Cross Fire - James Patterson [63]
“And you can try the shelters. There’s a list of them in the back of the paper.” She took a copy off the top of her stack and handed it to me. “God, you know, I hate myself for telling you all this.”
“Don’t,” I said, and paid her a dollar for the paper. “You’re doing the right thing.”
Finally.
Chapter 82
AFTER A LONG DAY of canvassing homeless shelters and soup kitchens, I wasn’t any further along than I’d been that morning. For all I knew, Talley and Hennessey were still in New Jersey. Or gone to Canada. Or up in smoke.
But when I went back to the office for some files to bring home, Jerome Thurman caught me at the elevator with some news.
“Alex! You heading out?”
“I was,” I said.
“Maybe not anymore.”
He held up a page from some kind of printout. “I think maybe we’ve got something here. Could be good stuff.”
Normally, Jerome works out of First District, but I’d gotten him a space in the Auto Theft Unit down the hall, where he could monitor vehicle leads for me. And by “space,” I mean a stack of crates in their Records Room where he could set up his laptop, but Jerome’s never been a complainer.
What he had was a list of hot license plate numbers from an NCIC database. One of the entries was circled in blue pen.
NJ — DCY 488.
“It’s a Lexus ES, reported stolen from an apartment complex in Colliers Mills, New Jersey,” he said. “That’s, like, two, three miles down the road from where your white Suburban went into the water.”
I risked a half smile. “Tell me there’s more, Jerome,” I said. “There’s more, right?”
“Best part, actually. An LPR camera picked up the same plate number coming into long-term parking out at National on Saturday morning at four forty-five.”
LPR stands for License Plate Reader. It uses optical scanning software to read the tag numbers on passing cars and then compares those numbers against lists of wanted and stolen vehicles. It’s an amazing bit of technology, even if all the kinks haven’t quite been worked out yet.
“Any reason we’re just finding out about this now?” I asked. “That’s well over forty-eight hours ago. What was the problem?”
“The system isn’t live at the airport,” Jerome said. “There’s a manual download once a day, Monday to Friday. I just got this a few minutes ago. But, bottom line, Alex? I’m guessing your little birdies came home to roost.”
“I’m guessing you’re right,” I said, and turned back toward the office.
Even before I got to my desk, though, my excitement started turning into something else. This was a double-edged sword, at best. Considering the heat on Talley and Hennessey right now, I couldn’t imagine too many reasons why they’d come back to DC. Chances were, if we didn’t find at least one of them soon, some other fox in the henhouse was going to get a bullet in the brain.
Nothing like a little pressure to help you do your best work, right?
Chapter 83
IT WAS JUST after midnight when Denny approached the black Lincoln Town Car parked on Vermont Avenue and got in. The man he knew only as Zachary was waiting for him. Zachary’s usual nameless driver/goon was sitting face front at the wheel.
“The clock’s winding down on this thing,” Denny said straight-out. “We need to put it to bed before it all blows up.”
“We agree,” Zachary said. Like it was his decision. Like the big man in the ivory tower, whoever he was, didn’t pull the strings, write the checks, and call the shots here.
Zachary took a plain manila folder out of the seat pocket and handed it to him. “This will be our last arrangement,” he said. “Go ahead. Take it.”
Arrangement. The guy was too much.
Inside the folder were two dossiers, if that’s what you could call them — a couple of pictures, a few paragraphs, and some Google maps slapped together on copy paper, like somebody’s shitty little school project. Wherever the boss man spent his billions, it sure as hell wasn’t on document prep.
But as for the names on those dossiers? Now they were impressive.
“Well, well,” Denny said. “Looks like your man wants to