Girl One: Murder (A Maya Gray FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1)

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Maya headed into the office as soon as she got off the red-eye. Six AM wasn’t the earliest she’d gone into work, by a long shot. She wanted to get through the paperwork on the Harrow case, and then get started on the backlog of other cases sitting on her desk.

There were always more cold cases, always more families in need of closure.

At this hour of the morning, there was only a skeleton crew in the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, so the lobby was largely empty as she went through the security checks and headed up to the fifth floor.

That should have been even emptier, because this hour of the morning was normally reserved for those parts of the bureau that had time sensitive cases. Maya actually liked being in there alone, in the middle of the vast bullpen of the fifth floor, with no one to distract her.

As she got out of the elevator, though, she saw that she wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea. Maybe three other agents were spread out around the bullpen, working on their cases.

“Gray! What are you doing here this early?”

To her, Harris always looked like someone’s rich uncle, with a suit Maya was sure she couldn’t have afforded, a gold clip holding his tie, and his head shaved to hide the spot where he was balding. His body had a slight softness to it, and his features had a broad openness to them that Maya suspected might make people think he was stupid, but she knew far better than that by now.

“I wanted to get the paperwork done on the Harrow case,” Maya said.

“And start another three cases?” Harris guessed. “My office, Gray. Now.”

There was a sharpness to that order that got her a look of sympathy from a couple of tired looking agents who glanced up from their work at the sound. Maya felt a little like she was being summoned to the principal’s office back at school. That had happened more than a few times. She made her way across the bullpen, to the spot where the door to Harris’s office stood open, waiting for her. Would he be angry about the way the Harrow case had turned out?

The space within had that feel to Maya of somewhere the occupant didn’t intend on moving from anytime soon. She spotted the pictures of Harris’ family set out on the desk, and the pictures hung on the wall of Harris with at least three former Presidents. He’d actually put a hat stand in one corner, in what Maya suspected was a deliberate affectation, from which his tactical jacket was hanging.

“Come in, Gray,” he said, loud enough that Maya was sure it would carry out to the few agents who were there this early. “Shut the door.”

Maya did as she was told and couldn’t stop herself from standing at attention in front of Harris’s desk, like she was about to be court-martialed.

“I know things didn’t exactly work out the way I might have planned in the Harrow case,” Maya began, “but-”

“Oh, don’t bother with all that,” Harris said, in a reassuring tone that seemed completely at odds with the sharpness before. It left Maya wondering precisely what was going on.

“Sir?” Maya said.

“What? You think I’m going to chew you out for catching a murderer?” Harris said, and now he looked amused. “That was just for the benefit of everyone out there, so they don’t think you just get away with taking risks.”

Maya was so relieved, that she almost laughed. She dared to relax a little, although she couldn’t help pointing out the ways that things still weren’t simple. She felt almost as if she was playing Harris’s part in this conversation now.

“We still only have an admission that wasn’t recorded, and a slightly weak alibi,” Maya said.

Harris waved that away. “He attacked an agent, too. That will let us hold him and look closer. He’ll break. Now we know he did it, the evidence will stack up.”

Maya wished that she had his easy confidence about these things. There would still be a lot of details to get right with all this, a lot of traces to follow. Still, she had to hope that she could do it.

“I wanted to congratulate you personally,” Harris said. Maya caught the knowing look out towards the bullpen. “And yes, make sure that everyone understands how dangerous it was for you to walk in to talk to a suspect alone.”

“He wasn’t a suspect,” Maya pointed out, trying to cut off Harris’s objections. “I thought he was just a witness.”

“Even so, going in alone was dangerous,” Harris said.

Maya couldn’t really argue with that, not when she’d stumbled straight into a hand-to-hand confrontation with a murderer. She could guess what he was going to say next, mostly because they’d had this conversation before.

“You need a partner,” Harris said.

“I don’t,” Maya replied. “You can’t spare the personnel for cold cases, and I can always partner with local PD when I need them.”

She didn’t want a partner. She liked working alone. Every person too close to her was someone who might get hurt. Someone else she had to worry about.

“So you keep saying,” Harris said. “But you can’t keep going into situations on your own, Gray. You need a partner.”

“If I’d known it would be a situation, I would have brought backup,” Maya replied. She wasn’t about to be pushed into having a partner she didn’t want or need. “Seriously, I work cold cases. Ninety-nine percent of what I do is routine.”

“And the other one percent?” Harris asked.

Maya shrugged. “I deal with. I can take care of myself, sir.”

