Last Chance to Die. Noah Boyd

laughed. “I was just trying to see how tired you were.”

      When the elevator door opened, the only passenger, a black man, said, “Steve Vail?”

      It was Luke Bursaw, an agent Vail had worked with in Detroit more than five years earlier. “Luke,” Vail said, shaking hands with him. “What are you doing here?”

      “I finally got my ‘office of preference’ transfer. I’m at the Washington Field Office now, working general criminal. Are you back with the Bureau?”

      Vail looked at Kate. “I’m sorry. This is Kate Bannon. She’s—”

      “Sure, I remember Kate from Detroit. And now she’s a deputy assistant director. We get most of the memos over at WFO. How are you, Kate?” He extended his hand.

      Kate took it. She remembered him because he was the only agent Vail had worked with in Detroit, usually when a difficult arrest needed to be made. The most memorable one was where Vail and Bursaw came barging into the office with four bank robbers handcuffed together early one morning. One of them, also wanted for murder, had been on Michigan’s ten-most-wanted list. It happened shortly after she’d arrived in Detroit, and the thing that had always stuck with her was that no one seemed to think it was out of the ordinary, at least not for Vail.

      Bursaw had gone to Penn on a wrestling scholarship and majored in philosophy. He’d gained a couple of pounds since she’d last seen him, but he still seemed to move with an athlete’s ease. “And I remember you, Luke. What brings a WFO agent here at this time of night?”

      “I caught a couple of shifts as night supervisor that nobody wanted—you know, holiday pay. And I had some evidence to drop off at the lab on the way home.” Bursaw turned back to Vail. “One thing I do know about you, Steve, is how good you were at ducking questions. So what are you doing here?”

      “Actually, I am back with the Bureau, sort of as an independent contractor, working with Kate.”

      Bursaw glanced at him carefully, letting Vail know that there were still holes in his story that would be queried later. “Small world. Where are you staying?”

      “Over on Sixteenth Street.”

      “Any chance we could get together? Share some lies over a beer?”

      “Sure. I’ll give you a call.”

      “Actually, I’ve got a problem, and you’re the perfect person to run it by.”

      “What kind of problem?”

      “A woman from headquarters, an intelligence analyst, went missing a few months back, and I wound up with the case. So far I’m getting nowhere.”

      Vail took the DVD out of his jacket and handed it to Kate. “Any reason this can’t wait until morning?” he asked her.

      “It can wait. Besides, I am beat.”

      “We’ll get a running start at it first thing tomorrow.”

      “Sure.” The elevator opened onto the first floor, and the two men got out. “Nice seeing you, Luke.”

      “You too, Kate.”

      As they walked toward the street exit, Bursaw said, “Any idea how long you’re going to be here?”

      “To tell you the truth, it’s starting to look like the minute I stepped off the plane, I’d already been here too long.”

      VAIL AND BURSAW found a bar that wasn’t far from headquarters. Since it was relatively empty, they went to the far end and climbed onto a couple of stools. After the bartender had brought them beer, Bursaw asked, “So what could possibly have brought you back to the Bureau after the way they treated you?”

      “You know you’re one of the few people I ever trusted.”

      “I can’t really remember you trusting anyone. Sounds like you’re about to tell me that you can’t tell me.”

      “If you knew what this was about, you’d thank me for not involving you, especially when they start hooking people up to the polygraph.”

      “That serious?”

      “I think you know I wouldn’t be keeping it from you if it weren’t.”

      Bursaw nodded and then took a sip of beer. “You’re right, I don’t want to know. But how did you get involved in it?”

      “I did some work for the director six months ago, in L.A.”

      “That Pentad thing, that was you?”

      “More Kate than me. I was just looking for a change of pace.”

      “From the little I heard, you got it—and then some.” Bursaw looked at him for some reaction, but Vail just shrugged. “You never did like a lot of noise.” Bursaw chuckled salaciously. “But you and Kate, huh? That’s got to be a major factor in you being dragged back in.”

      Vail snorted. “It was supposed to be, but unfortunately we don’t seem to be a good fit.”

      “You know what Nietzsche said—‘Woman was God’s second blunder.’”

      “Is that a shot at me or at Kate?”

      Bursaw took a scholarly tone. “Philosophy is not a discipline of answers but one of contemplation.”

      “Great, things aren’t surreal enough around here. Now I’ve got a black guy quoting Hitler’s favorite philosopher.”

      “Whether it’s working or not, that’s still a good-looking woman,” Bursaw said.

      “She is that,” Vail said. “But enough about my blundering celibacy. What’s the story on the missing employee?”

      “Her name is Sundra Boston. She’s an intelligence analyst at headquarters, or at least she was. I didn’t know her. She disappeared about three months before I was transferred back here. I’ve got this cousin, Eden. Nice gal, but she married a loser. Actually, ‘drunk’ would be a more accurate description. They got a couple of kids, and he’s always going off on these drinking binges, leaving her with nothing to get by on. Anyway, she met Sundra at church, and they became friends. My cousin may have made a couple of bad choices in her life, but she’s not a complainer. When her husband takes off, she sucks it up and doesn’t say anything to anyone. I suppose it’s as much out of embarrassment as anything else. She said that somehow Sundra always seemed to know when she was going through those times, and she would show up unannounced at Eden’s with a carload of groceries. She’d been doing it for over a year. When I got back here, Eden pulled me aside at a family get-together and asked me if I could find out what happened to her. She thought Sundra had been transferred to some secret assignment or something.

      “So I checked indices and found that we had a case on her disappearance, and that it was being handled on my squad. I’d been back in D.C. less than two weeks, knew nothing about the case, and I hadn’t caught on to my supervisor yet. So I went in and asked him about it.” Bursaw shook his head and took a long pull on his beer. “Steve, this guy is everything that is wrong with the new Bureau. He actually grew up in Beverly Hills—that’s right, my brother, 90210—and couldn’t get through an hour of the day without performing some affectation. He calls the bad guys ‘thugs’ and ‘hoodlums.’ When I asked him about Sundra, he gave me the rundown and told me that the investigation was at a standstill. Then he cocks his head to the side in thought and says, ‘You know, she’s an African-American, too. You could probably find her, because these people would talk to you.’ And you think the leadership was bad when you were in. Then he reassigns the case to me as if he had just had some sort of movie-of-the-week life-altering epiphany.”

      “I take it you haven’t had any luck getting those African-Americans to tell you where she is?”

      Bursaw grinned. “Don’t start,” he said. “So I pull the file and find out that very little had been done