“No,” Kate said.
“Then I’m confused. What swindle are you talking about?”
“You trespassed on private property. You impersonated an engineer.”
“Those are federal offenses?”
“You swindled a hospital for asbestos cleanup that you didn’t do.”
“Did they say they paid me?”
“No,” she said, “but—”
“Is there asbestos in the hospital?”
“No,” she said.
“I rest my case,” he said, and smiled at her. “Can I go now?”
She wanted to hit him with a bus all over again. She was glad her back was to the mirror, to the agents who were watching, so they couldn’t see the flush on her face and her frustration as the interrogation slipped away from her.
Kate leaned forward against the table. “There are dozens of other swindles and heists we haven’t talked about yet. You’ve been doing this for a very a long time, Nick. Scotland Yard, the Sûreté, and the Russian Politsiya all want a piece of you. We’re only just getting started.”
He lifted his eyes to hers. “You must have me mistaken for someone else.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“You’ve misinterpreted everything that happened last night,” he said. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”
“Then by all means, set me straight,” she said, leaning back again. She needed a moment to regroup anyway, to collect her thoughts and regain control of the situation.
He looked past her, directing his appeal to the audience. “I’m a struggling performance artist. What happened at the Kibbee was a show.”
“Like the Blue Man Group, only in green and with a diamond?” Kate said.
“In a sense, yes. Live theater on the stage of life. A big stunt that we hoped would go viral on YouTube. Obviously, it was a dumb thing to do. I’ll gladly do my thousand hours of community service and pay restitution for the scratch we left in the glass display case.”
“You drove away with a fifteen-million-dollar diamond,” she said.
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “It was a cubic zirconia, a fifteen-dollar bauble just like the one we left behind in its place. So see, it was theater on both sides. No harm done.”
It was another bold guess, but an educated one, Kate thought. She’d switched the real diamond before its arrival at the Kibbee, though only Roland knew that. And as the situation was playing out, her unwillingness to gamble with the real diamond would cost her in the courtroom. He wouldn’t do much prison time for this heist. They’d have to nail him for all the swindles he’d pulled before, assuming they didn’t end up having to stand in line behind the other countries that wanted to extradite him. Either way, though, he was going down. She had to show him how futile it was to fight the inevitable, that now was the time to make a deal.
“I know all about you, going back to when you were eighteen,” Kate said. “I don’t get it, either. You had such a bright future. You had the smarts to get yourself into Harvard, but you threw it all away by running a massive, multifaceted cheating operation for rich students. Your scams ran the gamut from hiring impostors to take tests to creating entirely fake transcripts that you planted in the registrar’s office. When you were finally caught, you and a dozen students were expelled and seventy-eight of your other victims were quietly forced to repeat entire academic years.”
“They weren’t victims. They came to me to take advantage of the unique services that I offered so they could have more time for their leisurely pursuits,” he said. “Harvard taught me how to be an enterprising entrepreneur in a global marketplace.”
“What you learned was to target the rich and the venal, people who could afford to be swindled and would rarely report the crime or press charges because they wouldn’t want to be seen as fools,” she said. “That’s what’s kept you out of jail. Until now.”
“It’s odd to hear you talking to me about jail,” Nick said.
“I don’t see why,” she said. “I’m an FBI agent and you’re a crook.”
“Your mother died when you were seven. Your father, a career soldier, took you and your younger sister with him from base to base, all over the world, so you lived the same regimented life that he did. Instead of escaping from the military life when you were eighteen, you joined up, becoming a Navy SEAL, until your commanding officer tried to cop a feel.”
“He was a jerk.”
Nick grinned. “You broke the jerk’s nose, and the good ol’ boy network made you settle for an honorable discharge instead of court-martial. You joined the FBI after that, which is like the army only there’s no uniform and no saluting. You don’t play well with others. You work alone, because you’re too driven and emotionally distant for anyone to last as your partner, and you live alone for the same reason. So you’re in your own kind of prison. Which is really a shame because you’re very pretty, frighteningly competent, and compellingly complex.”
Kate was momentarily speechless. She was shocked that he knew all those things about her. And she was gobstruck that he thought she was pretty.
“I usually look better,” Kate said, “but I threw up.”
“I hope it wasn’t on my account.”
“I’m pretty sure it was the breakfast burrito.”
“You should take better care of yourself and stop eating all that fast food,” he said.
“How do you know these things?”
“Facebook.”
“I’m not on Facebook.”
“But your sister is and so is everybody else in your family. I love the pictures from your thirteenth birthday party. What was with the braces on your teeth? I’ve never seen anything like it, all those wires, rubber bands, and headgear—”
“I had crooked teeth and an overbite, okay?”
“You were cute.”
“I wasn’t cute. I looked like a demented chipmunk.”
Nick smiled wide. “I thought you looked cute.”
Kate narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re playing me.”
“I’m not playing you. I’m serious. I’m attracted to you. You’re sexy and exciting.”
“That’s it.” She slapped the file shut, tucked it under her arm, and got up. “Forget about a deal. Let’s see what your smile is like after ten years in prison.”
