“Why not?”
“On the grounds that I might incriminate myself.”
“Incriminate yourself?” Gaston said, his brows raised in surprise. “Did you participate in the murder of Dr. Robinowitz?”
“No! No, sir!”
“Then how would you be incriminating yourself by answering a simple question?”
“I’d just prefer not to, if it’s all the same to you. Respectfully. Sir.”
Gaston got up and turned his back on me, and that made me feel really bad. The director had put a great deal on the line when he’d hired me; in fact, he’d likely risked his reputation and career by insisting that I be hired on as a consultant. As a general rule, the FBI does not hire psychics. Even completely reputable ones. To my knowledge, I was one of only two or three on their payroll, and I knew that Gaston often got flak for that, even though I’d proven myself to be a valuable asset many times over.
So I could understand why Gaston was pissed off. Essentially, I’d betrayed him and possibly made him look the fool by resigning.
At last he turned back around and said, “Agent Harrison has been suspended.”
My jaw dropped. “What?”
“And your husband has been reassigned to the San Antonio bureau.”
I added a gasp. “Why?” I demanded. “They’ve done nothing wrong!”
Gaston came back over and took his seat again. “Agent Harrison arrested another federal agent today even after that agent presented him with credentials. His ability to separate his personal life from his professional life has come into serious question, and I’ve temporarily relieved him of his duties. He’ll be suspended with pay until Internal Affairs finishes their investigation.”
I sat there slack-jawed and bug-eyed as Gaston spoke. Clearly I’d missed a great deal when I’d exited the highway chasing after Candice.
“As for your husband, I’d prefer for his career not to go up in flames like Agent Harrison’s, so I’ve temporarily reassigned him to the San Antonio branch. He’ll have a long commute if he chooses to remain in Austin, but it’s the best I can do to protect him for now.”
“Sir!” I exclaimed. “I think there’s been a huge misunderstanding!”
“And as for you, Abigail,” Gaston said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “if you were still on my payroll, there is much I could’ve done to protect you too. But as you’ve clearly resigned so that you can assist your best friend in her efforts to remain a fugitive, there is little I can do for you. You should have come to me before making a decision like that.”
“I’m not assisting her!” I yelled. “I’m trying to find her!”
My admission seemed to surprise Gaston. “You truly don’t know where she is?”
“I swear to God I don’t know, sir!”
Gaston seemed to weigh my sincerity before he said, “Well, then, Abigail, for your own safety I suggest you stop looking for Ms. Fusco.” At that moment there was a knock on the door and Gaston turned his attention away from me. “Yes?”
The door opened and a stranger stood there; tall and beefy, the man was well over six feet with a thick neck and bullet-shaped head. He looked like he’d probably played football at some point in his life. He was certainly big and intimidating enough to have played in the pros.
“This her?” he asked Gaston.
“It is,” the director said, getting up. Turning to me, he said, “You have the right to have an attorney present, Abigail. It might even be a good idea.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. They must’ve discovered the file and they were here to arrest me for obstruction. I stared a little desperately after Gaston as he moved to the door, and the big beefy dude clearly wasn’t pleased by the director’s advice to me.
“Am I under arrest?” I managed to squeak out.
“Not yet,” said Big Beefy. “But the day’s still young.”
Chapter Six
• • •
The second Big Beefy sat down, I stood up. “I want to speak to my attorney. I won’t answer any of your questions unless he’s present.”
He eyed me with irritation and tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “Fine. You can use this phone. But the minute your lawyer gets here, we’re gonna talk and you are gonna tell me what I need to know.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” I snapped. I don’t much like being intimidated.
“I’m Special Agent Frank Oppenheimer, Ms. Cooper.”
He said that like it should mean something to me. It didn’t. “I’ve never heard of you.”
He snickered. “Yeah? Well, I’ve heard of you.”
“Color me flattered.”
Oppenheimer got up and pointed to the phone. “Hope your lawyer’s a good one,” he said as he walked out the door.
I sat down and dialed Dutch’s cell. It went to voice mail. I left him an urgent message to call me and waited nervously for him to call me back. After fifteen minutes the door opened and Oppenheimer stuck his face in. “Where’re we at, Cooper?”
“My husband isn’t answering his phone,” I said.
“You were supposed to call your attorney.”
“My husband has our attorney’s phone number on his cell.”
“I can look him up,” Oppenheimer suggested, pulling out his smartphone.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll wait for my husband to call me back.”
Oppenheimer seemed totally annoyed and he shut the door again. I got up to pace. Finally, a half hour later my cell rang. “Dutch?”
“You okay?” he asked.
“No. There’s an agent named Oppenheimer here and he wants to interrogate me. Gaston suggested I have an attorney present.”
“Dammit,” he swore. “I figured they’d want to talk to you, but I didn’t think it’d be this quick. I’ll send over Calvin Douglas. He’s good. Sit tight until he gets there.”
“Thanks, but could you come too?”
There was a pause; then Dutch said, “Where are you?”
“In Harrison’s office.”
