Searching for Cate (23 page)

U
nlike some people she knew, Cate never liked throwing her weight around, never enjoyed being pushy. She only became that way when all else failed.

All else had failed now.

The people she found herself dealing with from the moment she deplaned, both the Americans in charge at the embassy and the Ukrainian agents who had been sent over from Interpol, expected a woman to defer to their authority. She gave the people from the embassy a little slack because of what they had undergone in the past twenty-four hours. As far as she was concerned, the Interpol agents were deserving of no such consideration.

It was as if officials from both groups were determined to keep her on the outside. She was just as determined not to stay there.

Her patience quickly grew short as she tried to gather information as to the events preceding the explosion. In their meandering, conflicting responses, both groups directed their words to the medical examiner she had brought with her.

Until Cate, exasperated, utterly out of patience and afraid that she had already run out of time, assumed the commando persona she'd seen work so well for her father. She became hard as nails.

They had gathered in the section of the embassy that had miraculously escaped any damage. Specifically, in the shaken vice ambassador's quarters. When she once again requested to see Baker's body, the vice ambassador looked at Walter and in a distant voice said, “Perhaps tomorrow we can honor your request if that's all right with you.”

Walter in turn looked at her with miserable watery eyes. He'd already shared his allergy history with her. She had no doubt that the awful smell of smoke, which persisted in hanging in the air, had caused it to kick into high gear.

She didn't have time to offer him her sympathies. Sitting on the edge of her seat, curbing an almost insurmountable desire to tell the four other men in the room just what she thought of their slightly older than eighteenth-century views, Cate took over. “Gentlemen, I would appreciate it if you addressed your answers to my questions to me, not Dr. Phelps. And no, it's not all right if we see the body tomorrow. If you really have found Mr. Baker's body, we need to see it immediately. As in
now,
” she emphasized.

The Interpol agent with breath like rotting garlic
smirked at her. When he spoke, his English was as flawless as his thinking was flawed. “You seem to be very eager to view a dead body, Ms. Kowalski. This passion you have, one could almost interpret it to be a touch of necrophilia.”

If he meant to fluster her, he was going to have to do a lot better than that, she thought. Her eye contact never wavered. “Necrophilia means that I have an erotic attraction to dead bodies. I assure you that all I want to do is make sure that Mr. Baker is really dead.”

The vice ambassador inclined his head, confused. His hand shook as he brought the end of the cigarette he was holding to his lips and dragged in the nicotine. “Why all this interest in one undersecretary? There were a great many more important people hurt in this bombing—” His voice broke. When he looked at her, it was with the eyes of a man who had stared into hell and seen his reflection there. “Why aren't you investigating what happened?”

“There are people on their way to do just that,” she assured him. “But that's not my assignment. My only job is to find Baker, verify his identity and bring him back home.”

The vice ambassador exchanged looks with the rather thin man at his side. She'd been told Lewis Seager ran the embassy. Had he also run something else? she couldn't help wondering.

“Just Baker?” Seager asked.

“Just Baker,” she repeated.

The other Interpol agent hadn't spoken yet. She wasn't even sure if he understood English. Dressed in a suit that should have been on a man one size smaller, he leaned forward and fixed her with a look. “Why?”

Her smile was perfect. And impersonal. “I'm not at liberty to say.”

His partner snickered. “You Americans are tight-lipped.”

“Yes,” Cate agreed. “We are.” Rising to her feet, she looked directly at the vice ambassador. She was aware that Walter got up behind her, ready to move the moment she did. She got the feeling that he would be as relieved to leave this room as she would. “Now, if we may see the body…?”

The vice-ambassador continued sitting in his chair, as if his legs no longer supported him. The cigarette he kept drawing to his lips was almost an ember by this time. He glanced at Seager.

Seager took his cue, stood up and turned on his heel as if he'd been practicing marching all day.

“This way.”

Cate was relieved that the two Interpol agents had elected to remain behind.

 

Cate struggled not to gag. The smell of death was everywhere within the room. Walter, she noted, had no such problem. This was his element. Thank God it wasn't hers. The thought of becoming so anesthetized to the dead appalled her.

There were twelve bodies in the makeshift morgue that had been hastily put together in the basement of the embassy building. Miraculously, it had escaped damage. Seven of the bodies were Americans, the rest were locals working at the embassy.

She was told by Sally Reynolds, the weeping woman who had taken over for Seager, that the locals
were all hoping to someday make the trip across the ocean and see the country for themselves.

“And now they never will,” Sally sobbed, lifting up her rimless glasses and wiping her eyes with a worn, graying handkerchief. “This is Mr. Baker.”

Cate looked at the body. His face was so badly burned, it hardly bore resemblance to a human being. “How do you know?”

Sally's hazel eyes clouded over again. “The ring.” She indicated his left hand. Except for parts of his face, the rest of him had not been burned. Cate leaned closer and saw that the ring in question was a college graduation ring. From Princeton. What a horrible waste of a once-promising life, she thought.

“He was very proud of that ring,” Sally told her.

She left a few minutes after that and Walter got down to work.

Cate's stomach revisited her throat almost immediately. “God, this is a grim business,” she muttered.

Walter looked as if he would start humming at any moment. For the first time since she'd met him, he looked content. Wearing a leather smock over his clothes, his sleeves rolled up, it was obvious that he enjoyed his work.

“Gotta have the stomach for it,” he told her cheerfully.

Cate was already edging her way to the door. There was just too much death in this room to suit her. It was the kind of place that gave her nightmares.

“Well, you obviously do.” Her hand was already on the doorknob. “I'm going to see what I can find out.”

Walter raised his eyes from the corpse on the cafeteria table that had been brought down for them. “You're leaving?”

