The man said something in what sounded like Arabic.
“Yeah, yeah, you don’t speak English,” Ward said. “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to learn it in prison if I see you on my ass again. Got that?”
He took a step back from the car as Brennan returned. She said the man’s name, Hamza Zarif, when she addressed him and told him that his resident status can be revoked at the discretion of a judge if he is found guilty of stalking. She asked if he understood; if not, he could come to the station and a translator would be found.
He nodded once.
“So you understand me?” Brennan repeated.
He nodded again.
Ward stepped over and told the police chief there was no reason to take it to that level; they’d reached an agreement and it wouldn’t happen again. When Brennan asked if this was the case, the man nodded. She returned the documents and let him go. He drove off, the window rattling comically as he went.
“I believe the technical term for what you did is called ‘escalation,’” the police chief told Ward. She didn’t seem angry but her mind was clearly processing what-comes-next. Ward knew the look. It was a slightly off-target look, with a crinkle around the eyes. It haunted the features of every beat cop who routinely dealt with gang members or ethnic unrest.
“I made the only move I had,” he said. “I met with the director of the Al Huda Center. He tried to bribe me, implied he’d go after Joanne and Megan.”
“Did you think about taking it? The bribe?”
Her directness shouldn’t have surprised him. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I thought about the problems it would solve. But I also thought about the ones it would create.”
“Pretty scary how strange you get when you’re down.”
“It’s unfamiliar territory,” he said.
“I’ve been there,” she confessed. “Well, not exactly. When I have to bust friends for vagrancy I think about how I’d like to buy a beachfront shack and sell clams. Only no one’s made me that offer.” She thought for a moment. “You got someone looking after your girl?”
Ward nodded.
“I’ll send a car up every couple of hours, just so we have a presence there,” Brennan said, thinking aloud.
“Thanks.”
“You need a firearm? We’ve got some throwaways.”
“Probably not a good idea,” he said.
“If you’re saying you might use it, I don’t have a problem with that.”
Ward was beginning to think he was in love. The NYPD came down hard on the practice of carrying an unmarked gun to plant on someone who was shot and killed by accident. He was glad the American West had not been tainted by that kind of delicacy.
“No, I’m good for now,” he said. “Thanks for your help—and the offer.”
“No problem. Stay in touch,” Brennan said as she got back into her car.
Ward turned toward the inn as she drove off, saw that Angie was the only one still standing in the doorway. He had one pair of underwear and, if he took them off now, a pair of socks and a shirt for her to clean. The young woman might suspect she’d been used as bait, especially if she knew whose nose Ward had just tweaked. Her worried expression suggested that she had a good idea what had gone down. What that didn’t tell him was how much she might know.
He resolved to find out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ward walked Angie to a pair of wing chairs that sat catty-cornered on the far side of the lobby.
“What was all that about?” she asked. Anxiety played a little around her smile. Ward didn’t make much of that; he saw a lot of that around Basalt.
“Do you know him?”
“I’ve seen him around,” she replied.
She was probably telling the truth. It didn’t have the slight hesitation of a lie.
“I saw him around too, watching the bank this morning and then following me,” Ward said. “I decided to be safe and call the police chief.”
“It seemed like you knew her,” Angie said. “Chief Brennan.”
“I know her a little bit,” Ward said truthfully. “You heard what happened to Mr. Randolph?”
She nodded.
“I was there right after it happened,” Ward told her. “That’s how I met her.”
“You were there?”
“Yeah. Heard the sirens,” Ward said. “Instinct.”
“That was probably pretty awful.”
Ward nodded. “Is there anybody you know who might do something like that?”
The young woman’s face scrunched thoughtfully. She shook her head.
“What were people saying at work?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? Not even, ‘Hey, did you hear what happened? ’”
“No. But I’m not around the store a lot.” Her face relaxed, but only for a moment. “Do you think something’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s just been this strange vibe today. Mr. Fawaz was kind of short and his wife was quiet. Plus my dad seemed pretty agitated.”
“How so?” Ward was glad she brought it up. He’d been trying to figure out a way to get there.
“He called and told me he needed one of his shirts,” Angie said. “He never does that. Mr. Fawaz suggested that I just bring him all the shirts we had.”
“Why did your father need a shirt?” Ward tried to make it sound conversational rather than interrogatory. He hoped he pulled it off. He hadn’t grilled a lot of Midwestern girls.
“Dad said he was sweating a lot today. That was, like, TMI, and I didn’t ask anything else.”
I’ll bet he was, Ward thought.
“So, am I going to get great service on my clothes?” he asked.
“The Fawazes are real good, yeah.”
“Do you take all your family’s dry cleaning to the shop?”
“We take all our cleaning there, period,” she said. “We get freebies. Part of my compensation.”
“Nice. How often do you do that?”
“Every day,” she replied. “Between my parents and my two young brothers, we go through a lot of laundry.”
