“I’ll roll the calls as soon as I’m on the road. Tell Briggs to give me five minutes.”
Briggs could wait. First Ian needed to share the news of his triumph.
He turned the chair slowly and gazed at the satchel in the corner of his office.
It was a black satchel, old, worn, the leather creased and scarred, but still sturdy. A satchel built to last, but then, so was the British Empire. A strap and a lock secured the case. Above the lock, the initials PSP were embossed in gold leaf. They’d found the satchel in the parking garage next to his father’s car.
After all these years, he thought, after the endless queries, the fruitless leads, after exploring shadowy path after shadowy path, all to no avail, just maybe there was a chance.
His eyes rose, catching a shadow. A man was standing next to the satchel. He was tall and upright, dressed in a navy chalk-stripe suit, a maroon necktie done with a perfect dimple, lace-up shoes polished to a regal shine. “Lobb of London. Only the best, right, son?”
Peter Prince’s black hair was cut short, parted immaculately on the left and shining with brilliantine. He was a gentleman, to look at. A man of authority. He was not a man who walked out of his home one morning and vanished without a trace. He was not a man who left his satchel beside his car.
“It worked,” said Ian proudly to his father. “I fixed it.”
Peter Prince dipped his gaze. His eyes narrowed, searching the room.
Ian raised a hand in greeting. A smile pushed at the corners of his mouth. “Dad…over here…”
“Five minutes, my ass!”
Ian spun back toward the door as Peter Briggs stormed into the office.
“You going to keep me waiting all day, then?” Briggs said. “Think I came over just to gossip? I know how to use a phone, too. We’re not all of us idiots who don’t know what Everest stands for. Christ!”
“What is it?” Ian asked.
“Urgent.” Briggs sat down in a guest’s chair, snapping his fingers in the air. “You all there? This one requires your attention. Semaphore.”
Ian glanced over his shoulder. His father was gone. There was only the black satchel by itself in the corner. “What about Semaphore? ‘Tied off,’ you said. ‘Bank it.’ ”
“The wife. She’s asking questions.”
“Excuse me. ‘The wife’? What do you mean?”
“The agent’s wife. Mrs. Joseph Grant. She’s got quite the bee in her bonnet.”
The mention of the dead agent’s wife was like a dash of cold water. “How so?” asked Ian, his attention squarely on Briggs.
“She doesn’t believe her husband could have been killed by an informant. Claims there are discrepancies in the FBI’s story. Wants to know what’s what.” Briggs helped himself to a fistful of almonds from a bowl on the desk, flicking them into his mouth one at a time. “You know the type. Nosy. Doesn’t know when to let well enough alone.”
“Are there?”
“Discrepancies?” Briggs shrugged. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. It’s the call. He must have said something to her.”
“Not that I recall.” Ian had listened to Joseph Grant’s message several times and was sure he hadn’t mentioned anything about Semaphore or ONE. “Anyway, I erased it from her phone. No evidence there.”
“She’s a woman. She doesn’t need evidence. She has intuition.”
“And the rest of it…besides the woman?”
“Tied off.”
Ian averted his gaze. He was beginning to despise the term. “We can’t afford any problems. Nothing that might put things in jeopardy.”
“I understand,” said Peter Briggs.
“I know you do,” said Ian. “So it’s just the woman?”
Briggs nodded.
“What’s her name?”
“Mary Grant.”
“Her full name.”
“Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.”
Ian wrote the name on his ledger. “Go ahead, then. But easy does it. Nothing heavy-handed. Level one and that’s it. We don’t want to stir things up.” Ian stood, signaling that the meeting was over. “She can’t find anything anyway. It’s ‘tied off,’ right?” He looked hard at Peter Briggs.
“Bank it.”
–
Ian stared at the name on the ledger.
Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant.
He knew what it was like to lose a loved one under mysterious circumstances. He knew about the power of unanswered questions. He knew about curiosity hardening to obsession. He also knew better than to take anyone for granted. Not even an ordinary housewife.
Ian called his assistant and asked her to push back his schedule fifteen minutes. He typed Mary Grant’s name into the Search bar and got three hits: Facebook, Austin real estate registry, and a Shutterfly account.
The Facebook account was under the name Mary Olmstead Grant, the private information available to her friends. Still, as a beginning it was promising. There was a picture of a tropical beach, two children walking at water’s edge. He guessed it was somewhere in southern Mexico, Costa Rica, the Philippines, or Thailand. A photograph of a woman he assumed to be Mary Grant was inset in the landscape. It was an odd photo, showing only half the woman’s face, purposely cropped to disguise her identity. Still, he could see that she was blond, pretty, and vivacious. Her eyes held the camera.
She listed her work as “household engineer.” She had studied at Georgetown. She lived in Austin. She liked Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cold-play, and Alfred Brendel. She also liked the American Cancer Society, Sacramento Children’s Hospital, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. She had forty-three friends.
Again, not much, but a beginning.
A private woman proud of her upbringing, not wanting to lose her maiden name and all that it meant to her. An intelligent woman with an education. A woman who had traveled the world. A woman who had been touched sometime in her life by cancer, either her own or a family member’s. A woman who valued her privacy and was not comfortable sharing personal information with strangers. A woman who chose her friends carefully.
Ian’s concern grew. A formidable woman, he sensed.
He drew up yesterday’s work log to locate the number Joseph Grant had called minutes before his death. He noted that Mary Grant was not currently a ONE Mobile customer. (This had not prevented him from using the competing carrier’s equipment to gain access to her phone. Traffic between wireless carriers demanded cooperation on the most intimate technological levels. He had nearly unfettered access to his competitors’ servers, routers, and relay stations.) ONE Mobile had strong market share in Sacramento. Perhaps she’d been a client and switched carriers upon her arrival in Austin.
He logged into ONE Mobile’s Sacramento database and plugged in her name.
Bingo. In fact Mary Grant had been a customer of ONE Mobile during her residence in Sacramento.
He pulled up the customary information: date of birth, home address, banking details (Mary Grant was an autopay customer), and Social Security number. He smiled inwardly. This last piece of information was crucial. A person’s Social Security number was a skeleton key that could unlock troves of personal, often confidential data.
He continued for a few minutes longer, downloading phone records for the prior two-year period. Digging deeper, he found a record of her voicemail password: 71700. He guessed it was either an anniversary or the birth date of a family member, most probably one of her children.
The Shutterfly hit yielded only two photos, but to Ian they were important. Both showed two girls seated together. One was dark-haired and olive-skinned, the other fair and sickly pale. Mary Grant’s daughters.