The Millionaires - Brad Meltzer [89]
“Ready for some relief ?” DeSanctis asked as the passenger door popped open.
“What the hell took so long?” Gallo asked, never taking his eyes off the laptop.
“Patience—haven’t you ever heard of patience?”
“Just tell me what you got. Anything useful?”
“Of course it’s useful…” Still standing outside, DeSanctis swung two silver aluminum attaché cases into the front seat, stacking them one on top of the other. Sliding in next to them, he pulled the top one onto his lap.
“They give you a hard time?” Gallo asked.
DeSanctis answered with a sarcastic smirk and a flip of the attaché locks. “You know how it is with a Delta Dash—tell ’em what you need, tell ’em it’s an emergency, and bing-bang-bing, the James Bond gadgets are on the next shuttle. All you have to do is pick ’em up at baggage claim.”
Inside the silver case, set into a black foam mold, DeSanctis found what looked like a pudgy, round camcorder with a wide oversized lens. A sticker on the bottom read “DEA Property.” Typical, DeSanctis nodded. When it came to high-tech surveillance, Drug Enforcement and the Border Patrol always got the top toys.
“What is it?” Gallo asked.
“Germanium lens… indium antimonide detector—”
“English!”
“Handheld infrared videocamera with complete thermal imaging,” DeSanctis explained as he peered through the viewfinder. “If she’s sneaking out late at night, it’ll home in on her body heat and spot her down the darkest alley.”
Gallo looked up at the bright winter sky. “What else did you get?”
“Don’t give me that look,” DeSanctis warned. Resting the infrared camera on his lap, he tossed the first case into the backseat and flipped open the second. Inside was a high-tech radar gun with a long barrel that looked like a police flashlight. “This one’s just a prototype,” DeSanctis explained. “It measures motion—from running water, to the blood flowing through your veins.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means it lets you see straight through nonmoving objects. Like walls.”
Gallo crossed his arms skeptically. “No friggin’…”
“It works. I saw it myself,” DeSanctis insisted. “The computer inside lets you know if it’s a ceiling fan or a kid spinning around in circles. So if she’s meeting someone in the hallway, or stepping out of camera range…”
“We’ll catch her,” Gallo said, grabbing the radar gun and pointing it up toward Maggie’s apartment. “All we have to do is wait.”
37
So where do you want to start?” Gillian asks as we step into her dad’s faded pink house.
“Wherever you want,” Charlie says as I survey my way through the overcrowded living room. Set up like an indoor garage sale, the room is filled with… well… a little bit of everything. Overstuffed bookshelves that’re crammed with engineering and science fiction books cover two of the four white stuccoed walls, stacks of papers bury an old wicker chair, and at least seven different throw pillows—including one shaped like a pink flamingo and another shaped like a laptop—are tossed haphazardly across the stained leather couch.
In the center of the room, a mod Woodstock-era coffee table is lost under remote controls, faded photographs, an electric screwdriver, random loose change, plastic squeezable figures of Happy and Bashful from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a stack of Sun Microsystems coasters, and at least two dozen rabbits’ feet that’re dyed in impossibly bright colors.
“I’m impressed,” Charlie blurts. “This room’s an even bigger wreck than mine.”
“Wait’ll you see the rest,” Gillian says. “He was purely function over form.”
“So all this stuff is his?”
“Pretty much,” Gillian replies. “I’ve been meaning to go through it, but… it’s not that easy to throw away someone’s life.”
She hits it right on the head with that one. It took my mom almost a year to toss dad’s toothbrush. And that’s when she hated him.
“Why don’t we start back here,” she suggests, leading us into the spare bedroom her dad used as an office. Inside, we find an L-shaped black Formica countertop jutting out from the back wall and continuing down the righthand side of the room. Half