And then the detective knew for sure what was happening: something was being transferred via laundry. Gahrah thought Ward had known this earlier, or at least suspected. That was why he had sent the bogus package to the bank.
“Do you have an empty laundry bag in the car?” Ward asked.
She nodded.
“Would you mind getting it? I’ll meet you back here.”
Angie left and Ward hurried to the gift shop. He purchased a pair of denim Basalt Rocks button-down shirts from the rack, along with a couple of T-shirts and also deodorant—which he happened to need. He borrowed scissors to clip the tags from the clothing items then ducked into a recess in the hallway, by the janitorial closet. He put one of the button-down shirts on and crumpled the other and the shirt he was wearing into a fat, wrinkled ball. Then he rubbed the T-shirts under his arms to make sure they had a worn-in smell. He returned to the lobby. Angie was standing there with the bag, suddenly looking very young and very alone. As he stuffed the items in the canvas sack she entered their description into a small handheld device. He followed the young woman to the van as she printed a receipt. He knew the rest of this operation wasn’t going to go well. The trick, he’d learned over the years, was to look at the darkness as temporary, the light inevitable.
“How fast can you get these done?” he asked.
“This afternoon, if you pay for Super Rush.”
“Let’s do that,” he said. “Do you bring your own clothes home on your daily run or after work?”
“At night,” she replied. “I’ve got one last run at five and then I take the van home. That’s my other perk.”
“Do your brothers ever help?” he asked as he knotted the bag. Once again he was striving to make it sound like idle chat.
“How do you mean?”
“By putting away the laundry?”
“Duh! Wh
y would they? They’re boys—”
“So they leave it all to you?” He doubted that but he had to ask.
“No. My mom. She doesn’t mind that part of it.”
So Mrs. Dickson knew too.
Angie was suddenly confused. “Mr. Ward, is something wrong?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“We?”
Ward calmed her with a look. He had learned that on the beat when he would have to talk to a woman whose purse had been snatched or who was the victim of a push-in—shoved into the lobby of her apartment building while she turned the key, and then robbed or worse. Men just got angry, wanted to lash out; women were always struggling to regain their mental footing in the face of something obscenely disorienting.
“I’ll explain in a second, Angie. I need you to answer one more question. Just one. Can you drop my clothes here on the way home?”
“I guess so,” she said. “Mr. Ward, is my dad in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “If he is, I’m on his side and so is Police Chief Brennan. We’re going to help him.”
“Oh, God—”
“Listen to me, Angie—”
“Dad!”
“It’s going to be okay,” Ward told her, “but he’s got to be willing to help us. That’s the only way he can help himself.”
“From what?”
Ward took one of her small hands in his, relatively sure that no one was watching them now. This was the part when he went from being a comforter to being a major league son of a bitch. Back in the city, his accomplices, the ones who wore wires or testified against capos or pimps, were usually deep in the swamp and wanted out. The only mud this girl had on her was stuff splashed by her father.
“Your dad may be involved in something that’s getting away from him,” Ward said. “I want to throw him a lifeline. But for me to be able to do that, it’s important that you stay calm and focused. You can’t tell him what we talked about or even that I asked you to drop off my clothes.”
“Because—?”
“Men like that lunk of a guy I sandbagged, Hamza, are going to be watching him—and you.”
“Jesus.” Breath just seemed to go out of her. It took a moment for Angie to find it again, to get back into the rhythm of breathing.
“Angie, it’ll be okay as long as they think everything’s normal, that it’s business as usual,” Ward assured her. He held her hand more firmly. It had been soft and lifeless but it responded to his touch. “If they believe that, then we can do what you just saw: box them in and take them out.”
“I always wondered—I always felt—” Angie stopped, her voice cracking and eyes tearing. She inhaled and rallied. “I was always afraid that something was happening here. Don’t ask me what—I don’t know. It was just my folks, people at work acting a little different, a little suspicious.”
“That’s what we’re going to fix, me and the police chief and Scott Randolph, and the other folks who care about this town,” Ward assured her.
He gave her hand a final squeeze, sought her eyes, and lifted her face up with his fixed gaze. He smiled and she forced a smile in return.
“You gonna be okay?” he asked.
She nodded then got into the van and wiped her eyes with a tissue. She looked out at him before shutting the door. “I don’t want anything to happen to my mom or dad.”
“That’s the goal,” he said, wishing he could give her a more concrete assurance.
“I’ll do whatever I have to,” she assured him.
“Thanks, but I think we’re good now,” he smiled. “You have my number. Call if you need anything.”
She said she would.
As Ward watched her drive off, he found it endearing that she had not asked why a cop from New York was involved in this. In her mind he was a lawman and that was that. He wondered if that trusting mind-set was a result of the Patriot Act and the whole concept of Homeland Security, a generation growing up with the idea that peacekeeping no longer needed to respect boundaries or jurisdictions or even privacy. It was no wonder: those like himself and the police chief afforded the only protection from greedy, anti-traditional social hyphenates and the blind, accommodating zealotry of political over-correctness. Hopefully, fear and an unraveling of the social order would cause defections from both of those groups—people like his liberal ex-wife and groups pushing for same-sex marriage or socialized medicine while civilization itself was being torn apart by monsters.
