Unsolved

by James Patterson

  A storage facility. An acre of concrete. A series of large sheds with wide white doors. Large enough to park a tractor or a boat in.

  Or hide a person in.

  Books pulls the car over again, this time along the side of the county road. He picks up the phone and dials it. “Elizabeth,” he says, “I need agents right now.”

  99

  WITHIN THE hour, federal agents have swarmed the storage facility and are searching around the perimeter. They’re wearing flak jackets, their weapons drawn. For all we know, Wagner is inside one of those locked storage sheds. It would be odd, but everything about this case is odd, and nobody’s taking any chances.

  The storage site is not manned by any employees. That would have helped. Apparently, this is the kind of place that lies dormant most of the time and doesn’t require much daily upkeep.

  Back at the Hoover Building, agents are trying to contact the owner of the facility to find out who rented these sheds and how to get them open. Arguably, we need a search warrant for this, so Books is working with a lawyer at Justice on yet another warrant application.

  Books kills his phone and looks out over the sea of agents. “If he’s here, he’s done,” he says. “He’s not getting away. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “He’s not here,” I say. “I don’t see him pinning himself down that way.”

  Books shrugs. We just don’t know yet. We can’t even be sure that Wagner came here.

  “This will take a while,” I say. “Let’s make our next stop. We can come back.”

  We get in his car and head to our next destination. I drive so Books can keep in touch by phone with Justice and check on the attempt to get inside those storage sheds.

  While he talks, I try to sort through everything we’ve learned today. It all adds up to…weird. All that cash. The Taser under his bed. The Garfield the Cat watch in his trash…

  I see the sign up on my right, a polished slab of granite that reads A NEW DAY: REHABILITATIVE AND PHYSICAL THERAPY.

  Which matches the name on a business card we found in Wagner’s home this morning.

  Books shows his badge at the front desk to an elderly man, bald with a ruddy complexion. It’s always something to see the look on a person’s face when he hears an agent say, “FBI.”

  “Lieutenant Wagner,” says the man in answer to Books’s question. “I haven’t seen him today.” The man starts leafing through the daily sign-in sheets. “He’s usually here early on Thursday mornings.”

  “You know him?” Books asks. “You’d recognize him?”

  “Oh, sure, everyone knows Lew. He’s quite a character.”

  “He’s usually here on Thursdays?”

  The man hums to himself. “I wanna say Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday? He’s outpatient. He comes for PT. No,” he says, looking up from the pages, “he’s not here today.”

  It’s what we figured. It wouldn’t be much of an escape from the authorities if he’d stopped in for his physical-therapy session first.

  “You said Wednesday was one of his days,” I say. “So was he here yesterday?”

  “Well, now, I think I saw him yesterday. Let me see.” He flips back and sorts through some pages. “Yes, he was. Signed in at eight forty-seven a.m.”

  “Is his physical therapist here?” Books asks.

  “That I don’t know. I don’t know who works with who.”

  Books nods and smiles. “Would you do me a favor and call your administrator or whoever runs this place?”

  “Yes, sir.” He picks up his landline phone and punches a button.

  Just then, my phone rings. Officer Ciomek from Chicago. “Natalie,” I say into the phone.

  I hear her saying something, but it’s garbled. And then the connection fails.

  I call her back, or try to, but the call won’t go through.

  “I can’t get a signal in here,” I tell Books. I walk outside into the climbing heat, the sun high overhead, and call her again.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Call dropped. You got something for me?”

  “Got some vid for you, girl. From the Friday before the bombing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I have POD footage capturing a Dodge Caravan—the same Dodge Caravan—driving past the payday-loan store three different times between three twelve p.m. and three twenty-eight p.m. that Friday. That would be three hours before Mayday disappeared from his spot.”

  Right. In the store video from the car wash north of the bombing site, we saw the homeless guy, Mayday, leave his spot across the street from the payday-loan store at 6:15 p.m. the Friday before the bombing. That, we think, is when Darwin—Wagner—paid him off for that spot. Now we have Wagner in Chicago three hours earlier.

