by Tom Clancy
“Listen to me,” he said. “The description’s to confirm this e-mail isn’t a hoax from somebody who might’ve found out what’s happened through a leak. Something of that nature.”
“There’s a lot of information,” Megan said. “The reference to the color of Julia’s eyes. Also that part about the jogging. Her greyhounds. Even her schedule.”
“She’s been watched.”
“Yes.” Megan took an audible breath. “Pete, what do you think whoever’s behind this is after? If she’s being held for a ransom, what sort of announcement can they want?”
“Wish I could give you an answer. All I know is somebody likes playing games. You can feel the spite here.”
“Yes.”
Nimec thought aloud. “The boss might have some ideas. He has to see the e-mail. I’ve got to show it to him right away.”
“I don’t know how he’ll manage to handle everything. It’s so much at once.”
Nimec was quiet. He felt the vast spread of distance between them.
“Ricci up to snuff?” he asked after a moment.
“He’s at the rescue center now. With Rollie. I haven’t contacted him about the message.”
“Better do it in a hurry,” Nimec said. He thought some more. “We need to rely on him, Meg.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“You’ve got no choice. If there are any solid leads, Ricci’s the one to find them. He’s the one, Meg.”
Silence.
“I know,” she said. “But knowing it doesn’t give me much comfort.”
Nimec stared out the chopper’s canopy into the rushing blackness of night.
“Sometimes,” he said, “we can only go with what we have.”
As far as his statement to Ricci went, Erickson had been candid: There wasn’t much of anything helpful to be found outside in the way of evidence.
Not on the grounds per se.
Accompanied by the detective, Ricci and Thibodeau had again walked back to the greyhound exercise pen and kennel, both empty now with the dogs taken into temporary care by the ASPCA. They had reinspected the sides and rear of the shop, then strode along the periphery of the bordering woods. Finally they went out front to the parking area to take a look at Julia Gordian’s Honda Passport, and the muddy vestiges of tire prints the cops had already lifted the previous day.
They were standing over by the Honda in the rain when Ricci noticed a car parked among a group of police cruisers a yard or two farther down the lot—a Ford Cutlass, standard-issue plainclothes unmarked in precinct requisition lots. Its window was open slightly more than a crack, a man in a navy blue suit working on a laptop computer in the front passenger seat.
Ricci looked more closely and saw something on the armrest beside the man. It raised a thought.
He broke away from Erickson and Thibodeau and hastened over to the car.
“Got a minute?” Ricci said, crouched under his umbrella. He motioned his head back toward the Passport. “I’m with Erickson.”
Surprised by the sudden interruption, Navy Blue glanced out at him, pushing the computer screen down out of his angle of sight.
“You one of those guys from UpLink?” he said.
Ricci nodded, came up close to the window, and shot a look inside at what he’d recognized as a pad of graph paper on the armrest. But he had no chance to catch more than the briefest glimpse of the sketch on its top page before Navy Blue reached over and turned it facedown where it lay.
“This is a crime scene,” he said. “I’ve got important things to do.”
“Like I said,” Ricci said. “Not more than a minute.”
Navy Blue continued to regard him from inside the Cutlass, his expression at once standoffish and warily curious.
A grunt. “Something I can call you besides Man From UpLink?”
“Name’s Tom Ricci.”
Navy Blue sat a moment, pushed the button to lower the window about halfway.
Ricci figured that was all he would need.
“I’m Detective Brewer,” the cop said. He still sounded suspicious. “Go ahead and make it quick.”
Ricci did, but not in the way Brewer expected. Before the other man could react, he thrust his free hand through the window, turned Brewer’s laptop toward him, and raised the lid so he could see it.
Brewer flinched in his seat.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” He pulled the computer back around, snapped it shut.
Ricci’s face was calm.
“Didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “Might be none of my business, but I thought I saw you using that crime scene diagramming software. Figured I’d check for sure. Maybe offer some advice.”
Brewer glared at him. “You want advice, keep your fucking hands to yourself—”
“No harm intended.” Ricci held a low, level tone. “I was on the job once upon a time. Boston. Found out the hard way these computer sketches aren’t worth jack on the witness stand. You want to impress a jury, don’t lose your original hand sketch on that pad. Accurate’s good. Sometimes giving them a feel for what you saw can be better.”
Brewer stared at him in angry confusion. Ricci knew he wouldn’t believe his excuse for the grab. It didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that he’d incidentally happened to be telling the truth about the testifying part. He’d gotten his look at the screen image. Not a long one. But long enough.
“There a problem here?”
The voice was Erickson’s. Ricci half-turned and saw the detective standing behind him. He and Thibodeau had come over from the Honda.
Ricci left the explanation to Brewer. He doubted the cop would mention anything about the laptop, embarrass himself by admitting he’d been caught off guard.
As expected, pride won the day.
“No,” Brewer said. He was trying not to seem abashed. “The two of us were having some shop talk.”
Erickson gave his partner a long look, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, water dripping from his hair.
“Shop talk,” he repeated.
Brewer nodded inside the car.
