First Family (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 4)

“And Cassandra has a house down there?”

“A condo right on the water. I hear it’s very nice,” he added hastily.

“And there wasn’t anyone else Tuck would’ve stayed with?”

“He didn’t know anybody else down there. The only reason we opened that office was because Cassandra lived there and didn’t want to make the move up here and didn’t want to work out of her home. I think there were covenants in her condo building docs that precluded that. Plus, Jacksonville is a big defense area and we might want to go after other work down there. So it made sense to have a footprint.”

Sean sat back in his chair. “What did you really think when you’d heard about what happened to his family?” he asked. “Truthfully.”

Hilal let out a long sigh. “It’s no secret that he and Pam weren’t the closest couple in the world. He had this business and she kept the home fires burning with the kids. But murdering his wife and kidnapping his own daughter? Tuck’s no saint, but I can’t see him doing something like that.”

“Do you think Pam suspected something was going on?”

“I honestly don’t know. I didn’t have that much interaction with her.”

“If he wanted out of the marriage there’re easier ways to do it,” Michelle pointed out.

“Right. Why didn’t he just divorce her?” asked Sean.

Hilal tapped his fingertips against the desk. “That might’ve been problematic.”

“Problematic how?”

“I said that we hired Cassandra about six months ago. Before that she’d been working for the Department of Homeland Security in their contracts department. That’s the same agency we’re trying to win the contract from. That’s what I meant when I said she had great contacts.”

“So if Tuck tried to divorce Pam then maybe the affair would become public?”

“In the world of government contracting the Feds don’t like even the appearance of a conflict of interest. If the prime contractor we’re subbing found out about an affair with a former employee of DHS, it would be a big problem. Maybe not enough to kill the relationship under normal circumstances, but this isn’t a normal circumstance.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sean.

“Tuck is the president’s brother-in-law. Everyone is already edgy about an appearance of preferential treatment because of that. And the government might even think there was hanky-panky going on between the two before she left the agency and maybe they’d start checking past contracts awarded to us. It gets complicated real quickly. It’s tough enough as it is to win these types of bid competitions. The other side will exploit any gaffe.”

“You realize that you’ve just built up a very plausible scenario for Tuck to have orchestrated this whole thing,” Sean said.

“I still can’t believe he would’ve done something like that to his family.”

Sean gave Michelle a subtle look that she still immediately translated.

She said, “We’ve got some more questions, Mr. Hilal. But do you have any coffee around here? You could probably use a cup too.”

Hilal rose. “I sure could.” He looked at Sean. “Would you like one?”

“No, but if you can just point me to the men’s room.”

Hilal led them down the hall and directed Sean to the restroom while he and Michelle headed to the lunchroom.

Instead of hitting the john, Sean doubled back and slipped inside the office two doors down from Hilal’s and which they had passed on the way in. This was Tuck Dutton’s turf, helpfully indicated by his name being stenciled on the door.

The space was large but cluttered and clearly showed a person juggling many things at once. Sean didn’t waste time but went right to the computer on the desk. He pulled a small USB thumb drive from his pocket. Loaded on it was a unique program used by law enforcement to extract forensic evidence from computers without turning off the machine and seizing it. Sean had managed to snag one from a buddy of his at the FBI.

He inserted it into the slot on the keyboard, performed some mouse clicks, and the program from the thumb drive uploaded onto the screen. There was password protection on Tuck’s database, of course. The software on the USB had password override programs that would take some time, so Sean decided to opt for a shortcut. He went through several

attempts before it hit him.

He typed in the name “Cassandra.” Nothing. Then he tried “Cassandra1.”

The digital gates parted and with a few commands from Sean the software started dumping select parts of Tuck Dutton’s hard drive onto the thumb drive.