Justice Served Page 12

  “Looking for Trudy.”

  “For Frye.” The way Mitchell said it, it wasn’t a question.

  “Maybe.”

  Agitated, Mitchell rubbed her hand up and down Sandy’s bare arm. “You gotta be careful, honey. People are going to be on edge because of the bust. Looking for something that’s off. Don’t go asking around for her right now.”

  “You think I’m dumb, Dell? You think I made it this long without you by being stupid?” Sandy pulled away. “Jesus. Sometimes you are just as bad as a guy.”

  “Whoa. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s supposed to mean just because we’re fucking I don’t need you to take care of me.”

  “What if I want to?”

  “Not if you’re going to be a pain in the ass about everything.”

  “What if I want you to take care of me?”

  Sandy caught her breath. “Do you?”

  “Sometimes, yeah, I think I do.”

  “Fuck, Dell.” Sandy settled back against her, seeking the warmth of her skin with her fingers again. “I...you know…I love you too, rookie.”

  “I missed you while you were gone tonight.”

  Sandy kissed Mitchell’s shoulder, then rested her cheek on the spot. “Why did your sister come today?”

  “I don’t know. She said it was because…she wanted to make sure I was okay.”

  “How come you don’t sound like you believe her?”

  “Because she doesn’t care if I’m okay.”

  “How do you know?” Sandy stroked Mitchell’s stomach, dipping her fingers beneath the waistband of her jeans where they rode low over her hips.

  Unconsciously, Mitchell lifted her hips into the touch. “She stopped caring two years ago.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She followed the rules,” Mitchell murmured softly, reaching for the button on her jeans.

  “Dell, baby, what…”

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” Mitchell said, pushing Sandy’s hand deeper into her jeans. She closed her eyes, wanting only the solace of Sandy’s touch. “Please, honey.”

  “Shh,” Sandy crooned, stroking tenderly as Mitchell gave a small cry. “It’s okay, baby. Everything is going to be okay.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thursday

  At 7:20, Rebecca settled in her usual place at the conference table in Sloan’s office, struggling to ignore the faint headache building behind her eyes. She hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep a night in over a week, but it wasn’t the lack of rest that was wearing on her. It was the case. There was something she was missing, had been missing since the day she’d looked down on Jeff’s and Jimmy’s bodies, and, whatever it was, it still eluded her. The investigation had splintered in too many directions too quickly. From the very beginning, her focus had been fragmented. Jeff had been killed in the midst of a madman’s serial-murder spree, and she hadn’t been able to pursue her partner’s killer while hunting a maniac. She’d had to keep working, and she had been able to do little more than bury her shock and pain over Jeff’s death.

  Then she’d been shot, nearly died, and had fallen in love, all in the course of a few weeks.

  As soon as she returned to duty—too soon by all accounts—the “desk job” she’d been assigned to led to a morass of underground criminal activity ranging from Internet pornography to child prostitution. And now she had to ferret out the mole in the police department who had very likely orchestrated the murder attempt on Sloan, crack the prostitution ring that had supplied the young girls for the porn videos, and discover why two cops had been executed. Still too many threads with nothing to connect them.

  She sighed, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes.

  “Rough night?” Sloan asked.

  “A few of them.” Rebecca might not have admitted that to anyone but Sloan, but in many ways they were equals on the job. Whatever Sloan had done for the government in her past life, Rebecca had no doubt that she’d been the team leader, not one of the troops. Rolling her head on the chair back, she surveyed Sloan’s rumpled shirt and pasty complexion. “You look a little ragged yourself.”

  Grunting in agreement, Sloan slumped across from Rebecca with her own cup of coffee cradled between her hands. “Just got home.”

  “Were you at Police Plaza all night?”

  Sipping her coffee, Sloan nodded.

  Rebecca sat up straighter. “Anything?”

  “I know who it is.”

  Rebecca was suddenly very much awake, flashing back to the last time Sloan had thought she’d discovered the person behind the murder attempt that had nearly killed Michael. Sloan had come close to taking matters into her own hands. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Just put the pieces together.”

