In Hot Pursuit Page 11

  The masked man was standing less than three feet away. She’d seen his reflection in the stainless steel toaster on the counter in front of her, and had spun around quickly to confront him. Her first instinct had been to reach for her gun, but it was too far away for her to get her hand on it. She tossed what was left of the wine in his face, instead, and shoved him backwards. He ended up against the granite counter, and lost his balance for a second. He found his footing again and pounced at her.

  He grabbed onto her left arm and tried to put it behind her back, but she pushed

  back hard, sending him head first into the counter, the impact spinning him around. She didn’t wait—she jammed her left knee forcefully into his groin, and her hands reached up for his neck to choke the life out of him. He was a big man, but she got him in a choke hold long enough to rip off the black ski mask on his face. She tossed it to the floor, and applied pressure around his neck.

  He was stronger than she thought. He tried to wrestle out of her grip. He lifted her slim frame off the floor as she held onto him and swung her around a couple times. He eventually managed to get her on to the floor. He fell first, and she went down with him, landing hard against his muscled body. She let go of his neck then, and rolled away from him.

  She tired to scramble to her feet to get her gun, but he got to her. His hands clamped around one of her feet, and he tried to pull her back to the floor with him. She kicked him in the face, the tip of her high heels landing squarely into his cheekbone, piercing through the skin just below his eyes. He released her feet, then, and she rushed for the gun.

  She turned and shot him twice in the right leg, just below the knee, where she was certain he wouldn’t bleed out. She didn’t want to kill him, at least not yet. He screamed, and his eyes went down to his bloodied leg. There was intense fury in his dark eyes when he stared up at her.

  “Bitch!” he yelled at her. “You shot me!” He pressed one of his hands over the

  wounds to stop the bleeding.

  She met his eyes. “And I will do it again, but this time I will definitely shoot to

  kill. Get up!” She held the gun on him.

  He looked at her and held his injured leg.

  “How the fuck do you expect me to stand? You broke my fucking leg!”

  “Get up against the wall! Don’t let me tell you again! Over there!” She pointed

  the gun in a corner of the large kitchen next to the door.

  He dragged himself up and over to the wall and leaned on it. He gave her an infuriated look. She moved closer to get a better look of his face. He was a heavy-set Hispanic man, in his late to early forties with a tear-drop tattoo on his cheek. A deep, ugly scar ran down the side of his face. Probably from a knife brawl, she thought.

  “How did you get in here?”

  He looked at her and smirked, showing his cigarette stained teeth.

  “I don’t have to tell you shit!” His full lips parted in another angry snarl.

  “You are right—you don’t have to tell me shit!” She took menacing steps towards him. “But you are going to tell me shit, starting with the name of the person who sent you here.” She pressed the tip of the gun into his chest. “I know this isn’t some random robbery—you bypass the alarm system to get into the house—a dumb ass like you couldn’t have done that without help.”

  He looked at her and laughed. He couldn’t hide the smoldering look on his face.

  “As I said, bitch, I ain’t telling you shit!”

  “Want to bet.” She took slow deliberate steps back from him.

  He gave her a guarded look and laughed some more.

  “What are you going to do—kill me!” He taunted her. “You are a cop—I know you wouldn’t kill me in cold blood. They will look at the cameras you have in here and know that I was unarmed the whole time. Besides, if you kill me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything.” He raised his head and laughed loudly. “Dead man tells no tale—yes!”

  Bowles gave him a calm look. “You are right. I’m not going to kill you, but I will do something even better.”

  She aimed for his leg, and shot him again, where she had shot him the first time,

  and again in the left shoulder. She made sure the bullet didn’t go in.

  He fell to the floor screaming as blood spurted from his wounds.

  “Ahh! Ahh! Shit! Crazy bitch! I will kill you for this! Bitch!”

  He squirmed around on the floor and swore at her.

  She moved in closer and stood over him. “I would watch my language if I were you.” She took a shot at his foot again, missing it by mere inches, just as she intended. “Who are you working for? Who paid you to come after me?”

  He turned on his side, and there was a nasty scowl on his flustered face when he

  glanced up at her.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. We can do this some place else. On your feet!” She stepped back and held the gun on him.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Get on your feet!”

  “Go to hell!” He turned away from her.

  She saw his hands going around the back of his jeans to reach for the gun he had tucked there. She didn’t give him the chance to bring it around.

  She lowered the gun and shot him between the eyes.

  The gun fell from his hand, and she moved in quickly to kick it away from his body. He was bleeding out quickly—blood oozing out of him, gathering into a large pool around his body. She bent down and felt for a pulse in his neck, even though she knew he was already dead. It was something she did by habit—better safe than sorry. She stepped over his body and went to the kitchen sink to get a towel to wipe the blood splatter off her face.

  She was wearing a white blouse and the blood was already soaking into it. She wet the dish towel and pressed it against the front. Then she unbuttoned the front, took it off and tossed it into the garbage bin. She removed the plastic bag and tied it. She reached for the blazer she had left on the back of the chair and slipped her

  arms into it, and buttoned the front. She took one of the gloves she usually used to

  wash the pots from under the kitchen counter and put it on.

