you saw burglarized belonged to a suspect. We are not interested in prosecuting the boys who broke into the car, but we need to speak to them. You were lying just then, Mr. Adkins. I saw it in your eyes. The boys came from this park.'
'No, I-'
'Let me finish. Yes, you were lying to us. But we're going to give you another chance. You can tell us the truth now or we'll go back and get more agents and police and we'll go through this dump you call a trailer park like an army laying siege. You think we'll find any stolen property in those tin cans? You think we might run across some people wanted on warrant? How about some illegals? What about safety code violations? We passed one back there, I saw the extension cord going out the door into the shed. They've got somebody living in there, don't they? And I bet you and your employer charge extra for that. Or maybe just you do. What's your employer going to say when he finds out? What's he going to say when the receivables go down because the people who are supposed to be paying you rent cannot because they've been deported or they're in lock-up on warrant holds for not paying child support? What about you, Mr. Ad-kins? You want me to run the serial number off that television on the computer?'
'The TV's mine. Bought it fair and square. Know what you are, FBI lady? Fucking Bitch Investigator.'
Rachel ignored the comment, though I thought Thompson turned away to hide a smile.
'Fair and square from who?'
'Never mind. It was those Tyrell brothers, okay? They're the ones what robbed that car. Now if they come in here and beat the shit outta me, I'm suing you. Got that?'
With directions from Adkins we arrived at a trailer four units in from the main entrance. Word had spread that the law was in the park. There were more people on stoops and sitting on the outdoor couches. When we got to Number 14, the Tyrell brothers were waiting for us.
They were sitting on an old glider beneath a blue canvas awning extending from the side of a double-wide trailer. Next to the door of the trailer were a washer and dryer set beneath a blue canvas cover to keep the rain off. The two brothers were teenagers, maybe a year apart and of mixed race, black and white. Rachel stepped to the edge of the shade provided by the awning. Thompson took a spot about five feet to her left.
'Guys,' Rachel said and got no response. 'Your mother home?'
'Nah, she not, Officer,' the older one said.
He looked at the brother with slow eyes. The brother started rocking the glider back and forth with his leg.
'You know,' Rachel said, 'we know you're smart. We don't want any trouble with you. Don't want to give you any trouble. We promised Mr. Adkins that when we went in there to ask where your trailer was.'
'Adkins, shit,' the younger one said.
'We're here about the car that was parked out on the road last week.'
'Didn't see it.'
'No, we didn't see it.'
Rachel walked over close to the older one and bent down to talk directly into his ear.
'Come on now,' she said softly. 'This is one of those times your mother told you about. Think now. Use your head. Remember what she told you. You don't want trouble for her or for yourselves. You want us to go away and leave you alone. And there's only one way we're going to do that.'
When Rachel walked into the squad room at the field office, she carried the plastic bag like a trophy. She set it down on Matuzak's desk and a handful of agents gathered around to look. Backus came in and looked down at it as if he were looking at the Holy Grail. Then he looked up at Rachel with excitement plain in his eyes.
'Grayson checked with the PD,' he said. 'No record of any break-in reported at that spot. Not on that day, not on that week. You'd think a legal citizen who gets his car broken into would make a report.'
Rachel nodded.
'You'd think.'
Backus nodded to Matuzak, who picked the evidence bag up off the table.
'You know what to do?'
'Yes.'
'Bring us back some luck. We need it.'
What the bag contained was a car stereo stolen from a late-model Ford Mustang, white or yellow depending on which of the Tyrell brothers had better eyesight in the dark.
It was all we got from them but the feeling, the hope, was that it was enough. Rachel and Thompson had interviewed them separately and then switched sides and interviewed them again, but the radio was all the Tyrell brothers could give. They said they never saw the driver who left the Mustang at the curb in front of Sunshine Acres and they took nothing but the stereo in a quick smash-and-grab. They never bothered to open the trunk. They never looked at the plate to see if the car was even registered in Arizona.
While Rachel spent the rest of the afternoon doing paperwork and preparing an addendum on the car to be transmitted to all field offices, Matuzak fed the serial number of the stereo to the Automotive ID unit at Washington, D.C., headquarters, then gave the stereo itself to a lab tech for processing. Thompson had taken prints of the Tyrell brothers for elimination purposes.
The lab got no usable prints off the stereo other than those left by the Tyrells. But the serial number was not a dead end. It came back to a 1994 pale yellow Mustang registered to Hertz Corporation. Matuzak and Mize then headed to Sky Harbor International to continue tracing the car.
The mood of the agents in the field office was upbeat. Rachel had delivered. There was no guarantee that the Mustang had been driven by the Poet. But the time of its being parked outside Sunshine Acres matched the time period in which Orsulak had been killed. And there was the fact that the break-in by the brothers had never been reported to the police. It added up to a viable lead and, more so, it gave them a little more knowledge about how the Poet operated. It was an important gain. They felt like I felt. That the Poet was an enigma, a phantom somewhere out there in the darkness. Coming up with a lead like the car stereo seemed to make the possibility of catching him more believable. We were closer and we were coming.
For most of the afternoon I stayed out of the way and simply watched Rachel work. I was fascinated by her skill, amazed at how she had come up with the stereo and how she had talked to Adkins and the Tyrells. At one point in the office she noticed my gaze and asked what I was doing.
'Nothing, just watching.'
'You like watching me?'
'You are good at what you do. It's always interesting to watch somebody like that.'
'Thank you. I just got lucky.'
'I have a feeling you get lucky a lot.'
'I think in this business you make your own luck.'
At the end of the day, after Backus had picked up and read a copy of the alert she had transmitted, I watched his eyes narrow into two black marbles.
'I wonder if that choice of car was intentional?' he asked. 'A pale yellow Mustang.'
'Why's that?' I asked.
I saw Rachel nodding. She knew the answer.
'The Bible,' Backus said. 'Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.'
'And Hell followed with him,' Rachel finished.
We made love again Sunday night and she seemed even more giving and needing of the intimacy. In the end, if either of us was holding back, it was me. While I wanted nothing more in the world at that moment than to surrender to the feelings I had for her, a low whisper in the back of my mind found just enough volume to question her motives. Perhaps it was a testament to my own precarious self-confidence, but I couldn't help but listen to the voice when it suggested that perhaps her aim was just as much to hurt her ex-husband as to please me and herself. The thought made me feel guilty and insincere.
When we held each other afterward, she whispered that this time she was going to stay until dawn.
31
