CHAPTER 36
Detective Cordero was on the phone trying to make child-care arrangements when Harvath hung up his coat and set the umbrella she had lent him in the corner.
“Okay, I understand. Thank you,” she said and then hung up. Looking at Harvath she stated, “I’m definitely in the wrong business.”
“Why?”
“The day-care center where I have my son charges a dollar a minute for every minute after five that you’re not there to pick him up.”
“That’s pretty steep.”
“It is, but I understand. Too many parents are irresponsible these days. If they didn’t have some sort of penalty, people would be leaving their kids there until midnight. What about you?”
“What about me?” asked Harvath.
“Are you married? Do you have any kids?”
He smiled. “No.”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“I knew it,” she said. “The haircut and suit were a dead giveaway.”
“A dead giveaway to what?”
“Don’t be so defensive. Boston’s a very progressive city. We’ve got a few gay cops on the force here.”
Harvath laughed. “I’m not gay. And by the way, this is a Brooks Brothers suit and I’ve had the same haircut since college.”
Cordero looked at him for several seconds.
“What are you looking at?” said Harvath.
“You’ve gotta be what, in your mid, maybe late thirties?”
That was a heck of a compliment and one he had no intention of correcting her on. “Give or take,” he replied.
“So what’s your problem? Never grew up? Peter Pan syndrome?”
Boy, is she direct. “Just never met the right girl.”
“Your first mistake,” said Cordero, “was looking for a girl instead of a woman.”
Brutal, too. “And my second mistake?”
“Allowing yourself to get to this age without realizing you’re the problem.”
“Wow. This is turning into a heck of a beating. I hope your paramedics respond faster than your crime lab.”
Cordero smiled. “What? No defense of your lifestyle? Isn’t right about now the time you’re supposed to stand up for confirmed bachelorhood? You know, trot out that old don’t hate the player, hate the game line?”
“My bad,” Harvath replied. “I didn’t know there was protocol for this sort of guy-bashing. Speaking of which, why isn’t Mr. Cordero helping you figure out picking up your son?”
The smile faded from her. “Because he’s deceased. He died shortly before Marco was born.”
Harvath felt like a total asshole and winced at her response. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s not your fault,” she replied, attempting to bring back a small smile in order to take the sting out of the exchange. “How could you?”
“Was he a cop?”
“No, stockbroker. We’d known each other since grade school.”
“So Cordero is your married name?”
“It’s my maiden name. He had this long Eastern European name with a billion consonants that nobody could ever pronounce. I decided to keep my name.”
“Marriage is all about give-and-take. That’s what they say, right?” said Harvath.
Cordero rolled her eyes. “I know nothing about you, yet I get this sense—and I hope I don’t hurt your feelings, but—you’re a real idiot. You either have yourself convinced that it’s easier to just drift from one casual thing to the next in a state of perpetual adolescence, or you’re looking for that perfect ten. That sort of thing doesn’t exist. If you’re hitting on five out of six cylinders, or even four out of six with someone who truly cares about you, you should run, don’t walk, all the way to the bank with it.”
“If it’s that easy, how come you’re not remarried?”
“I never said it was easy,” she corrected him. “It’s hard work, but along with raising a child, it’s the most rewarding hard work you’ll ever do. Even better than being a SEAL, if only you knew how to swim.”
“And if I was—”
Cordero rolled her eyes again. “And if you were smart enough. I got that part the first time, too.”
“Any chance we can talk about something other than my love life?”
The detective slid the crime lab report across her desk.
Harvath skimmed it and eventually said, “So based on the elimination prints they used from Brittany Doyle’s arrest record, the crime lab is certain this other full and partial print belongs to our killer?”
“No. That’s not what they do. That’s our job. All they can tell us is the two prints we have been given do not belong to Ms. Brittany Doyle of Southie. The additional prints belong to someone else.”
“So what’s the next step?” he asked, knowing already what her answer was.
“We begin searching the databases. We already sent a copy of the prints to the FBI, so we’ll start with state and local. If we don’t come up with anything, we’ll go international. Sound like a plan?”
“I think I’d rather go back to getting lectured about my love life.”
“Don’t worry. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ll do both.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Harvath replied. “Listen, as much as I enjoy discussing my shortcomings with people I’ve just met, why don’t we bifurcate our work? You take the state and local databases, and if you give me a computer, I’ll work on the international. That way, we’ll be twice as fast and hopefully get you to your little boy by five o’clock. Make sense?”
Cordero smiled. Whatever his problem was, a healthy sense of humor and what appeared to be a decent sense of compassion weren’t part of it.
Once again, she found herself attracted to him. More unsettling, though, was her growing feeling that whatever was wrong with him relationship-wise, she could fix it. But then there was her rational side. Through years of counseling brokenhearted girlfriends over countless glasses of wine, she knew what a dangerous proposition that was. You couldn’t fix something that was intent upon staying broken.
After showing Harvath to an available computer, she pushed her romantic notions from her mind and returned to her desk so she could begin scouring the databases.
In any other circumstance, Harvath would have smiled and watched a woman like Lara Cordero as she walked away. Not now, though. Now all he was focused on was catching a killer, and catching him before he could kill again.
CHAPTER 37
Harvath went through the motions of searching all the databases he had access to, but he knew he wasn’t going to find anything. Even if their killer had a prior record, it would have been scrubbed clean. An operation this sophisticated, regardless of who was behind it, would not roll the dice on everything falling apart because their lead hitter had his prints on file in a law enforcement database somewhere.
That didn’t mean, though, that his prints didn’t exist somewhere. If the man was indeed part of some black-ops program, the Agency was going to have a full dossier on him. Accessing that dossier, though, was going to be very difficult, particularly if the powers-that-be at Langley were trying to keep the program secret. Based on what he had heard about Swim Club, if the guy they were looking for was a part of it, Harvath would have a better chance locating Jimmy Hoffa than the man’s personal information. He decided to turn it over to the Old Man. Monroe Lewis wanted regular updates and he owed Reed Carlton a situation report anyway.
Typing up a brief synopsis, Harvath transmitted it to Carlton via a secure server they used. Attached to the email were photos from the crime scenes as well as scans of the prints the Boston PD crime lab had isolated from Brittany Doyle’s wrist cuff. He asked him to please forward the materials along to Bill Wise. With the two of them working on the prints, there was nothing else he could do in that arena and he logged off the computer.