11 hours left…
10:29 a.m.
A perimeter had been set up along the two adjacent streets. A swarm of curious onlookers stood just beyond the barricade while a bevy of bored-looking officers monitored them from this side of the line.
Lieutenant Doehring and Officer Tielman, the CSIU member I’d met Tuesday evening, were standing beside the Honda Accord in which the laptop had been found.
Doehring was filling out a stack of paperwork on a clipboard and Tielman was peering into the car’s open trunk, but his forensics kit was nowhere in sight. The Evidence Response Team must have already completed their work.
When Doehring saw me, he called, “How’s that arm?”
My eyes were on the crowd. “Hanging in there.”
“Ah. You should be a comedian.”
“Not according to my stepdaughter.” I gestured toward the roadblock at the end of the street and asked Doehring, “We’re taking video of that crowd, right?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s see if we can get any probables on body type and posture that might match Aria Petic or the unidentified man we captured on tape pushing the wheelchair into the Lincoln Towers.” As far as we knew, Aria Petic was a fictional name, but I could tell Doehring was tracking with me.
“Good call.”
“Also compare the facial characteristics of the people here with those of Richard Devin Basque.” I took a deep breath. “And Sevren Adkins. The Illusionist.”
He stared at me. “Richard Devin Basque and Sevren Adkins?”
“Yes. I think Basque might be in the city. I want to know if he’s in that crowd. Adkins is a long shot, but it’s something I need to check. I’ll fill you in later.” Then a thought. Why not. “And Dr. Renee Lebreau. You should be able to get her photo, height, and weight from Agent Kreger up in Michigan. Let’s see if she’s here.”
I saw him tap through his fingers, reviewing the five names. “I’ll be right back.” He pulled out his radio and stepped away.
I said to Tielman, “Tell me about the car.”
“Well, somebody gave a homeless guy a hundred dollars in quarters yesterday afternoon. He’s been feeding the meter every hour or so. Anderson saw him, figured he couldn’t possibly be the car’s owner. And, well, there you go.”
“Someone gave a homeless man a hundred dollars? What motivated him to keep feeding the-”
“The promise of more money, if he kept it going for twenty-four hours-and no, the homeless guy couldn’t give us a description of the man who gave him the money.”
Hmm.
“No one else besides Anderson noticed this?”
“Apparently not.”
I studied the vehicle. “Did your team find anything significant here?”
“Well, the luggage claim tag.”
“What?” Angela hadn’t mentioned that.
“Yeah. Cassidy found it. Farraday swept the car first, must have missed it. No prints on it, though. No DNA.”
Why would killers this careful leave a claim tag behind?
“What else?”
“We ran the plates, examined the carpeting for soil samples, no red flags; Cassidy checked the steering wheel, door handles, trunk for DNA and prints, but so far the only ones come from the owner’s family, two friends, and the guy who owned the car before they bought it last year.”
He had a look of satisfaction on his face, as if he were proud of how well he’d done his job. “The owners are clean. They were both at an art reception at the time of the chase at the hotel. Their car was gone when they left.”
“They reported it missing?”
“Yes.”
“No candy wrappers in the car?” I said. “Gum? Straws, napkins, anything else you could get DNA from?”
“I’m good at what I do, Agent Bowers.” His voice had turned cold.
“I’m glad to hear that.” Donning the latex gloves, I slipped into the car, sat in the driver’s seat, peered out the windshield.
This is the last thing the driver saw before exiting the vehicle.
From here, I could see the panning surveillance camera above the police station’s front entrance. I waited, it rotated toward me, then away from me, then toward me again, but by its position in relationship to the entrance and the panning angle, I guessed this car wouldn’t appear in the frame.
I asked Tielman about it, and he confirmed my suspicions-the team had checked the footage, he told me, but nothing came up. “If the killers’d parked thirty feet further up the block we would’ve had ’em.” His tone seemed to praise the police department’s potential cleverness rather than the killers’ anticipation of it.
Man, these guys were good.
And it was video again.
Always something to do with video.
Angles.
Orientation.
I recalled the cameras at the research facility, the deleted footage from 5:00 to 7:00, the video feed to the electronics store, the traffic camera catching the plates of the Volvo, the looping video footage of an empty alley. The killers seemed to be experts at turning against us the very tools we were using to try to find them.
And yet.
Yet…
The man who wheeled Mollie into the hotel had gotten caught on camera twice-entering the hotel and then entering the service elevator.
He’s too good for that.
Why didn’t he just use the alley entrance or the The dog didn’t bark.
He wanted us to chase him through the hotel.
I considered that.
Why would he want that?
I had no idea, but either the killers had been careless or they were so far ahead of us that they were orchestrating everything. Six moves ahead of us the whole time. They seemed to know the cave and were only showing us the tunnels they wanted us to see.
I stepped out of the car, asked Tielman, “This vagrant who was feeding the parking meter, did he remember when the guy gave him the money?”
“Just sometime yesterday afternoon.” He folded his arms: I’ve thought of everything. Go ahead, try to come up with something I missed.
“Any change left? If so-”
“He used about half of the money on booze,” Tielman interrupted me harshly. “We checked the coins he had left for prints, nothing came up in AFIS.” He looked past me, toward HQ. “I’ll see you at the briefing.”
“Good work here.”
After a pause. “Thank you.”
As I watched him leave, I noticed that three TV news vehicles were lined up at the end of the street, and Nick, the cameraman who’d been at the Lincoln Towers Hotel yesterday when I arrived, was climbing into the WXTN van.
And as he did, I had a few thoughts about an entrance to the cave I hadn’t yet peered down.