The Inside Man Read online

  O’Connor stopped at a closed door and knocked.

  A voice sounded from within the room, “Come in.”

  The agent opened the door and motioned for Levi to enter.

  Levi walked into a cramped office furnished with a single Formica-topped desk and several government-issued drab gray metal cabinets. Stacks of paperwork were piled on every flat surface.

  A gray-haired man in his late fifties stood behind the desk and motioned to a chair. “Please, Mr. Yoder, take a seat.”

  O’Connor closed the door, and sat within arm’s reach of Levi. “Mister Yoder, this is Special Agent in Charge Gary Michaels.”

  Levi was familiar enough with how the FBI was organized to know an SAC was high up the food chain. There’d be no reason for the three of them to be in the same office. This Michaels guy was likely in charge of many if not most of the employees in this building. Levi wondered what the big to-do was.

  “Mister Yoder, before we get into the details of what you’re here for, I want to make perfectly clear how serious your situation is. You’ve been accused of the first-degree murder of three federal agents. We have testimony placing you at the scene of these incidents. I have more than enough to hold you for three days in detention, and due to the severity of the crimes, I can make sure that when your arraignment comes up, you won’t be given bail. I need you to understand the gravity of your situation.”

  Levi gritted his teeth and studied the SAC. The tone of his voice and the way he held himself clearly indicated he was used to being in charge and wasn’t playing. He seemed cold and intelligent, and he wasn’t up for any BS from someone like him.

  “I understand, sir.”

  Michaels nodded curtly. “Good.” He grabbed a sheet of paper from one of the stacks on his desk and looked at it. “Are you agreeing to be a cooperating witness and to assist us in identifying the suspects involved in the deaths of Special Agents Bruce Wei, Tony Mendoza, and Tran Nguyen?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will not, and I repeat, will not engage or attempt to apprehend any suspects associated with this investigation. That is not your job. Any evidence you find, you’ll bring back for us to act on. Is that clear?”

  “Crystal, sir.”

  “Good.” Michaels turned to O’Connor. “Agent O’Connor, I happen to know that Nick Anspach just came in from the Quantico lab. Take Mister Yoder to visit with our forensics expert—”

  “But—” O’Connor protested.

  “No buts, just do it, Frank. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Michaels jabbed his pointer finger at Levi. “Mister Yoder, we aren’t going to ask you to wear a tracking device as long as you’re checking in daily with Agent O’Connor. He’ll be your bureau liaison for the duration, and you’ll take your cues from him.”

  Levi glanced at O’Connor and frowned. “I don’t understand. If you want me to look under every rock for whoever did this, I can’t exactly be playing ‘Mother May I’ all the time with Agent O’Connor.”

  Michaels’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head ever so slightly. “I think you’ll find Agent O’Connor isn’t a micro-manager.”

  O’Connor twisted in his seat to face Levi. “Mister Yoder, can I ask you to wait outside in the hallway for a second? I need a word in private with Mister Michaels.”

  “Sure.”

  Levi exited the room, and closed the door quietly behind him—then pressed his ear against the wall outside of Michaels’s office. He heard the gruff tones of O’Connor’s whisper.

  “How can we just let him go … with that polygraph…”

  Levi pressed harder against the wall. What was it about his polygraph?

  “Frank, it’s not my call.”

  “If it’s not you, then—”

  “Just shut up and do this thing. There’s some … I barely understand it, myself.”

  The voices got even quieter and then … silence.

  Levi stood up straight just as Michaels’s door opened.

  Agent O’Connor stepped into the hallway, barely glanced at him, and said, “Follow me.”

  ###

  As they walked down the stairs to the second floor, Levi asked, “Agent O’Connor, when your guys picked me up, I was in the middle of following up on a lead regarding a kidnapping. The mom works for the FBI and—”

  “What’s her name?” O’Connor glanced at him with a wide-eyed expression.

  “The girl’s name?”

  “No, the mom’s name.”

  “Helen Wilson.”

