I’d have thought, which means he stretched up to get a better view of you.” He lightly pressed down a thick strip of tape and lifted off the print. “I’m using white powder, so black cards, as you already know. Here we go. Digits crossed, Cinelli.”
She watched him carefully press the tape onto the card. And there it was, a distinct thumbprint.
“Amazing. But why only a thumbprint? I would have thought he’d use his whole hand to steady himself.”
“I think he did. He asked you to come help him, then he had to push off fast to hit you, and that smeared his other fingerprints.”
“This may be all we need,” Pippa said, and felt a punch of optimism.
“If we’re lucky and his thumbprint’s in the system.”
Pippa rose, rubbed her hands over her arms, and winced. She watched him repack his kit and slip it into his pocket. She looked back at where she’d been standing when Black Hoodie hit her. She stared at the bloody hook still lying in the corner, saw herself moving her wrists back and forth on it, gritting her teeth against the pain, her blood smearing the tip. “It’s humiliating how easily he brought me down. He must have dogged my every step yesterday, from the time I left Major Trumbo’s B&B. And I never saw him, never felt someone was watching me.”
“You weren’t expecting anyone to be tracking you. You’d only been here a day and a half. Even the few people who recognized you couldn’t know you were FBI, here undercover. Hey, I’m a cop, and I had no idea who you were.”
“Yeah, make me feel better. Fact is, he dealt with me easily. It’s humiliating, really humiliating.”
“It’s a good thing he didn’t want to kill you, only put you out of commission. That makes me wonder what he was going to do with you if you hadn’t gotten yourself free. Would he have let you go? Maybe left you here until someone found you?” He slowly rose, dusted his hands on his jeans. “Either way, it seems there was a lot of luck on their side, or Black Hoodie and whoever he was getting his instructions from knew Savich well enough to know if he believed you were in trouble, he would rush right over to St. Lumis.”
“It makes sense they’d know Agent Savich was my boss. But I wonder what they would have done if he hadn’t come.”
“Probably something more obvious, more violent. Like I said, they got lucky, got exactly the result they wanted. But now that we have Black Hoodie’s thumbprint, their luck might be about to change. We have to find out how they knew you were FBI so quickly.”
“Only one place to start. We need to talk to Mrs. Trumbo.”
44
CLAIREMONT, VIRGINIA
CLARKSON UNITED INDUSTRIES
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
Rebekah pushed the up button in the elevator lobby. As they waited, she said to Griffin, “When Grandfather was elected to Congress back in the early eighties, he had to divest control of his holdings. He signed Clarkson United over to a blind trust, but arranged it so my grandmother could continue to run things. Grandfather was never much interested in the business, it was more pro forma for him, though the business thrived under him. He had a knack for it. He was charismatic, and people loved working for him. But politics was his true love. When he was elected mayor of Clairemont, he’d already handed the company over to my grandmother. This was three years before he was elected to Congress.” She laughed, shook her head. “Politics and me, both of us his true love.” She paused a moment, smiled. “It helped that the incumbent was caught in a love triangle.”
“Do you find it a little unusual how much he loved you, now that you’re an adult?”
She nodded. “Unusual, sure, but I was lucky. I was well loved and I knew it.” She paused a moment, then said, “You think he loved me too much? Why? Don’t you think I was lovable enough?”
“I’m sure you were. What did your mother have to say about it?”
“I think she saw him as stepping in to fill a gap, since I didn’t have a father. Do you know, because of him, I never missed having a father, I had Grandfather.”
“What happened to your father?”
The elevator pinged, the doors opened. There was no one inside. Rebekah punched the button for the eighth and top floor. “I was told he abandoned Mom—well, I started calling her Caitlin when