Levi’s arms were cuffed behind his back, and his shoulders throbbed. He was seated on a metal chair, bolted to the floor, in front of a table with a brown Formica top. His holding cell, a six-by-ten-foot room with drab gray walls, was otherwise empty. And it was cold—very cold. Not quite cold enough to see his own breath, but it was probably in the fifties.
This certainly wasn’t the J. Edgar Hoover Building in DC. This place was some dump out on the outskirts of nowhere, and from the various turns and the time it had taken to get here, he figured they were somewhere near Quantico, Virginia.
He wondered when they’d come for him. It had been twenty minutes since he’d been shackled to the chair, and he figured they were trying to soften him up. Wear him down for an interrogation. It’s what he would do. But he’d dealt with much worse conditions before. So he just closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. The dull ache of his scraped cheek and sore muscles faded.
Seconds turned into minutes, and his senses absorbed the tiny details of his surroundings. Through the metal chair, he felt the dull vibrations of the world outside.
Somewhere in the distance, he sensed a car’s engine idling, and then the opening and closing of a car door.
He heard the murmurs of voices, then footsteps echoing through an unseen hallway. Both grew louder.
Levi opened his eyes just as the door to his room opened. A tall man he’d not seen before entered, and the door swung shut behind him with a metallic clank.
The man was an agent straight out of central casting. Late forties, generic dark-gray suit, dark glasses, humorless expression. He took a seat on the other side of the bare table and stared at Levi for a few long seconds, making a sucking sound through his teeth.
“Mister Yoder, I’m Special Agent O’Connor with the FBI, and I’m afraid you’re in serious trouble.”
Levi tilted his head to the side and cracked his neck. “Whatever the charges are, it’s a load of crap. I didn’t do anything.”
“The agents who picked you up already told you what you’re charged with, Mister Yoder.” O’Connor frowned. “And I got your records. I know everything there is to know about you and your association with the Bianchi crime family out of New York. You’re also a paid informant, which I’m sure your mob cronies wouldn’t take too kindly to—”
“That’s bullshit. I don’t know anything about any crime families, and even if I did, I’d never talk to the feds about them. Why did you guys really pick me up?”
O’Connor stared at Levi for a full ten seconds before responding. “We have evidence placing you at the scene of the murder of three federal agents. Couple that with your known involvement in the sex-trafficking—”
“You’re not pinning that shit on me!” Levi snorted, and shook his head. “Your records are bullshit. I helped you assholes find some crooked feds who were taking bribes. They were the ones importing and playing with underage prostitutes. Is that it? You’re trying to set me up as some kind of revenge tactic for your pedophile buddies? I want my phone call. Get me my lawyer.”
The tight control Levi maintained on his temper was starting to fray. He’d spent two months on contract to the FBI’s child sex trafficking division, looking for and finally finding two of their agents who’d been taking kickbacks from one of the other East Coast mob families. It was an ugly business, and the more Levi had looked into it, the more disgusted he’d gotten with some of what the other families had gotten themselves into. But he never dropped the dime on anyone but the dirty feds.
It was the FBI agents who were violating their oaths, not him, and not even the Mafia associates he’d dealt with.
But now it looked like the FBI wanted payback. Levi had prepared himself for just such an event. He had both videotapes and audiotapes of almost everything. These federal bastards weren’t going to take him down.
O’Connor glared at Levi and shook his head. “You’re not getting anything until I say so. Those three agents you killed were my friends, and I intend to—”
“You intend to what?” Levi strained against his shackles and puffed out his chest. “You have rules you need to follow, Agent O’Connor. I know my rights. I know I didn’t do what you’re claiming I’ve done. Get me my lawyer.”
The agent sat back and blew out a loud breath. “Listen to me, Yoder. I can make your life miserable if you fight me. Sure, you’ll eventually get your phone call. But I’ll make sure you don’t get bail. I’ll make sure you’re in the hole for months, maybe even years before your case comes to trial. I’ll bury you.”
Levi glared at the agent. He wasn’t wrong. No matter how confident he was in being able to convince others of his innocence, this asshole could make things difficult for him.
“I know I didn’t murder anyone,” Levi said. “You’ve looked me up. I’m clean and you know it. I’ve done nothing but help you assholes clean up your—”
“You never gave up your mob contacts—”
“That wasn’t the deal I made. It was your guys that were dirty. I gave you the evidence you needed to take two dirty feds off the streets. You should be kissing my ass, but instead you’re hassling me over something you know I didn’t do.”
