Scorched (32 page)

“Who?” Derek asked.

“Trent Lohman. With a gun.”

“Kelsey, you’re
bleeding
.” Gage took her by the shoulders and lowered her to the ground, which she let him do with almost no resistance.

“I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t fine. Not by a long shot. Blood saturated her arm. He tugged her sleeve up. “Shit, Kelsey.” His heart lodged in his throat as he searched for a bullet wound.

“I’m fine.
Ouch!
” She pulled away.

“I need to look at this. What happened?”

She laughed—and it sounded a bit hysterical. “I punched through a window.” She tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. “I was trying to get off the roof. Trent was chasing me.”

Gage stripped off his shirt to make a bandage for her wound. He exchanged a look with Derek.

Trent Lohman was a fucking dead man.

•   •   •

“Step over to the wall.” Elizabeth tried to sound calm as she pointed her weapon at his center body mass. “Put your palms against it, feet spread.”

Trent Lohman didn’t move. He watched with an icy gaze as she stepped over to his gun and—not taking her eyes off him—crouched down to pick it up. She tucked it into the waistband of her pants. The sirens grew nearer, and he darted a glance over her shoulder.

“What are you doing, Elizabeth?”

She raised her weapon. “I said, hands against the wall.”

“Or what? You going to shoot an unarmed man? A fellow agent?”

“I’m going to arrest you.” Her mouth was so dry, she could hardly speak. Her heart was racing.

“No, Elizabeth, you’re not.” His voice was low now, and she could barely hear it over the approaching sirens. “You’re going to turn around and walk away and pretend this never happened.”

He took a step back. And another. Fear gripped her. He glanced at her gun. Fully loaded, the Glock weighed thirty-one ounces. Right now it felt like thirty-one pounds.

He looked into her eyes. She stepped closer. Seconds ticked by. She knew he saw the tremor in her arms because his lip curved in the faintest smile.

He bolted.

“Stop!”

She sprinted after him. He raced around the corner. She burst into the sunlight. Brakes screeched. Horns blared.

She heard a sickening thud.

CHAPTER 21

Kelsey loathed hospitals. She hated the smells, the sights, the crowded waiting rooms. She hated the delays. She and Gage had been here for three hours, and even though a young intern had stitched her up ages ago, they were still stuck in an exam bay.

The doors to the corridor pushed open, and Kelsey watched with curiosity as a woman came toward them with a purposeful stride. She stopped just outside the curtain.

“Dr. Quinn? I’m Elizabeth LeBlanc.” She cast a tentative look at Kelsey’s arm and seemed to decide not to offer a handshake. “How are you?”

“Almost finished, I hope.” Kelsey glanced at the nurses’ station, where her paperwork seemed to have been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle. “How are
you
?” she asked, studying the agent’s face. It wasn’t as pasty as it had been earlier, when she’d been watching a pair of ME’s assistants zip Trent Lohman into a body bag. But still the woman looked a bit shell-shocked in her wrinkled pantsuit, her blond hair pulled back in a messy bun.

“What’s the word from Gordon?” Gage asked. His steely expression said he was in no mood for brush-offs.

“I just got off the phone with him. A lot’s happened. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“We’re sure,” Kelsey said, surprised by the agent’s candor. Everyone else they’d talked to tonight—including Gordon, whom Kelsey had called while she was having her arm sutured—had demanded all kinds of information, but provided little in return. About all they knew right now was that Trent was dead, Gordon was still in Washington, and CNN was doing all anthrax, all the time.

The media was having a field day. All reports so far indicated they were dealing with inhalation anthrax, which was scariest from a public health perspective. The news stations were hungry for visuals, though, and kept running pictures of cutaneous anthrax, which was characterized by skin legions and grotesque sores. The pictures were frightening, and it was no wonder there was a run on antibiotics in Washington, D.C.

The agent glanced at a television mounted in a nearby waiting area. “So you’ve seen the news?”

