Burying the Past Read online

  “Ok, maybe I don’t. I’m not a shrink, hell, that was all BS anyways. Maybe it’s something you should think about though. I want you to consider something.”

  “What?”

  “She’s welcomed you into our home. Not just welcomed, but she’s really tried to let you make it feel like your home. When you wanted to paint this room, she got it ok’d by the landlord, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When you said you missed food from home, she learned to make several dishes you said you liked, right?”

  “They weren’t great, but yeah.”

  “She’s trying. You can see that, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So maybe cut her some slack. This hasn’t been easy for her, either. Maybe it’s not as big of a change as you’ve had to deal with, and maybe she doesn’t have as much baggage to deal with, but it’s still been tough on her, too. But she’s trying, ‘cause she wants all the things you want for yourself.”

  “She never says anything to me.”

  “Have you told her that you actually like her, too?”

  “No ... I don’t ...”

  “Come on, I’ve seen you doing little things around here to help out when you think no one’s looking. I’ve seen you around her, when you’re not angry. You like her, a little bit.”

  “She’s ok,” Kara said but didn’t make eye contact.

  “And have you told her you think she’s ok. That you like living here with us?”

  “No.”

  “You know, you two are more alike than you think. Maybe that’s why you’re butting heads with her so much. You’re both very proud, and don’t want anyone to think you can’t do everything all by yourself.”

  “And you’re not too proud?”

  “Hell no. I’m constantly asking people for help getting out of my screw-ups.”

  A small burble of laughter escaped Kara’s throat in spite of herself, belying the angry exterior she’d been trying to maintain.

  “You have that right. You are mess.”

  “You better believe it. So, are we done with all the yelling and slamming doors?”

  Kara let out an exaggerated sigh and said, “Yes, I’m done.”

  “Great. I was about to talk Loretta into sitting down and streaming a movie. Wanna join us?”

  “Fine, but I don’t want to watch any of her silly crying girl movies,” she said, brushing past Taylor.

  ‘Great,’ Taylor thought, ‘something else they can fight about.’

  He headed out of Kara’s room, closing the door behind him and crossed to the room he shared with Whitaker, knocking softly on it as he opened the door.

  “Hey babe, we ...”

  Taylor stopped abruptly as Whitaker held a finger up to her lips, the other hand cradling her cell phone against her ear.

  “Got it. Give us thirty minutes.”

  She snapped the phone closed and turned to Taylor.

  “Problems?” he asked at her expression.

  “Yeah, Joe wants us to come up to a meeting at his office that’s going on right now.”

  Joe was Joe Solomon, Whitaker’s boss and a man that had very little use or patience for Taylor, who he saw as some kind of amateur interloper who regularly stuck his nose into bureau cases.

  “Us?”

  “Yes, us. He was very specific he actually needed you in the meeting.”

  “Joe’s calling me in on a job?” Taylor asked, his tone rising in disbelief.

  “I don’t know if it’s a job, he just said something was going down, and he wanted to see you in his office ASAP.”

  “Shit. What’d I do to piss him off now?”

  “I don’t know if you did anything, but it sounded serious. We need to get going.”

  “Fine. Man, I just got Kara off her rampage, now I gotta tell her movie night's off.”

  “She’ll live.”

  Hoover Building, Washington D.C.

  Kara actually took the news fairly well. Taylor had been putting off jobs till their new situation evened out, but the few times he’d had to go out for work, she’d always taken it well. So they’d ordered some pizza and left money behind for Kara.

  The first few months Taylor’d been worried about leaving Kara at the apartment by herself and was always hovering around until she’d complained to her doctor, who’d pointed out to Taylor the value of letting the girl experience some independence. She’d pointed out that Kara’s whole life or at least the bulk of it since she’d been sold into the sex trade, her every action was controlled by others. Part of the healing process was letting Kara make her own decisions, and be trusted with doing things on her own.

  By now, Taylor and Whitaker had found enough excuses to get out of the house and leave Kara to her own devices that he wasn’t even worried about her back at the apartment by herself. Well, not much anyway.

  The importance of the meeting started to really set in when they walked into the lobby, and an agent was waiting by the desk for them, visitors' badge in hand for Taylor. Most of the time he almost always had to wait a long time before he got a visitor's badge and escort to go where he needed to go. He was pretty sure Solomon had given directions to keep him waiting extra as some form of petty retribution for the several times he’d shown up the bureau on cases they’d whiffed on.

