young woman that he would check in later if he could leave his bag.
After she took it he walked back out into the lobby lounge area and sat down to think.
There were Web sites and criminal rings where you could buy credit card numbers, but obtaining the cards themselves required you to meet someone in person. There must be a hundred black-market dealers in LA, but they’d never trust him enough to deal with him, not quickly anyway. And finding them would be next to impossible: if he went down to South Central and just started asking around, he’d be rolled inside of an hour.
Maybe the solution wasn’t to stay anywhere. He needed to use a computer, and there was a business center in the hotel; he’d give them a false room number. Beyond that, what did he need?
A shower would be nice.
And sleep.
There was too much to do to sleep.
Ball had just decided to use Amanda Rauci’s credit card again when a better solution fell literally into his lap — a woman passing nearby dropped her purse on the floor. Ball got up and gave it up for her. There wasn’t time to take the card from her wallet — she would have seen — but now that he had the idea, all he to do was find the opportunity.
Opportunity presented itself about a half hour later, at a hotel restaurant across the street. Ball positioned himself in the bar near the cash register, planning to swipe a card off an unattended tray after the cashier had run up the charges. But as Ball ordered a beer he noticed that the bartender and some of the waitstaff stowed their pocketbooks on a shelf next to the bar. He slipped his hand down and took out the bartender’s wallet as she poured the beer at the far end of the bar.
Ball slid a ten across the bar and smiled at the woman’s joke about it being a little early for anything stronger. Then he went to the men’s room. The purse he’d picked had six different credit cards; he took the one that looked least worn from swipe machines. Returning the wallet was easy; the bartender had gone into the other room to help set up for dinner.
Ball sat down and finished his drink, sipping slowly as he planned out what he needed to do next.
131
it was all about patterns, Johnny Bib liked to say; the uni-verse had a certain order to it, and anything that violated that order did so for a reason. Anomalies were as informative as symmetry, many times more so.
Which made the unsuccessful attempt on Senator McSweeney’s life stand out.
“It’s the gas,” Gallo told Rubens. “Ball normally buys gas every two to three days when he’s in Pine Plains. It’s always twenty dollars. Clockwork. Habit. He never tanks up — except for the day before Gordon killed himself. Then there’s no activity on his card during the three days around the time Gordon dies.”
“He used cash,” interrupted Johnny Bib. “And probably someone else’s credit card.”
“Whose?” asked Rubens, looking at Gallo rather than Johnny Bib.
“Haven’t figured that out,” said Gallo. “But getting back to the pattern, there’s a gap around the time when Gordon dies, but no gap when someone shoots at McSweeney. And it’s not because his wife was using his card — she uses a Discover Card, and the charge pattern is consistent.”
“It is consistent with what the wife told the op,” added Johnny Bib. “He was only away that time.”
“He wasn’t the shooter,” said Gallo. “Maybe he killed Gordon, but he didn’t shoot at McSweeney.” Rubens looked at the billing information. It would have been much, much better to find positive evidence — a trail of receipts that would have put Ball in a specific place at a specific time. But real life was messier than that — or maybe Ball was simply very clever.
“Keep working on it, Mr. Gallo,” said Rubens. “Continue gathering as much information as you can about the police chief. There’s no such thing as too much information.” That wasn’t entirely correct, but neither man pointed that out as they left his office.
132
By the time Lia made the connections with the courier at the county airport and shipped Chief Ball’s hair off, it was already after six. Lia tracked down the properties the chief’s wife had mentioned, and though it was dark she checked them as best she could, driving as much as she could through them and then walking around with her flashlight and even checking on an old building at the Burdick farm. Lia kept calling Amanda’s name, though she had long ago concluded she wasn’t going to find her alive.
Lia had no evidence, but she did have a theory: Amanda Rauci had found something in Forester’s car, maybe one of his notebooks or something else the state police had missed.
That led her to investigate the chief and then confront him.
He’d killed her and then run away.
Or maybe not. Cold and tired, Lia went back to the hotel, had a quick meal, and fell asleep facedown on her bed without bothering to change. When she woke, it was two hours or so before dawn. Lia got up and went straight to the Castro property, not even stopping for coffee.
The place looked even more forbidding during the day.
Dominated by an old gravel mine, it consisted of roughly a thousand acres. Large clumps of rocks and deep gouges in the earth made the landscape look like the back side of the moon. A stream ran through the middle of the property, bisecting a spider’s web of dirt trails before disappearing in the woods.
Lia drove her rental car to the edge of the widest trail, looking for signs that someone else had been through recently. She got out and walked up the narrower paths. But she saw nothing suspicious.
The old Burdick farm was several times the size of the Castro property, with even more places to dispose of a body.
Besides the standing farm house that she had checked the night before, six or seven other buildings stood at the far end of the property, obscured by rows of bushes and young trees.
They were all in various stages of disrepair, moldy, their thin walls bereft of siding and pockmarked with bullet holes.
Lia checked them all, without finding a body. It was a long, hot day, and even though she’d spent it entirely outdoors, Lia didn’t feel particularly close to nature when she gave up looking for Amanda late in the afternoon.
133
Timothy O’Rourke had worked for Senator McSweeney for several years, as a combination chauffeur- bodyguard. When the senator had geared up for the presidential campaign, he had been switched to a full-time security officer. But he’d been pushed aside even before the arrival of the Secret Service and the redoubling of the Ser vice’s efforts following the attempt on McSweeney’s life. O’Rourke was considered a bit too old and too rough around the edges to really fit in.
Though that wasn’t his interpretation of what had happened.
“These young guys and their BlackBerry thingers,” O’Rourke had told Ball bitterly several weeks before, when he had effectively been demoted to the status of an advance flunky. “They don’t understand the importance of experience. What experience do they have, anyway? None.” Ball remembered the conversation as he waited for O’Rourke to answer his cell phone. It was shameful how they pushed older guys out, he thought, though he knew in this case there was probably a bit more to the story than O’Rourke let on. The retired trooper was several years older than Ball, and not nearly in as good physical shape. And he’d never been as smart.
“O’Rourke.”
