No Good Deed Read Online Free PDF Page B

processing. Debriefing in—” he glanced at his watch “—about ninety minutes. That should give us time to follow-up with these kids.”
    “I need to report to Casilla.”
    “I’ll ask him if I can use you for the duration.”
    Lucy would do anything to help, but she also recognized that her boss had only recently begun to trust her again after a series of events that necessitated her violating protocol and engaging in a rescue mission south of the border. Brad had been a part of that. “Are you sure?”
    “Lucy, you’re the only one I trust. Nicole had someone on the inside—she couldn’t have planned and executed this escape without help. The day and time of the transport could have come from her attorney, but the route—you’re right, that was limited knowledge and decided at the last minute. She wasn’t told.”
    “She could have guessed.”
    “Yeah, but there are three preset routes from the jail to the courthouse. She couldn’t have known which one we’d choose.”
    Brad and Lucy walked back toward the staging area where they spotted Juan Casilla talking with Samantha Archer, Juan’s counterpart at the DEA, and the SAPD chief of police, Milton Turner. “Stay here,” Brad said.
    Lucy watched as Brad talked to the group. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Brad did most of the talking. No one looked at her. Two minutes later he shook Juan’s hand, then approached Lucy. “You’re with me.”
    “That was fast.”
    “I told the truth. We have a mole and I trust you. I didn’t need to convince Juan so much as Sam. I don’t know why she doesn’t see it—I think she’s in shock.”
    “She lost two men today,” Lucy said. She needed to talk to Juan to make sure this really was okay with him—their working relationship had been better over the last couple of weeks, but it was still not the same and she feared it would never be.
    “We both need to be at the meeting at FBI headquarters later—a multi-jurisdictional clusterfuck if you ask me, but better that we all know who’s doing what so we don’t miss anything.”
    “I’m surprised Sam Archer is letting you work this case,” Lucy said.
    They got into Brad’s car and he immediately sped off. “She doesn’t have a choice.”
    “She always has a choice. She’s in charge.”
    “I told Sam and the AUSA that Nicole was playing them. They didn’t believe me, or they thought they could handle her. I told them not to transport Nicole using any method that the DEA has used in the past. They didn’t change their methods, only kept her in solitary. Me being right buys me at least a day or two of getting to do whatever the fuck I please. I’m going to find her.”
    Lucy said, “I understand vendettas better than most people. You have to be smart, Brad—don’t go off on your own. Don’t be reckless. We need information—not just about what happened today, but about Nicole herself. Who she is now and who she was when she first joined the DEA.”
    “What’s that going to do?”
    “I’m a criminal psychologist. I’m going to figure her out. And when I do, I’ll know how to find her.”
    “This isn’t magic. We’ll find her because of old-fashioned police work. And a limited group of people who have all the information—I was serious that we have a mole.”
    Lucy agreed about the mole, but Nicole must have thought beyond today, especially with an escape that was so well-planned. She had a place to hide or transportation out of the country. What would she do? Go underground for a week until the manhunt slowed down? Or immediately flee the country? Did she already have a fake passport, money, a final destination?
    William Shakespeare wrote, “ The past is prologue. ” What was in Nicole’s past would tell Lucy exactly what she needed to know to find her.
    Ten minutes later Brad and Lucy arrived at the residence of Rosita Nocia, the grandmother of Matthew and Lucas Garcia, the young boys who hadn’t boarded the bus. She