Dangerous Games (15 page)

“A weed can’t help being a weed, either, but that doesn’t mean we let it grow and choke off the better plants. You know Hegel? The philosopher Hegel? He understood.” Kolb spoke in the tone of a quotation. “‘So mighty a figure must trample down many an innocent flower.’”

“Innocent,” Abby echoed. She signaled discomfort by shifting her stance, widening the distance between them.

He noticed. “I’m talking too much. Sorry.”

She couldn’t let him think he’d alienated her completely. She tried a smile. “The weeds didn’t choke
you
off, did they?”

He smiled back. “They gave it their best shot, and I’m still here.”

With a swastika on your arm
, Abby thought. Prison had hardened him, radicalized him. She’d expected as much.

“Wow,” she said, “you’ve got a pretty great attitude. I’d be pissed at the world. And especially that woman in Beverly Hills.” She intentionally gave the wrong location because it might be suspicious if she knew her facts too well.

“Bel Air,” he corrected. “You know, I got no hard feelings against her.” The hell he didn’t. His hands were fists. “She’s just…I don’t know…messed up. Paranoid or some damn thing.” Projecting his own paranoia onto others. “This city, though…”

“Yeah?”

“They screwed me over. I mean, I was one of them. I wore the uniform. And they abandoned me. They abandoned one of their own.”

“People in power don’t care about the rest of us,” she said. “We’re just ants under their feet.”

“Yeah.” Kolb looked at her. “Well, sometimes ants can bite.”

There was no anger in his voice, only calm determination. Abby found this more worrisome than any display of rage.

“Look,” he added, “I’d better get going or I’ll be late for work.”

She let her gaze drop downward, a standard courtship cue. It worked.

“You, uh…” Kolb hesitated. “You want to get together sometime? Maybe have a meal, catch up a little more?”

It would be easy to say yes and assure herself of more time with him. But she knew better than to take the obvious path, especially with a man as paranoid as this one—and as shrewd.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She said it with a little shoulder shrug, a signal of uncertainty.

“We hit it off pretty good last time.”

“We did, but…”

He filled in the blank. “But that was before I got arrested and spent three hundred days as a guest of the state.”

“It’s not that.”

“Sure it is. I told you I was innocent. But hell, what else am I going to say?”

She let him think she was uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Right. You didn’t mean it.” Angry again, his fist slapping his palm. “Even if I did what they said—and I didn’t—I paid my dues. I put it behind me.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, you know.” He averted his face, refusing to look at her. “You’re still afraid, though. It’s like I’m carrying the plague. The guys I worked with won’t talk to me. All my old friends…oh, fuck it. It’s not your problem.” He started to walk away. “Glad I could help you out with the car.”

“William.”

This was the first time she’d said his name. He turned.

She spread her hands. “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing.”

“Sorry enough to give me another chance?”

She was silent.

“I didn’t think so. Nice running into you, Abby.”

He climbed back inside his car and pulled away into traffic. She stood watching him go.

All in all, a successful encounter.

She drove four blocks away and pulled into a mini-mall parking lot, then dictated into her microcassette recorder. A year ago Kolb had been an insecure, frustrated man. Now he was angrier than ever, but he’d learned to hide his insecurities behind a pseudo-philosophical smoke screen. The strong against the weak, the elite against the masses. Ordinary people were weeds. Was that what Angela Morris and Paula Weissman had been to him?

She was getting ahead of herself. There was no evidence that Kolb was implicated in those murders. Not yet.

Soon, maybe there would be. Once she had a look in his apartment to see what she could find.

11

At eight A.M. Tess handed in her report to Michaelson. “You’re late,” he said from behind his desk without looking up.

She glanced around at the office, crowded with plaques and photos advertising its occupant’s career milestones. The standard term for such a display was an “I-love-me” wall. Here, the trophies covered two walls, implying a degree of self-regard rare even among the Bureau’s elite.

“You told me to get it to you at eight,” she said tonelessly, aware that he was needling her for no reason.

“It’s eight-oh-two.”

