3

The Academy lay forty miles south of Washington, straight down Interstate 95, not far from Kenzie’s townhouse. She knew that Jack would probably have been better off in a place with a big backyard, but realistically, she had no time to mow grass.

Guilt dogged her as she cut through the night. She should have prepared for an emergency with work clothes and a toothbrush in the trunk. She’d gotten complacent, working at the Academy. Scott wouldn’t say anything because he was Scott.

She’d known him for eight years, had met him when she was an assistant professor of linguistics and he was working on a threat case and needed her expertise. Impressed with her knowledge, Scott had recruited her for the Bureau. Kenzie was intrigued by the application of her specialty, linguistics, to law enforcement, and her visit to the FBI Academy cemented her decision. Eighteen months later, PhD in hand, Kenzie found herself a new agent in training. That was just three years ago.

Jack was waiting for her when she came through the garage door into the kitchen, a silly grin on his face, his stub of a tail wagging furiously. “Jack, I am so sorry! Did Corey take you for a run?” Kenzie patted the black and white springer spaniel. “I know he did. But you’re ready for more, aren’t you? And guess what? I have bad news. I have to go back. It’s a little girl, Jack, a little five-year-old. I have to help her.”

She threw her keys down on the kitchen countertop and kicked off her high heels. “I’ve got to change, Jack.”

He followed her with not one, but two tennis balls in his mouth. As she pulled off her dress, her slip, and her stockings, Jack dropped the balls at her feet and waited expectantly. “I don’t have time to play right now. I promise, when this is over . . .”

But he kept following her around. She went into her closet where she grabbed a clean pair of khaki pants and a golf shirt with an “FBI Academy—Behavioral Science Unit” patch. Then she moved back out into her bedroom, where she put them on. She threaded a holster onto her belt, and filled it with her Bureau-issued Glock. It felt heavy. She wasn’t used to wearing it every day. Not at the Academy.

“Of course, I feel guilty, Jack, but then, this is my job! I’ll make it up to you. I swear I will.” Grabbing a duffle bag, she threw in two more pairs of pants, three shirts, underwear, more socks, her travel kit, a brush, some elastics to hold her hair back, and a toothbrush. “What am I missing?” she said out loud. Her navy blazer. She retrieved it from the closet.

Jack barked at her, a solitary, sharp bark. “OK, OK.” Kenzie kicked the balls out into the hallway, and then down the stairs. Jack went bounding after them and Kenzie followed him, her duffle bag in her hand. She grabbed her personally owned weapon, a small pistol, and put it in her bag.

There were four new messages on the answering machine in the kitchen. All four were from her mother. Clarice Graham lived in northwest D.C. in the house where Kenzie had grown up. At sixty-six, she was still beautiful, still trim, and still the most difficult person in Kenzie’s life. Her messages demanded that Kenzie call her, tonight. It was a matter of utmost urgency. The last one, recorded at ten fifty-five, sharply accused Kenzie of ignoring her again. “Oh, good grief,” Kenzie muttered. Being an only child definitely had disadvantages.

Jack barked again, his one sharp, insistent bark. Kenzie looked at him. He’d laid the two tennis balls, side by side, right in front of her, begging her to play.

“OK!” Kenzie said. “Five minutes. That’s all. Then I have to go.”

At 1:20 a.m., she arrived back at the Grables’ house in Georgetown. She parked in the back, near the Mobile Command Center, and showed credentials to the agent at the back gate. Driving down the alley, she’d seen an agent walking the neighborhood. He belonged, no doubt, to the Special Operations Group, called out to scan the streets around the Grables’ house.

The cooler night air, a perfect seventy degrees, felt refreshing. Overhead, the stars shimmered in the velvet sky. Kenzie grabbed her briefcase and made her way into the house.

“I’m back,” she said. Scott stood over the dining room table, making notes. His deep brown eyes, set in a broad face, creased at the edges with tension.

“The senator should be here shortly,” he said.

“No calls?”

“Nothing, not even . . .”

An agent appearing at the dining room door interrupted him. “Heads up!” he said, and motioned for them to follow.

“Showtime,” Scott said quietly.

They walked to the front hall, and seconds later, Senator Bruce Grable, along with a man in an expensive suit who Kenzie figured must be his lawyer, and two additional FBI agents strode through the front door.

“Where’s my wife?” the senator demanded, fixing his cold gaze on Scott.

