“To stay with Harvey. I need to leave tomorrow morning. Early. Charlie Wurth has a case in Florida he wants me to check out. Is Emma home?”
Too long of a pause. He knew what she was up to. He was a profiler, too. But would he let her get away with it? Gwen wouldn’t.
“She hasn’t left for college yet, has she?” Maggie asked the question only to fill the silence. She knew the girl was dragging her feet about going.
“No. Not until late next week. She’s not here right now, but I’m sure she’ll be okay about staying with Harvey. Text her instead of calling. You’ll get an immediate response.” Another pause. “Does AD Kunze know about this trip?”
“Of course, he does.” She hated that it came out with an edge. “Wurth checked it out with him.” She didn’t add that Kunze thought it was a good idea. Tully would add it on his own. He had faced the wrath of Kunze last fall when their new boss put Tully on suspension. “It’s probably not a big deal,” Maggie jumped in again. “Some body parts found in a cooler off the coast.”
“More body parts.” She could hear Tully laugh. “Sounds like you’re becoming an expert on killers who chop up their victims.”
She would have laughed, too, if it wasn’t so close to being true. Then, without regard to all the work she had done to change the subject, Maggie heard herself say, “Do me a favor, don’t tell Gwen about today, okay?”
“Not a problem.” This time there had been no pause, no hesitation. A partner backing up another partner. “Let me know if I can help. With the case,” he added, allowing her cover.
CHAPTER 5
NEWBURGH HEIGHTS, VIRGINIA
Maggie O’Dell downloaded and printed the copies Wurth forwarded to her. The photos and initial documents from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department reminded her that she’d want to take her own photos. She’d be able to decipher only the basics from these shots.
One photo showed an assortment of odd-shaped packages wrapped in plastic and stuffed inside an oversize cooler. The close-ups displayed the individual packages lined up on a concrete floor used for staging. What she could see beyond the plastic wrap looked more like cuts of meat from a butcher shop than parts of a human body.
She asked Wurth if they could wait until her arrival before unwrapping the packages. He told her it was probably too late.
“Doubtful. You know how that goes, O’Dell. Curiosity gets the best of even law enforcement.” But then he added, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Now Maggie sat cross-legged in the middle of her living-room floor, scattered photos on one side, Harvey on the other. His sleeping head filled her lap. She kept the TV on the Weather Channel. Initially the TV just provided background noise, but she found the weather coverage drawing her attention. She was learning about hurricanes, something that might come in handy in the following week.
Maggie found it interesting that the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, though measured by sustained winds, was also based on the level of damage those winds were capable of causing. A category-3 storm produced sustained winds of 111 to 130 miles per hour and could cause “extensive” damage; a category 4, 131 to 155 mile per hour winds and “devastating” damage; a category 5, 156 miles per hour and greater winds with “catastrophic” damage.
One hundred and forty mile per hour winds were not something Maggie could relate to. Damage, however, was something she could.
Hurricane Isaac had already killed sixty people across the Caribbean. Within several hours it had gone from 145 mile per hour winds to 150. The storm was expected to hit Grand Cayman in a few hours. One million Cubans were said to have evacuated in anticipation of the monster hitting there on Sunday. Moving at only ten miles per hour, the hurricane was expected to enter the Gulf by Monday.
On every projected path Maggie had seen in the last several hours, Pensacola, Florida, was smack-dab in the middle. Charlie Wurth hadn’t been kidding when he told her they would be driving down into the eye of a hurricane. Consequently, there were no available flights to Pensacola. Tomorrow morning she was booked to fly to Atlanta where Charlie would pick her up and they would drive five hours to the Florida Panhandle. When she asked him what he was doing in Atlanta—his home was in New Orleans and his office in Washington, D.C.—he simply said, “Don’t ask.”
Wurth still had difficulty acting like a federal government employee. He came to the position of assistant deputy director of Homeland Security after impressing the right people with his tough but fair investigation of federal waste and corruption in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But Wurth, like Maggie, probably would never get used to the bureaucracy that came with the job.