3
CRIMINAL APPREHENSION UNIT, CAU
HOOVER BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MONDAY AFTERNOON
When Savich invited Special Agent Cam Wittier to move over to the CAU from the Criminal Division, there was no question in her mind it was a good move, though her chief had cursed Savich out for stealing her. She knew it was going to be an easy transition for her since she already knew most of the CAU agents and liked them, and they seemed to like her and think she was a good addition. She’d long admired the unit and what they did, just as she admired CAU chief Dillon Savich, occasionally even wished he wasn’t married to her kickboxing partner, Sherlock. She did wonder, though, if he would have invited her into the unit if she hadn’t managed to solve the Starlet Slasher murders two weeks before in L.A. She wasn’t about to float that question. She doubted she ever would.
It was twelve thirty on a bright Monday afternoon in July, an oven outside, but inside the Hoover Building the AC was pumping along fine. It was officially her first day in her new unit. She’d left the personnel department only a few minutes ago and paused a moment in the doorway, uncertain. All five agents working in-house looked up from their computers and their cells, stopped their conversations, smiled at her, waved, welcomed her. Shirley, the unit secretary, hugged her and showed her to the desk of Special Agent Dane Carver, who’d recently transferred to the Los Angeles Field Office, with his professor wife and baby daughter. L.A. was a meaty assignment in the bank-robbery capital of the country, but Cam preferred the CAU. She spoke to everyone, listened, laughed. She didn’t see Sherlock, but she did see her new boss, Dillon Savich, through his office windows, alternately speaking on his cell and typing on his laptop MAX. He looked up, smiled at her.
She was soon drinking a mug of black coffee and leaning over Agent Ruth Noble’s shoulder reading a report from Walt Monaco, SAC of the Richmond Field Office, about Liam Hennessey, aka Manta Ray, and his escape from the U.S. Marshals only a mile out from their destination—Lee Penitentiary in Pennington Gap, Virginia, the high-security federal prison.
He’d escaped only three hours before, and Monaco had already mobilized the local FBI office and coordinated with local law enforcement to begin the manhunt.
Agent Ruth Noble looked up and put her hand over her cell phone. “Give me a minute, Cam, then we can discuss this mess. It’s my son Rafe—he’s suffering girlfriend problems.”
Cam nodded, waited until Ruth punched off. Though she wasn’t a stranger here in her new home, she knew better than to rush into things like she usually did back in the Criminal Division. What happened? Let’s get this moving; let’s go! She said with an easy smile, “Girlfriends can be tough. What’d you tell Rafe?”
“I told him to speak to his father.” Ruth gave Cam a fat smile. “I told him his father knows everything about girls—well, just about everything, can’t overdo—and he should do whatever his father says. Now I’ll call Dix, warn him, so he’ll have time to come up with the right approach.”
Cam laughed. She liked Ruth, knew a bit of her history. She’d married the sheriff of Maestro, Virginia, and become a mother to his two teenage sons. Ruth, she’d heard, had a target group of local informants in her back pocket, most gathered when she’d been a detective with Metro. It was one of her informants who’d called to tell them where Manta Ray was hiding in Alexandria on the day of the robbery.
Savich stepped out of his office. “Cam, welcome to the CAU. I’m glad you’re here.” He raised his voice to get everyone’s attention. “As you know, we have a situation. I sent all of you Walt’s report on Manta Ray’s escape. Come into the conference room, I’ve got some new information, and we need to go over what happened.”
Ollie Hamish, Savich’s second-in-command, asked, “Where’s Sherlock?”
“It’s her yearly physical, and yes, I ordered her to keep it with the promise I’d fill her in on everything later.”
When everyone was seated around the CAU conference table, Savich said, “Walt is in charge of the local manhunt. He and his people in Richmond are gearing up to cover all the roads for Manta Ray and the men who took him. Marshal Chan Michaels, the driver of the transport van, told officials at the scene he wasn’t sure how many men staged the escape. He and the other two guards were incapacitated almost immediately by a flash bang and some sort of knockout gas. So our only physical evidence is what’s left of the flash bangs and the housing for the chemical agent they used. They’re trying to identify it now.
“Liam Hennessey, or Manta Ray, as he calls himself, had only one known cohort, Marvin Cass, and he was killed during the bank robbery. Other than this one robbery, to the best of our knowledge, Manta Ray has operated on his own.”
Cam said, “That was the Second National Bank of Alexandria, Virginia, right?”
Savich nodded. “Manta Ray was busy dumping the contents of the six safe-deposit boxes into a dark brown leather bag when his partner decided he wanted some cash. He ordered a teller to fill up a sack for him, but she was too slow. He shot her in the head. Cass and Manta Ray ran out of the bank, fortunately without shooting anyone else. But the teller died en route to the hospital.
“Two FBI agents were near enough to be at the scene only a few minutes after the alarm tripped. In the firefight, Cass was killed and Manta Ray was shot in the side, but he escaped on a motorcycle, drove a circuitous route through some alleys where cars couldn’t go.” He sent a nod toward Ruth.
She said, “One of my informants called me, said this guy who’d just escaped had staggered, bleeding like stink, into one of the ancient buildings in the derelict warehouse section in Alexandria. Dougie’s always reliable, so I called the agents involved and they went out there.
“Gotta say, Manta Ray was worth the three hundred bucks I paid Dougie, even if he spent it on drugs and Wild Turkey.”
