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Sean didn’t feel comfortable talking to the FBI about something that could get him in hot water—he stood by his decision. He considered calling Duke for advice on whether to pull in a lawyer, but quickly dismissed the thought. He wasn’t going to lean on his brother every time he came head to head with law enforcement. He was a big boy, he would make his own decisions, and he knew he hadn’t been out of line in talking to Sergey Yuran. There was no way Yuran would have spoken to a cop, and if it was true he was under surveillance, Armstrong wouldn’t even be able to get in there. Shaking the trafficker down for the murder of a scumbag like Morton was way down on the priority list from trafficking in guns and human beings—which told Sean that Noah wanted this meeting off the record, hence here at Kate’s house. Maybe the Fed wasn’t the “by-the-book” hard-ass Sean had thought when he met him on Saturday.
Yet, every time Sean had spoken to cops in the past it had come back to bite him in the ass.
Before he’d been kicked out of Stanford, Sean discovered one of his professors liked child porn. Sean exposed his repulsive obsession so everyone would know what kind of pervert he really was. The Feds promised nothing would happen to Sean if he told the truth about how he’d hacked into the professor’s system and what initially tipped him off. Sean told the truth. Next thing he knew, Stanford expelled him for hacking into the school database. Duke had said the FBI did what they could, and Sean was damn lucky he wasn’t in prison. They’d agreed to expunge the record; however, Sean was certain his FBI file was an inch thick. The incident with the sick Stanford professor wasn’t the only time he’d been in hot water when trying to right wrongs.
Kate said, “Sean, you’d better watch yourself around Armstrong. He’s good, and he doesn’t like interference.”
“I didn’t interfere with anything.”
“Showing up at Ralston’s apartment wasn’t interfering?”
“I’m not going to rehash this. You know why I was there. I didn’t screw with his investigation.”
Hans said, “No one is looking to get you in trouble, Sean.”
Sean didn’t know whether to believe him, but Duke thought Hans Vigo walked on water, and that couldn’t be said of a lot of people, so Sean gave the profiler the benefit of the doubt.
“All right, but if Armstrong arrests me, you’d better be the one to post bail.”
Hans smiled. “I give you my word.”
Sean relaxed marginally and went to pour himself coffee.
Hans said to Dillon, “Switching gears, is there anything in Buckley’s file that puts her on or off the suspect list?”
Sean glanced at Hans. Hans said, “Dillon called me last night and told me about Prenter’s murder and Lucy’s concerns about a setup with parolees.”
Sean frowned. “Is this going to be a problem for Lucy? She’s in the middle of the FBI application process.”
“I’m well aware—I gave her a recommendation. And nothing she’s done is going to affect my recommendation. I can’t honestly say how this will play out with the Bureau, however.”
“But we can’t keep it secret,” Kate said. “This kept me up all night—Morton was on federal probation. But he was shot in the back of the head, just like Prenter and several of the other parolees Lucy discovered last night.”
Kate’s theory stunned Sean. He hadn’t considered that the Morton homicide was connected to WCF.
He said, “You think the same people killed Morton as killed Prenter and the other parolees?”
Hans said, “I’m quietly pulling all the files—we’re dealing with multiple jurisdictions here—to see if there’s something that connects the killer to the victims. Different manners of death, and so far no ballistics matches. I’m looking for other patterns, such as that they all were killed after dark. They all were in public. None of the crimes were solved.
“No one brought him out using WCF’s system,” Hans continued. “It would have been extremely easy to put him back in prison for the rest of his life if someone found him violating his parole by traveling to D.C.”
“Go directly back to jail, do not pass go,” Kate mumbled, sitting next to Dillon, a hot cup of coffee in her hands.
“They wanted him dead,” Hans said. “Not back in prison.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why they brought him here and didn’t gun him down in Colorado,” Sean said.
“Noah learned this morning that Ralston flew to Seattle three days before Morton arrived in D.C.,” Hans said.
Sean looked at him blankly. “Is there something important about Seattle?”
Dillon said, “It’s where Adam Scott and Morton took Lucy after they kidnapped her. To an island off Seattle.”
Sean’s skin crawled. “Why was he there?”
“We don’t know,” Hans said, “but the SAC in Seattle is on top of it. He’s been part of this from the beginning.”
Sean walked to the kitchen counter and topped off his mug, even though he didn’t particularly like coffee. He needed something to do or he’d go right now to retrieve Lucy.