  The gun was lying next to the fridge where she had kicked it. She bent and took it up, and looked at it. She had seen it before. She didn’t need ballistics to tell her that it belonged to Earnes. She gave it another discerning look and dropped it into the Ziploc freezer bag she had pulled from one of the drawers and sealed it shut. Earnes had reported the gun stolen from the glove compartment of his Bronco about a month ago.

  What was this guy doing with it? He wasn’t some random thief who was coincidentally robbing her house with Earnes’ gun. If Earnes was indeed working for Raybourne, and was trying to kill her she would find out, and she would personally deal with him. She took the gun and headed down to the basement to put it in the secret safe she had in the broiler room. She went upstairs after to erase the security footage.

  She placed the call to Dr. Bailey’s secured line on her way down the stairs. She went over the crime scene a second time to make sure she hadn’t missed anything she didn’t want the team to know about. She knew he hadn’t shot the gun so she didn’t have to worry about looking for shell casings or bullets holes in the wall. She left him the way he was, switched off the light in the kitchen and went back upstairs to take a quick shower, and to get rid of her blood stained clothes.

  Dr. Bailey and the team were already in the house when she stepped out of the

  shower and came down the stairs.

  “Agent Bowles, are you okay?” He was at her side the moment she walked into the kitchen.

  “I’m fine. Unfortunately, he isn’t.” She glanced down at the dead man.

  “What happened here?”

  “He was waiting for me when I came into the house.”

  She gave him a very brief version.

  “Well I’m glad that you are alright, and that it’s him l
ying there on the floor. Do you know how he got in?”

  Bailey glanced at the back door that led into the kitchen, thinking that it was where he came in from.

  “He probably smashed one of the windows in the basement and made his way in from there. I haven’t gone down to check.”

  “What about the alarm system—didn’t it go off?”

  “It was activated when I came in. I disarmed it.”

  “The scoundrel must have bypassed it somehow. Do you think he’s one of Raybourne’s men?”

  “There is no doubt about it.” She avoided his eyes. She didn’t think she should bring up her suspicions about Earnes, not until she could be sure. “We will take

  him back to the morgue and find out all we can about him.”

  “I don’t think he wanted to kill me,” Bowles told him. “I think he was trying to

  subdued me. He planned on taking me out of here.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “No. I didn’t see one. If he had one, he probably left it in his car somewhere.”

  Dr. Bailey peered at her. She looked away. He probably didn’t believe her, she thought. Well, too bad, she wasn’t going to tell him more than she had to.

  He glanced down at the man and shook his head. “I would think that someone

  like him would carry one with him at all times. It’s very usual for a criminal like him to do something like this without one. Surely he must have known that you are law enforcement, and what would happen to him if you caught him here.”

  “I guess he didn’t think that far ahead,” Bowles told him casually and moved away. She wasn’t going to hand over the gun to him. She was going to run tests on it herself.

  “He didn’t need a gun.” Hendrick told them. “Not when he had these.” He produced a large bundle of rope, a bottle of chloroform, and an oversized blanket. “They were sitting next to the door in the basement.”

  They looked at the things in Hendrick’s hands, and exchanged disturbed glances.

  “He meant to drug you, and carry you out of here.” Dr. Bailey concluded. He

  reached for the bottle, popped the cork off, and took a quick whiff. “It’s chloroform alright. I thought Mr. Raybourne would have been smart enough to keep out of sight. Okay, Agent Bowles, we will get him out of here. Did you get anything out of him, at least?”

  “No, nothing. He refused to talk.”

  “And no bullets were fired except from your gun.”

  “Correct. All of the bullets are from my weapon,” she confirmed quickly.

  “Very well then. He got exactly what he deserved.”

  Hendrick appeared with a black body bag, and he helped Dr. Bailey lowered the body into it.

  They heard a small commotion at the front door soon after.

  “Gabb, darling, honey, where are you? Honey!”

  “It’s Kirk.” She gave Dr. Bailey an anxious look. “We can’t let him see this. I have to get him out of here.”

  She hurried towards the foyer. One of the agents was holding Kirk back at the door.

  “Gabb, honey, are you okay?” He broke free and rushed towards her. “You are not hurt, are you?” He peered into her face with a worried frown.

  “No, I’m fine,” she told him calmly, wishing that he wasn’t here.

  He took her by the arm and searched her face. “Thank god you are okay. What’s

  going on here? Those agents won’t tell me anything.”

  “Some one broke into the house,” she told him coolly.

  “What! You arrested him, right! Where’s he—where’s the bastard!” He made an attempt to get pass her to go into the house.

  She held him back.

  “It’s okay. We already have him in custody,” she told him, feeling she didn’t have to go into more details, or say more.

  He wouldn’t understand, and quite frankly, the less he knew about her job and what she had just done, the better. She didn’t want him to get caught up in any of this either—this was between her and Raybourne, and whoever was working for him, Earnes included. And she knew Raybourne wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, if it meant getting back at her.

