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The woman, who initially smiled, froze, assessed him critically.
“Your name?”
“Lance Martelli. I’m a nurse at Bethesda General Hospital. I work with Jenna Johns. She asked me to come in.”
A tall, slender black man with broad shoulders wearing a shoulder holster over a gray button-down shirt approached him. “I’m acting chief deputy Charlie North. We’ve been looking for Ms. Johns. I just got off the phone with her employer who said she’s called in sick for the last two days.”
“Yeah. I need to make sure you can protect her. Before I tell you where she is, you have to promise me you’ll protect her.”
“Come into the conference room and tell me what you know. Then, I’ll tell you what we can do.”
Thirty minutes later, Charlie said, “I’m going to call a colleague of mine. When she gets here, we’ll go talk to Jenna.”
“So you’ll protect her.”
“I need to hear from her exactly what she knows about Deputy Granger’s investigation and a statement about the two men she saw who claimed to be FBI agents. But yes—if her story holds, we can and will protect her.”
Thirty-Six
Regan and Lance drove with Charlie in his truck an hour south to a nondescript suite-style hotel off the interstate. Regan was finally going to have answers. Maybe not all of them, but Jenna Johns had been threatened and she was in hiding, which told Regan that she knew something important.
Though Lance had been uncomfortable at first, he seemed to relax as they drove and talked. It helped that Charlie had a similar military background as Lance and Lance was naturally predisposed to trust law enforcement. Regan let him and Charlie talk about the army, tell stories, become familiar with each other, while she considered what the connection was between the bank robbery and Chase’s murder.
She still didn’t see it. But there had to besomeconnection, otherwise why would Tommy have been so involved in tracking Becca Johns during that time? Why would he have reached out to Jenna?
The answers were in those safe deposit boxes. What if...one of those companies was affiliated with the law firm? Or with Brock Marsh, the security company? Perhaps it had to do with the financing of crimes—crimes like taking out a hit on a lawyer. Because Grant wasn’t the first target of these people.
Once someone got away with murder, they’d do it again...and again.
Lance introduced Charlie and Regan to Jenna. “You can trust them,” he told her. “I do.”
Jenna was a cute, muscular girl with dark blond hair she had loosely braided down her back. She had the ruddy skin of someone who liked to be outside when she could, wore no makeup, and had intelligent brown eyes that looked at all of them warily. Except for Lance—when she looked at Lance she relaxed.
He went to her side, took her hand. “Tell them everything, Jenna. They both knew Deputy Granger. They’re investigating his murder.”
“Full disclosure,” Charlie said. “The FBI is investigating Tommy’s murder, but we haven’t talked to them about you or anything Lance told us. Why don’t we start with why you called the FBI in the first place?”
The “suite” was really an oversized room divided by a half wall. Two queen beds were on the sleeping side of the room, and a couch and desk were on the living side of the room. Lance and Jenna sat on the couch and Charlie motioned toward the chair for Regan, but she shook her head. She wanted to stand, observe. So Charlie took the seat and Regan leaned against the door, waiting for answers.
Jenna’s story was very believable, Regan thought, and Jenna herself a credible witness, even though she was nervous. She recounted that when she hadn’t heard from Tommy she’d called him and a stranger answered his phone, a man who wanted to meet with Jenna in person to discuss Tommy’s unauthorized investigation.
“Those were his words,” Jenna said. “He said, ‘unauthorized investigation’ and I hung up. It didn’t sound right. He called back, but I didn’t answer. He left a message, saying that it would be beneficial for me to call back and talk to him, but I didn’t. I panicked, left at ten o’clock at night. Packed a bag and left my phone because I thought someone might be able to track me.”
Lance said, “You should have called me.”
“I know. But I had a couple days off, so went to this family camp I’d gone to as a kid. They have individual cabins and I thought it would be far enough away—near the Pennsylvania state line—that I could figure things out. I planned to call Deputy Granger’s office in the morning, not his cell phone, but then I learned that he’d been murdered. The news reported it, and had a number to call, the FBI hotline.”
“You called the number on the news?” Charlie clarified.
Jenna explained how she called the number, talked to several people before Agent Wexford called her back on Wednesday. “She didn’t think I had any important information, but I told her I was scared because of the stranger who answered Tommy’s phone. I must have sounded scared, because she said she’d have two agents come to my home or work to talk to me.”
“Did you tell the FBI, on the phone, anything about why you were working with Tommy, or what he was investigating?”
“No. I’ll admit, I was really nervous and didn’t know what was important, and I didn’t like how Agent Wexford kind of, I don’t know, dismissed my concerns.”
“And Tommy reached out to you, correct?” Regan asked.
“Yes,” Jenna said. “He was so nice to me, so patient even when I got upset—he didn’t judge my sister, anything. Just listened and helped me figure everything out. I knew he was on leave—he told me. He was building a case, but he said he needed to devote all his time on it. Then he called me last Sunday and said he was going to his boss because he needed a warrant, and he felt he had enough evidence to get it. A warrant for Legacy CPA.”