O’Connor leaned forward and growled. “I don’t know any such thing. What I do know is that we have mob-connected murders of three federal agents, and you’ve been implicated in those murders. I should just put you into the system. I heard about what happened the last time you were put in. It got a bit bloody, didn’t it?”
Levi glared. The last time he had been put in lockup, on trumped-up charges, he’d been attacked by Russian mobsters.
O’Connor chuckled. “Oh, you didn’t think I knew about that? I’ve got your number—”
“You don’t have crap. Need I remind you that all the charges against me were dropped?”
“You murdered two people in that jail.”
Levi laughed. “What, are you some long-lost cousin of the dead Russian mobsters who tried to kill me? Give me a fucking break. Self-defense, and you know it. Reliving history is making me all teary-eyed and nostalgic, but what is it that you really want from me?”
“I want answers. Did you have anything to do with murdering agents Wei, Mendoza, or Nguyen?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“I have no idea. All bullshit aside, you’re barking up the wrong tree on this.”
“You willing to take a polygraph on that?”
Levi smiled. Whatever so-called evidence this agent had, the guy probably knew it was crap. He was on a fishing expedition.
“I have no problem with a polygraph, Agent O’Connor.” Levi frowned. The longer he sat around wasting his time with these people, the harder it would be to find Tanaka’s granddaughter. “So what’s it going to take for you to get out of my hair? Believe it or not, I actually have things to do.”
O’Connor shifted in his chair and drummed his fingers on the table. “You might be under the impression that you’re calling the shots here, but you’re not. Your ass is mine until I say otherwise. However, I might be able to work a deal.” He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop and nodded. “Assuming you can pass a polygraph exam, we might be able to work something out. Your access to some of your mob buddies could prove useful in this investigation. I might be able to convince the higher-ups to treat you as a cooperating witness.”
What O’Connor didn’t realize was that Levi would never give up a family member to the feds. Things in the family were handled by the family. Always. He pictured a five-year-old girl in the hands of a kidnapper and swallowed the bile rising in his throat. “And that will get me out of these cuffs and my freedom?”
“Out of the cuffs, yes. Freedom ... well, that all depends on the details of whatever deal is made. No matter what, you’re still a suspect until we resolve the case to the Bureau’s satisfaction.”
“Fine.” Levi shrugged, not seeing that he had much choice in the matter. Not without major legal hassle and lots of time that he couldn’t afford. There was an innocent girl on the line. And who knew, maybe they weren’t lying just to get his help—maybe they really did have some informant falsely pointing the finger at him. But who?
“You’re smarter than you look.” O’Connor stood and put a phone to his ear. “It’s me. He’s ready to submit himself to a polygraph. Bring in the equipment.”
That settled it. Whoever was on the other end of that phone call had been expecting this outcome. They wanted Levi to voluntarily submit to a lie detector test.
But why?
###
After filling out a long questionnaire and being hooked up to the polygraph equipment, Levi sat back against the metal chair and focused on his breathing.
He’d practiced with a polygraph machine a dozen times, but this one was a bit different. There were more leads attached to his fingers, which Levi knew was intended to measure his skin’s galvanic response—the electrical changes triggered by various emotional states. Two pneumography tubes were wrapped around his chest and stomach to measure his breathing. And finally, a blood pressure cuff was wrapped around his right upper arm.
The polygraph examiner, a heavyset man in an ill-fitting suit, tapped a few keys on a laptop attached to the polygraph equipment. “Mister Yoder, we’ll be going over the answers to your questions you filled out earlier. I need to let you know that...”
Levi’s mind drifted away from the words of the corpulent examiner and he began meditating. Preparing himself for the questions he knew were coming.
Years ago, he’d learned from an Indian guru the art of transcendental meditation, and it had proven useful for clearing his mind. It was especially useful back then, because the death of his wife had been eating at his soul. And since then, he’d learned several variations of the same skill, mindful techniques that allowed him to relax while at the same time enhancing his senses.
He heard the examiner’s labored breathing, felt his own heart beating at a slow rhythmic pace, and even sensed the hum of electricity powering the fluorescent lights in the hallway outside the room. He imagined his mind as floating separate from his body. He heard and saw everything, but in an emotionally detached sort of way.
