The Bone Chamber by Robin Burcell

right, I’m wrong. I’ll go home. Be a good girl.”
    Scotty stood, leaned over, kissed the top of her head, gentling his tone, as if that would make up for his disbelief in her whacked-out theory. “You’re doing the right thing. Get some rest, quit worrying. You have a long flight in the morning.”
    “Good night,” she said, then sat there for several minutes in the dark, long after he’d disappeared into his bedroom and shut the door. Doing the right thing…That was what she was all about these days. The prudent thing would be to go home, let the authorities here handle it, forget about everything—everything but Tasha…Besides, why couldn’t it be a home invasion robbery, as the “locals” called it?
    Because for one, regardless of what Scotty thought, it was clear the locals weren’t handling it. This shadow agency, whoever they were, was. And two, home invasion ? It was more like a home assassination than some robbery attempt. She pictured the guy looking into Scotty’s car, as though he’d been watching it, probably followed her there. That part she believed, that they’d followed her, probably from the moment she’d left the Smithsonian, but what sort of crook follows a victim, an FBI agent, to the PD and doesn’t back off? Most crooks liked their victims unaware, unassuming, and uninvolved with the police.
    Too many connections to other seemingly unassociated matters. Her secret sketch sanctioned by the CIA, or OGA, her discovery of the Smithsonian grounds as the crime scene, the “phone company” showing up at Scotty’s, the towed car leading to the missing paranoid boyfriend who thought people were following him, never mind his unaccounted-for paramour, and the now dead Smithsonian security guard. She still wasn’t sure what all the connections meant, only that her hunch on the possibility of a towed car leading her to a potential victim had landed her here. These were not the sort of coincidences Sydney believed in. And if it wasn’t coincidence then what the hell was it, and what did it haveto do with the forensic sketch? Was there any connection to this foreign diplomat’s missing daughter?
    She got up, walked to the window, looked out to the street below, wondered if she was being watched at this very moment, figured she probably was. If there was one thing she had faith in, it was the various U.S. intelligence agencies’ methods of surveillance. After all, the FBI shared a number of those techniques. She’d been trained in some of them, and certainly been a part of them in the past—the very recent past. If one of these other government agencies had been following her, it explained why the cops had arrived so fast. What it didn’t explain was why two armed men were allowed to get that close to her in the first place.
    Unless a mistake had been made somewhere along the way?
    She wasn’t supposed to look into the case, and the CIA/OGA had suspected she might, which was why they’d taken the steps they had when she’d left Quantico. But the CIA, if they were following her, had lost her. The bad guys, whoever they were, had definitely followed her. But if they were ready to take her out that quickly, if they were the ones responsible for Tasha’s hit-and-run, then how was it that Penny had escaped their notice? As whacked out as Penny’s theories had sounded, she certainly had some information that could be considered vital.
    Then again, maybe they had ignored Penny, assumed she wasn’t a threat, because her only connection to her missing boyfriend and his new girl had been the loan of her car, and that had merely been left in a construction zone, towed, and subsequently returned…They might not have even realized there was a connection to Penny, via her boyfriend, until Syd had stepped in, followed up on the lead herself.
    Clearly no one had suspected that a lowly domestic FBI agent would connect the dots and stumble onto the Smithsonian and right into the lap of one of the