“Three more letters,” Gage said.

“Four,” she corrected. “The most recent one hasn’t been announced. We’ve now had a total of four letters turn up in D.C., one in New York, and another that just showed up in a mail-sorting facility in Los Angeles. All were addressed to political targets, such as senators or cabinet members.”

“Any fatalities?” Kelsey asked.

“Another postal worker. And a staffer who works for a New York congresswoman is in ICU. She opened
the mail Friday and started experiencing respiratory problems over the weekend.”

Gage shook his head.

“It’s hard to find a silver lining here, but”—she took a deep breath—“the positive news is, Gordon is no longer alone in trying to address this threat. The entire Department of Homeland Security has been spurred into action. We’ve got elevated security levels at airports, malls, stadiums. We’ve got stepped-up security at train stations and subway entrances. We’ve even got police posted at several D.C. pharmacies to deal with the run on antibiotics.”

Kelsey looked at Gage and was pretty sure she knew what he was thinking. Just days ago, he’d been within arm’s reach of the man who started all this.

She turned to the agent. “Why do I get the impression you didn’t really come here to tell us all this?”

“You’re right.” She took out her phone. “I have a photograph to show you.”

She pushed a few buttons and handed the phone to Kelsey. The picture on the screen was clearly an autopsy photo, and Kelsey’s stomach clenched as she recognized the face.

“That’s the man from Blake’s.” She looked at Gage. “The man who came after me.” She turned to LeBlanc. “Please tell me he’s not really a cop.”

“Manuel Artigas. He was a career criminal down in South Texas. Detectives investigating his hit-andrun ‘accident’ now think he was murdered by Trent Lohman. They have an eyewitness who provided a description of the car that struck Artigas. Traces of
paint from the victim’s clothes match paint from the bucar Trent was using that day.”

“Bucar?” Gage asked.

“A Bureau car. A vehicle from the motor pool.”

“You’re saying this man was Trent’s accomplice, and Trent murdered him, too?” Kelsey asked. She looked at the picture again. The man was Latino, which would fit with the hair evidence recovered by Dr. Froehler at autopsy.

“The new theory of the case is that Trent hired Artigas to help kill Blake after Blake stumbled across Trent’s connection to this ACB terrorist cell.”

“This all started with me,” Kelsey said, feeling a sharp pang of guilt. “I asked him to help ID those bones, which led to the ACB cell in the Philippines.”

“Which led to that training video, in which Ramli is the ringleader,” LeBlanc said. “We may never know for sure how it happened, since both Blake and Trent are dead. But it appears Blake had some sort of tip-off that Trent was closely involved with this group. Maybe Trent tried to cover something up and Blake got suspicious. Or maybe he tried to stymie Blake’s questions about the group. We’ve gone back and analyzed both of their phone records and it appears that Blake systematically called a list of people Trent had been contacting on his cell phone. Personally, my guess is that Blake got hold of the phone and copied down the numbers for investigation.”

Kelsey glanced at Gage and felt a faint stirring of hope as the scenario started to take shape. Not once had the agent mentioned evidence against Gage.

“Again, we may never know just how it unfolded, but that would account for Blake’s calls to Dr. Shamus at Berkeley and Robert Spurlock, aka Charles Weber, up in Utah. Blake called Spurlock repeatedly, but he never answered his phone and the call went to voice mail.”

“Spurlock was dead by then,” Kelsey said. “Postmortem interval indicates he was killed at least a week before Blake’s trip there.

“Which might explain why he gave up on the phone and decided to pay him a visit.” LeBlanc paused. “He must have had at least some inkling of the importance of all this by that point.”

Kelsey looked away and closed her eyes. All this because she’d asked him to run some tests for her.

“Hey.”

She looked at Gage.

“Cut it out,” he said sternly.

“What?”

“The guilt. If your case hadn’t tipped him off about what Trent was doing, something else would have. And we’d still have this threat on our hands, only we’d probably be in the dark about the FBI connection.” He looked at LeBlanc. “Am I right?”

