Mercy (Atlee Pine #4)(57)

Were the Atkinses running a human trafficking operation? That didn’t seem likely to him. Most times such operators quickly moved their “merchandise” by truck to locations all over the country. They got their full compensation when the product was delivered. This woman looked like she had been a prisoner for a long time. Unless she had been delivered to the Atkinses as a slave.

He looked down at his phone screen where an associate had previously sent him a copy of Eloise Cain’s current driver’s license.

The face that stared out at him seemed carved from granite. There was nothing “happy” about the features. The long dark hair swirled around her shoulders. The photo, not particularly good to begin with, and even grainier as a digital copy, was some years old.

He sipped his drink and made a phone call. Buckley told the man what he wanted done.

Two hours later, through a text, Buckley received copies of the Georgia driver’s licenses for both Joe and Desiree Atkins. Buckley checked the physical descriptions. He was most concerned with height.

Joe Atkins was five five. Desiree was four eleven.

He looked at Cain’s driver’s license. Her height was listed as six one. And in the image he had seen of her on the TV, she looked every inch of it.

Unless a serious genetic aberration had occurred, or there was some ancestor of considerable height lurking in the family tree, Rebecca was probably not the Atkinses’ biological daughter. Height was one of the most predictable genetic traits passed from generation to generation. Short parents typically made for short offspring, the same for tall parents. He looked at the images of the Atkinses on their driver’s licenses. There were no similarities between their features and Rebecca’s, and the hair color, while not decisive, was nowhere close.

So either she was adopted or she’d been abducted and provided to the Atkinses—unless they had done the abducting.

He focused on another aspect of the case. A news article from back then detailing the loss suffered by Leonard and Wanda Atkins, Joe’s parents and Desiree’s in-laws. Buckley reasoned that they had to know about Rebecca. They lived nearby and were the only family Joe had. And they were the only survivors, other than Desiree, mentioned in the news article and the related obituary. The article also said that Leonard Atkins had fought in Vietnam. Buckley checked Len Atkins’s age at the time, which was given in the article, and added on the intervening years. He would be well into his seventies now.

He sent an email with another information request. An hour later he received a reply. It turned out that Atkins was registered with the VA and was getting treatment after having had a stroke. And the reply included his current address. Buckley didn’t know how his associate had obtained this info so fast, but he thought that the VA needed to seriously upgrade its cybersecurity firewalls.

But then don’t we all?

However, this time, he wasn’t complaining.

Buckley was wheels up on his jet in a few hours. When they landed he drove a waiting rental car to a hotel where he had made a reservation. He checked in, went up to his room, and spread his case files out on the desk.

He had some wine from the minibar and pondered what to do next. This was all growing extremely complicated. And intriguing. He opened his laptop and brought the image up. He flicked his finger against Rebecca Atkins’s/El Cain’s picture on the screen.

She would not be easy. He smiled at the challenge.

And since the FBI was now involved, he had a unique asset that he could call on to help him in his quest to find the woman. It was late, but he could always leave a message. He hit the name in his contact list, and a voice answered within two rings.

“Hello, Peter, I trust you have something worthy of me. I’ve been rather bored lately.”

“I do indeed. In fact it has to do with your former employer.”

“The Army or the FBI?”

“The latter,” Buckley replied.

“Excellent, I always love to stick it to the Bureau when given the chance.”

“They’re looking for a woman named Rebecca Atkins, aka Eloise Cain. And so am I.”

“And your interest in her?”

“Entirely personal. She killed my brother, Ken,” said Buckley.

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I can send the jet. Just give me a location and a time.”

“I’m a bit tied up at the moment. Just finishing something up. I can be ready to go tomorrow morning around eight. I’m in DC currently. I can go out to Dulles to catch your ride.”

“All right. They’ll fly out of the Signature Terminal.”

“And where are you?”

“The great state of Alabama.”

“Okay, and what is there of interest to you in the great state of Alabama?”

“I’ll fill you in when you get here,” promised Buckley.

“Private jets are so convenient. I wish I could afford one.”

“Well, you’ll always have the use of mine.”

“Aren’t you sweet. Look, I really have to go. A few things to tidy up, like I said.”

“Right, see you soon, Britt.”

He clicked off.





CHAPTER





38


BRITT SPECTOR PUT HER PHONE AWAY and looked down at the body on the floor. A few minutes ago it was a living, breathing human being. Now she had transformed it into a corpse via a broken neck that would make it look like the very elderly and long-serving and high-ranking congressman had fallen down the stairs of his lovely home, in a stately old neighborhood in northwest DC. The tox report would show that the man had had too much to drink, and was already unsteady on his feet due to some neurological ailments and cognitive debilitation, although he had won his reelection by a landslide. And the forensic trail the fall had left would not suggest foul play, because while she had nudged him down the stairs, it wasn’t enough to change the trajectory of his descent, alerting the police that something was amiss. Then it came down to finishing the job with a slight but classic maneuver on the man’s already extensively damaged vertebra that the Army had taught her. And he had died.