“I don’t doubt this fellow is deranged and has some perverse obsession with diamonds. But if he’s basically a mercenary, hired to sabotage the drilling, well, as soon as he finds out we’re onto him, he could sell my client’s rough as soon as he can and leave town. I think I should contact dealers again and explore that possibility.”
Sellitto and Rhyme agreed. Ackroyd pulled on his overcoat and, looking even more like a stolid British detective inspector, left to pursue that lead.
Sellitto too slipped on his jacket. “I’ll go talk to the commissioner and the mayor, recommend we announce the whole thing is probably fake. And I’ll have ESU and Bomb Squad set up a staging area down there. They’ll send a robot down the shafts, see if they can find any more IEDs and render safe.”
For his part, Rhyme had a task too. He placed another call to his spy down in the nation’s capital.
Chapter 41
Trooper J. T. Boyle had had, over the course of his fourteen-year career with the Pennsylvania State Police, some bizarre assignments. Chasing an Amish horse and buggy hijacked by a very non-Amish drunk college kid. The typical cats up trees (“Not our job, ma’am, but I’ll do the best I can”). Birthing babies.
But he’d never pulled over a whole bus before.
This job came as a courtesy to the NYPD, whom Boyle had worked with before and generally liked, though the language of some officers he didn’t approve of. On board the Greyhound he was now trailing was a witness on the run—and, no less, a witness from a case that’d made the news. WKPK, at least. The Promisor—the serial perp murdering young couples who’d just bought their engagement rings. That’d be one sick pup.
A New York detective was sure this witness was on the bus. Their computer department had found his phone and done some kind of high-tech thing so that its GPS kept working, and beaming the location, while incoming and outgoing calls were disabled, so no one could warn him that the police were after him if someone was inclined to do so. The screen showed No Service. He’d get suspicious after a while but after a while didn’t matter; Boyle had him now.
He lit up the Greyhound, which was on its way to Indianapolis. There, according to the ticket the witness, one Vimal Lahori, had bought, he would transfer to a bus for St. Louis. And onward and onward to Los Angeles. They knew his itinerary because they had tracked the phone to the Port Authority bus station in New York and run a scan of the CCTVs in the ticket seller’s cubicles, noting that a young man who fit the description of Vimal had bought such a ticket.
Except he wasn’t going to get any farther than the county lockup ten miles from here. Solely for his own protection. This Promisor knew about him and had already killed one witness. Though Trooper Boyle had to admit that the odds of the suspect getting all the way out here were pretty slim.
The bus eased to the side of the road and Boyle climbed out of his car. He wore the standard PSP trooper outfit: dark slacks, gray shirt, black tie. He pulled on his gray Smokey-Bear hat, with chin strap, and strode to the bus.
The door sha-hushed open.
Eyes scanning the passengers. No obvious threats. Not that he expected any. “Looking for somebody you got on board,” he said softly to the driver, a slim African American whose face registered concern. The decision had been made by the NYPD to not radio or call him earlier; they didn’t know what kind of actor he was and were concerned that the boy would catch any wary behavior, jump off the bus and flee. “He’s not armed. There’ll be no issue there.”
“’Kay. Feel free.”
At least the New York detective, a gruff-sounding guy, said he wasn’t armed. Witnesses generally weren’t but sometimes they were. This kid seemed like he fell into the unarmed category. Besides, he was Indian, as in overseas Indian, and in Boyle’s admittedly limited experience there didn’t seem to be a lot of firepower packed by people of that extraction.
Boyle had memorized the picture of Vimal, and he now made his way through the bus, looking, with a neutral expression, at the faces of the passengers he passed. Terrorism would be on everyone’s mind, of course. A bomb on the bus. Someone with a gun ready to blast away in the name of Allah or for no reason at all.
He nodded when smiled at, and answered questions like “What’s wrong?” and “Is there a problem?” with a noncommittal “Won’t keep you long, folks.”
But darn. He didn’t spot the boy. There were a couple of darker-skinned men but they were all much older and seemed Latino, not Indian.
He returned to the front of the bus and called that detective in New York.
“’Lo?” Lon Sellitto asked.
Unprofessional. But then again these were New Yorkers he was dealing with, whole different kettle of fish.
But by way of object lesson he said, “Sir, this is Trooper J. T. Boyle again. I’m on board the bus and’ve taken a look at all passengers. I don’t see him.”
“Did you—”
“Checked the john too, yessir.”
“—ask the driver if anybody got off at any stop?”
Boyle hesitated. He turned to the driver and asked if anybody’d gotten off at any stop.
“No, sir.”
“No, Detective, nobody got off,” Boyle said, then added, “Detective. Can you call it?”
“What?”
“Can you call the boy’s phone?”
“Oh. Hm. Good plan. Hold on.”
There were some clicks and then Sellitto said, “I’ve got that detective at Computer Crimes who’s been tracking it. Trooper? You’re on with Detective Szarnek.”
“Hey,” came the voice. Boyle heard rock-and-roll music.
These New York folks simply were not to be believed.
“Detective…” He didn’t try the name. “This is Trooper J. T. Boyle, state police.”
“Hi, Trooper.”
“Uhm, hi. Could you call the phone?”
“Sure. I’ll activate it.”
A moment later, the default ringtone of an iPhone bleated. The sound was coming from a row three back from the front. Boyle walked forward to find a passenger reaching into the side compartment of her bag, a frown on her face, and pulling the phone out, staring at it.
“Miss, am I right in figuring that’s not your phone?”
She looked up at him. Her face, surrounded by blue and green hair, was pretty, though in the trooper’s opinion spoiled by the nose studs and the ring in her eyebrow. She said, “No, sir. And I have no idea how it got here.”
*
Ron Pulaski entered the lab and Rhyme knew immediately two things: He’d had some success and he was as uneasy as hell about it.
“Rookie?”
He nodded, broadly and furtively, if doing both simultaneously were possible. He would have made an absolutely terrible spy.
“The den,” Rhyme said. He glanced back.
What would they say if they knew…?
The men crossed the hall and stepped, and wheeled, inside.
“What do you have?”
“I’m not feeling great about this, Lincoln.”
“Ah, it’s all good.”
“‘All good.’ You know, that sort of rates with that other phrase, ‘No worries.’ You notice people say them when all is not good and when there is something to worry about. I mean, you didn’t just break the law.”
Pulaski had been out to the warehouse where the shoot-out had occurred involving Eduardo Capilla—El Halcón.
“I doubt you did either.”
“Doubt? The place was sealed. You know it was sealed.”
“It’s a crime scene. I would assume it was sealed. Nobody was there, though?”
“No. Just the tape. And the notice that said not to enter. Oh, it also shared that entering was a federal offense.”
“Oh, you don’t take those things seriously, do you, Rookie?”
“Those things? Federal offenses. Of all the things I take seriously, federal offenses hover near the top.”
Rhyme was amused. He’s sounding more and more like me.
“Let’s get going. Where are we?”
From his bag Pulaski extracted a sheaf of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pages. “The ballistic and trace analysis from the prosecution and defense reports. Scene photos, diagrams.”
“Good. Spread them out.”