“Most likely, yes.”

“So, the investigation shows that Trent killed Blake,” Kelsey said. “What does that mean about his supposed ‘alibi’? Can we get Bolton, too? He’s part of the effort to frame Gage.”

LeBlanc glanced over her shoulder, clearly uneasy with even the mention of his name. “That part is not as straightforward. There’s been a misunderstanding
about Bolton’s statement to investigators—the statement in which he gave Trent an alibi.”

Gage folded his arms over his chest. “I’d love to hear this.”

Another glance over her shoulder, and Kelsey started to get annoyed.

“Evidently, Bolton told investigators Trent was in a meeting with him in Washington at the time of Blake’s murder. That was Trent’s original alibi. Now Bolton’s saying they had the meeting by Skype after Trent missed his flight. Obviously, that makes for a much flimsier alibi because we can’t determine the exact time of Blake’s death.”

“I could,” Kelsey said.

“Leave it alone.” Gage gave her a sharp look. “You don’t want to get any deeper into this. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. Bolton’s off the hook.”

“But that’s not right,” Kelsey protested. “He comes off as innocent.”

“He may actually
be
innocent,” LeBlanc said.

Kelsey gaped at the woman. The word
naïve
popped into her head.

“Gordon tells me forensic accountants have uncovered a money transfer into a Hong Kong bank account for Trent Lohman.”

“A money motive, just like we thought,” Gage said.

“We wouldn’t even know about the payment, except that we’ve had our eye on this organization for a while,” LeBlanc continued. “It poses as a legitimate business, but we’ve been investigating whether it funnels money to terrorists. It evidently funneled money to Trent, but we have no indications that Bolton received payments
like that. We really have no solid evidence Bolton is involved in this at all, beyond making an ambiguous statement to investigators.”

“What about the fingerprint evidence?” Gage asked.

“Gordon asked me to update you on that, too. Apparently that
also
was the result of a mix-up. The lab now says the print they found on the beer bottle in Blake’s apartment is inconclusive.”

Kelsey felt outrage bubbling up in her chest. “How is that possible? That print was the basis for an arrest warrant! And what about the hair?”

LeBlanc looked puzzled. “What hair?”

“The human hair—not Blake’s—that was recovered from his body at autopsy. It probably belongs to Artigas. It definitely doesn’t belong to Gage.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been over all the reports and I don’t know anything about a hair.”

“It was sent to Quantico.”

The woman just looked at her, and Kelsey felt a renewed wave of outrage. Clearly, someone had manipulated the physical evidence.

“I understand your frustration.” The woman glanced at Gage. “Gordon does, too. He wanted me to assure you that he’s looking into how this could have happened.”

Gage shook his head and looked away, obviously disgusted.

Kelsey glanced down the hallway to see Derek coming toward them. He’d changed out of his jogging gear and was now in his typical civilian attire of jeans, T-shirt, and cowboy boots.

“What’d I miss?”

He directed the question at the FBI agent, and Kelsey noticed she seemed flustered all of a sudden.

“I was just giving Lieutenant Brewer here an update on recent developments.” She glanced at her watch. “But I’m dragging this out.” She looked at Gage. “What I most needed to tell you is how sorry I am, on behalf of the Bureau, for your ordeal.”

Gage didn’t say anything.

“The warrant for your arrest has been dropped. You’re free to go back to your base, your life, your vacation.” She smiled weakly. “Although I realize it’s almost over now.”

Kelsey looked at Gage. He was off the hook.
Finally.
Which meant he was off the hook in other ways, too. He was free to go back to San Diego, as Kelsey had known he would all along.

“Well, that’s it.” The agent looked at Kelsey, then Derek, then Gage. “I’ll just . . . get out of your way. Have a safe trip back to base, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you.” Gage nodded crisply.

Kelsey watched her leave.

“So.” Derek slapped Gage on the back. “Good news, huh?”