Falco lifted his head from his paper.
“Who are you?”
“Jack Gannon, the reporter. We met yesterday.” Gannon slid into the booth. “You were going to help me review some security video?”
Falco took a pull from his beer, stuck out his bottom lip, shook his head.
“I don’t know you.”
Gannon recoiled. What was this? He couldn’t be
“I gave you twenty bucks. We made a deal. You were going to help me. You called me last night, you said to meet you at noon.”
“Fuck off and leave me alone, asshole!”
Was this guy on meds? Gannon was at a loss, when he felt a big hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s you and me talk, pal.” The bartender nodded to the bar, taking Gannon out of earshot. Gannon gave him a brief summary, then the bartender said, “You don’t really know Jerry, then?”
“No, what’s his story?”
“A long time ago he was a network-TV news editor. He drove home drunk after a party and killed a little girl. He did time, got beat up in the joint. He’s not all there, see. He’s been in and out of jail ever since. He gets by on a small inheritance.”
“He was supposed to help me with his video work. I need to see it.”
“Buy him a meal.”
“What?”
“After he sees his parole officer, he comes here and cries in his beer. Food usually brings him back, closer to normal.”
About an hour later, Falco’s recollection returned after he ate the clubhouse sandwich Gannon bought him. “Let’s go,” Falco said, still enveloped by despair when, without an apology or explanation, he led Gannon to his apartment.
It was cleaner than Gannon had expected. He was acquainted with the photographs of captured video stills on the walls of the woman at the flower shop across the street. Gannon now noticed inspirational passages of Scripture scrawled on paper taped near the photos, passages about forgiveness, redemption.
Before the windows there were three tripods with cameras aimed at the street. Falco sat at a desk that looked like a TV-editing suite, with small monitors, consoles and electrical equipment.
“I keep a vigil on the neighborhood and send police anything suspicious I see.”
“Yes.” Gannon gave him the time and date.
Falco entered commands on a keyboard and a sharp color-video image with a date graphic appeared on a monitor. It showed the street, the pay phone. Then the activity began moving backward at high speed.
“This will take a moment,” Falco said. “I got this equipment from a friend at Channel 88. It’s older.” Falco turned to Gannon. Seeing him fixated on the photos of the woman, Falco said, “It’s not what you think.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m not a peeper or a voyeur or anything.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“About fifteen years ago, a little girl died because of me.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“It was my fault and I’ll carry that mistake to my grave. Had she lived, she’d be the same age as Florence, the woman across the street in the pictures. It gives me comfort to see how she would be doing in her life, had she lived.”
Gannon just nodded.
“Here we go.” Falco stopped the rewind on the time and date of the last call Gannon had received on that phone from his tipster.
“Jesus.”
The monitor showed a clear image of a man using the pay phone. Falco’s keyboard clicked and the image got larger. The man was white, medium build, brush cut, olive-green T-shirt, jeans.
“That’s your guy, right?”
It had to be him. Gannon double-checked the date and time.
“Yes. Can you make a color print from this still now, then send me a clear electronic version? You have my email address on my card?”
“Sure, for three hundred dollars.”
“No, I wasn’t going that high.”
Falco raised his index finger over the delete key and held it there.
“Okay, okay, three hundred.”
Gannon hurried down the street to the ATM machine, his heart racing as his tipster’s words echoed.
American Centurion’s depot was on Rockaway Boulevard among the acres of storage operations, customs brokers and freight-forwarding agencies clustered around Kennedy.
It was situated in a warehouse equipped with cameras, loading bays secured with razor wire, motion sensors and a round-the-clock K-9 security team.
At 6:30 a.m., Agent Morrow and Detective Al Dimarco met with other investigators there to continue their work.
Moe Malloy, company founder and CEO, was on the loading floor flipping through pages of his clipboard amid the grind of diesel engines. Malloy was resuming operations today. But detectives and agents were stopping the trucks before they moved out, requesting guards expose their wrists for inspection, then showing a photo or something to the crews.
“What’s going on?” Malloy asked Morrow and Dimarco in the gruff, cement-mixer voice he was known for.
Morrow opened a folder and showed Malloy the cobra tattoo.
“Does this look familiar to you?”
Stress lines cut deep into Malloy’s craggy face, the manifestation of the strain of three murdered employees, a six-million-dollar loss, a maelstrom of insurance claims and the stench of police suspicion that someone inside his company was responsible. He hadn’t slept since the attack.
“No. It’s not familiar to me. Should it be?”
“It could be a factor,” Dimarco said. “Have another look. It’s a tattoo.”
“Everybody and their mother has a tattoo.” Malloy reexamined it and shook his head. It was not familiar to him or to his crews on duty that morning.
The three men went to Malloy’s second-floor office. He shut the door, offered Morrow and Dimarco fresh coffee while they glimpsed 747s lifting off, near enough to rattle windows.
The rattling propelled Morrow back to Beth, shaking in his arms after he’d told her about his condition. How she held on to him through the night; how Hailey sobbed when they broke the news to her the next day.
