“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“I didn’t know I had a choice, sir.” Bowen forced a grin.
Nelson laughed, his Southern charm coming through. “You didn’t. Come on. She’s waiting for you.” Accustomed to spending time in the lofty realms of the twelfth floor, the AD put a hand on Bowen’s back and ushered him into the director’s office.
The office was spacious, at least thirty feet across with a separate sitting area and centered coffee table that she must have decided was too intimate for this particular meeting. Rich blue and gold carpeting glowed in the light from the windows along the north wall that offered a panoramic view of Reagan National Airport, the Potomac River, and downtown Washington, D.C. He wondered if people like this had big offices to make visitors feel small. It was sure working with him, a POD with a cubicle and a gun locker.
Director Carroll stayed seated when they walked in, flanked by her chief of staff and the deputy director. She was in her mid-fifties, with a full mane of frosted blond hair that lay perfectly on her padded shoulders. A high-collared wool suit and fist-size gold brooch accented her stern demeanor. The pinched look on her face made Bowen think she might spring from her seat at any moment and shout “Off with his head!” He’d seen few Taliban fighters that looked as fierce.
The chief of staff, a female former chief deputy from somewhere in the Midwest — Bowen couldn’t remember where — smiled, as if to set his nerves at ease. The DD was busy talking on his cell. “Go ahead and have a seat, Deputy Bowen,” the director said, not sounding as ferocious as she looked. “You are wondering, no doubt, why I called you in.” Bowen started to answer but she kept talking.
“AD Nelson tells me you grew up in Montana,” she said, with more of a nasal tone than he would have guessed from her photograph that hung in the Alexandria squad room. “Am I right on that?”
“You are correct,” Bowen said. “Flathead County.”
“He says you’re an avid bow hunter.”
“I am,” the deputy said, eyes looking to Nelson for any sign of an explanation.
“I suppose,” the director went on, fiddling with the brooch on her shoulder as she spoke, “hunting with a bow and arrow requires a good deal of patience and skill… Good qualities to have in a deputy marshal.”
“I suppose so.” Bowen gave an obedient nod, wondering where this was going.
“Well.” The director looked him over one last time, as if she hadn’t quite made up her mind until that very moment. “Fairfax County has given us a remarkable opportunity in the form of a fugitive warrant for Officer Chin’s shooter.”
Everyone within five hundred miles of D.C. had heard about some nut job murdering the young police officer. Bowen was sure the D.C. Area Regional Fugitive Task Force had boots on the ground helping find the shooter, but he’d not been involved. So far, they’d kept the identity of the fugitive off the news.
The director went on. “The Bureau has been going round and round with Fairfax County and Main Justice trying to grab this one.” She leaned forward, staring, nodding as if only she held some great secret to the universe. “But I told the attorney general it had to be us.” She pounded the desk. “You want to know why?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because we have you, Deputy August Bowen.” She smiled. “And the FBI, thankfully, does not.”
Bowen opened his mouth to speak, but an almost imperceptible headshake from the chief of staff stopped him.
“Does the name Jericho Quinn mean anything to you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bowen said. “We worked together a couple of times on some cases in Montana. I believe he’s still in OSI.”
“I understand you lost a boxing match to him in college.”
Bowen’s neck burned at the memory. He groaned. “Indeed I did, ma’ am.”
“So you know him pretty well.”
“I suppose so,” Bowen said. “He’s an Air Force Academy grad. I was Army ROTC, so there was always a certain amount of rivalry. But I’d have no trouble working with him again, if that’s what you mean. That fight thing was a long time ago.”
“I don’t want you to work with him.” Director Carroll leaned back in her chair. “I want you to hunt him down and arrest him.”
She didn’t say “off with his head,” but the nuance was crystal clear.
Dismissed with his marching orders, Bowen accompanied Nelson back to his division in the adjacent office tower, with the AD insisting they stop for coffee at a Starbucks across from the barbecue joint in the underground mall along the way.
“Can you tell me what we have on him, sir?” Bowen asked five minutes later when he sank down into Nelson’s plush leather couch. The notion of Jericho Quinn murdering a police officer popped back and forth inside his head, refusing to settle. Still, people did weird things. He knew that from experience.
The Assistant Director for Investigative Operations had a view similar to the director’s. Bowen would have thought the office was huge had he not just been to Carroll’s palatial digs.
Nelson slid an open Bible to one side of his desk and took a folder from the lap drawer. “Well, to tell the truth, we don’t have very much,” he said. “The Air Force seems to have misplaced Quinn’s entire file.”
“Family?” Bowen offered. “Friends?”
“There is that.” Nelson nodded. “Turns out somebody shot his ex-wife at a wedding in Colorado a couple of days ago. She lost her leg. Looks like the shooter may have been going for his daughter.”
That was too big a detail to be unrelated. “Anyone arrested?”
Nelson shook his head. “Nope. But at least OSI still had that incident report. There are a couple of names. One’s a Marine, I believe. That should get you started.”
Bowen took that as an indication he should get right to work.
“But wait.” Nelson grinned. “There’s more.” It was impossible not to like this guy. For one of the top managers in the Service, he was amazingly down to earth, kicked back at his desk and talking with a POD. Bowen couldn’t help thinking he’d like to work for the man someday, if only that didn’t mean being assigned to headquarters.
Nelson held up a clear plastic bag like a trophy. “We have his phone.”
That was good news. People kept all sorts of data on their phones, usually trusting a simple passcode to safeguard their secrets — appointments, e-mails, photographs, and most important to Bowen, friends and contacts. With the information from the phone, he should be able to build a pretty clear map of Jericho Quinn’s recent life.
“It’s encrypted,” Nelson said, sliding it across the desk and moving his Bible back to the center.
“No problem.” Bowen nodded. “I’ll take it to Geoff. He could get a call history off two tin cans and a string. We’ll find him, sir.”
“You’d better,” Nelson said. “Because the way I hear it, there are a lot of folks out there who don’t plan to work very hard to bring him in alive.”
CHAPTER 31
Quinn met Emiko Miyagi at an Exxon station east of Chantilly, not far from Dulles, where she gave him an envelope containing three fat rolls of twenty- and hundred- dollar bills, two credit cards, a passport, a Virginia driver’s license, and an airline ticket, all under the name of John Hackman. It was a fitting name, she pointed out, considering his penchant for using a blade.
Since Narita Airport’s entry procedures required a photograph and two fingerprints from each entering passenger, Quinn opted to take a less direct route into the country, flying out of Dulles to Seoul, then taking a domestic hop to Buson before boarding a ferry for the three-hour ride across the Sea of Japan to Fukuoka, where he was to meet Miyagi’s contact.