  “And?”

  Sloan met Rebecca’s gaze head-on. “No one’s dead yet.”

  “Good,” Rebecca said gruffly, the tension in her chest dissipating. “Am I going to like this?”

  “Like I thought, it’s not a cop.”

  “What isn’t?” Watts asked, as he lumbered into the room and made straight for the coffeepot.

  “You’ll find out in a minute,” Rebecca informed him. “Let’s wait until everyone’s here, and then we’ll bring the team up to speed.”

  Grunting assent, Watts shuffled toward the table with his coffee in one hand and two doughnuts in the other. “Who sets all this stuff up, anyhow?”

  From the doorway, Jason replied, “I do.”

  “You’ll make somebody a great wife,” Watts mumbled around a mouthful of jelly and dough.

  “I already have the wardrobe.”

  Watts sputtered and choked, inspiring Sloan to pound him on the back as she laughed. He was still wheezing when Mitchell arrived, walking slowly but without her cane.

  “How’s the leg, Detective?” Rebecca asked as she rose to refill her coffee. She lifted a cup in Mitchell’s direction and scrutinized her.

  “It’s fine, Lieutenant. Thank you.” Mitchell did her best to hide the limp as she moved as quickly as she could to the counter next to Rebecca. “I can get that, ma’am. But thanks.”

  Rebecca raised a brow. “I thought we dispensed with the formalities a while back.”

  “Yes, ma’am…Lieutenant.” Mitchell took the offered cup of coffee.

  “Good to see you up and around.”

  “I should be ready for full duty anytime now.”

  “I want it in writing. From Torveau and…” Rebecca shot a look over her shoulder toward the others gathered at the table and lowered her voice. “Whoever else you’re seeing.”

  “Dr. Rawlings.” Mitchell held Rebecca’s gaze, searching for a reaction.

  Rebecca merely nodded. “Good enough. Now, let’s get this meeting started.”

  Mitchell maneuvered into a seat next to Jason as Rebecca returned to the head of the table and said, “So, where do we stand? Watts?”

  Watts gulped down the last of his second doughnut and cleared his throat. “The stakeouts have pretty much been a bust. Neither Campbell or Beecher has done anything even a little bit suspicious. Considering our lack of manpower, I say we can that detail.”

  “We’ll come back to that in a minute. Anything else?”

  “Charlie Horton and Trish Marks’s homicide investigation into Hogan and Cruz’s murders went nowhere. For all practical purposes, they’ve pretty much cold-cased the files. I got nothing from talking to the guys in narco about what Jimmy was into—nothing that we didn’t get from the first round of interviews, anyhow. If someone there was running him, no one knew who it was. More likely, he was reporting directly to the feds and giving everyone else just enough to avoid suspicion.”

  “I’ll take another run at Clark myself,” Rebecca said stonily. “If he’s holding something back now, then he’d better have a very good reason for it.”

  Watts muttered a disparaging observation about Clark’s lineage, then continued, “The only other thing I
got was the possible lead at Port Authority.”

  “Go ahead and fill in the others,” Rebecca advised.

  Watts recounted his trip to the property room, his discovery of a few of Hogan’s unfiled papers, and the undercover detective’s interest in activity at the Port of Philadelphia. “We’re gonna take a run down there today to check things out.”

  Rebecca studied Sloan, who had a faint frown line between her brows. “What do you think?”

  “I suppose it’s possible that Hogan tripped onto something illegal on the docks that got him killed. Stolen cars coming in by boat, a drug shipment, wholesale-container thefts—there’s a lot of merchandise moving on those docks every day. It’s not that difficult to divert a tractor-trailer full of electronics or other pricey commodities to a warehouse somewhere. One ‘misplaced’ shipment among hundreds every day is going to take a while to catch anyone’s attention.”

  “That’s what we think too,” Rebecca said. “At least it’s a plausible explanation for why someone would be willing to risk killing two cops. Protecting an operation as lucrative as that could be worth it.”

