“I am, sir, thank you.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, closing the lid of his laptop to lean forward and rest his elbows on it. “Agent Hart has requested you to go with her to Grecco’s home and help sniff out this wine cellar he’s got hidden somewhere in the house.”
“She briefed me in the elevator, sir.”
“Good. When you get back, I believe Agent Perez and Agent Robinson have a case that they’d like your . . .” Rivera’s voice trailed off as he seemed to struggle with what to call my intuitive input.
“Insight?” I offered.
“Yes,” Rivera said. “A case requiring your insight.”
“Are you sure Agent Robinson wants my input?”
“I’m sure we’d all like your input on this particular case, Ms. Cooper,” Rivera said, his tone growing a little flinty. He was probably waiting for me to challenge him further, especially after Robinson’s abrupt departure from the room the day before.
“Of course, sir. I’m here to help.”
“Good,” Rivera repeated. There was a small awkward pause; then he said, “Ms. Cooper, I think you should know that, even given that exhibition of yours yesterday, my team remains skeptical.”
I ran down a list of possible retorts and went for simple. “I see.”
“Director Whitacre has asked me to keep him in the loop about your progress here. However, he’s leaving the decision to keep you on for the full two weeks up to me. I want you to know that we’ll be proceeding with you as a consultant for now, but I’m reserving the right to dismiss you and send you back to Austin on a moment’s notice.”
I sat with that for a long moment and everything that Candice had said to me the night before rang in my ears. Mentally, I stepped back from the tone of Rivera’s words, and the second I did that, I was able to see his barely contained hostility—and that of his team—in a completely different context. One that didn’t attach itself to me personally, but more as a group of serious professionals expressing their collective fear about something they didn’t fully understand and couldn’t yet relate to. The minute I saw myself through their eyes, it was like a lightbulb ignited over my head, and I began to think about Rivera informing me he’d be ready to dismiss me at a moment’s notice as something that was actually kind of funny; I mean, did he think I’d be upset about being allowed to go back home? Just like that, I felt all that tension and anxiety I’d been walking around with since Brice ordered me to L.A. fall away. “Of course, sir,” I said smoothly. “I’d expect nothing less.”
He nodded curtly and stood up. I got up too. “Agent Hart should be waiting for you at her cubicle. She won’t leave for the Grecco residence until you join her.”
“Excellent,” I told him, turning for the door with a great deal more enthusiasm than when I’d entered. Not only was I confident in my abilities to help these people, but now I didn’t care what they thought. I’d do my job and not give a crap about the obvious skepticism wafting off every agent save Hart. And if I got sent home—so be it. All I could do was all I could do.
Hart spotted me in the aisle leading to her cubicle and got up to meet me. I noticed she’d swapped her suit jacket for a Kevlar vest. “Expecting trouble?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said, belting her gun holster. “But we go in prepared.”
“Do I get a vest?”
Hart smiled. “Not today. We have no plans of putting you in harm’s way.”
“Comforting,” I told her, returning the smile. “Are we ready to roll?”
“We are,” she said. “I’ll fill you in on how this’ll play out in the van.”
* * *
I followed Hart down to the parking structure located underneath the building, which was where two large dark blue vans were lined up, engines running. Hart motioned me to the first van and I pulled open the door to see agents Kim and Robinson already buckled into their seats. Robinson glared at me with open hostility, while Kim’s expression remained carefully neutral, and I could tell he was working to avoid my gaze.
“Hey, guys!” I said brightly. “Ready to have some fun?” (Okay, okay . . . so sometimes I like to poke the dragon.)
Behind me I heard Hart chuckle. “Don’t tease them, Cooper. They bite.”
I continued to grin winningly at the two men, hopping into the van to take a seat in the back without further comment. Hart took up the seat next to me. A moment later, agents Simmons and Perez joined us, and as Simmons closed the van door, Perez patted the shoulder of the driver to motion him to go.
Once we were under way, Hart said, “We’ll have you stay in the van until we secure the residence. At this point we don’t know if Grecco is at home or at work, but if he is home, we’ll remove him from the premises until we can finish our search. I’ll do a sweep of the whole house first and see if the wine cellar is somewhere obvious. If I can’t locate it, I’ll call you on your cell and ask you to come inside.”
“Got it,” I told her.
“It may be a while before I call you, though,” she said.
I wiggled my cell phone and said, “Candy Crush. Level four forty-two.” I could easily lose track of time playing Candy Crush; it was the crack of all online games.
“Excellent,” Hart said.
We rode the rest of the way in silence and I busied myself by staring out the window. Eventually we arrived in what appeared to be a very wealthy community, where the privacy fences were crazy tall, and only the rooftops of most houses were visible.
“Grecco lives pretty high on the hog, huh?” I asked Hart.
“He does,” she said. “But not for long. I can’t wait to show this guy his new twelve-by-twelve-foot digs.”
“Been chasing him for a while?”
“Far too long,” she said.
