“Uh-huh.”
“SDPD, LAPD and SFPD are checking the clubs but we’re not holding our breath.”
A rifle would fit neatly inside a guitar case. He looked at the pictures again. The kid’s hands may have been holding something. Hard to tell with all those people.
“We’ve come up empty on other CCTV—city, security, ATM. Nothing for three miles,” Lind said.
“Let’s up the search radius to ten miles,” Abbey said, “get SDPD and county to earn their overtime and do our legwork. We’ll get this sketch up to Stockton. You two wrap up what you got here, you’re heading up there too. Oh, did you wish Duffy a happy birthday?”
“Out,” Duffy ordered, and when the rookies were gone, “What’s your thinking?”
“Male, late twenties to mid-forties, possibly molested as a child. A pro, done it before, maybe for money, likely in a uniform. He’s well trained.”
“Anything else?”
“Just me waking up in bed this morning alone.”
He wasn’t taking that bait either.
She grabbed the sketch, slipped out without another word. That promised a conversation later.
He leaned back in his chair. The Parish-Jackson connection could be anything. Could be nothing. Could be one was a distraction to throw off the other. Could be their shooter poked his finger in a phonebook.
“Betty!”
Betty had been his assistant for twelve years. Her auburn head peeked around the door, notepad in hand.
“What time’s the office brief?”
“Grouchy, are we? Eleven. SAC at eleven thirty, ADIC Arsenault after that—”
“Arsenault? What the hell does he want?” He had been passed over for ADIC after the Mexican debacle, the job going to someone less assertive and more unctuous.
“His secretary didn’t deign to tell me. Elise Hutchens wants twenty minutes.”
“Wish in one hand—”
“She says she has official ‘unnamed’ sources linking the Parish and Jackson killings.”
“Goddamn it.”
Les Miller’s protégé, twenty-something, just getting her legs, Hutchens showed appreciation for facts, eschewed sensationalism unlike her ratings-ravenous rivals. It had earned her some cred with the Bureau, though the buzz was not so much with her network.
His Midwest attitude didn’t care for leaks, however well intentioned. But if she just wanted his confirmation, he wasn’t giving her anything she didn’t already have. Better she got the story straight then someone else scaring the bejesus out of thirty-five million Californians. Plus, she’d think she owed him.
“She gets five. And no questions about the Circle-K. I also need an MOU drafted for San Joaquin. And somehow find out how I can get James Dugan on the damn phone.” Betty nodded and left.
With Maz gone Dugan was the only old friend he had left in the Bureau. If this was his last hurrah he wanted Jimmy beside him when they nailed the bastard going around shooting people without permission.
He spun around in his chair, looked out at the passing traffic below. He could make out Maria’s store from here, past the green and slate office parks and the ribbons of hot asphalt. One semester to go. Good for her.
Betty popped her head back in the doorway. “Forgot. Happy fifty-seventh, boss.”
He sighed. It was going to be a helluva year.
CHAPTER 35
AUGUST
Redmond, Washington
The rain drummed relentlessly upon the roof as it had the last two hours. He shifted in his seat, tried to stretch, tried to get more comfortable, surrendered. Nissan Maximas were not made for the long-legged.
The dog next to him whined.
Or German shepherds, apparently.
From the entrance of Chip’s Topsoil, where the Maxima hugged a tree-covered, shadowy embankment, he was to watch for traffic, in particular police traffic, and watch the Millennium Campus across the road, in particular building F. The road glistened with pools of streetlamp gold, the drops on the windshield little reflective gems. Busy in the daytime, at midnight and with a steady Pacific Northwest downpour the four lanes of Union Hill Road were quiet save the rare traveler eastbound to one of the commuter towns, like Duvall where he had left his truck. Was that this morning? Time had slipped into a plodding blur.
Waiting. At least it wasn’t for someone to murder. Tonight they waited for Hewitt’s Security and Motorcade, route 47, truck number 19448.
