Exposed (9 page)

Click
.

She checked the screen. At last, a decent shot. She pocketed her metal scale and stood up to look at him.
In the street light, she saw that his face was slick with sweat, but he wasn’t even breathing heavily, and here she was shaking so badly she could hardly hold a camera. He’d called her after the carjacking, but the few minutes between hearing those distant gunshots and getting that phone call had been terrifying as she envisioned Special Agent Brian Beckman bleeding out on some street corner.

She looped the strap around her neck. “I needed to document fleeting evidence. Stuff that fades or blows away—strands of hair, dust . . .” She nodded at the sidewalk in front of her. “Wet shoe prints on concrete.”

Brian’s phone buzzed, and Maddie pulled it from the pocket of the borrowed jacket. She handed it to him and strode back to the SUV, where she could busy herself with more photos of the running board.

Someone had
shot at him
just minutes ago, and he looked completely unfazed. His voice sounded perfectly normal as he stood behind her, talking on his phone. Any doubt that he’d once been in the military was erased.

Maddie crouched beside the black Explorer and clicked a few more pictures of the blood smear on the running board. These particular shots could wait for the FBI crime-scene techs, but extra pictures wouldn’t hurt. She studied the blood, knowing it could very well belong to Jolene Murphy. This might have been the primary vehicle used in her abduction. It made sense. The Explorer had tinted windows, unlike the sedan.

The SUV shifted as the police officer ducked inside and reached for the keys.

“Hey!” Maddie shot to her feet. “Hands off. This is a crime scene.”

He frowned. “Who are you?”

Who the hell are
you
?
she wanted to ask. This was another rookie she didn’t know, but at the moment, that was good.

“I’m the forensic photographer.” She nodded at Brian. “We’re waiting for the rest of our evidence response team. Until they arrive, no one touches anything. Are we clear?”

She didn’t wait for a reply but resumed taking her photographs as the officer stalked off. Footsteps scraped behind her, and she stood up. Brian was watching her, a look of concern on his face.

“You seem upset,” he said quietly.

Upset
didn’t cover it. Maddie took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “What happened at the apartment?”

“They didn’t find her. Looks like some people might have been in there recently, but it’s empty now.”

She bit her lip and looked away. They’d been so close.

“SWAT took off, and our evidence team just showed up to have a look around,” he said. “Sam’s over there supervising things.”

“Where are the shell casings?”

He looked blank.

“From the movie theater,” she said.

“Our evidence guys are processing the scene. Why?”

“I’d like them.”

“The casings?” He sounded surprised.

“We can run them through our ballistics lab.”

“So can we.”

“Probably tomorrow.”

He rested his hands on his hips and gazed down at her.

“Don’t even pretend you can turn anything around that fast,” she said. “You have to send them to Quantico, and then it will probably take weeks.”

“We need them for the case record.”

“You can have them back as soon as we’re finished. You can even run them again yourself, but in the meantime, you might have a lead.”

She watched him consider what she was offering, and she knew he felt tempted. Her time frame blew his out of the water. Problem was, investigators were notoriously controlling when it came to evidence, and she already had the tripod he’d wanted.

“Give me one of them, at least,” she said. “For twenty-four hours.”

She could see him starting to cave as his phone buzzed. He exchanged a few cryptic words with someone—probably Sam—and hung up.

He gazed down at her and sighed. “One casing, but I’m going to need it back.”

“Fine.”

“And I have to drive you home now. Sam needs me at the crime scene.”

Her stomach clenched. “The apartment’s a crime scene?”

“By the looks of things, yeah.”

Goran Mladovic eyed the FBI vehicle parked outside his house with annoyance. Not that he minded being
under investigation. He’d been dealing with that for years, and Matt Cabrera’s task force didn’t know its ass from its elbow. It was the agents themselves he found insulting. Cabrera had sent two rookies—including a woman—to conduct surveillance on him only hours after he’d made a major play.

Goran’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he read an incoming message from an untraceable e-mail account.

Delivery complete
.

He went to his bar and poured two fingers of vodka. Tonight he should celebrate. Only February, and it was already shaping up to be his best year yet, and the problem that had cropped up last spring was about to get solved, permanently. Soon he would be back in business and well on his way to making seven figures this quarter alone.

Goran tipped back his Stoli. Not bad for an inner-city kid who’d grown up on powdered milk and Beanee Weenees.

For the first time in a very long while, he thought of his parents, who still lived in a tiny Chicago apartment that smelled like boiled cabbage. It was an unpleasant place, where Goran had spent an unpleasant childhood. Having a mother and a father with Russian-sounding accents during the Cold War had not been easy. His parents knew English, but his father would lapse into Serbian during his drinking binges, and Goran would end up on the back steps of their four-story building, nursing his bruises and listening to his parents scream at each other through windows opened to relieve the sweltering summer heat. During those miserable afternoons, Goran dreamed of one thing: an air-conditioning
unit so that his family could keep the windows shut and prevent the entire building from knowing the extent of their dysfunction.

