Dutch finished with his conference call about an hour later. He found me in his office working on the very last file in the Bankers Box, and I had all the other files sorted into three stacks: Dead, Iffy, and Solvable.
The Dead group was by far the largest, but out of eighteen files in the box, I’d come across four that I felt we could solve. And only one of the others, the file on Keisha, got pushed to Iffy.
“What’cha doin’, dollface?” Dutch asked, peeking over my shoulder while I scribbled “Dead” on the legal pad and placed it inside the last case file.
“Auditing the files,” I told him.
Dutch chuckled. He thought I was joking and he moved around to take his seat. “Oh, yeah?”
“I’m serious.”
Dutch cocked his head. “Okay,” he said in that voice that suggested he was trying to tread carefully. “Did you make it through the form?”
“That form is useless,” I said with an impatient wave of my hand. “Really, it’s a total waste of time.”
Dutch’s brow furrowed. “So, how exactly have you been auditing these files?”
I tapped my temple wisely. “I’ve got my own system.”
“Which is?”
“I’ve been pointing my radar at each and every file,” I told him, picking up one in the solvable stack. “See? Like this one: The San Antonio Feds were investigating a series of homicides. Some guy was targeting taxicab drivers—robbing them, then shooting them execution-style. The MO was always the same; these were cabs that regularly picked up fares at the airport. Each dead cabbie was discovered within a day after they’d been reported missing; all of the cars were dumped in remote locations just off I-Thirty-five but within a mile of some other form of public transportation. According to the case notes, the theory was that someone posing as a passenger hijacked the cab, forced the driver to a remote location where they robbed them, then shot the cabbie at point-blank range.
“The case notes further suggest that an extensive surveillance of the airport’s taxicab traffic yielded nothing concrete because of the heavy volume of departing passengers—there were just too many cabs to try and follow on any given night. And by the time surveillance cameras were installed to focus solely on departing cabs, the suspect must have gotten cold feet, because no more murders took place.”
“Okay,” Dutch said patiently. “What did your radar hit on?”
“I think there’s a clue the bureau overlooked.”
“A clue?”
I nodded. “The case notes say that all five cabs were wiped completely clean. No fingerprints were found, not even ones that belonged to the driver. But I think you missed one.”
Dutch held out his hand for the file while I was talking, and I gave it to him with my finger tapping that note in the case file. “Our forensics units are top- notch, Abs,” he said. “If there were any fingerprints in those cars, we would have found them.”
I raised an eyebrow. “O ye of little faith,” I said with a tsk. “There’s a fingerprint on or behind a mirror. Have your guys go back over those cars and look around the cars’ mirrors.”
Dutch frowned. “Abby,” he said gently. “This case is two years old. It’s unlikely that we would have held on to the cabs. They’ve probably already been sent back to the cab company or to the junkyard by now.”
But my radar insisted otherwise. “Okay, but will you please just check anyway?”
Reluctantly Dutch lifted the receiver on his phone and began dialing a number located in the file. It took some time, but finally he was put through to the head forensics manager in San Antonio. I overheard only half of Dutch’s conversation, and by the sound of it the other guy wasn’t too optimistic that he still had even one of the cars in question, but Dutch finally managed to convince him to go check.
After Dutch hung up, my stomach gave a low grumble. “Hungry?”
I smiled. “I could eat.”
Dutch got up, grabbed his keys, and said, “We won’t hear back from that guy for a while anyway. You can tell me more about your auditing system over lunch.”
We found a wonderful little deli called Murphy’s not too far from our office. My Reuben was amazing and the atmosphere delightful. “Okay, so I really think I’m warming up to Austin,” I admitted.
Dutch laughed. “I knew it was always all about the food.”
When we got back to the office, Dutch’s message light was blinking. I watched his face while he picked up the voice mail. At first he looked surprised; then he reached for a notepad and jotted a few things down; then he locked eyes with me and gave me a thumbs- up. My knee bounced impatiently until he finished listening, and the moment he hung up, I asked, “What’d they find?”
