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  “And Eddie Mitchell was off during all four of the strip club heists. He was not working.”

  “Oh God.” The lieutenant put his head down on the table and banged it gently, then sat back up. “He’s all over that fucking TV show, he’s practically the face of ‘Detroit SWAT’. What the hell’s his nickname on the show? Not Roo.”

  “’Chainsaw’.”

  “Right. Shit.”

  “So I crosschecked the work schedule of everybody else in SRT against the robberies. Four other guys were off during every robbery.”

  “Four?” the lieutenant said incredulously. He’d been hoping Mitchell had maybe been working with some friends, that he’d started running with a bad crowd outside of work. Childhood friends who’d ended up as gangbangers or something. Not this.

  “I was able to eliminate one guy, Ted Brown. He’s been off because he’s actually on medical leave, he fell off a roof and got busted up real bad. But that leaves three other guys. Three members of SRT, plus Eddie Mitchell, all of whom were not working every time one of those strip clubs was hit.”

  Avila took a deep breath. Then another. “Who.”

  “Paul Wilson, Randy Parker, and Gabriel Kilpatrick. I actually went through the academy with both Wilson and Mitchell. That’s one reason I wanted to get this out there. How many guys that graduated with us are still with the department, all these years later? If they’re dirty, I don’t want anybody to think I knew and didn’t say anything.”

  Avila shook his head. “Wilson I might know. The others….they black?” He didn’t give a shit about their races other than the fact that the three guys who had been doing the robberies had been identified as black males. George nodded.

  “Shit.”

  “We’ve got nothing right now, simply circumstantial shit that wouldn’t hold up in a junior high school court. And I still hope to God I’m wrong, that’s it’s just a weird coincidence. The next step is to start trying to build a case. Pull financials, to start with. We don’t have nearly enough for a search warrant or wiretaps, much less surveillance. But…I can’t do that, we can’t do that. Shouldn’t. Not something this big, that involves so many officers. Not me, not us, not even Internal Affairs. Am I wrong?”

  Avila looked him in the eye. “Ringo, you are one damn fine detective, and right now I really fucking hate you for it.” He sighed. “No, we’re not going to be able to do this ourselves. Somebody’s going to have to call the FBI, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be me. This has gotta go upstairs.” He pulled out his cell phone.

  Since the Chief of Police had contacted the FBI, Ringo hadn’t heard a word. He and his team had continued to investigate leads in the strip club robberies, because to do otherwise would have raised red flags, but they were no closer to solving the cases.

  “I just wanted to get a feel for him,” George told the FBI agent as they sat in his Durango. “I haven’t seen him for a few years, but we went through the academy together, and spent a lot of time riding around in a car. I know I was the one who called you, but it’s been bugging me, you know? I only meant to do a drive-by, I didn’t know they’d be sitting out there. Once they saw me, I thought it’d be weird if I didn’t stop and say hi. I didn’t say anything about this. We just bullshitted.”

  Safie knew exactly what had been said in the back yard, he’d been listening through the whole episode. “I heard what you said.” Dumbass. Well, the detective hadn’t torpedoed their investigation, but maybe his visit would spook the SWAT cops into doing something stupid. Right now all their investigation had turned up was circumstantial evidence, and not much of that. No huge purchases by any one of the suspects, although most of them seemed to be two paychecks away from bankruptcy.

  Wilson spent all of his off duty time with his family. Mitchell practically lived at strip clubs, Parker had been to three Tigers games in the past week, and all Kilpatrick seemed to want to do was work out and play blackjack at the casinos. The FBI had nothing tying them directly to the robberies….but then again they hadn’t turned up any evidence that cleared them, either. “And?”

  George sighed. “And he feels dirty.”

  “Feeling dirty doesn’t do shit for us.”

  “Yeah. Hey, where are your guys? Looked for a vehicle, but didn’t see one. You in a house somewhere?”