“They call it ‘The Indian Run’ ’cause they pick up from a few casinos,” Garrett had informed them as the four of them, stuffed into a Prelude, drove over the area that morning. Garrett’s ponytail was blond, sideburns and goatee to match. He wore Dickie’s overalls, forearms covered in artwork, the kind you get in prison. Jamal was black, wiry, couldn’t be more than twenty-five. Jack was stocky, Asian, gray in his temples. He didn’t say much. Last was Dave, who rode shotgun, tall, deep tan but white as rice beneath, medium-dark brown hair, light charcoal glasses.
“See there, Dave? Yeah?” Garrett pointed to the gap between the Millennium buildings. Beyond the gray asphalt parking lot a swath of green stretched a mile. “Keller Farm. ’Bout a hundred feet in, drops off sharp to the creek. Ain’t visible from the road. Even if the GPS is up all they know is the truck’s stopped and looks a bit off grid. Four minutes, in and out. Yeah?”
Dave nodded. Was that a Midwestern accent?
Redmond, pasture and orchard before Bill Gates made it the center of his software universe, still remained bucolic. Downtown urbanized, clean and personable, family-owned shops rubbing shoulders with the low-key mall the locals had allowed into their Shire. No high-rises, no homeless, no crime. Recession, what recession? It smelled of green. And money.
“Easy as cake,” Garrett said, soaking his breakfast in syrup at a Denny’s before his shift at Hewitt’s, one arm guarding his plate, a hand cupping undrunk coffee like a plump breast.
“What happens when you don’t turn up tomorrow?”
Garrett grinned around a mouth of hotcakes. “Don’t know, don’t care. Wanna stick around to find out, be my guest, Dave.”
“You cool wit’ it all, Dave?” Jamal asked.
“I’m cool,” Dave said. And McConnell was.
“Sure glad you made it, man. We was fucked.”
Jack grunted.
“Your boy a sharp motherfucker,” Jamal added.
That earned a grunt from Jack as well.
“Don’t worry. Easy as fuckin’ pie. Yeah?” Garrett added.
Pie, cake. Hopefully as easy as one of them. Yeah.
Jamal was monitoring a police scanner about a mile west of where Union Hill Road began. Garrett and Jack sat in the tow truck in a dark corner behind building F while McConnell watched from the shadows. All waiting for the guests of honor to arrive so they could start the party.
Lights flashed and a brown SUV turned out of the parking lot.
“Last of the swing, just the grave now,” Garrett assured. Graveyard shift at the Xbox Operations Center consisted of three guys watching monitors while working hard at staying awake.
They waited. Crime, it seemed, entailed an awful lot of waiting.
McConnell had driven straight to Idaho, returned the rental, picked up his truck from the provincial Park N’ Fly then made that final, interminable six-hour drive back to Spokane where he collapsed upon the sofa between unperturbed bastard cats, the dog licking his hand, and was blissfully asleep all of ten minutes before the fax woke him. Christ, who still sent faxes? Why did he still have a fax machine at all?
One page, one word, all caps: WATERLOO.
Grumbling, he fired up his laptop.
“Took you long enough,” HAMMURABI said, his new Grok voice feature fully operational.
“Why Waterloo?”
“I dunno,” Mitch confessed, “it sounded cool.”
“I’m going back to bed.”
“No you’re not.”
It was after midnight when he reached the farmh
ouse. At least Mitch had the courtesy to grill him a Ribeye and eggs. He attacked it with vigor on the porch. He was starving.
“You look like shit.”
McConnell nodded, washing down a bite with cold beer.
“Portland PD ran your credit card,” the hacker added nonchalantly. He was sporting his magic robe and waving a spatula from one hand. “Relax. You were never a suspect, they just needed to show due diligence. There’s an email thread about harassing you needlessly after your brother was killed, and a lot of general agreement that Odom had it coming.”
“So I’m good?”
“You were never bad. I went ahead and did the same alibi for this last trip. Learn your Montana rivers. Like the back of your hand. Fishing. Lots of fishing.” The hacker pushed up his glasses. “Did I say you look like shit? Seriously. I can get someone else to take the thingamajig.”
“No you can’t. And it’s a lot of money.”
Mitch didn’t disagree. “You should have brought the dog out here. Still can if you want.”
