The Professionals (18 page)

N
ancy was still awake when Stevens got home. He found her sitting at the kitchen table, an array of file folders and photocopies spread out before her. “Agent Stevens,” she said, looking up as he came in from the garage. “Back from saving the world?”

He was back, that was true, but it was only a brief respite from the road. Windermere wanted to be on a plane to Seattle by noon the next day.

“Kiss your wife, hug your kids, and pack a bag,” she’d told Stevens as they parted ways at the airport, and Stevens had spent the cab ride home wondering just what he was going to tell Nancy.

Now he stood over her, bending down to kiss her forehead, and he still hadn’t come up with any kind of a plan. She looked up at him, smiled through sleepy eyes. “How’s your day?” he asked her.

“Busy,” she said, closing her eyes as he rubbed her back. “I missed you.”

“Yeah,” said Stevens. “I sure missed you.”

He massaged her back for a few minutes, working out the knots and feeling the tension in her shoulders. She leaned back into his touch, a contented smile playing on her face.

“The kids asleep?”

She nodded. “Been about an hour.”

“Rats. How’s J.J. feeling?”

“Better. Fever’s down. You could wake them.”

“Nah. Let them sleep.”

She opened her eyes and stared up into his. “I guess you’re flying out again.”

He blinked. “How did you know?”

“I know you, Agent Stevens,” she said. “You look like you’re into something deep and you don’t think I’m going to like it.”

Stevens stared down at his wife. “Some poker face I’ve got.”

Nancy smiled. Reached back to rub his arm. “We can’t all be born liars.”

“Seattle.” He sighed. “Couple days, maybe more.” He felt like nothing he could say would fix it. “I’m sorry, honey.”

Nancy reached back to pull him closer. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“I do.”

“I knew what I was getting into when I married a policeman. It’s just crummy that it all has to come together this week of all weeks.”

“It plain sucks,” said Stevens. “I figured when I joined the BCA I’d get to sleep in my own bed every night.”

“We’ll get through it. Brennan will come back and you’ll figure out this case and we’ll all go back to normal. All right?”

She tilted her head back, and he kissed her. “All right,” he said.

She smiled up at him. “So tell me about this case of yours.”

“This case of mine,” he said, walking around the table and taking a seat opposite hers. “We got these kids pulling kidnapping jobs all over the place. Minnesota. Detroit. Seattle, maybe. They’ve got aliases, fake addresses, credit cards. It’s insane.”

“It better be, you leaving like this,” she said. “What time’s your flight?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

She stood, stretching, and walked over to where he sat. “Well, then, Agent Stevens, I guess you’d better fulfill your marital responsibilities while you have the chance.”

She sat down in his lap and he tilted his head up toward hers and they kissed again, long and slow and deep.

W
as your wife upset?” Windermere glanced across the aisle of the Delta A320 as Stevens settled into his seat.

Stevens fastened his seat belt and stared up the aisle, willing his stomach to stay settled. “We worked our way through it,” he said. “What about Mark?”

Windermere frowned. “Mark. Yeah, he had some issues with it.” She smiled at Stevens. “He’s jealous of you.”

“You tell him I’m married?”

“I could have told him you were gay and he wouldn’t have cared.” She sighed. “We agreed to disagree.”

“Yikes.”

She sighed again. “He’s just moody,” she said. “Ever since we moved up here. He can’t find any work, so he just sits at home and mopes around all day. Can’t even go out because he hates the cold.”

“You tell him about ice-fishing?”

“I told him,” she said. “He told me I was insane and went to turn up the heat.” She dug around in her briefcase and handed him a sheaf of paper. “Anyway, we’ve got homework to do.”

“Credit cards?”

“Partly. That’s Ashley McAdams’s Visa statements for the last twelve months. Take a look.”

Stevens flipped through the first few pages. He started from the front, working backward from the October statement. There was the deposit on the Avis rental car in Minneapolis, but apart from that single transaction, no activity whatsoever. Stevens looked back at Windermere. “They’re all blank.”

Windermere nodded. “Same with the Wellman card. One charge in Detroit and nothing else.”

“Maybe they’re new cards?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “Those cards were issued and activated about a year ago. The girl just never used them.”

“Then why use them now?”

“She has other aliases we don’t know about,” said Windermere. “She could have twelve, for all we know. Uses one card, then ditches the alias.”

“Except Ashley McAdams got on a flight to Seattle a couple weeks after using her credit card.”

“Yeah, but she paid cash. Maybe she didn’t think anyone would make the connection.”

“Hot damn,” said Stevens. “Let’s hope she slips up again. Unless we want to start interrogating all the curly-haired girls in Seattle.”

“In other news,” said Windermere, “Landry at Birmingham homicide called with an update. Someone in Beneteau’s household caved. They’re admitting he was kidnapped.”

Stevens looked up. “And the kids asked for sixty grand, right?”

“A hundred this time, but still. Just when we’d figured it out for ourselves. I thanked the detective, told him we were past that already. Told him we were headed to Seattle to check on the curly-haired girl, but keep us in the loop if they heard anything else.”

The flight attendants closed the cabin doors, and Stevens filed the folio away while the plane taxied from the terminal. When the plane was pointed down the runway, Stevens gripped the armrests, his knuckles straining the skin. Windermere looked over at him. “You’re really hating this, aren’t you?”

He glanced out the window and felt his stomach flip over. “I’ve been like this since I was a kid.”

She reached over and touched his hand. “Look at me, Stevens. Forget about the airplane a second and just try and breathe.”

He held on to her hand and stared straight ahead.

