She saved a copy of the article and, out of habit, saved a copy to disk, which she labeled, dated and slipped into a storage box that contained copies of all of the archival information she had researched on Lopez. After the internal security leaks concerning the case, two of which had resulted in failed busts, and the more mundane fact that occasionally information had a habit of disappearing off the scope in the Bureau’s system, she liked to keep her own separate set of records.
Stifling a yawn, she hit the send button and e-mailed a copy to her work computer.
Just before she went to bed, she reread the article and made a brief note. The wintry chill seemed to intensify as she studied what she had written.
Mendoza had had a book. The book had been important enough that he had died because of it.
Three
A week later, Taylor leaned back in her office chair and skimmed a page of Alex Lopez’s file. She’d studied the information found on Lopez’s computer after the unsuccessful raid on his estate at Winton on the West Coast until her eyes ached. Legitimate company accounts, tax legislation and a bunch of legalese about property-development trusts.
The information, most of which had been supplied by an unnamed South American source eighteen months previously and which had formed the basis for the FBI’s investigation into Lopez, should have put her to sleep, but Taylor refused to be lulled by the familiarity of the material.
She needed to find something—anything—that would provide a lead on a man who had killed almost everyone who had ever gotten close to him. The list had included Lopez’s own father; his business partner and father-in-law, Cesar Morell; and, at the age of twelve, his own bodyguard.
Exhaustion, the product of another late night spent surfing government databases and the Internet, sucked at her as she read. Her mind began to drift, slide sideways.… She blinked, staring at the page, not seeing the words, suddenly on the verge of—
A sharp thud jerked her head up.
Mike Colenso, the agent occupying the adjacent desk, was rummaging through the box of files he had just dropped onto the floor.
Stifling a yawn, she tried to recapture the moment. When the relaxed mood wouldn’t come back, courtesy of Colenso opening and discarding files, she went over what she’d just read. After skimming the page a second time, then a third, she stopped trying to force the knowledge. Whatever it was that had gotten her antennae twitching was obscure enough that she wasn’t going to find it by focusing harder. It was entirely possible that what she was looking for wasn’t on the page, but the result of information triggering her mind to make a connection.
She checked her watch and set the file down. She would get that moment back, and now she was going to have to do it on her own time, not the Bureau’s. Marc Bayard, her boss and a newly appointed division head, had been saying for weeks now that she was too close to the case, that she had lost her perspective and needed to back off. In fact, this morning he had ordered her to back off.
According to Bayard, the Lopez case had redefined her commitment to her job in “an unhealthy way.” The only reason she had been assigned to the Lopez task force in the first place was her connection to Rina Morell. He had assigned another agent in her place. He had been polite but he hadn’t pulled his punches. Her psychiatric report detailed post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, chronic fatigue, paranoia and evidence of obsessive behavior. Bayard had enough material to suspend her on medical grounds if she didn’t fall into line.
She had argued the point on the “obsessive behavior.” Driven, maybe. Bayard hadn’t seen the distinction.
She pulled out Lopez’s psychological profile and studied it. He was clinically organized and successful, but he had made significant errors in judgment, notably in underestimating the Morell family. Years ago, Esther Morell had outsmarted him, Cesar Morell had worked with him, but only under duress, and their daughter, Rina, had come close to bringing him down.
Lopez was also eccentric. Amongst a list of known traits, it was noted that while he used computers in his business, he didn’t trust them. In a way, that was understandable, since Esther Morell, in partnership with Xavier le Clerc, had relieved him of billions of dollars through a series of electronic transactions.
A pen rolled off Colenso’s desk and dropped onto the floor, but this time the elusive feeling that she was about to get something didn’t vaporize.
Taylor stared at the sentence she’d just read. That was it.
So far they had gleaned zilch from Lopez’s computer files. In a nutshell, he didn’t store his information on any electronic system they’d found. They had assumed that he had the information stored on a computer somewhere. It was possible he had an encoded system and they simply hadn’t found it, but what if he stored information in another way?
Feverishly, she turned pages. Mendoza had had a book, and there had been a mention of a book in Earl Slater’s testimony.
She found the page and ran her finger down the margin until she located the piece she was looking for. According to Slater, Lopez had recently retrieved a book from a bank vault in Bogotá. Slater didn’t know what the book contained, just that it had been important enough for Lopez to make a trip to collect it. It was possible it had been a rare antique, an easy asset to liquidate when he’d needed—
Colenso’s chair creaked as he rocked back and propped his expensively shod feet on the desktop. He jerked his head toward the file she was reading. “Thought Bayard pulled you off the case.”
“He did.” She indicated a pile of paperwork occupying one corner of her desk. “In theory I’m working on operation Update the Filing System.”
His gaze sharpened. “You’ve found something.”
Several heads turned. Taylor closed the file. “Maybe. Nothing that isn’t already on file.”
And nothing that she was prepared to talk about yet.
The fact that there had been a serious leak connected with the Lopez case—in effect, a mole in the Bureau—made her wary. According to her own private snooping, the information leaks were exclusively related to the Lopez case. That meant Lopez had either corrupted someone in the FBI, or else he had managed to hack into the Bureau’s information systems. She trusted everyone in the office…to a degree.
Colenso looked disgruntled. “You’re giving me that schoolmarm look again.”
“Get used to it. I’ve applied for Bayard’s old job. You could be looking at your new boss.”
“After what happened on the West Coast?”
Colenso’s amused expression set her teeth on edge. Taylor picked up a file detailing Slater’s successful prosecution and tossed it onto his desk. After “what happened” in both Eureka and Winton, she had zero tolerance for assholes. Someone had hemorrhaged information, compromising the operation on more than one occasion, with the result that Lopez had slipped the net. She had been caught off guard and taken hostage on the heels of the last spoiled operation. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my mistake was the only investigative break we had.”
His hands shot up in surrender. “I hear you, Yoda.”
A reluctant smile twitched at her mouth. Lately, she’d gotten a lot of wisecracking
