“Here we go,” Jamil said. His voice was calm but Ryan sensed anundercurrent of anticipation in it.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“I input the car’s image into the system and asked it find any matchesin the area in the days around the murder. This is what it gave me. It’s fromearlier that day.”
He hit “play” and they watched as what looked like the same car frombefore passed slowly through an intersection. Jamil froze the image. It wasn’tgreat quality but the driver certainly looked like the man in the Holt footage.
“Where is this from?” Ryan asked.
“It’s a convenience store about two blocks away from Hartung’s house,”Jamil said. “I wonder if he went there earlier in the day to scout it out.”
“That’s not a crazy theory,” Ryan said, more impressed with Jamil everymoment.
Jamil smiled shyly but said nothing. After a few more seconds ofsearching, another box popped up. It was a video clip from two hours after theinitial one.
“Freeze it!” Ryan shouted, and then added, “Go back a little.”
Jamil scrolled back several frames and stopped on a fairly clear imageof an elderly man. The quality wasn’t good enough to discern many details. Butone jumped out to Ryan.
“He’s got a long scar across his forehead,” he pointed out, reluctantto say the words out loud because of what they meant. “In the exact spot whereGarland Moses slashed the Night Hunter the night they fought. It’s him. There’sno doubt.”
All three men were silent for a second. Trembley recovered first.
“This is awesome,” he said. “I mean, obviously not awesome for thevictims, but great for us. We can bring this to Decker now. We can save HSS.”
“Not so fast,” Ryan warned. “I don’t want any of this leaving this roomyet. News like this could have serious consequences. Decker will want to use itto bolster the unit. Invariably word would leak out and that might tip theNight Hunter off. The last thing we need is for a guy who’s been hiding fordecades to go back underground. The best thing we have working for us is thathe doesn’t know that we know it’s him. We have to find a way to getahead of him somehow.
“I might have an idea for that,” Jamil said, forwarding the footage acouple of seconds to a wider shot of the car. “Look, the license plate isvisible. With a little digital cleanup, I think we can get the whole thing.”
Trembley looked perplexed.
“It’s hard to believe a guy who stayed off the radar this long woulduse his own car to do this,” he said. “That seems awfully sloppy. I realize he’solder but he has to know we have cameras that can grab plate numbers.”
“I’m sure he does,” Ryan said, “which is why I doubt that’s his car. Iwouldn’t be surprised if he bought an old junker like that for cash from aprivate seller. He’d want something that was impossible to trace back to him.”
“And impossible to track in other ways—a vehicle that old wouldn’t haveGPS,” Jamil noted. “But at his age, and if he’s been out of circulation for along time, he might not be aware of some of our other tricks.”
“Like what?” Trembley asked.
“Like that regardless of who the vehicle is registered to, we can trackthe license plate location.”
“Oh yeah,” Trembley said. “I forgot all about that. The database logsplates periodically, right?”
“That’s right,” Ryan confirmed. “We’ll give you a pass since you’vebeen on vacation. And remember, it’s not just periodically. Traffic camerafeeds hold onto that data for months before dumping it. And since both thesemurders took place in the last month, the vehicle data should still beavailable.”
“They will be,” Jamil assured him as he started typing again. “Betterthan that, if we give it enough time, the system should be able to pinpoint patternsof movement. We should be able to determine where this car went most often.That might give us leads on where he’s been holed up.”
“And who he might be targeting next,” Ryan added. “Great work, Jamil.How long do you need?”
“It’s a lot of data but it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
“Excellent,” Ryan said. “I want to focus on locations the car hasfrequented often—at least ten times to start with. That should narrow thesearch a bit when we go out.”
“Wait a second,” Trembley said. “Is that a good idea? I thought thewhole reason Decker brought me in was to be your feet on the ground.”
Ryan smiled broadly.
“Just because I can’t kick open a door or even drive doesn’t mean I can’tcome along for the ride. I’ll keep you company. If we find anything suspicious,we’ll call it in.”
“Maybe we should make sure the captain is cool—” Trembley started tosay.
“Let’s get to it,” Ryan instructed, bulldozing through the detective’sobjection as he headed for the door. “We don’t know how close this guy is tokilling again.”
He hurried out of the room as fast as his recovering legs would allow.In part he wanted to short-circuit any more protest from Trembley. But there wasanother reason.
He needed time alone to think about the two questions that were centralin his mind: Why had the Night Hunter started killing again? And why here, inLos Angeles?
There was actually a third question eating at him, one he wasdeliberately avoiding: Why did the thought of this septuagenarian killer fillhim with a dread that murderers half his age did not? If he was honest withhimself, he knew the answer. It was because the Night Hunter and this versionof Ryan Hernandez—hobbled, weak, uncertain—were equal matches. If they met in adark alley tonight, he wasn’t sure who would come out on top.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Things had deteriorated badly.
Just as Jessie had feared, once the Ferros lawyered up, everyone else didtoo. More dominos fell after that. All the members of the group—the Ferros, theLanders, Steve Crewe, and Theo Aldridge—quickly returned to their suites to packup in time to make the 12:20 ferry.
Unless she was willing to insist that Peters arrest someone, there wasnothing she could do about it. Considering that
