My cell phone buzzed. I pulled it out and checked the caller ID. “Speak of the devil. It’s Jeff.” I flipped it open. “Hey, Jeff. Got anything for me?”
Jeff chuckled. “Of course, I do. But I’m strictly off-limits now. You know, ’cause of the little lady.”
“No disrespect meant to you or yours. Hey, I’m in the Ops Room with Ethan and everyone.
Can I put you on speaker?”
“Knock yourself out. Probably helpful for all to hear.”
I put the phone down in the middle of the table, then pressed the speaker button. “Okay.
You’re live. What do you have?”
“Aw, if only I’d prepared a monologue.”
We heard Catcher’s voice in the background.
“Focus, kid.”
“Well,” Jeff said, and I heard the clacking of keys, “it turns out the security cameras are live, and Colin and Sean do record the video. It’s stored in the bar on a dedicated server, and there are also external backups just in case some bad stuff goes down. I was actually pretty impressed.
You don’t expect bars to have that kind of security protocol.”
From the looks of the crusty back room, Temple Bar definitely did not seem like the kind of establishment with a “dedicated server,” not that I could differentiate a dedicated server from an undedicated server.
“So, anyway, I grabbed the video and uploaded it.”
I leaned forward, linking my hands together on the table. “Tell me you found something, Jeff.”
“It took some spooling,” he said. “Trucks use the alley quite a bit to make deliveries. There’s also the occasional catering-truck pickup, garbage trucks, taxis, bar drop-offs, et cetera, et cetera. But beginning two months ago, every couple of days, usually in the wee hours, a vintage Shelby Mustang—wicked car—pulls into the alley. Sometimes the car sits there for a few minutes, nothing happens, the car drives away.
Sometimes a driver gets out.”
My heart began to beat in anticipation. We were getting closer, I knew it. “What did the driver look like?”
“Well, although the backups are impressive, the video is for shit. Very grainy. But I did manage to pull a still for you. I’m going to send you a pic.”
“Use this e-mail,” Luc said, reading off an address to Jeff and picking up one of the tablets from the desktop. “That way we can project the image.”
“Done and done.” Jeff had barely gotten out the words before Luc’s tablet dinged, signaling a new message. His fingers danced across the tablet, and an image popped onto the screen.
The guy was short—maybe five feet in shoes—older with slick, dark hair and bulbous features. There was nothing especially remarkable about his face, but I would have sworn I’d seen him before.
“Does he look familiar to anyone?” I asked, but got muttered “no’s” around the room.
The others might not have recognized him, but I had a sense Sarah would have.
“He matches the description of the guy Sarah—the human at the Streeterville party—met,” I said. “Make my night and tell me you got a license plate on the car, Jeff.”
“Because I am, in fact, awesome, I was able to zero into the video. I got the license of the car, then ran it through the DMV system. The car is registered to one Paulie Cermak.” Jeff read out an address. “The interwebs say his address is near the Garfield Park Conservatory.”
I made plans to pay Mr. Cermak a visit. I also opened my eyes again and smiled at the phone.
“Jeff, you are a paragon of man.”
“The funny thing is,” Jeff continued, “the car’s title shows a recent sale—only a few months ago to our Mr. Cermak. But there’s no information about the prior owner or who he purchased the car from.”
I frowned at the phone. “That seems weird.”
“Definitely weird,” Jeff agreed. “When we’re looking at records, too much data usually signals a plant. Not enough data signals a scrub. Vehicle sales are almost always in the system; there’s no reason not for them to be. This file had scrub all over it. Oh, and that’s not all.”
“We’re listening.”
“Because I am, in fact, not just supremely awesome, but also all that and a bag of chipspreferably kettle-cooked jalapeño of some kind—I checked Mr. Cermak’s criminal record in the Cook County DB. I mean, probably not supposed to go into their system without permission, but what else is a boy to do when his favorite vamp makes a call?”
“Indeed. What did you learn?”
“Factually, not much. There’s one sealed criminal record in the file, and that’s it.”
“Do you think that file was scrubbed, too?”
“Eh, not necessarily. You can seal criminal files for all sorts of legitimate reasons. To protect the victim, because the perp’s underage, because the perp’s a brains-eating mind-dead zombie with no mens rea whatsoever—”
“Sealed record?” Ethan prompted.
“Yeah. So, the file is sealed, and I can’t access any data. They’re actually rocking some pretty good encryption on the sealed records. I’d need the access key or password, or you’d have to get a court order to pull the file.”
“So a dead end there?”
“Ha! You made a joke. But yes. Very dead.
Dead as a doornail. Dead as a doorknob even, although I’m not sure I know what the difference is between those two things.”
“We got it.”
“Oh, one final thing.” I heard more key tapping, the sound overlaid by Jeff’s humming. It sounded like “White Christmas.”
“Little early for Christmas carols, isn’t it, Jeff?”
“Never hurts to get into the holiday spirit, Merit. Okay, so the video isn’t great, and the alley by the bar door isn’t very well lit. But occasionally, on a full moon, the light shines just right. . . .” As he trailed off, I heard more tapping. “Okay,” he said again. “I’m going to send you another image.”
This one was a fuzzy black-and-white shot of a car in the alley. Jeff was right—the image was grainy, but the vehicle it showed was undeniably a classic Mustang, complete with racing stripes and side vents. And that wasn’t all.
I squinted at the picture, trying in vain to bring it into focus. “Is that a woman in the passenger’s seat?”
“It appears to be so,” Jeff said. “It’s more of a shadow, but it does appear to be a woman.