Drained (23 page)

I looked back at Andrews. “There’s a black Ferrari in the driveway.”

“I’m getting more agents out there,” Andrews said. “I don’t think they’ll beat us there, but if Bailor is the killer, I want more than three of us there to take him down.”

“Hear that?” I asked Beth.

“Yeah, Andrews is getting more agents out here,” she said.

“Hang tight. Make sure he doesn’t leave, but stay the hell away from him. We’ll be there in a bit.”

“Shit,” Beth said.

“What?”

“He’s behind my car.”

“What? Drive away,” I said.

“Shit,” Beth repeated.

“Beth, leave now, go.”

She didn’t respond.

“Agent,” a man said, “um, obvious question: why are you parked in front of my home?”

“Damn. Bailor is talking to her.” I muted my phone and clicked it onto speaker so Andrews and I could both hear the conversation.

Brett walked out to the garage, passed his Jeep, and opened the driver’s door of the Ferrari. He ducked his head as he got inside and behind the wheel. He clicked the button on the remote attached to the visor, to lift the garage door. He fired up the motor and tapped the gas, and the roar echoed through the garage. Brett shifted into reverse and began backing up. He looked back over his shoulder and pulled out.

Brett thumbed the button again, to close the garage door.

He patted his pockets.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Cell phone.”

Brett hit the button on the garage remote again, sending the door back up. He clicked the car into park and got out. After heading inside, he found his wallet sitting on the nightstand of the master bedroom and scooped it up. Then he headed back through the house and out through the open garage door, and something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. A car had parked just outside the front gates of his property. Brett’s was the only house on a dead-end road. He craned his neck and then took a few steps toward the front of the house. Brett’s house was on a bit of a hill, sitting higher than the street below. The front gates were a hundred yards down the driveway. The farther Brett walked toward the front door of the house, the better his view became. The car was a newer blue sedan.

Brett started down the driveway toward the street.

The rear of the car came into full view. He stood at the edge of his front gates and looked through the back glass of the car. A single person was inside, a woman. Brett walked around the side of the gate and hopped a short cement wall with a stone facade that surrounded the front of his property along the street. He noticed a sticker from a rental-car company applied to the corner of the trunk lid and walked to the driver’s-side. The woman inside was a brunette. She was talking on the phone. Brett banged his knuckles on the window.

The woman’s head quickly turned to look at him, and she tossed the phone on the passenger seat of the car.

Brett yanked his head back in shock. The driver was the female FBI agent he’d seen the day prior.

She lowered her window.

“Agent,” Brett said, “um, obvious question: why are you parked in front of my home?”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Bailor.”

Brett waited for the agent to reply to his question—she didn’t.

“Again, I have to ask the nature of your visit,” Brett said.

The woman seemed to stumble for words. “I just wanted to follow up with you on a few things.”

“Those things being?” he asked.

“Just a few discrepancies regarding what you have told us and what an employee had told the other agents that visited your office—that is, before they were asked to leave by your corporate attorney.”

“Asked to leave?” he asked.

The woman nodded.

“Well, that order didn’t come from me. I haven’t been in today and haven’t spoken to anyone on my staff aside from my intern, and that was me chewing him out for not getting a set of transcripts over to one of your other agents.”

“Okay,” she said. The woman went quiet.

Brett wondered why she seemed to be stalling, sitting inside the car.

“Are you going to get out and ask me these questions or what? Did you want to go up to the house? I’m kind of pressed for time.”

“Um, I actually need a few minutes here. I need to make a couple of phone calls,” she said.

“Well, I’m going to have to ask you to schedule something with my secretary, then. I have a lunch meeting that I need to be at.”

The woman shut off the car and grabbed her phone and a file from the passenger seat. She opened the driver’s door and stepped out. “I guess my calls will have to wait, then. This is time sensitive.”

Brett shook his head and started for the house, but the woman lingered at the end of the driveway.

Brett stopped and looked back at her. “Are you coming?”

