Burying the Past Read online

  Tucson, Arizona

  The flight to Arizona was long and cramped, thanks to the coach tickets provided for by the FBI. Taylor mused that they only gave the private jet to people they actually wanted working cases. When he voiced the thought aloud, Whitaker assured him this was the way normal FBI agents traveled when they had to fly. Private jets were only for the higher ups and red ball cases. Taylor mollified his annoyance with traveling like cattle again by having Whitaker traveling with him. Being stuck between two people was better when one of them was someone he didn’t mind getting squished into.

  Taylor had noticed that Crawford had found another row to sit in, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that Taylor had managed to find another civil servant to be on the wrong side of. Not that it bothered Taylor much, but since they were going to be stuck with the man for a few days, it was going to be annoying.

  They were met at the gate by an agent from the Tucson office, who drove them down to the border. It was just over a two-hour drive to the crime scene, a little south-east from San Miguel. The agent had been grabbed off another case to spend the day as a chauffeur and didn’t have anything on what happened beyond scuttlebutt. Taylor tuned out, watching the stretch of southwest nothingness roll by as Whitaker and the agent made bureau small talk.

  She excelled at that sort of thing and had always told Taylor he should do more of it. Apparently, advancement in the FBI was more about social networking, and making connections, than it was about actually cracking cases. That had always seemed like a terrible way to run an organization, but he kept his opinion to himself … mostly.

  On what seemed like the fifth small, dusty road they’d been on, they finally came upon the crime scene. Considering how flat the area was in this desert valley, with ridges rising up both east and west, it was easy to see the scene before they got there. A blue tarp suspended on poles covered the truck and about ten feet on all sides, from the sun. A lonely state trooper patrol car sat nearby.

  As they pulled up, the trooper got out of his car and held up a hand. The SUV pulled to a stop, and all four got out, the Tucson guy flashing a badge.

  “My office called ahead about these DC folks coming out?”

  “Yeah, they called. You guys have fun, I’m going back into my car until my relief shows.”

  Taylor couldn’t blame him. It was over a hundred degrees and, except for the blue tarp, there wasn’t any shade for a mile in any direction.

  The Tuscon guy followed suit and got back into the SUV, which started back up, with the AC cranked to full. Crawford, Whitaker, and Taylor walked over to the blue tarp covered area and stopped outside of the perimeter, looking in at the truck and ground around it.

  The truck was white with the wide green Border Patrol stripe on the door. The bed of the truck was black, but Taylor could see a reddish-brown stain along the back of the white cab and another series of reddish-brown drops going down one side of the outside of the truck bed. If he had to guess, Taylor would bet more blood stains would show up in the bed of the truck itself if put under a UV lamp.

  He’d seen firsthand the effect of someone having their throat slashed, the geyser of blood that the body produced as the heart pumped the stuff out before the pressure dropped. That didn’t take into account what would have come out of the body once it was dropped into the bed of the truck.

  “Scene’s a fucking mess,” Crawford said, standing outside the tented area looking in.

  Whitaker made a grunting noise in agreement. Even with over a year of investigating missing persons, Taylor wasn’t a cop. What he did was very different than what Crawford and Whitaker did, so he wasn’t sure what specifically they were referring to, although even to his untrained eye he could see a dozen or more different footprints around the vehicle.

  “I’m not sure how much we are going to get out here, anyway,” Taylor said, turning and looking towards the border.

  “Why? This is the crime scene,” Crawford said.

  “We already know who did the crime. Maybe not the specifics, since from the photo you showed me Qasim had some people with him, but we know who ordered it. We also know why he did it, so there isn’t much to learn here.”

  “I’m not sure we can jump to conclusions. Sure, these guys just like killing Americans, but maybe he’s planning something else.”

  “You might be right in a general sense, but not about Qasim. He doesn’t do anything without a specific reason, including killing Americans. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, that wouldn’t be his plan. If I had to guess, I’d say Lawson was an obstacle, and Qasim didn’t want there to be a chance someone would tail him or figure out what he was up to.”

  “Then why pick this spot to cross?”

  “Look at the brief on Lawson. He was out here on his own time. If you look, you’ll see no one was scheduled to patrol this area when the killing occurred. This tells you how good Qasim's planning is. He knew our patrol schedules! Lawson was a variable he couldn’t plan for, and he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “There still might be something,” Crawford said obstinately.

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. Qasim wouldn’t have lingered. I guarantee he had a timetable to stick to.”

  “Ok, smart guy, if not here, then where should we be looking?”

  “In the short term, Tucson. Although I doubt he’s in the area, still. The shot we have of him is just outside of Tucson, and the car they’re driving had US plates. He didn’t drive that up across the border, and he didn’t take Lawson's. My guess is he came across on foot or, more likely, a car from Mexico, and dumped it in Tucson.”