Savich picked it up. “Manta Ray was bleeding pretty bad, but he managed to hold himself together long enough to hide what he’d taken from the safe-deposit boxes before the FBI got him. Agents haven’t been able to find any of the stash, and believe me, they’ve torn that warehouse apart. Manta Ray refused to talk. Ollie?”
Ollie said, “From what Walt wrote, today’s escape was flawlessly planned and executed. As you said, Savich, Manta Ray usually acts alone, and look what happened the one time he didn’t. His partner killed that bank teller. One question is, how was he able to hire anyone to break him out while he was locked up inside Northern Neck Regional Jail?”
Savich said, “Manta Ray’s lawyer, Duce Bowler, springs to mind. The bank robbery happened less than a month ago, but on the advice of Bowler, Manta Ray accepted a plea bargain. Thirty years to avoid the death penalty. Duce Bowler’s name is the only one that appears on the visitor sign-in.
“Here’s a big question: Manta Ray rifled only six safe-deposit boxes and maybe that was all the time he could afford, but why those particular boxes? The six owners reported only jewelry, cash, and papers that could easily be replaced, nothing unusual. But someone went to a lot of trouble to break Manta Ray out, and you have to wonder if it had something to do with what was in those boxes. Was one of the box owners desperate enough to get back whatever it was Manta Ray stole to break him out to get it? Four of the six box owners are old bank customers, and they look solid, but the other two could do with a closer look. We’ll be repeating those two interviews.”
Ruth raised her hand. “Dillon, I’ve been thinking about Walt’s report. It took the driver, Chan Michaels, and the other two guards about thirty minutes to come around after they were pulled from the van. That had to be true for Manta Ray, too. They must have loaded him in a car and driven him out of there quickly, knowing the roads would get dangerous for them real fast. I wish we knew how many were involved in breaking him out.”
Savich said, “Chan Michaels saw a man down in the middle of the road beside the motorcycle and he heard someone barking orders, but he was fading fast and disoriented from the flash bang and the gas bomb. The whole breakout was over in a couple of minutes.
“Michaels also said he believes Manta Ray knew what was coming, based on some of the things he said and his body language. He was ready. So did Bowler tip him off?” Savich shook his head. “Walt told me it was a good enough operation that he’d be happy to hire whoever planned it to come work for him.”
Ruth tapped her fingertips on Manta Ray’s prison photo. “The dude looks seriously hot, even in prison orange, I’ll give him that, but underneath that sexy smile? The black of a rotted tooth.” She let that hang a moment, then added, “Three of us had a flash bang blow up in our faces last November in San Francisco. We couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, felt like someone had thwacked our heads with an ax. I don’t think Chan Michaels and the other guards had a chance after that. Still, the whole thing makes us look like Keystone Cops.”
Ollie took a swig of his coffee. “We should have deported Manta Ray—Liam Hennessey—back to Ireland, let them put him in that Belfast prison, what’s it called? The Maze? By the way, do any of you know where he got the moniker, Manta Ray?”
Savich said, “We’ll ask him when we get him back in custody. Let’s get back to the people who freed him. He was in prison, so how did he make contact with whoever planned this? His only visitor was his lawyer, Duce Bowler, is the obvious go-between. Walt asked us to interview him even though he’s well aware that Bowler knows he has attorney-client privilege and won’t say a thing. He’ll claim Manta Ray could have gotten word to the outside some other way. What other way? All he has to do is shrug that question off, and trust me, he will.”
“But Bowler’s got to be right in the middle,” Cam said.
Savich nodded. “I’m going to set MAX onto opening up Bowler’s life like an oyster. We’ll begin with his client list.”
Ruth said, “Poor MAX won’t find any pearls inside.”
There was a spot of laughter.
Savich said, “Ruth, you and Ollie will pay lawyer Bowler a visit this afternoon, get a feel for him, see what you make of him. Before you leave, drop by my office and take whatever MAX has dug up on him. Maybe you’ll have some ammunition.
“Now, there’s something big I’ve saved for the end, something none of you know about yet.” He sat forward. “A teenager by the name of Kim Harbinger was heading back from a camping trip in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky less than an hour ago. She spotted three men in the parking lot, heading into the forest. She believes Manta Ray was one of them. The forest is about a two-hour drive from Pennington Gap, so the timing’s about right. We’re paying attention to her because Kim’s dad is Chief Harbinger, of the Pennington Gap Police Department. She’d seen photos of Manta Ray in his office, thought he looked like a rock star, and that’s why she remembered him. She called her dad immediately. Chief Harbinger called Richmond FBI, and Walt called Mr. Maitland to ask for more manpower. I told Mr. Maitland we’re lucky to have the perfect agent with us to track Manta Ray down in that forest, if he’s in there. As to the number of men who broke Manta Ray out, we still don’t know, but if the teenager is right, it was the two men who went into the forest with him.
“New York SAC Milo Zachery sent down one of his crew yesterday to work a case with the Criminal Division—Special Agent Jack Cabot. I know him quite well. He’s an ex–army ranger with experience in special ops, an expert in survival and surveillance techniques in the wild. He’s perfect for tracking these guys, and I’ve already hijacked him. I was thinking about which of you to partner up with him. Cam, as I recall, you spent some of your formative years hiking around in national parks with your parents. And you hiked and camped throughout college. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, I did, but—you’re picking me, Dillon?” The agents around the conference table would have had to be deaf not to hear the excitement in her voice. She nearly bounced out of her chair.
“Yes, you. Come to my office and we’ll talk. The rest of you, carry on. Text me your ideas.”