  They were hustled up to Solomon’s office, which had four other men in suits in it, all gathered around a small round table off to one side of the office. Taylor recognized two of them, and Solomon of course. Between cases that he’d been passed under the table or just coming to visit Whitaker, Taylor’d had a chance to meet a lot of the agents that worked for Solomon, although not all of them. Still, it was getting to the point that seeing someone he didn’t recognize meant he was either from another office or another agency. And Taylor didn’t recognize the other man in the office.

  “Good, you’re both here. Dean, this is Agent Whitaker and Mr. Taylor, the man I was telling you about.”

  The man shook both of their hands as Whitaker looked at her boss, “What’s up, Joe?”

  “This is Dean Crawford from Homeland. They needed some assistance on a case, and it turns out John’s the man they need to talk to.”

  “Someone missing?” Taylor asked.

  It seemed the logical assumption, since for the last couple of years he’d worked private missing person cases, most of which had been passed to him from Law Enforcement agencies when they’d come up dry or had to drop the case for various reasons.

  Joe, however, just half rolled his eyes, catching himself and stopping before he finished and said, “No.”

  “Do you know this man?” Crawford asked, holding up a photo.

  Taylor’s heart all but stopped as he looked at the man in the picture. He realized he was holding his breath, and let it out, but tried to remain as calm as possible. Although in a room full of investigators, his reaction couldn’t have been any more clear than if he’d just answered the man.

  “What’s this about?”

  “I just need an answer to the question.”

  “Yeah, I get that. Look, Joe’s probably filled you in on how much of a massive pain in the ass I am. I know you guys like asking questions, and giving nothing away. It’s your schtick. Before I answer, I’m gonna need some context as to what I’m looking at.”

  The man looked over at Solomon, who sighed and nodded once.

  “Fine. Twenty-two days ago, a border patrol agent in Arizona was murdered. His throat was slit. He was in the middle of nowhere, and his killer never stepped in front of Simon’s patrol vehicle, so there wasn’t anything to catch on the truck's dashcam. We scoured video from every public-facing camera in a fifty-mile area, down to ATM cameras and gas stations. This was snapped by a traffic cam that was monitoring a test of a solar stoplight signal some Silicon Valley group was testing in a small town about twenty miles north of where the officer was murdered. He pinged in our system as a possible match to a person of interest in our records, but th
e picture we have on file for this person was extremely blurry, and we weren't able to make a positive ID. The software only gave us a seventy percent match.”

  “So you needed to find the only person you guys know of that’s met the man face to face?”

  “So you’re saying this is him?”

  Taylor stopped for a minute, staring at the picture. Not so much to decide if this was the man, since he knew without a shadow of a doubt who the man in the picture was, but to make up his mind what he wanted to do about it.

  Normally, Taylor wasn’t so indecisive. His training in the Army had drilled into him that second-guessing your decisions only got people dead. You had to keep an open mind to changes as tactical situations evolved of course, but you could sit and worry if you made the right decisions. Or between two decisions, indecisive on which was the best option. If they were so close you couldn’t pick between them, then just choose one and go for it.

  This wasn’t a situation anyone could be trained for. The man in that picture had kept him in chains, or at least behind a locked door, and had beaten him nearly every day for three years. When he’d escaped ... thanks as much to blind luck as any training, if he was being honest, Taylor thought he’d never see the man again.

  Now here was a picture of the man, straight out of Taylor’s more frequent nightmares.

  “Yes, that’s Waleed Qasim.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Have you ever been tortured, Agent Crawford?”

  “Umm ... no,” he said, his eyes flicking to Solomon.

  “You forget a lot of things after years of constant torture. Sometimes, in the middle of it, you don’t even remember your own name. Trust me, though, the one thing you never forget is the guy responsible for your torture. So yes, I am positive that the man in that picture is Waleed Qasim.”

  “Ok. Thanks for your help.”

  “I want in,” Taylor said, turning to Solomon.

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  “Look, this man is a crafty bastard. He’s not like your run of the mill fundamentalist. He’s not one of these kids talked into blowing himself up or radicalized over the internet. He’s the guy who does the radicalizing. If he’s here in this country, it’s for a reason. You’re not going to have an easy time finding him. He knows how to go to ground. Hell, after all these years of chasing him, you’ve only got the one crap ass photo. No one on our side knows this guy better than me. You’re going to need me if you want to find him before he does whatever it is he’s here to do.”

  “John, I get why you want this guy, I really do,” Joe said, and managed to sound only a little condescending when he said it. “We have strict policies that people personally involved with the subject of an investigation cannot be involved with it. We have that policy for a good reason. Even if I could overlook the fact that you’re not an agent and have no business being involved with any federal cases, I’m not going to taint our investigation by bringing someone so close to this man in on the case. We appreciate you coming in and identifying him for us, now let us do our job and find him.”