  “He drove by the store three times in, what, sixteen minutes?”

  “He was casing it.”

  “And it was Wagner’s plates?”

  “Can’t get a license plate. Our POD cameras aren’t that focused.”

  “Did you get a shot of him driving?”

  “Nope. You know how our PODs work, right? The cameras rotate every few seconds. We just get a little video clip, then the camera turns away and picks up a different angle. It gives you a freakin’ headache going through them.”

  Inside the clinic, Books is talking to some woman, probably the one who runs this place.

  “Natalie,” I say, “are you sure it’s the same Dodge Caravan?”

  “They all look like the same van to me. And what are the odds that three different Dodge Caravans were cruising around that spot at that time?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know enough about cars. I thank her and end the call just as the phone beeps with the arrival of the video clips.

  I pull them up one at a time. Each one, grainy, black-and-white, shows a four- or five-second clip of a Dodge Caravan proceeding southbound on Broadway in Chicago; the time stamp in the corner of the screen shows the various times between 3:12 p.m. and 3:28 p.m. that Friday, as Natalie said. The angle is different than the one we saw in the side-profile, ground-level surveillance footage from the pawnshop in New Orleans. This one is from a police observation device mounted on a traffic light on Broadway and aimed downward; it shows the rear, passenger side, and roof of the van. Looks like the same van all three times to me too.

  I head back inside to where Books and the facility’s head administrator are talking. “Emmy Dockery, this is Louise Hall,” Books says. We shake hands.

  “Oh, here he is,” the administrator says, looking down the hallway. A middle-aged man with a buzz cut approaches us; he’s wearing a white T-shirt, sweatpants, and running shoes.

  “This is Tom Miller, his physical therapist,” she says.

  Tom nods to his boss. “You need me, Louise?”

  “Tom, these people are from the FBI.”

  “The F—” Tom Miller looks at Books and me with an expression that’s a combination of startled and curious, a typical reaction. “Michelle called you?”

  Books says, “Michelle who?”

  “Michelle Fontaine,” he says. “One of the other PTs.”

  “Why would Michelle Fontaine have called us?”

  Miller draws back. “I’m confused. Is this about…Lieutenant Wagner?”

  Books and I look at each other. “As a matter of fact, it is,” says Books.

  “Wow.” Tom Miller puts his hands on his head. “This is real.”

  “We’re going to need to talk to you right now,” says Books. “Somewhere private?”

  “Sure, yeah, of course.”

  “Is this Michelle person here?”

  “No, she didn’t come to work today,” Louise says. “She sent an e-mail last night saying she quit.”

  100

  TOM MILLER leads us down a long hallway. We pass patients of various ages and shapes and sizes moving with the assistance of wheelchairs, canes, crutches, or walkers. Every one of them says hello to Tom, and Tom’s ready with a cheery response: Hey, Claire, you got some sun
! You see those Nationals last night, Mr. Hoyt? Shelvin, you look like a movie star today!

  I couldn’t be a physical therapist. I don’t have the patience or the rah-rah disposition.

  At the end of the hallway is a stairwell that goes down to the basement—the exercise rooms, Miller tells us—and up to the second floor, where we head. “Second floor’s being remodeled,” he says as we climb the stairs. “But they’re finishing one room for us to use as our conference room. You can’t get reception on the main floor or in the basement. Cell phones are totally useless. Second floor, they work. Here.” We turn from the stairwell into another long hallway, the walls unpainted, the floor partially carpeted, some ladders and drop cloths and construction equipment lying around. The first door on the left has a white sign taped to it that says CONFERENCE.

  In the center of the room, there’s a nice oak table surrounded by assorted chairs, and in one corner, there’s a television and a DVD player. But the rest of the room is a work in progress. Half of one wall is painted a light purple, the rest unpainted with tape along the edges; cans of paint and drop cloths and roller pans are everywhere, and there’s a twenty-four-pack of bottled water on the floor with the plastic sheath ripped open. The windows have no blinds, and the afternoon sun is blasting through. I start sweating the moment I enter the room.

