Jonathan shook his head. “The CIA can’t do that. Not on American soil.”
Venice rolled her eyes. “Okay, then the Secret Service. Or maybe the CIA drags them out of the country and renditions them. Work with me. Since we’re only guessing, there could be a thousand possible scenarios.”
Jonathan turned his attention back to loading. “Let’s go through it again,” he said. “What did the police reports say about the shooting in Ohio?”
“Nothing,” Venice said. “That’s my point. A call was made and a complaint was filed. After that, there’s nothing. It’s as if nothing happened.”
Jonathan looked over to Boxers. “In context with the other non-shoot-out and the warrants, that’s very strange,” he said.
“Maybe the arrest warrant is really a protective custody thing,” Boxers offered. “You know, bring them to safety long enough for the FBI to shelter them from people who would hurt them.”
Jonathan dismissed the idea. “Why spin up every police department in the Lower Forty-eight to be looking for felons when the real point is to give them an administrative hug?”
“What’s your theory, then?”
“I don’t have one,” Jonathan said. “What I have are fears. If one arm of the federal government is fighting against another arm, we’re in the middle of a fight that we can’t possibly win.”
“Who do you think the two arms are?”
Jonathan had no idea. “I think the smart money says the FBI is one of them. After that, I would guess CIA, but only because they’ve been such a pain in the ass over the years. But if that’s so, why aren’t the warrants issued by them?”
Venice fell silent for long enough to pull Jonathan’s attention back to her. “You’re troubled,” he said.
“You mentioned context,” she said. “Well, let’s go to an even bigger context. This Maryanne Rhoades chick makes my skin crawl. Just the way she comes on. First, there was the familiarity, and then there was the aggressiveness. I learned a long time ago to trust my instincts, and she makes my instincts uncomfortable.”
“You suspect she’s lying?”
Venice gave him that look. “I think everyone’s lying, thanks to you,” she said. “Hanging with you is to take a master class in mistrust.”
“You’re welcome,” Jonathan said with a smile. In Washington, DC, mistrust was a survival skill, particularly when it came to senior political appointees. It wasn’t that they were unpatriotic — in fact, they were so friggin’ patriotic that they believed their zeal to be better than the words in the dusty old Constitution. They scared Jonathan more than the crooks. Crooks did what they did for personal gain. Jonathan might not agree with their logic or their approach, but at least he understood it. The ones who purported to speak for the public’s own good gave him the willies. Paging Adolf Hitler…
“Why would Maryanne lie?” he asked.
“I have no idea. I’ve only just begun my investigation into her.”
“Give me a theory,” Jonathan pressed. “Why would Maryanne, handpicked by Wolverine, want to work both ends against the middle?”
Venice counted off on her fingers. “Okay, there’s money, sex, secrets—”
“In other words, you don’t have a theory,” Jonathan interrupted. He went back to his bullets.
Venice explained, “Last night at the gala, Maryanne approached you at what, ten-thirty, eleven o’clock?”
Jonathan hitched his shoulders. “Sounds about right.”
“And that was maybe an hour after what happened in Indiana, right? If that?”
Jonathan saw it. “How did she know so many details so quickly?”
“Pretty well dressed at the spur of the moment, too,” Boxers added.
Venice touched her nose. Bingo. “More than that, how come she knew all that she knew, yet didn’t know anything else?”
Jonathan laid the magazine on its side on the table. He was fully engaged now. “Advance knowledge? It would have to be. This is really beginning to smell bad.”
Venice’s computer dinged, drawing her attention. She scowled as she jiggled her mouse and leaned in closer to her computer screen to take in whatever information was being delivered. “Huh,” she said.
Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks. It was best to let Venice process information at her own pace. She’d share when she was ready.
“Now this is interesting,” she said. “I got a hit on a filter I set up through ICIS. There was an interesting incident last night on the outskirts of Napoleon, Ohio. Same general area as all the rest.”
“Another shoot-out?”
“No, more interesting than that. There was a potential statutory rape call.” She leaned into the screen again. “The Hummingbird Motel. Sounds like a place where you’d rent rooms by the hour.”
“And why is this interesting?” Boxers asked.
“Because it’s within a reasonable drive of Antwerp, Indiana, and Defiance, Ohio,” she said.
“I think Big Guy meant, why is a statutory rape call interesting?” Jonathan said. Venice’s mind was wired differently than other people’s. Asked to solve the arithmetic problem for the sum of two plus two, she was apt to investigate the origin of the word “two” and the reason why it has a silent w, and in the process still come up with the answer more quickly than a math major sitting next to her.
Her expression said, Duh. “Because it was all about a young woman and a teenage boy. I thought that might be our PCs.”
“Of course you did. And?”
She sighed. “And nothing. The police investigated, and their report says it was a sister and brother traveling together.”
“I recognize that look in your eye,” Jonathan said. “There’s more.”
“Maybe,” she said. She returned her gaze to the screen and started reading aloud, skimming and compressing information as she spoke. “The call was placed by the front-desk manager — he said he didn’t like the way she was acting, like she was trying to hide the fact that she had someone else with her. The ICIS file contains a security-camera image.”
“Jolaine?”
“Really close,” Venice confirmed. She tapped a few keys, and the image transferred from her screen to the larger one on the wall. “You know how the angles are on those cameras — always just a little bit wrong. But if you ask me, I think it’s her.”
Jonathan agreed. “Let’s finish up and pack, Big Guy. We’re deploying to Napoleon, Ohio.” He stood.
“I think that’s a mistake,” Venice said. And then she disappeared into her head and her keyboard while she attacked the keys. “Sit back down and give me a minute,” she said without looking up. “Please.”
Ninety seconds later, she fist-pumped the air. “Yes!” When she made eye contact again, she was beaming. “The chances of them still being in the motel aren’t very high, I don’t think. They’d want to stay moving, right?”
“But I don’t want to lose time hanging around in Virginia while the PCs are somewhere in the Midwest,” Jonathan said. “Particularly not with cops looking for them. What do the police have to go on, by the way? What are they looking for?”
“Just descriptions,” Venice said. “And pictures. They’re the same ones we looked at.”
“Do they have a license number for a car?” he asked. “Or a make and model?”
“Not that I know of,” she said, then she gave a triumphant whoop. “But I think I do. The Humingbird Motel uses ProtecTall Security for their alarms and video.”
Jonathan felt a rush. ProtecTall was a premier low-end physical security company, with contracts for roughly half of the free world, and Venice had conquered their computer backstops ages ago.
“There were only a few cars in the parking lot last night,” she said. “One of them was a black Mercedes that happens to be registered to a Douglas Wilkerson from — wait for it — Defiance, Ohio.” An image of the car materialized on the screen.