“They think?” Birn repeated, sounding more than a little skeptical of this. “What’s that supposed to mean.”
“Well… that’s what I wasn’t so happy about,” Diane sighed, averting her eyes from ours. “There’s also a possibility that it’s just, well, a smudge.”
“A smudge?” I repeated, gaping at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You can’t be serious,” Birn echoed.
“What can I say? These things take time,” Diane said, throwing her arms up in the air in a helpless expression. “Time that I worry we won’t have. We don’t exactly know what these people are planning.”
This was true enough, as well. Sure, we hoped that the Hollands were just fleeing the scene of the crime in the Keys, in which case the law would no doubt catch up with them sooner or later, even if it did take some time to distinguish between birthmarks and smudges, or whatever. But the couple’s associates down under had more than hinted at a much broader conspiracy surrounding Chester and Ashley.
We’d interviewed these associates, to be sure, as had the police in the Keys. A few Naval officers from the base on Key West even joined in on the interrogations. And an FBI agent flew down from Virginia to observe since it was technically still an MBLIS case. But the Hollands had covered their tracks just as well with their criminal associates as they had with their financial assets, and none of the leads that the lowly foot soldiers of the Holland drug empire provided us with panned out in the end.
“So I’m still trying to work out how exactly these people are able to mix up a birthmark or a sunspot or whatever with a smudge?” Birn asked, narrowing his eyes at Diane. “A smudge on the guy or on the camera?”
“Way to miss the forest for the trees, Birn,” I chuckled but turned to Diane for an answer since I was interested in what she had to say, anyway.
“I’m not sure,” she said, shaking her head again. “The camera, I think. The picture’s pretty blurry, though better than the other ones in the file. But Ethan’s right. It’s beside the point. Either it’s him, or it isn’t, and we’re going to have to figure out which.”
“Nothing on the wife?” I asked.
“There is a woman with him of the same general shape, size, and age as Ashley Holland,” Diane said. “But she’s wearing this big floppy sunhat, and the cameras only got her from behind, anyway. Couldn’t even clock a hair color when I looked at the footage.”
“That tracks,” I sighed. “So what’s the next step? There’s no way they’re anywhere near Atlanta by now, even if it was them. It’s been two days. Unless their stop was in Atlanta, that is….”
“That’s one question, but we’re pretty sure they didn’t leave into the city,” Diane said in a confident tone. “We can’t see their faces well, but we can see their movements. Or at least a portion of them. They were going through security to get into the airport at the time, so if they’re still in Georgia, it’s because they faked us out intentionally. Which I suppose isn’t technically out of the question considering who we’re dealing with…”
Her voice trailed off as she considered this possibility for a brief moment, but I shook my head.
“Doing that would just give the security cameras more opportunities to catch them,” I pointed out. “It wouldn’t make much sense on their end. So they were probably headed somewhere else. I’m guessing there’s only the one shot, and there’s no footage of them as they’re boarding or even heading to a gate?”
“No, though there are people still reviewing all the footage from that day to make sure,” Diane said with a slight shake of her head. “They’ve already been through it all once already, though. They may have missed something considering it is a big airport. But we can’t count on it.”
“They must’ve been in Georgia, then,” Birn said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with the palm of his large hand. “They went through security, so they started their travels there. Did they own property in Georgia? I don’t remember seeing anything about that in their file.”
As if on cue, I pulled the thick Holland file out of my bag.
“I thought I told you to stop taking that out of the office,” Diane said sternly, giving me a pointed look.
“Right, sorry,” I said dismissively, knowing that she didn’t really care as long as I got results. And I wasn’t exactly one to misplace important items. The ‘don’t take the files out of the office’ rule was mostly for Holm, anyway, ever since he spilled coffee on an important case file a while back.
“So?” Diane asked with a sigh of resignation, turning her attention to the file, as well.
“No, it doesn’t look like they own any property in Georgia, at least not under the Holland name,” I said, flipping the file to a map of the eastern coast of the United States peppered in small yellow dots to indicate where the Hollands’ real estate empire extended. “Nothing in the surrounding states that would use the Atlanta airport as a launching off point, either. Most of their property—no, actually all of it—is in coastal zip codes.”
“Atlanta is mostly a layover airport,” Birn noted with a shrug. “That narrows down the pool of visitors they could be if they started their trip there.”
“That’s a good point,” Diane said, pointing at him and biting her lower lip. “I’ll make sure the people reviewing the other footage from that day keep that in mind. It’ll help them figure out what tapes to focus on and which ones to just give a cursory glance.”
“Alright, then, so
