Chat - Archer Mayor [60]
“That still leaves a possible short bus trip,” Sam countered.
Willy shrugged, but Joe followed up. “Issue a BOL to all municipalities within fifty miles. What we’re after is an abandoned car in a lot or parking space near a bus depot or train station, maybe with out-of-state plates.”
Sam began writing herself a note as Joe pointed at Lester. “I’m having Rob Barrows send you a copy of the hard drive we collected from Steve’s Garage. Like I said, they’ll be concentrating on the drug deal between CarGuy and SmokinJoe, but I’d like you to find out what you can about Rocky from that—retrieve what he said and who he said it to, or at least do the best you can.”
Lester looked doubtful. “I’ll give it a shot, Joe, but it may be slim pickings. You know that.”
“Yeah, Barrows already warned me. But until we can either locate Rocky’s computer or find whoever he was talking to in that chat room, we’re reduced to grabbing whatever straws float by. Which includes John Leppman, by the way,” he added as an afterthought. “If you can pull him on board sooner than later, he might be able to help you profile this guy, even with the little we get off the hard drive. Not to mention,” he suddenly added, “that he might have a file with N. Rockwell already on it—this is his line of work, after all, and my guess is that a name like that is a whole lot rarer than Ready Freddy or all the other playful crap out there.”
“Roger that,” Lester acknowledged.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation, after which Willy asked, “Who do you want me to chew on?”
Joe pressed his lips together. “I haven’t forgotten you,” he finally admitted, adding, “but I’m of two minds about using you for what I’m after.”
“Don’t tell me,” Willy said with a pitying smile. “It’s the car thing up north, right? Your big family drama?”
Joe barely heard the tone in his voice, being so used to the man’s unrelenting style. “It may not be only about me anymore, as the Rocky reference just made clear. Still, I won’t deny I’d love to get to the bottom of what happened to Mom and Leo.”
“Want me to torture Dan?”
Joe shook his head, not doubting for a moment that Willy could and would do it if properly encouraged. “Tempting, but no. Dan’s too hot right now. Go after the old man—E. T. Cozy up to him somehow, get under his tent flaps. In his prime, there was nothing that moved in that whole township without his knowledge, and he ran his family like a full-bird colonel. That’s changed. I need to find out what happened, and I’m too involved and too well known to do the kind of job you might. And I’m not just after the car crash—think more generally than that. Barrows could benefit from this, too, if you get lucky.”
Willy’s response was eloquent in its brevity. “Sure.”
Volunteering to do the unorthodox was an easy response. What Joe sensed here, however—never to be publicly recognized—was Willy’s implicit personal loyalty to him. That was a trickier trait for an avowed hard case to acknowledge.
Joe honored the message with a single nod of the head. “Thanks,” he added quietly before addressing them all. “Okay, let’s break it down into pieces, so nobody’s stepping on anyone else’s toes.”
Joe parked his car on Oak Street, appreciating that the plows had kept the curbs clear, and got out into the still falling snow. This had turned into an old-fashioned snowstorm. Forecasters were calling for six inches by morning.
He paused by his car, looking up the street, noticing a few forlorn electric candles in windows, and the odd wreath or two on a door, left over from Christmas. This was familiar territory. Not only was it a major backstreet thoroughfare in a town he’d known since his days as a rookie, decades earlier, but he’d once lived a hundred yards to the south, on the corner of Oak and High, before he and Gail even met, when she’d been merely a successful local Realtor and he’d been a lieutenant on the detective squad.
The coincidence was ironic, since he had parked opposite Lyn Silva’s address