“No time.” It was a four-hour turnaround to bring the dog back out.
“You really should’ve called her from the road.”
McConnell gave him a look. Had he called Marissa from the road the hacker would’ve crucified him. He did try her a couple more times on the way back to his house but she still wasn’t answering. What imagined slight was it this time? Beginning to feel like being married again. Without the carnal benefits.
The thingamajig in the backseat, Geronimo up front, they drove a beeline west. The sun was rising when he left the dog in the car and walked the half mile to a shack of a house in a rundown neighborhood in Renton. His newfound partners in crime were glad to see him, glad to see the thingamajig under his arm, despite the hour. They ran over the plan. At the end, Jamal asked, “You cool wit’ it all Dave?”
“Cool as Vanilla Ice.” And so tired that sounded funny.
The casino’s money was camouflage for the real prize; next-gen Xbox chips, prototypes which were being sent back from Microsoft Game Studios to the Intel labs in Hillsboro, Oregon, the latter ironically where Tom Woodridge had failed to land a job. It really was a small world.
Garrett had worked the past couple months at the Hewitt depot as a mechanic, sneaking pictures and mapping the undercarriage of the rigs, especially the ventilation system. That morning he had gone in, installed Mitch’s thingamajig alongside Jack’s contraption and bid a silent adieu.
Somewhere along life’s journey Jack had acquired some knowledge of chemistry. He had built a pressurized, battery-powered remote gas dispersal system that would release a non-lethal solution to render the guards unconscious and not dead. He didn’t say much, but seemed confident about it.
Mitch’s role had been threefold: Ensure Garrett’s background check cleared; the thingamajig, which would scramble cell, radio, satellite and GPS signals; and disabling the armored car’s operation center’s main tracking system as a fallback if the thingamajig failed.
Besides lookout, McConnell was tasked to text-to-email Mitch via a prepaid burner. The hacker then would activate his botnet, “Atlas Shrugged,” hiding in the wild for weeks, having infected thousands of devices around the world, unleashing a DDoS attack and flooding Hewitt’s system with data requests.
The rest was simply the getaway. Easy as pie. Yeah?
“Quit breathing so much,” he told the dog. “You’re fogging up the windows.”
His hands were sweating in their gloves. Jamal had “rounded up” the vehicles and he didn’t want to leave any prints. His feet were sweating, too. He was wearing hiking boots, jeans, dark blue T-shirt. He should have worn his Adidas so his feet could breathe. And brought a sandwich. He was hungry. He had brought his pistol. It too waited, under the seat. No plan to use it but there was that whole God and laughing and making plans thing.
Waiting and sweating. Like the construction site in Stockton. The roof in San Diego.
At forty past midnight Jamal announced with enthusiasm, “Homerun comin’ down the line.”
“Copy first. Got him second?” Garrett’s drawing out his ‘O’s this time. Minnesota dialect, maybe?
A maroon and gray armored truck with Hewitt’s red shield and yellow lettering on the door rolled into the turn lane. McConnell’s adrenaline burned away his fatigue. “Runner turnin’ towards home,” he said.
“Home has the runner in site.”
The code was over the top, their radios encrypted, but some ham radio hobbyist or the police might get lucky. Just another level of security. And denial. He sent the SMS to Mitch’s bogus email account.
“Throwin’ the ball,” announced Garrett, meaning they were releasing the gas and activating the thingamajig. McConnell held his breath at the thought of the compound of isoflurane and nitrous oxide. When the device received its command a fine-mist vaporizer would introduce the gas into the ventilation system and the truck’s forced-air would act as the carrier. Several things could go wrong.
Long moments. He was still holding his breath when the radio crackled “Runner down, goin’ for the tag,” which meant they were hooking up the truck to be towed.
“Shit! Hot dog comin’!” Jamal shouted. “Repeat, hot dog comin’ your way!”
“Fast?” Garrett asked.
“Nope. Looks routine.”
“There’s no patrol route down here at this hour.”
“Want me to knock on his window and tell ’im that?”
“If they don’t turn in we’re good. You got eyeballs on, second? Yeah?” Was it New England?
“Got it,” McConnell replied, spying the pair of oncoming headlights.