Goran walked through the hallway now and adjusted the thermostat to sixty-two. Never mind that it was forty-six degrees outside, and he could have opened a window. No one opened windows in his house. Ever. The temperature didn’t fluctuate unless he wanted it to. No one besides himself, not even his wife, was authorized to touch the thermostat.

He took his drink and settled into his favorite chair to watch the basketball game. The Devils looked strong, possibly even strong enough to win the whole thing. Another reason to celebrate.

Goran had landed a scholarship to Duke, where his natural intelligence and his striking blue eyes had made both the grades and the women come easy. He’d been denied admittance to Harvard Medical School, but his acceptance at UTMB had turned out to be a stroke of luck that would result in more wealth than he ever could have imagined. What the Texas med school lacked in Ivy League prestige, it made up for in location.
Geography is destiny
. He’d read that somewhere once, and it turned out to be true, as the pinko kid from Chicago started practicing medicine in the Lone Star State.

By the time Goran had finished his residency, he was married, in debt, and supremely motivated to get to the earning phase of his career. Rather than waste his time on a narrow specialty, he’d gone straight into general practice, which was sufficiently flexible to suit his ambitions. By twenty-eight, he was already implementing his master plan to achieve his two principal objectives:
money and power. It wouldn’t take him long to realize that they were one and the same.

Goran had set up a clinic in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Antonio and immediately started seeing the sort of traffic he was looking for: housewives with tennis elbow, husbands with erectile dysfunction, everyone with tension headaches and lower back pain. He’d kept his calendar booked, even when it wasn’t, and made sure anyone who called, no matter how desperate, waited at least a week for an appointment. Slowly but surely, he had developed a reputation for being expensive but free with his prescription pad. It wasn’t long before the myth became reality and then exceeded it, and he was making money hand over fist by providing in-house scripts for a long list of patients who waited days and often weeks for a fifteen-minute office visit.

But then the feds had started nosing around, and the game was up. Temporarily.

Growing up poor had taught him to be resourceful, though, and it didn’t take him long to circumvent not only the state medical board but also the federal investigators who had begun sniffing around his practice. With the help of a marginally intelligent attorney, Goran had restructured his business and managed not to lose a single patient. In fact, he’d gained hundreds.

He took out his phone now and composed an e-mail. He would handle things personally this time, and there would be no mistakes. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being afraid to get his hands dirty.

The address listed on Volansky’s driver’s license was about what Brian expected, with a few unpleasant surprises. He stepped through the front door of the apartment unit for the second time that night and traded his shoes for paper booties.

“I talked to the landlord,” he told Sam, who was standing beside a sliding glass door and watching a crime-scene tech dust for prints. It was one of the few places to dust, as the unit was nearly empty.

“Where’d you find him?” Sam asked.

“Called the number posted at the front office. Turns out he lives on the premises.”

Sam lifted an eyebrow.

“Don’t get excited. He doesn’t know much. Or so he claims. Says the tenant in this unit wasn’t around a lot. Says he leased the place fifteen months ago and paid a year’s worth of rent in cash—”

“Cash?”

“Yep. And he was back the first week of January to pay this year’s.”

“You ask to see the lease application?”

“He thumbed through the files, says he must have ‘misplaced’ it. My guess is he pocketed some money not to get one in the first place.”

“Don’t nobody know nothin’ about nothin’,” Sam said.

“And he was jumpy as hell, which tells me he at least has some idea his tenant’s got something going on here.”

Brian glanced around, more carefully this time. The only furniture in the apartment consisted of a sofa, a plastic patio chair, and a big-screen TV in the corner of the living area. The bedroom didn’t have a bed, and the fridge was completely empty. Brian had checked.

“You get a look at what this guy bought at the gas station earlier?” Sam asked him.

“A six-pack of beer. Why?”

“Anything else?”

“Probably cigarettes. He lit up as soon as he exited the store.”

“We need the brand.” Sam nodded at the small patio on the other side of the door. “There are some butts out there, all Marlboro Reds. We need to find out if they belong to Vlad or one of his buddies. Maybe we’ll even get lucky and find one that belongs to Mladovic.”

Highly doubtful, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. Brian pulled out his phone and scrolled through three separate messages he’d just received from Maddie, all with photographs attached.

“Maddie got a picture of the SUV’s interior,” Brian said. “Looks like a six-pack of Bud on the seat, but I don’t see a carton of smokes. Maybe he only bought a pack.”

“Brian? Sam? You guys need to look at this.”

He turned to see Elizabeth LeBlanc standing in the foyer. The agent was even newer to the job than Brian, but they’d brought her along in the unlikely event that they found Jolene Murphy alive.

Brian braced himself as he followed her down the short hallway leading to the bathroom. It smelled like a litter box. A crime-scene tech was crouched beside the bathtub.

“Check out these marks,” Elizabeth said.

Brian studied the side of the tub. “What’s that from, a hammer?”

“Probably a hammer, maybe a mallet,” the CSI said. She turned and pointed to the drainpipe under the sink. “We’ve also got some scratches here on the pipe. I can’t say for sure, but they could be from handcuffs.”

“Any idea how old those bloodstains are?” Sam asked.