  “Why Tucson?”

  “He’d want to avoid random traffic stops if he could, and a car with Mexican plates is a good way to get pulled over.”

  “If he’s as good of a planner as you’re saying, wouldn’t he just have someone over here with a US car waiting to switch.”

  “Yes, but he’d want the car to disappear. These guys have a more than healthy respect for our forensic ability, sometimes to absurd levels. They attribute our technical prowess beyond what we’re actually capable of. He wouldn’t want to have FBI techs to go over the car and find some minute grain of sand, or an insect that pinpointed where he was going. He’s clever, but he’s not a technician. If he saw it on CSI, then he believes we can do it, and he doesn’t realize that most tests take weeks, at best, to get processed. So he’d leave the car in a busy but run down area with the keys in it and the doors open. Even if it gets picked up later, it would be harder to trace back to him, and he’d hope the new owners would inadvertently destroy some of the evidence for him.”

  “Ok, so he’d have a car waiting for him. We have the plate from the video, but if he’s as good as you say he is, then wouldn’t he have gotten it without it tracing back to him?”

  “Probably, but it’s where we start. He’s not working alone, and he hasn’t operated inside the US before. If I had to guess, I’d bet he was using some other group's people. We can hope one of them made a mistake.”

  “So why did you come out here?” Crawford asked.

  “Because she said I had to,” Taylor said, jerking a thumb at Whitaker. “Besides, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to go over all the street cam, or whatever footage you guys can get your hands on, from that night when the snapshot was taken. It would give us more to work with. Have you guys run the plates on the car yet?”

  As they talked, Taylor led Whitaker back to the SUV, Crawford was giving a last look at the crime scene before following behind them.

  “Yeah, it’s from the Happy Time rental agency. Like you said, they covered their tracks. The card was stolen, and the ID was bogus.”

  “What do we know about the card?”

  Whitaker took her phone out, and started clicking on something, silent for a minute as she looked for the information.

  “Looks like it hadn’t been used before. The owner is a guy in Los Angeles. Agents from the field office are tracking him down now,
but I’d bet he didn’t even know it was missing, since the card company had no record of it missing.”

  “Probably. What about the ID?”

  “The rental was out of Tucson, right?”

  “Yeah. We already had people talk to them. They’re pretty low rent, and the cars don’t have low-jack or anything, so tracking the car is out of the question.”

  “What about the ID?”

  “Fake … or stolen and doctored, more specifically. The ID's a DC address, and the guy who rented it to them said the picture matched the guy who rented the car. The name on the ID comes back to a guy named Takir Malek, an Iranian living in DC. We have agents looking for Mr. Malek, now.”

  “Odds are they copped this guy’s ID, and doctored it. It’s not like they had to get it past a cop, they just had to fool a bored rental car agent.”

  “Probably, but we still have to check it out. I guess this trip was a waste of time then.”

  “We still needed to see the crime scene,” Crawford said.

  “Doesn’t hurt,” Taylor agreed. He could tell Crawford was getting agitated. “It’s going to take some legwork to track him down. Normally, I’d be pulling all-nighters trying to find where they slipped up and following leads. Lucky for me, the Feebs have a lot of legs.”

  “So we just wait?”

  “We keep running down leads," Taylor said, "and hope something breaks. We can do that from home.”

  Chapter 3

  Crawford broke off from them at the Tuscon airport, saying he still thought there was something to investigate there, and seemed pretty confident that Qasim or his men weren’t still in town. Whitaker seemed to want to agree with Crawford but eventually sided with Taylor, who was certain the trail at this end was cold.

  It wasn’t an easy decision for her. Her experience clawing her way up the through the bureau told her it was a bad idea to go against a high ranked agent, even one from another agency. In the end, it came down to a feeling that Crawford’s reason was partially just to be contradictory to Taylor. One of the reasons she’d fought against Taylor being involved with the official investigation was this exact reaction he tended to provoke in people.

  Her instincts told her Taylor was right, and she had enough faith in both his experience with the terrorist and his track record over the past several years when it came to tracking people down.

  Taylor was fairly quiet on the flight back, putting off most of Whitaker’s attempts to talk about the case. While he was confident that he was right and Qasim had already passed through, he had no idea what the man’s actual goal was. The reports he’d read on the flight out were light on Intel on Qasim and his group, which wasn’t that surprising.

  Qasim had always been one of the smaller groups that had sprung out of Al Qaeda. US intel tended to focus on the big, noisy groups like ISIS and Boko Haram. Considering how successful ISIS had been, for a while at least, that made sense. Taylor knew first hand that the US military was more comfortable with organized, territory-based opponents. Its institutional memory still tended to reach back to WWII and had trouble with guerrilla-style conflicts.