At that moment the van slowed and began to make a sharp right turn. I looked out the window again and saw that we’d entered the top of a driveway with a gate and call box. The driver of the van lowered his window, pressed the call button, and exchanged words that I couldn’t quite catch with someone in the house. The gate opened a moment later, so whatever he’d said to get us in, it worked.
The driveway was long and the house was big. It was pale white stucco with a Spanish clay-tile roof and a fountain centered steps away from the entrance. The driver of our van parked right at the front door and every agent in the van got out quickly and headed up the steps. Hart lingered only as long as it took her to say, “Sit tight. I’ll call you with a status as soon as I can.”
I saluted to her and got busy crushing some candy.
Time passed—I had no idea how long, but when my phone did buzz, I jumped and answered with a hasty, “Hello?”
“Cooper, it’s Hart. Come on in. We can’t find the wine cellar.”
“On my way.” Before pocketing my cell, I noted the time: They’d been inside for almost two hours. “Wow,” I muttered. “That was a time suck.”
My knock on the front door was answered by Agent Kim. He wore that same blank expression, but he did say, “Agent Hart is waiting for you in the kitchen. Follow me.”
I tagged dutifully along behind him as he led me through the large house, which I ogled as much as I could get away with. The place was gorgeous, with bright white walls to display a ton of art, and furnishings that didn’t distract from the stuff on the wall. We passed several rooms that I would’ve loved to explore, but Kim kept a pretty good pace. I did take note of one room along the way that held a particularly large aquarium set into the wall, which hosted a bounty of richly colored fish. “So cool,” I whispered to myself.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it was as marvelous as all the other rooms we’d passed. Open and airy with marble countertops, slate gray cabinets, double ovens, a cooktop range with a gajillion burners, and one of those refrigerators that costs more than most cars. Dutch—who’s defi
nitely the cook in the family—would’ve loved it.
“Awesome,” I said, looking around.
Hart, who was over by the sink with agents Robinson and Simmons, looked up as we entered. “Thanks for coming inside,” she said. “We’ve gone through every room, closet, bathroom, and storage space and there’s no sign of a wine cellar.”
I noted Hart’s expression and the slight flush to her cheeks. She was frustrated and maybe a little embarrassed. I could feel the tension wafting off her, and I understood. The rest of her peers were expecting this search to pay off, and she needed a win. I figured I did too.
So I held up my finger and stared down at the ground while I opened up my intuition. The first thing that popped into my head was a fish. At first I wondered if I might just be curious about the aquarium and that’s why the image came to mind, but when I focused again, asking myself where the wine cellar was, the image of the fish became a little more intense. “Did you check behind the aquarium?” I asked.
Kim, Simmons, Perez, and Robinson stared at me like I was an idiot, but Hart at least indulged the question. “No,” she said. “It’s built into the wall.”
“You sure?” I asked her.
Hart looked confused, while Simmons rolled his eyes and nudged Robinson, who shook his head and sighed. I ignored them and said to Hart, “How about we check, just to make super-duper sure?”
Hart bit the inside of her cheek. I knew she must’ve been feeling like I was putting her on the spot—I mean, if my hunch didn’t pay off, she would likely be seen as a fool by her team—but I had faith that there was something about that aquarium that would lead us to the cellar.
So, before she could even answer me, I turned on my heel and walked back the way I’d come. Behind me I could hear the patter of lots of footsteps and I couldn’t help but smirk. The guys thought they were going to see my hunch come up empty, and they wanted to be there to witness it. But I thought that Hart probably was really hoping I was right, and damn it, I didn’t want to disappoint her.
After entering the spacious room where the aquarium was housed, I paused in front of the tank and looked around. Behind me, all the agents had come to a stop at the entrance, and they were each staring at me as if wondering what the hell I’d do next. I ignored them for a moment and studied the wall the tank was set into. The blue of the water was set off beautifully by a dark wood-paneled wall. Then, I backed up and turned in a circle, studying the architecture around me. “This room is at the very center of the house, right?”
Hart and the other agents looked around, but only she nodded. “Yes,” she said.
I moved over to the tank and saw that there was a plastic piece at the top that swiveled, allowing the fish to be fed. I pushed at it and tried to peer through the opening, but it didn’t seem to house any secrets. Then I moved to the side of the tank and tapped on the wall next to it. I had a feeling there was a hollow space behind the paneling, which sort of made sense when I thought about it, because the aquarium would need to be cleaned every once in a while, and no way could that be accomplished just by pushing the piece of plastic up above the tank. Looking back at the tank, I could tell there was no obvious way to access it fully from where I stood, so there must have been some other way to get to the tank. Someplace hidden behind the wall. Backing up again, I pointed my radar right at the tank, willing my intuition to guide me to an access point, and like a trusted friend, it came through. Feeling a tug on my right side, I moved over several steps to the right of the tank and then moved close to the wood paneling again to study it. “Eureka,” I whispered, then put my hand on the panel in front of me and gave it a small push.
There was a click and then a narrow door that had been all but completely obscured opened up. I put my head through the opening to see what was inside, then turned around with a flourish and swung the door all the way open, revealing a room behind the tank with a stairway leading down to what I knew was the wine cellar.
