WHEN I GOT a call from my FBI friend Ned Mahoney the next day, I never would have guessed it had to do with Caroline’s murder case. All he told me over the phone was to meet him at the food court at Tysons Corner Center in McLean. Coming from anyone else, it would have seemed a strange request. Since it came from Ned, whom I trusted implicitly, I knew something was up.
Ned was a pretty big deal who had once headed the Hostage Rescue Team at the FBI training facility out in Quantico. Now he had an even bigger job, supervising field agents up and down the East Coast. We’d worked together when I was an agent at the Bureau, and again more recently, at a bizarre showdown with dirty cops from SWAT and some drug dealers in DC.
I sat down across from Ned at an orange plastic table with white plastic chairs, where he was gulping coffee.
“I’m pretty busy these days. The hell do you want?” I said, and grinned.
“Let’s walk,” he said, and we got right back up. “I’m busy too. Monnie Donnelley says hello, by the way.”
“Hello back at Monnie. So, Ned, what’s on your mind? Why the John le Carré cloak-and-dagger stuff?” I asked as we left the food court at a brisk pace.
“I know some interesting things about Caroline,” he told me, point-blank. “Honestly, Alex, I wouldn’t be talking to you if she wasn’t your niece. This whole thing is getting hinkier and more dangerous every day.”
I stopped walking across from a store with David Sedaris books stacked up high in the window. “What whole thing? Ned, start me at the beginning.” Mahoney is one of the smartest cops I’ve ever known, but information moves through his brain too fast sometimes.
He began walking again, eyes scanning the mall. He was starting to make me nervous. “We’ve had a surveillance team on a certain location in Virginia. Private club. Very heavy hitters. Alex, I’m talking about people who can go over both our heads—in more ways than one.”
“Go on,” I said. “I’m listening to every word.”
He looked at the ground. “You know that your niece was, um…”
“Yeah. I know the forensics, all the other details. I saw her at the medical examiner’s.”
He threw the rest of his coffee into a garbage can. “It’s possible, even probable, that Caroline was murdered by someone at that club.”
“Hold on.” We stopped again. I waited for a blond mother with three small towheads and an armful of Baby Gap bags to go by. “Why is the Bureau involved?”
“Technically, Alex? Because a body was transported across state lines.”
I thought of the mobster who’d been found and then lost: Johnny Tucci. “You’re talking about the punk from Philly?”
“We have no interest in him. Chances are he’s dead anyway. Alex, this club is frequented by some of the more important people in Washington. It’s gotten heavy at the Bureau in the last couple of days. Top heavy.”
“I assume you mean Burns is involved.” Ron Burns was the Bureau’s director, and a decent guy. Mahoney shook his head; he wouldn’t answer that one directly, but I could figure it out for myself.
“Ned, whatever happens, I’m only going to help.”
“I figured as much. But listen, Alex. You should assume you’re being watched on this one. It’s going to get nasty like you wouldn’t believe.”
“The nastier the better. Just means somebody cares. I’ll take my chances with that.”
“You already have.” Ned clapped me on the shoulder and offered a grim smile. “You just didn’t know it until now.”