face, the impact—then the car disappears around the corner. Theresa swallows hard. It isn’t easy to see Brooklyn flung like a rag doll to the curb, especially knowing how badly she was injured.
“Can you get a better shot of the driver?”
“Nope.”
“Then at least tell me you got a plate.”
“We got a plate. And as it happens, duh-dunn-duhhh, this was the same SUV that Andrew Locke got into when he originally left the Atlanta airport.”
“Oh, wow. So this definitely was a targeted hit.”
“Seems to be. The question is, Was Andrew driving? Or someone else?”
Theresa realizes he’s holding back. There’s more. She crosses her fingers under the table. “Tell me you found the SUV?”
He grins. “We found the SUV. But it was torched. Plates were missing, and the rideshare sticker was scraped off, but it matches the rest. The interior was trashed, no prints, no hairs. A good-sized dent in the front bumper, though. It’s definitely the car that hit her.”
She’s grateful as hell that Drake managed to get involved with the case. It would take her months working alone to make this kind of progress. And she sends another thank-you to Bob Gussin for reporting Andrew for embezzling funds. That’s made justifying the FBI’s involvement much easier.
“Where was it?”
“North of Alpharetta, in a junkyard. Owner saw smoke in the back of his lot. When he investigated and realized someone had dumped a vehicle, he called the police. Happily, there was a BOLO out on the SUV, so they called us. One of those lucky breaks.”
She mentally maps the drive from Eden’s home in Atlanta to Malogen. Alpharetta is dead center between them. “Has anyone searched the traffic cams between Malogen and Atlanta?”
“They have. The SUV shows up in a few spots on Tuesday night the twelfth and then again the thirteenth, overnight into Wednesday morning. I think it’s safe to say whoever was driving was in Malogen the night Andrew disappeared, and the night his parents were murdered.”
“This is good news, Drake. Great work. So now what?”
“They’re refining the video to see if we can get a clearer shot of the driver. But I think I know who it is.”
“Who?”
“It’s him. It’s Andrew Locke.”
She stares at him. “Let me see it again.”
When the video gets to the spot where the driver’s face flashes on-screen for a heartbeat, she hits pause. Squints. “I don’t know, Drake. I don’t see it. In the airport footage, he has a beard. This person is clean shaven, I can tell that much.”
“Not hard to get a razor. I still think it’s him. I think he’s systematically removing everyone in his way. His wife, his parents. He has a weapon now, too, there was a bullet hole in the roof of the SUV.”
“That’s just great. Still, if he wanted Brooklyn dead, why didn’t he just murder her in Nashville?
Why an elaborate ruse to get her to another city and abandon her, and then come back to kill her?
And then torture and kill his parents and send—” She cuts herself off.
He doesn’t know about her intruder. She’s kept that to herself.
“Maybe he wants custody. Maybe she’s worth money.”
“Maybe. This feels pretty tenuous to me. Let’s see what happens when they refine the video.”
“There’s more. The video feeds at Grady were shut off while Brooklyn had her event, correct? Well, we looked a few hours before that, and this time, you aren’t going to be able to argue with me. Watch.” He hits play. “This is the second floor. Keep an eye on the elevator.”
“A doctor in scrubs? That’s not exactly a groundbreaking video, friend.”
“Just wait. He turns his head and looks back, and you can see his face for a brief moment.”
She watches. Her heart speeds up.
“Play it again. Slower this time.”
He does.
“Son of a bitch. That is Andrew Locke.”
“Yep. Matched the facial recognition from the airport. An hour later, the feeds go down, and Brooklyn is attacked.”
“Do we know for sure that she was? The event wasn’t related to the concussion?”
He hands over a piece of paper. “This is the interesting part. Her blood work was normal, except her white blood cell count was high, but that wasn’t unexpected, considering.
But according to the doctor, the sudden onset felt off.
After Eden Barrow told them about the man in her room, the doc really wasn’t convinced Brooklyn’s tachycardia was concussion related.
Happily for us, she has an imagination. She did a blood gas, and it showed”—he looks at the paper—“respiratory alkalosis. That was very unusual for a concussion. So she asked for an expanded toxicology screen, just in case they missed something on Brooklyn’s intake, and something popped. Cotinine. Metabolized nicotine.”
“Nicotine? Huh. I didn’t know she smoked.”
“She doesn’t. Nor would it show up like this if she did. She ingested it somehow.”
“So first she’s rushed out of town, then abandoned, then hit by a car, then someone feeds her nicotine? That’s . . . a lot.”
“Someone wants Mrs. Locke out of the picture. And Mr. Locke is tied to every incident. This might just be as simple as a greedy husband who needed his wife out of the way.”
They’re interrupted by the arrival of their food, and Theresa has to use her left hand to eat.