“Two of the five cabs were sent back to their respective companies. Two more were shipped off to the junkyard, but one was never claimed and remained in the FBI’s evidence yard.”
I felt a little rush of adrenaline and I knew he had more to tell me. “And? And?”
Dutch beamed me the full grille. “And, supergirl, just to prove me wrong, the managing lab tech dusted all the mirrors on the car. Know what he found?”
“A fingerprint!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet and pumping my fist.
Dutch laughed at my exuberance. “Yes,” he said. “He extracted two perfect prints from just behind the rearview mirror.”
I raised my arms in victory. “I am awesome!”
Dutch laughed again. “And ever so humble.”
I gave him a smart look and sat back down. “Is that it?” I asked him, sensing there could be more.
“No,” Dutch said. “This is actually the best part: Turns out the prints he recovered matched one of the suspects on the list. A guy with a previous conviction for robbing taxicab drivers and who’s currently in jail on a felony assault conviction. They were never able to confirm his alibi, but they had no forensic evidence to tie him to the cabbie murders. Until now.”
My eyes widened. “So we solved it?” I asked. “We solved our first case?”
Dutch came around the desk and held out his arms to hug me. “We did, Abs. We sure did.”
The next case we tackled from my Solvable pile was quite puzzling. The details of the investigation involved a bank manager named Donald Wyzinski who’d locked up his branch one night, and security tapes showed that he’d stolen over fifty thousand dollars in cash as he exited out the back. He was found dead the next morning, with the briefcase full of money still in his crumpled car, which was wrapped around a tree. Accident investigators took note of two pairs of skid marks on the road, and a foreign car’s paint on the left rear quarter panel.
The FBI agent assigned to the case thought perhaps the manager had been involved in some illegal gambling, and owed someone a lot of money. Before he had a chance to pay off his debt, he was run off the road.
Still, there were several pieces that didn’t add up: Donald had no criminal record of any kind, not even a traffic ticket. His friends and family all said he was a quiet, affable young man, who was shy around girls, was fiercely devoted to his family and his church, and donated his time and money to charitable causes.
Plus, his Web browser contained no history of any gambling sites, not even penny poker. He could have been betting the horses, but the nearest track was over seventy miles away from his home, so it seemed pretty illogical. No one could figure out how he’d gotten mixed up with what everyone assumed was the wrong crowd—and neither could I.
When I focused on Donald’s energy, however, I kept coming back to one name on the contact list, Jackson Wyzinski—Donald’s brother.
I had written his name down in my notes and showed it to Dutch when we moved on from the taxicab murders. “You need to refocus on this guy,” I said as Dutch looked over the case notes.
“The brother?”
I nodded. “He did it. Bring him in and interrogate him, pronto.”
Dutch laughed. “Hold on there, Sherlock. Let me just sort through this for a minute, okay?”
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I crossed my arms and sat back in my chair while my foot bounced up and down. Dutch took his sweet time reading through the file, and I was about to get up and go visit the vending machines when he suddenly shifted forward in his chair. “Wait a second,” he whispered as he came across something in the back of the file. “Donald had a one million-dollar life insurance policy that was almost fully vested.” Dutch glanced up and blinked at me.
“I’m assuming that’s important?”
Dutch nodded. “If he needed money, why didn’t he just dip into his life insurance fund, instead of risking his career and reputation, not to mention a felony conviction, by robbing his own bank?”
A slow smile crept onto my face. “Let me guess,” I said. “The policy was paid out to the brother, right?”
Dutch glanced back down at the file, and his shoulders fell. “No. The beneficiary was Donald’s mother, Estelle Wyzinski.”
I frowned and shook my head. “Dutch,” I insisted, “the brother’s involved. And I know he had something to do with Donald’s murder. Just make a call or something, would you?”
Reluctantly, Dutch picked up the phone and began to dial the number of the insurance company.
