‘‘Yes.’’ Coughlie had made his INS identity known to the woman. LaMoia took this as a bad sign, for it supported the man’s innocence. He wanted Coughlie defined—on or off his list of suspects—he didn’t want to keep guessing.
‘‘His interest here?’’ LaMoia asked.
‘‘Building permits,’’ she said. ‘‘Must have spent a half hour going over them.’’
‘‘Current? Past?’’
‘‘Current. Said that construction sites often employed illegals— illegal immigrants, you know?—for the manual labor, the ‘grunt jobs,’ I think he called them. Said construction permits were a great resource for the INS.’’
This made sense. LaMoia sank a little lower, his suspicions dashed. ‘‘Then you’d seen him before?’’ he inquired, thinking to ask.
‘‘Me? Oh, no. Never once. Not ever.’’
‘‘You’re new to this department?’’
‘‘Aren’t you the one for compliments!’’ she said. ‘‘Eighteen years I’ve worked here behind this counter.’’
‘‘Other INS agents?’’
‘‘Here? Never. Not so as they identified themselves, anyway.’’
LaMoia considered all this carefully as he asked to be shown the same material Coughlie had viewed.
LaMoia spent twenty minutes reviewing the exact same construction permits as had Brian Coughlie but failed to connect any importance to his case. He considered every angle: location of the sites; any possible connection to Mama Lu. He found nothing.
He asked a dozen questions, including if Coughlie had focused on any particular permit, if he had asked for any specific qualification. The woman couldn’t help him.
He could feel the connection staring back at him but could not see it. He decided to let it go, hoping it might make sense to him later, the way that sometimes happened.
‘‘Where to from here?’’ Gaynes asked.
‘‘I gotta get back to the surveillance,’’ LaMoia replied from the passenger seat of her Chevy. He didn’t see the point in wheels like this. No style. Nothing to offer.
He’d brought her a cup of mocha coffee, and she had seemed touched that he knew the way she took it.
‘‘Me?’’ she asked.
‘‘Try his crib. Try his office. Make up some bullshit if you have to. Try to find him. Keep me up to speed. If you strike out, when you get back to PS check with the lab. The Doc said he passed the Jill Doe evidence on to Lofgrin. Where’s it at? How come we don’t have it?’’
‘‘The Sarge?’’
‘‘He’s doing the dance with Mama Lu. He may have something— providing we ever see him again.’’
‘‘Don’t joke around like that,’’ she chastised him. ‘‘That shit bothers me.’’
‘‘Who’s joking?’’ LaMoia replied, taking one last noisy sip from the cup’s plastic lid before venturing back outside.
CHAPTER 64
e’re working together, right?’’ McNeal asked Boldt from the other end of a cellular call.
‘‘Far as I’m concerned.’’ His mind was on Mama Lu—the location of that sweatshop. If the Great Lady wouldn’t cooperate, then, as far as he was concerned, their one and only chance of finding Melissa, of busting the sweatshop, came down to the shipment expected that same night. Stevie McNeal, and her world of problems, was far from his thoughts.
‘‘Together as in: Whatever I have, you have and vice versa.’’
‘‘As in,’’ Boldt confirmed, his attention still drifting.
‘‘This surveillance that was reported,’’ she said, waking him up some. ‘‘What are your chances of making this bust?’’
‘‘Until they reported it, our chances were pretty good, I think.’’
‘‘And now?’’
‘‘Not so good,’’ he answered.
‘‘There’s something going down,’’ she stated. ‘‘A container shipment?’’
His mind sprang fully awake. Where had she gotten that? ‘‘It’s possible,’’ he admitted. ‘‘We don’t know exactly when, although any time around the new moon makes strategic sense for them.’’ He added, ‘‘We thought the drop was going to be at a naval yard—that is, until things leaked this morning. That hurt us. Now, quite honestly, we’re not so sure.’’
‘‘Your plan?’’
His mind briefly prevented him from discussing it—do not share this with the press! But his tongue overruled. ‘‘Had been to intercept the drop fully cloaked and to follow the shipment wherever it led. We believed that would include not only the sweatshop and those people
responsible, but quite possibly Ms. Chow as well.’’
‘‘And now that it has leaked?’’ she inquired.
‘‘One step forward, two steps back. We’re still watching our location, but I’m guessing we’ve been sandbagged by the leak.’’
‘‘So you’re tracking all arriving freighters,’’ she stated. Reporters and cops thought the same way.
‘‘Freighters, tankers, trawlers.’’ He hesitated. ‘‘Any ship making port in the next thirty-six hours. Of special interest are any that made port in Hong Kong. I’ll be down at Port Authority. We’ll be tracking every ship closely,’’ he confirmed, though his jaw was tight and his voice sounded foreign even to him. ‘‘Three in particular, due in later tonight, all made port in Kowloon. That matches with the Visage. None due in from Hong Kong scheduled for tomorrow or Friday, so we’re leaning on tonight. We play the high-percentage hunches.’’
‘‘So do I, and my hunch is you’re about to be sandbagged again,’’ she warned. She explained what she had found out about Channel Seven’s SkyCam crew.
Boldt remained silent trying to clear his thoughts, suddenly a tangle of confusion and outright anger. The press no longer reported cases, they intervened and destroyed them.
‘‘We haven’t much time,’’ she warned.
‘‘I’m listening.’’ His throat dry and scratchy, his temper flaring.
‘‘No one—not you, not the mayor—can stop a news crew from reporting.’’
‘‘Believe me, I’m aware of that,’’ he said.
‘‘Competition is a wonderful thing. The infrared technology has its limits: It doesn’t like light. If we—my team, I’m talking about—were to aim enough light toward that infrared camera, we’d blind the equipment. We’d piss them off, sure—but we wouldn’t be breaking any laws, just one news crew out to scoop the other. You see how this works?’’
‘‘You’re going to sabotage a live news feed?’’
The open line hissed with static. ‘‘I’m going to improve Melissa’s chances,’’ she said. ‘‘They expose this freighter, and who knows what
happens? When people panic, they make poor choices.’’
‘‘Agreed.’’
‘‘If you’re going to be at Port Authority, then that helps. I need you to provide me the exact locations of these three freighters,’’ she suggested. ‘‘Maybe we can mislead Seven’s chopper.’’
Boldt paused, his mind whirring.
She asked, ‘‘You’ve got to trust me on this.’’
A week earlier he might not have, but they were two pieces of the same puzzle now. Boldt said, ‘‘Let me have your number again. I’ll call you from Port Authority.’’
CHAPTER 65
aMoia pulled up to a red light. A dozen ways existed that he might have made the connection between Coughlie and the purpose behind the man’s stop at City Hall. He might have used a detective’s cunning or logic or some complex strategy born of his years of experience. Instead it was simply that red light. The Camaro idled alongside a high-rise construction site. LaMoia, ever on the lookout for a nice set of legs or a chest to fix his eyes upon, noticed a construction crane in the process of hoisting a pallet of steel beams. The light changed. He pulled to the side of the street, set his flashers to blinking and thought it through. What if they were right about Coughlie being involved? What if the man suspected the reported police surveillance was on his drop point, the naval yard? With only hours to go before the arrival of the container ships, a new container of illegals, with crane rentals being carefully watched by SPD—information to which Coughlie was privy—how would he select a backup location? The answer was now obvious to him: Look for a waterfront construction site that had a permit to operate a crane, and therefore, a crane on-site. He popped open his cellphone and dialed: They could have surveillance in place on any such sites in a matter of minutes.