from the living room and motioned her to join him.
“FBI,” a woman’s voice answered.
“I’m trying to reach an agent named Eldridge Sawyer,” he said.
“Thank you.” After a short wait the operator came back on the line. “I’m sorry. No one by that name is here.”
“I see. What about Tucker Bond?”
Her response was immediate. “One moment, I’ll connect you.”
A second pleasant female voice came on the line. “Mr. Bond’s office.”
“This is Inspector Smith from the San FranciscoPolice Department. I’d like to meet with Mr. Bond as soon as possible.”
“Can I tell him what this is concerning?”
“A former employee, Cecily Campbell.”
“Let me check his calendar.” She put him on hold. About two minutes went by before she came on the phone again. “He has a few minutes available today at twelve-thirty.”
“That’s fine. Can you tell me what Mr. Bond’s exact title is?”
“Certainly. He’s the Special Agent in Charge.”
“Thank you.” Paavo hung up the phone. The SAC was the head of the San Francisco office. So Bond had moved up in the world over the past thirty years. He wondered what had become of Cecily’s boss, Eldridge Sawyer.
Angie was bursting with questions by the time he hung up. “Did you find out anything?”
They went out to the deck and he handed her the FBI files. “There isn’t a lot here.”
She scanned them quickly. “I wonder where she lived. No address is shown.”
“So I noticed. There are names, though. I’m starting with one of her bosses. I wonder how much he’ll remember about her.”
Angie’s eyebrows rose. “Judging from the pictures I’ve seen of her, whether he admits it or not, he’ll remember a lot.”
Chapter 14
Although the FBI files didn’t show Cecily’s address, Angie had a good idea how to find out where the woman had lived, or darn close to it. Despite the many lies Paavo had been told about her, Angie was fairly confident that Cecily and Aulis had been neighbors. What else could a young widowed FBI employee and a middle-aged Finn have in common? Hmm, Angie decided not to pursue that, especially in view of Connie’s brainstorm about the two of them.
The cleaning service had done a nice job on Aulis’s apartment. Still, being here made Angie’s hair stand on end big time. And the fact that the last time she was here, a man standing beside her car ended up wearing a toe tag only added to her nervousness.
She dashed into the bedroom and flipped through papers and old envelopes until her eye fell on one postmarked thirty-three years earlier from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company with stock certificates.
The address showed Liberty Street in the city. She had no idea where that was. Several more recent envelopes had different addresses, even some inLos Angeles and Bakersfield, but Liberty Street was in the correct time frame.
Not until she was back in her car, doors locked, did she breathe again. In the glove compartment, a Thomas Bros, map of the city gave her the information she needed. Liberty Street wasn’t far at all.
What the map didn’t tell her was that she couldn’t reach it by the most direct route, along Sanchez Street. An imposing cement wall, with stairways on both sides, blocked the way. She had to circle around and approach from the opposite side.
The street was quiet and narrow, high on a steep hill, with a barrier at the far end to prevent cars from going any further. Most of the homes were elegant Victorians, some badly weathered, and others “gentrified.” A couple of modern houses looked overbearing and sadly out of place. Near the end of the block, she found Aulis’s old address in a two-story Victorian. A long staircase with an ornately carved wooden banister led up to a covered front porch with four doors. An overhang on the porch mirrored the ornate carvings of the banister. As with many older buildings in the city, the house most likely had once been an elegant single-family home
Debbie Viguié
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