They waited. Watched. Hoped. Towed an armored truck full of gassed guards towards a creek.
The headlights turned in about one hundred meters away.
“Coming in at building A,” he reported as the silver Dodge Charger made the turn, REDMOND POLICE in dark blue on the door.
“Is he flippin’ a bitch?” Jamal asked.
“Looks like a drive-through. Disappeared between A and B.”
“We’re close. Can you distract him?” Garrett asked.
“With what?”
“Shit, I dunno mate, use your fuckin’ horn.”
Shit was right.
He pressed his palm on the horn. It made a dull click.
“The horn doesn’t work.”
“Can you pull ’em away?” Garrett asked.
“I’m in a stolen fucking car.”
No one disputed that.
It was Katie that made him do it. Which didn’t make a lot of sense but sense enough. He could always land a job, pay bills but this was real money, for her college, her future. His parental choices suspect of late at least he could provide that. “Finish it,” he said.
“Thatta boy,” Garrett said.
“Big balls, man,” Jamal added.
He told the dog to hold on and bounced the suspension off the entrance into the parking lot. Peeling left he floored it along the chain of buildings, their dark windows reflecting the Maxima with the ghostly glow of monitors here and there.
Redmond’s finest were coming up between buildings, spotted him, tried to reverse but it was too late as McConnell aligned his right headlight with the patrol car’s front tire, braced Geronimo for impact with his arm and slammed into them, glimpsing two furious faces spinning away across the wet asphalt.
He gunned the engine, tires spinning up the exit, opting east, away from the city, away from more police, his best hope to get lost among the suburbs, farms and forest, fully aware that hope had never been an adequate plan.
“You okay, buddy?” He glanced at the dog. Geronimo gave him a look back that said no, he wasn’t okay, but what could he do, he was a dog in the passenger seat.
The car pulled to the right as he checked the rearview. “C’mon, c’mon.” He wanted to see headlights. He also wanted to put as much distance between them and those headlights.
Angry red and blue a
nd an accusatory high beam filled the darkness behind them. He floored it, the motor grunting and growling as the streetlights were replaced by dark trees and even thicker darkness along the wet ribbon of road. There were homes, farmhouses, all dark at this hour. Some appeared to have horses. He could steal a horse…Jesus, that was a stupid idea.
The police Charger ate up their lead with an appetite, growing ever fatter in the mirror.
He flew through a stop sign, glimpsed another sign, PAVED IN 1913, and the pavement abruptly gave way to red brick slick with rain. The road curved sharply right then back left and then sharper right again and he slid along, a hair’s breadth from losing control. A hard left landed them on a narrow track, tires squealing on the brick now kicking up mud. Fighting the pull of the wheel he was certain he couldn’t have picked a worse road but that went both ways. The unsettling rearview showed the cop slowing to make a more civilized turn and giving up a bit of ground. Rocks and earth dinged and dented the undercarriage as he pushed past fifty around tree-crowded curves, branches whipping off paint, brush raking what was left.
He broke into a clearing, was through it, through a barbed-wire fence and into a pasture, sliding as much as driving on the soft ground, willing the speedometer faster, the oil light on, the engine light too as a farmhouse and outbuildings rose up on the left. He flicked on the high beams; pasture and farmhouse might mean cow and horse and sure enough there was a herd of cattle a hundred meters ahead and to the right. As smoke began pouring from the hood he steered into the thickest part of them, pulling his foot off the gas, killing the engine and the lights and coasting to a stop. There was a perturbed mooing scatter. The light on the farmhouse porch came on.
The horse idea not so stupid after all, here on he was on foot. Once more he rued not wearing his Adidas. Running in boots in the dark would probably earn him a broken ankle or a broken neck, not to mention the subsequent prison term.
He reached for the radio but Geronimo already had it in his mouth.
“Good boy,” he said. “Now quiet.”
He flicked the dome light off, slipped his glasses into a pocket and slipped out the door into the rain, reaching underneath the seat for the pistol as he did. Burned clutch and manure filled his nose. The engine crackled and popped and at least two tires hissed as they deflated.
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