She looked reluctant but started walking his way.

He spoke to her over his shoulder. “How long is this going to take? If I need to reschedule my lunch meeting, I’m going to need a time.”

“Um, it shouldn’t take too long,” she said.

Brett continued up the driveway without responding.

“Nice car,” the agent said. “What is that? A Ferrari?”

“Yeah. It’s a rental.” He opened the front door and stepped inside the house. The woman followed him in, and Brett closed the door at her back.

“Wow, nice place,” she said.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“We need a place we can sit and go over this,” she said. “That will work.” She started for the living room.

Brett glanced to where she was headed. The wine glass Monica had been drinking from still sat on the edge of the table. He could have passed it off as his own if it weren’t for the red lipstick around the rim. Brett figured keeping the agent away from it, and any questions about it, would be best.

“Over here. We’ll sit at the kitchen island,” Brett said.

The woman stopped, turned, and walked to where Brett was taking a seat.

She sat two stools away from him, opened the folder she had, and flipped through the papers within.

Brett stared at her for a silent minute. She didn’t look as though she was looking for anything in particular.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name from yesterday,” Brett said.

“Agent Harper,” she said. She didn’t take her eyes from the papers in the folder.

Brett continued watching the woman—she was clearly stalling.

“These questions?” he asked. “I’m pressed for time.”

“Right, sorry. I’m just trying to get organized here.”

Brett cracked his knuckles.

The woman looked up from her papers and stared across the kitchen near the stove. “Wine connoisseur?” she asked.

Brett glanced over at the bottles in the rack and dismissed her comment.

“That container with the bow-tie pasta in it is cute,” she said.

“Let’s get on with this,” he said. “I don’t have all day.”

Agent Harper flipped one of the papers in the folder over to give herself a clean page. “Sure. Tell me why one of your employees would say that terminated and canceled accounts are in fact retrievable when you have told us on multiple occasions that they aren’t?” She held a pen against the paper, waiting for his answer.

“He’s mistaken. You used to be able to, but we made some changes a while back to increase our bottom line a bit. The costs associated with storing all the information were too high to justify continuing in that way.” Brett said, lying blatantly.

“Right.” The woman wrote something down on the paper. “When were these changes made?”

“Second quarter of this year.”

“Second quarter is when?”

“April to June.”

“So just before these women became victims.”

Brett shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

The agent cocked her head to one side. She tucked her brown hair behind her right ear. “Strikes me as odd. The time line there is coincidental.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. What are you insinuating? That a financial move by my company to help the bottom line was done to destroy information from these women?”

“I just said that it was odd. So you’re saying that there definitely isn’t a way to reinstate closed accounts?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

The woman scooted around a bit on the stool. She flipped the folder closed. “Maybe the living room would be better. These stools are kind of hard.” She stood, took the file, and started for the living room.

Brett shook his head as the woman looked from side to side. She was taking in everything in the room. Something was off. He thought of all her actions since he saw her parked in front of his home—her stalling, her questions about the wine and pasta, the car, the fact she was even there. Brett rose from his stool and followed.

The agent stopped in the center of the living room. “Have some female company lately?” She nodded toward the wine glass. “Looks like someone spilled a bit.” She reached inside her blazer with her right hand.

He took several lunging steps toward her, his feet thumping. The agent dropped the file she carried, the papers inside falling from within and floating through the air to the floor. She spun toward him, trying to free her weapon from the holster under her arm. Brett delivered a right fist to her face. The agent flew back and fell to the floor, tripping over the edge of the coffee table. Her left arm sent the wine glass and miscellaneous knickknacks on the table’s surface flying. The woman tried to pull herself to her feet while removing her gun. Brett grabbed her by her hair and lifted her.

“It’s him!” the woman screamed.