“In the family room, sir,” Scott said. He motioned with his head to Kenzie and they followed the senator to the rear of the house.

“Bruce, do something!” Beth cried out and she half rose from the couch. He took her in his arms, then sat down next to her.

“It’ll be all right; we’ll find her,” he said, but a catch in his voice told a very different story. He held his wife for a moment, their grief framed by the large picture of Zoe hanging behind the couch on the pale green wall; then he stood up and squared off with Scott. “Who are you?”

“FBI Special Agent Scott Hansbrough. I’m the case agent.”

The senator looked past him, straight at Kenzie. “You! What do you think you’re doing?”

“She’s an expert in psycholinguistics,” Scott said calmly. “She’ll be invaluable if we get any communication from the kidnappers. I’ve asked her to join the case.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like people who deceive me.” He turned to the well-dressed man who’d come in with him. “Get her out of here!”

The man, the presumed lawyer, took a deep breath. “The director told me he specifically allowed it,” he said. “She’s supposedly an expert.”

“You get that son of a . . . get him on the phone. Now!”

It only takes being a senator, Kenzie thought, to gain immediate access to the FBI’s top dog. She could picture Director Joseph D. Lundquist now, patiently listening as he got an earful from Grable, who paced while he yelled into the cell phone his lawyer had handed him. Calming the senator down seemed to take forever. Eventually, the diplomatic talents of the director must have won out. The senator snapped the phone off and strode back toward the two agents. “Just what are you doing to find my daughter? Or is your job just to harass me?”

Scott took a big breath. “We have agents working hard on this already, Senator, canvassing the neighborhood, getting security tapes from local businesses, going over possible suspects, and reviewing similar cases. We have a tap on your phones and we’re monitoring e-mail. Now we need information from you.”

The senator tightened his lips into a straight line. “How long is it going to take you to find Zoe?”

“There’s no way to know that,” Scott replied.

“That’s not an answer!” Grable stood with his hands on his hips, his jaw thrust forward.

“I need to ask you some questions, sir. Could we go into your office?”

The senator’s home office, a one-story wing, stood off to the right side of the house, balancing the sunroom on the opposite side. A huge walnut desk dominated the room. The walls were a medium brown. “Mocha latte” is what Kenzie figured the designers would call it. Flanking the front window, framed by thick brown and cream curtains, were two brown leather chairs and a love seat covered in a dark green, brown, and cream plaid fabric. Very masculine. Very rich.

The senator walked right past the couch and chairs and stood behind his desk. He motioned for Kenzie and Scott to sit down. The lawyer pulled up another chair. “Now, what do you want?” Grable asked as he sagged into his high-back, leather desk chair.

Scott shifted in his seat, but did not respond to the senator’s gruff prompt. Kenzie sensed he was asserting control, letting the silence grow between them until he was ready to initiate. She looked at the two of them, the senator with his polished good looks, and Scott, a brown-haired, thick-necked former football player. In a standoff, Kenzie would put money on Scott.

On the wall behind the senator hung pictures of him with two presidents, with the prime ministers of Israel and Great Britain, with the secretary of defense, and with his little girl. Zoe was about two years old and wore pink corduroy Oshkosh overalls. Grable was throwing her in the air, and Zoe appeared to be squealing with delight. A diploma from the University of Illinois, his home state, hung next to the pictures. That explained the broad A Kenzie had heard in his speech.

Scott turned to the man on the senator’s left. “First, who are you?”

“J. Barton Thompson. Senator Grable’s lawyer. And I want to point out he doesn’t have to answer anything.”

“No, of course not,” Scott interrupted, “if he doesn’t care about finding his daughter.” He returned his gaze to Grable. “Senator, we’re covering all the bases as we search for Zoe. It’s possible it was a random act, but my hunch is, and it’s just a hunch, the kidnapper is someone who knows you or your wife, someone with a grudge. Someone who wants to strike directly at your heart.”

Well put, Kenzie thought.

The senator glared at Scott. But as the agent’s words sank in, Kenzie saw Grable swallow hard, his expression softening. “So who are we looking at? Political enemies? The gardener? The guy I cussed out last week at the parking garage?”

“All of the above,” Scott said. “Let’s start with people who might be angry with you.”

