NINE

I stopped by my desk to check my messages and sign out some of the mail that was beginning to pile up. One thing led to another and it was an hour before I broke away, summoned Lisa, and told her we would drive over to Abahd’s office together.

By the time we got there it was pouring rain, freezing rain. The office was one of many in a converted industrial building near Dupont Circle. There were no police around when we arrived, and Abahd’s secretary, her eyes heavy with the shock of what had happened to her boss the day before, told us why.

“They were here most of the morning,” the heavyset young woman told us. “Two detectives and a crime-scene specialist.”

“They take anything?”

The woman shook her head. “Made some copies, but this is a business office. We still have clients. We can’t give away our files and records.”

“We’re sorry to intrude,” Lisa said, “but we need to look through her desk as well.”

“Help yourselves,” she said. “Just don’t take anything without telling me.”

Inside Abahd’s office it was too cold to work. I walked around the desk and closed the factory-type windows that had been left open. Raindrops splattered against the glass, and the dull gray light that came through added to the bleakness of our task.

Abahd’s desk was stacked with files. Her criminal clients’ files, I saw, when I looked through a few of them, along with notes about her strategy for trial, records of phone calls made and received, the usual stuff you’d find in a trial lawyer’s office. I pushed them around but saw nothing to interest me. The desk itself was what you call double-pedestal, a center drawer with two large drawers on either side.

“Why don’t you take the left side,” I told Lisa. “Regardless who Robert Bennett turns out to be, Abahd might have made notes of their conversation, and what she told him about Brenda Thompson.”

She nodded and I bent to examine the center drawer myself.

Desk supplies, mostly. Pens and pencils, a ruler, paper clips and a stapler, scissors, a half-empty pack of gum, and a fresh tube of lipstick.

The two drawers on the right side were filled with the same type of files as those on the desk, their little plastic tabs sticking up in an orderly row, even smaller names typed on the tabs. I concentrated on the top drawer first, bent lower to scan the names, saw nothing that meant anything to me. I closed the drawer and went on to the bottom one. Exactly the same thing: files, tabs, little names, no Brenda Thompson, no Robert Bennett.

I considered taking the time to go through the files one by one, but decided it would be counterproductive. The Cheverly P.D. would do that, probably had already done so. Besides, it was unlikely that notes pertaining to Thompson or Bennett would be stuck into a file that didn’t bear either one of their names. I closed the drawer, turned to help Lisa.

“Whattya got?” I asked her.

“No Bennett, no Thompson, lots of other stuff.”

I bent over her shoulder. My chin touched her hair and I backed off a little, not far enough, however, to avoid the wildflower scent. I ignored it, mostly, then got back in close again. She was still examining the top drawer on her side.

“Personal files,” Lisa said, “looks like to me. Household accounts, receipts and warranties, bank records, stuff like that.” She turned her head suddenly enough that our noses almost collided. This time I couldn’t make myself retreat. “Want me to copy some of this?” she asked.

“If you see something we can use.”

She nodded, began to open folders and examine contents. I took another whiff of her hair, then straightened up and stared out the window at the rain. The reflection of my face didn’t look happy. Searching for something is always tough, but it’s even more frustrating when you’re basing the search on guesswork.

Abahd had been pretty clear—at least in my mind—that she had bad news about Brenda Thompson, but it was possible I’d read too much into her words. That I’d wanted to read too much into them. That in my need to elevate the suspense I was trying too hard to make this special, something to get my juices flowing again.

“Hey,” Lisa said, right in the middle of my soliloquy.

I looked at her. “Hey what?”

“No home phone bills.”

“And?”

“And phone bills are all that’s missing.” She pointed at the drawer. “Like I said, these are household files, and everything else is here. Gas and electric, newspaper, water bill, cable TV, car lease, Visa and Mastercard, stuff like that, all here. Including her Verizon cell phone account. Everything but the bills for her home phone.”

I turned and walked out the door, went over and spoke to the secretary for a moment before going back to Lisa.

“The only phone bills the secretary keeps at her own desk,” I told her, “are the ones for the telephones here in the office. Abahd’s home phone bills should be with the rest of the personal stuff in her desk in here.” I nodded toward the file drawer. “You can’t find any phone bills at all? Not even old ones?”

“Haven’t looked yet, not for the old stuff.”

She bent over the drawer, rifled through the other folders, plucked one out and straightened up with it. She opened the folder and glanced through the contents, turned to me.

“End of mystery. Here they are.” She rifled through them. “Except for this month’s. But Abahd might have misplaced it … or hadn’t gotten around to filing it yet.”

“The rest of the bills, had she filed them already?”

“All there, neat as a pin. The old phone bills all show the pay-by date as the fifth of the month. If Abahd didn’t lose it, it should be here with the rest of them.” She paused. “We can get it from the phone company, if you think it’s important.”

“Might not be important at all, but there’s no way to know without looking at it.” I stared out the window at the rain. “What about long-distance carriers? Sprint or IDT … one of the others.”

She checked the folder again. “Sprint mostly, but a couple others, too. Looks like she uses whatever’s handy at the time. She gets the bills separately from the regular phone bill.” Lisa paused to flip through a dozen or more pages, then shook her head. “Nope. No current bills from either of them.” She looked at me. “We can get the same subpoena for their records.”

“We could if we had the luxury of unlimited time, but we don’t, so we’ve got to go to plan B.”

To Quantico rules, in other words, although this wasn’t the time or place to go into the details of those rules with my newest partner. I pointed at her purse on the desk.

“Got your cell phone in there?”

She did, and a moment later it was in my hands. I punched numbers.

