Elaine absorbed it and closed her eyes. “Are you certain?”
“Yes. Based on the copies you’ve shown me, I’m pretty certain.”
Elaine sat on a bar stool at the breakfast counter and said, “Tell me everything.”
16.
At six, Elaine called Lamar Bradshaw, the head of the FBI’s Rare Asset Recovery Unit, and woke him up. His plans for the day were also tossed. Two hours later they met in his office in the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue for a full briefing. As she expected, Bradshaw and his team were irritated that Elaine and her company had secretly put together such an elaborate scheme to spy on Bruce Cable, a suspect they had discussed only in passing a month earlier. Cable was on the FBI’s list, along with a dozen others, but only because of his reputation. Bradshaw had not taken him seriously. The FBI detested private, parallel investigations, but at the moment bickering in a turf battle would not be productive. Bradshaw was also forced to swallow his pride because Elaine Shelby had once again found the stolen goods. A quick truce was found, peace prevailed, and joint plans were made.
17.
Bruce Cable awoke at six in his apartment above the store. He drank coffee and read for an hour before going downstairs to his office in the First Editions Room. He turned on his desktop and began reviewing his inventory. The most unpleasant part of his job was deciding which books were not going to sell and must be returned to their publishers for credit. Each book returned was a failure on his part, but after twenty years he had almost grown accustomed to the process. For an hour he roamed the darkened store, pulling books from shelves and off tables, piling them into sad little stacks back in the stockroom.
At 8:45, as always, he returned to the apartment, quickly showered and changed into his daily seersucker, and at nine sharp turned on the lights and opened the front door. Two clerks arrived first and Bruce set them to work. Thirty minutes later, he went to the basement and unlocked the metal door leading to Noelle’s storage area. Jake was already there, tapping small nails into the back of an ancient chaise. Mercer’s writing table was finished and off to one side.
After the pleasantries, Bruce said, “Our friend Ms. Mann will not be buying the table after all. Noelle wants it shipped to an address in Fort Lauderdale. Knock off the legs and find a crate.”
“Sure,” Jake said. “Today?”
“Yes, it’s a rush job. Hop on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
18.
At 11:06, a chartered jet took off from Dulles International. On board were Elaine Shelby and two of her associates, and Lamar Bradshaw and four special agents. En route, Bradshaw spoke again to the U.S. Attorney in Florida, and Elaine called Mercer, who was holed up in a local library trying to write. She said she was finding it impossible to be creative at the bed-and-breakfast. Elaine thought it best if she stayed away from the bookstore for a couple of days, and Mercer assured her she had no plans to go near it. She had seen enough of Bruce for a while and needed a break.
At 11:20, an unmarked cargo van parked on Santa Rosa’s Main Street across from the bookstore. Inside were three field agents from the Jacksonville office. They aimed a video camera at the front door of Bay Books, and began filming every person who entered and left. Another van, with two more field agents, parked on Third Street and began surveillance. Their job was to film and monitor every shipment in and out of the store.
At 11:40, an agent dressed in shorts and sandals entered the front door and browsed for a few minutes. He did not see Cable. With cash, he bought an audio version of Lonesome Dove and left the store. In the first van, a technician opened the case, removed the eight CDs, and installed a tiny video camera and a battery.
At 12:15, Cable left with an unknown person and walked down the street to lunch. Five minutes later, another agent, a woman also in shorts and sandals, entered the store with the Lonesome Dove audio case. She bought coffee upstairs, killed some time, returned to the ground floor, and selected two paperbacks. When the clerk went to the rear, the agent deftly returned the Lonesome Dove case to the audio rack and took the one next to it, The Last Picture Show. She eventually paid for the paperbacks and the audio and asked the clerk about a good place for lunch. In the first van, the agents stared at a laptop. From the inside, they now had a perfect frontal view of everyone entering the store. They could only hope that no one would want to listen to Lonesome Dove anytime soon.
At 12:31, the chartered jet landed at the small airport on Camino Island, ten minutes from downtown Santa Rosa. Rick and Graham were there to meet Elaine and her two associates. Two SUVs picked up Bradshaw and his crew. Because it was Monday, hotel rooms were available, for a few days anyway, and several had been reserved at a hotel near the harbor, less than a five-minute walk from the bookstore. Bradshaw took the largest suite and set up his command post. Laptops were arranged on a table, and the video surveillance from the cameras ran nonstop.
After a quick lunch, Mercer arrived at the suite and a flurry of introductions followed. She was startled at the show of manpower, and felt ill with the thought that she had unleashed all these people on an unsuspecting Bruce Cable.
With Elaine in the background, she was interrogated by Bradshaw and another special agent named Vanno. She retold her story, leaving out nothing but the intimate details of her long weekend, a rather romantic little fling that now seemed like a nostalgic romp from long ago. Bradshaw walked her through a series of high-density photographs of the Fitzgerald manuscripts taken years earlier by Princeton. Elaine had the same set and Mercer had seen it all before. Yes, yes, in her opinion, what she had seen last night in the basement vault was the original Tycoon.
Yes, it could be a fake. Anything is possible, but she didn’t think so. Why would Bruce be so protective of a fake manuscript?
When Bradshaw repeated a question for the third time, and did so with a tone of suspicion, Mercer bristled and asked, “Aren’t we on the same team here?”
Vanno eased in with a soft “Of course we are, Mercer, we just need to get everything right.”
“I got it right, okay?”
After an hour of back-and-forth, Mercer was convinced that Elaine Shelby was smarter and much smoother than Bradshaw and Vanno. Elaine, though, had handed her off to the FBI, and there was no doubt they would run the show until the end. During a break, Bradshaw took a call from an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Jacksonville and things got tense. It seemed as though the federal magistrate there was insisting on a closed hearing with “the witness” present, as opposed to allowing “the witness” to testify by video. This upset Bradshaw and Vanno, but they got nowhere.
At 2:15, Mercer was loaded into a car with Rick behind the wheel and Graham riding shotgun and Elaine in the rear seat with her. They followed an SUV loaded with FBI agents off the island and in the direction of Jacksonville. On the bridge over the Camino River, Mercer broke the ice with an unpleasant “So, let’s have it. What’s going on?”
Rick and Graham stared straight ahead and said nothing. Elaine cleared her throat and said, “It’s all federal crap, your tax dollars at work. Federal Agent Bradshaw is pissed off at the U.S. Attorney for this district, he’s federal too, and everybody seems pissed off at the federal magistrate, who does the search warrants. They thought they had an understanding whereby you could stay on the island and give your statement by video. Bradshaw says they do it all the time, but for some reason this federal magistrate wants to hear you in person. So, we’re headed for court.”