“Not this time. We saw them entering the café and got a glimpse of one of the guns when the blond one paid. We thought it was a good idea to keep an eye on them because they acted suspiciously. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had planned to rob the café. How are you doing, by the way? When you went down, I thought she got you hard.”
The first part was completely bogus, and Forard’s skeptical look said as much. The second was a thinly veiled attempt to derail Forard, and the leader of the SWAT team was kind enough to let it happen.
“I’m fine. Nothing a few days of rest won’t cure. I’m a bit more worried about Millner and Beaumont. The paramedics said they would be okay, though.”
“I’m glad to hear that. And thank you for coming so quickly. Without you—” George shook his head. “Well, without you, I think we all can imagine what would have happened.”
Forard didn’t comment, just slapped George on the shoulder, wisely realizing Andi would probably fall over if he did the same to him.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Hayes tends to have aces up his sleeves when you would expect him to draw a blank. As far as I’m concerned, this is another successful arrest, that’s all I care about.” George nodded, acknowledging Forard’s silent promise to back them up.
“Thank you for that. We have to get to the precinct now.”
“Yeah, see you there.” Forard waved and went into the café, probably to get himself some caffeine. After he had collected two blood samples from the ground, using a handkerchief and stuffing it into the plastic it had come in, George turned to Andi, who had somehow managed to stay on his feet.
“Come on, Andi. We need to go.” George guided Andi to the Escalade, not liking the ashen color of his partner’s skin. “Will you be all right?”
“Yeah. It’s going to take a while to get the DNA from the blood and match it to the case. We should use it to find a plausible explanation as to why we want the DNA tested when all we suspect the women of is a possible robbery.”
“Well, the way they leveled four SWAT team members should be incentive enough to look at them more closely. And if anybody gets suspicious, we keep it simple. We have the blood, it’s only natural to look at it.”
Andi massaged his temples. “That’s actually a good idea. No sense wasting evidence, is there?”
“No. Anyway, once it’s clear who they are, the FBI will be here in a flash, understaffed or not, and hopefully nobody’s going to ask too many questions why we looked at the DNA.”
“Certainly not the FBI. They will only care about the solve.”
“And claim it for themselves.” George had worked with the FBI often enough to know this.
“Another reason why they won’t question how we found out. That would just mean more investigative work they don’t have the resources for. And why would they waste what they don’t have on a case that’s already solved?”
“Sometimes human laziness is a good thing.” George started the Escalade and drove them back to the precinct.
25. Closing a Case, Opening a Can of Worms
AS GEORGEhad predicted, the FBI showed up in Charleston the moment CSI got confirmation of a DNA match with not only their murder case but the others with the previously unknown DNA as well. The blond who had provided the blood through the wound in her leg was the one whose DNA had been found in connection with the other cases. The second woman’s DNA matched the sample from the one case where the police had found two traces. Both women carried false ID and refused to cooperate. They didn’t even ask for a lawyer, instead waiting until the FBI appeared. Andi and George didn’t get to interrogate them; the honor fell to a seasoned FBI agent who saw to it that nobody could listen in on his chat with the women. When he was done, he told Andi and George that the women—still no names, which made Andi suspect the FBI either knew them or had plans for them—had gotten the contract to kill Lawrence Miller, Alexander McHill, and David Hector Portius II through a broker called Swallow. They claimed they hadn’t known there was another contract out for the men and that the stipulations for the kill had been very clear. Originally, the customer had asked for the men to drown while fully conscious, but when they had gotten to the cabin, the three victims had been dazed by ketamine, which finally confirmed what Tabitha and Josephine had done at the crime scene. Though what they had had in mind would remain a mystery because Andi had no inclination to go after them. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, the assassins had taken the men with them, using their own ketamine spray to keep them docile. Apparently they always carried it for close-up kills, never knowing when it would come in handy. And since they knew the water would dissolve any traces of it before the victims were found, they didn’t see why they shouldn’t make their work easier. If anything, they were pragmatic. The reason why they had been in Charleston so soon again after having left it right after the assassination was because they were passing through on their way to another contract. Andi sensing them in the café had been a stroke of sheer luck, one George said they more than deserved in this crazy case.
With the actual killers whisked away by the FBI, the official explanation being they were internationally wanted, which had the nice side effect of making Andi and George’s work shine even more, Shireen concentrated on finding the broker, Swallow. She even managed to hack the person and find the payment—two point five million—for the kills. The money had traveled around the globe before it landed in Swallow’s accounts, but Shireen managed to trace it to a company Gideon Gartner had a share of 40 percent in. Combined with all the other circumstantial evidence they had found, Gideon Gartner was arrested. He made bail after the initial twenty-four hours.
