“Lucky? I nearly passed out when I opened that envelope.”
“Don’t you see?” said Rankin. “We’re looking at a whole new count against him now. We were already looking at theft, fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and interstate racketeering, but if we can add extortion to the indictment, that’s potentially another twenty years.” He grinned. “Man, I never really believed he would be so dumb.” Price shot him a warning look, and the smile left his face. For the second time in the past hour, I felt a churning wave of shock and sickness. I stared at Price, then at Rankin. “My God,” I breathed. “You knew this would happen. You wanted me to end up in this position all along.”
He frowned. “Not you, Doc—him. We wanted him to end up in this position. There’s a difference.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You knew the minute I agreed to go into that strip club that he’d do something like this, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t know,” Price answered for him, “but yes, we thought it was possible. The FBI would be doing a pretty sloppy job if we failed to anticipate this sort of thing. It’s a time-honored trap.”
I felt betrayed, humiliated, and furious. “Do the words ‘informed consent’ mean anything to you? You didn’t tell me the whole truth about what you expected when you pulled me into this. You got my consent under false pretenses. I deserved better than that.”
“Fair enough. Yes, you deserved better,” Price said, in a tone that sounded more like a challenge than a concession, “but we couldn’t afford to risk giving you better. We knew you’d hate the strip club, and we knew Sinclair might try to compromise you. But what Ben said when you called him that night was dead-on: If you were too much of a goody-goody to set foot in a strip club, why on earth would Sinclair believe you’d lie and steal?”
The words stung like a slap—not just “lie” and “steal” but “goody-goody” as well. Was that what Price thought of me? Was that what Rankin thought of me? Was that, in fact, what I was?
“I’m sorry,” Price added, her tone softening. “It was my call, not Ben’s, and I had to hold my nose as I made it. An undercover sting requires imperfect choices and tough decisions. But I stand by this one, and I hope you can understand why. We’ve got great audio and video evidence on multiple counts—wire fraud, conspiracy, and interfering with interstate commerce, for sure. If you’ll hang in there with us just one more step, we’ll nail this guy for extortion, too. And then we’ll let you get back to your normal life.”
“Normal life? I have no idea what that means anymore.”
I looked out the window for a long time. The sun was dropping toward the horizon. A few hundred yards down the hill from where I stood, a sliver of sunlight glanced off the bronze glass of the Sunsphere, one of the few remaining relics of Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair. A half mile or so beyond, just before the big bend where the Tennessee River first turns toward the Gulf of Mexico, Neyland Stadium glowed orange and white in the late-afternoon light. At this distance, at this moment, the massive stadium seemed small and unimportant, and my tiny office—my place beneath it—was an invisible, insignificant speck. I looked back at Price. “I feel infected,” I said miserably. “Diseased. Feels like toxic shock attacking every moral fiber I’ve got.” I stared out the window at the river of cars flowing westward from downtown, taking normal people home to their neighborhoods and their families. “How do I get these toxins out of my system?”
A look of relief passed between the agents. They still had me. The bait was thrashing, but it was still on the hook, still twitching and writhing as the big fish opened its jaws. RANKIN DROVE ME BACK TOmy office, partly to save me the walk and partly to retrieve the envelope so the lab could fingerprint the photos. On the way he coached me about the call I needed to place to Sinclair. “You know the drill. Make him spell out the details, if you can. The more explicitly he threatens or pressures you, the stronger the extortion case is. So don’t initiate anything. Get him to say what he wants you to do or what he’ll do to you.”
“Got it,” I said impatiently. This was the third time he’d told me this, in slightly different words, since we’d ridden down in the elevator from Price’s office, and I’d grasped the point the first two times. We threaded the service road ringing the base of the stadium and parked by the stairwell at the north end zone. Rankin followed me up to my office and took a seat as I unlocked the desk drawer where I’d hidden the envelope.
For the second time that day, I felt close to fainting. The envelope was gone.
CHAPTER 39
“AND YOU’RE SURE IT WAS IN THE DRAWER?”