“I’m in the conference room, and I’m about to be interrogated myself. My union rep is on the way, and I’ll meet with him before these Feds from Vegas start grilling me.”
“Honey?”
“Yeah?”
“What guys from Vegas are we talking about? I thought Oppenheimer was IA?”
“Oh, sorry, dollface. I forgot you weren’t in the loop about what’s happened since this morning.”
I clutched the phone tightly. “What’s happened?”
Dutch sighed. “Brice noticed a tail on me this morning as I left the subdivision. We managed to get him to pull over, and we were in the middle of arresting him when he claimed to be a Fed. That’s when Brice lost it. I don’t know what got into him, but he refused to let the guy show us his ID and slapped some cuffs on him. Then he was a little rough getting him into the car. I tried to talk him down, but I think this thing with Candice has shaken the sense out of him. He wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t listen to the guy he arrested, and then a whole fleet of Feds showed up and I realized we’d arrested a fellow bureau boy.”
“Whoa,” I whispered.
“You said it. Anyway, it took a call from Gaston to get Brice to stand down, and even then he was giving the other agents lip. Turns out they’re a group from Vegas, and normally they’re supposed to let us know when they’re in town as a professional courtesy, but under the circumstances, they kept their arrival on the down low. And now we’ve got two divisions angry as hell at each other.”
“Why is the Vegas bureau here?” I asked. I’d actually had a rough time with some Vegas boys a few years back. If Oppenheimer was from that office, we definitely weren’t gonna get along.
“They’ll fill you in,” Dutch said. “Listen, let me get off the phone and get Cal over here. You
’ll like him, Abs. But don’t talk until he gets here. And tell the Feds the truth about Candice asking you to retrieve her computer, okay?”
I blinked. Dutch had said that so firmly that I knew he was trying to help me cover up the fact that I’d retrieved a file from Candice’s office.
“Tell them exactly what happened,” Dutch went on. “That Candice left you a voice mail asking you to retrieve her computer, which you never found, and that after your offices were broken into, you suspected you were being watched, so we set up a ruse to draw out whoever was surveilling you.”
“Yes,” I said to him. “Yes, you’re right. I’ll come clean and tell them the truth.”
“Good girl,” he said, but I hardly felt better. “I’d be in there if I could,” Dutch added, like he was reading my mind. “Call me the second the interview is over.”
I hung up with Dutch and went back to pacing the room. What did the Vegas bureau want with me? I could only speculate that they were here investigating Dr. Robinowitz’s murder, but even that seemed odd, as the jurisdiction should’ve fallen to the Austin Police Department. What were the Feds doing getting involved in a doctor’s murder?
I had quite a while to ponder that question, because Calvin Douglas, my attorney, didn’t show up for two more hours. Dutch texted me after an hour and a half. He was through with his interrogation and had been ordered to go home. He wasn’t allowed to set foot in the Austin offices until further notice.
I felt even more scared and vulnerable knowing he was out of the building. Just before one o’clock the door opened again and in walked a man of medium build with red hair and wire-rimmed glasses. “Hello,” he said, extending his hand. “Mrs. Rivers?”
“Hi,” I said, shaking his hand. “You can call me Abby.”
“I’m Cal,” he said, sitting down and opening up his briefcase to pull out a legal pad and a pen. Motioning with his chin toward the door, he added, “They’re itching to get started, but I told them I needed twenty minutes to confer with you. Your husband has retained me and I’ll be representing you through this interview and also through the possible arrest—”
“The what, now?”
Calvin put his pen down. “Sorry,” he said. “But typically when I show up at a federal office and sit with a client through an FBI interrogation, it almost always ends in arrest.”
I felt dizzy and realized I was panting. “I haven’t done anything!”
“Okay,” he said, picking up his pen again. “Let’s start there. What is it these guys think you’ve done?”
I bit my lip. I knew I could trust Calvin not to breathe a word of anything I told him given attorney-client privilege, and I was nervous about lying to him, but remembered Dutch’s subtle warning and thought Cal might be the perfect person to practice my lie on.
“I think the Feds believe I’m hiding evidence, Mr. Douglas.”
“Call me Calvin,” he said kindly before adding, “And what evidence do they believe you’re hiding?”
“On the night that Dr. Robinowitz—do you know the case?”
“The doctor from Vegas who was shot at the airport?”
“Yes. On the night he was shot, I received a voice mail from my business partner, Candice Fusco-Harrison—the woman currently accused of that crime. In the voice mail Candice asked me to go to her office and get her computer for her. I’ve known Candice for years, and I trust her, so I followed her directions and went to the office, but her computer wasn’t there. I didn’t know if it was locked in her desk, and I didn’t have keys for it, so I went back home. The next day, the office I share with Candice was burglarized, and many of our belongings were either stolen or damaged beyond repair. I went home later and felt super paranoid, and that’s when I swore I saw someone lurking around our neighbors’ house. They’re out of town and Dutch and I have been keeping an eye on the place, so I went over and entered through the garage, but I don’t have their alarm code or a key to the house, so I simply sat in the garage with my ear pressed to the door, listening for any sign that someone might be inside. When I didn’t hear anything, I left and went back home.