One of Waters’s attorneys gathered everything they had and presented it to a judge, trying to convince the woman to admit the case to court. When Gartner’s defense attorney was done shredding everything the attorney had presented, the judge threw the case out and Gideon Gartner was a free man again.
Andi wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about it. The cop in him wanted everybody involved in the murder to pay, while another part of him, the one that saw justice as a prickly bitch, applauded the man for having executed his revenge so perfectly. Why Gartner had waited so long to kill his tormentors would remain a mystery, but Andi was sure it had to do with how the murder had been planned and executed—being able to erase or blur all the traces leading to him.
The news of Lester Miller being arrested for a case of fraud with one of his customers didn’t help their case but was interesting enough they mentioned it in their final reports. Timmy Delain looked closely at the case, eager to impress Shireen. He found out the customer who had brought the charges against Miller was the son of a cousin of one of Gideon Gartner’s partners. Interestingly enough, he didn’t use the services of Gartner & Partners but turned to another law firm who did have ties with Gartner, but only in a professional capacity. It was another threadbare lead Gartner’s lawyer had snipped with some well-placed words.
When they got the information that David Hector Portius III had been evicted from his office, Andi wasn’t even surprised anymore. Again Timmy dug deeper, finding out David Hector III was absolutely inept when it came to handling money and had made some bad investments that had come back to bite him in the ass. Since he didn’t have an office anymore and word of his precarious situation had gotten around, he was at the end of his rope. His house had been confiscated, as well as his car, and if there wasn’t a miracle, he would end up on the streets. His mother, Tamara, hadn’t shown any interest in helping her son, though that could be because she apparently was on a cruise through the Mediterranean at the moment. Peter LaFarge had been clever enough to leave the cruise ship when it anchored at the Bahamas, which didn’t extradite people to the US. More than two-thirds of his money was distributed between Switzerland, the Bahamas, Ireland, and Monaco, which made freezing his accounts in the US more a gesture of principle than actually having an effect. Andi was a bit torn about the whole thing. He would have loved to see LaFarge pay for his crimes. On the other hand, the man had been nothing but a pawn for Gartner, which made his escape feel somehow justified. Andi wished Interpol and CIA good luck getting him, knowing he wasn’t anywhere near their top ten list of dangerous people to catch.
George seemed to be content with how everything had played out because he was now fully focused on their showdown with Chief Norris.
She hadn’t spoken to them since their last confrontation, not even to congratulate them on their impossible solve, and both Andi and George were waiting for the other shoe to drop. They had a meeting with somebody from IA this afternoon at Andi’s house where they could speak freely. The officer, one Luke Gelman from Spartanburg, had suggested they meet outside the precinct, and Andi didn’t know if this was good news or bad news. George had bought some groceries on their way to James Island and was currently preparing tea, sandwiches, and cookies for when their guest would arrive. Andi found it a very British thing to do but wasn’t sure if mentioning it was such a good idea because George’s father was Irish, not British. Pondering on the relationship between Brits and the Irish conveniently kept Andi from questioning why he liked having George in his house so much.
Two hours later, Luke Gelman arrived in a beige Dodge so nondescript it practically screamed “cop car in a cheap TV film.” The man himself was pleasant, a little shorter than Andi, with dark hair, gray eyes, and a friendly smile. He eyed the sandwiches and cookies hungrily and with a rueful pat to the little belly protruding over his trousers.
“I really shouldn’t,” he said with a sigh before he took one of the sandwiches, ham and egg, cut in neat triangles, and with the mayo-mustard sauce George did so well. After Gelman had devoured the sandwich and drunk some of the lavender tea, he went straight to the point. Andi had to concentrate on what he was saying because the arthropods in the house were in an uproar over the intruder disrupting their usual tranquil routines. Especially the silverfish were appalled by the acid stink of the nail polish Gelman used against the nail fungus on his toes. Something about the chemical set them off like nothing Andi had ever encountered. Another fact to file away in his ever-growing library of sensory images. Thankfully he was doing better again, managing the impressions he was getting, though his control was still thin and ready to snap. He only hoped it would keep getting better, and not revert back to what it had been only a few weeks before.
“First of all, I want to stress that everything we talk about here is strictly confidential. I have read everything you’ve sent me, Detectives, and I can understand why you decided to take such drastic measures. Chief Norris’s behavior is concerning, and we’re currently looking into her affairs. We haven’t talked to her yet, but you need to know that she submitted a formal complaint about you as well, citing insubordination.” Gelman took a sip of his tea. “You don’t seem surprised.”
George shook his head. “Not really, no. It’s the way she works. And the way our last confrontation went, I would have been surprised if she hadn’t taken any measures.”
