“
The FBI man chuckled at the other end of the line.
“I know you’re sincere when you stutter in Flemish,” he said. “Seven on the nose, Delano. And expect me to eat hearty.”
SEVEN
At a little past eight o’clock in the morning, Ricci left his hotel room, took the elevator downstairs, and, as he went past the restaurant’s lobby entrance, saw Derek Glenn stepping out with a cup of takeout coffee.
Ricci would have walked on toward the street if their paths hadn’t crossed.
They stopped in front of each other, exchanged glances.
“Am I early, or you late?” Glenn said with a wooden smile.
Ricci shrugged.
“I want to check on some things downtown,” he said. He continued to eye Glenn flatly. “Those are the same clothes you had on when I left there yesterday.”
Glenn’s expression grew more awkward.
“If you’re so bothered by it, I’ll just hurry on up to my room and change,” he said. “Meet you at HQ in a while.” And abruptly turned toward the elevators.
When Ricci got to her office, Noriko Cousins was at her desk behind her computer. She pulled her head up from an open file folder and waved him through the door.
“I’ve heard you had a busy night,” she said, sounding anything but pleased.
Ricci went to the corner chair and sat without hanging his coat.
“Wasn’t the only one,” he said.
She gave him a look. “Am I supposed to guess the meaning of that?”
“We’re talking work, it means your frequent spotter at Kiran better learn to be more careful. If I could pick him up, so could the guy in the van,” Ricci said. He shrugged. “There’s some other meaning of ‘busy’ you want to discuss, I’m all ears.”
Noriko was quiet a moment.
“I got your advance billing,” she said. “The tough-guy attitude. The lone wolf bit. But I hadn’t heard what a truly pathetic human being you are.”
Ricci’s smile slashed at her.
“Guess we’ll stick to talking work,” he said.
Noriko had kept looking steadily into his eyes, and she still didn’t flinch.
“I don’t care how you operate in San Jose, or what you’ve gotten away with under people’s noses out there,” she said. “But this is my city, and I’ve got no long leashes for anybody. Heading out on a surveillance last night wasn’t something you should have done without authorization. It wasn’t something you had any right doing in secret… and just so there’s no confusion, my problem isn’t with you getting your neck hacked open without anybody having a clue what’s happened. The important thing is that you could have put our whole investigation in jeopardy.”
Ricci stared back across the desk, shrugged his shoulders. “I was worried about keeping secrets from you, I’d have gotten myself a Hertz rental car instead of ticketing that one out of the req lot, where I knew you’d make sure somebody would notice.” He shrugged again and gestured toward the file folder that had remained spread open in front of her. “What’s important is if those printouts mean your boy Bennett got any results off the cigarette lighter.”
Noriko looked at him.
“Your partner called to say he’d be here any minute,” she said. “I want him in on this, too.”
It was, in fact, almost five minutes of chilly silence before Glenn arrived at her office. He moved past Ricci with a nod, tossed his coat up on a hook, and stepped toward Noriko’s desk.
“Good morning,” he said to her, smiling.
“Getting there,” she said, and flashed him a quick little smile of her own.
Glenn settled into a chair, waited.
“Time for us to share and share alike,” Noriko said. She gave him a revelatory look, then shifted her gaze to Ricci. “Starting with what you saw last night out at Kiran, and then afterward.”
Even as an expression of surprise began spreading over Glenn’s features, Ricci told of his observation of the plant, the loading and apparent unpacking of boxes aboard the U-Haul van, the dark-suits who’d done it, and the Tall Man. Then he went through his tailing the van to the trucker’s motel, his recovery of the tossed lighter in the motel lot, and his passing it on to Bennett for examination… recounting all of it in a precise but dispassionate near-monotone.
“That’s what I saw,” he said finally. He looked straight at Noriko. “The rest’s with you.”
There was no hesitation in her nod.
“We lifted quite a batch of prints off the lighter, ran them through IAFIS courtesy of the access we’re permitted by the Feds,” she said, using the acronym for the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification database. “Every one of them belongs to a man named John Earl Fletcher… or John Earl, as he prefers to be called.”
“What kind of rap sheet’s he got?” Glenn said.
“A long and bad one,” Noriko said. She scanned a sheet in her folder. “It starts almost twenty years ago with a string of misdemeanors and minor felonies in Maine. Possession of illegal substances, drunk driving, public nuisance, that sort of thing. There’re several juvie arrests and probations, a conviction for snatching a wallet at knifepoint. Then he does six months in county jail for assault and battery. A year later, he’s slapped with a charge of third-degree murder… a sheriff’s deputy. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in the Maine state penitentiary.”
“That sounds kind of light for a cop killing,” Glenn said
“I thought so, too,” Noriko said. “Went ahead and cross-referenced the IAFIS information with other clearanced databases, found that it was ruled accidental… the details in the system are sketchy, but it seems they had a personal background of some sort. Knew each other from high school, the way they do in small towns. Earl was driving a truck for a local fuel company. He and the cop are involved in some kind of shouting match over a routine traffic summons, stupid affair. One thing leads to another, and soon they’re in a fistfight. The cop falls, hits his head, doesn’t get up. And Earl goes into the system for a major stretch, where he becomes a man.”
“Gets uglier as they get older.”
“Doesn’t it always,” Noriko said. “When we next catch up with Earl, after his release, he’s changed scenes to Newark, New Jersey, and been arrested in connection with a RICO probe. There’s a charge of interstate travel in aid of racketeering… and worse, multiple charges of murder-for-hire. But a couple of key witnesses change their testimony prior to trial, and the case against him is dropped.”
Glenn snorted. “Oh, what luck,” he said with an ironic smile.
Noriko shrugged, glanced down at her folder.
“There’s nothing else as far as what I’ve dredged out of the computers. John Earl Fletcher — a.k.a. John Earl — seems to exit stage left until he shows up at Kiran with a U-Haul.”
Ricci had sat in his corner of the office without reacting to what she said, or apparently having done anything but lean back and stare into space. Now he moved his eyes to Noriko and kept them on her.
“Your lookouts ever see that van at the plant before?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Last night was a first.”
“And it’s still at the motel.”
She nodded. “The minute Earl leaves his room, I’ll know about it.”
“So we’ve got a guy who gets mobbed-up doing hard time, a pro hitter and dirty carrier, moving stuff for Kiran when the lights are off, then parking a mile away like he’s in no kind of hurry to go anywhere with it. That make sense?”