Taking care of herself was the easy part. It was when she had to take care of other people too that things got complicated.

“Take the rest of the day to think about it,” Harris said.

“Sir?” Maya said, looking at him in surprise.

Harris’s expression was firm. “I’m sending you home, Gray. Not even you can close a case, come straight in off the red-eye, and expect to do a good job. Take the day off. Get some actual rest.”

Maya didn’t want rest. She wanted to get on with the next case. Every second she took without doing so would feel like ants crawling on her skin, like she was letting down some family out there that could have answers.

“Sir, I’m fine,” Maya said. “I still have-”

Harris didn’t give any indication of backing down. It was sometimes easy to forget the steel it must have taken to reach his position.

“Take the rest of the day,” he said. “Even you need time to recover after going toe-to-toe with a murderer. If you argue, if I see you before 9am tomorrow, I’ll make you take the week.”

Maya knew when she was beaten. “Yes sir.”

*

Maya had heard somewhere that almost nobody actually lived in Washington, DC. Oh, there were plenty of people who passed through, or stayed there for a while to be near the seat of political power in the country, or had jobs that made them need to be there, but no one thought of it as home.

Maya guessed that made her the exception. She traveled all across the country with her work, but wherever she was, DC was ready to call her back. When she unlocked the door to her apartment, it was like gravity had pulled her back into her natural resting spot.

The moment she’d seen the open plan spaciousness of her apartment, Maya had known that it was perfect for her. It was on the third floor of her building, with views out towards the Capitol Building that made Maya think of the whole thing more like a postcard than an actual place.

When it came to furniture. She’d taken the time to set up a small gym area in a corner with a punchbag and a few weights, and if that ate into the living space a little, well, it wasn’t like she had people around much. She had more than enough for herself with a couple of chairs and a TV bolted to the wall. The kitchen was small, but since Maya ate takeout or microwaved her dinner as often as cooking, she didn’t care much. Her bed sat off in the back corner. Maya had made it with military corners before she left, because she found that some habits die hard.

No one welcomed her home. Maya preferred things that way, or at least, she was pretty sure that she didn’t have time for anything right now. There had been a couple of guys in the past, but none of them had lasted. What was it her last boyfriend had said?

“I can’t take being in second place to a bunch of dead people.”

Something like that, at least. It had hurt, enough that Maya had told him to get out there and then. Probably the worst part was that Maya hadn’t been able to argue with the sentiment even a little. Her work, her career, came first, and had done so since she first joined the military. When she’d gone to college, she’d been shocked to see people just drifting through it without the sense of purpose that had made her a straight A student.

Maya ordered in pizza and then sat down to watch TV with cranberry juice out of the refrigerator. She heard a neighbor’s dog bark downstairs and, not for the first time, wondered if she should get one of her own. That wouldn’t be fair, though, when she was away so much. She was fine just as she was, alone.

Maya sat like that for a while, because she was pretty sure that was what most other people did with their lives. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, though. Every moment she spent like this felt like a moment she was wasting. Maybe that was a good reason to hold back, though. Some obsessions weren’t healthy.

As much as she tried to tell herself that she ought to just relax for a while, she knew that she couldn’t. Instead, Maya went over to the small corner of the apartment that she used as an office, starting up her laptop and opening up the metal filing cabinet she’d bought with a small key.

Maya took out a mix of files. There were a trio of folders by now, all devoted to the same thing: her sister, Megan.

Just the thought of Megan’s name made a twinge of pain and guilt flash through Maya. What had it been now? Five months since she’d gone missing? Maybe more. An exact date was hard to pin down. Maya had all the details of possible sightings of her sister set down, but it was hard to work out which ones were real and which weren’t.

Megan was younger than her by five years, gentle where Maya was tough, always the kind of girl who had been interested in dresses and gossip when Maya had been the one getting into fights. She’d talked about going to art school but had ended up working for a tech company instead, in human resources.

As far as Maya could tell, Megan had been going about her normal life, and she’d just vanished. It was the “as far as she could tell” that bothered Maya most, because if she’d just been there for her sister, maybe none of this would have happened. They’d been close as kids, even in the first days when Maya had joined the army. Now though, it seemed that her sister could go missing and Maya couldn’t even be certain exactly when it had happened, because she hadn’t been keeping track of Megan’s life closely enough to know. She’d assumed that her sister was ok. Maya hated herself for that.

