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Hearing Tommy’s voice now that she knew he was dead broke her heart all over again. She didn’t know how many pieces she had left to break.
“I need to talk to Peter Grey.”
“That’s going to be tough,” Charlie said. “You’re not a marshal anymore. He’s in maximum security.”
“You can make it happen.”
“We can’t force him to talk.”
“He talked to Tommy.”
“Regan—”
“He took time off to investigate. The only reason he would do that is if Tommy believed him. Neither of us bought into the revenge theory of Chase’s murder that the FBI ate up hook, line, sinker.”
Charlie grunted at the mention of the FBI. He didn’t like them any more than Regan did. The US Marshals didn’t always play well with other agencies. Most marshals thought the FBI were a bunch of lazy bureaucrats, and the FBI thought the marshals were a bunch of arrogant mavericks. There were some truths to both stereotypes, but Regan always sided with mavericks over bureaucrats.
There were of course exceptions. Regan had more or less liked FBI agent Lillian O’Dare the few times she’d worked with her—until she investigated Chase’s murder. Then they’d butted heads to the point where O’Dare had threatened to write Regan up for impeding an investigation and Regan had nearly decked her. It had been an unpleasant scene.
Charlie said, “You know the FBI has Tommy’s homicide.”
“Of course they do,” she grumbled.
“It’s O’Dare. She’s the SSA—she’s taking lead.”
O’Dare had no imagination, no ability to see all the possibilities. If something wasn’t right in front of her, the FBI agent declared it irrelevant. She was competent, Regan supposed, but not much else.
“We should talk to her,” Charlie said.
“I don’t like her.”
“That never stopped you from doing your job.”
“Thisisn’tmy job.” She paused. “Tommy’s entire investigation was predicated on what Peter Grey told him.”
“Not necessarily,” Charlie said.
“What else?”
“Tommy never let it go, Regan, even after you left. I agree—something Grey said or didn’t say helped Tommy, gave him a clue to follow—but he was following a lot of threads and there’s no way of knowing what yielded results. If Tommy had a smoking gun, so to speak, he would have left something more for us, wouldn’t he? Something beyond a vague phone message?”
She didn’t know the answer to that so she changed course, asking, “Any suspects? It’s been more than twenty-four hours.”
“The FBI thinks it’s related to an old case of his. Asked me to compile a list of all his cases, threats, the whole nine yards. They’ll identify recent parolees, track their whereabouts.”
“It’s not a parolee,” she said. Of course the FBI would need to look at that angle, but Tommy was killedright beforehe was going to tell Charlie everything he knew about his investigation into the murders of Chase and Adam Hannigan. That was not a coincidence. “Wait—did you tell them about Tommy’s investigation?”
“No,” Charlie said slowly.
“Why not?”
“Because I have no details. He planned to talk to me, then he was killed. I don’t know where to point them.”
“We need to tell her. As much as I detest turning this over to the FBI, they have the manpower and resources.”
“I hear abutin your tone.”
“In my experience, they’re going to dismiss everything we say and we won’t know if they’re pursuing this avenue of investigation or not.”
