CHAPTER FIVE

Honestly, Kate had expected a little bit of blowback about what she had done, but nothing to the degree of what she experienced when she reached the Third Precinct Station. She knew something was coming when she saw the glances from the police who passed by in the midst of their office errands. Some of the looks were of awe while others stank of a sort of leering ridicule.

Kate let it slide right off of her back. She was still too riled up from the confrontation on Neilbolt’s porch to care.

After she’d waited several minutes in the lobby, a nervous-looking officer approached her. “You’re Ms. Wise, right?” he asked.

“I am.”

A flash of recognition showed in his eyes. It was a look she had once gotten all the time when officers or agents who had only ever heard about her record met her for the first time. She missed that look.

“Chief Budd would like to speak to you.”

She was frankly quite surprised. She was hoping to speak to someone more along the lines of Deputy Commissioner Greene. While he might have been a hard ass on the phone, she knew he could be persuaded more effectively in face-to-face meetings. Chief Randall Budd, though, was a no-nonsense kind of man. She’d only ever met him on one occasion a few years ago. She barely remembered the occurrence but did remember Budd leaving an impression of someone strong-willed and strictly professional.

Still, Kate did not want to seem intimidated or at all worried. So she got up and followed the officer out of the waiting area and back through the bullpen. They passed by several desks where she got more uncertain glances before the officer led her down a hallway. In the center of the hall they came to Randall Budd’s office. The door was open, as if he had been waiting for her for quite some time.

The officer had nothing to say; once he had delivered her to Budd’s doorway, he turned on his heel and left. Kate looked into the office and saw Chief Budd waving her in.

“Come on in,” he said. “I won’t lie. I’m not happy with you, but I don’t bite. Close the door behind you, would you?”

Kate stepped inside and did as she was asked. She then took one of the three chairs that sat on the opposite side of Budd’s desk. The desk was occupied with more personal effects than work-related items: pictures of his family, an autographed baseball, a personalized coffee mug, and some kind of sentimental shell casing sitting in a plaque.

“Let me start off by saying that I am well aware of your track record,” Budd said. “More than one hundred arrests in your career. Top of your class in the academy. Gold and silver placement in eight consecutive kickboxing tournaments in addition to standard bureau training where you also kicked ass. Your name got around while you were running things and most of the people here in the Virginia State PD respect the hell out of you.”

“But?” Kate said. She didn’t say it in an attempt to be funny. She was simply letting him know that she was more than capable of being reprimanded…although she honestly didn’t think she deserved much of it.

“But despite all that, you have no right to go around assaulting people just because you think they might have been involved in the death of one of your friend’s daughters.”

“I didn’t visit him with intent to assault,” Kate said. “I visited him to ask some questions. When he got physical with me, I simply defended myself.”

“He told my men that you pitched him down the porch stairs and banged his head against the floor of the porch.”

“I can’t be blamed for being stronger than him, now can I?” she asked.

Budd looked closely at her, scrutinizing her. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny, taking this lightly, or if this is really your everyday attitude.”

“Chief, I understand your position and how a retired fifty-five-year-old woman beating up someone that your men had questioned briefly and then released could cause you a headache. But please understand…I only visited Brian Neilbolt because my friend asked me to. And honestly, when I learned a bit more about him, I thought it might not be a bad idea.”

“So you just assumed my men didn’t do an adequate job?” Budd asked.

“I said no such thing.”

Budd rolled his eyes and sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to argue about it. Honestly, I would love nothing more than for you to leave my office in a few minutes and once we are done talking about this matter, it’s done. I need you to understand, though, that you crossed a line and if you happen to pull something like this again, I might just have to place you under arrest.”

There were several things Kate wanted to say in response. But she figured if Budd was willing to press all arguments down, so could she. She knew that he was well within his power to really bring the hammer down on her if he wanted, so she decided to be as civil as possible.

“I understand,” she replied.

Budd seemed to think about something for a moment before interlocking his hands together on the desk, as if trying to center himself. “And just so you know, we are certain that Brian Neilbolt did not kill Julie Hicks. We have him on security cameras outside of a bar on the night she was killed. He went in around ten and didn’t leave until after midnight. We then have a text message trail between him and a current fling that went on between one and three in the morning. He checks out. He’s not the guy.”

“He had bags and suitcases packed,” Kate pointed out. “Like he was trying to leave town in a hurry.”

