The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [69]
“Which brings us to the second issue. You’re involved here.”
“And you aren’t?”
The rebuttal popped out before I had time to think about it. Reggie chewed on it for a minute, one thumb drumming on the steering wheel, and I realized it had been exactly the right thing to say. He’d dedicated his life to finding people who were lost or taken, and he was honest enough with himself not to pretend it was just a job. He’d never given up on Kyle, because he cared.
He took a hit from his cigarette, sighed as he exhaled, and then dropped the car into gear. We made an illegal U-turn across four lanes of traffic and headed south on York Avenue. I kept quiet as we passed Rockefeller University, not wanting to accidentally dissuade him from his apparent decision to let me ride along. The sun was already down, and the Rockefeller campus was a floodlit oasis, a grassy fifteen-acre chunk of Harvard or Princeton transported to the Upper East Side. I fleetingly wondered where Kate would be at school next year—and where Claire and I would be, and whether we’d be together.
“You’ll do what you’re told, right?”
“Of course,” I replied immediately. “Where is this guy?”
“Staten Island.”
“How’d you find him?”
“Remember I told you that most stolen cars in this part of the world get reregistered with fake VIN numbers or chopped for parts?”
“Right.”
“If you’re going to reregister a car, the easiest way is to pretend it’s coming in from out of state. That way there’s no paperwork for the local DMV to match to.” He clucked irritably as he made the left turn onto the descending ramp for FDR Drive. The highway was jammed in both directions. “I checked out-of-state registrations in the tristate area for the six-month period after Gallegos’s car was stolen. A couple of potentials but nothing that really rang any bells. Again, it’s lucky as hell for us that the M5 is limited production.”
We reached the bottom of the ramp. The cars before us had alternated into traffic, but a shiny black Hummer with chrome running boards was refusing to give way, tailgating the vehicle in front of it. Reggie closed to within eighteen inches, the roofline of his beat-up Chevy level with the bottom of the Hummer’s windows. Shifting his cigarette to his right hand, he popped open the driver’s door and slammed it hard into the side of the Hummer. The driver screeched to a halt, and Reggie accelerated smoothly into the resultant gap.
“Somebody’s going to take a shot at you one of these days,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder. The Hummer owner was out of his car and walking around to the passenger side to inspect it. He looked perplexed. I could hear horns sounding behind him.
“Happened before. At any rate, the other thing I did was to go back through the records and look for chop-shop busts. There’s usually a couple a year. Then I went through the seized property lists to see if anything matched the M5. Again, nothing really jumped out.”
“That’s not much of a surprise, is it? The detectives investigating Carlos’s murder would have been looking for Gallegos’s car also. They must have left some kind of flag in the system.”
“True,” he said, sounding offended. “But the department computer is three monkeys in an orange crate. You got to try the data a bunch of different ways to make sure you’re getting good answers, and you got to be creative.”
“So, what’d you find?”
“I’m getting to it,” he muttered, checking his side-view mirror intently. I hoped he wasn’t sizing up another victim. “Don’t rush me. The next thing I did was to pull the plate numbers of all the tow trucks owned by the busted chop shops.”
“Why?”
“BMW and other high-end cars have good security systems. Sophisticated thieves don’t bother messing with them. They just hook the car to a tow truck and haul it away.”
“Your point being?”
He reached up and tapped the small white box Velcroed to his windshield below the rearview mirror.
“You matched the tow trucks to their E-ZPasses,” I said, comprehension dawning. “Very clever.”
“Not many chop shops cough up for Manhattan rent, and most vehicles