Two hours later he and I were high- fiving each other. We’d learned several key facts: One, Donald and Jackson’s mother had suffered a severe stroke a few years before Donald’s accident, and Jackson had been given power of attorney over her affairs. Estelle had died about six months after her son, but as far as we could tell, she’d died of natural causes.
As the only remaining heir, Jackson inherited what remained of the one-million-dollar life insurance policy.
Dutch was able to get a copy of the actual application form that Donald signed from the insurance firm, and when he compared it with Donald’s signature from his driver’s license, they didn’t even come close to matching.
Dutch also pulled Jackson’s credit report, and we were both shocked at the amount of credit card debt Jackson had run up prior to his mother’s stroke and Donald’s crash, over a hundred thousand dollars, in fact, which had been paid off almost exactly thirty-two days after Donald’s crash. Dutch checked, and was able to confirm that the insurance money had been wired into Estelle’s account on the thirty-first day, and because Jackson had power of attorney, he had control of her bank accounts, and had obviously paid off his debts using those funds.
Dutch had enough for a warrant, but quickly discovered through a public-records check that Jackson had moved to Florida. Dutch then had a buddy of his at the Tampa office pick Jackson up, and within twenty minutes, Wyzinski admitted that he’d taken out the insurance policy on his brother right after his mother’s stroke without Donald ever knowing about it. He’d made sure to put down his mother’s name as the sole beneficiary to avoid suspicion if his brother died of unnatural causes, and because he had been granted the power of attorney, he knew he’d have access to the money. He told the investigator that the purchase of the policy was prompted by his gambling addiction, which had started to get out of control, and he figured if he ever got into serious trouble, he could take out his brother and have enough cash to settle his debts.
Serious trouble had arrived when a bookie had sent a few muscled thugs to rough Jackson up and threaten him. Afterward, he’d called Donald and confessed that he was in debt to the mob, and that they were threatening to kill him if he didn’t show up with fifty thousand dollars the night of the accident.
Donald didn’t have that kind of cash on hand, but he did have a 401(k). He told Jackson that he would withdraw the funds from the bank’s cash reserves, then start the process of liquidating the funds from his 401(k) the next day and replace the money in time for the end of the week’s audit before anyone was the wiser.
He’d then agreed to meet his brother at a remote location with the cash, where Jackson was waiting to run him off the road, using a stolen car.
However, after Donald was sideswiped into a tree, Jackson had taken one look at his dead brother and he’d panicked. He’d left the scene without taking the money and dumped the stolen car in a nearby lake. A month later, when the funds arrived, Jackson had paid off all his debts and entered Gamblers Anonymous. As part of the twelve-step program, he’d been forced to take a hard look at himself and his actions, which had brought about a wave of guilt, and he was actually relieved to be picked up and clear his conscience with the Tampa Feds.
We listened on speaker as the agent in Florida relayed the confession, stunned that it had all come out so easily. Afterward, I got another huge hug from my main squeeze and we were able to put a big fat “2” up on the whiteboard under the heading “Cases Solved.”
By the end of the day, Dutch and I were on a roll, and had put the clues together on one last case that closed more easily than even the first two.
After that, I was on one heck of a high and I couldn’t help smiling gleefully at the other agents’ stunned faces as Dutch erased the “2” and wrote in a “3.” As one, they all turned to stare at me through the glass in Dutch’s office. I waved all friendly-like at them, and didn’t even mind when not one of them waved back.
Harrison also took note, and as Dutch was wiping his hands together and walking back, Brice looked over at me through the glass and crooked his finger. I got up and dutifully went to his office. As I entered, he shouted, “Rivers! You too. Please join us.”
I knew we weren’t in trouble, but Harrison had this way of making you feel like you could be. “Have a seat,” he instructed.
I sat at once, my back rigid against the chair. Dutch came in and shut the door. “We’re having a good day,” he said cordially while he took the chair next to mine.