“In the text thread, he and this fling of his discussed visiting Atlantic City. They were supposed to be leaving this afternoon.”

“I see.” Kate nodded. She did not feel embarrassed per se, but she did start to regret acting so aggressively on Neilbolt’s porch.

“There’s one more thing,” Budd said. “And again, you have to view things from my position on this. I had no choice but to contact your former supervisors at the FBI. It’s protocol. Surely you know that.”

She did know that but honestly had not thought about it. A slight yet gnawing irritation started to bloom in her guts.

“I know,” she said.

“I spoke with Assistant Director Duran. He wasn’t happy, and he wants to speak with you.”

Kate rolled her eyes and nodded. “Fine. I’ll give him a call and let him know it’s from your instruction.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Budd said. “They want to see you. In DC.”

And with that, the irritation she was feeling quickly morphed into something she hadn’t felt in a while: legitimate worry.

CHAPTER SIX

Following her meeting with Chief Budd, Kate made the appropriate calls to let her former supervisors know that she had received their request to visit them. She was not given any information over the phone and never actually spoke to anyone in power. That left her to leave a few rather rude messages with two unfortunate receptionists—an exercise that actually helped to relieve some of her stress.

She left Richmond the following morning at eight o’clock. She was curiously more excited than she was nervous. She figured it was kind of like a college graduate revisiting their campus after a brief time away. She’d missed the bureau terribly over the last year or so and was looking forward to being back in that environment…even if it was to be disciplined.

She distracted herself by listening to an obscure cinema-based podcast—a suggestion made by her daughter. Within five minutes of the podcast, the commentators had been drowned out and Kate was instead reflecting on the last few years of her life. For the most part, she was not a sentimental person but for some reason she had never understood, she tended to get nostalgic and reflective whenever she got on the road.

So instead of focusing on the podcast, she thought of her daughter—her pregnant daughter, due in about five weeks. The baby was to be a girl, named Michelle. The baby’s father was a good enough man but, by Kate’s estimation, had never quite been good enough for Melissa Wise. Melissa, called Lissa by Kate ever since she’d started to crawl, lived in Chesterfield, an area technically within Richmond but considered different by those who lived there. Kate had never told Melissa, but that was why she had moved back to Richmond. It had not been only because of her ties to the city due to her college experience, but because that was where her family was—where her first grandchild would live.

A grandchild, Kate often thought. How did Melissa get that old? Hell, for that matter, how did I get that old?

And when she thought of Melissa and the unborn Michelle, Kate typically turned her thoughts to her deceased husband. He’d been murdered six years ago, shot in the back of the head while walking their dog at night. His wallet and phone had been taken and she’d been called to ID the body less than two hours after he’d left the house with the dog.

The wound was still fresh most of the time but she hid it well. When she had retired from the bureau, she’d done so with about eight months left before official retirement age. But she had been unable to commit her full time, attention, and focus to her work after having finally scattered Michael’s ashes over an old derelict baseball diamond near his home in Falls Church.

Perhaps that was why she had spent the last year so depressed about leaving her job. She had left months before she’d legally had to. What might those months have offered her? What else could she have done with her career?

She’d always wondered about these things, but had never fallen on the side of regret. Michael had deserved at least a few months of her undivided attention. He actually deserved much more than that but she knew that even in the afterlife, there’s no way he would have expected her to ditch her work for too long. He would have known that it would have taken some work for her to properly grieve—and that work had meant literally working at the bureau for as long as she had been emotionally capable after his death.

She was relieved to find as she drew closer to DC that she was not feeling as if she was betraying Michael. She did personally believe that death was not the end; she didn’t know if that meant Heaven was real or if reincarnation was possible and quite frankly she was okay with not knowing. But she did know that wherever Michael might be, he’d be happy that she was heading back to DC—even if it was to be severely reprimanded.

If anything, he was probably having a laugh at her expense.

This made Kate smile in spite of herself. She cut the podcast off and focused on the road, her own thoughts, and how even if she’d screwed up, life somehow always ended up seeming cyclical in nature.

***

She didn’t get a rush of emotion when she stepped through the front doors and into the large lobby at the FBI headquarters. If anything, she was very aware that she felt she no longer belonged here—like a woman revisiting her old high school to find that the halls now made her feel sad rather than nostalgic.