“Let’s just talk,” said Windermere. “Forget about flying and talk to me for a minute. Your hobbies, Stevens. What do you do for fun?”

Stevens looked at her. She was staring back at him, her eyes calm. He felt the plane start its surge forward and made himself exhale slowly. “Basketball,” he said. “I played varsity, back in the day.”

“Basketball.” She examined him. “You were a guard?”

He shook his head. “A center in high school, believe it or not. I was tall for my age.” He found himself smiling. “All I ever wanted was to do play-by-play for the Milwaukee Bucks home games. Somehow I got sidetracked.”

Windermere kept her hand on top of his. “Basketball, huh? I was more into football. Of course, girls couldn’t
play
football, so I was shit out of luck.”

Stevens exhaled again. Felt a little bit calmer. “What did you do?”

“Back then? I ran track. Now I do kickboxing three nights a week. Take out my aggression without worrying about lawsuits or criminal charges.”

The plane sped up off the runway and the ground fell away. Windermere squeezed his hand. “Takeoff’s over, Stevens. We made it. You gonna live through this or what?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.” He gripped her hand in his. “I’m just going to borrow your hand for another few hours.”

Later on, when the plane was well up in the air and Stevens had a cocktail in front of him and could relax a little, he turned back to Windermere. “So what do we do?”

Windermere looked over at him. She gestured to the folio. “We read, Stevens. I brought more than credit card statements. In that folder is a list of every unsolved kidnapping in the continental United States for the last five years. If we can find anything that fits, we can put together a time line for these guys.”

Stevens leafed through the folder. It was thick. “Jesus,” he said. “These kids are too good to leave much of their history lying around. We’ll lose them if we can’t get ahead somehow.”

“We’ll get ahead.” Windermere shuffled her papers. “Maybe history will repeat itself.”

Stevens started reading. Kidnappings in Delaware, in Houston, in Atlanta. None of them fit the profile. This is like searching for a marble in a room full of ball bearings, he thought.

He drained his cocktail and gestured to the flight attendant for another. Then he started reading again. The plane shuddered and dove on its way over the Rocky Mountains, and Stevens stared glumly at the long list of kidnappings, unable to shake the desperate feeling they were losing the case.

D
’Antonio sat in the business-class seat of another Delta airliner, staring out at the clouds as the plane sped toward the coast.

Earlier in the day, the Detroit PD contact had called with good news. “They bit on the Beneteau scoop,” he told D’Antonio. “The Fed told me they’re headed to Seattle to check on the McAdams girl.”

He was on his way to the airport and on board the next flight to Seattle within the hour, booked under an alias he used sometimes, Pistone. Name of the FBI cop from
Donnie Brasco
; kind of a joke. Now he sat watching the plains pass beneath him, hoping the Feds had a better lead on Ashley McAdams than he did.

He pictured the cops in his head. The tall black woman and her partner, the older guy. Windermere and Stevens. He’d watched the two agents when they came back with Landry to talk to the neighbor again. They weren’t local, and they sure as hell weren’t in racketeering. From Minnesota, his contact said. Sniffing out a kidnapping ring dumb enough to snatch a made guy. What the fuck was this world coming to?

The plane touched down in Seattle, and D’Antonio checked his BlackBerry as they taxied to the gate. More news waited: He had missed calls all over the map, but one in particular from Miami. He
called back from inside the terminal. “It’s D’Antonio,” he said when his contact picked up. “What do you have?”

“You’re not going to believe this,” said the contact. “It wasn’t just the blond kid working alone.”

“No shit,” said D’Antonio. “He had at least two other people.”

“Three, but how’d you know?”

“Doesn’t matter how I know. What I want to know is how you know.”

“Few things,” said the man. “First, the room was rented out to some guy named Howard. According to the clerk, he was tall and muscular. Brown hair. Paid cash. Came with another kid, shorter. They brought a girl back to the room before it all went down.”

“Let me guess,” said D’Antonio. “She had curly brown hair.”

“No, sir. Blond hair. Hot body. Real gorgeous, apparently.”

“What else?”

“Police found clothes in the room, enough for three guys. Duffel bags with winter gear and a couple shopping bags from down the road.”

“What else?”

“You’re going to love this part. They also recovered like five grand in cash. Twenty-dollar bills, the lot of it. Four thousand in one bag and a grand in another. And a laptop computer, all shot up. They’re trying to save the hard drive as we speak.”

“Make sure they save it,” said D’Antonio. “I need to know what’s on that computer.”

“Might be tough. I can’t just walk into the lab and ask to see what everyone’s working on, you know?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

The man sighed. “I’ll get you the computer.”

D’Antonio ended the call. That computer could have everything anyone ever needed to know about those kids. It would be a goddamn shame if the goons had fucked up the computer at the same time they
weren’t
fucking up the kids. Speaking of which—

He called Zeke from the cab on the way downtown. “How we doing on our project?”

“It’s not good,” said Zeke. “The kid disappeared.”

“You mean kids,” said D’Antonio. “You have multiple projects now. Kid named Howard, big guy with brown hair. Shorter guy, that’s all I know about him. The blond kid who you already know about and a girl, supposed to be beautiful. Blond as well.”

“Okay,” said Zeke. “But how are we supposed to find them?”

“I don’t know,” said D’Antonio. “Look for them.”

He put down his phone and watched the Seattle skyline come closer. Somewhere in this city, he thought, is a pretty little curly-haired girl who knows everything I need to know about the bullet in the back of Donald Beneteau’s brain. Somewhere in this city are the answers. I just need to find them.