  Safie just gave him a dirty look in response. “Don’t go near Wilson or anybody involved with this case again or I’ll have you arrested for interfering with a federal investigation, we clear Ringo?”

  “And people say the FBI are officious pricks who don’t play well with others,” George said, shaking his head. He got out of the Durango, back into his own vehicle, and took off.

  Al Safie sat in his car and thought for a few minutes. He’d watched the impromptu meeting on a widescreen TV sitting a block away from the action, and the image of Wilson tapping on his iPhone stuck in his mind for some reason. There was something there.

  PART II

  NO SHAME

  From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

  John Updike

  CHAPTER SIX

  Traffic wasn’t bad heading in to work, but then Mickey had it easy—living in Woodbridge, he drove away from D.C. during morning rush hour, and toward it in the evening—the exact opposite of most everybody else.

  That’s not to say traffic was good—east coast traffic just plain sucked, all day every day, second verse same as the first. But, most days he was able to travel in sizable fractions of the speed limit on I-95. Not like those poor bastards in the northbound lanes, bumper to bumper and just crawling along. Like Ben, who had to work in D.C. Well, actually, Ben did have a car, but he almost never drove it all the way in to work. The drive took too long and parking fees were highway robbery. Ben, like a lot of D.C. employees, used the Metro. He parked at the Franconia-Springfield station and rode the rail in to work. Not driving saved him at least half an hour of travel time each way.

  Mickey exited I-95 at Russell Road and headed west. When he’d first started working at the FBI lab, he’d been surprised at how much green there was so close to D.C. There were huge parks everywhere, plus the lab was on the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, which was ninety-five percent forest. There was a wall of trees to either side as Russell curved this way and that, and ahead he saw a large office building on the left. Among other things it housed the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. If he kept following the road around the curve to the right he reached the entrance to the base. Some days there were only a few cars and he was able to zip right in, other days the line—lines, actually, there were three lanes to get in—stretched for hundreds of yards. He knew sometimes the delays were due to heightened security, and more than once he’d seen the Marines bring in their dogs to sniff cars.

  He always made sure to have his FBI ID out ahead of time—Federal Bureau of Investigation employee Michael Mitchell. It still seemed a little surreal to him, having FBI ID. The baby-faced Marine guards checked his ID as well as the stickers on his vehicle, and then he was waved through with a polite, “Have a good day, sir.” Having Marines be so polite to him every morning just seemed wrong. He could see some days they were fighting back the impulse to salute him ingrained into them in boot camp. These were the kids—kids, because most of them looked younger than him—who fought America’s wars. Shit, he should be saluting them.

  Past the checkpoint Russell Road became MCB 1. He followed its winding path for just over a mile and saw the Marine Corps Information Center. Behind it was the Marine Corps Association building. Just past them MCB 2 ran off to the left. Apart from the occasional isolated building, there still wasn’t anything but trees to either side of the road. He wasn’t exactly sure how big the base was, but it seemed huge. He’d only ever driven on a small section of it. Half a mile beyond the intersection with MCB 2 Mickey turned left onto MCB 4 and headed into the FBI complex.

  He left early every day i
n part because there was no way to know how bad traffic was going to be on I-95, or how long the stack-up of cars would stretch at the Marine checkpoint. But he also left early because he loved his job.

  Mickey worked with some true-blue, third-generation, FBI-runs-in-my-blood-and-they’ll-bury-me-with-my-badge types, but that wasn’t him. He worked for the FBI because he loved forensics, fingerprints especially, and the FBI was it. There was nobody bigger. When you wanted, when you needed evidence in a crime handled, when life or death was on the line, when only the finest techniques and the latest technology in the world would do, you went to the FBI. The lab did as much or more work for police departments around the country, examining their evidence, as it did for its own investigations. The FBI even did work for some foreign governments.