“Go through the latest of the bills,” I told Lisa, while I waited for Gerard Ziff to answer. “You know the number we’re looking for.”

When Gerard answered, I dispensed with our usual pleasantries. “Telserve,” I told him. “I need a quick favor.”

“From me? You people have the same contacts I do … or perhaps your typing fingers are broken. If that’s the case, I’m dreadfully sorry.”

“I don’t want to use the bureau computers for this,” I said. “It’s a long story. Can you or can’t you, I need to know right now.”

“I can do it, you know I can. But we try not to, unless there’s no other choice.”

“There’s no other choice.”

“Give me the phone number.”

“I’ve got three of them. Four, actually, now that I think about it.”

“You’re pushing it, my friend.”

“Just think how grateful I’ll be. What you can twist out of me next time we play tennis.”

“I can’t wait.” He paused and I heard sounds of papers rustling. “Give me the numbers.”

I picked up one of the old phone bills, read Jabalah Abahd’s home number to him, then grabbed a cell phone bill and gave him that number, too. I had to pull my notebook from my briefcase, check the notes of my interview with Judge Thompson to get the third and fourth ones, the judge’s home number, along with the number of the phone in her chambers.

“The last two,” Gerard said. “Double-check them, will you?”

I read them again, slowly.

“Give me a minute,” he said. “You want to hold the line?”

“E-mail them to my bureau laptop,” I told him. “You have the address.”

“Can’t do that, not to that address. Got your Palm Pilot with you? The one with your personal e-mail account? I’ve got that address as well.”

“Yeah, I do, but—”

“We’ll use that one instead.”

“The screen’s too small. I’ll go blind look—”

I stared at the phone in my hand. He’d hung up. Spies, I thought, nothing was ever simple with a spy. I saw Lisa looking at me, and it was easy to anticipate her question.

“Telserve,” I said. “Ever run across them when you were a D.A.?”

“Telserve … One word?” I nodded. “If I did,” she said, “I don’t remember.”

I wasn’t surprised. I’d been an agent a long time before I knew about them either.

“It’s a high-tech company in the Middle East. Business to business. A service company for the telecommunications industry.”

“Middle East? You’re going to get American phone records from the Middle East?”

“American, European, Asian … anywhere there’s a telephone.”

She frowned. “I feel like I’m in a television commercial, but I have to ask anyway. How can they possibly do that?”

“Pretty simple, really. If you have seven or eight thousand high-tech pros involved, and contracts with most of the world’s telephone and Internet service providers.”

“They work for the phone companies?”

“Customer care, order management, but most of all billing. Every time you make a call, a computer sends the data—not the voices, of course, but the phone numbers involved and the duration of the call—to Telserve’s mainframe. The supercomputer does the rest. Makes sure each call is billed properly, each of their client companies gets the correct amount of money.”

“You mean there’s a record of every call I make? Every call everybody makes? All in one place?”

“There are exceptions. Top-level government phones in this country are excluded, same in the rest of the world.” I looked at her. “But it sounds worse than it is. With or without Telserve, every call is computerized anyway. You can see that just by looking at your bill. It’s the fact that almost all of them are in one database that makes some people queasy.”

“I can see how it would. Especially when it’s so easy to access.”

“It’s almost impossible to access, that’s the only reason it’s allowed to exist.”

“But I just heard you do it. Heard you tell your friend that you didn’t want to use a bureau computer to do it. I gather he has his own computer, and doesn’t mind at all.”

“Oh, he minds, but we go back a long ways. Besides, no one’s harmed. We could get subpoenas—duces tecum subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney’s office—but there’re two problems. Kevin Finnerty would find out about it, and we don’t want to bother him with details. Secondly, we don’t know exactly which service providers are involved, especially for Brenda Thompson.”

“This Gerard. Who is he?”

“A friend, I told you. I shouldn’t have let you hear his name.”

“I’ve forgotten it already.”

“Be sure you tell the inspectors that. Or the Senate subcommittee.” Her eyes widened before I grinned. “A joke, Lisa, an old bureau joke.” I stopped grinning. “I’m not about to do anything to get you into trouble. Trust me, I’m neurotic about that. You might not know all the details, but as long as I’m in charge you’re going to be protected.”

She cocked one eyebrow at me, but my cell phone rang to break the moment. Gerard Ziff on the other end.

“I’m forwarding your information now,” he said. “See you Friday?”

“Friday, yeah, at the club. And bring the two-hundred bucks you’re holding for me.”

He laughed and hung up. Hadn’t even asked what my request was all about. Must be awfully busy, I thought. Nosy bastard never forgot to ask.

I pulled my Palm Pilot from my briefcase, opened my e-mail, then downloaded the attachment Gerard had forwarded. I shook my head as I scrolled through the pages of tiny numbers. I knew what I was looking for, but nothing jumped out at me to indicate contact between Jabalah Abahd and the judge who claimed to have lost track of her. Which meant nothing, of course. Not until each of the numbers was analyzed far more closely than we were prepared to do here in Abahd’s office.

I closed up the Palm Pilot and put it away. When we got back to the office I’d give the data from Gerard to our computer analysts, let the whiz kids see what they could come up with.

I told Lisa as much.

“Isn’t that a lot of work,” she said, “when we could just go to Thompson and ask her?”

“Bad idea. Never ask a question that important until you already know the answer.”

She stared at me for a moment. “But … but how …?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense, Puller. With the roommate dead, how can we possibly know the answer?”

“We can’t. Not if we keep looking in the wrong place for it. Not if we keep looking here in Washington.”