The Holland case had made communicating with other agencies even more important. MBLIS was only really concerned with the coastal territory by nature, after all, and the criminal couple could be anywhere by now, though technically they did seem to own land exclusively on the coast, at least under the Holland name.
“What did they have to say, then?” I asked Diane, clearly hoping for some intel on the Hollands but also secretly hoping that they had finally updated her on Lafitte’s ship. I decided to keep that to myself, though, for fear of being scolded for not having my priorities straight on this one.
“Nothing concrete,” Diane said with a slight shake of her head, her mouth set in a thin line. “Though there was something. A TSA agent with a good eye thinks he saw the Hollands boarding an international flight at the Atlanta airport a couple of days ago.”
“The Atlanta airport?” Birn repeated, incredulous. “A couple of days ago? That’s the biggest airport in the world! That’s not just trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s trying to find a thumbtack in an entire barn!”
“A weird analogy, but an apt one,” Diane chuckled. “It’s good to have you back, Lamarr. How are you feeling?”
I realized that Birn must’ve arrived after Diane locked herself in her office earlier that morning.
“I’m alright,” Birn said with a shrug. “A bit bored.”
“Of course you are,” Diane sighed, shaking her head for real this time. “You spend nearly a week half-starved and dehydrated in a tent in the middle of nowhere, and you can’t even spend half that time recovering.”
“Hey, I was gone for more than a week!” Birn cried. “It’s been more than two!”
“The time you spent in the hospital doesn’t count,” she said dryly, arching an eyebrow at him. “Anyway, you’re on desk duty for now. So is Muñoz when she gets back this afternoon.”
“Oh, come on, really?” Birn complained. “You’re not going to send us to Atlanta?”
“Atlanta isn’t anywhere near the ocean,” Diane pointed out. “And you said yourself that it would be a difficult task trying to glean much of anything from that TSA agent’s tip. It’s not for nothing that this is the busiest airport in the world we’re talking about here.”
“We’re not going to do nothing, though,” I said, gawking at this. “There has to be something we can do.”
“A trip to Atlanta won’t do me in. I swear to God,” Birn said, holding his hands up in the air in protest.
“If we need anyone to go anywhere, it will be Holm and Marston for the time being,” Diane said, and her tone was final. “As for Atlanta, the FBI already has people on the way.”
“Just on the way?” I asked, thinking that this just kept getting worse. “It’s been two days already!”
“Yes, but they just got the tip themselves,” Diane said darkly. “My contact called me the second he was told. So, we are working together at least. They’re not hanging us out to dry.”
“But someone else is hanging us out to dry if the tip just came in,” Birn pointed out, and I nodded in agreement.
“It shouldn’t take that long, should it?” I asked. “Usually, tips come in straight to us without going through too many channels.”
“Yes, but that’s us,” Diane emphasized, crossing her arms and sighing as she leaned back against one of the desks sitting between mine and Birn’s. “We’re a smaller agency, and our tips are more regional and have fewer rungs to go through in the process. The FBI is a whole different animal, I’m afraid. Their wider reach comes with a bureaucratic cost.”
“Of course it does,” I scoffed, shaking my head and wringing my hands together. “Should’ve guessed.”
“I’m still not getting how it takes two days for a viable tip to get through the channels,” Birn complained bitterly.
“Best-case scenario, it doesn’t,” Diane sighed. “But when you’re asking everyone in the world to look for two rather generic-looking people, and it’s the FBI telling them to do it—an agency they see all over TV and the movies—everybody’s going to start to see what they want to see. And then it takes too much time to comb through all the tips and get to the credible ones in a sea of nothing.”
Secretly, I wasn’t so sure that Chester and Ashley Holland, or whatever their real names were, were all that generic looking. I’d spent more than my fair share of time staring at the pictures in their files, and they both resembled prunes more than people from all the tanning and fancy treatments they’d clearly used to try to circumvent the aging process. It hadn’t worked, in my humble opinion, leaving them looking kind of dumb as far as I was concerned. But I figured that there were probably enough people who fell into the same cosmetic traps to create a lot of false positives on the tip line.
“I guess that makes sense,” Birn admitted, though he didn’t sound all that happy about it.
“So what makes the FBI think that this tip is credible instead of all the other ones?” I asked. “How many do they get for something like this, a couple hundred?”
“More like thousands,” Diane corrected, and Birn looked like he just might choke at this news.
“Thousands?” he repeated. “In a couple of days? Okay, that can’t be all that efficient.”
“It’s not, but it does cast a wide net, which is helpful here,” Diane explained with a shrug. “And if it was the Hollands, it’ll make it all worth it. A small lead is better than shooting in the dark any day of the week.”
“Fair enough,” Birn relented with a nod.
“So what about the tip?” I pressed again.
“Right, so I think they were able to get some clear-ish security photos of the man, Chester,” Diane explained, her eyes widening with excitement as she got to the good part.
