"DUBSTEP"

FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd watched the gleaming Lincoln Navigator roll into the parking lot of the northern Virginia Safeway.  A dozen other vehicles clustered near the grocery store entrance, but the burgundy SUV by-passed them and headed toward Dawna at the far corner of the lot.  The driver must be her target, the not-so-innocent bystander who'd witnessed an auto accident that had supposedly happened last week right where she stood.

She tucked her clipboard under her arm, freeing a hand to shade her eyes from the glare of a bright November afternoon sun.  The SUV parked next to the boxy sedan she was using for this undercover operation.

The muscles in her upper back tightened as the man who had to be Clayton D. Cooper slid out.  Winning his confidence was vital to the op's success and her well-being.  She had maximum ten seconds to size him up and choose her strategy.

He was as tall as Dawna, six-foot-three, and looked younger than his 72-years, with more than 250 solid pounds distributed nicely on his long frame.  His suit was well-cut but the sheen of the gray silk announced that Cooper rated flamboyance higher than discreet tailoring.  Tie-less, he wore his pink dress shirt open at the collar, no chest hair visible.  But his head was thickly covered by a silvery Elvis-pompadour and his wide smile showed a full set of gleaming teeth.

As the man neared, Dawna got a whiff of Old Spice and her tension eased.  Smelling old-fashioned was better than smelling old.  Cooper wanted ladies to find him attractive.  She'd be safest and most appealing as an admiring woman-in-need.  She smoothed her curly blonde mane, a casual move to mask her wariness of this career criminal and draw his gaze upward from her chest and the recording device riding next to her skin.  The man could react badly - perhaps violently - if he suspected she was an FBI agent setting him up for another prison term.

Cooper had been defrauding auto insurance companies for two decades.  He’d served an 18-month sentence for staging a major crash between a “hammer car” and a multiply-insured “nail car” stuffed with passengers ready to claim false injuries.  He'd been released ten years ago and so far sophisticated FBI data mining programs had detected no sign he'd resumed his criminal activities.  Yet, a confidential informant had named the aging Cooper as ringleader of a major northern Virginia gang.

Dawna's assignment today was more ambitious than the routine low-level undercover goal of getting Cooper to incriminate himself on record.  She wanted to discover how Cooper was evading FBI software.  To glean that vital information, Dawna had to get close to the man.  She needed to come across as a potential ally and lure Cooper into offering her a first-string position on his team.  But carefully, without a single off-note to arouse his suspicions.

Read the whole story in the April 2012 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.