“The very next morning Dutch woke me and said there’d been a break-in next door. When we went over to see what was happening, we both noticed that the Witts’ house had been burglarized in the same manner as my office, and I mentioned to Dutch that it seemed too familiar to be a coincidence. I told him that I’d gone over to the Witts’ to make sure their house was secure, and he thought maybe we were being watched, so we set a trap to make it look like I was trying to hide something over there, and that’s when Dutch and Agent Harrison arrested the Fed who was tailing Dutch.”
Calvin was scribbling furiously over his legal pad and after he finished, he picked his chin up and said, “Okay. Let me see if I understand this: Your business partner murdered a man in cold blood at the airport three nights ago, and shortly after that murder, she called you and asked you to go to her office and retrieve her computer?”
“Yes, but at the time I didn’t know that she’d been involved in a shooting. She just left me a message that said, ‘It’s not how it looks.’”
“And what did you take that to mean?”
I blinked. “Uh . . . I don’t know. I think I took it to mean that something bad had happened and Candice was caught in the middle.”
“Something bad.”
“Yeah.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, like maybe one of the people she was running surveillance on caught on and some sort of an altercation had taken place.”
“Did she ever mention Dr. Robinowitz to you?”
I shook my head. “Never.”
“Do you still have the voice mail?”
I felt a blush touch my cheeks. “I dropped my phone in the sink. It’s dead.”
Cal’s brow furrowed. I could tell he thought that was suspicious. “Do you have the phone?”
I reached into my purse and pulled out the dead phone. I knew I had to hand it over or risk being arrested for obstruction. Cal attempted to turn the phone on, and when it didn’t respond, he pocketed it. Then he eyed his notes and said, “Okay, so what were you going to do with Candice’s computer if you got your hands on it?”
I shrugged again. “I was going to give it to her.”
“Where did you think to meet her?”
“Uh, probably at her condo. Remember, I didn’t know she was on the run at the time.”
“Have you spoken to Candice since that night?”
“No.” That wasn’t a lie. We hadn’t spoken; we’d texted and I’d deleted all of those. True, the Feds could retrieve the texts through the phone company, but I knew from personal experience that those records would be very slow to come in. I could only hope Oppenheimer asked me the question about hearing from Candice the same way.
“All right,” Cal said. “When Agent Oppenheimer comes in, I want you to keep your answers short and to the point. Don’t elaborate even if they don’t respond to your answer. They’ll try to draw information out of you by asking a broad or general question, wait for your answer, then wait a little longer to see if you’ll elaborate. Don’t. Answer only the question they pose, nothing more, and don’t explain more than you have to.”
“Got it,” I told him. I was plenty wise to the ways of interrogators.
Cal then eyed me as if he wanted to ask me another question but was hesitating.
“What?” I asked.
“Your husband mentioned that, until recently, you were a consultant for the bureau. He also mentioned that you’re a professional psychic.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Why did you quit consulting for the bureau?”
“It’s this thing with Candice,” I said. “It really upset me, and I just needed a break for a while.” That wasn’t the truth, but there was no way I was lett
ing on to anybody but Brice and Dutch that I’d quit to try to track down Candice without it being a conflict of interest.
“Fair enough,” Cal said. “And as for that second part, would you mind, Mrs. Rivers, giving me a demonstration of your abilities?”
“Why?” I asked. I get irritated when people look to me for freebies. I mean, would these same people walk into a bank and ask for free money? Or a doctor’s office and ask for a free exam? Why am I any different? Readings are how I make my living, and it ticks me off that people put such little value on my abilities that they think nothing of asking to get one for free.
Cal smiled. “You get asked for free readings a lot, don’t you?”
“Probably even more than you get asked for free legal advice.”
Cal chuckled. “Touché,” he said. “But please know that I’m not asking for any other reason than I have a feeling these guys from Vegas are gonna come in here and basically scoff at you and your abilities in order to intimidate and discredit you. I’d just like to see for myself that you’re the real deal.”
I looked at Cal for a long moment, weighing my annoyance over the genuine need for the demonstration. I understood his barely veiled skepticism—I was faced with it every day—but at some point it just got wearisome. I mean, I wasn’t asking him to prove his competence as an attorney.
With a sigh I said, “Normally I’d tell you to stuff it, Counselor, but under the circumstances, I suppose if it better helps you to advise me, then what choice do I have?”
Cal shrugged. “You always have a choice, Mrs. Rivers.”
I stared hard at him. “Yeah, right. Whatever. I’ll go along with it this one and only time, but you will need to credit me one hundred and fifty dollars in billable hours. Like you, my time is valuable.”
“That’s fair,” Cal said, an amused look on his face.
“Good. So my impressions for you are this: I’m sensing a nasty divorce in your recent past that has made you really look at who you are as a person. I believe your ex-wife called into question the kind of man you are, and you’ve spent the better part of a year taking a long hard look at yourself and you’ve made a few improvements as a result.”