  The agent paused at the door leading from the stairwell to the second floor and focused on Levi. “I’m familiar with that case. We’ve got people on it.” O’Connor frowned. “I appreciate your concern for the kid, but that’s not your issue. I don’t want to hear about you spending time on anything other than finding out who took out three federal agents. Are we clear on this?”

  Levi so wanted to smack this guy into tomorrow, but he pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and nodded. “Understood, Agent O’Connor.”

  “Good.”

  But as O’Connor led Levi from the stairwell and down a wood-paneled hallway, Levi gritted his teeth. There was no way he was leaving the Tanaka kid’s kidnapping to the feds.

  ###

  Nick Anspach, the forensic examiner, looked to be in his forties. He had platinum-blond hair and scars from what looked to be a nasty burn on the right side of his face. And as Levi shook the man’s hand, he noticed that the man was missing half of both his pinkie and ring finger.

  “It’s good to meet you, Mister Yoder.”

  Agent O’Connor stood in the doorway to the forensic examiner’s office. “Nick Anspach is one of the FBI’s best forensic examiners.” He turned to the examiner and hitched his thumb at Levi. “Mister Yoder is a cooperating witness on the Mendoza, Wei, and Nguyen case.”

  Levi noted the neatly arranged desk, nothing out of place, everything oriented just so. The only detail of the office that had any level of disorder was the pictures tacked to the wall behind the desk. Nearly thirty pictures of Anspach at various social gatherings. A drink in his undamaged hand was a common theme, and in many of the shots, FBI employee badges were present. A popular guy.

  “Nick, a few ground rules on our CW here. He doesn’t have credentials, so I’m handing him off to you. He obviously needs an escort. He’s cleared to look at the evidence we’ve gathered on the three homicides, but he can’t remove or get copies of anything that’s in evidence.”

  Anspach nodded. “Anything else?”

  O’Connor shook his head. “No, that’s it. I’ve got to catch up on other things.”

  Just as the agent turned to walk out, Levi asked, “Hey, what about my car? I was parked at that preschool when you guys picked me up.”

  O’Connor looked over his shoulder at Levi. “I’ve already gotten it taken care of. By the time you and Nick are done, it’ll be parked outside the building.” He left the office, closing the door behind him.

  Anspach motioned toward a chair. “Mister Yoder, why don’t you grab a seat and we can go over what we’ve gathered on these cases.”

  ###

  “Mendoza was killed in New York City eight days ago.” Anspach’s voice was soft, almost as if he were whispering.

  Levi flipped through the Mendoza case file as the forensic examiner sat on the opposite side of the desk. There were nearly fifty pages of notes, interviews, and other forensic reports. The agent’s autopsy stated that the man’s carotid artery had been severed by a deep laceration across the front and side of the neck.

  With a lopsided grin that pulled slightly at the scar tissue on his cheek, Anspach slid a pad of yellow sticky notes toward Levi. “You can’t have any of the records, but O’Connor didn’t say you couldn’t jot down a few notes.”

  Levi returned the examiner’s smile and tapped the side of his head. “Thanks, but I’ll see if I can keep it all up in h
ere.” He tapped on the file. “This happened in the middle of the day in Central Park. How is it that this guy hasn’t been caught?”

  Anspach shrugged. “I can’t say. Frankly, I didn’t do the initial investigation, but I talked to the guy who did, out of the New York field office. Initially it looked like a random mugging, but nothing was stolen.”

  Levi flipped to the next page in the file and was greeted by an artist’s sketch of an Asian man. “Is this the suspect?”

  Anspach held a grim expression. “Yup. It happened right in front of Mendoza’s wife and two kids. The sketch is based on the wife’s description.” He reached across the desk and tapped on the Asian man’s cheek. “She also stated that she scratched him something good across the left cheek. We got a DNA sample from underneath her fingernails and it matched that of a Chinese male.”

  Levi wondered why the hell he was even involved in this. I’m a six-foot Anglo with blue eyes and one hundred and eighty pounds. There’s no way I’d be confused for a five-foot-seven Asian guy weighing one hundred and forty pounds.