Grable picked up a paper clip, straightened it, and threw it on his desk. “That could be a long list.” He began by naming political enemies, two activists in the opposite party, a man he’d soundly defeated to win and keep his Senate seat, another senator who’d felt double-crossed when Grable changed his vote on a bill, a couple of people jealous of his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the way he wielded power, some people on the White House staff. “But these are all professional politicians. They’re not the kind to steal a little girl,” he said.

“What exactly is that kind, Senator?” Scott asked. “Because we’ve seen them all.”

Grable sighed with exasperation. “All right,” he said, leaning forward, “that’s all I can think of right now.”

“OK. Now, Senator, who do you owe money to?”

Grable went over the list, ticking them off on his fingers—the mortgage company, an auto loan, an investment broker, a bank . . . no, two banks. He kept hunching his shoulders, the tension playing out in his body. “What else?”

“Senator, how’s your marriage?”

The man visibly stiffened. He straightened up in his chair. “What are you insinuating?”

“I’m not insinuating anything. I just asked a simple question.” Scott’s eyes were fixed on Grable’s face.

Grable blustered and fumed. He stood up and turned his back on Scott and Kenzie. When he finally turned around, his face looked red. “My marriage is like every other Washington marriage I know. Difficult. Struggling. Infuriating at times. But do I think my wife had anything to do with Zoe’s disappearance? No. No way.”

“That isn’t what I asked, Senator.”

Grable tightened his jaw. “What exactly are you getting at?”

“Any affairs going on?”

“No!”

“Has there been talk of divorce? Separation?”

“No, of course not.” Grable sat back down in his chair. “We have our problems but look, I do the best I can as a husband, a father. And Beth, she . . . she tries, too. I’ve been there, done that when it comes to divorce. I don’t intend to do it again.”

“You’re pretty close to Zoe.”

“So what? So that’s illegal now? Being close to your daughter?”

Scott switched gears, asking questions about the people who had access to the house, the neighbors, any workmen who’d been around lately. They’d recently had the house reroofed and repainted. They had a lawn-care company and they’d used a caterer for a party recently. The senator added that Scott would have to get the names of the contractors from his wife.

“Would any of the people who know you have any reason to believe you or your wife had a part in Zoe’s disappearance?” Scott asked.

“Absolutely not!” the senator said, fuming.

“It’s a standard question, sir. One more thing. You’ve accepted some money . . .”

“Don’t respond to that!” Thompson said firmly. He looked at Scott. “He will not answer any questions along those lines.”

Scott refocused on the senator. “What I wanted to know, Senator, is have there been any potentially illegal transactions that might have put you in the company of unscrupulous people, people who now believe they can recoup some of their, uh, investments? Or people who may feel they didn’t get their money’s worth?”

“Don’t say a word!” Thompson said to the senator. He sat on the edge of his seat. “Senator, I strongly advise you not to engage in this line of questioning.”

“Although it could be the most productive,” Scott said. “As you yourself pointed out, Senator, most of the people you’ve named would not be considered prime suspects. Anyone who’s engaged in criminal activity, on the other hand . . .”

“Bruce, don’t do it!”

Senator Grable took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling, and closed his eyes. Kenzie could see the veins in his neck popping out. When he opened his eyes he focused on the fancy penholder on his desk, refusing eye contact with Scott. “I can’t go there, Hansbrough. On the advice of my counsel.”

Scott waited to see what would come next. After a full minute, he gathered his notebook and said, “All right, Senator. Would you be willing to take a polygraph? On the other issues?”

“Of course!”

Scott nodded. “We’ll keep you advised.” He and Kenzie stood up to leave. “One more thing, sir. If we could have a list of your associates at the Senate, in all of your offices, in fact, including contact information. Volunteers as well.”

“I’ll have my secretary get it to you as soon as I can reach her.”

“Thank you, Senator. It’s worth waking her up.” Scott and Kenzie turned toward the door.

“Hansbrough!”

They looked back at the senator, who rose from behind his desk and walked toward them.

“I want you to know I don’t like you—or her—one bit.” Grable jabbed the air with his forefinger. “But I expect you to find Zoe. You find my little girl!”

“That’s my job, sir. I intend to do it.”

“I’ll tell you one more thing. You fail at this and I will crush you. Your career will be over. What’s more, I’ll do everything I can to make sure your director gets nothing he wants on the Hill. Ever.”

Scott nodded. “I understand.”

“Do it, Hansbrough. Find Zoe!”