Free Reasonable Doubt by Carsen Taite Page A

isn’t the only woman in this city and you shouldn’t have expected your love life in a new city to just fall into place. Once the furor from the bombing abated, there would be lots more events and many opportunities to meet someone. Just because you’ve decided to settle down doesn’t mean women are going to line up for the opportunity to be Mrs. Sarah Flores.
    She laughed at the realization that the singular focus she applied in her work didn’t necessarily translate to her personal life. Trip had always been on her ass about her impatient nature, telling her she couldn’t force things to happen. He was right, of course, but knowing it didn’t necessarily make it easier to wait it out.
    She thought of Trip again as she checked her mail. Just as he had said, there was a plain brown envelope in her box. She was dying to know what was inside, but waited until she was in her apartment and the door was locked before sitting down at her dining room table and peeling back the seal.
    She shook out a single piece of paper with a few lines of typewritten names: Sadeem Jafari, Hashid Kamal, Abdul Kamal. She recognized the first name. Liz had mentioned him in relation to Amir Khan and said Jafari was on a CIA watch list. No surprise that Trip had also heard the name. She turned the paper over, but the rest of the page was blank. She flipped it back over and repeated the names to herself as she opened her laptop and started a Google search. Hashid and Abdul Kamal, aka Michael and Brian Barstow, were brothers, in their early twenties, and they were both listed on a Homeland Security terrorist watch list, which she verified by signing in to the agency’s official database. Neither of them had a criminal conviction, but they’d been flagged as supporters of ISIS as a result of postings they’d made to several blog sites.
    Sadeem, on the other hand, was a bit of a mystery. He wasn’t in the FBI database and Google searches showed only a successful local business leader whose philanthropic interests were well known throughout the DFW Muslim community. She could understand why Hashid’s and Abdul’s names had come across Trip’s radar, but Sadeem was a mystery. She searched for another half hour, but nothing she found led her to believe Sadeem was either connected to the other two men in any way or that he had any big secrets of his own to hide. If he was really on a CIA watch list, they were keeping the reason a secret from their sister agency.
    She circled back through her searches and started looking at the names of the charities he supported. His primary interest appeared to be the Global Enterprise Alliance, which didn’t ring a bell. She switched to the LexisNexis database and started digging. GEA was a US based Muslim charity whose stated primary purpose was assisting refugees from Middle Eastern Arab countries adjusting to life in the United States. As she read the mission statement, the words sparked a memory. She’d read a similar statement, earlier that day in fact.
    Sarah dug the flash drive with the WHI records out of her bag and plugged it into her computer. She’d expected to find a copy of the WHI charter and IRS application for 501(c)(3) non-profit status along with the bank records, but neither of those documents was included in the file. Chalking it up to a careless scan job by one of the clerks at the office, she took to the Internet. One quick search netted what she was looking for. There it was, right there on the WHI website, virtually the same statement about purpose as that listed on the GEA site, but she checked her excitement. It could mean anything. Two charities with the same purpose wasn’t unusual, but what if there was another connection? She started another search, but her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered anyway, thinking it might be Trip. “Flores.”
    “Hey, it’s your good pal, Soto.”
    “Hey, Danny. What are you up