Harrison’s eyes focused again on the whiteboard. “I see that. What are you two up to?” he asked, his tone flinty.
“Solving cases, sir,” Dutch replied easily.
“I thought I directed you to audit files, Agent Rivers.”
Dutch’s easy countenance never wavered. “Yes. Abby’s already finished a complete audit of an entire box of files, sir, and from that, we’ve managed to solve three cases in the course of the afternoon.”
Harrison’s steely gaze swiveled to me. “You’ve completed an entire box of audits?”
My mouth felt dry and I had to clear my throat before answering. “Yes, sir.”
“Let me see,” he said.
I glanced at Dutch and he nodded, so I got up and walked quickly back to his office, collected all the files, and brought them back to Harrison’s office, where I grouped them into my three piles again. Only, as I set down the stack of solvable cases, I moved the three we’d already resolved to a fourth pile. “These are the cases Dutch and I were able to resolve.”
Harrison grabbed one of the files in the “Dead” pile. He opened it up and saw the big yellow sheet of legal paper with my handwritten note across it that read simply, “Dead.”
“What the hell is this?” he demanded, holding up the sheet. “Where’s the audit?”
It was Dutch’s turn to clear his throat. “Abby’s been doing her own special kind of audit, sir.”
Harrison’s eyes came up to stare at us, his look incredulous. “Her own special kind of audit?”
I sat forward to explain. “I’ve been using my radar, sir. By concentrating intuitively on each individual file, I’ve been able to isolate which cases will eventually be solved, and which ones have no further energy.”
Harrison blinked. “Come again, Ms. Cooper?”
I sighed. I hated all this “sir” and “Agent Rivers” and “Ms. Cooper” crap, but it’s what the office environment seemed to demand, so I reined myself in and tried again. “For me, thoughts contain energy. And if I ask a question in my head, something like, Can the case that I’m focusing on be solved? then that thought will either travel outward and feel like it has energy to it, or it will hit a proverbial big brick wall, and I know it’s a dead end.”
Harrison held up his hand in a stopping motion. “Hold on,
” he said. “Are you telling me that if you think a case can be solved, it can?”
I glanced at Dutch for help and he took the lead. “Consider it like this, sir,” he said. “When Abby focuses on a case, she’s looking into the future to see if there is a positive resolution to it. If she sees one, she knows that by working backward she might be able to hit on the clues that were missed in the initial investigation, and we can work off those to solve the case. But if she looks into the future and doesn’t see it being resolved, she knows that it will remain a cold case.”
Harrison sat back in his chair utterly dumbfounded. “You’re shitting me,” he said.
Dutch and I exchanged a look. “No, sir,” I said meekly. “I’m afraid that’s what we’ve been doing.”
“And,” Dutch said, his tone a little more firm, “that’s what you hired her for, isn’t it, sir?”
Harrison let out a laugh that caught me completely off guard. And he kept laughing until his face turned red and tears were leaking down his cheeks. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him lose his composure like this, and I didn’t know if I should go ahead and laugh with him or get ready to pack up my things and update my résumé.
And I could only imagine what the other agents in the office were thinking. Although my back was to them, I was fairly certain they were taking in everything that was happening in the boss’s office.
When Harrison had finally sobered enough to speak, he looked surprised to see that Dutch and I hadn’t joined him in the merriment. Wiping his eyes, he said, “I’m finding this all a little hard to take in.”
I squirmed in my seat. “I know it’s a little unconventional, sir.”
Harrison chuckled again. “A little unconventional, Abby?”
The moment he said my first name, I relaxed and smiled. “Listen, if you really want us to waste time with these paper audits and number crunching and percentages, then fine, I’ll cooperate and go along with that. But I gotta tell you, we’ll get a whole lot further doing it my way.”
Harrison’s eyes moved back to the whiteboard and he shook his head ruefully. “Oh, of that I’m certain, Abby. It’s the end of day one for this squad and you’ve already managed to get us halfway to our goal for the entire month.”