“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll spare you the colorful verbiage. Bottom line, the caller threatened to take me down by exposing my past to the media unless I backed off on the Gamble-Lovette thing.”
“And you said?” I kept my voice neutral to hide my skepticism.
“Nothing. I hung up.”
“Did you trace the number?”
“The call was placed on a throwaway phone.”
“Your explanation?”
“The body in the landfill. The story in the paper.”
Galimore’s eyes again swept the restaurant.
“Someone out there is getting very, very nervous.”
“WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE?”
“I did some checking. Fries was in the wind for a while, reappeared about five years back, and now lives outside of Locust. He’s in his eighties, probably senile.”
Offended by Galimore’s broad-brush dismissal of the elderly, I snatched up the bill. He didn’t fight me.
“You intend to question him?” I asked curtly.
“Can’t hurt.”
While digging for my wallet, I spotted the page of code I’d torn from Slidell’s spiral. I withdrew both.
When Ellen left with my credit card, I unfolded and read Rinaldi’s notations.
“This mean anything to you?” I rotated the paper.
“What is it?”
“It’s from Rinaldi’s notes on the Gamble-Lovette investigation.”
Galimore looked at me. “Rinaldi was a stand-up guy,” he said.
“Yes.”
The emerald eyes held mine a very long moment. When they finally dropped to the paper, my cheeks were burning.
“Wi-Fr. That’s probably Winge-Fries. Rinaldi was curious about the contradiction between their statements.”
I felt like an idiot. I should have seen that, but then I’d just learned of Fries.
“OTP. On-time performance?”
“Seriously?”
“Onetime programmable? You know, like with some electronic devices.”
“Onetime password? Maybe the rest is a password for something.”
“Could be.” Galimore slid the paper to my side of the table. “The rest, I’ve no idea. Unless FU stands for the obvious.”
My eyes were still rolling when Ellen returned. I signed the check, collected my card, and stood.
Galimore followed me out to the parking lot.
“You’ll let me know what Fries says?” I asked in parting.
“Shouldn’t this go two ways?” Slipping on aviator shades, though the day was cloudy. “You must have something on that John Doe by now.”
Oh yeah. The ricin. The confiscation and destruction of the body. The Rosphalt. No way I could share that information.
“I’ll talk to Dr. Larabee,” I said.
“I’m good at this, you know.” The aviators were fixed on my face. “I was a detective for ten years.”
I was weighing responses when my iPhone overrode the traffic sounds coming from East Boulevard.
Turning my back to Galimore, I moved a few paces off and clicked on.
“Yo.” Slidell was, as usual, chewing something. “This will be quick. Got two vics capped, another bleeding bad, probably not gonna make it. Looks like the gang boys are unhappy with each other.”
“I’m listening.” Sensing Galimore’s interest, I kept my response vague.
“Owen Poteat.” I waited while Slidell repositioned the foodstuff from his left to his right molars. “Born 1948, Faribault, Minnesota. Married, two daughters. Sold irrigation systems. Canned in ’ninety-five. Two years later the wife divorced him and moved the kids to St. Paul. Dead in 2007.”
“Why was Poteat at the airport?”
