No response.
Her hands balled into fists. “Well?”
“Tantrums never work on me,” he said, unmoved. “But anyway, in answer to your questions, in order of asking, yes, I don’t know, yes, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, no, don’t care, sucks, deep subject.”
She was not amused. “Are you going to help me or not?”
He stood and stretched. He limped around the spacious room. He stopped outside the door to Sylvia’s bedroom and stared as if he had x-ray vision or supersonic hearing. He ran a hand through his hair. He limped some more. He returned to his seat.
He said, “Of course, I’ll help you. But with what? There’s something going on here, and it’s buried deep. I don’t even know what it is, let alone know how to prove it. We turn all this over to an internal investigations unit and they fail, too, and then what? Give me a stroke of genius and I’ll be there. Otherwise, I don’t see any options except deliver Sylvia in the morning.”
She sighed.
He pressed. “Any bright ideas? Preferably something that won’t get us fired? Did I mention I have a large family?”
She said nothing.
He said, “That’s what I thought. You got zilch.”
He was wrong, technically. She had one desperate, last-ditch option. But she didn’t describe it. Maybe she would never need to. Maybe something else would come along.
She went back to pacing. She talked as she walked. “Roscoe said Archie Leach is howling because we left before he debriefed us. He wants vengeance for his brother.”
Gaspar said, “We didn’t kill his brother. So how is Archie Leach our problem?”
“Cooper called you after the fire in the mailbox store.”
“Right.”
“He asked you about Sylvia’s mail. You told him everything. The smashed mailbox theory, forwarded envelopes, the list of box holders, and how you found her mug shot.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t ask to see the list?”
“No.”
“That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“You saw the list just like I did. His name is on it. And so is mine. And yours. He wasn’t even interested?”
Blandly, like he was calming a suicide, Gaspar said, “But I didn’t know all that when I was talking to him. You took the list with you, remember? To the bar? In your pocket?”
“But he had to know, right? So it’s weird that he didn’t ask or deal with it somehow, isn’t it?”
“You’re wearing me out.”
“Isn’t it?”
“We’ve been over this, Sunshine. All we have is the list. Nothing else. If it comes to it, he’ll say he has no idea why his name was on the list, and he’ll say he didn’t have a mailbox at Bernie’s, and we’ll believe him, because we have no idea why our names were on the list either, and we sure didn’t have mailboxes at Bernie’s.”
“Cooper is involved with Sylvia.”
“Sex is not illegal.”
“Sylvia laundered the money and stole it from Harry and killed him.”
“Maybe so. No proof, though. And nothing connecting Cooper to any of that.”
When she didn’t raise anything else, he said, “Can I go to sleep now?”
She patted herself down, checked her gun and her pockets, and walked toward the door.
Stretched out in his chair, eyes closed, Gaspar asked, “Where are you going?”
“To call Finlay.”
He didn’t move so much as an eyelid. But his tone conveyed every catastrophic consequence she’d already argued in her head. “If anybody asks, you’re on your own. I’ve got a family to feed. Did I mention that? Twenty years left. Fit for no other work. Not even fit for this, to be honest. I’m a charity case. You can throw your career out the window, but please don’t add mine to the landfill while you’re at it.”
“Cooper’s not God, you know,” she reminded him, in his own words.
“He’s the God of my family dinner. And yours, too. Whatever special relationship you think you two have, Sunshine, make no mistake. He’ll throw you under the train in a Hot’lanta second and never look back.”
O
She opened the door. Looked back. He hadn’t moved.
“I was wrong about you,” she said. “Zorro, you’re not.”
“Sad but true,” he said, and the door slammed behind her.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Kim got a cab outside the hotel and sharpened her plan on the fly. It was cold, but she barely noticed. She thought through her counter-surveillance options but knew she was unlikely to hide much. Unmonitored transmissions in Washington, D.C., were as scarce as innocent felons. The very airwaves were alive with ears and eyes every moment of every day.
Best case: Cooper was otherwise occupied at that moment. He was covering a private operation solo and off the books. There would be inevitable windows of surveillance black-out. He wasn’t God. He could find the pieces afterward, but he might not be observing in real time.
But he’d anticipate her call to Finlay. He’d be ready to intercept. The problem gnawed at her. She rubbed Finlay’s card inside her pocket. She needed an unpredictable location. And fast. The Redskins’ FedEx Field would work, but there wasn’t enough time to get there and back.
Which was: Verizon Center during tonight’s hockey game.
Twenty-thousand-plus in attendance; most of them using electronic devices. On a pre-paid burner phone, she would be as anonymous as any hay straw in the stack.
The cab ride took eight minutes door-to-door in light traffic. The game was already in progress. She used the media entrance at 6th and G Streets Northwest. She flashed her badge everywhere she needed to. She found the best reception she was likely to get. She put a finger in her opposite ear to mute the screaming crowd. She called the number.
Finlay answered on the fourth ring. Boston accent. Rich baritone.
He said, “How can I help you?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” she said. “We’ve hit a snag.”
“Your partner knows you’re calling?”
“Yes. But he advised me not to.”
“Because you’ve worked your way up the food chain to the killer whale?”
“Correct.”
“And you want me to remove the obstacle in your path. Why would I do that?”
Trading favors. What did Kim have that Finlay wanted? “You tell me.”
“Much has changed since we met. You’re operating under a bright spotlight now.”
But his price might be too steep. “Can you help or not?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“How far you’re willing to go.”