“Ricci used to be a cop,” he said. “We were comparing notes about procedures. How they’ve changed and so forth.”
Erickson’s gaze dissected him another moment and then swung onto Ricci.
“Didn’t do much comparing with me before,” he said.
Ricci shrugged under his umbrella.
“We had other things to talk about,” he said.
Erickson was silent. Thibodeau was silent. Both of them were looking at Ricci and had separate reasons for being skeptical and displeased.
“Okay,” Erickson said at last. He gestured the Sword ops toward the road. “I think maybe it’s time I walk you two back to your car.”
Thibodeau hadn’t taken his eyes off Ricci.
“Guess it would be,” he said, and started traipsing down the gravel and mud drive in the rain.
“I get to find out what was going on between you and that other detective?” Thibodeau said.
“Sure,” Ricci said. “I aim to please.”
Thibodeau waited. They were back inside Ricci’s Jetta on the shoulder of the road, rain dashing against the roof and windshield.
“Erickson was holding out on us,” Ricci said. “I knew he wouldn’t give up whatever it was and played his partner on a hunch.”
Thibodeau looked across the seat at him.
“That hunch pay off?”
“Yeah.” Ricci told him how he’d seen Brewer in the car with his graph paper and laptop, gone over to check it out, and gotten a look at the crime scene diagram on Brewer’s computer. “It was all right there for me on his screen. The stain on the floor. Its location and measurements. And an outline of a dog. The word greyhound lettered right over it.”
Thibodeau was shaking his head, his brow creased.
“A dog,” he said. “Don’t get it. Erickson said—”
“I heard what Erickson said. Kept it nice and vague for us. E
xcept vague only works when it’s consistent, and he wasn’t making sense. The blood left behind isn’t Julia’s and he’s thinking about other possibles. Maybe one of her attackers, maybe not. But if not, who? If he isn’t looking at anybody besides Julia being in that store when things went down, it would’ve had to belong to whoever came after her.”
Thibodeau tugged at his heavy beard as it all sank in.
“Be damned,” he said. “Be damned if it didn’t slip right by me.”
Ricci stared out into the rain.
“At first I figured he was lying straight out. That the cops had somebody in custody and wanted to keep it secret,” he said. “Wouldn’t have guessed those possibles he mentioned didn’t include human beings.”
Thibodeau was quiet a moment, still plucking his beard.
“We got to be concerned with Erickson. He hear tell about what you did . . . how you did it . . . he gonna shut us out altogether.”
Ricci shrugged.
“Let him,” he said. “Gives me one less person to second guess.”
Thibodeau shook his head some more. “I ain’t trying to start a gripe, just saying you might’ve warned me. Never know when we gonna need him. We’d put our minds together, consulted, we might’ve figured a way to get the information out of him so we don’t lose his trust—”
Ricci pitched a glance across the seat at him.
“I don’t want anybody’s trust,” he said. “Just want to know why the cops are keeping that dog’s body under wraps. And where it is.”
Thibodeau started to say something, quickly cut himself off.
“Any thoughts about how you gonna do that?” he said with a kind of yielding resignation.
Ricci thrust his key into the ignition and brought the Volkswagen to life.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
ELEVEN
VARIOUS LOCALES
“THIS THE STREET?”
“Sheffield’s place is just ahead of us.” DeMarco motioned to a dormered Old Quarter house on the right as he turned a corner in their Land Rover. “When I drove him over from the airport, the boss was in a pretty decent mood. Bushed, you know, but kidding with Wade and Ackerman in the backseat about it being a fancier Motel 6 than the one where he usually grabs a bed.” He shook his head. “I never would have thought I’d be here again tonight, bringing the kind of news we’ve got.”
Nimec glanced at him across the front seat.
“There’s no good time for bad news,” he said. “When things hit us over the head, we cope. Timing isn’t part of the bargain.”
DeMarco checked his mirrors and pulled to the curb. It was almost ten o’clock at night, twenty minutes having passed since he’d met Nimec’s chopper at the same field where Gordian had arrived some hours earlier.
The two men sat quietly in the vehicle’s dark interior.
“You think about how you’re going to break it to him?” DeMarco said.
Nimec’s smile was catacomb bleak.
“If I do that,” he said, “you can forget about me coping.”
He exited the Rover, strode into the building’s forecourt, and went up the steps to its entrance. The penguin who answered his ring reminded him of the waiters at the Rio de Gabao dinner reception. When did the black suits and ruffled white shirts come off?
A hurried introduction. Nimec said he needed to see Roger Gordian alone, was told Monsieur Gordian was in a meeting with his host and fellow house guests, explained he’d come about something very urgent, was then led into a side parlor, and invited to have a seat while he waited.
He stood instead with his back to the plush sofa.
Gordian was smiling as appeared through the parlor’s sliding walnut doors minutes later.
“Pete, hi,” he said. “I heard the doctors were checking you out and didn’t expect to see you until sometime tomor—”
He caught Nimec’s sober, uneasy expression and stopped in the middle of the room. The smile had faded.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Nimec quickly went past Gordian to the doors, drew them shut, and then turned to face him.