  Levi huffed with frustration and focused on the artist’s drawing. One of the earlier pages in the file had listed Mendoza’s kids as being five and seven, both boys. What kind of animal would attack someone in front of his two kids?

  The examiner slid a thicker file toward Levi. “This is what we have on the Nguyen and Wei incident. It happened only about an hour from here. It was a car bomb that took them both out, and—”

  “I don’t get it.” Levi began flipping through the new case folder. “One New York murder and two near here. Why are these three murders being lumped together? I’d think they’d be handled by two different field offices, wouldn’t they?”

  Anspach tilted his head and stared silently at Levi for a moment before answering. “O’Connor didn’t tell you?”

  “O’Connor hasn’t told me dick about any of this. What am I missing?”

  “Well—I guess it doesn’t do any harm telling you. They’re all part of a sex tourism taskforce.”

  “You mean child sex trafficking?” Levi’s lip curled up with revulsion, and his mind drifted to the image of the missing Tanaka kid.

  “Not only children, but yes. Import of foreign nationals for … less than honorable reasons. Even though slavery has been abolished in this country for over one hundred and fifty years, it still exists.” Anspach’s face took on a haunted expression that implied the forensics specialist had seen some things he’d rather not have seen.

  Levi looked over the reports on the bomb used to kill the two agents. One of the printouts showed a picture of an Asian man. “You found a fingerprint on a bomb fragment?”

  “Lucky as hell, really. In the FBI lab over in Quantico, we have some really good processes to help bring out latent prints. I managed to find a print amid all that junk from the scene, and as you can tell in the report, it led to a hit in IAFIS.”

  “Aye-fiss?”

  Anspach chuckled. “Oh, sorry. FBI acronym, we’ve got boatloads of them. That’s our fingerprint database.”

  Levi scanned the IAFIS report on a Kiyoshi Ishikawa—thirty-two years old, a Japanese foreign national on an expired student visa. Current whereabouts were unknown. The section of the report titled, “Criminal Record and Associations” included a list of relatively minor beefs with the local law in DC. But Levi’s heartbeat echoed loudly in his head and a chill raced up his spine as he read the next line aloud. “A known member of the Tanaka syndicate.”

  Anspach grumbled something unintelligible then said, “From what I know, they’re a really bad set of folks out of Japan, trying to make inroads in the US. But to be honest, that’s not my area of expertise, so I can’t really give you much insight on them.”

  As Levi skimmed the rest of the report, his mind raced. After another five minutes in silence, he pushed the file back to Anspach. “Are these files everything you have?”

  The man’s right eye twitched in what looked like a painful tic, and the scar tissue next to the corner of his eye creased. “I’m afraid that’s it.” He motioned to the sticky notes and pencil. “You sure you don’t need to take any notes?”

  Levi stood and shook his head. “I’ve got what I need.”

  Chapter Four

  Back in his rental car, Levi had just called Madison when a capitol police car flew past the FBI’s DC field office, its siren blaring. “Maddie, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Her voice came over the car’s speakers. She sounded stressed. “What’s up? You don’t normally call during the weekday.”

  “Well, believe it or not, I’m in DC and I have a few hours before I need to catch the train back. Are you able to grab a bite?”

  “Oh … I wish I could. To be honest, I’ve been feeling kind of blah, so I’m heading to the doctor to get checked over. Maybe I’m getting the flu or something.”

  Levi frowned. Something didn’t sound right. She seemed to be upset about something. “Well, I can go with you—I’ve got time. Just let me know where to meet you.”

  “No, that’s perfectly all right. You go take your train, Seriously, I mean it.”

  “But—”

  “Levi!” Madison raised her voice, then laughed. “Do you really need me to tell you that I’m going to my gynecologist and I would prefer you not be there? I’m fine, just not feeling one hundred percent. I’ll call you on Friday and we’ll figure something out, okay?”

  Embarrassed, Levi shifted the car into gear. “Okay, I suppose I understand. Have fun.”

