held for a ransom, what sort of
“Wish I could give you an answer. All I know is somebody likes playing games. You can feel the spite here.”
“Yes.”
Nimec thought aloud. “The boss might have some ideas. He has to see the e-mail. I’ve got to show it to him right away.”
“I don’t know how he’ll manage to handle everything. It’s so much at once.”
Nimec was quiet. He felt the vast spread of distance between them.
“Ricci up to snuff?” he asked after a moment.
“He’s at the rescue center now. With Rollie. I haven’t contacted him about the message.”
“Better do it in a hurry,” Nimec said. He thought some more. “We need to rely on him, Meg.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“You’ve got no choice. If there are any solid leads, Ricci’s the one to find them. He’s the
Silence.
“I know,” she said. “But knowing it doesn’t give me much comfort.”
Nimec stared out the chopper’s canopy into the rushing blackness of night.
“Sometimes,” he said, “we can only go with what we have.”
As far as his statement to Ricci went, Erickson had been candid: There wasn’t much of anything helpful to be found outside in the way of evidence.
Not on the grounds per se.
Accompanied by the detective, Ricci and Thibodeau had again walked back to the greyhound exercise pen and kennel, both empty now with the dogs taken into temporary care by the ASPCA. They had reinspected the sides and rear of the shop, then strode along the periphery of the bordering woods. Finally they went out front to the parking area to take a look at Julia Gordian’s Honda Passport, and the muddy vestiges of tire prints the cops had already lifted the previous day.
They were standing over by the Honda in the rain when Ricci noticed a car parked among a group of police cruisers a yard or two farther down the lot — a Ford Cutlass, standard-issue plainclothes unmarked in precinct requisition lots. Its window was open slightly more than a crack, a man in a navy blue suit working on a laptop computer in the front passenger seat.
Ricci looked more closely and saw something on the armrest beside the man. It raised a thought.
He broke away from Erickson and Thibodeau and hastened over to the car.
“Got a minute?” Ricci said, crouched under his umbrella. He motioned his head back toward the Passport. “I’m with Erickson.”
Surprised by the sudden interruption, Navy Blue glanced out at him, pushing the computer screen down out of his angle of sight.
“You one of those guys from UpLink?” he said.
Ricci nodded, came up close to the window, and shot a look inside at what he’d recognized as a pad of graph paper on the armrest. But he had no chance to catch more than the briefest glimpse of the sketch on its top page before Navy Blue reached over and turned it facedown where it lay.
“This is a crime scene,” he said. “I’ve got important things to do.”
“Like I said,” Ricci said. “Not more than a minute.”
Navy Blue continued to regard him from inside the Cutlass, his expression at once standoffish and warily curious.
A grunt. “Something I can call you besides Man From UpLink?”
“Name’s Tom Ricci.”
Navy Blue sat a moment, pushed the button to lower the window about halfway.
Ricci figured that was all he would need.
“I’m Detective Brewer,” the cop said. He still sounded suspicious. “Go ahead and make it quick.”
Ricci did, but not in the way Brewer expected. Before the other man could react, he thrust his free hand through the window, turned Brewer’s laptop toward him, and raised the lid so he could see it.
Brewer flinched in his seat.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” He pulled the computer back around, snapped it shut.
Ricci’s face was calm.
“Didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “Might be none of my business, but I thought I saw you using that crime scene diagramming software. Figured I’d check for sure. Maybe offer some advice.”
Brewer glared at him. “You want advice, keep your fucking hands to yourself—”
“No harm intended.” Ricci held a low, level tone. “I was on the job once upon a time. Boston. Found out the hard way these computer sketches aren’t worth jack on the witness stand. You want to impress a jury, don’t lose your original hand sketch on that pad. Accurate’s good. Sometimes giving them a feel for what you saw can be better.”
Brewer stared at him in angry confusion. Ricci knew he wouldn’t believe his excuse for the grab. It didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that he’d incidentally happened to be telling the truth about the testifying part. He’d gotten his look at the screen image. Not a long one. But long enough.
“There a problem here?”
The voice was Erickson’s. Ricci half-turned and saw the detective standing behind him. He and Thibodeau had come over from the Honda.
Ricci left the explanation to Brewer. He doubted the cop would mention anything about the laptop, embarrass himself by admitting he’d been caught off guard.
As expected, pride won the day.
“No,” Brewer said. He was trying not to seem abashed. “The two of us were having some shop talk.”
Erickson gave his partner a long look, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, water dripping from his hair.
“Shop talk,” he repeated.
Brewer nodded inside the car.
“Ricci used to be a cop,” he said. “We were comparing notes about procedures. How they’ve changed and so forth.”
Erickson’s gaze dissected him another moment and then swung onto Ricci.
“Didn’t do much comparing with me before,” he said.
Ricci shrugged under his umbrella.
“We had other things to talk about,” he said.
Erickson was silent. Thibodeau was silent. Both of them were looking at Ricci and had separate reasons for being skeptical and displeased.
“Okay,” Erickson said at last. He gestured the Sword ops toward the road. “I think maybe it’s time I walk you two back to your car.”
Thibodeau hadn’t taken his eyes off Ricci.
“Guess it would be,” he said, and started traipsing down the gravel and mud drive in the rain.
“I get to find out what was going on between you and that other detective?” Thibodeau said.
“Sure,” Ricci said. “I aim to please.”
Thibodeau waited. They were back inside Ricci’s Jetta on the shoulder of the road, rain dashing against the roof and windshield.
“Erickson was holding out on us,” Ricci said. “I knew he wouldn’t give up whatever it was and played his partner on a hunch.”
Thibodeau looked across the seat at him.
“That hunch pay off?”
“Yeah.” Ricci told him how he’d seen Brewer in the car with his graph paper and laptop, gone over to check it out, and gotten a look at the crime scene diagram on Brewer’s computer. “It was all right there for me on his screen. The stain on the floor. Its location and measurements. And an outline of a dog. The word greyhound