Kate stormed out, slamming the door behind her. She squinched her eyes closed and slapped herself in the forehead hard enough to rattle things loose. “Ugh!” she said. “Crap, damn, phooey!” She threw the file against the wall, ran over to it, and kicked it twenty feet down the hall.
The door to the observation room opened, and Carl Jessup stepped out and eyeballed the file scattered over the floor.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“No. I’m sorry, sir. I let him get to me.”
“He’s a con man, it’s what he does. But it doesn’t matter. He’s sitting in there in irons. You got him and he knows it,” Jessup said. “He’ll end up giving us what we want, every dollar that he stole, to avoid extradition and the possibility of ending up in a Russian gulag. So don’t beat yourself up over this.”
“I should have gone with the French braid,” she said. “The ponytail isn’t my power look.”
Kate spent the next couple days back in Los Angeles, gathering all of her notes and files on Nick Fox and handing them over to the federal prosecutor who was leading the trial team. She offered to stick around, to do whatever additional investigation might be necessary, but the prosecutor thought it was best for the case if she stayed out of it until she was called to testify. So she was finally free of the investigation that had occupied most of her time and attention for years.
She enjoyed that freedom in the privacy of her cubicle for five whole minutes before marching into Jessup’s office. It had a commanding view of the Santa Monica Mountains and the hilltop Getty Center museum, which she knew Nick Fox had twice tricked into buying fake paintings, not that she’d been able to prove it.
&nbs
p; Jessup looked up from his desk. “Did you give the Justice Department everything?”
“I cleaned out my files,” she said. “I even gave them my paper clips and the half-eaten turkey sandwich that’s been in my desk drawer since January. What have you got for me?”
He handed her a thin file. “Pirates.”
“You’re sending me to Somalia?”
“There’s a ring in Southern California that’s been duping DVDs of movies and TV shows and posting the digital files on the Internet for people to download for free,” Jessup said.
“We go after that stuff?”
“Haven’t you seen the FBI warning at the beginning of every DVD?”
“Yeah, but I thought it was a joke.”
“It’s not,” Jessup said.
“It is to me,” Kate said. “I brought in Nick Fox. I should be going after the next Nick Fox.”
“This is big-time crime, Kate. The ring has cost the studios millions of dollars,” Jessup said. “One of the movies that they uploaded to a file-sharing site was downloaded twenty-seven thousand times in ninety days. And they’ve uploaded hundreds.”
“I’m not feeling it,” she said.
“The maximum penalty for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement is five years in prison, a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine, and damages, which are computed by taking the sales price of the DVD and multiplying it by the number of times the digital file has been downloaded. On a twenty-five-dollar DVD downloaded twenty-seven thousand times, that’s six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Now multiply that by hundreds of movies, and you get the picture. This is a huge case.”
Kate shook her head and put the file down. “I should be going after someone in the same league as Nick Fox. What about Derek Griffin? That big-time investment guy who ran off with five hundred million dollars that he stole from his clients? I should find him.”
“We’ve already got somebody on it,” Jessup said. “An entire task force, in fact.”
“There must be someone else on the Ten Most Wanted list I can have.”
“They are all taken.”
“All of them?”
“Believe it or not, while you were chasing Nick Fox, the rest of the Bureau was busy, too.”
“Fine. I’ll take number eleven on the list.”
“You’ll take this.” Jessup tapped the file. “Oh, and you’ll be working with an MPAA investigator on this one.”
“MPAA?”
“Motion Picture Association of America,” Jessup said.
“They have cops?”
“Yes,” Jessup said. “They do.”
“You’re telling me to work with a make-believe cop.”
“She’s not make-believe,” Jessup said. “She’s real. It’s what she’s hired to protect that’s not.”
Kate looked Jessup in the eye. “Are you punishing me?”
“Not every case can be Nick Fox,” Jessup said. “Get used to it.”
“You have to take down your Facebook page,” Kate told her sister, Megan.
It was clearly an order, but Megan wasn’t the least bit intimidated. The two women were sitting at a table in the backyard of Megan’s hillside home, one of the many red-tile-roofed Spanish Mediterranean McMansions in Calabasas, a suburb of guard-gated communities at the southwestern edge of the San Fernando Valley. Megan was in shorts and a T-shirt, reading Star magazine and getting the latest news on the Real Housewives of Everywhere. While she was talking to Kate she was keeping an eye on her narrow lap pool, where her four-year-old son, Tyler, and six-year-old daughter, Sara, yellow floaties around their chubby, pale arms, were in a water cannon fight with Megan’s husband, Roger. They were all splashing and shrieking, and their Jack Russell terrier, named Jack Russell, was running around the pool barking.
The air was rated “moderately unhealthful” by the Air Quality Management District, the fire hazard in the surrounding foothills was deemed “very high” by the Department of Forestry, and a SigAlert had been declared by the California Highway Patrol on the Ventura Freeway, meaning it would be an hour-long crawl to anywhere across the valley floor. In other words, it was a perfect Saturday afternoon in Southern California.