He wasn’t looking directly at the examiner, but he knew when the man picked up the previously-filled-out questionnaire. Levi felt absolutely nothing when the man spoke.
“Mister Yoder, I’m going to ask you a series of control questions that are intended to create your baseline physiological responses. These will help me calibrate the equipment. After I ask each question, please say ‘no’ as your response. Do you understand?”
Levi nodded.
The examiner shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mister Yoder, you are forty-one years old, is that correct?”
“No.” In fact, Levi was forty-one.
“Are you the current President of the United States?”
“No.”
“Have you ever told a lie?”
“No.” The pace of Levi’s breathing remained steady as the questions continued.
The examiner soon finished with the control questions, and he went on to ask Levi about his mob ties. Levi lied about nearly everything on that topic. When the questions touched on his whereabouts on certain days in the last two weeks, and his knowledge of certain agents, Levi told the truth. He had nothing to hide on those counts.
After about thirty minutes, the questioning stopped and the examiner tapped repeatedly on the laptop’s keyboard. The man’s face was red, and despite the coolness of the room, his forehead was damp with sweat. Finally, he closed the lid of the laptop, detached it from the wires that were still connected to Levi, and walked with it out of the room.
Levi was left alone in the room for a full ten minutes. His arms, which were still bound to the chair, ached from lack of movement.
The door suddenly flew open and O’Connor walked in, his stone-like expression giving way to displeasure. “Yoder, what the hell kind of Mickey Mouse bullshit did you pull? What’s the trick?”
Levi looked up as the agent roughly removed the leads from his fingers, the blood pressure cuff, and the tubes around his chest. “Agent O’Connor, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The agent harrumphed and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I got a call from my SAC. I’m bringing you in.”
###
Levi shrugged his still-sore shoulders as he followed Agent O’Connor through the halls of the FBI’s field office in Washington, DC. They’d travelled nearly thirty minutes in the agent’s sedan, and aside from the agent’s instructions to “buckle up,” the trip was made in complete silence.
Several passing FBI staffers glanced curiously at Levi’s visitor’s badge. That, plus the time it had taken for the security folks to get a ledger from another room for him to sign, gave him the distinct impression that visitors weren’t often seen in this field office.
O’Connor stopped at a closed door and knocked.
A voice sounded from within the room, “Come in.”
The agent opened the door and motioned for Levi to enter.
Levi walked into a cramped office furnished with a single Formica-topped desk and several government-issued drab gray metal cabinets. Stacks of paperwork were piled on every flat surface.
A gray-haired man in his late fifties stood behind the desk and motioned to a chair. “Please, Mr. Yoder, take a seat.”
O’Connor closed the door, and sat within arm’s reach of Levi. “Mister Yoder, this is Special Agent in Charge Gary Michaels.”
Levi was familiar enough with how the FBI was organized to know an SAC was high up the food chain. There’d be no reason for the three of them to be in the same office. This Michaels guy was likely in charge of many if not most of the employees in this building. Levi wondered what the big to-do was.
“Mister Yoder, before we get into the details of what you’re here for, I want to make perfectly clear how serious your situation is. You’ve been accused of the first-degree murder of three federal agents. We have testimony placing you at the scene of these incidents. I have more than enough to hold you for three days in detention, and due to the severity of the crimes, I can make sure that when your arraignment comes up, you won’t be given bail. I need you to understand the gravity of your situation.”
Levi gritted his teeth and studied the SAC. The tone of his voice and the way he held himself clearly indicated he was used to being in charge and wasn’t playing. He seemed cold and intelligent, and he wasn’t up for any BS from someone like him.
“I understand, sir.”
Michaels nodded curtly. “Good.” He grabbed a sheet of paper from one of the stacks on his desk and looked at it. “Are you agreeing to be a cooperating witness and to assist us in identifying the suspects involved in the deaths of Special Agents Bruce Wei, Tony Mendoza, and Tran Nguyen?”
“Yes.”
“You will not, and I repeat, will not engage or attempt to apprehend any suspects associated with this investigation. That is not your job. Any evidence you find, you’ll bring back for us to act on. Is that clear?”
“Crystal, sir.”