  “It won’t be all that easy to prove,” Jason remarked. “Tracking those shipments is going to be time-consuming.”

  Rebecca gave a feral grin. “I figure there has to be a way to do it by computer.”

  Both Sloan’s and Jason’s eyes sparkled. In unison they said, “Maybe.”

  “Let’s get a feel for the situation down there, and then we’ll put some pressure on Port Authority to let us have a look into their system.”

  Watts snorted. “That could take some doing. Port Authority cops aren’t always the most cooperative.”

  That was, Rebecca knew, an unfortunate fact. More often than not, law enforcement agencies were not terribly forthcoming when it came to sharing intelligence. Sometimes not even about sharing basic operational information. What it came down to was that everyone protected their own turf in an attempt to ensure the longevity of their own positions. “We’ll be…insistent.”

  That idea seemed to please Watts, because he grinned and crossed his hands over his belly, a contented man. Rebecca nodded in Sloan’s direction. “Go ahead.”

  Sloan gave no sign of tension, other than her fists clenched around the coffee mug, as she spoke in a level, quiet tone. “The network connecting the various departments at Police Plaza and City Hall is lousy with worms and viruses. Someone has been monitoring almost everything that goes on down there…I can’t say exactly for how long…but more than a year.”

  “That takes sophisticated computer know-how,” Mitchell said.

  “You’re right. And I doubt that anyone inside the system could do it. I haven’t seen any sign of that level of internal expertise. I’d say the job was probably shipped out to a hacker who programmed the malicious code on a laptop and then handed that off to someone who worked inside. They carried the laptop into the building, connected it to the network, and let the beasts loose.”

  “The Mob has the resources to pull off something like that,” Jason observed.

  “They do. On the other hand,” Sloan said as she kept her eyes on Rebecca, “so do the feds. It’s hard to know who your enemies are anymore.”

  “Can you find out who’s behind it?”

  “Not directly,” Sloan admitted. “If the programs were encrypted off-site and delivered from a remote location via laptop, the hacker is essentially untraceable.”

  Watts groaned.

  “But I can trackback to the internal source of the contamination.”

  “To whoever logged in to the network and injected the virus into the system,” Mitchell said.

  “Right.” Sloan sipped her coffee, careful to keep the tremor from her hand. “George Beecher. The ADA.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Watts whispered. He suddenly sat up straighter, his palms flat on the tabletop, his attention riveted to Rebecca. “Can we pick up the slimy little bastard? I’d like to get him alone in a room.”

  “Sloan?” Rebecca countered. “Is there enough for a warrant?”

  Sloan shook her head. “Right now, all I can do is show that his computer was the source point for the intrusion. His attorneys would simply argue that that kind of evidence is circumstantial. Anyone could’ve logged on to his computer when he wasn’t around and uploaded the malicious code.”

  “Are we even sure it’s him?” Rebecca asked, all too aware that Sloan was barely able to be objective, given the situation. She wasn’t surprised when Sloan stiffened, her eyes growing cool.

  “I’ve now tracked two intrusions from two different network points—Captain Henry’s office and the forensics lab—back to him. Give me enough time, I’ll find you a dozen.”

  “It still doesn’t prove that he personally is responsible.”

  “Then maybe we should pay him a visit,” Sloan said flatly. “And…ask.”

  Mitchell shifted subtly in her seat, then said, “What we need is corroborative evidence. Maybe Jason and I can find some connection in Beecher’s personal data that will strengthen our case.” She gave Jason a questioning look. “What if we really hit him hard—dig down another layer. If it’s him, we’ll find hidden bank accounts somewhere. Real estate transactions. Stocks. Unaccounted-for expenditures. Something.”

  “We can phish him too,” Jason thought aloud. “See if we can get him to bite on a fake request for credit card information from one of the Internet video porn sites. If nothing else, we can squeeze him with that.”

  “Do it,” Rebecca said. “Today.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mitchell said, her voice tight with anticipation.

  “I’ve got street sources looking for other girls who’ve been hired for the porn shoots,” Rebecca went on. “We’ll show his picture around. Maybe he likes to sample the merchandise.”

