we might be wasting our time.”
“No,” Orlando said. “We’re not.” She glanced down the list of names. “Look, you’re right. Most of these people probably are working. But this one…” Her finger stopped two thirds of the way down the list. “Alex Berkeley.”
“What about him?”
“He works with a partner most of the time. Tom Benson. You know him, right?”
“Sure. I’ve worked with both of them.”
“I talked to Tom. He said Alex had been hired on something that was supposed to last a week, tops, a surveillance thing that apparently didn’t need both of them. He was supposed to be back a few days ago, but Tom hasn’t heard from him. He’s getting a bit annoyed because they have something scheduled for early next week.”
“His project probably got extended.”
“Probably,” she admitted. “But you’d think Alex would have let Tom know.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said, unwilling to make the full leap just yet.
Orlando circled Berkeley’s name and studied the list again.
“Hold on,” she said. “I have an idea.”
She pushed back from the dining table and went into the kitchen. Drawers and cabinets began opening and closing.
“Where do you keep your Post-its?” she called out a moment later.
“Used to be some in the drawer by the sink,” he told her.
“Well, they’re not here now.”
“Try the pantry.”
As her steps crossed the kitchen, the front door opened and Daeng walked in, carrying several bags.
“Who’s hungry?” he said.
Quinn hadn’t even thought about eating, but the intensifying aroma that preceded Daeng into the dining room was hard to resist.
“I’ve got two spicy chicken
“I thought you were getting Thai?” Quinn said.
“I was, but I passed by a couple of those food trucks and wanted to check them out. One of them was Vietnamese food and looked too good to pass up.”
“I’ll take a spicy chicken,” Orlando said as she walked back into the dining area, carrying three different- colored pads of Post-its and a bottle of Sriracha hot sauce.
While Daeng handed out the lunch, she set the hot sauce on the table, wrote NATE on a light blue Post-it, and stuck it to the window. Next, she wrote PETER on one of the same color, and put his name right below Nate’s. On a yellow note, she wrote Berkeley, and started a new column on the window. Finally, she wrote out individual green ones for the other twenty-two names and gave them a third column.
She touched the glass above Nate’s name. “Assuming Nate and Peter are connected, these are our known missing,” she said. She moved her fingers to the yellow column. “Our possibles.” To the green. “And our pool of potentials. When we can rule someone out, we’ll start a fourth column.”
“And what color will that be?” Quinn asked, an eyebrow raised. “I don’t want to get confused.”
“You only have the three colors, so it’ll also be green, jerk.”
He took a bite of his pork sandwich, and nodded at her makeshift bulletin board. “You’re missing a name.”
She looked at the glass. “Whose name?”
“Mine.”
“Right.” She wrote Quinn on a blue piece, put parentheses around it, and butted the square against Nate’s. She then repositioned Peter’s Post-it so that it was centered beneath them. “Okay, now look at the names. Anything stand out?”
Quinn set his sandwich down and examined the Post-its. “Well, the obvious connection is that I’ve worked with everyone up there, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere.”
“Just concentrate on you and Nate and Peter and Berkeley. Anything you all have in common? Any jobs you may have worked on together? Anything.”
He frowned. “We’ve all worked together over the years. Nate not so much, of course, but sometimes.” He looked at Orlando. “I could come up with a dozen or more connections that might or might not mean anything.”
She turned back to the names and stared at them for several seconds. “We need to narrow down the pool.”
As much as he thought they might be going down the wrong road, he didn’t see what else they could do at this point.
After they quickly finished lunch, Quinn called the next name on his contact list. As he was in the middle of what he realized would be another fruitless call, Orlando yelled, “Quinn!”
He put a hand over his phone and whispered, “What is it?”
“I just got a ping.”
“Sally, I’m sorry,” he said into his cell. “I need to get off the phone. I might call you back later. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine,” the woman told him.
“Thanks.”
He hung up and moved behind Orlando. On the screen of her computer was the program she’d set up to automatically ping Nate’s emergency beacon until it made a connection. Which, according to the display, had finally happened.
“Can you get a location?” he asked.
“I’m trying. The signal’s weak. I just need a little more-dammit!”
The readout in the program window switched from CONNECTED to SIGNAL LOST.
She tried to reestablish the link, but after a few minutes, it was clear it wasn’t happening. She set the software on automatic, and opened a new window that was filled end to end and top to bottom with what looked to Quinn like a single string of numbers and letters. She scrolled through it carefully, her head angling back and forth as she scanned each row.
When she reached the bottom, she grunted in frustration and leaned back. “Partial coordinates. I can get us a range based on which satellite picked up the signal, but that’s it.”
“A range is better than nothing,” Quinn said.
Not looking happy, she said, “Yeah, but I was hoping for more. Hold on.” She ran the numbers through another program, and a map appeared on the screen. “Here’s what we’ve got: St. Louis, Missouri, in the north; Trujillo, Honduras, in the south; Hermosillo, Mexico, in the west; and Roseau, Dominica, in the east.”
The area included, among other things, pretty much the entire southern US, the Caribbean, and a good chunk of Mexico, with a little bit of Central America thrown in.
“Northern Mexico,” he said, pointing at the map. He thought for a moment. “Can you bring up that news report about that manhunt?”
Before going to bed the previous night, Orlando had done a search of news sites serving northeastern Mexico to see if there was anything about the manhunt Pullman had mentioned. The only article she found was about a search police had conducted for someone they were calling “an important operator” in the drug trade. It had taken place in Reynosa, though, not Monterrey. And while witnesses said they saw someone taken into custody and flown away on a helicopter, the police had yet to confirm that. The timing was right, especially if Nate was making a run for the border, but it seemed iffy at best.
They had planned to make some follow-up calls once people woke up in the morning, but the disappearance of Peter and the possibility of even more missing had pushed the manhunt to a back burner.
Perhaps that had been a mistake.
Orlando opened a web browser, and brought up the bookmarked article. It was in Spanish, but that wasn’t a problem. Both Quinn and Orlando spoke it fluently.
