Tenderloin (Abby Kane FBI Thriller) Read Online Free Page A

6
     
    The media had a field day with Ballard’s suicide. It was all they reported on in the days that followed. To add to the hoopla, multiple neighbors caught his last hurrah on their cell phones and posted the videos online within the hour. While I wished we could have apprehended the amateur acrobat and prosecuted him in federal court, we had heard through the rumor mill that the victims were happy to see something about the Prince that was “hung.”
    These women wanted something more than closure; they wanted the world to see him for who he was: a weak man. He was a coward and had taken the easy way out.
    Of course we still had the girlfriend; she was guilty of aiding Ballard and would take the heat in court. Goodbye, catwalk. Hello, cellblock. Before Agent Stone left, I thanked him for his help. In the end, he came through with our guy, and I had officially closed the first case the FBI had assigned to me.
    I sat quietly at my desk and gave myself a few pats on the back. You still got it, Abby. It felt good. I thought of treating myself to a slice of Napoleon from the small bakery two blocks north of us in Little Saigon. Theirs was so delicious. Not dry at all, flaky with generous amounts of cream. Yummy . It would be perfect with a cup of green tea. As I grabbed my purse, Reilly poked his head out of his office.
    “Abby.”
    “Dammit,” I muttered. I put my purse back down and headed over to his office.
    “Take a seat,” he said as he looked up at me over his reading glasses. “I don’t have much time, and I’d rather not repeat myself, so listen carefully.”
    I took out my notepad and pen, knowing I wouldn’t jot anything down.
    “Our friends at the Drug Enforcement Administration sent a file over. They want us to look into a death,” Reilly said as he flipped his laptop around so I could see the picture on the screen. “The victim is a white male. He was found badly beaten—multiple contusions over every inch of his body.”
    “It looks like he was a punching bag.”
    “You could say that. Almost every bone in his body was broken.”
    “Talk about trauma.”
    Reilly tapped a few keys, and another picture appeared. “This is the victim’s face.”
    I nearly fell out of my chair.
    He didn’t look human. The swelling was well beyond what I had ever seen. He looked like a blow-up doll ready to burst at the seams. Dark discoloration signified intense bruising. I didn’t want to imagine what his torso looked like under his shirt.
    “We’re still waiting on the autopsy results,” Reilly added.
    “No noticeable lacerations or holes,” I noted. “Blunt trauma, mostly.”
    “It looks that way, but like I said, let’s see what the medical examiner has to say.” Reilly flipped his laptop back around and leaned back in his chair.
    I shook my head. The questions were coming. “Who’s the victim?”
    “He’s a DEA agent. His name is Fernando Riggs.”
    My stomach tightened a bit. It always did when the victim hit home. He wasn’t FBI, but the DEA was a sister agency. “Was he killed in the line of duty?”
    Reilly shook his head. “The locals found his body in a ditch.”
    “Locals?”
    “Special Agent Riggs was on assignment in Colombia.”
    “South Carolina? Missouri?” I guessed.
    “Try South America.”
    “Colombia… the country.”
    “The DEA has agents in Bogotá conducting mostly counternarcotics. Their primary mission is to keep the drug czars from using El Dorado International Airport as a waypoint for moving their drugs out of the country. They nab the mules.”
    I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. “Why are we getting involved?”
    “The DEA is better at curtailing the drug trade, not solving murders. Also, Riggs’s death didn’t happen during a mission. He was found dead in Mitú, a small town located in the southeastern part of Colombia near the edge of the Amazon forest. We’re unsure as to why he was there.”
    “Maybe one of the cartels