The Prince of Risk A Novel(23)

“With my phone.”

Alex asked her to send the photograph to her own phone. Fifteen seconds later she had it.

The picture was terrible. It was dark and out of focus and of course taken from 50 feet away. Still, there was no mistaking the olive-drab crate with rope handles and some kind of yellow writing on the sides.

Alex considered this. Wooden crates with rope handles. Cyrillic writing. Whatever was inside the box—Kalashnikovs or Tokarevs or little wooden matryoshkas—it sounded as if it were military issue and a resident of Nassau County should not be in possession of it.

Alex ended the call after confirming Turner’s address and that of her neighbor and extracting a promise from Turner to come to the FBI’s office in Chelsea for an interview the following day. After that, she walked into the bullpen and waited until all her young lions raised their heads and gave her their attention.

“Gentlemen and gentlemen,” she announced, with the theatricality she reserved for promising leads, “we have a live one.”





14




Alex stood beside Jim Malloy at the door of 1254 Windermere. “Ready to go?”

Malloy nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Alex rapped twice on the door, then stepped back so that the keyholder could see her. She pushed her shoulders back and lifted her chin. She liked this moment best. The moment before the real job began. She never knew what she might find out, what crime she might discover, what threat she might mitigate. Too much of her job involved waiting, analyzing, convincing, and cajoling. This is what she had joined the Bureau for. Catching bad guys.

The house was a two-story clapboard with a shingle roof built in the early ’40s. A fringe of lawn out front needed mowing. An American flag hung limply next to the door. The owner was one Maxim Ustinov, an immigrant from Russia like Irene Turner, the neighbor who had called in the report, but Ustinov was just the landlord. The tenant, or in FBI parlance “the keyholder,” was a thirty-one-year-old male named Randall Shepherd. According to the owner, Shepherd was a model tenant. He had moved in on June 1 on a twelve-month lease. A cashier’s check in the amount of $9,000 had covered the security deposit as well as the first three months’ rent.

Alex had established twenty-four-hour watch on the house two days earlier. During that time there had been no sightings of Shepherd coming or going. To verify that no one was inside, she’d conducted a pretext, sending Malloy and Mara to the front door, posing as activists canvassing the area for signatures. No one had answered, and readings from the infrared scanner programmed to detect warmth emitted by human beings came back negative.

She was raising her hand to knock again when the door swung open.

“Hello.” The man was tall and fit, with dark hair cut to the scalp. He wore a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. His eyes were blue and steady. Alex couldn’t tell if he had a nice behind or not. He did, however, have arms like a weightlifter, his biceps bursting from the sleeves. Alex felt a pinch between her shoulder blades, a twinge, nothing more. It was her sixth sense, and it said, “Trouble.”



“Mr. Randall Shepherd?”

“Yes?” The response was tentative, as the man looked at the two agents, both attired in dark suits, both wearing sunglasses.

Alex badged him. “I’m Special Agent Forza with the FBI. This is Special Agent Malloy. We were wondering if we might have a word.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Not yet.” Alex smiled as she removed her sunglasses. “May we come in?”

“I’m happy to answer any questions out here.”

Alex detected a hint of a foreign accent. The h in happy was too soft, more ’appy. A background search on Shepherd had come up close to empty. He had no credit cards, didn’t subscribe to cable TV, and neither the IRS nor Social Security had heard from him in years. The Texas driver’s license number he’d given on his rental application was valid, though she hadn’t been able to pull up the picture. And of course there was the matter of the cashier’s check. No one paid three months’ rent in advance. To Alex’s eye, he was a straw man.

“We’d prefer to come inside,” said Malloy. “We can get a warrant if you’d like.”

Shepherd shrugged and his blue eyes softened. “Come in, then. The place is a mess. Don’t want to give the FBI the wrong impression.”

Shepherd swung open the door. Alex followed Malloy inside. The home was cheaply furnished and smelled of smoke and stale beer. There was a sagging couch, a beat-up armchair, and a coffee table scarred with cigarette burns. Copies of New York, Time Out, This Week in New York, and, more interestingly, Guns and Ammo lay arranged messily on one end. At the other, Alex noted a residue of spilled coffee or tea, not in a puddle but shaped very clearly at a right angle, as if it had been spilled next to a magazine. A magazine that had been hastily hidden.