CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sam Morel ran his hands through his hair and sighed. It had been one very long day. Brent Hawkins had called at ten in the morning and filled him in on the death of Alicia Walker in New York and the possible Canadian connection to Edward Brand. Sam didn’t know Alicia Walker from Adam, but any time a law enforcement person died it was a black day. With one of their agents on a slab in a morgue, the FBI was going to be taking a much more proactive approach to the NewPro case. That was probably a good thing.

He wondered about the Canadian angle. It seemed strange that Edward Brand would be so careful about every detail, then let something like that slip. Canadians were known for adding ‘eh’ on the end of sentences, turning a comment into a rhetorical question, but someone wishing to remain an unknown would be careful of slips like that. No, something didn’t sit right with him on that one.

The Mexican angle was equally as confusing. The Mexican government didn’t play ball with fraud artists. They kicked them out of the country. There had been an Internet fraud run out of Costa Rica from 1999 to 2001 under the name Tri-West that had defrauded investors of about ninety million dollars. When the pyramid scheme had collapsed, the two key players had fled to Mexico and set up new lives in Puerto Vallarta. Both men had been expelled from Mexico and sent back to the United States, where they had received jail sentences for their complicity in the scam. Mexico was not the place to hide. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He dialed Alan and Taylor’s number from memory. Alan answered. “I heard you were visiting with Hawkins and Abrams today,” he said after they had exchanged hellos.

“They called this morning. Wanted us to come down right away. One of their New York agents was killed last night. They were pretty hot.”

“I can imagine. But getting a body along with hers gives them something to work with.”

“What?” Alan asked. “What are you talking about?”

“They never told you that Walker managed to kill the guy who shot her?”

“No,” Alan said. “They didn’t say a word about that.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Sam said. “I think it makes the feds feel smug when they know something you don’t.”

“Who was the guy? Was he involved in stealing our money?”

“They’re not sure. He had no identification on him, and they didn’t get a match on his fingerprints. They’re submitting a DNA sample, but don’t hold your breath on that. The DNA database in the States is nothing compared to the one in the UK. We’re a little behind the times over here.”

“Was this Alicia Walker woman working on the NewPro case?” Alan asked.

“From what I understand—yes. She had met a guy about six weeks ago who called himself Tony Stevens, and she suspected he was planning some sort of scam with NewPro. The district office in New York didn’t have any undercover work for her at that time and gave her the okay to follow up on it. And it was Tony Stevens who killed her. The connection’s there all right.”

“It’s not good news that an agent is dead, but maybe this is a bit of a break.” Alan heard a clicking sound as Taylor picked up the extension.

“Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” Sam said. He ran his fingers across the glass that covered a picture of him posing with his family. All four of them were smiling. Days long gone. “Hey, Hawkins told me you and Taylor may have given them something to work with.”

“The Canadian thing?”

“Yeah. They’re expanding the search to include Canada. Personally, I think they should be looking internationally on this one, but they seem convinced Brand and his accomplices are American.”

“What about the tie to Mexico you found on the computers?” Alan asked.

“In their minds that’s even more evidence pointing to them being from the States. They’re definitely not Mexican or South American, so that just leaves the United States and Canada in close proximity to Mexico. None of them spoke with any kind of an accent, so they’ve mostly ruled out Europe as well. I think the real reason they’re not looking outside the States or Canada is that once they do, they lose control. The FBI doesn’t have jurisdiction outside the country’s borders. They don’t in Canada either, but our country and theirs are so tightly linked, the Bureau can operate there and get away with it. In a clandestine manner, of course.”

“Maybe they’re right about Brand and his guys being American. None of them had accents.”

“You mean Brand and his two VPs here in San Francisco?” Morel asked.

“Yes. Roger Tate and Ben Wright. I don’t imagine anything came up when they ran those names?” Alan asked.

Morel shook his head. “Nothing. Names mean nothing to these guys. They pick a name, use it for the duration of the con, then chuck it. Investigators refer to the name they were using just so we can keep track of who we’re talking about.”

Taylor nodded. “We understand. We discussed that.” She was quiet for a minute, then asked, “What now? Where does it go from here?”

“There are a lot of people at the Bureau mighty pissed off right now, and that could help us. There’s the possible Canadian connection, and we can always hope they match the DNA on the body they found in the bathroom with Alicia Walker. Other than that, we don’t have a lot.”

“Ghosts,” Alan said. “These guys are ghosts. How is that possible with today’s technology?”

“Sometimes I think technology makes things easier for the bad guys,” Morel said. “If someone’s got money and a bit of savvy, they can disappear quite easily. If you keep yourself clean and never get fingerprinted or have your DNA stored on a police database, you can just blend into the crowd. There are a lot of crowds out there these days.”

“Six billion people on the planet. That’s a pretty big haystack,” Taylor said.

Alan’s voice was grim. “And we need to find one.”