  “Not exactly the kind of thing you tell a girl going to her lady parts doctor, but okay.” Levi heard a smile in her voice. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  He tapped his destination into the car’s navigation system and pulled away.

  ###

  Standing in the middle of Union Station, Levi pressed his cell phone tightly against his ear, trying to hear Denny’s voice over the noisy crowd of evening commuters.

  “Levi, that Domino’s delivery car was abandoned in the back of a run-down taqueria near the corner of Arliss Street and the Garland turnaround. Across the street is a beauty school with a security system that snapped some wide-angle shots from around that time. The photos aren’t good enough to identify anything useful like a plate, but there was a dark-colored Suburban parked in the back of the taqueria after the restaurant was closed. I had a local check with the owner, and nobody there owns anything like that and the owner didn’t see a thing.”

  “That’s great, Denny. Did you by any chance catch what direction the Suburban was going when it left the parking lot?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. A library next to the beauty school had a video camera pointing at Walden Road. Right around the time the Domino’s car got dumped, the library camera shows a black Suburban going north on Walden Road.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Don’t get too excited. I wasn’t able to track it any further. That’s mostly a residential area, and there’s not much in the way of security cameras around there. I spread my net pretty far, pulled in lots of local favors, but I couldn’t find the car again. It could have parked in someone’s garage, but more likely it’s gone. Walden is one of those through streets that runs straight across residential areas. That Suburban could be anywhere.”

  “Shit, okay.” Levi began walking toward the gates where his train was set to depart from. “I’m still in DC, but I’m taking the Acela to Penn Station, so I’ll be back in the city in a few hours.” Levi spotted a familiar profile fifty feet ahead, and steered toward the man. “Listen, Denny. I have to go. Gather up whatever you have for me, and I’ll see you sometime after midnight.”

  “Gotcha. I’ll be at the bar, as always.”

  Levi ended the call and stepped up behind the Asian man staring up at Amtrak’s schedule board.

  He placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Yoshi, funny seeing you here.”

  ###

&nbs
p; Levi and Yoshi sat next to each other in the coach section as the train sped north to Penn Station. The conversations of late-evening commuters buzzed all around them. Yoshi had wanted to go into the quiet car, but Levi wanted their conversation to be drowned out by the surrounding noise. In Levi’s mind, everyone was a suspect, and there was a lot about this mobster’s brother and the whole Tanaka thing that bugged the hell out of him.

  It was hard to imagine that it was only twelve hours ago that he had been interviewing Helen Wilson in her dining room. He replayed that conversation and found himself focusing on a just a couple sentences she’d said.

  “The only reason I even let you in was because I trust Yoshi. He and I used to work together a long time ago.”

  “So,” Levi said. “Why’d you quit working for the FBI?”

  Yoshi had leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes, but now he sat up straight and twisted in his seat to face Levi. “How the heck did you know I worked there? Did Helen say something?”

  “Not in so many words, but yes.” Levi studied the man. His posture was stiff, and he looked Levi directly in the eyes, somewhat defiantly.

  But then Yoshi sighed wistfully, and his posture softened. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Listen, no bullshit.” Levi leaned. “I’ll figure it out, but for everyone involved, it’s a lot better that I know what’s going on. Everything. There’s no way you’d leave the security of a government job with the Bureau to be some two-bit security lackey unless there’s a good reason.” He noticed a rather expensive Tag Hauer chronograph on Yoshi’s left wrist. An image from this morning’s interview with Helen flashed into his mind’s eye, and he smiled. “Let me guess, your brother was supplementing your pay, and the Bureau got wind of it.”

  Yoshi cast his eyes downward. “You’re close. Ryuki asked me to start looking after Helen a few years back. I didn’t ask for any compensation, but he started depositing money into my account, and someone at work must have noticed. I passed the lie detector tests, because I honestly didn’t even know about the deposits yet, but still, after that I was sort of set aside by my bosses, and I can’t blame them. I always knew that if my brother came to the States, it might pose a problem for my career.