“Good.” Michaels turned to O’Connor. “Agent O’Connor, I happen to know that Nick Anspach just came in from the Quantico lab. Take Mister Yoder to visit with our forensics expert—”
“But—” O’Connor protested.
“No buts, just do it, Frank. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Michaels jabbed his pointer finger at Levi. “Mister Yoder, we aren’t going to ask you to wear a tracking device as long as you’re checking in daily with Agent O’Connor. He’ll be your bureau liaison for the duration, and you’ll take your cues from him.”
Levi glanced at O’Connor and frowned. “I don’t understand. If you want me to look under every rock for whoever did this, I can’t exactly be playing ‘Mother May I’ all the time with Agent O’Connor.”
Michaels’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head ever so slightly. “I think you’ll find Agent O’Connor isn’t a micro-manager.”
O’Connor twisted in his seat to face Levi. “Mister Yoder, can I ask you to wait outside in the hallway for a second? I need a word in private with Mister Michaels.”
“Sure.”
Levi exited the room, and closed the door quietly behind him—then pressed his ear against the wall outside of Michaels’s office. He heard the gruff tones of O’Connor’s whisper.
“How can we just let him go … with that polygraph…”
Levi pressed harder against the wall. What was it about his polygraph?
“Frank, it’s not my call.”
“If it’s not you, then—”
“Just shut up and do this thing. There’s some … I barely understand it, myself.”
The voices got even quieter and then … silence.
Levi stood up straight just as Michaels’s door opened.
Agent O’Connor stepped into the hallway, barely glanced at him, and said, “Follow me.”
###
As they walked down the stairs to the second floor, Levi asked, “Agent O’Connor, when your guys picked me up, I was in the middle of following up on a lead regarding a kidnapping. The mom works for the FBI and—”
“What’s her name?” O’Connor glanced at him with a wide-eyed expression.
“The girl’s name?”
“No, the mom’s name.”
“Helen Wilson.”
The agent paused at the door leading from the stairwell to the second floor and focused on Levi. “I’m familiar with that case. We’ve got people on it.” O’Connor frowned. “I appreciate your concern for the kid, but that’s not your issue. I don’t want to hear about you spending time on anything other than finding out who took out three federal agents. Are we clear on this?”
Levi so wanted to smack this guy into tomorrow, but he pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and nodded. “Understood, Agent O’Connor.”
“Good.”
But as O’Connor led Levi from the stairwell and down a wood-paneled hallway, Levi gritted his teeth. There was no way he was leaving the Tanaka kid’s kidnapping to the feds.
###
Nick Anspach, the forensic examiner, looked to be in his forties. He had platinum-blond hair and scars from what looked to be a nasty burn on the right side of his face. And as Levi shook the man’s hand, he noticed that the man was missing half of both his pinkie and ring finger.
“It’s good to meet you, Mister Yoder.”
Agent O’Connor stood in the doorway to the forensic examiner’s office. “Nick Anspach is one of the FBI’s best forensic examiners.” He turned to the examiner and hitched his thumb at Levi. “Mister Yoder is a cooperating witness on the Mendoza, Wei, and Nguyen case.”
Levi noted the neatly arranged desk, nothing out of place, everything oriented just so. The only detail of the office that had any level of disorder was the pictures tacked to the wall behind the desk. Nearly thirty pictures of Anspach at various social gatherings. A drink in his undamaged hand was a common theme, and in many of the shots, FBI employee badges were present. A popular guy.
“Nick, a few ground rules on our CW here. He doesn’t have credentials, so I’m handing him off to you. He obviously needs an escort. He’s cleared to look at the evidence we’ve gathered on the three homicides, but he can’t remove or get copies of anything that’s in evidence.”
Anspach nodded. “Anything else?”
O’Connor shook his head. “No, that’s it. I’ve got to catch up on other things.”
Just as the agent turned to walk out, Levi asked, “Hey, what about my car? I was parked at that preschool when you guys picked me up.”
O’Connor looked over his shoulder at Levi. “I’ve already gotten it taken care of. By the time you and Nick are done, it’ll be parked outside the building.” He left the office, closing the door behind him.
Anspach motioned toward a chair. “Mister Yoder, why don’t you grab a seat and we can go over what we’ve gathered on these cases.”
###
“Mendoza was killed in New York City eight days ago.” Anspach’s voice was soft, almost as if he were whispering.