  Mitchell stared straight ahead, her posture rigid. Rebecca saw the reaction but noted with satisfaction that this time Mitchell kept her temper in check. It took effort, and Rebecca gave her points for it.

  “Watts and I,” Rebecca finished, “will ride down to the docks today and see if we can get a line on what Hogan was chasing down there. Tonight, we’ll take shifts watching Beecher. Sooner or later he’ll misstep.” Rebecca rose, indicating the meeting was over. Turning to Sloan, she said quietly, “Let’s take a walk.”

  Wordlessly, Sloan followed her to the elevator. Once inside, Rebecca leaned a shoulder against the wall and slid her hands into her trouser pockets. “Are you going to be able to handle this Beecher situation?”

  The elevator doors glided open, and they walked across the garage to the street door. Sloan hit the exit bar with her hip, and the two of them stepped out into bright, cold October sunshine.

  “It depends on what happens, I guess,” Sloan finally replied.

  “That’s not the answer I was looking for.”

  Sloan angled her head and smiled at Rebecca humorlessly. “What did you expect me to say? That it would be all right with me if he goes free or cuts a deal? Even if we can find enough evidence to nail him?” She wore only an oxford shirt and jeans with no jacket, but the wind did not seem to bother her. “If he walks, you’d best look the other way.”

  “You know I won’t.”

  “Then I’ll just make sure there’s nothing for you to see.”

  “Make sure there’s nothing for me to even think about.” Rebecca stopped walking and put her hand on Sloan’s shoulder. They very rarely touched, and it wasn’t a comforting or even a particularly friendly gesture. But it was an honest one. She squeezed slowly and turned Sloan to face her in the middle of the sidewalk. “I know what you’re feeling.”

  “I know that you do,” Sloan said, not resisting the hand that restrained her. “But when someone threatened your lover, you blew his heart out.”

  “I’m a cop. I had no choice.”

  “We’ll never know that for sure, will we?”

  “You know, if you go after this guy on your own, Michael will know.”

/>   For the first time, anger flared in Sloan’s eyes. “You don’t talk to Michael about this.”

  “I won’t have to, Sloan.” Rebecca’s tone was level and mild. “She’ll know. Because...they always do. The women who love us.”

  Sloan stood very still, her gaze unwavering. Then, her muscles eased and a genuine smile appeared. “Fuck. They do, don’t they.”

  “Yep.” Rebecca dropped her hand and rolled her shoulders, relaxing as she watched Sloan reach a decision. “I promise you this. If it’s him, we’ll get him. We’ll get him now, or tomorrow, or next month. But he won’t get away with it. You have my word.”

  “All right.” Sloan shivered. “So are you done with the interrogation, Lieutenant? Because I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

  Laughing, Rebecca gripped Sloan’s shoulder, in camaraderie this time, as they turned to head back. Sloan would keep her word, for Michael.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rebecca drove south on Delaware Avenue deep into South Philadelphia. The Walt Whitman Bridge to New Jersey loomed overhead—a huge blue spiderweb, the shadows of vehicles traversing the central span like so many prey struggling to escape. Rush hour was nearly over, and it took less than ten minutes to reach the main gates of the Port of Philadelphia. Rebecca slowed and extended her ID out the window at the security booth, a four-by-four-foot kiosk with a wooden gate and a single, bored-looking Port Authority officer inside.

  He ignored them for a full thirty seconds before leaning out and squinting at Rebecca’s badge. “Yeah?”

  “Philadelphia police. We’re looking for Officer…Reiser.”

  “That would be Captain Reiser. Building C, all the way in the back. The captain know you’re coming?”

  “No. It’s a social call.”

  The grizzled officer eyed Rebecca laconically. “Uh-huh. Sure.” Taking his time, he half turned back into the tiny booth, pushed a button that powered the motor to raise the barrier arm, and gave Rebecca a perfunctory nod. “Have a nice day.”

  Rebecca proceeded into the complex as Watts muttered, “You have a nice fucking day too. Moron.”