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“Your curiosity will make you a great FBI agent.”
She smiled. “I still haven’t heard back about my interview.”
“You will. You know how slow those bureaucrats can be.” He reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’ll see what I can find out about Prenter’s death, and I’ll bet there’s a logical explanation as to why he bailed on ‘Tanya’ and went to Club 10.”
Robbie “RNR” Ralston lived in a third-floor flat of a tiny row house in a decrepit area on the edge of the D.C. limits. Sean rapped on the door, then stepped back, listening for movement inside. He heard nothing, but something felt strange. He shivered. He squatted in front of the door and pressed his fingers to the crack between the door and the floor. The air was ice cold—colder than it should be even if the guy was keeping his heat low to save on the bill. In this cold spell, even with blue skies, if Ralston had turned off his heat, he probably hadn’t been home for quite a while.
Sean considered trying to find someone to let him in. He could talk himself in and out of nearly any situation, but a rental property this small probably didn’t have an on-site manager and he didn’t want to prolong the situation. He pulled out his lock pick and popped the old lock in seconds.
As soon as he slipped in and closed the door behind him he knew exactly why the apartment was so cold—every window had been cracked open an inch. He pulled his gun, though he suspected that if anyone was in this apartment, he was dead.
The front room was cluttered but neat. However, the computer on a small desk against the far wall had been smashed. The hard drive had been removed; the shell of the CPU was open and exposed. There were only two rooms in the apartment, and Sean found Ralston, long dead, on the bedroom floor, shot in the back of the head. On the bed was a half-packed suitcase.
“Fuck,” Sean muttered. He pulled out his phone and stared at it. He considered, just for a second, calling the D.C. police, coming up with a plausible excuse for his presence. But that would prolong the inevitable. Ralston was connected to Morton, which made this murder likely connected to Morton. Which made this murder connected to Lucy.
The apartment had been kept cold to slow the rate of decomposition and minimize the smell to avoid quick discovery. Why? To avoid connecting this murder with Morton’s?
He dialed Kate Donovan. “It’s Sean Rogan. I would have called the cavalry, but I don’t know who’s in charge of Morton’s murder investigation.”
“What’s going on?”
“I was doing my own side investigation and came across an associate of Morton’s. He’s dead.” Sean glanced at the body. “A very cold stiff.”
FOURTEEN
Noah had spent more time than he’d planned at Quantico talking to Kate and the cybercrimes task force about the files they’d recovered from Morton’s computer. That had been followed by a conference-call briefing with Hans Vigo and Rick Stockton. When he finally broke away well after the lunch hour, Abigail had a sandwich waiting for him, which he ate during their drive to the Triple Tree Motel near Dulles Airport.
The manager, Paul Grunelli, was a scrawny guy in his fifties with stringy, thinning gray hair and the aroma of a heavy smoker. He looked up from his television when Noah and Abigail entered the motel’s small, dingy office.
“Room?” he asked.
Noah flashed his badge. “Questions.”
Grunelli turned back to the television with a shrug. “Ask.”
“Turn the TV off, please, Mr. Grunelli,” Abigail said.
“I don’t want to miss—”
“We can ask the questions in the quiet interview room of FBI headquarters, if you’d prefer,” Noah said.
“Fuck,” Grunelli mumbled, but he turned off the television. “What?”
Abigail slid a picture of Morton across the counter. “This man registered early in the morning on January sixth, according to your logs. He paid for three days in cash up front, used the name Cliff Skinner. Do you remember him?”
Grunelli shrugged.
“He never checked out,” Noah added.
“Oh, him.” He narrowed his eyes at them. “Weren’t one of your people here yesterday picking up his crap from the room?”
“That would be me,” Abigail said. “But your relief manager hadn’t actually seen Mr. Morton, said you’d checked him in and had been working that weekend. He was in room 103—you can see it from your chair there.”
“If the blinds are open,” Grunelli added.
Noah didn’t have patience for the back-and-forth with a jerk like Grunelli. “Morton was killed in Alexandria less than two days after he checked in. We’re retracing his steps. When did you see him?”
“Dead, eh? Well—he checked in at eight-something on Thursday, which I noted in the log. And he was gone most of the day after that. Came back that night, then left again Friday morning. Didn’t see him after that.”
