The Narrows - Michael Connelly [88]
“What meeting?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m on Paradise now.”
“All right.”
I closed the phone and waited, looking at the billboard on the back of a cab that was waiting in front of me. It was an advertisement for a floor show at the Riviera. It showed the beautifully proportioned rear ends of a dozen women standing side by side and naked. It made me think about the changing nature of Vegas and what had been mentioned in the Times article on the missing men. I thought about all the people who had moved here on the family ticket only to have that ticket punched with this and a thousand other billboards just like it after they got here.
A basic G-car—a Crown Victoria—pulled up next to me from the opposite direction and Rachel put down the window.
“You want me to drive?”
“I want to drive,” I said, thinking it would give me a little slice of control over things.
She made no argument. She pulled the Crown Vic into a parking space and got into my car.
I didn’t move the Mercedes.
“Are you going to drink both of those coffees?” she asked me.
“No, one’s for you. Sugar’s in the bag. They didn’t have cream to go.”
“I don’t use it.”
She lifted one of the coffees and drank from it. I looked forward, out through the windshield, then I checked the rearview. And I waited.
“Well,” she finally said, “are we going?”
“I don’t know. I think we need to talk first.”
“About what?”
“About what is going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“What were you doing at the field office so early? What’s going on, Agent Walling?”
She let out her breath in annoyance.
“Look, Harry, you are forgetting something here. This investigation is of high importance to the bureau. You could say the director is directly involved.”
“And?”
“And so when he wants a ten a.m. briefing, that means us agents in Quantico and out in the field get together at nine a.m. to make sure we know what we’re telling him and that there’s not going to be blowback on anybody.”
I nodded. Now I got it.
“And nine a.m. in Quantico is six a.m. in Vegas.”
“You got it.”
“So what happened at the ten? What did you all tell the director?”
“That’s FBI business.”
I looked at her and she was waiting with a smile.
“But I will tell you because you are about to tell me all of your secrets, too. The director is going to go public. It’s too risky not to. It will look like a cover-up if this comes out later in uncontrolled fashion. It’s all about managing the moment, Harry.”
I put the car in drive and headed toward the parking lot exit. I had already plotted my route. I’d take Flamingo to the 15 and then a quick jog over to the Blue Diamond Highway. Then it would be a straight shot north to Clear.
“What’s he going to say?”
“He’ll hold a press conference late this afternoon. He’ll announce that Backus is apparently alive and we’re out looking for him. He’ll hold up the picture Terry McCaleb took of the man who called himself Shandy.”
“Did they check all of that out yet?”
“Yes. There’s no trace line on Shandy yet—it was probably just a name he gave Terry. But photographic analysis and comparison of the photos Terry took and photos of Backus are under way as we speak. The initial report is they’re going to come in as a match. It was Backus.”
“And Terry didn’t recognize him.”
“Well, he obviously recognized something. He took the pictures, so there was some sort of suspicion. But the guy had a beard, hat and glasses. The analyst on it said he’d also changed his nose and teeth and maybe had cheek implants. There’s a lot of things he could have done, even a surgery that would have changed his voice. Look, I looked at the photos and didn’t see it for sure and I worked directly with Backus for five years, much longer than Terry. Terry got moved out to L.A. to man the Behavioral Sciences outpost.”
“Any idea where he got all of that done?”
“We’re pretty sure we know. About six years ago the bodies of a surgeon and his wife were found in their burned-out home in Prague. The home had a surgical suite and the doctor was the subject of an Interpol intelligence file. The wife was his