  “Wasn’t the alarm on?”

  “It was, but he didn’t trigger it.”

  A deep frown appeared on Kirk’s handsome face. “I don’t understand—we just upgraded it last month. It’s supposed to protect us from something like this, and from people like him.”

  “We got him,” she told him. “There’s no way he would be coming back here. He won’t be robbing anyone’s house for a while.” She held onto his hand and steered him back to the front door.

  “Does that mean he’s going to jail?”

  “Let’s say he’s going away for a very, very long time.” She turned and gave him a small smile. “How about some dinner?”

  “Yeah, sure, but I don’t think I can eat anything after this,” he told her, glancing

  back over his shoulders.

  “That’s fine. We will sit and enjoy each other’s company over a glass of red wine. We haven’t had one of those in a long time. I know a great place.” She smiled widely at him.

  Kirk wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

  “Sure, let’s go.”

  Bowles reached for her coat and bag, and walked out the door, her arm linked comfortably through her fiancé’s.

  Chapter 7

  “Take a look at these. I think you will find them intriguing.” Director Nilsson pushed a stack of photographs across the large desk. “Does anything strike you as unusual there? Take your time and compare the two.” He sat back in the chair and waited with keen interest.

  Bowles and Earnes reached for the two piles of blown up photographs, and took turn looking through them, going back and forth between the two pile, comparing the enlarged ones, with the smaller photos that were pasted into the passports.

  “They all look like the same people to me.” Earnes finally decided.

  “Yeah, they do,” Bowles agreed with him. “It’s hard to tell the difference.”

  “You are both right. They are identical, but they aren’t the same people. The photographs of those dead men are a dead ringer for the ones in the passports, but they are not the same people. They appear to look alike, but I assure you they aren’t.”

  Bowles and Earnes exchanged surprised glances.

  “Identify theft?” Earnes offered.

  “They do look alike—and if they are not the same people, do you think they had

  plastic surgery to alter their features?” Bowles inquired. “The mafia used to do it.”

  Director Nilsson took the files back and dropped them onto the stack next to him.

  “It’s possible, but I doubt they would do it to all of those men. They would need a lot of surgeries and a couple good plastic surgeons to help them. But what I do know, is that every effort had been made to make those individuals look alike. It’s my bet that those people were hunted down and murdered for their identities.”

  “You don’t think Raybourne recruited them?”

  “He may have, Agent Earnes, but clearly under false pretense. Do you think those individuals would have gladly offered themselves up to be murdered? I don’t think so. He couldn’t keep them around when he was using their identities. That would have certainly complicated things for him. Those men and women were chosen because of who they were, but more importantly, for what they looked like. Raybourne made sure they had the same nationality as the ones in the passports. It’s identity theft alright, but on a more sophisticated level. These people didn’t just have their identities stolen, but I suspect they were killed for them as well.”

  “Were the authorities able to recover any of the bodies?” Earnes eyes went back to the pile of photographs.

  “Not as far as we can tell. We haven’t been able to check them against the data base of missing and murdered people yet. Maybe no one reported them missing. And we remember we just became aware of this.”

  Bowles reach
ed for the photos again. She took time to scrutinize the unfamiliar faces. “South Asian, Chinese, Russian, Afghani, Middle Eastern, North African—quite an impressive mix.” She dropped the photograph back onto the desk as she went through each one of them.

  Director Nilsson shook his head in agreement. “Those countries are all hot beds for ISIS, the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

  “What about the Chinese and Russians?” Earnes pointed to the photos he had separated from the pile. “How did those get in there with the terrorists?”

  “They are probably members of organized crimes,” Dr. Nilsson informed him. “The Chinese and Russians are willing to pay whatever it takes to get them what they want. We have seen cases of them, especially the Russians trying to smuggle their people into the country, including young women to work as prostitutes and strippers at their clubs. We haven’t found any evidence tying them to Islamic extremists.”

  Earnes sat back in his chair. “Raybourne goes where ever the millions take him—the Chinese and Russian make millions smuggling drugs and women into the country, and across state lines. I guess Raybourne wants a cut of what they make.”

  “Where did you get those, sir? I couldn’t recall those photographs being in any of the evidence we seized.” Bowles pointed out.

  “They were some of the material we downloaded from the two chips we found on

  Mr. Al-Bishi’s.”

  Incredulous looks appeared on Earnes’ and Bowles’ faces.

  “He had a chip on him?” Bowles was first to asked.

  “As a matter of fact, two, each one embedded in his waist and arm. My guess is

  that he planted them there himself. He was hiding them from Raybourne. It brought him some time too—as long as Raybourne couldn’t get his hands on those chips, Mr. Al-Bishi had a good chance of staying alive. Raybourne probably discovered Mr. Al-Bishi had downloaded some sensitive information about him and wanted it back. It explains why he was repeatedly beaten and starved. They wanted him to tell them where they were.”