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Chapter 37
Josh
At noon the next day,I waited in a conference room of the District of Columbia FBI Field Office. Nicole and the rest of my family were in the air on the way home. It was lunchtime, and a half-eaten Subway sandwich and a Coke sat in front of me. Nervousness had destroyed my appetite. Debbie had said she would call at two, but I’d been here all morning, just in case.
I typed out a text to my girl.
ME: Miss you
She wouldn’t likely get it until she landed, but what the hell. I added another few.
ME: Waiting for the call
Not wanting to spend a minute of time away from Nicole, I hadn’t brought my laptop on this trip, and now I had to settle for looking out the window to keep myself occupied.
Adam’s partner on the case, Rylie Brolin, opened the door and poked her head in. “How you holding up?”
“Okay, I guess. The waiting sucks.”
“Tell me about it. You should try an overnight stakeout. Talk about bored out of your mind.”
The TV shows depicted the life of an FBI agent as packed with excitement, and she was clearly setting me straight.
The truth was, I was more nervous about this than anything in a while. Dad and the rest of the family were relying on me to keep Debbie safe, and the goals of the FBI might not align with that.
“Any idea why she insisted on you?” Rylie asked.
I gave the same answer I’d given each time before. “No. Not really.”
I’d known Debbie when we were younger, but that was a long time ago, and if she wanted to talk to a family member, why hadn’t she asked for her parents?
Did that mean she knew they were dead? If she knew, what did that tell us about who had taken her and how she’d been held captive? Merely thinking like that had me making dangerous assumptions.
Adam had warned me that we didn’t know anything for sure. It was more important to draw out information than to provide it. The purpose of the call had to be either locating her or setting up a meeting. That had been drilled into me.
Adam’s boss, Dempsey, wanted a meeting so the FBI could apprehend the bank-robbing crew she was working with.
My sister-in-law Ashley had told me before she left that although Debbie had been the victim of a kidnapping years ago, Dempsey viewed her as a suspect to be apprehended, and to be careful. When I learned the evidence tying her to the robbery was a video, I’d asked to see it, but was rebuffed by Dempsey.
* * *
At a quarter before two,the room filled up. Adam was joined by his boss, Dempsey, his partner, Rylie, and his previous partner, Neil Boxer, with whom he’d worked the original bank robbery where Debbie’s DNA had been identified.
“We’ll all be listening,” Dempsey said as he pointed to the headsets attached to the phone in front of me. “You use the phone, not the speaker. We don’t want to spook her.”
He’d explained this to me twice before, like I was a kid or something. “As far as she’s concerned, it’s just the two of you on the phone.”
I stated the obvious. “She’s calling the FBI, so she has to know you’re listening.”
“Even so, we want her to be at ease. This is just two old friends talking.” He said old friends as if it hadn’t been almost twenty years. “Remember, we want to set up a meeting, just the two of you.”
When I’d asked him what he recommended, he hadn’t been definitive. “Whatever she’s comfortable with,” he’d said.
Dempsey repeated himself a few more times before the appointed hour, and finally added, “Remember, we want to stop this crew before anybody else gets hurt.”
It was almost exactly two o’clock when the phone in front of me rang.
Dempsey checked around the room and gave me the thumbs up.