She didn’t bother to check her wristwatch. “Your clock is fast.”

He grunted, ostentatiously reviewing a file as if his attention were too precious to be wasted on her. “Any strong leads?”

“It’s all there in the report.”

“Any strong leads?” he asked again, still not raising his eyes. Over his shoulder was a posed shot of Michaelson shaking hands with the president of the United States. Michaelson looked awestruck and the president looked bored.

Tess sighed. “Half a dozen decent possibilities. A lot of maybes.”

“There are always a lot of maybes. It was your job to weed out the maybes.”

“It was my job to weed out the no-ways. I did. The maybes are another matter.”

Another grunt. “Half dozen solids, you said?”

“Five, to be exact.” She felt guilty because there should have been six. Madeleine Grant’s tip had not been among the highlights of her report. It had been buried with the low-priority call-ins.

“That’s five more than I expected. Usually these hotlines don’t turn up a damn thing.”

“I guess we’re lucky, then.” She turned to leave.

“How early did you come in this morning to finish this?” he asked.

“Five thirty.”

“Would’ve been easier to work longer last night.”

“I was kind of beat.”

“Yeah, a ninety-minute plane ride will do that to you. Or maybe it was the strain of adjusting to a different time zone. We’re a whole hour behind Denver here. It can throw off your entire metabolism.”

“I got the job done. What more do you want?”

Finally he looked at her. “From you, Agent McCallum, I don’t want anything at all.”

She walked away, into the outer office where the ADIC’s secretary worked. From behind, his voice trailed after her.

“Squad supervisors’ meeting starts at nine hundred hours.
Not
nine-oh-one.”

She had honestly forgotten how much she disliked Michaelson. It was all coming back to her now.

She retraced her route through the labyrinth of carpeted hallways and reached the C-1 squad room. At the door, she hesitated.

Rick Crandall stood at her workstation, going through the papers on her desk.

She stared at him for a long moment. No one else was in the room, and Crandall’s back was turned. She could have watched him indefinitely, except that somehow he sensed her presence. Probably it was the same mysterious sense of being watched that she’d noticed last night outside Madeleine Grant’s home.

He turned. “Oh. Hello, Agent McCallum.”

She stepped into the room. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Just, uh—”

“Looking at my notes? My personal papers?”

“I was looking for your report. The AD wants it. It was supposed to be on his desk at eight.”

“I just delivered it to him.”

“Well, I guess you were a little late. He sent me to track it down.”

“I don’t want you or anyone else rummaging through my things, Crandall.”

“I’m sorry. The director was very insistent—”

“I’ll deal with Michaelson. He and I go way back. We have great rapport.”

His eyebrows lifted. “You do?”

“We’re old pals.”

“I don’t think the director is feeling very friendly toward you right now.”

His voice was flat. She caught the tone and the hostility on his face. “I guess he’s not the only one,” she said.

“It was stupid, that stunt you pulled. Backing out of the media event. You could have stood there, accepted the accolades, helped out the Bureau.”

“
You
could have told me about it.”

“I was under instructions not to. I—” He stopped, looking flustered.

“And you were also under instructions not to admit that fact, weren’t you?” She smiled at his discomfort. “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to the Nose.”

“The director, you mean.”

“I think ‘the Nose’ suits him better.”

“You ought to show some respect.”

She was honestly baffled. “For Michaelson?”

“He’s running this office. He’s in charge—just like you are, in Denver. Would you like it if one of your subordinates behaved the way you did yesterday?”

This jarred her. “No,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t.”

“We went to a lot of trouble to set up that event. We’ve been sucking heavy heat ever since Angela Morris was snatched. It’s all over the news every day and night. Bringing you in was partly a show for the cameras—but it was necessary. We’re trying to keep the pot from boiling over. And you didn’t help. You went out of your way to make things harder for Michaelson”—he corrected himself—“for Director Michaelson. Made you feel good, didn’t it? Kind of puts the ‘special’ in special agent? You’re the rebel, the superstar. Well, it wasn’t just the director you screwed over. You made it harder for the rest of us, too.”

