No Strings__ - By Janelle Denison Page 0,67
was a contender in a very narrow pool of candidates. And now that he was in the spotlight, he was going to make damn sure he was a shining star.
* * *
ANGIE WOLF SIGHED WHEN SHE heard the voices of the rest of the White Collar Crimes team coming in from their break on the outdoor patio. Damn, it seemed as if they’d left two minutes ago, not nearly enough time for her to breathe let alone hear herself think.
They were a great bunch: competent, dedicated and generally nice people with whom she got along well considering work colleagues were always a crapshoot. But the past two months had been brutal. She’d spent way too many hours in the office and right now she’d give anything to be alone, preferably on a ten-mile run with nothing more to worry about than beating her last record.
Even as she heard them close in on the bullpen, she stayed just as she was, legs stretched out in front of her, ankles crossed, one heel on her desk, leaning back in her chair as far as she could. The fresh air would’ve been nice, but two of the team members smoked and that she could do without.
“Hey, how come you didn’t come out for the lifting of the Red Bulls?”
Angie smiled at Paula, another Special Agent who’d been in charge of the artwork aspect of the operation. The painting in question was a Reubens, stolen during World War II and recovered in the late 1990s. It was worth millions, and had been “gifted” to a New Mexico art gallery, which had then sold it to an anonymous private collector.
The transaction had been legal on the surface, but the granddaughter of the original owner was certain her grandfather had been blackmailed into giving away the family treasure. The Deputy Director of the FBI had been friends with the family since birth.
And now, if Angie’s White Collar Crimes team had done their jobs right, the task force was days away from zeroing in on the blackmailers.
Angie realized Paula was still waiting for an answer. Break time was definitely over. “Haven’t we spent enough quality time together? Two months of eighty- and ninety-hour weeks? I mean, come on.”
Paula flopped into her chair and turned it so she faced Angie. “You can take a break when you’re dead. Or tonight, when we go out for drinks. That one, you’re not getting out of. We’ll use force if necessary.”
“You and what army?”
“Me, for one.” It was Brad Pollinger, Angie’s partner in the field. He was followed into the room by several other members of the group, all of whom cheerfully let her know that they weren’t above using every dirty trick in the book to get her to join them.
“Fine. But I’m having exactly one beer.” The bullpen was pretty full now, with only Fred MIA, but he was perennially late.
“Don’t you have any fun?” Paula eyed Angie’s sturdy low-heeled pumps propped on the desk. Comfort won over fashion every time for Angie. “Ever?”
“I have plenty,” she said, although her definition of fun leaned more heavily toward achievement than clubbing. Whether it was cutting a few seconds off her morning run or working on side projects that could get her to the next stage of her ten-year plan, she wasn’t much of a party gal.
She’d always been a big believer in setting short-term goals that fed directly into long-term strategies. Even though she’d stopped being a competitive runner, she still kept up the discipline and used the skills she’d picked up as a kid to keep herself on task.
From the beginning of this assignment, she’d realized the potential. With her computer programming skills and familiarity with investigation protocols she could make a significant contribution. And she had.
Angie’s new program had led to the revelation about Delilah Bridges’s father, that he’d been arrested under an alias for robbery on four separate occasions. It wasn’t much as far as real leads went, but it was still a piece of an ever-expanding puzzle. The broader the picture, the more likely the pieces that didn’t appear to connect would suddenly come together.
She’d worked damn hard on coding that sucker, a search engine with such a sexy algorithm it had given the guys in Cyber Crimes nerdgasms.
It had also been noteworthy enough to put her in the running for the position with the Deputy Director in Washington D.C. She wanted that job, badly. It would be a huge feather in her cap, the kind