She didn't want him panicking. “Just going exploring,” she assured him. “I won't be gone long.”

She was almost out the door when Walter's mild voice called her back. “You might want to know that he didn't die in the explosion.”

Everything inside of her went on alert. Care crossed back to the table in long strides. “Talk to me,” she ordered.

“Baker was already dead. Strangled. Obviously no one's going to strangle him after he was burned.” He pointed a gloved finger to the man's neck. “Those are ligature marks.”

Bingo.
“Walter, when we get back to the States, dinner's on me,” she declared happily. “Anything you want. Sky's the limit.”

“Can I bring my wife?”

“You can bring your daughter's basketball team if you want to.”

He regarded her for a second, then shook his head and got back to work. “Never saw anybody so happy about someone being strangled before.”

“Because it just proves to me that we're on the right trail.”

And it also suggested, she added silently as she left the room, that the embassy bombing might
not
have been the act of terrorists, especially since no group had come forward claiming responsibility. She had a very strong feeling that the bombing had been the work
of someone trying to cover up Baker's death. And cover up the trail to the white-slavery ring.

Now all they needed to find out was who had killed Baker.

 

Cate packed as much work into the next few hours as she could. Their return flight was already booked and her time was limited. She talked to everyone from the embassy she could find. The impression she came away with was that no one really paid much attention to Baker. He'd been described as “a little odd” by several of the people who worked directly with him. Even Sally Reynolds agreed with that assessment, albeit reluctantly because the man was dead.

It was Sally who gave her the address to Baker's one-room apartment, located less than a mile from the embassy.

Wanting to avoid unnecessary contact with strangers and the questions of a possibly nosy landlord, Cate used her own “keys” to get into the apartment and pick the lock. When she walked in and closed the door behind her, she wasn't surprised to discover that the small place looked as if it had suffered the ravages of a tornado.

Everything within the apartment had been taken apart and shattered. If there was anything to be found here, it was long gone.

Still, her training required her to search for herself rather than assume the worst. She sifted through everything, looking inside slashed pillows, broken lamps, paging through books whose spines had been broken and that now littered the floor like so many tiny sag
ging pyramids, their pages mashed against the floorboards.

It took her almost two hours to reach the conclusion she'd come to upon entry. There was nothing in the apartment to remotely suggest that the late Brad Baker had ever been involved in a white-slavery ring.

Her cell phone rang, making her jump.

“Where are you?”

The sniff at the end of the question gave the man's identity away. Walter's allergy was going strong.

“On my way back,” she answered. She knew better than to give her location away. Any form of electronic communication could become a party line without notice.

Flipping her cell closed, she turned to walk to the door. Her heel caught on a piece of the comforter that had been dissected. Trying to regain her balance, she dropped her phone. It hit the bare floor beside the bed with a thud.

The sound registered, nudging at a memory, as she picked the phone up.

Why did that sound so familiar?

And then she remembered. When she was a child, she'd had a secret hiding place beneath one of the floorboards under her bed. She kept her diary there, as well as a few assorted “treasures.” The board made the same kind of sound when she knocked on it, which was how she'd been able to locate it in the first place.

Cate's heart was racing.

On her hands and knees, she began to knock on first one length of board, then another, following each well
under the bed as she tried to duplicate the sound she'd heard.

Locating it took time and she kept glancing toward the door, afraid that the landlord might come in for some reason.

And then she heard it, that funny little hollow noise. Cate stopped breathing as she tried to pry the board loose with a butter knife she found on the floor. It came up easily.

“And we have a winner,” she murmured to herself, hardly believing what she was seeing. Beneath the board was a small, narrow hollow space, no more than five inches wide and eight inches long.

Big enough for a small metal box.

She pulled on her last pair of rubber gloves. Her hands shook slightly as she withdrew the box and placed it on the floor beside the opening. There was no lock, as if Baker was arrogant in his belief that no one would find it. And if she hadn't been a little girl with secrets once, no one might have.

She held her breath as she lifted the lid. Inside the box was a small rectangular object that could have passed for a key chain. The inscription 256 MB was faintly scratched across the back. She knew a wealth of data could be stored inside. There were also several photographs and what looked like an address book. Flipping through it, she saw names, dates, amounts, followed by a combination of three different letters on three quarters of the pages. The desire to run back to her hotel room nearly overwhelmed her.

But training won out, forcing her to take out the device she liked to refer to as her spy camera. As quickly
as she could, she photographed the contents of each page. Just in case.

Finished, she deposited what she'd found into her purse. And then she got the hell out of there.

 

The first full breath Cate drew was when her plane touched down at LAX. The entire return flight, she half expected to be hauled back to Kiev by either Ukrainian security or the two men she'd met from the Ukrainian Interpol. While Baker's body was in the cargo area of the plane, the papers he'd undoubtedly believed were his insurance policy were safely with her. She hadn't even mentioned finding them to Walter and no word was sent back to the field office, beyond a confirmation that they were taking the flight back. And that she had news.

Lydia and Sullivan met the plane. One look at Lydia's face as she and Sullivan approached told Cate that the woman somehow sensed that the mission had been a success. As always Sullivan had a poker face.

Lydia looked at her, a hopeful note in her voice as she asked, “We got 'em?”

“We got 'em,” Cate declared. Taking out the sealed envelope that contained everything from her purse, she addressed Sullivan. “This is everything we were looking for. Names, dates, everything,” she repeated. Then almost gleefully added, “Let the dismantling begin.”

Hooking her arm through Cate's, Lydia gave her a quick, warm squeeze. Lukas was right. It didn't matter who did the job, as long as it got done. “I knew you could do it. Just the same, I've been holding my breath the entire time, waiting for something to go wrong.”