  But….if there was somebody bigger or better than the FBI, he’d be working there, because it was the job that was important to him, not the Bureau. However, he knew better than to actually say that out loud. A lot of the lab employees treated their employer like a hometown sports team, and anybody that didn’t love it better shut the hell up. FBI agents took the “team player” thing to a whole new level. Mickey wasn’t much of a team guy, but he liked his job, a lot. If all the other techs in the lab wanted to mistake his love for forensics for love of the FBI, he wasn’t going to correct them.

  Ben’s criticism of the lab bothered him more than he would admit in part because he knew, to some extent, it was accurate. They’d had some problems, with Lab staff acting as agents for the prosecution first and scientists second, which was completely contrary to what they were supposed to be doing. You didn’t take a side with science—the facts were the facts, the evidence was the evidence. Once you brought it to light, you let it speak for itself. It was finding it, winnowing the information from the scraps of prints he sometimes had to deal with, which was the fascinating part of the job.

  While he loved everything to do with fingerprints, the whole world of forensics fascinated him, and to get where he was he’d had to learn a hell of a lot of chemistry and math. Not that he used much of either; the closest thing he got to chemistry was the rare occasion where he would help a senior tech use superglue vapors to bring up the print on an object that didn’t lend itself to traditional printing techniques. Ninhydrin, diazafluorenone, vacuum metal deposition, ethyl cyanoacrylate polymerization….modern techniques for revealing and retrieving fingerprints were amazing.

  Mickey parked in the mostly empty lot and headed toward the building, then stopped as a black helicopter roared over the two new buildings next to the lab used for training intelligence analysts. It startled him, and he looked up to see guys hanging out both sides of the helicopter in raid gear. HRT—The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, doing more training.

  Mickey watched the bird turn stand on its side as it executed a sharply banked turn, then roar back toward HRT’s nearby training area. Right before it dipped out of sight Mickey saw thick ropes unspool from the sides of the chopper as the agents prepared to “fastrope”—a term he’d learned—to the ground. He checked his watch. They were at it early that morning; never a dull day at Quantico.

  It was a beautiful morning, with a blue sky and a few wispy clouds reflected in the lights of the big Lab building. The J. Edgar Hoover building in D.C.—that looked like a lab. Actually, it looked more like a prison, but that was another opinion he kept to himself. The FBI lab at Quantico…it looked like an upscale office building designed by IKEA. Both inside and out. The exterior was all glass, and indoors was none of the drab colors or stuffiness you’d expect from either a laboratory environment or a government office. There were windows everywhere, letting in a lot of light, and all the cabinets were clad in blonde wood. The first time he’d seen the inside of the place he thought it looked very alpine, like Carl Sagan channeling a ski lodge.

  With over 500 employees at the lab, FBI agents running in and out on cases, plus forensic scientists from around the world constantly visiting, the guys running security in the lobby didn’t know everyone’s name, but familiar faces got a nod and a smile. Coming in as early as he did, avoiding the rush, Mickey’s face was more familiar than most new employees to the uniformed guards, and he returned a wave before heading to the elevators.

  Once at his desk, he powered up his computer and checked to see if he had any work emails. He knew what he’d be doing at least for the next day—the FBI was in the process of hiring another batch of agents, and it was his job to run the prints of the applicants through the system. Most of the time it was very boring work—scan the prints, run them through the database to see if there was a match, and if the computer spit out a possible with a high likelihood of a match, he then had to compare the two. There were a number of different databases, but he was only checking the criminal database, as many of the applicants had prints in the federal system due to jobs in law enforcement or the military. You wouldn’t think someone with a criminal record would be stupid enough to apply for a job with the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, but he was learning to never underestimate the stupidity of some people.

  A lot of the veteran lab employees worked odd hours, helping agents with rush cases, but Mickey for the most part was a 9-to-5 guy. He really wanted to move up to examining evidence from important criminal cases, but knew he had to do the grunt work first. Every organization did things a certain way, and the federal government was set in its ways and slow to change. It was also weird.