She sat, trying to work through the small scraps of her sister’s life. When someone vanished, Maya knew that there were always the same possibilities: they’d fled to escape their lives, they’d run to escape someone, or someone had taken them.

Megan didn’t have anything in her life that it seemed she might want to run from. She had a steady job, Mom said that she sounded happy when they talked, and Maya wanted to believe that her sister would have talked to her if she’d been in any kind of trouble.

Maya sat for half an hour with her laptop, linking up to law enforcement databases to check through the latest scraps of information. There was pitifully little that was new. Instead, Maya worried at the old information. She had the forensics report from Megan’s apartment, and went over it, hoping to find some sign of something out of place.

She thought about motives, but Maya had a hard time believing that anyone could have a motive to take her sister. Megan was a good, kind, generous person, and as far as Maya could see, the people around her loved her. She was single, with her last serious boyfriend a few months before she vanished.

Maya had seen the worst of what people could do to one another, over and over. She’d seen families left without answers for years, and people who disappeared, never to be found.

Every crime Maya solved made the world a little more like it should be, but it didn’t find Megan.

Dead or alive, she was going to find her sister. Maya wasn’t going to give up, even though months of searching had so far turned up precisely zero useful leads. Maya wanted to be able to put together a theory, but there just wasn’t enough to go on.

She’d tried looking for possibly dangerous casual boyfriends, and there weren’t any. She’d explored the possibility that Megan had stumbled into something dangerous at work, but there didn’t seem to be anything dangerous to find. Maya had talked to their mother, and neither of them could think of a single reason why someone would have wanted to take Megan.

Maya kept looking until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Too much of this would drive her mad. Plus, she’d finished her juice. She needed a break.

Not able to think of anything better to do, she decided to walk down and collect her mail. She took the steps slowly, her mind still trying to chew over her files in the hope that there was something that might lead to her sister. Maya tried to console herself with the idea that no body meant that there was still hope Megan might be alive, but the experience of her job told her how easily a body could be hidden or lost.

She made it down to the mailboxes, set on one wall outside the super’s office. Maya used her key to unlock hers and took out the usual thick bundle that gathered when she’d been away. She moved over to a trash can, sorting the pile into things she might want to read, and things that could go straight in there.

Bill… takeout menu… store card offer…

Maya sorted through it, most of what she held dropping straight into the trash. When she got to the postcard, she almost dropped it in with the rest, assuming that it was probably some promotional thing. Still, she stopped short. What if this was how Megan chose to get in touch, saying that she was having a great time in Goa or somewhere? Ok, maybe not that, but what if it was from some family member wanting to get in touch, or a friend?

The picture was of cute bunny rabbits gamboling in a meadow. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing anyone she knew would send Maya, but still, it was kind of cute. There was a return address for an Anne Postmartin on the top. Maya frowned, because she didn’t know the name. Was this just the marketing department of some company after all, trying to catch her attention? Yet the postcard was handwritten, and that alone was enough to make Maya read.

Instantly, her blood ran cold.

I have taken twelve bunnies for my own. Twelve lovely lost women. You have a chance to win them back from me, a reward for services to be rendered. There are crimes that must be solved. Your first is contained here.

Maya stared at it, trying to make sense of it, even as it felt like a yawning pit was opening up underneath her. This didn’t happen. Questions flashed through her. How had someone managed to find where she lived? Was this serious, or just some sick joke? Did someone really have women locked away somewhere?

Every instinct she had said that this was real, and that made a feeling of dread start to flow through her.

Still, she managed to think like the agent she was. Holding the card carefully by the edges so that she wouldn’t compromise any fingerprints, Maya read on.

There are rules. You have until 12 midnight on the 29th.

The 29th was just a few days away. Midnight to do what? There were no details set down. Was this all meant to be some kind of puzzle?

Succeed, and a bunny goes free. Fail, and a bunny dies.

Maya’s first instinct was that she would use the time to find whoever had sent this message and make them pay, but it seemed they’d anticipated that.

Try to find me, and a bunny dies. I will be watching.

Maya tried to think, but she couldn’t think, because of the one word at the bottom, signing off the rest.

Sar-bear.

Maya dropped the postcard in shock, caught it, and stared at it again, willing that final word to say anything else. It couldn’t be right. It… no, she couldn’t believe it. Yet it was there, set down, as clearly as the rest of it. A word that made her heart pound in her chest and made her feel almost sick with fear.

That word… that was the nickname Megan had given her as a child, and had only used when they were alone. The only way someone could know that was…

Was if they’d taken her.