Every tribe has an ancient blood feud until the nation is attacked by outsiders, he reflected.
Ward waited as Angie vanished into the foothills. His eyes were on the road, watching the cars. He didn’t see Hamza, though he hadn’t expected to. The Muslims knew her route and could pick up her trail at any time. The clean white van with its black lettering wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. They probably didn’t anticipate Ward making another move now, and would certainly ask her questions when she got back to the dry cleaner. The truth was, he didn’t have another move to make. Not until Angie came to the inn with his laundry and he could get a look at what might be in the Dickson laundry. If he was correct, there was a careful flow to what they were doing. They couldn’t afford to hold off even a day.
He went back inside. The inn rented laptops and he got himself a Dell for two hours to see what he could find out about MRI. He first made sure he knew how to erase his footprints before he started. Then he sat back in the armchair and tucked into the work, hunting and pecking around the keyboard. This might be the only chance he got: it wouldn’t be long before they thought of hacking into the Wi-Fi signal here to find out what he might be researching and who he might be contacting.
That was fine with Ward. It was just like any crime scene. The bad guys had a head start. To head them off, he would have to get his facts, spin them around in his head, and hit the ground running.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Angie Dickson wished she did not have to be alone right now. In particular, she wished that John Ward had stayed with her. The few times she had met him in the past, he was like nothing else in her life. He was—solid was the word that came to mind.
Ward was right. For a while now her father had not been the strong, attentive, happy man she had known growing up. The economic situation had sucked the energy from him, made him seem almost like her grandfather ... old and stiff, even though he still managed a certain robustness in public. For the last few weeks he had been even worse; when he wasn’t anxious or snappy he was just plain depressed. Her mother was flat-out sad, with lines and shadows on her face that had never been there before. She said it was the job, having to go back to work as a travel agent after raising a family, but Angie knew there was more to it than that.
Now John Ward’s suspicions had confirmed it. It was nice of him to care. That made her feel safe and scared at the same time.
Angie’s stomach gurgled and her hands were shaking as she finished her rounds and returned to the dry cleaning shop. She didn’t know how to act normal. She usually just was normal.
Angie tried singing to herself. That wasn’t something she normally did, unless she had her iPod, which she didn’t use during work. Mr. Fawaz didn’t think it was professional, even though he wore a beanie and his wife wore a headscarf, which most people in Basalt thought was weird. None of that mattered now. She had come to the office to drop off the cash payments and dirty laundry before picking up the loads to make her final run. Mr. Ward’s clothes would get rush treatment so she could put it on the van for the final run. Usually, that gave Angie just enough time to go to Papa Vito’s for a Coke and hang-time.
The owner’s wife, Mahnoosh Fawaz, was working behind the counter. Angie transferred the bags from the car. They were collected by Tariq, the Fawazes’ teenage son. Angie reviewed the receipts with Mrs. Fawaz, calling her attention to new clients as well as special orders. She felt her belly turn to liquid when John Ward came up in both categories. She couldn�
��t help but watch Mrs. Fawaz for some kind of reaction but saw none. Maybe she wasn’t in on whatever was going on. Or maybe she was just better at covering it up. These Muslim women were pretty quiet.
“My husband would like to see you in the office,” the woman said when Angie had finished.
“Okay, all right,” the girl replied. She heard her voice, high and fast, and hoped she sounded carefree and not buzzed.
Mrs. Fawaz’s brown eyes seemed a little suspicious as Angie eased around the counter, though the young woman thought that might be her own insecurity talking. She made her way along the half-full racks of shirts, suits, and dresses. Joblessness had cut the demand for clean suits. She didn’t understand how the place made money. At least the overhead was pretty low; she had heard her father talking over dinner about how rents had gone down considerably since 2008.
Yousef Fawaz was seated behind his desk in the small office in back. He was on the phone as she arrived but he motioned her in. He was not smiling—typical for him—but he did not seem upset. That was good. Angie didn’t get called in here often; when she did it was usually for something like a schedule change or a price increase. She wondered if she was going to be fired; she hoped not. She liked having a little money and there were no jobs to be had. A little piece of her wondered what that would be like, being fired. It had never happened to her when she worked at McDonald’s or as a camp counselor. Just thinking about it made her want to cry. Then again, after that afternoon, she was already emotionally rattled.
Fawaz hung up and asked her to sit in the swivel chair that used to be his desk chair before he got one that was better for his back. It creaked loudly and the back gave willingly as she sat, crossed and uncrossed her legs, waited while he made some notes.
“I see you brought in a new customer today,” Fawaz said pleasantly as he continued to write.
She thought for a second, momentarily perplexed. “Oh, right. You mean Mr. Ward? I used to babysit his daughter—”
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