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Special Agent Jerrod Westlake sat at his desk in the FBI’s Austin office, looking out a window at the late-afternoon sky. The ordinarily exquisite February weather was about to give way to one of those window-rattling, tree-toppling thunderstorms for which Texas was known.
He watched the clouds turn blacker by the second over toward Balcones. If it had been raining up in the hill country to the west, floods wouldn’t be far behind.
But Jerrod wasn’t really thinking about the storm. At thirty-eight, he had a decade under his belt as an agent, and he looked at the building storm with the uneasy sixth sense that life was about to imitate meteorology.
The case file that lay all over his desk, sorted into types and sources of information, screamed things that burned into his brain. Fourteen-year-old runaway female, last seen hawking herself on the streets of Houston. This time, unlike most times, she had been reported missing by another prostitute, an older woman who had tried to take the child under her wing and protect her. It was this woman who had reported the girl’s disappearance. Usually they just disappeared into inky silence, without a trace.
Another rumble of thunder, too low to be audible, but strong enough to be felt, passed through the office.
Lately too many of his cases seemed to settle around government contractors. The rush of often poorly overseen privatization of government work, coupled with the spending bonanza of the “global war on terror,” had led to a boom in contractor fraud. For a while, it had gone largely unnoticed and unchecked, but then courageous whistle-blowers had begun to come forward. Sadly, despite the whistle-blower protection laws, he knew that those witnesses would probably find themselves out of work and unemployable in the government-contracting sector.
But those cases were not his passion. They were just his job. As another rumble of thunder passed through the room, he looked at the framed photo on his desk. The girl who looked back at him from a face framed by blond curls appeared to be just on the cusp of womanhood, entering the awkward stage of life where her smile was the impish one of childhood mixed with the almost-sensed mysteries of adulthood. Elena. Resident forever in his heart, an ache that would never end.
He’d known he wanted to be a cop from the time Elena had disappeared. He’d been sixteen then, six years older than she was. Family tragedies hit in a lot of ways. His sister’s abduction had sent his mom into an alcoholic spiral and his dad into a withdrawal from which he’d never fully emerged.
After Elena disappeared, all that remained was the silence.
It was his father’s sudden, overwhelming sense of powerlessness that had energized Jerrod. He decided he would become a cop. He would step in for fathers whose invulnerability had been irretrievably shattered. He would rescue his father, even if he never found Elena.
That had led him into the army’s military police program, the fastest way to get into uniform and on the job, and a way to pay for the college education he would need in order to work for the FBI. His rugged athleticism and quick, keen mind had attracted the attention of recruiters in the special-ops community, shadowy heroic figures who’d told him he was destined for better things than waving cars through the front gate.
Six years later, he’d passed through the revolving door that led from special operations into private military contracting, where the pay was better and the missions even farther from public awareness. The company he’d worked for had specialized in overseas personal security, protecting U.S. businessmen and key employees in parts of the world where a U.S. passport was all too often irresistible bait for rebels who financed their operations with ransom money.
It was there, in that dark, shadowy world, that he’d learned what happened sometimes to those little girls and boys who disappeared. It was the first time he’d learned that there really was a white slave trade.
He’d become an expert in finding the missing, sniffing out clues that others might miss, able to project complex networks of informants, sources and dark alliances onto a screen in his mind. He followed links that seemed obvious only in retrospect, guided by intuition, supported by a twenty-hour-a-day work schedule when he was on a case.
And then he’d blown the whistle himself.
Ultimately, the case had gone nowhere. He knew what he knew, but too much of what he knew lay in inferences he had drawn from that screen in his mind. The investigator who had worked the case couldn’t verify any of Jerrod’s claims, at least not enough for prosecution.
But it had pushed him out of the private sector and into the job he’d always wanted. He’d joined the FBI. And he’d joined with a résumé and a passion that had quickly turned into a specialty.
He worked all kinds of cases, but Special Agent Jerrod Westlake had quickly emerged as the go-to guy on abductions. A photo album in his desk drawer was filled with the faces of kids he’d found. The bulletin board over his desk was also covered with photographs, those he hadn’t yet located.
