The Innocent

Chapter





71


IT WAS SIX in the morning and Robie was on the move again. His rental glided down the dark street.

As soon as he left Annie Lambert still lying in her bed, he had regretted sleeping with her. The sex was wonderful. It had left him shaky and warm and completely out of sorts. It had been a liberating feeling.

And yet it still had been a mistake.

He had essentially left a man dead on the National Mall to go and screw a White House staffer. He hadn’t been thinking about the case while in bed with her. Well, that would change right now.

He called Vance. Despite the early hour she picked up on the second ring.

“I’m in the office,” she answered. “Actually I never left the office. Where are you?”

“Driving.”

“Driving where?”

“Not sure.”

“What happened to you last night? You just sort of disappeared after we got Julie squared away.”

He didn’t answer.

“Robie?”

“I just had to step back for a bit, get my head straight.”

“Is it straight now? Because we have a case to work.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t have dinner. And I haven’t had breakfast. There’s a twenty-four-hour place around the corner from WFO. You know it?”

“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes,” said Robie.

He beat her there and had already ordered them both mugs of coffee when she walked in.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been home. You’re wearing fresh clothes,” he said.

“I keep a set at the office,” she replied as she sat down and picked up her coffee and took a sip. “You don’t look good,” she said.

“Should I look good?” he shot back. He wondered for a moment if she could tell he had been with another woman.

They sat in awkward silence drinking their coffees until Robie said, “How’s Julie?”

“Fidgety, depressed. I think she believes you’ve abandoned her.”

“How did you explain things to your boss about all this?”

“I skirted the line. Told him some things, didn’t tell him others.”

The waitress came over and they ordered. After she had refilled their coffees she left.

Robie studied Vance. “I’m not looking to derail your career over this, Vance.”

“You know, you can call me Nikki, if you want.”

This offer seemed to deepen Robie’s guilt. “Okay, Nikki, at the end of the day you need to be able to walk away from this with everything in your life intact.”

“I don’t think that’s possible, Robie.”

“My point is you don’t have to cover for me. It was unfair to ask it of you.”

“And my point is if I don’t cover for you the FBI will come down like a ton of bricks. Too many questions, not enough answers.”

“I’ve got some professional cover.”

“Not enough. And quite frankly, I’m not just doing it for you. If everything does come out, my butt is probably off this investigation and it’ll get so muddled we’ll probably never figure it out. And I obviously have a real problem with that happening.”

“Just so we understand each other,” said Robie.

“I’m not sure I completely get you, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not your shrink. I’m just working with you to see if we can put away some killers.”

“Leo Broome,” he said. “Anything found on him that would help? He said they had gotten to his wife?”

“He had nothing on him. We’re trying to trace where he came from. There was no car parked nearby that was unaccounted for. That late at night we can rule out the Metro probably. We’re checking with cabbies to see if we can determine where he was picked up.”

“Or else he could have walked,” pointed out Robie. “But there was no hotel room key card, nothing else to show where he was staying?”

“Nothing like that. But we did find one thing.”

“What was that?”

“A hoplite tattoo on his forearm identical to the one on Rick Wind’s arm. And it has to match the one Julie said her dad had on his arm.”

“So they must’ve known each other in the Army, then,” said Robie.

“What if this isn’t connected to you after all? They were in the Army together, maybe had some secret. Now it’s come back to haunt them.”

“Still doesn’t explain me and Julie walking off that bus. Or them missing you and me in front of Donnelly’s.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t. You said they let him escape after they killed his wife. Part of the game, you said. They might be screwing with you, but there has to be some purpose to it all.”

“I’m certain there’s an excellent purpose. I just don’t know what it is.”

“If this is a contest of sorts between you and them, there must be something in your past to account for it. Given that any thought?”

“Some. But I have to give it a lot more.”

“What line of work were you in, Robie? DCIS isn’t your real home, but somewhere else in the federal government obviously is.”

He drank his coffee, said nothing, because there was nothing he could say.

“I’m not read in, is that why your lips aren’t moving?” asked Vance.

“I don’t make the rules. Sometimes the rules suck, like now, but they’re still the rules. I’m sorry, Nikki.”

“Okay. You don’t have to answer, but hear me out, okay?”

Robie nodded.

“I think you were at Jane Wind’s apartment to kill her as some sort of sanctioned hit. Only you didn’t pull the trigger for some reason. But someone else did, from long range. You took her youngest child to safety and then got out of there. Then you got roped into investigating a crime you were present at under the cover of a DCIS badge.” She paused, studied him. “How am I doing?”

“You’re an FBI agent, I would’ve expected no less.”

“Tell me about the hit on Wind.”

“It wasn’t really sanctioned. I never should have been dialed up, but I was. Person who did it is now a burnt pile of bone.”

“Cleaning up loose ends?”

“How I see it, yeah.”

“So someone is playing with you, digging you in deep. Seems like the start of it was your going after Jane Wind. Her hubby was already dead. So she dies. The Winds are out of the way. Point one.”

Robie finished his coffee and sat up, looked more attentive. “Keep going.”

“Point two. Julie’s parents are killed. We know they were friends with the Broomes. And Rick Wind and Curtis Getty had the same tattoo on their arms. It must be from them serving together in the military. Have your people connected them up yet?”

“Still working on it.”

“Point three. So Getty, Broome, and Wind, including their spouses—or, in Wind’s case, ex-wife—are all dead.”

Robie nodded and took up the thread. “I try and make my escape on that bus. They knew that I would. Julie gets routed to the same bus by a message supposedly from her mother. We get off, the bus blows up.”

“The attack outside of Donnelly’s where you and I should have been killed?”

“More window dressing, more playing with my mind.”

“Some playing. A lot of innocent people were killed, Robie.”

“Whoever’s behind this could care less about collateral damage. They’re chess pieces to them, nothing more.”

“Well, I’d love to slap a pair of cuffs on people who think like that.”

“But what’s the endgame? Why do all of this?”

She took another sip of coffee. “So where’d you spend last night?”

The image of a naked Annie Lambert sitting astride him flashed into Robie’s mind before Vance had even finished her question.

“I didn’t sleep much,” he admitted truthfully.

Their plates of food came and they spent some time digging their way through eggs, bacon, toast, and hash browns.

When they were through, Vance pushed her plate away and said, “How do you want to attack this?”

“Priority one is keeping Julie safe. We obviously had a mole in our operation and I have to count on the Bureau.”

“We will do all we can to make sure no harm comes to her, Robie. What’s the second priority?”

“I have to find out who in my past wants me this bad.”

“You have lots of possibilities.”

“Too many. But I have to narrow it down and I have to do it fast.”

“You think this thing is on a timer?”

“Actually, I think the timer is just about up.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Take a trip, far away from here.”

Vance looked astonished. “You’re leaving?”

“No, I’m not.”