Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)

She speed-dialed home as she gunned out of the parking lot. Her brother, Tom, answered his cell on the second ring.

“Just got off the plane,” she said. “How’s she taking it?”

“Everything’s fine. We set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. That’s so cute that you guys do that every Sunday.”

“That little fibber,” Emily cried. “A lemonade stand? Near the street!? Oh, that’s just like her. She’s got her hooks into you already. I told her no last week. What about the traffic? Are you there? Right now? Who’s watching her?”

“Of course I’m here, Em. What do you think, I’m talking to you from a bar?” her brother said. “Me and the Olive are glued together at the hip.”

Tom had gotten a job with a defense contractor in Bethesda after getting out of the Marines the month before. He was due to start next week. Renting him the basement apartment in her split-level had turned out to be a win-win stroke of genius, a built-in babysitter. Emily grinned, picturing her precious goofball of a four-year-old, Olivia, out by the end of the cul-de-sac in her winter coat, wondering where the customers were.

“Do we even have lemonade?” she said.

“I made a command decision and substituted Kool-Aid.”

“Kool-Aid!? That’s pure processed sugar and dye. Kool-Aid! She can only have one glass. One.”

“You sound like I’m force-feeding her antifreeze. Besides, she’s not drinking it, she’s trying to sell it. Try not to have an aneurysm, please. I survived Kabul, I think I can look after the Olive. You have any idea how long you’re going to be gone for?”

“Not yet, but I’ll let you know. Kiss her for me, okay, Tom? I know you can take perfect care of her. I just get nuts leaving ever since . . . you know.”

“The D-I-V-O—”

“Shut up, Tom, would you? She can spell better than you. Good-bye.”

After her divorce the year before, Emily had taken a transfer to ride a desk at CASMIRC, the Bureau’s Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center, because it had regular hours. The case files that came in for review from every corner of the country weren’t exactly light reading, but when you were a profiler, you had to take the work where you could find it.

The job was ideal for taking care of Olivia, but to say Emily was starting to climb the beige walls of her cubicle in the basement office at the FBI Academy would be putting it mildly.

Emily smiled as she dropped the Buick’s hammer up the entrance for the turnpike, cutting off a tricked-out Cadillac SUV. Off to her right, New York City’s metal-and-glass skyline appeared like a vision over the Jersey swamp.

Still got it, she thought, keeping the gas on the floor. Gangway, badass coming through!

Chapter 6

I DON’T THINK I’d ever been as proud of the NYPD. In only two hours, we’d managed to get everything up and running.

I, two other Major Case detectives, and a PD tech were stationed at the Dunnings’ apartment. Another team of detectives was busy scouring NYU to find out where Jacob had last been seen. A third surveillance team, made up of undercover Emergency Service Unit tactical guys, was spread around outside the Dakota, especially the Strawberry Fields area in Central Park.

After Lennon was shot, the building had become a kind of morbid landmark, like the grassy knoll in Dallas. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Jacob lived here, but for the time being, we couldn’t rule out the pull of the place for some unbalanced person.

An NYPD TARU tech had already spliced recording equipment onto the Dunnings’ line. The phone company had been contacted and was ready with something called a time-stop trace. Its billing computer would zip through its millions of circuits that were operational at the exact second the Dunnings’ phone rang and find the one calling the apartment.

All we had to do now was the hard part. To sit and wait until four o’clock. Sit and wait and pray.

My heart rattled like an alarm clock in my chest cavity when the phone rang at three-thirty. It took me a long second to realize that it wasn’t the apartment phone but the building’s intercom buzzer in the kitchen.

Armando, the butler, rushed to answer it.

“There’s an FBI agent in the lobby, sir,” he called to Donald Dunning.

What?! I thought. Who called the FBI?

“Send her up,” Dunning said. Turning to me, he added, “Did I forget to tell you? I called the Justice Department when I was down at Jacob’s dorm. The attorney general, Fred Carroll, dated my sister in college. He’s sending in his best, he told me. You can work together with the FBI, right?”

“Sure,” I said, exchanging uncertain glances with Detectives Ramirez and Schultz, the other members of my team. We had everything ready to go. Now the Feds were here? What did that mean?

We exchanged much happier looks as a tall, auburn-haired woman came through the door two minutes later. Good-looking women, even ones who were turf-invading FBI agents, were always a pleasant surprise.