And on his desk, surrounded by a simple white frame, was a photo of Elena.
He looked at her now, sensing more than hearing the rumble of thunder that reverberated through his window, strong enough to feel in the arms of his chair.
Elena, as sweet as a spring morning, a tiny little elf of a girl who had come into the world one day after his sixth birthday. His mom called her a surprise gift from God. His dad just plain doted.
And it still pained Jerrod not to know. Despite all the resources he could call on, he could find no trace of Elena Westlake. Not even among the hundreds of Jane Does who filtered through morgues and into anonymous plots of ground provided by cities, counties or states.
His reputation now preceded him, and he claimed a network of friends and allies throughout law enforcement who kept him abreast of new cases. When local authorities wanted help, they asked for him by name. And whatever field office he was working from, his special agent in charge would book him on the next flight out.
Twenty-two years ago this week. That was when Elena had disappeared. A ten-year-old girl waiting for her school bus had been yanked into a car by a dark-haired, middle-aged man of medium height and build, driving a late-model blue sedan. The recorded story of Elena Westlake ended on that cold February morning, the description of her last known moments dragged out of the terrified boy who had been awaiting the bus with her.
He knew Elena must be dead. Still, he hadn’t given up. One day he would find his sister’s body. At least his mom and dad would know what had happened.
The storm rumbled again. Georgie Dickson appeared in the door of Jerrod’s cubicle and placed a Starbucks coffee on his desk. Then she sat in the chair beside the desk and sipped her own coffee.
She was a beautiful woman, her café-au-lait skin shining with the good health that came from being physically fit. Georgie had no vices, although the rest of the crew was always trying to find one. It had become a game. Did Georgie ever have a drink? Did she eat meat when she thought no one was looking? Did she really go to church every Sunday?
Georgie knew about it, and Jerrod was sure she enjoyed every moment of being a mystery.
She was also one of his best friends in the office.
As if she’d been reading his mind, she leaned over and picked up Elena’s photo. After a moment, she sighed and put it down again. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
“Big storm,” she remarked.
He nodded, glancing toward the window. There was an ugly swirl to some of those clouds now, the kind of swirl that might portend a tornado. “Has anyone listened to the weather?”
“The usual. Severe storm warning, tornado watch. Were you expecting something else?”
Almost in spite of himself, he chuckled. Georgie was good at dragging him out of his brooding.
“So how did it go, testifying in the Mercator case?”
“Pretty well, I thought. I hung around afterward to listen to some of the other testimony. I got the feeling there might be another whistle-blower, one we never identified.”
“Is it worth looking into?”
He shook his head dubiously. “I honestly don’t know. This was the stupidest case of fraud I’ve ever worked. The prosecution won’t rest their case until next week, though, so I guess we’ll hear about it if they want us to look any further.”
Government fraud cases were as varied as the human mind’s capacity for dreaming up ways to root a few extra dollars from the public trough. Jerrod divided them into three categories: the sinister, the slick and the stupid. The sinister were the most dangerous, occurring at the junction of policy and profit. The slick were the most clever, often using one set of regulations against another, tucking away sometimes obscene piles of money, so close to the legal line that they were often impossible to prosecute.
The Mercator Industries case, on the other hand, was in the category of the stupid, a case where the acts were so obvious and the payoff so small that you had to wonder why they’d even bothered.
“Really dumb,” Georgie said, apparently thinking over the facts of the case. She laughed. “I mean, c’mon. Persian rugs and Italian leather executive chairs? What were they thinking?”
“It was a cost-plus contract,” Jerrod said, shrugging almost humorously. “They were real costs, right?”
Cost-plus contracting required the contractor to itemize the costs of performing the work. The government paid the costs, plus a profit percentage specified in the contract. Slick contractors looked for creative ways to pad the costs and thus increase the base from which their profit was calculated. This padding often involved layers of subcontracts to companies that were subsidiaries or even mere shells for the principal. Those subcontracts included a profit which was added to the prime contractor’s cost, even though that cost was simply money being shifted from one accounting column to another in the corporate books.