She took this in. “I’m not a rebel,” she said. She didn’t know why this denial mattered, in the face of everything else he’d said.

“You’re not a team player, that’s for sure.” He moved to leave. She didn’t stop him. But in the doorway he paused to look back at her. “You going to the supervisors’ meeting?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t have to let you attend, you know. He could have frozen you out. If I were in his place, that’s what I’d do.”

Crandall walked off. Tess wished she’d thought of something better to say in her defense. But there was nothing she could have said, because Crandall was right.

She’d let her personal dislike of the assistant director compromise her judgment. If anyone else had arranged a news conference for her, with or without her knowledge, she would have played along. She might have griped about it, but she would have done her duty. For teamwork. For the Bureau. But when it was Michaelson…

All she’d thought of was teaching him a lesson, making her foolish, futile little power play. She’d acted like a prima donna. And she’d let down her colleagues, who now disliked and distrusted her—even Crandall, who’d been her buddy up until five o’clock last night.

Now he was solidly against her, firmly siding with Michaelson.

She sat at her workstation. The printouts of the tip-line messages were stacked on her desk. She riffled through them and found her notes on the Madeleine Grant interview. If Crandall had seen them, he would know she was investigating a lead on her own. He might be sharing this news with Michaelson right now.

Or maybe she was just being unreasonably suspicious. This was what happened when you broke the rules. Everybody became a potential enemy. She didn’t like it. She was beginning to wish she’d never met Abby Sinclair.

Too late for second thoughts. But if she was going to risk her job carrying out a clandestine operation, she was at least going to learn more about William Kolb.

As a cop, he’d worked out of LAPD’s West Los Angeles station. She looked up the phone number and called from her cell phone, identifying herself as an FBI agent and asking to speak with the supervisor of detectives. A lieutenant named Collins came on the line. When she mentioned Kolb, he cut her off.

“It’s Pacific Area you want. They handled the arrest.”

“Why?”

“Because the investigation originated at Kolb’s residence. He lived in Mar Vista at the time.”

“Where’s that?”

“I take it you’re not from around here.”

“I’m in from out of state, working a special.”

“Mar Vista’s a district of LA, south of the city of Santa Monica. You can find that, can’t you?”

“I think I can track it down. You remember the name of the detective who arrested Kolb?”

“Goddard. He’s still working out of that division.”

Tess put in a call to Pacific. The duty officer said Detective Goddard was out on a case. He transferred Tess to Goddard’s voice mail, and she left a brief, vague message, giving her cell phone number, but saying nothing about Madeleine Grant. She still wanted to preserve some degree of deniability if Michaelson asked if she was handling a lead on the side.

She sat at the workstation for a while, rereading and resorting the tips. She thought about how badly she’d botched her first sixteen hours in LA. So far she’d humiliated Michaelson, alienated her colleagues, violated procedure, and hooked up with a vigilante who dated stalkers.

Still, she was committed. She was in it for keeps. All the way, like that Sinatra song said, the one Crandall had played in the car. It had sounded romantic when Frank sang it. It sounded ominous now.

When she checked her watch, she saw that it was nearly nine. Michaelson had been explicit about the virtue of punctuality. She preferred not to disappoint him again.

Before leaving, she hid her notepad underneath the stack of call-ins, placing both at the back of her desk drawer. If Crandall had filled Michaelson in, the assistant director would probably demand to see her notes. If she left them behind, at least it would buy her a little time.

She shook her head. Hiding things, skulking around—this wasn’t what she signed up for. Or maybe it was. She’d made her deal with the devil, and she would have to live with it, if she could.

12

Kolb was still pissed off when he arrived at the security firm. He marched into the locker room, ignoring the other guards getting into their uniforms at shift change. He wasn’t friendly with any of them. They were assholes and losers, willing to while their lives away playing rent-a-cop for starvation wages.

He opened his locker and stripped out of his civilian clothes. As always, he was careful not to let anyone see the swastika tattoo. With all the blacks and Mexicans around, he didn’t think his skin art would go over too well.