  “Listen,” Taylor started to say until he felt Whitaker's hand on his elbow. He looked over at her and could tell what she was thinking by her expression.

  She’d always been a ‘by the book’ kind of person, and she was very good with bureau politics. The look she gave him he recognized as being her ‘not here’ look. Taylor took a deep breath, turned, and walked out of the room. He heard Whitaker behind him making nice over his abrupt departure and waited for the elevator. She caught up just as the doors opened, and they both stepped on.

  “You’re not done with this, are you?” she asked as the doors closed.

  “You bet your ass I’m not!”

  Chapter 2

  “What are you planning?” Whitaker asked as they got back in the car and headed home.

  “I need to find a way into the investigation.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” she said. “How? You know Joe isn’t a fan of yours. Neither are a lot of the other top brass. They don’t like your methods, and they all think you're a loose cannon. There is no way in hell they’ll let you take part of an active investigation.”

  “The rank and file guys I know like me,” Taylor said defensively.

  “Yeah, cause you get results. That’s all that matters to the people in the field. The guys in charge have more to worry about. They have to answer to Congress if an investigation goes sideways. They have to deal with the press, who love nothing more than a juicy story with enough government screw up or corruption in it to make it sell. They have the ACLU and a dozen other groups coming at them every day, looking for the slightest slip-up. This is why the procedure is such a big deal for us. It’s what lets us walk the narrow path between all those groups and still get the job done. And you suck at procedure.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “You aren’t giving up though, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then, what’s your plan?”

  In answer to her, Taylor pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed dial number.

  “Kara,” he said when she picked up, “I need a favor … Yeah … Could you call your friend and ask her to get me in to see her mother. Tell her it’s important … Thanks.”

  Disconnecting, Taylor sat the phone in the center console between the two seats and caught a glare being directed at him by Whitaker.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You know what. You can’t keep going to the Senator every single time you need to get around the rules. For one, it’s taking advantage of that relationship, and two, it hurts her relationship with the Bureau. If the election goes her way, that’ll be bad for everyone. That doesn’t even begin to take into account what would happen once the media digs into your past.”

  “They’re welcome to it, I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done.”

  “Maybe not, but think about what’s there. Gunfights in city streets, gunfights in Russian towns, and if they get hold of someone like that kid Ronnie. I know you said you did what you needed to do to get him to talk, but the way that kid looks at you, it’ll read as torture to the papers.”

  Taylor rolled his eyes.

  “Ronnie’s a white supremacist, drug dealing, human trafficking scumbag. No one gives a shit about that low-life. I may have gotten aggressive with him, but people’s lives were on the line.”

  “They won’t care about any of that. They’ll hear torture, and it will be off to the races. If you’re connected to a Senator, or worse, a sitting President, it will be congressional hearings and demands for criminal investigations.”

  “The Senator’s smart. The times Kara’s gone to visit Mary Jane, they’ve always been careful about it, and it hasn’t gotten out. She meets them at a secure garage, get in an unmarked car with dark windows, and then offloaded in the garage at her house. I figure that’ll work for me too. I still think it’s bullshit that the kid's gotta sneak around like she did something wrong, instead of treated like the victim, but it’s the Senator's neck, and Kara said she was cool with it. It’s not like I’m gonna stand outside her front door or anything.”

  “Except, you’re not just visiting her house. You’re going to ask her to intercede in a federal investigation, something a Senator isn’t actually allowed to do. If she does somehow talk the AG or someone high enough up at DoJ into getting you in on the investigation, there will be agents that’ll be pissed about it. They’ll know who ordered it. If you screw up, they’ll make sure your name, and how you got in on the case, gets out.”

  “Then I’ll have to not screw up.”

  Her look could have frozen a volcano, “We’ll see.”

  Georgetown, Washington D.C.

  Taylor hadn’t been too far off in his description of how he’d get to see the Senator. He’d gone to a secure garage at the Department of Agriculture, an agency the Senator had no direct business with, showed his ID to the guard at the entrance, and was directed to a speci
fic parking space. There, a SUV with very dark windows was already waiting for him with a driver he’d met before, probably someone the Senator trusted since he’d also driven Kara on her trips to the Senator's house.

  Taylor had ridden in silence towards a very upscale section of Georgetown, working out how he was going to make the pitch. He’d been flippant with Whitaker, but he couldn’t dismiss her concerns out of hand. He knew she was right about how some people at the FBI viewed him, and how they’d react to him once again forcing his way onto a case. She’d also been right about the possible danger to the Senator.