The Camel Club (Camel Club 1)

Slowly, Anne Jeffries’ defiant look dissolved. “Well, I left work around six-thirty. Traffic, as usual, was a bitch. It took me an hour and ten minutes to crawl a few miles. I made some phone calls, had a bite to eat and went back down to Old Town to meet with the woman who’s making my wedding dress.” Here she paused and let out

a sob. Alex handed her a fresh tissue and nudged the glass of water she’d earlier poured for herself closer to the woman. She gulped from it and continued. “I finished with her around nine-thirty. That’s when I got a call from a girlfriend who lives in Old Town, and we met for a drink at Union Street Pub. We were there for about an hour or so, just chitchatting. Then I drove home. I was in bed by midnight.”

“Your friend’s name?” Simpson asked, and wrote it down.

The two agents rose to leave, but Jeffries stopped them.

“His . . . his body. They didn’t tell me where it is.”

“I would imagine it’s at the D.C. morgue now,” Alex said quietly.

“Can I . . . I mean would it be possible for me to see him?”

“You don’t have to do that. They’ve already positively identified him,” Simpson added.

“That’s not what I meant. I . . . I just want to see him.” She paused and said, “Is he, is he terribly disfigured?”

Alex answered, “No. I’ll see what I can do. By the way, is his family nearby?”

“They live in California. I’ve spoken with them; they’re flying in with Pat’s brother.” She gazed up at him. “We were really very happy together.”

“I’m sure you were,” Alex said as he walked out the door with Simpson.

Outside, he faced off with his partner. “Is that what the hell you call effective interrogation techniques?”

Simpson shrugged. “I was the bad cop and you were the good cop. It worked pretty well. She’s probably telling the truth. And she doesn’t know zip.”

Alex was about to respond when his phone rang.

He listened for a minute and then turned to Simpson. “Let’s go.” He started walking off fast.

“Where to?” she asked, hustling after him.

“That was Lloyd from the FBI. They think they just found out what Patrick Johnson was sorry about.”

CHAPTER

21

WHEN ALEX AND SIMPSON arrived at Patrick Johnson’s Bethesda residence, they were surprised, for two reasons. One, there was no visible police presence, not even a marked vehicle or yellow police tape. A couple of Suburbans in the driveway were the only evidence of someone being on-site.

The second surprise was the house itself.

Alex stopped on the front sidewalk, put his hands on his hips and surveyed the single-family home. It wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t attached to another house either, and the upscale neighborhood was within walking distance of the thriving Bethesda downtown area. Alex said, “At Johnson’s pay grade I thought we’d be looking at a one-bedroom apartment like his fiancée. Hell, this thing’s got a yard. With grass.”

Simpson shook her head. “When I got assigned to WFO and didn’t know squat about the D.C. housing sticker shock, I priced some places around here just for the hell of it. This is over a million dollars, easy.”

Inside, Agent Lloyd was waiting for them. Alex said, “Where’d he get the money for this place?”

Lloyd nodded. “And it’s not just the house. There’s a new Infiniti QX56 in the garage. Runs over fifty grand. And we found his other car. He left it on the Virginia side of the river before he took his last swim. Lexus sedan, another forty grand.”

“Selling secrets?” Simpson asked.

“No. We think it’s a more reliable source of illegal cash.”

“Drugs,” Alex said quickly.

“Come up and see for yourself.”

As they were being led upstairs, Alex mentioned to Lloyd, “Bureau securing crime scenes differently these days?”

“Special marching orders on this one.”

“Let me guess. Since it involves NIC, discretion is valued over all other things.”

Lloyd didn’t answer but he did smile.

In the master bedroom closet there was a set of drop-down stairs leading to an attic access panel. On the floor of the closet they saw bundles of something stacked in clear plastic.

“Coke?” Simpson asked.

Lloyd shook his head. “Heroin. That brings ten times the return coke does.”

“And his fiancée knew nothing? Where’d she think he got all this money?”

“I haven’t asked her that yet because we interviewed her before we found this. But I will,” Lloyd added.

“How’d you get onto the drug angle so fast?” Alex asked.

“When we saw where he lived, we ran Johnson’s name through SEISINT and pulled up the property records on his purchase of this place. He bought it last year for one point four million and put a half million in cash down from a financial source we haven’t been able to trace. He financed the cars and then paid them off soon after, again using a bank account we can’t track. I knew it had to be an inheritance, drugs or selling secrets. The point of least resistance was the drugs. So I pulled in a dog from DEA. It started barking its head off when it went into the closet. We didn’t find anything until we saw the panel to the attic. We lifted the dog up there and bingo! He had it stacked between the rafters with insulation over it. ”

“Well, I guess other things being equal, it’s better he was selling drugs than selling his country down the river,” Simpson commented wryly.

“I’m not even sure he had access to secrets worth selling,” Lloyd replied. “And now we don’t have to go down that road. But this is going to be a big enough mess as it is. Hell, I could write the Post headline myself: ‘Carter Gray, Intelligence or Drug Czar?’”

It seemed to Alex his FBI counterpart was looking forward to every last bit of dirt thrown up on the only federal law enforcement agency that rivaled his in terms of budget and bite. He said, “Now the question is, did he kill himself because he was a drug dealer getting married to a respectable woman and suddenly couldn’t handle it, or did his druggie associates kill him and try to make it look like a suicide?”

Lloyd said, “I’d vote for him taking his own life. He died on the spot where he and his fiancée had their first date. Drug dealers would’ve just popped a new hole in his head while he was sitting in his car or sleeping in his bed. The whole murder-suicide subterfuge is way too sophisticated for those types.”

Alex considered this, then said, “Did you find anything else connected to the drugs? Transaction journal, list of drop-off spots, computer files, anything like that?”

“We’re still looking. But I doubt he would’ve been careless enough to leave stuff like that around. We’ll let you know what we do find so you can close your file out.”

As Alex and Simpson walked back to the car, Simpson glanced at her partner. “Well, there goes the pain in your ass that you didn’t really need. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Alex said curtly.

“But a drug dealer at NIC, they’re still going to take heat over that.”

“That’s how the cards fall sometimes.”

“So back to WFO?”

He nodded. “I’ll shoot off my e-mail upstairs, follow with a more detailed one when friend Lloyd fills in the rest of the spaces, and we go back to busting counterfeiters and standing in doorways looking to catch a bullet.”

“Sounds like a thrill.”

“I hope you believe that, because you’re going to be doing it for a long time.”

“I’m not complaining. I joined the ranks, nobody pushed me here.” She didn’t sound very convincing, though.

“Look, Jackie, I usually mind my own business, but here’s a piece of real honest advice for a healthy career with the Service from someone who’s seen it all.”

“I’m listening.”

“Do your share of the crap work, no matter who’s looking out for you upstairs. One, it’ll make you a better agent. Two, you’ll leave the Service with at least one friend.”

“Oh, really, who’s that?” Simpson said irritably.

“Me.”