Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (2 page)

He didn’t have to see this
building’s entrance to know that very few of the people who worked
here would be heading home on time tonight. The address was 935
Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest. It was the J. Edgar Hoover Building,
headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. Other
than the teams of special agents who had departed an hour earlier
for Lincoln, Nebraska, many of the Bureau’s personnel here at
headquarters wouldn’t leave until sometime tomorrow. Some would be
sleeping in their offices and cubicles after exhaustion finally
overtook them, and wouldn’t go home for more than a few hours over
the next several days.

A special agent had been brutally
murdered, and with the addition of another name to the list of the
FBI’s Service Martyrs, every resource the Bureau could bring to
bear was being focused on bringing his killer to justice. Special
agents from headquarters and field offices around the country were
headed to Nebraska, along with an army of analysts and support
staff that was already sifting through electronic data looking for
leads.

Everyone had a part in the
investigation, it seemed, except for Dawson. In his hand, he held a
plain manila folder that included the information that had been
forwarded by the Lincoln field office. It was a preliminary report
sent in by the Special Agent in Charge (SAC), summarizing the few
known facts of the case. In terse prose, the SAC’s report described
the crime scene, the victim, and what had been done by the local
authorities before the SAC’s office had been alerted. And there
were photos. Lots of photos. If a picture was worth a thousand
words, then the ones Dawson held in his shaking hands spoke volumes
about the agony suffered by the victim before he died. Because it
was clear from the rictus of agony and terror frozen on Sheldon
Crane’s face that he had still been alive when–

“I’m sorry, Jack,” came a gruff
voice from behind him, interrupting Dawson’s morbid train of
thought as Ray Clement, Assistant Director of the Criminal
Investigative Division, came in and closed the door. It was his
office, and he had ordered Dawson to wait there until he had a
chance to speak with him.

Ray Clement was a bear of a man with
a personality to match. A star football player from the University
of Alabama’s Crimson Tide, Clement had actually turned down a
chance to go pro, and had instead joined the FBI as a special
agent. That had been his dream since the age of ten, as he had once
told Jack, and the proudest moment of his life had been when he’d
earned his badge. Jack knew that a lot of people might have thought
Clement was crazy. “I loved football,” Clement would say, “and I
still do. But I played it because I enjoyed it. I never planned to
do it for a living.”

Over the years, Clement had worked
his way up through the Bureau. He was savvy enough to survive the
internal politics, smart and tough enough to excel in the field,
and conformed to the system because he believed in it. He could be
a real bastard when someone did something stupid, but otherwise
worked tirelessly to support his people so they could do their
jobs. He wasn’t a boss that any of his special agents would say
they loved, but under his tenure, the Criminal Investigative
Division, or CID, had successfully closed more cases than under any
other assistant director in the previous fifteen years. People
could say what they wanted, but Clement got results.

When he had first taken over the
division, Clement had taken the time to talk to each and every one
of his special agents. He had been up front about why: he wanted to
know at least a little bit, more than just the names, about the men
and women who risked their lives every day for the American
Taxpayer. They were special agents, he’d said, but they were also
special human beings.

Jack had dreaded the interview.
Whereas Clement could have been the FBI’s poster child, Jack didn’t
quite fit the mold. He was like a nail head sticking up from the
perfectly polished surface of a hardwood floor, not enough to snag
on anything, just enough to notice. Outwardly, he was no different
than most of his peers. He dressed the same as most special agents,
eschewing a suit for more practical and casual attire for all but
the most formal occasions. His well-muscled six foot, one inch tall
body was far more comfortable in jeans and a pullover shirt, with a
light jacket to conceal his primary weapon, a standard
service-issue Glock 22. While he had no problems voicing his
opinions, which had sometimes led to respectful but intense
discussions with his superiors, he had never been a discipline
problem. He was highly competent in the field, and was a whiz at
data analysis. At first glance, he seemed like what he should be:
an outstanding special agent who worked hard and had great career
prospects.

But under the shiny veneer ran a
deep vein of dark emptiness. Jack smiled, but it never seemed to
reach his eyes, and he rarely laughed. He was not cold-hearted, for
he had often displayed uncommon compassion toward others,
especially the victims, and their families, of the crimes he was
sent to investigate. But he had no social life to speak of, no
significant other in his life, and there were very few people who
understood the extent of the pain that lay at Jack’s
core.

That pain had its roots in events
that took place seven years earlier, when Jack was serving in the
Army in Afghanistan. His patrol had been ambushed by the Taliban
and had taken heavy casualties before reinforcements arrived. Jack
had been badly wounded, having taken two rounds from an AK-47 in
the chest, along with shrapnel from a grenade. The latter had left
its mark on his otherwise handsome face, a jagged scar marring his
left cheek. That had been rough, but he was young, only twenty-six,
and strong, and would make a full recovery from his
wounds.

What had torn him apart was what
happened back in the States. While he lay unconscious in the SSG
Heath N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital in Bagram, his wife Emily was
kidnapped while leaving a shopping mall not far from their home
outside Fort Drum, New York. Emily had her own home business, and
they had no children, so no one immediately noticed that she’d gone
missing. Four days passed before a persistent Red Cross worker who
had been trying to get in touch with Emily about Jack’s injuries
contacted the provost marshal at Fort Drum. Two military policemen
went to the house, and when they found it empty, they contacted the
local police.

The police located her car that same
day: the mall’s security center had ordered it towed away after it
had sat in the parking lot overnight, reporting it to the police as
abandoned. The next day, the fifth since she had disappeared,
police investigators found footage on one of the mall security
cameras that vividly showed what had happened to her. A man stepped
around the back of a nondescript van as she had walked by, laden
with shopping bags. With a casual glance around to see if there
were any witnesses, he turned as she passed and jabbed her in the
back with a stun gun. Scooping her up in one smooth motion, he
dumped her into the van through the already open side door, and
then collected up the bags that had fallen to the ground. He didn’t
rush, didn’t hurry as he threw the bags into the van. Then he
climbed into the back and slammed the door closed. After a few
minutes the van backed out of the space and drove away.

