The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [35]
“Aren’t we putting the cart before the horse?” Montgomery grumbled. “You got a bunch of calls. Whoopdee doo.”
Special Agent in Charge Everett replied sternly, “The fact that an agent’s personal telephone number was disseminated to over twenty correctional facilities is whoopdee doo. We don’t need any more whoopdee doo than that.”
Montgomery turned to the SAC. Quincy thought the disheveled agent would quit while he was ahead; he was wrong. “Bullshit,” Montgomery snapped, making them all blink. “If this was something personal, if this was someone serious, the instigator would do more than pass along a private number to a bunch of schmucks behind bars. He’d visit the house. Or he’d arrange for someone else to visit the house. Phone calls? This is fucking child’s play.”
Everett’s face darkened. A thirty-year veteran of the Bureau, he was a throwback to the days when an FBI agent dressed, spoke, and carried himself a certain way. Agents were the good guys, the last bastion of protection against gangsters, bank robbers, and child molesters. Agents did not arrive on the job in wrinkled suits and they did not go around saying things like “fucking child’s play.”
“Special Agent Montgomery—”
“Wait a minute.” Quincy surprised them all by raising his hand and saving Montgomery from a lecture that wouldn’t be career-building. “Say that one more time.”
“Phone calls,” Montgomery drawled as if they were all daft. “The question is not who, but why phone calls.”
Glenda Rodman sat back. She was nodding her head now. Randy Jackson yawned.
“Montgomery’s right,” the techie agreed. “If it’s a hacker, guy could get your home address from the phone company just as easily as your unlisted number. If it’s just some person who happened to snag your number, they could still call information and get your street address from a reverse directory. Either way, home phone number equals home address.”
“Wonderful,” Quincy said. Somehow, he hadn’t put those pieces together, another sure sign he was not himself these days. The dull ache was back in his temples. Morning, noon, and night. Grief was like a hangover he couldn’t shake.
Why phone calls? The obvious answer was that someone was out to get him. Probably someone from an old case. Psychopaths were like sharks. They probably viewed his daughter’s death as blood in the water and now they were moving in for the kill. So why not keep it simple? Move in. Attack. Finish him off. Hell, he definitely wasn’t in any kind of shape for a fight.
Was that why he had gone to Rainie? Because he knew he was becoming too isolated? Or because he wanted to remember how to fight the good fight? Rainie never gave an inch, not even when backed into a corner. Not even when she should.
Focus, Quincy. Why phone calls?
“This is serious,” Everett pronounced. “I want an immediate follow-up with the newsletters and Web sites involved to determine the origin of these ads. Furthermore, we need to figure out just how many inmates now have this information. We ought to be able to trace something.”
Quincy closed his eyes. “So many grassroots newsletters,” he murmured. “Big ones, little ones, and for all we know, he placed ads in all of them, which is a lot of work. So why . . .” His eyes popped open. He had it. Dammit, he should’ve thought of this last night. “Cover,” he said.
“What’s that, Agent?”
“Cover,” Montgomery repeated for him, then grunted. He stared at Quincy with red-rimmed eyes that appeared reluctantly impressed. “Yeah, probably. Let’s say this guy has your home address right now—which, by the way, he probably does. He goes after you tomorrow, we can hunt him down through process of elimination. But he spreads that info to dozens of prisons where the inmates will pass it along to dozens more. . . . Now we gotta look at superfelons A, B, and C, their pals on the outside, and the pals of their pals on the outside.