  There had been movement of course. Patreaus had surprising success during the surge with his ‘clear, hold and build’ strategy. Soldiers operating inside the same communities, working day after day with the same people eliminated several of the insurgents best tools.

  That, however, was a one-off. Again and again, he’d seen leaders going back to ‘hit them hard with overwhelming force, and we’ll win’ ideas that had worked poorly in Vietnam and continued to work poorly. Sure, it was going to let them shut down ISIS, who made the mistake of picking up territory and becoming something the US knew how to fight. That, however, was unique to that group and left less formally structured groups unidentified and untraceable.

  Again, that was understandable. You had to deal with the big threat first, but it lets those looser groups build up resources and make plans. That was bad enough, but it got worse when one of those groups had a man like Waleed Qasim in charge of it.

  Taylor had seen firsthand how organized his band was. They took operational security seriously, doing no planning or coordination electronically. Everything was person to person contacts, which made tracking them a lot harder. The US was the master at pulling information from the air and analyzing it, but all that expertise meant that old school techniques were ignored or overlooked.

  The file Taylor had seen had nearly zero recent information on the group, in fact. He couldn’t help but notice that, aside from information that looked to be more rumor than a real source, the file's most up to date info had come from Taylor himself. Which meant no one knew what Qasim had been up to for almost three years.

  The plane landed, and Taylor pushed it all to the back of his mind. He wasn’t going to figure it out today, and he had other things he’d prefer to focus on. Qasim was in action, and Taylor knew that there’d be something new breaking soon. All he needed was a little more data to get a whiff of what the man was up to.

  “So you’re back with me,” Whitaker said as they took the tram to the parking lot to collect their car.

  She’d become good at reading his moods, which he actually appreciated.

  “Yeah. I was trying to work out what Qasim’s next move is, but I’ve got nothing.”

  “At all?”

  “No. All we have is the border crossing. We know he’s got some assets already in the States, but that’s not enough. I need a few more pieces of the puzzle before I can start figuring it out.”

  “Joe had been hoping you’d lock on to him quickly.”

  “I know. I hadn’t said anything before, because there was always the chance that the crossing would have left more detail for us, but I was pretty sure we’d end up here. We have some feelers out, and Qasim’s already started on whatever his plan is. Something new will pop up soon, and then we’ll have a direction to go.”

  “See, you need us methodical, plodding bureaucrats with our procedures and policies after all.”

  “Never said I didn’t, Princess. I’ve never had a problem with your methods when it comes to tracking down pieces. It’s the hesitation in putting the pieces together that I have a problem with. There will be a point where methodical investigation stops, and you have to roll with what you have, work the rest out on the fly.”

  “That’s how innocent people end up getting killed.”

  “Sometimes that’s true, but always going with procedure and working the system instead of following what’s in front of you is how planes end up flying into towers.”

  Her head whipped around and she glared at him. Nine-Eleven was still a sore subject in the Bureau, even after almost two decades. It was their biggest institutional failure, pretty much since its founding. They took their missing the plot personally and didn’t like being called on it.

  She didn’t speak to him again as they got to the car, and Taylor could feel her seething beside him.

  After putting the keys into the ignition, Taylor stopped and looked at her.

  “Sorry, that was too far. I apologize.”

  “But you don’t take it back?” she said.

  “No. I believe what I said, but I know you and the people you work with try to do what you think is best. You know I have problems with your methods, I won’t pretend I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I should throw it into your face. You were right. Right now I need your way of doing things.”

  She glared at him and then rolled her eyes. She knew Taylor well enough to know that was as much of an apology as she was going to get out of him. One of the things she liked most about him was that he always told you what he thought. It was also one of the things she hated most about him.

  “Fine,” she said as he turned the engine over and pulled out of the parking lot.

  “At least this way, we get to be here tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, I was worried we’d have to reschedule.”

  “Have you told her how much you’re looking forward to
it?”

  “You know Kara. She hates talking about ‘silly emotional stuff.’”

  “That’s what she says, but it’s a front. It means a lot to her, but she still has trouble letting anyone see what she really feels. She had to hide for a long time. It’s a reflex at this point.”

  “Has she said anything to you?”

  “Some, but I’m also better at reading her. Even though she won’t say it, she’s looking forward to the finalization of the adoption.”

  “Really?” Whitaker asked, turning to look at John’s profile.

  “Yeah,” he said, reaching out to hold her hand. “I know you’re looking forward to it too, even though you haven’t told her, either. I was serious, you know, before we left. Your and Kara’s biggest problem is you’re too similar. You both need to be so strong, that sometimes you limit yourselves when you should be vulnerable.”