“Why would I want to take down my Facebook page?” Megan asked.
“Because it allows stalkers to mine personal information about you and your entire family,” Kate told her.
“I don’t have stalkers.”
“You might.” Kate was wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, and she felt naked without her Glock, which was in a lockbox in the trunk of her car. “You won’t know until one of them kidnaps your daughter to be his sex slave.”
Megan glared at her over the top of her Star magazine. “How can you say something awful like that about your adorable niece?”
“It’s a fact of life.” Kate gestured to the cover of the magazine. “It’s right there. ‘Teen Kidnapped by Hillbillies Reveals Ten-Year Ordeal as Sex Slave.’ ”
Megan put the magazine down on a stack of publications that included People, Us, and the National Enquirer, all of which Kate had brought. Reading trashy gossip magazines and making fun of the celebrities was a traditional part of O’Hare family picnics. It was something they’d picked up from the mothers on the military bases when they were growing up.
“There are no hillbillies in Calabasas, and even if there were, nobody is going to kidnap my kids,” Megan said. “You know why? Because my sister is an FBI agent, and my dad, an ex-marine who can kill a man sixteen different ways with an eyebrow tweezer, lives in the house.”
“He lives in the garage,” Kate said.
“It’s a casita,” Megan said.
“What would Dad be doing with an eyebrow tweezer?”
“It’s mine and it might be the only weapon handy when the hillbillies attack,” Megan said. “We aren’t taking down the Facebook page. The family loves it.”
“So make it private,” Kate said.
“It already is,” Megan said. “Family and friends only.”
“How many are there?”
Her sister reached for a handful of Doritos from one of the three big salad bowls of different chips in the center of the table. “One thousand three hundred and twelve.”
“We don’t have one thousand three hundred and twelve family and friends,” Kate said.
“That includes family of family and friends of friends,” Megan said.
Roger called out from the pool. “Easy on the Doritos, honey. You’ll want to save room for my world famous cheeseburgers.”
His burgers were simply ground beef patties sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and topped with a slice of Kraft processed American cheese. It wasn’t like it was a recipe that his great-grandmother had smuggled over from the old country on a scrap of paper stuffed in her cleavage or a unique blend of spices that he’d refined over years of backyard barbecuing. But everybody in the family, Kate included, dutifully ooohed and aaahed over the burgers anyway.
“Fine, you can keep your Facebook page,” Kate said. “But you have to remove all the pictures of me.”
“I can’t,” Megan said. “They’re family photos that you happen to be in. Everybody loves them. You are one part of a lot of great memories that we enjoy sharing. It’s how we stay connected as a family. Well, all of us but you.”
“Then photoshop my part out,” Kate said. “Or at least erase my braces and zits.”
“Oh, grow up, that was almost twenty years ago,” Megan said. “Besides, you’ve never cared much what people think of how you look. So something else must be in play here.”
“Thank you, Dr. Phil.”
Megan studied her. “When was the last time you had a chitty-chitty-bang-bang?”
“Drove a flying car?”
Megan glanced over at her kids to make sure they weren’t listening. “You know what I mean. How long has it been since you danced the horizontal mambo?”
Kate did know what Megan meant, but she was stalling for time. “
What does that have to do with anything?”
“Because you’re afraid of somebody seeing how geeky and awkward you were when you were a kid and finding you less attractive now as a result.”
Megan was three years younger than Kate and had never been geeky or awkward, so she didn’t care about how she looked in old pictures. After birthing two kids she was carrying a few extra pounds but she wore the weight well, probably because she didn’t give a damn about it, and half of beauty is attitude anyway. Or so they say in Us Weekly.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kate said.
“You want to know how often I have sex?”
“No!” Kate said.
“Three times a week,” Megan said. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. How about you?”
“None of your business.”
“So it’s been at least six months,” Megan said. “You need a love life. Heck, you need a life.”
“I have one,” Kate said.
“What you had was chasing Nick Fox. That’s a case, not a life. Now it’s time to reassess your goals and look ahead. Where do you want to be in five years? Who do you want to be? How many orgasms do you want to be having?”
“You plan your orgasms five years in advance?”
“You know how I got all of this?” Megan gestured to the house, the kids, and Jack Russell taking a crap on the lawn.
“Unprotected sex,” Kate said.
Megan was twenty-four years old and six months pregnant when she married Roger, an accountant she’d met on a blind date.
Megan ignored the comment. “I imagined it. I saw myself as a wife and mother. And here it is, a dream come true. What’s yours?”
Kate gave her a look and said, “Daniel Craig, a tropical island, a quart of Oreo cookie ice cream, and a pair of handcuffs.”
“Who’s wearing the cuffs?” Megan asked.
Kate ate another chip and let the question go unanswered.
Megan wagged a finger at her. “Your big problem is that you spend all of your time on the job, where the only men you meet are cops and crooks.”
That comment worried Kate. She’d heard it before. It was Megan’s excuse for creating an account under Kate’s name at eHarmony and setting her up for dates.