Killer Instinct (Instinct #2)(9)

Then there were those quirks. The meticulousness—everything in front of Elizabeth always had to be neat and tidy and perfectly lined up. She loved pizza but hated tomatoes. She barely made any noise when she sneezed. Oh, and she could sing the alphabet backward as if singing it forward. I’ve tried and tried and I still can’t do it.

But above and beyond all that was the one fact that doubled as a quirk. Elizabeth absolutely, positively lived for working cases.

So nothing piqued her interest more than something that might help her solve one. On her phone right then had come something—I could tell—and all it took was that single little word.

“Huh,” she’d said.





CHAPTER 10


“WHAT IS it?” I asked.

I could practically read her mind as she was quickly deciding how to answer. On the one hand, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was like Las Vegas—what happens there, stays there. She couldn’t discuss anything specific involving her unit. Those were the rules.

On the other hand, it was me who was doing the asking. I’d trusted her with my CIA past. The CIA was like Vegas even before Vegas was like Vegas. I’d even introduced her to the Byrdman—Julian Byrd—the J. D. Salinger of hackers in terms of reclusiveness. Vladimir Putin would kill to know how to find him. Literally. After all, Putin’s foreign bank accounts and cryptocurrency holdings didn’t magically disappear by themselves after the Russians meddled with our elections. Payback is a bitch. Huh, Vladdy?

Of course, even if Elizabeth was fine telling me, there was still the issue of Tracy being at the table. Then again, Tracy had been the first to insist she stay with us while waiting out the news vans surrounding her apartment building. She was our guest. Plus, who was he really going to tell?

“Ah, screw it,” said Elizabeth.

After another swig of Johnnie Black, she told us about her trip up to Boston and the first case she’d been assigned to on the Task Force. Or rather, “this so-called case.” She clearly wasn’t happy about it.

An Iranian-born professor at MIT, a nuclear physicist, had died accidentally during an act of self-love gone awry. That’s a very polite way of saying that he suffered a heart attack with a tiny liquor bottle inside him where the sun doesn’t shine.

“So, what exactly are you investigating?” asked Tracy.

“I’m not sure,” said Elizabeth. “My new boss—who hates me, by the way—said that no two words make him twitch more than Iranian and nuclear. So when an Iranian nuclear physicist suddenly turns up dead, he wants to look into it no matter how certain the police are that it was an accident.”

“And you?” I asked. “How certain are you?”

“This professor had been watching a porno in the hotel room and there was excessive Viagra in his system. He also was on prescription meds—OxyContin and an anti-inflammatory. It’s all embarrassing as hell, especially with his turning that liquor bottle into a sex toy, but it’s not exactly suspicious,” she said. “As for his colleagues and neighbors I interviewed up in Boston, they all said the same thing. Iran was his homeland, but this was his home. The guy loved America. Everything points to him being alone in that hotel room when he died, and given what he was doing, it makes complete sense.”

“So, what’s changed?” I asked, motioning to her phone. “Why the huh?”

“It’s the hotel where the professor was staying. Their surveillance cameras showed him leaving to meet some colleagues for dinner, but they didn’t have any footage of him returning that night. At least they didn’t until now,” she said. “Can I borrow your computer?”

“Here, use mine,” said Tracy, getting up to grab his laptop from the living room. In the meantime, Elizabeth handed me her phone so I could see the text she got.

“It’s from one of the detectives on the case,” she said.

1 mystery solved. Another created.

That was followed by a file number on what was the NYPD’s version of an encrypted Dropbox, a way for cops and detectives to share files securely. Sure, Julian could probably hack into the server with both eyes closed, but that was Julian. The Byrdman was one of a kind.

Elizabeth logged into the site on Tracy’s laptop, glancing up at us before entering her JTTF password. Tracy and I jokingly made a show of covering our eyes to prove we weren’t looking, only to see that Annabelle thought we were playing peekaboo. She covered her eyes, too.

“Here it is,” said Elizabeth, turning the screen so Tracy and I could see. She double-clicked the file. The footage flickered before smoothing out.

“Is that the guy?” asked Tracy, pointing.

“Yeah, that’s him,” said Elizabeth. “Dr. Jahan Darvish.”

The recording was in color, albeit not very crisp. No surprise, as it came from a surveillance camera. Still, we could all clearly see the professor walking through the door of what looked to be a back entrance of the hotel.

He wasn’t alone.

There was a woman clutching his arm. She was wearing a white blouse with a scoop neck, a black skirt, and black high heels. That much we could see.

But the mystery was what we couldn’t see.

“Huh,” I said.





CHAPTER 11


I WAS sure of two things before going to bed. One, the sun would rise in the morning. Two, life would go on.