Progress Theresa
Progress
Theresa
The Nashville FBI offices are near the airport in a nondescript concrete building that doesn’t need the FBI nomenclature to look like it belongs to the government.
It is a dingy yellow stucco with a gray railing, the same color as the winter sky, traversing a meandering wheelchair ramp.
From a tall pole, a snapping flag proudly flies the Stars and Bars.
They’re a relatively new shop—the old field office for Tennessee used to be in Memphis, but now it’s more centrally located.
Drake has called ahead. Once they’ve shown their credentials and signed in, they’re met by a very tall, salty-dark-haired man with striking green eyes.
Not that Theresa notices such things. But he’s ridiculously handsome and watching them like a hawk.
It must be hard to be under him, the distraction those green eyes must provide.
To work under him. She blushes at her double entendre and looks away. God’s sake, Theresa. Get it together.
The man has his hand out. “John Baldwin. Good to meet you.”
They all shake. “Drake Sheehan, Theresa Lee. Didn’t you used to be in the profiling unit at Quantico?” Drake asks. “I recognize the name.”
“Technically, I still am,” Baldwin replies. “I float where I’m needed. Right now I’m doing a favor for the SAC here, running the office temporarily. My fiancée is based in Nashville. Win-win for us all. What’s up? What are you looking for?”
“Need to do a background check on a victim’s family. The Brooklyn Locke case.”
Baldwin stops in the hallway. He takes up most of it. “Related to the murders in Malogen, Georgia?”
Theresa cocks a brow. “Yes. Wow. Word travels fast.”
“It’s been a slow week here, and the media’s been all over it.
Let me get you set up with an office and access.
” He walks them down a long, anonymous hallway that looks like every government cop shop Theresa has ever been in.
US flags and awards and schedules and framed articles, portraits of presidents, past and current, and the head of the FBI.
The office is small, with a desk and a red-tagged desktop. “You have your own secure logins?” Baldwin asks.
Drake nods. “I do. Thanks for this.”
“Sure thing. Shout if you need help with anything.”
He shakes their hands again and disappears into the hall. Drake watches him go, uttering a long, low whistle.
“What?” she asks.
“Man’s a living legend, that’s what. Kind of weird to bump into him here, of all places.”
“Why? What’s he famous for?”
“He’s probably the best profiler that’s been on staff since Hazelwood, Ressler, and Douglas. They basically invented profiling. John Baldwin perfected it.”
“Sounds like he’s one hell of an asset,” she says, maybe a touch too enthusiastically. Drake shoots her a look. “What?”
But he just smiles and shakes his head, and she realizes he saw her blush before.
“Oh, shut up. He could be my secret summer baby.”
“Yeah, if you had him when you were twelve. Stop mooning over the pretty SAC and help me, would you?”
There’s nothing but laughter in his voice, and it makes Theresa relax a bit. She’s been on edge for days, tight as a whip, and needs to blow off some steam. She promises herself to have a couple of beers and make a move on Drake later and pulls out her notebook.
“Why is there a red tag on the computer?”
“Red means internal to the FBI ecosystem. It’s an intranet, totally secure. We can’t access—or be accessed—by the outside internet. If we want to do anything outside, we have to use a different server. That’s the white one, here.”
“Handy. Okay. We’re looking for anything on a Roman Thomas. Brooklyn and Margot were born here in Nashville, so I’d start the search around the early 1990s.”
Drake logs into his system and pulls up one of their criminal databases. Plugs in the name. The screen fills with page after page of data almost instantaneously.
“You guys have all the best toys,” she says. “I’d solve every crime in a heartbeat with this much data.”
“Hmm, maybe. Sometimes more isn’t necessarily better.” And then, “Holy shit.”
“What?”
“Roman Thomas has been a very bad boy. He has a record.”
“What kind of record? DUI at eighteen? Or something we can use?”
He smiles again, and her stomach flips. Yeah, the acting SAC was handsome, but Drake smiling makes her want to chuck it all and lock the door. But it’s his next words that make her heart start to pound.
“How’s incarcerated in federal prison for drug smuggling work for you?”
“What?”
“Roman Thomas did a stint in Coleman Low, a federal prison in Florida. Minimum security camp. Originally sentenced to forty-six months, he did a deal and gave up the rest of his network.” He laughs under his breath.
“They got him for ‘conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine.’ They were moving blow from Mexico into Tennessee on car carriers. He was the money behind the operation.”
“When was this?”
“2007. He got out in 2012. Went back in again in a few years later, again for trafficking, and they tacked on a possession charge for good measure. He got out early in 2020. He’s still on parole.”
“So Brooklyn and Margot were teenagers when he was first put in prison?”
“Yep. They were, what, sixteen, seventeen? That’s just after their mother died of cancer.”
“No wonder Pat and Bob Gussin stepped in and took care of them. Their dad was in jail.”
Drake continues reading. “Interesting. There are a few other charges here, from other cases. Fraud and money laundering.”
“So their dad was a good old-fashioned white-collar criminal.”
“Yes, he was. I wonder why they didn’t mention it.”
“Would you?” she asks. “I’d hardly volunteer that information if it were me.”
Drake leans back in the chair, hooks his hands behind his head. “I understand the daughters holding it back. But why didn’t Bob Gussin mention this to us?”
“Is he mentioned at all in the cases?”
Drake types away. “Not that I can see. But that’s one hell of an omission, don’t you think?”
“It is.” Theresa stalks the small office, thinking aloud. “I really want to figure out what Aleksey Durov’s role is in all this. It’s too much to hope that he’s tied to Roman, right?”
Drake chews on his lip, thinking.
“We were going to look up the French prison Durov matriculated from.”
“Yeah. Hold, please.” He starts typing, and the machine whirs to life again. It takes a few minutes to get an answer.
“It was in Normandy. Val-de-Reuil.”
Theresa plugs the name into a map on her phone.
“Hmm. I have no idea how the French treat their drug crimes. I don’t know if that helps us.
We should go talk to Gussin again. There’s a reason he didn’t mention his brother’s record.
Maybe the wife will be there. I’d like to take her measure. Woman to woman.”
“All right.” Drake logs out of the computer. “And when we’re done, we can swing by Brooklyn’s place and have a chat, too. I think your instincts are spot on. There’s something here.”