“But then they’ll write the story anyway, and without our input it might be pretty bad. We have tons of government contracts. With Walter doing what he did, there’s the possibility the Feds might terminate some or all of them.”
“Sorry, that’s not my department.” He clicked off and looked at Jamison.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Other than her worrying far more about the firm’s ass than her really good friend shooting someone and then killing himself, not really. Dabney booked this mysterious trip on his own. And his wife and kid
s share his partnership interest. So they control the company.”
“That would be a good motive to kill him, if he hadn’t killed himself,” said Jamison.
“What would drive a seemingly rock-solid guy like Dabney to murder someone and then shoot himself? I get that he was terminal, but that’s a little much.”
“Someone must have been holding a sword over his head. The woman on the video probably indicates that.”
“Maybe,” said Decker, though he didn’t look convinced.
“What are we going to do now?”
He held up the file. “You’re going to drive to someplace we can get some food, and I’m going to read.”
* * *
Decker wedged himself into the front seat of Jamison’s subcompact; he had to push the seat as far back as it would go, but his knees were still uncomfortably close to the dash.
As she drove off, he opened the file and started to read. Every word he took in was permanently imprinted onto his memory. The file wasn’t long, but it was instructive.
“She had passed a background check, which meant there was no criminal history for the woman.” He shuffled through some pages. “Okay, we couldn’t find anything for her from over ten years ago, but the file says she has her teacher’s certificate. And it also showed that she held undergraduate and master’s degrees from Virginia Tech.”
“So we know she has a past, then.”
“Well, yeah. But why couldn’t Bogart find it when he did his search? I have to believe the FBI has a few more resources than a Catholic high scho—Wait a minute.”
“What?”
He held up a page. “The file lists her name as Ann Berkshire.”
“Okay.”
“Her driver’s license, which was used to run her background check, lists her as Anne with an e on the end.”
“Wouldn’t someone have noticed that?”
“Apparently they didn’t. Lots of people wouldn’t, in fact. Her Social Security number is on here. We’ll have to check it with the one that Bogart came up with. Since he couldn’t find her educational history on his search I have to assume that something’s off. Driver’s licenses in Virginia don’t use the Social Security number as the ID number anymore. Probably no state does. Yet it should have brought up all the stuff in this file from some database. But it didn’t.”
“So is the background in that file even hers, then? Or someone else’s?”
“I don’t know, but the degrees listed are in engineering. Computer engineering.”
“Is that important?”
“I have no idea. It also says she worked for twelve years at Ravens Consulting.” He got on his phone and did a quick search. “Okay, Ravens is now defunct. Ten years back.”
“Lots of companies go belly up.”
“And why do I think if we try to check on that we’ll find no one from Ravens Consulting who will confirm that she worked there?”
“This is so weird.”
“So her past is an enigma. And maybe a fake one. But she’s apparently fifty-nine, obviously rich, and also a part-time volunteer for hospice patients and a substitute teacher at a Catholic school even though she doesn’t need the money.” He glanced at Jamison. “What does that suggest to you?”
“That she lucked out somewhere, maybe in her business career, and is now giving back?”
“Close, but not quite how I see it,” said Decker thoughtfully.
“Well then, how do you see it?”
But Decker had gone back to reading and didn’t answer her.
They pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant. Decker kept reading the file as he and Jamison walked into the place. They sat at a table near a window. While Jamison gazed out, Decker closed his eyes and began whirring through frames in his memory vault. When he opened them, Jamison was tapping keys on her phone.
“Something from Bogart?” asked Decker, glancing at her phone.
“It would have made things so much easier if Berkshire had been the woman on the video with Dabney at the bank,” she said wistfully.
Decker gave her a dubious look. “If you want easy, Alex, I think you picked the wrong profession.”
CHAPTER
15
SIX IN THE morning. The capital city was blessed by a crisp