Levi flipped through the Mendoza case file as the forensic examiner sat on the opposite side of the desk. There were nearly fifty pages of notes, interviews, and other forensic reports. The agent’s autopsy stated that the man’s carotid artery had been severed by a deep laceration across the front and side of the neck.
With a lopsided grin that pulled slightly at the scar tissue on his cheek, Anspach slid a pad of yellow sticky notes toward Levi. “You can’t have any of the records, but O’Connor didn’t say you couldn’t jot down a few notes.”
Levi returned the examiner’s smile and tapped the side of his head. “Thanks, but I’ll see if I can keep it all up in here.” He tapped on the file. “This happened in the middle of the day in Central Park. How is it that this guy hasn’t been caught?”
Anspach shrugged. “I can’t say. Frankly, I didn’t do the initial investigation, but I talked to the guy who did, out of the New York field office. Initially it looked like a random mugging, but nothing was stolen.”
Levi flipped to the next page in the file and was greeted by an artist’s sketch of an Asian man. “Is this the suspect?”
Anspach held a grim expression. “Yup. It happened right in front of Mendoza’s wife and two kids. The sketch is based on the wife’s description.” He reached across the desk and tapped on the Asian man’s cheek. “She also stated that she scratched him something good across the left cheek. We got a DNA sample from underneath her fingernails and it matched that of a Chinese male.”
Levi wondered why the hell he was even involved in this. I’m a six-foot Anglo with blue eyes and one hundred and eighty pounds. There’s no way I’d be confused for a five-foot-seven Asian guy weighing one hundred and forty pounds.
Levi huffed with frustration and focused on the artist’s drawing. One of the earlier pages in the file had listed Mendoza’s kids as being five and seven, both boys. What kind of animal would attack someone in front of his two kids?
The examiner slid a thicker file toward Levi. “This is what we have on the Nguyen and Wei incident. It happened only about an hour from here. It was a car bomb that took them both out, and—”
“I don’t get it.” Levi began flipping through the new case folder. “One New York murder and two near here. Why are these three murders being lumped together? I’d think they’d be handled by two different field offices, wouldn’t they?”
Anspach tilted his head and stared silently at Levi for a moment before answering. “O’Connor didn’t tell you?”
“O’Connor hasn’t told me dick about any of this. What am I missing?”
“Well—I guess it doesn’t do any harm telling you. They’re all part of a sex tourism taskforce.”
“You mean child sex trafficking?” Levi’s lip curled up with revulsion, and his mind drifted to the image of the missing Tanaka kid.
“Not only children, but yes. Import of foreign nationals for … less than honorable reasons. Even though slavery has been abolished in this country for over one hundred and fifty years, it still exists.” Anspach’s face took on a haunted expression that implied the forensics specialist had seen some things he’d rather not have seen.
Levi looked over the reports on the bomb used to kill the two agents. One of the printouts showed a picture of an Asian man. “You found a fingerprint on a bomb fragment?”
“Lucky as hell, really. In the FBI lab over in Quantico, we have some really good processes to help bring out latent prints. I managed to find a print amid all that junk from the scene, and as you can tell in the report, it led to a hit in IAFIS.”
“Aye-fiss?”
Anspach chuckled. “Oh, sorry. FBI acronym, we’ve got boatloads of them. That’s our fingerprint database.”
Levi scanned the IAFIS report on a Kiyoshi Ishikawa—thirty-two years old, a Japanese foreign national on an expired student visa. Current whereabouts were unknown. The section of the report titled, “Criminal Record and Associations” included a list of relatively minor beefs with the local law in DC. But Levi’s heartbeat echoed loudly in his head and a chill raced up his spine as he read the next line aloud. “A known member of the Tanaka syndicate.”
Anspach grumbled something unintelligible then said, “From what I know, they’re a really bad set of folks out of Japan, trying to make inroads in the US. But to be honest, that’s not my area of expertise, so I can’t really give you much insight on them.”
As Levi skimmed the rest of the report, his mind raced. After another five minutes in silence, he pushed the file back to Anspach. “Are these files everything you have?”
The man’s right eye twitched in what looked like a painful tic, and the scar tissue next to the corner of his eye creased. “I’m afraid that’s it.” He motioned to the sticky notes and pencil. “You sure you don’t need to take any notes?”
Levi stood and shook his head. “I’ve got what I need.”