Awkward, but she’s getting better at it.
She got lucky; the knife went through her palm without cutting any ligaments or tendons.
It’s healing, and she’s been working on it using physical therapy exercises she’s found on YouTube.
It just feels like it’s taking forever. Once the stitches are removed, it will feel better—that appointment is in a few days, unless she gets frustrated and removes them herself.
“You really should see a doctor about that.”
“I did see a doctor, or at least an EMT, who stitched it up and gave me a tetanus shot and some antibiotics, which is all he could do. I’m an idiot. Next time, I won’t try to cut an apple in the middle of the night.”
Drake nibbles on his fries. “You can talk to me, you know.”
“We’re talking right now.”
“You know what I mean. Something is going on with you. You’ve been distant. I’ve known you long enough to see it. Talk to me. What aren’t you telling me?”
What is she supposed to say? That the night Andrew’s parents were murdered, a random thug with an unidentifiable accent had shown up looking for Andrew Locke, and she’d promised her life to find and deliver him?
That she thinks Andrew Locke is on the hook for something much bigger than stealing from his boss? She’s been digging, really digging, for the past few days, and while she’s uncovered some interesting facts, none of them add up to any sort of solution?
That she has exactly zero idea what to do next, and waiting for Brooklyn Locke to get with it enough to give a statement, assuming she will cooperate, is driving her mad?
Tell him, her sanity pleads. Let him help. You’re in over your head.
She couldn’t live with herself if Drake rode in on his white horse to save her and ended up hurt—or worse. And with these people, she imagines worse is always on the table.
“Theresa. Please. Tell me what’s going on.
What am I missing here? We’re working the same case but from different angles.
I tell you what I know, and you have to tell me what you know.
We work together, we find Locke. You keep holding out on me, and we’re reliant on the faulty memory of a woman with a traumatic brain injury and nicotine poisoning who may or may not remember anything useful. ”
The weight of carrying this is too much to bear sometimes. She’s been trying, and failing, to find a hint of Andrew Locke in the world. She needs help.
“Still no ID on the man from the airport?”
“You know there isn’t. Please stop trying to change the subject. I want to help you. Help me help you.”
“If I bring you into this, I can’t guarantee your safety.”
Now he really looks pissed off. “The fuck, Theresa?”
“I don’t even know what this is, to be honest.” She holds up her hand, and Drake sucks in a breath. “I just know we really need to find Andrew Locke, as quickly as possible.”
“Or what?”
She stares at him until he sets his fork down and pushes his plate away.
“Talk,” he commands, and against her better judgment, she does.
“This stays between us.”
He swipes a finger in an X across his chest. “If it can, absolutely.”
“I had a visitor the night the Lockes were murdered. A stranger. He was looking for Andrew.”
Drake’s lips tighten. “Did he do that to you?”
She sighs. “He was being persuasive.”
“I’ll kill him,” he growls, and her stomach does a little flip. She is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but it’s nice to know he cares. “Who was it?”
“No idea. It was dark, it was fast, and I was in pain. He had an eastern European accent and wore a ball cap pulled low over his eyes. That’s the best I’ve got.
He disabled my security system and was sitting at my kitchen table waiting for me while you and I were going over the video from the airport.
I went for a cup of tea and he ambushed me. ”
Drake lets out a string of curse words tied together so creatively she has to stop herself from laughing. This is not the time for jokes. Now she’s committed. She has to plow ahead.
“And of course, with it being the night of the murders, I can’t be one hundred percent sure that this stranger wasn’t at the Locke residence before he came to visit me.”
Drake’s espresso eyes sharpen. “You’re just now telling me that there’s another suspect?”
“There’s always been another suspect. We’re looking for the man who followed Andrew from the airport just as much as looking for Andrew himself, right? I figured if you could identify him, I’d have a jump on finding him.”
Drake is furious. His whole body is vibrating.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
“You damn well should have, immediately after it happened. I have half a mind to write you up for this. If you worked for me, I’d fire you. Damn it, you’ve withheld evidence from a double murder investigation.”
The staring match is epic. She feels the shame bubbling up and forces it away.
Yes, she should have told him. But she’s trying to keep herself alive, too.
The Lockes’ murders were a message. Andrew’s passport being left there was a message.
A convenient scapegoat had been offered, so she’d done what anyone would have and presented the facts on their face: Andrew Locke had been at his parents’ house the day they were murdered. He was the most logical suspect.
He just wasn’t the only one.
“Maybe I should have trusted you sooner,” she concedes.
“You think?”
Wow, the anger in his voice . . . She’s never heard him so mad. He needs a distraction.
“Let’s change gears for a minute. Do you know what Andrew Locke did in the Air Force?”