It had all happened in broad
daylight.

Because it was clearly a kidnapping
and so much time had passed since the crime had been committed, the
local authorities contacted the FBI.

That was when Jack learned of his
wife’s disappearance. Immobilized in the hospital bed, still in a
great deal of pain, he was paid a visit by his grim-faced commander
and a civilian woman who introduced herself as an FBI special
agent. His commander told him what had happened, and over the next
three hours the FBI agent gathered every detail that Jack could
remember about his wife’s activities, associations, family and
friends. Everything about her life that he could think of that
might help track down her kidnapper. It had been the three most
agonizing hours of his life. The special agent had assured him that
everything was being done to find his wife and bring her back
safely. Jack prayed that they would find her alive, but in his
heart he knew she was gone.

His intuition proved brutally
prophetic. Her body was found a week later, buried under bags of
trash in a dumpster behind a strip mall in Cleveland, Ohio. She had
been repeatedly raped and beaten before she’d finally been
strangled to death. The FBI and law enforcement authorities in Ohio
did everything they could to find her killer, but he had covered
his tracks well and was never found.

When Jack was well enough to travel,
the Army arranged for him to be flown home, where one of his first
duties had been to formally identify Emily’s battered, broken body.
He had seen his share of horrors in Afghanistan, and some might
think it would have made the trauma of viewing her body somewhat
easier. It hadn’t. Thankfully, the family lawyer, an old friend of
his parents, who themselves had died in a car wreck a year before
Jack had gone to Afghanistan, had made all the necessary
arrangements for her burial. Jack simply had to endure the agony of
laying her to rest.

After the funeral, Jack had found
himself at a loss. His time in the Army was nearly up, and he was
tempted to simply lapse into an emotional coma to shut off the pain
and the nightmares of Emily’s tortured face.

But a cold flame of rage burned in
his core at what had happened to her, and the bastard who had done
it. He found himself sitting in the kitchen one morning, holding
the business card of the female special agent who had interviewed
him in Bagram. As if his body was acting of its own accord, he
found himself picking up the phone and dialing the woman’s number.
The conversation that followed was the first step on the path that
eventually led him to become a special agent in the FBI.

She had tried to dissuade him,
warning him that he wasn’t going to find answers, or vengeance, to
Emily’s death. In truth, while the thought of finding her killer
was more than appealing, he realized from the beginning that
avenging Emily wasn’t what was pulling him toward the Bureau: it
was the thought that he might be able to help prevent what had
happened to her from happening to others.

When he got to the FBI Academy, one
of his fellow agents was Sheldon Crane. Sheldon had an
irrepressible sense of humor, and immediately glued himself to
Jack. At first, Jack had resented the unwanted attention, but
Sheldon had gradually worn through Jack’s emotional armor,
eventually becoming the Yin to Jack’s Yang. Sheldon was a
self-proclaimed computer genius, recruited to work in the Bureau’s
Cyber Division, while Jack’s skills in intelligence analysis and
experience in combat made him a good candidate for the Criminal
Investigative Division.

Jack had done well in CID, but
remained an outsider, something of a mystery to his fellow agents.
Most of his supervisors knew his background and were content to let
it be, but when Clement took over and began his interviews, Jack
had heard that he could be very pointed in his questions. Jack
didn’t want to be interrogated again about his experience in
Afghanistan or Emily’s murder. He didn’t want anyone’s sympathy. He
just wanted to move on.

Clement had completely surprised
him. He didn’t talk or want to know about anything related to
Jack’s past or his work. Instead, he asked questions about Jack as
a person outside of the Bureau, what he liked to do in his free
time, his personal likes and dislikes. At first, Jack had been
extremely uncomfortable, but after a while he found himself opening
up. Clement talked to him for a full hour and a half. When they
were through, Jack actually found himself laughing at one of
Clement’s notoriously bad jokes.

After that, while Jack couldn’t
quite call Clement a friend, he had certainly become a confidant
and someone he felt he could really talk to when the need
arose.

Now was certainly one of those
times.

Clement walked across the office
toward Jack, but stopped when his eyes fell on the folder Jack
clutched in one hand. “Dammit, don’t you know any better than to
grab files off my desk, Special Agent Dawson?”

“Yes, sir,” Dawson told him. “I took
it from your secretary’s desk.”

“Lord,” Clement muttered as he moved
up to Dawson. Putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, he said
again, “I’m sorry, Jack. I’d hoped to have a chance to talk to you
before you saw anything in that file.” With a gentle squeeze of his
massive hand, he let go, then sat down behind his desk.
“Sit.”

Reluctantly, still clutching the
folder containing the professional analysis of Sheldon Crane’s last
moments alive, Jack did as he was told, dropping into one of the
chairs arrayed around a small conference table before turning to
face his boss.

“Why aren’t you letting me go out
with the teams to Lincoln?” he asked before Clement could say
anything else.

“Do you really
have to ask that?” his boss said pointedly. “Look at yourself,
Jack. You’re an emotional wreck. I’m not going to endanger an
investigation by having someone who isn’t operating at full
capacity on the case.” He raised a hand as Jack began to protest.
“Don’t start arguing,” he said. “Look, Jack, I’ve lost close
friends, too. I know how much it can tear you up inside. But you’re
not going to do Sheldon any favors now by screwing things up in the
field because you’re emotionally involved. I promise you,
we will not rest
until
we’ve found his killer.”