  The FBI got a respectable chunk of the multi-trillion dollar U.S. budget every year, and yet they wouldn’t buy their employees coffee, or water, or anything else. There was a small break room near their work area, and on the counter was their coffee club’s Keurig coffee machine. The lab employees had discovered the convenience of Keurig one-cup coffee makers, and even though it was more expensive per cup, the savings on filters and wasted coffee probably made it a wash—but everybody got what they wanted. He’d bought into the use of this one, with the warning from his co-workers that its presence in the lab was somehow a violation of the FBI workplace rules. Stupid. It was overlooked by management, but they could change their mind at anytime.

  There were three carousels of K-cups, the single serving plastic coffee containers, and he spun through them looking for something that looked tasty. He finally settled on a dark French roast, then grabbed the containers of sugar and powdered creamer while he waited.

  Mickey was a bit of a coffee snob, and at home would only drink coffee lightened with half-n-half, or better yet heavy whipping cream. There was a full-size refrigerator in the kitchen, but bringing his personal cream to the lab offices just hadn’t worked out. Whether it was half-n-half or heavy cream, somebody else (or probably several somebodies) kept using it. It frustrated him to no end.

  He’d begun marking the waxed paper containers DO NOT USE in heavy black marker, but that hadn’t worked. As large as the lab complex was, it was subdivided according to task, and their office area was only home to a couple dozen people at most. It didn’t take much effort to figure out that the cream or half-n-half belonged to the new kid, which meant it was self-serve—or at least that’s how it seemed to him. As a last resort he’d brought in some cream in a labelless plastic container, onto which he wrote URINE SPECIMEN. “Who the hell put a urine specimen into a food refrigerator!” Fortney, their group supervisor, roared not half an hour later across the work area. A lot of the techs working in the Latent Print unit of the lab had great senses of humor, but Fortney, an FBI Special Agent assigned to the lab, was not one of them.

  Mickey had just sighed, then explained, and from that day forward submitted to the indignity of having to use the bulk powdered creamer in his coffee. The irony was not lost on him as he sat in the middle of the FBI lab. Trust them to process the evidence for a high-profile capital crime? Sure. Trust them not to steal your cream for their own coffee? Not a fucking chance.

  “Good morning Mickey! You have a good weekend?” Brenda was two hundred po
unds of red-headed Irish enthusiasm each and every morning, and he knew to keep still when they both were in the narrow room because she changed speed and direction without warning. Mickey was one of the few people who regularly beat her into the office.

  “Yep. How ‘bout you?” He pulled his cup out of the coffee maker and began adding cream and sugar.

  “My little sister came in from out-of-town and we did the tourist thing all weekend. You know, I’ve lived here five years and never been to any of the monuments? Too busy working I guess. Here, look.” She pulled out her smartphone and flicked her finger back and forth a few times, then shoved the phone under his nose. Mickey looked at a self-shot of Brenda and another redhead in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Her “little” sister looked even heavier than Brenda.

  “I did all that stuff with my parents when I was a kid,” Mickey said. “Good thing, ‘cause it seems like I’m always too busy to do it now. How old’s your sister?”

  “Thirty. Three years younger than me.”

  “What’s she do for a living?”

  “She’s a stripper,” Brenda said, as she pulled her lunch out of her massive purse and stuck it in the refrigerator. She had a neutral expression on her face as she turned back, but could only hold it for a few seconds before she burst out laughing.

  “Oh, you should have seen the look on your face!” she giggled. “That was priceless. No, she’s in sales, a farm equipment company in Pennsylvania.” The thought of seeing Brenda, much less her bigger little sister, in a g-string and gyrating on a pole, had been a bit disturbing. Mickey pushed through it. “How’s Larry doing? He hang out with you guys too or was it just a girls’ weekend?” Larry was her boyfriend who did some sort of construction work.

  “He likes Marcie, but took the opportunity to do some fishing with his buddies this weekend. What are you doing today? Still the Special Agent application prints?”