  “No AC yet, sorry,” he says.

  “That’s no problem, Mr. Miller,” says Books.

  I nod toward the pack of water bottles in the corner. “You think anyone would mind if I stole one?”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.” Miller lifts a bottle through the ripped sheath of plastic and puts it on the table in front of me.

  Books says, “So what can you tell us about Lieutenant Wagner?”

  He gives us what background he can—Army Ranger, injured in Iraq, came to the clinic less than a year ago—but I already know most of it. “He has an incomplete SCI at T nine,” he says, which he translates for us as a spinal-cord injury that allows some movement in the legs. “He can walk a little with a walker. He’s made good progress.”

  “Tell me about him personally,” says Books.

  Miller says, “Oh, he’s kinda what you’d expect of a war veteran. He’s a crusty old guy. Very opinionated. He goes around the country and talks about how people are too dependent on government. He preaches to a lot of the folks around here. A lot of them look up to him.”

  “Do you?” Books asks.

  “Oh, well—you get all sorts in PT. If you’re my patient, chances are something bad happened to you. Or you’re old and losing functions. Some people handle that better than others. But Lew’s okay.”

  “So tell me about Michelle…Fontaine?”

  “Michelle started just a few weeks ago,” says Miller. “She’s great. But she didn’t get along with Lew. He’d say things that were pretty, uh, insensitive. They clashed a lot.”

  Books nods, stays silent.

  “So,” says Tom, heaving a sigh. “He goes to Chicago one weekend, y’know, to do one of those speeches. And that’s the same weekend as that bombing there. So Lew makes a comment like ‘A bunch of dead homeless people is a good start.’ And Michelle, she kinda flips out. They argued about it, more than once. She asked him yesterday if he had an alibi for the Chicago bombing.” He looks at us for a reaction. “Which I’m thinking…must be why you guys are here?”

  Books says, “What did Wagner say when she asked him about the alibi?”

  “Well, she didn’t really wait for an answer. She just stormed out. She wasn’t serious. But Lew—Lew took it pretty seriously. He asked me if I thought she might turn him in.”

  “He felt threatened by Michelle.”

  “Sure seemed like it. He definitely wasn’t happy.”

  Books mulls that over for a moment. So do I.

  “And then Michelle quit yesterday?” I ask. “Just a few weeks after she started?”

  “Yeah. She sent an e-mail last night, apparently,” says Miller. “Louise showed it to me. She said it wasn’t a good fit for her and she was sorry, but she was leaving, effective immediately. She was leaving Virginia, actually. Moving back home or something.”

  “Where’s home?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Never got to know her all that well. Nice lady, though.”

  “She said in her e-mail it wasn’t a good fit,” Books says. “You think she quit because of Lieutenant Wagner?”

  Miller shrugs. “I mean, probably. But you’d have to ask her.”

  I’d love to ask her. But she isn’t here. She seems to have vamoosed.

  At exactly the same time as Lieutenant Martin Wagner.

  101

  BOOKS AND I look at each other, each with questions about Michelle Fontaine, but Books’s phone buzzes before he can speak.

  “Excuse me,” Books says. He gets up and leaves the room.

  A break in the action. Miller drums his fingers on the desk. “So how real is this?” he asks. “Are you sure about Lew? I mean, he’s rough around the edges, but…”

  “Tell me more about Michelle,” I say, avoiding the question.

  “Not much to tell,” says Miller. “I know she’d worked as a therapist before. She said that. But she didn’t say where. She was kind of private.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  “Describe her? Well, she’s tall, maybe a little shorter than me, but tall for a woman. She’s—I wouldn’t call her heavyset but…not petite. Lew asked her if she played basketball. I think she was insulted.”

  I nod, thinking all this through. Trying to put together so many things that don’t make sense. The cash…the Taser…the Garfield watch…

  “Why do you ask?” Tom asks. “Michelle’s a great person.”

