The sound of movement behind her made her jump and spin around, her hand on the thick black belt at her waist, her fingers automatically seeking the thin syringe hidden farthest to the left.
Across the alley, a dazed-looking man on a bed of cardboard and rags was watching her with a mesmerized expression, but he said nothing and made no move to either leave or approach. She didn’t have time to think about what he would see. Keeping the homeless man in her peripheral vision, she turned her focus to the bag of original documents. She pulled her lemon-shaped squeeze bottle out of her handbag and squirted it into the paper bag. The smell of gasoline saturated the air around her. The man’s expression didn’t change. Then she lit the match.
She watched the burn carefully, the fire extinguisher in her hands now in case the flames started to spread. The homeless man seemed bored by this part. He turned his back to her.
She waited until every scrap was ash before she doused the flame. She didn’t know what was in the files yet, but it would assuredly be very sensitive. She had never worked on a project that wasn’t. She rubbed the toe of her shoe across the black and gray powder, grinding it into the pavement. There wasn’t a fragment left, she was sure. She tossed a five to the man on the cardboard before she ran back to the cab.
From there it was a series of cabs, two rides on the Metro, and a few blocks on foot. She couldn’t be sure that she’d lost them. She could only do her best and be ready. Another cab landed her in Alexandria, where she rented a third car on a third brand-new credit card.
And now she was outside of Philly in this cheap hotel room, a heavily perfumed deodorizer warring with the smell of stale cigarette smoke, staring at the neat stacks of paper laid out on the bed.
The subject’s name was Daniel Nebecker Beach.
He was twenty-nine. Fair-skinned, tall, medium build, medium ash-brown hair with longish waves—the length surprised her, for some reason, perhaps because she so often dealt with military men. Hazel eyes. He was born in Alexandria to Alan Geoffrey Beach and Tina Anne Beach née Nebecker. One sibling, Kevin, eighteen months older. His family had lived in Maryland for most of his childhood, except for a brief stretch in Richmond, Virginia, where he had gone to high school for two years. Daniel had attended Towson University and majored in secondary education with a minor in English. The year after graduation, he’d lost both parents in a car accident. The driver that had hit them was killed as well; his blood alcohol concentration had been .21. Five months after the funeral, Daniel’s brother was convicted on drug charges—manufacturing methamphetamine and dealing to minors—and sent to serve a nine-year sentence with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Daniel had married a year later, then gotten a divorce two years after that; the ex had remarried almost as soon as the rushed divorce was final, and she’d produced a child with the new husband—a lawyer—six months after the wedding. Not terribly hard to read between the lines on that one. During that same year, the brother died in a prison fight. A very long rough patch.
Daniel currently taught history and English at a high school in what most people would consider the wrong part of DC. He also coached girls’ volleyball and oversaw the student council. He’d won Teacher of the Year—a student-voted award—twice in a row. For the past three years, since the divorce, Daniel had spent his summers working with Habitat for Humanity, first in Hidalgo, Mexico, then in El Minya, Egypt. The third summer, he’d split his time between the two.
No pictures of the deceased parents or brother. There was one of the ex—a formal wedding portrait of the two of them together. She was dark-haired and striking, the focal point of the photograph. He seemed almost like an afterthought behind her, though his wide grin was more genuine than the expression on her carefully arranged features.
Alex would have liked the file to be more filled out, but she knew that, with her detail-oriented nature, she sometimes expected too much of less obsessive analysts.
On the surface, Daniel was totally clean. Decent family (the self-destructive cycle that had led to the brother’s death was easy enough to understand in light of the parents’ crash). The victim in the divorce (not uncommon for the spouse of a crusading teacher to realize that the salary would not support a lavish lifestyle). Favorite of the underprivileged kids. Altruist in his free time.