Every agent standing in the entrance stared at me with mouth agape.
I made a point of wiping my hands together before walking toward them. As I approached the line of agents, I said triumphantly, “All yours, boys and girls, my work here is done. Anybody needs me, I’ll be in the van getting my Candy Crush on.”
Booyah! I thought. I beat my chest twice before giving a peace sign, then passed through the line of stunned agents and yelled, “Cooper out!”
Chapter Four
• • •
Two hours and many Candy Crush levels later, Hart opened the van door and peeked in at me. “You hungry?”
“Freaking famished,” I said with a sigh.
“Good. I’m taking you out for something to eat. My treat.”
“I’m totes in for that.” Then I pointed over my shoulder toward the house. “The boys still inside wondering how I did that?”
Hart chuckled as she settled into the seat next to me. “Yeah. They’re on their way and they haven’t stopped talking about you since you dropped the mic and walked off the stage.”
I bounced my eyebrows. “I have that effect on the mens.”
“You don’t say?”
I sighed dramatically. “It’s a curse.”
“Robinson hasn’t said a word all afternoon,” she confessed.
“He strikes me as the strong, stubborn-like-bull type.”
“I think you really rattled him. And I know you freaked Perez out. Did Rivera tell you that his wife, Chelsea, was the one he gave you for his test case and he didn’t even know she was pregnant until you told him and he made a phone call home?”
“He told me something about that,” I said.
Hart shook her head in disbelief. “You’re amazing, Ms. Cooper.”
“Could you call me Abby?” I asked. I was sick of all this “Ms.” business.
“I’ll call you Cooper in front of the others, because that’s how we talk, but when it’s just us, I can certainly call you Abby if you’ll call me Kelsey.”
I put out my hand for her to shake. “Deal.” After we shook on it, I said, “So, Kelsey, how was the wine cellar?”
She rubbed her hands together. “A gold mine! Not only did we find evidence that Grecco is creating forged labels for the wine stored down there, passing off what looks like cheap homemade vino as rare bottles of some of the world’s most expensive wines, but we also found a journal that might actually be a record of Grecco’s sales in stolen art. It’s mostly written in shorthand, but some of the names he listed in the journal match with who we suspect had purchased stolen art from him. I’ll have my analyst look at it and try to pin down the shorthand, but we should be able to put Grecco away for a long time.”
“Congratulations!” I told her, feeling genuinely happy for the big win she’d be bringing home to Rivera.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said. “That whole thing you did in there with the hidden panel, like you knew exactly where the wine cellar was all along—that was amazing.”
I felt my cheeks heat with a blush. “It wasn’t that hard,” I said. “I mean, you guys probably would’ve figured it out soon enough.”
“No, Abby,” she insisted. “And that’s the point. The search warrant was only good for five hours and none of us even took much stock of the room you led us to. We kept looking around the perimeter, not the middle of the house, for the entry to the wine cellar.”
“It makes sense to put it in the middle of the house,” I said. “It’d be the most stable place given California’s earthquakes, right?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not a structural engineer, but that makes sense. Anyway, I don’t think we would’ve found it in the time allotted. You saved my ass in there and I owe you.”
“Happy to help,” I said, and I was kind of surprised to discover that I actually was happy to have helped.
The door to the van opened and several a
gents began bringing in boxes filled with wine bottles and paper sacks marked with evidence tags. Hart helped organize them all in the back of the van, and it wasn’t long after that that we were able to leave Grecco’s residence.
Hart was on the phone with someone the moment we were under way, and from what I could tell about the conversation, it sounded like she was on the line with local law enforcement. “You’ve got him?” she said at one point. “Great. Put him in a cell and I’ll be there first thing in the morning to interrogate him.”
After she hung up, I said, “Grecco?”
She nodded. “Yep. I had LAPD pick him up. They’ll hold him until I can get to him tomorrow. He’ll lawyer up, but it doesn’t really matter. We’ve got enough evidence for a solid win on this one and that means he might be open to a deal.”
“Ah,” I said knowingly. “You want the name of his accomplices.”
“I do. I also want the names of his clients.” When I looked at her curiously, she explained, “No way should these rich assholes who bought stolen art from Grecco get a pass.”
I nodded in appreciation. Kicking the one-percenters’ hornet’s nest guaranteed one quite a few WASP stings, and I hoped Hart was up for that. I was about to say as much when Agent Kim turned in his seat to face Hart and he held up his own cell. “Kelsey,” he said to her, “I just got word from Rivera. Agent Barlow didn’t make it.”
Next to me, Agent Hart paled and her eyes immediately watered. I saw her struggle to keep it together and she managed—barely. “Thanks for letting me know, Lee,” she told him.
The van was quiet for the rest of the way back to the bureau. Once we were there, everyone chipped in to load the collected evidence onto three double-decker carts, which were then sent down with an equal number of crime lab techs responsible for tagging and booking the items. Hart had a few words with one of them to let him know what she specifically needed for her interrogation of Grecco the next day, and then she waved to me to follow her to the elevator.