Best Revenge

Prologue 1997 If Kelda James hadn't been wearing inch-and-a-half heels and the toilet paper roll hadn't been empty, Rosa Alija would probably be dead. At about ten-twenty that morning Kelda had excused herself from her fellow FBI agents and followed directions to the restroomdown the long hall, go left, last door on the right. The bathroom was a step up from what she had expected to find, given the tacky condition of the rest of the building. She was relieved to see that the sink was reasonably clean and the toilet seat wasn't stained with yellow coins of urine. The only problem was that there was no toilet paper on the cardboard roll. Kelda stepped back out into the hall to retrace her route and retrieve her shoulder bag and its stash of tissues, but noticed a closet marked "Utility" adjacent to the bathroom. The knob on the door wasn't locked and she found herself staring into a space about six feet square. A window was mounted high on the wall, dividing the small room in half. A jumble of brooms and mops leaned against a cracked porcelain sink on one side; the opposite side was stacked with particleboard shelves piled high with what appeared to be a lifetime supply of paper towels, soap, disinfectants, and toilet paper. Kelda reached onto an upper shelf for a fresh roll of toilet tissue and reflexively glanced over the sill and out the window as she rotated back toward the door. The window overlooked the alley behind the building. Across the alley was the back of a single-story light-industrial building not noticeably different from the one that Kelda and her FBI colleagues had just raided. Except for the hand. Kelda was sure that for a split second she had glimpsed a hand in a window of the building across the alley. In her mind she was already considering it to have been a tiny hand, a child's hand. She approached the utility closet window, stood on her toes, and peered again at the building across the alley. No hand. She raised her fingers to the sill to hold herself up and examined the distant window in detail. The bottom edge of the cloudy pane was streaked with parallel vertical lines that could have been made by fingers. Tiny fingers. Child's fingers. "Oh my God," she said. Fresh out of the FBI Academy, Special Agent Kelda James had been in the Denver, Colorado, field office for all of five weeks. Her initial assignment was to a squad that investigated white-collar crime, and that morning she had been ordered to accompany three other agentsall male, all senior to her, all somewhere between significantly and maximally apprehensive of her skillsto serve a federal warrant and raid a company called Account Assistants, Inc., on Delaware Street in Denver's Golden Triangle neighborhood. The company did contract billing for medical practices, and the raid was intended to collect evidence of suspected Medicare fraud. For an FBI white-collar crime squad, this was routine stuff. Prior to entering the FBI Academy, Kelda had earned her credentials as a certified public accountant and had spent a few years investigating fraud for an international insurance company. Her role in the raid of Account Assistants, Inc., was to cover the back door as the raid started and, later, to use her forensic accounting background to help make certain that the agents didn't fail to retrieve any records that they might ultimately need to press their case against the firm. Most important, though, she knew that her primary responsibility was to remember at all times that she was the new guy, or in FBI parlance, "the fucking new guy." Her primary responsibility was not to screw up. Later in the day, after she and the other agents had finished collecting the evidence anWhite, Stephen is the author of 'Best Revenge ' with ISBN 9780440237426 and ISBN 0440237424.