It was well into the night before they wrapped up the crime scene and arranged transport for Cline’s body. Jordan headed home for a shower and something to eat. The next morning, she went in early and beat a straight line to Daugherty’s office.
“Give me the rundown,” he said.
She talked him through the scene and then laid out her concerns about the judge. “He won’t come in.”
“So let it go, Jordan. You did your job. You offered.” Daugherty reached for the phone. “I’m more interested in knowing what Cline was doing out there. Bring me the answer to that question, and I’ll give you a gold star.”
Daugherty waved her off, and Jordan banged the door on her way out. Figuring out what Cline was doing in the square wasn’t going to be easy.
Plopping herself down in her chair, she flipped on her computer, typed in her user name and password, and waited for the machine to load. At this point, she had four possible leads—Cline, the Palestinian who’d killed him, federal judge Benjamin Taylor, and the unknown shooter.
Detective Weizman was working on identifying the Palestinian and the shooter. On that front, his databases likely would prove more effective than hers. But, to cover her bases, she sent a picture of the dead Palestinian from her phone to her computer and started running it for facial recognition.
That done, she pulled up Steven Cline’s State Department dossier. She had skimmed the report on Cline the day she was offered his job. Nothing had caught her eye at the time. Now, with him knee-deep in whatever was going down, she hoped maybe she’d find something she missed.
The records detailed a family man with a wife and two kids who would soon be sitting Shiva in Tel Aviv. A Jewish funeral traditionally occurred within twenty-four hours of death, and seldom more than seventy-two. In Cline’s case, there would be some type of autopsy, and extended family would be given time to attend. Jordan figured it would be three days.
Focusing on the dossier, Jordan found that Cline—other than collecting a few parking tickets over the years—was as clean as you could get. A Stanford grad, he spoke both English and Hebrew, had studied Middle Eastern cultures in school, and had served at this Tel Aviv post for nine months before requesting an emergency transfer back to the states. Raised Jewish, he was the youngest of five from a family not known to be particularly pious, though he had spent one year in Israel between high school and college. Because of his DSS background check, the records were thorough, right down to his father’s eye color and his mother’s rosebud tattoo.
Jordan wondered what she was missing.
She pulled up his wife’s record. Born Tamar Kaufmann, Cline’s wife had attended a Jewish school in Chicago. She had met Cline during a study year in Israel shortly after their high school graduation. They had returned to the states, attended college, married, and had two kids—Hannah and Martin, ages two and four.
They’d been back in Israel less than a year. Then, one month ago, Cline had asked to be replaced. He claimed that his mother was ill and that he and Tamar needed to go back to the states to care for her. A lie. Instead, he’d arranged a leave of absence from his new post in Washington, D.C., and stayed. Why?
Digging a little deeper, Jordan discovered that Tamar Cline attended the Ida Crown Jewish Academy. Opened in 1942 as the Chicago Jewish Academy, it was conservative—ultraconservative—and ultrareligious.
Glancing at the clock, Jordan factored in the time difference and then placed a call to the school’s administration offices. She found herself stonewalled by a chipper-sounding woman with strong nasal overtones who claimed she was unable to reveal information about any student, past or present. An official request could be made in writing.
Jordan hung up and put a call in to the DSS office in Chicago. The local field agent said he would dig around and call her back.
While she waited, Jordan skimmed the State Department files on Ben and Sarah Taylor. There was the same old information—where they were born, who their parents were, whether or not they liked broccoli, and when their divorce was finalized. But two interesting facts jumped out. One, Sarah Taylor was a junior senator from Colorado who served on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Not a reason to go after her family, but interesting nevertheless. The other involved Judge Taylor’s service record. He had done one tour as a Navy SEAL before heading back to school and the bench.
A Google search on the senator turned up a few recent articles. One pulled from the Rocky Mountain News archives revealed that Senator Sarah Taylor had been a key player in crafting Title IV of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for retroactively disallowing foreigners with ties to terrorist organizations entry into the United States. A reason for someone to go after her, but not for someone to target her ex-husband and daughter.
The second article, published in the Denver Post, chronicled the trial in which Judge Taylor had ruled to freeze the Palestine Liberation Committee’s U.S.-based investments. That might have triggered an assassination attempt by the Palestinians. It had definitely triggered the incident in Denver.
Jordan knew all about the case. She’d been the one to flag the false passports identifying the terrorists who had holed up in the Lebanese consulate. Their target: the federal courthouse in downtown Denver. One of the terrorists died that night, along with the Lebanese consul’s daughter. The other sat in a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, refusing to talk.
But the scene today had been different. The gunman—or woman, rather—in the square had put a bullet through the Palestinian’s head before firing a shot that barely missed the judge. It made no sense for the shooter to play both sides of the fence.
Her phone rang, and she picked up. “Jordan.”
“Dirk Walsh, Chicago DSS, here. I have the records on Cline’s wife. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Jordan could hear him rustle pages. “Of note, it says here that her family is ultra-Orthodox and that she was shomer negiah.” Observant of touch.
“Meaning she didn’t have physical contact with any members of the opposite sex?”
“Affirmative. No holding hands, no hugging, no arms around her shoulders at the local movie theater.”
“Is that normal?”
“Odd for most,” said Walsh, “but common enough among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Especially ones raised in the West Ridge suburb of Chicago, locally referred to as the Golden Ghetto.”
“If that’s the case, why the notation in the file?”
Another page turned. Agent Walsh hummed into the phone and then said, “It seems Tamar ran into trouble with some of her fellow students.” More pages crinkled. “She filed several reports stating that ‘violations were made against her.’”
“What kind of ‘violations’?” Jordan envisioned kids poking her, tapping her on the shoulder. Counting coup.
“It says that a group of boys trapped her in the stairwell between classes one day and took turns fondling her breasts. Shortly after that, her parents showed up with Rabbi Tiran Marzel. He demanded someone ensure her rights.”
“Marzel? How do I know that name?” Jordan keyed the letters into the search tab on the browser.
“He has ties to a known terrorist group.”
On cue, her computer pulled up a picture and several articles.
“Anything else I can do for you?” Walsh asked.
“Can you forward me a copy of your notes?”
“Will do.”