Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [28]
This being his first counterterrorism case, Jason is anxious to make everything right on the status report he will send to headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“Sorry, ma’am, but it doesn’t track.”
“Which doesn’t?”
“He might have picked corn in Ohio, but the DeKalb Company is based in Illinois. They have a corn festival every year. I won the Diaper Derby when I was two years old.”
Donnato and I exchange a look and say nothing.
Jason fumbles. “I know. The Diaper Derby. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
Another pause.
“Ana?” Donnato asks finally. “Are you sure you heard Mr. Phelps correctly?”
I glare at him.
“I heard it right.”
“Run Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps through NCIC,” Donnato instructs the kid. “Search the databases for birth certificates, Social Security numbers, driving records, military records, and arrests for Phelps in Illinois and Ohio.”
We hang up and sit in silence in the motel room, where the once-savory remains of Caribbean takeout are starting to smell like a back street in the Yucatán.
“I need you to trust me,” I say after a while. “Why do you second-guess me in front of a rookie?”
“I’m not second-guessing you.”
“You are. Not only on Megan as a source but on a simple piece of intel, too. Did the subject say Ohio or Illinois?”
My voice is rising. My heart is beating fast.
“Look—” He takes off his reading glasses and rubs his forehead.
“Here’s the thing—”
“I know the thing. You shot a guy. A lot of people didn’t share that judgment call, or the way it worked out with OPR. So you’re feeling…scrutinized.”
“But not by you?”
“Not by me,” says my partner, and his eyes are soft.
Eight
Against a wash of middle-aged do-gooders perking along through the lobby of the convention hotel, with their important name tags and goodie bags of giveaways, radical leader Bill Fontana stands out like a gangsta hit man.
He has shaved his head since our most recent surveillance photos, which makes his cheekbones seem wider, and ears, with multiple earrings, stick out like a Chihuahua’s. Tall and muscle-bound, he is dressed in black, with heavy work boots meant to rip the shit out of laboratory doors. Despite a throng of groupies, he looks less like a media star and more of what he really is—an ex-con. You can spot it a mile away. He’s got what they call a “joint body”—the overdeveloped torso, the bullying prison strut.
I am not here alone. Undercover detectives from the Portland police department have mixed with the crowd, some posing as reporters to document the faces. You can bet if these good liberals knew they were being covertly photographed, they’d scream violation of civil rights. To protect my identity, the local cops do not know I exist; if my face surfaces in their reports, we’re doing something right. Donnato, disguised by a couple of days’ worth of beard, gold-rimmed glasses, and a beat-up denim jacket, is somewhere nearby.
This is not one of your great moments in espionage. All we did was walk through the door. The hotel is on a strip near the airport. You go up the escalator to the convention suite and buy a ticket for thirty bucks. If it’s easy for us, it is easy for FAN, whose members, you can bet, are also working the room.
These people—excuse the expression—are sitting ducks for recruitment by terrorists. The affable retirees with big bellies and gray beards are not likely to be fashioning Molotov cocktails in their home entertainment centers during the commercial breaks, but the young guard, the lean and hungry male youth who gather around Fontana, with thin grasping fingers, and tattoos, and “I’ve-been-up-on-speed-for-thirty-six-hours” hair, just want to be bad—any kind of bad. Well, so does Darcy DeGuzman in her ratty purple parka.
“I’m a great admirer of yours,” I tell Fontana, shaking his hand. “Going to prison, that was really brave.”
“It isn’t brave. It’s the only choice.