Page 52 of The Secrets We Hide
Still, Jude ran her fingers inside the door pockets. Checked the plastic indentations in the armrests. She opened the center console. Found a pack of gum and a black case with a pair of sunglasses. She studied the console’s plastic liner. Someone had wiped it clean, but there was a fine yellow dust caked into the crevices. You’d need a toothpick or some kind of scraper to get it out.
Cole was returning his phone to his pocket when Jude shut the car door. He said, “The only calls to 911 were after the shooting. Nothing from Mandy or Allison.”
“Dr. Archer?” Sherry was coming down the porch stairs.
Jude told Cole, “Check across the street. Make sure Darla Bell didn’t see any other cars parked in the driveway in the last few weeks.”
He saluted before jogging off.
Sherry didn’t speak until she was close enough to Jude for privacy. “The Glock belongs to Allison.”
Jude wasn’t surprised. The Crown Royal bag had been a dead giveaway. “Did you find any cash in the house?”
Sherry gave her a cautious look. “That’s why I came out to find you. We found a blue plastic container with a ton of cash in the attic.”
“FinCEN probably has a paper trail on the withdrawals, but you might be low on their list of investigations. Be sure to tell Emmy as soon as she’s back.”
“You’re not sticking around?”
“The sheriff has this under control.”
“It’s just—” Sherry dithered. “Emmy’s had a hard time of it lately. The way she went after Reggie—”
“You’re right. She should’ve arrested him. But the Clayville Police Department is hands off, right?”
Sherry got the message. “Right.”
Cole was jogging down Darla Bell’s driveway by the time Jude made it into the street. “Coach Bell said she told Mom that Ginny Saddler’s son drove by right before the shooting, but nobody else.”
“Do you know where Ginny lives?”
“Two streets over.”
“We’ll swing by on the way home. We both need to change, and you need to find Ginny’s son. He’s likely our only witness.”
“Are you going to Taybee’s farm?”
“No, I’m meeting an old friend.”
FOUR HOURS AFTER THE SHOOTING
CHAPTER NINE
Jude had been trying her best not to lie to Cole any more than she had to, and technically, it was true that she was meeting an old friend, but she’d left out the details of where the meeting would take place, that the man was an ex-lover, and that she had to travel roughly six hundred miles to ambush him.
With the broad exception of the Pentagon, which had seemingly endless resources both financial and logistical, working for the federal government was an exercise in alphabetized horse-trading. The DEA oftentimes worked with the IRS, who worked with the EPA, who sometimes availed themselves of DHS, who inevitably called in the DOJ to send the FBI to straighten everything out.
Jude had often worked with the United States Marshals Service’s child abduction unit, who coordinated with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit that received funding from the federal government. The USMS’s vast experience with capturing fugitives made them uniquely adept at locating child predators. Though it was the smallest law enforcement agency under the umbrella of the DOJ, tendrils of the USMS reached into every corner of the world through their fugitive-tracking network. Their asset forfeiture program was responsible for auctioning off ill-gotten gains of criminals and their organizations that are seized by the federal government. In other words, the Marshals were the ones who got all the fun toys, from confiscated Lamborghinis to mansions to yachts to private jets.
Which is how Jude had found herself flying to Richmond,Virginia, alongside two armed Marshals and four belly-chained convicted felons on a drug dealer’s gold-encrusted Dassault Falcon 50EX. She’d called a friend at Glynco, the USMS training facility outside Brunswick, Georgia, who had tipped her off to a prisoner transport leaving from Warner Robins Air Force Base, only a thirty-minute drive from North Falls.
A commercial flight to Richmond would’ve necessitated a two-hour drive to Atlanta, then at least an hour at the gate, then another two hours on a plane, then the same math again, but backward. Hitching a ride had managed to cut the travel time in half. It had also been a hell of a lot easier on her body.
Every time Jude let herself forget about the bullet that had come within millimeters of punching a hole in her skull, her aching elbow and throbbing hip reminded her that she’d still taken a hard fall. The hip pain was particularly galling. The closer she got to Medicare eligibility, the more that jokes about joint replacements stopped being funny.
The rental car drive to the north-eastern corner of Prince William County had offered a scenic view of the Potomac River snaking along the eastern boundary of a sprawling military base. Quantico was many things to many people. It was a quaint small town in Virginia a little over half an hour from DC. It was a Marine Corps base. HQ to the investigative branches of the Navy, Army and Air Force. Training academy for the DEA. Home to both the FBI Academy and the FBI laboratory services.
Obviously, Jude had trained at Quantico, but over the years, she’d also served as a guest lecturer and an adjunct to the behavioral sciences unit, which is why her credentials still got her through multiple security gates. There’d been a time in the early 2000s when her textbook on child abductions and kidnappings had been mandatory reading for all NATs, or new agent trainees. When Jude had put in her retirement papers, she’d been offered a teaching job, but instead, she had chosen to return to North Falls to sleep on a lumpy couch and share a bathroom with a charming but messy twenty-three-year-old boy and a forty-two-year-old woman who glowered at her every time she walked into the kitchen.