When the contractors were slick enough, this padding slipped right through the audits, enabling them to “profit on profit.” The Mercator people weren’t that slick. Not even by half.
Instead, they’d claimed that the contract had required them to open a temporary office in Houston to oversee the work being done locally. Under the regulations, if the office was temporary—opened solely for that one contract—reasonable office costs were chargeable to that contract.
The key words were temporary and reasonable. And the office complex in Houston was neither.
Mercator had bought two floors of a downtown high-rise, and its Houston complex housed two dozen executives and their staffs, overseeing no less than ten different contracts throughout Texas and Louisiana. The lavish furnishings might still have slipped through, had Mercator not billed the whole cost of the complex on each of those ten contracts. Fortune magazine had broken the story in a three-part whistle-blower saga aptly titled Deca-Dipping.
“Y’know what I can’t understand?” Jerrod asked, as Georgie thumbed through one of the stacks of paper that had been resting on his desk.
“What’s that?”
“Why are they even fighting it? It makes no sense. They have no defense. Christie Jackson said she offered them a quarter-million-dollar fine to plead out. That’s spare change for a company like Mercator. Why not just pay the damn fine and move on?”
“They’re worried the three-strikes law will actually get passed,” Georgie said.
She did have a vice, and Jerrod knew what it was. Georgie was a news junkie. She subscribed to a dozen online newspapers, from the Times of London to the Beijing Evening News, and a score of newsfeeds. If you wanted to know whether a pilot was missing in Afghanistan or a panda mating in China, all you had to do was ask Georgie.
Which Jerrod did. “What’s that?”
“There’s a joint contracting reform bill winding its way through committee,” she said. “Among other things, it has a three-strikes rule. Get popped for fraud three times and you’re out of the government contractor pool.”
“Like that will ever pass,” he said.
She shrugged. “It might. There’s a lot of support for it in the Netroots.”
“Huh?”
“The blogosphere,” she explained. “More and more, online communities are learning how to lean on government to get things done. When it rose from the traditional media we called it a grassroots movement. When it happens online…”
“I get it,” Jerrod said. “But how much influence do those people really wield? Yeah, they can get a story from the outhouse to CNN, but these contractors give huge sums to congressional campaigns. They’ll hold a hearing or two and talk about how something has to be done, and then some lobbyist will remind them that they’d shut down a big chunk of the government if they passed a law like that. Hell, we’ve farmed out so much of what government does, it’s not as if we can just turn off the spigot.”
“Spoken like a former contractor,” Georgie said with a playful grin.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just a grunt for hire. Don’t go lumping me in with those people.”
“Whatever,” she said. Lightning flared so bright that it washed out the room, followed by a sky-rending crack. Jerrod looked out the window again, noting that heavy rain appeared to be sweeping closer. Rush hour was going to be a mess.
“So…what? You came in here just to cheer me up?” he asked, swiveling his chair to face her again. “Or did you actually have something in mind?”
“Just to tell you this is probably our one chance,” she said. She handed him a printout. “Apparently the good folks there like Houston.”
He scanned the page. It was a blurb from one of her many online newsfeeds. “MMG buys Houston Examiner. This matters to me…how?”
“MMG,” Georgie said. “Mercator Media Group. Say goodbye to one of the last independently owned newspapers in Texas.”
“Interesting,” Jerrod said. “But again, how does that matter to me?”
“Erin McKenna broke the Mercator story when she was a freelancer for Fortune.”
He nodded. Georgie’s other vice was drawing out a story just to the point where he wanted to strangle her. She knew he knew Erin McKenna. They’d never met, but her story in Fortune had been so thorough as to be a blueprint for his investigation. “And?”
“She’s not a freelancer anymore. The Houston Examiner hired her as an investigative reporter.”
“And now Mercator owns the Examiner,” he said. The pieces came together. He let out a long sigh. “Oh shit.”
“Maybe you need to go to Houston,” Georgie said. “It would be bad to come this far and lose a key witness.”