He spun her in his arms and wrapped his left arm around her neck. She tried getting out another scream but was cut off when his left arm found its mark under her chin. She flailed for her weapon, finally removing it from her holster. Brett’s right hand met her weapon as soon as she pulled it. She fired a single shot into the living room tile, but Brett easily disarmed her. He grabbed his elbow to increase the pressure on the choke hold. The woman kicked her feet and scratched at his arms. Her hands pawed off the sides of his face. Her feet kicked at the coffee table.

Brett shook her back and forth while squeezing her throat between his forearm and bicep. She struggled frantically for another few seconds before going lethargic and then limp. Brett dropped her to the ground and went through her pockets. He felt a phone and removed it. The call timer was running—it showed a duration of twenty minutes to an Agent Rawlings.

He brought the phone to his mouth. “Better hurry,” he said and hung up.

Brett scooped up her gun, tucked it into the back of his waistline, and grabbed Agent Harper by the arm. He pulled her across the tile toward the basement door.

Andrews was heavy on the gas pedal. The car’s lights and siren were on full song. Beth being alone in the house with Bailor was troubling. Andrews had just finished contacting the local PD and requesting their assistance at the scene. I hoped they would beat us there.

Andrews and I had been listening to Beth and Bailor’s conversation for twenty minutes. Her voice sounded different—hesitant or downright scared, I didn’t know which. She’d never mentioned that we or other agents were on the way. However, she’d been making obvious comments about things she’d seen inside the home.

“How far away are we?” I asked.

“Ten minutes yet,” Andrews said. “She needs to back off a bit. She’s questioning things that she shouldn’t be questioning.”

Andrews’s radio came alive. We heard the local PD being dispatched. The sound of the radio blocked some of what Beth was saying to Bailor. It sounded as though she mentioned wine again.

“This guy is going to know something is up if she continues much more,” Andrews said.

As soon as the words left his mouth, we heard static and rustling noises coming from Beth’s end of the call, and she screamed, “It’s him!”

“Shit!” I said.

What followed next was worse. Andrews and I heard what could only have been a gunshot.

Neither of us spoke.

We heard more muffled sounds coming from Beth’s end of the call. I looked down at the screen and clicked the button to unmute the call. “Beth?” I asked.

“Better hurry,” a man’s voice said in response.

The line went dead.

Andrews stared at me.

“Get everyone there now,” I said.

Andrews got on the phone and started dialing as the car’s transmission downshifted and the motor revved. After Andrews made the calls, we didn’t speak until we slid to a stop in front of a pair of gates and Beth’s rental car. I looked around. Aside from Beth’s car, there was nothing—no local PD and no other federal cars. We were the only ones there.

“Where the hell is everybody?” I asked.

“On their way.” He pulled his service weapon and bailed out of the driver’s side of the car. I did the same on the passenger’s side.

Andrews and I rushed toward Bailor’s property. Halfway up the driveway, the full house came into view, a giant single-story brick home with four individual garage doors facing the driveway. The Ferrari was sitting near an open garage door. Andrews stopped short and pointed toward the front door. We rushed to it, him covering me while I tried the handle—locked. The door was big and looked to be crafted from hardwood. We went for the open garage door.

I covered Andrews as he stayed low, entering the garage.

“Looks empty,” he said.

To our immediate right was a white four-door Jeep that looked to be set up for off-road duty. On our left were garage bays filled with lawn-mowing equipment and a four wheeler. We went farther in, past the Jeep. On the right hand side wall was a flight of stairs leading down, and a door that I assumed headed inside stood just next to the stairwell. I checked the door leading in—open.

“Let’s go,” Andrews said.

I nodded and pushed the door open, and we went in. A large foyer spread out before us. The big, locked front door was twenty feet to my right—to my left, a huge living room with a vaulted ceiling. The back of the room was glass and looked out onto a patio attached to the back of the house—beyond the patio was a woods. My eyes came back to the living room itself, and I noticed papers scattered across the floor. The living room coffee table was off center and the items on top of it strewn about. The papers and state of the coffee table suggested a struggle.