“Boss,” he said. His hand went to Gordian’s arm. “It’s Julia.”
“That’s Rob over there on the tennis courts with the dogs,” Meredith Wagner said from the Jetta’s backseat. She motioned to the small community park on their left with her head. “He wanted to take them running while the rain gives us a letup.”
Pulled up by the park entrance, Ricci and Thibodeau looked out at the solitary figure of Rob Howell on the other side of a high chain-link fence surrounding the courts. His back to the plastic-coated mesh, hands deep in the pockets of his barn coat, Howell stood watching the dogs chase each other in repeated energetic circles around the wet artificial turf.
Thibodeau shifted around to face the woman.
“We won’t trouble him any more ’n we need,” he said. “I promise you.”
She nodded without turning from her window. Dressed in jeans and a light brown corduroy jacket that closely matched the color of her hair, Meredith Wagner was about thirty-five, plain, thin, soft spoken, and visibly worn. They had found her at the ranch-style house she shared with her husband, Nick; three-year-old daughter, Katie; and, since yesterday, her brother Rob and his five greyhounds in a quiet suburban development outside Sonoma.
“He’s so used to caring for those animals . . . I don’t think he could make it if not for them,” she said. “I don’t think he’d have anything left to keep him in one piece.”
Thibodeau did not comment. He wasn’t sure whether she had been addressing him or thinking aloud to herself. In either case, he could say nothing except what she would already know—that he wished things were otherwise, wished events hadn’t brought them to where they were right now.
He thought in silence a few moments. When you went fishing for information, you could never predict which facts would take a long cast of the reel to pull in, which ones would jump into your hands, and which would lead you toward a rich bounty of others. After Ricci had reminded him how he’d gotten Erickson to let out that Rob Howell was staying with relatives, Thibodeau had thought it might be a while before they could identify the particular family members and track them down. But that had proven to be as easy as stopping at a gas station to buy the Monday-morning edition of a regional newspaper called the Mountain Journal. Though they had originally picked it up to see what the police and emergency freq chasers might have found out about the crime from early dispatcher-respondent radio exchanges that would flurry over the air before law-enforcement put a stopper on open communications, it had been of far greater help than they’d bargained for. The paper’s freelance police stringer had picked up on the double homicide near the state park in time to get a jump on local television stations, learn where Howell had gone through his homespun contacts, and include the sister’s name and town of residence in his story. Once they read it, Ricci had only needed to call directory information for her phone number and street address.
And so they had found themselves here not two hours after leaving the rescue center. Thibodeau was convinced it was partly just luck that had delivered them to the Wagner family’s front door before a crush of media vans—if it wasn’t profane to use a word such as luck under these circumstances. The violence at the center had taken place on a Sunday morning, when the TV and radio crews were skimpiest, especially in the state’s more remote, unpopulated areas. What had given the Mountain Journal a chance to trump the competition also gave the police some time to go into clamp-down mode and keep the name of Roger Gordian’s daughter from surfacing as part of their investigation . . . for the time being. With the weekend over, things would start to percolate. The Journal people would want to spread its story around to make certain they got credit for breaking it first. Morgue beat reporters would get on the trail. Big-market newshounds with deeper and wider sources than some country red-bone with a police band radio in his Chevy would smell blood—literally smell blo
od, Thibodeau thought—and reports would be flying everywhere by the evening news cycle.
He and Ricci were ahead of the pack but Thibodeau believed it wouldn’t be long before the rest caught up. And while Ricci’s gut might fill with acid when he thought about the FBI joining the case, his own concern was having the press toss themselves into the mix. For reasons that didn’t exactly align, both men were very eager to talk to Rob Howell before others got wind of his whereabouts.
As a result, Thibodeau could sense the impatience with which Ricci glanced at their passenger’s pale, exhausted face in the rearview mirror.
“Okay,” Ricci said in his peculiar uninflected tone. “You want to go tell your brother why we’re here?”
Meredith Wagner nodded and reached for her door handle.
“I’ll let you know when he’s ready,” she said.
She went and talked with Howell for a couple of minutes. They saw him abruptly turn toward their parked car, saw him look back at his sister and talk to her some more. Then she waved them over, waited for them to approach, and sort of drifted off along the tennis court’s painted white foul line. Giving them room for privacy, Thibodeau supposed, but remaining close enough to cut short their conversation if Howell became too upset.
“Mister Howell—” Thibodeau began.
“Rob’s fine.” He shook their hands. “Meredith says you work for Julia’s dad. Private security, is it?”
Peripherally aware of the dogs in their circular sprint around the court, Thibodeau nodded, gave him their names, told him how sorry they were for his loss, and explained that what they wanted to ask wouldn’t take long.
“We know you been through everything with the police, ain’t about to put you on that go ’round again,” he said.
Howell cast his sunken eyes down at the ground a moment. Then he raised them to Thibodeau’s face and shrugged. “It’s all right. If it can help you find Julia, I don’t mind.”
Ricci looked at him. “Julia,” he said, “and the people who took what they did from you.”
Howell turned his way.