  “Tell me something,” I say, avoiding another one of his questions. “Did Wagner ever talk about money?”

  “Money?” He shrugs. “Not really.”

  “About banks, maybe? Do you know why he would have kept large sums of money at his house?”

  “Like under his mattress or something?” A humorless smirk plays on his lips. “Kind of a paranoid, antigovernment thing to do, I guess. But no, I don’t know about that.”

  Books pops back in. “Emmy, can I grab you a second?”

  I join him in the hallway. “What’s going on?”

  He’s holding his phone. “I totally forgot. I have a shipment coming today at two.”

  “A shipment of books?”

  “Yeah, for that other job I have, where I own a bookstore? The one I suck at, apparently.”

  You don’t suck at running a bookstore, I want to tell him. You just don’t love it like you love being an agent. “Is Petty there?” I ask. “It’s Thursday afternoon.”

  Monday through Thursday, Books said, he comes in like clockwork in the afternoon, stays the night.

  Then again, Sergeant Petty wasn’t there last night—Wednesday night—so who knows how reliable his schedule really is?

  “If he’s there,” says Books, “he’s not answering the door while they pound on it from the alley. He probably doesn’t think he should, with the store being closed.”

  “And you can’t call him?”

  “It’s not like he has a cell phone, Em. He’s a homeless guy.”

  Right. I guess that makes sense. “So go, Books,” I say. “Go take care of it. You can be there in half an hour, accept the shipment, and come back. Barely more than an hour. It might take them that long just to open the storage sheds. It’s not like Wagner’s here anymore. You can spare an hour.”

  He looks up at the ceiling and groans.

  “I suppose you’re right. Okay,” says Books, “be right back. Call me if anything—anything—comes up.”

  He leans in and gives me a quick kiss, then draws back and realizes what he did. “Oh, I—I wasn’t thinking—”

  “It’s okay, just—go,” I say, turning so he won’t see me blush. But he’s already bounding down the stairs.

  And then my phone buzzes. It’s
Elizabeth Ashland.

  “The owner of Xtra Storage is here,” she says. “He has a list of the people who rent the storage sheds. Wagner’s not on the list.”

  “He probably used a fake name. He’s careful about everything else.”

  “So let me read you the list, Emmy. Maybe you’ll recognize somebody.”

  She goes through the list of people who’ve rented out these storage sheds. Cunningham, Morris. Cole, Nathan. McDaniel, Steven. Spielman, Ellen—

  “Wait,” I say. McDaniel, Steven. McDaniel—“Steven McDaniel!” I shout. “Let me check something, Elizabeth. Hang on a second.” I scroll through the notes folder on my phone.

  There. There it is!

  “Steven McDaniel,” I tell Elizabeth, “was one of the Scottsdale victims. One of the senior citizens he killed there.”

  “Okay, hang on a minute,” she says. I hear her asking someone, “Why is there an asterisk by his name?”

  A man responds but I can’t make out the words. Then Elizabeth is talking to me again. “Steven McDaniel rented out this locker last December,” she says. “He paid in advance for three years. He used a credit card over the phone.”

  “That’s it!” I say. “Wagner must have purchased it with McDaniel’s credit card after he killed him in Arizona.”

  “Okay, Emmy, great work. We’re going to open that shed now.”

  I’m about to say, Hold on, give me a few minutes and I can be there. But then I realize two things. First, I’m not an agent, so I probably don’t have the right to insist. And second, and more important, with Books off to his store in Alexandria to receive a shipment of new novels, I’m stranded here at the clinic.

  “You want me to patch you in?” Elizabeth asks me.

  “I—can you—yes, yes!”

  “I’ll put you on FaceTime,” she says. “I’ll call you back in ten.”

  I hang up and walk back into the conference room, where Tom Miller has remained in his seat. “Everything okay?” he says. “I heard some shouting.”

  “Yeah, everything’s fine. Look, I’m going to need this room. Alone. Is that okay?”

  “Sure. Actually, I have a patient in a few minutes, so I’ll be in the basement.”