Jerrod looked at the file on his desk, the paltry window onto a life too short. Or a life that had been turned into a living hell of slavery.
“More than the Mercator case seems to have followed you from Houston. Cold case?” Georgie asked, following his gaze.
“Not quite.” He hated to leave it. But he couldn’t allow anyone to tamper with witness testimony. Reluctantly, he reached for the phone.
He was going to Houston. Maybe he could nose around on the missing-child case some more while he was there. Two birds with one stone.
Regardless, he needed to find out what was going on with Erin McKenna.
2
Erin McKenna climbed the stairs to her third floor apartment, a small box of personal belongings under her arm. As her feet hit each tread, a curse escaped under her breath.
Fired. Just like that. Oh, they called it a staff reduction, but she was too much of a reporter to believe it. Since word of Mercator Media Group’s purchase of the paper had begun to filter down, she’d known she was in the crosshairs. She’d expected pressure not to testify in the trial. The pressure had never come, and she’d gone off to Federal Court this morning and testified without one whisper of a suggestion that she reconsider.
Then she had come back to the office to find the news editor and her managing editor standing over her desk, her belongings already in a box, with the happy news that she had just become part of a staff reduction.
Hah!
Something in Bill Maddox’s face had communicated the truth. She’d been investigating Mercator again, and only Bill, her news editor, had known. In theory, anyway. And his face said as plain as day that this was no simple staff reduction.
Damn! She slammed her foot down hard on the next riser, so angry that she was grinding her teeth.
Effing giant corporations. Damn money men. Damn the whole corporate plutocracy that America was becoming. They figured money and power meant they were above the law.
She stomped down even harder on the next step. They’d taken all her files, of course, because anything she did on the job belonged to her paper. They’d taken her business laptop from her car and demanded to know if she’d kept any business-related information anywhere else.
To do so would have been a violation of the paper’s strict policy. So of course she had lied through her teeth and said she hadn’t.
Damned if she was going to tell them about the anonymous online file storage she’d started when she learned about the MMG purchase. She’d even gone so far as to go to a cybercafé to upload the info so there would be no record on any computer she used.
So the bomb was still out there, despite their best efforts. At the moment, that was the only satisfaction she had, and it was a grim one. She could still nail Mercator to the wall once she finished her research.
Reaching the landing outside her door, she leaned against the wall to hold the box in place while she fished through her vest pocket for her keys. Cell phone, extra pens, package of gum and, as always, way at the bottom, keys.
She pulled them out, sorted through them and then pushed the proper one into the lock. Or tried to. The door swung inward even as she slid the key into the hole.
Her heart froze. Someone had broken into her place. She stepped through the doorway and saw her things tossed about as if a raging tornado had blown through.
She stood stunned, barely able to believe her eyes. At that moment, a man, his face hidden behind a ski mask, burst out of her bedroom. She dropped the box, one part of her mind questioning the utter absurdity of wearing a ski mask in Houston, and charged toward him, ready to head-butt him or knock his legs out or…well, something…but before she finished her first step, she knew she’d made a mistake.
She’d exposed her back.
A rustle behind her was all the warning she had. An instant later, stars burst before her eyes; then everything went black.
She came to slowly, aware first of the excruciating pounding in her head, then, slowly, that she wasn’t alone. Hands felt gently around her head. She could feel warm goo on the back of her skull, and somewhere in her befuddled mind, the word blood registered.
But in the instant between the dim recognition that she was bleeding and full consciousness, awareness of those hands sparked a surge of fear. Someone was touching her. With her sore nose pressed painfully to a rug that had never offered much of a cushion, she tried to gather her scattered thoughts.
Break-in. Someone had hit her from behind. The fact that she could remember that much was a good sign. The concussion couldn’t be too bad.
As she lay frozen, she tried to decide what to do about the person who was with her. If he was the one who had attacked her…
Could she roll over fast enough? She realized she was still gripping her keys in the hand trapped beneath her body. Trying to keep her movements invisible, she slowly worked the keys between her fingers, turning them into a weapon.
