“What about the other gun, the mate to the one we found?”
“Still missing.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“But it’s not enough, not by a long stretch,” Troy said.
His cell phone rang and he walked out in the street to take the call. Ammara waited until Troy was out of earshot.
“I can’t get you the files you wanted on Thomas Rice. Troy has them locked up. I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Don’t sweat it. I put you in a tough spot. I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
“Troy’s not doing a bad job. In fact, he’s doing a pretty good job. He’s just growing into being in charge. That comes naturally to you. It’s more of a process for him.”
“Just don’t let him leave Wendy to the last.”
“I won’t. By the way, I got a phone call from that guy who gave you the dog.”
“Latrell Kelly?”
“That’s him.”
“You find anything else out about him?” I asked.
“Nothing. One of the neighbors says he keeps odd hours, leaving the house late at night, coming home at dawn. That’s evidence of someone having a good time, not killing people.”
“Latrell strike you as the party-hearty type?”
She shook her head. “Not unless he has a secret identity.”
“You better find out if he does. I gave him one of my cards and wrote your number on it. I told him to call you if he remembered anything else. What’d he have to say when he called?”
“Nothing about the case. Just said he had some toys for the dog he forgot to give you. Asked me for your phone number. I told him that I couldn’t give it to him but that I’d pass the message on and you’d call him.”
“You think he really has some toys for the dog or that he’d just rather talk to me than to you?”
“I don’t know. I interviewed him when we did the neighborhood canvass. He seemed like one of the good guys. He doesn’t have a record. He has a regular job; his employer vouched for him. He keeps his place up and isn’t into the whole hip-hop gangsta bullshit thing. Maybe you clicked with him and I didn’t. After all, he gave you the dog.”
Managing the information?ow is key to any investigation. I had told my story to Troy in the order everything had happened, but that’s not how evidence is collected. Sometimes it comes in buckets, like at a crime scene. Sometimes it comes in dribs and drabs, crumbs picked up along the way that don’t become gems until something else gives it meaning and context. This was one of those moments.
“Latrell lived behind Marcellus and he worked at the place where Javy Ordonez was killed.”
“The rail yard is a lot bigger than his backyard. Harder to make that connection stick.”
“It sticks until it falls off.”
“What’s his motive?” Ammara asked.
“You said he was one of the good guys. Maybe he decided to clean up his neighborhood.”
“You saw him. He look like the Terminator to you? Even if he did Marcellus and his people, how does he lure Javy Ordonez out to the rail yard, get in the backseat of Javy’s car, and blow his brains all over the leather upholstery? And if he could pull that off, why would he throw the gun away under a Dumpster where it’s so likely to be found?”
“It wouldn’t have been found for a long time if Javy’s body hadn’t gotten stuck in the trash truck. Have you found anything to connect Latrell to Javy Ordonez?’
“We haven’t looked, but we haven’t found anything, either. We’ve been working the drug angle.”
“What about Bodie Grant, the meth dealer from Raytown?”
“Disappeared. We’ve questioned his people. They think he’s dead. If he is, I’d say we’re in the middle of an epidemic of dead drug dealers.”
“I’d still look for something that ties Latrell to Javy Ordonez.”
“I will,” she said with a laugh, “but I won’t tell Troy you made the suggestion.”
“Latrell wants me to call him, I’ll need his phone number.”
“He said his number was unlisted, and if I wouldn’t give him your number, why should he give me his number? So I asked him how you were supposed to get in touch with him and he said that you knew where he lived. Said you could drop by if you were interested. You interested, Jack?”
“Yeah, I think I am.”
Troy finished his call, snapping the cell phone shut. “We done here?” he asked Ammara.
“Yes, we are,” she said.
Chapter Forty-seven
I wasn’t one of those people who could compartmentalize his life, tucking each competing component into a sanitized clean room where it existed independently of everything else. My life was like a teenager’s room. Everything was scattered on the?oor and I was always tripping over something.
That’s the way it was with Wendy, Joy, Kate, and this case. I was consumed with finding Wendy, confused about my feelings for Joy and Kate, and haunted by the images of Keyshon and Kevin begging me not to forget them. It would have been easier to live my life in a straight line-one person, one problem at a time.
“Food first,” Kate said when I came inside and found her in the kitchen.
She had changed into faded jeans, a navy blue V-neck cotton sweater and a scruffy pair of Nikes. Her new outfit may not have been a slinky black dress, but the effect was the same-dazzling.
We ate quickly, neither of us suggesting that the wine would have gone better with the sea bass than the tap water we drank from plastic cups. We rinsed the dishes, left them in the sink, and set up shop on the kitchen table.
“Where do you want to start?” she asked.
“I need to know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth but I don’t have a portable polygraph.”
“The polygraph isn’t a lie catcher’s only mechanical option anymore. A lot of research is being done on deception. Some of it involves using an MRI scan of the brain to look for neurological changes associated with lying. The subject pushes a button to answer questions during the brain scan. The MRI picks up changes in brain activity that are associated with lying.”
“Does it work?”
“Some of the research suggests that it’s as effective as the polygraph, but that’s no great comfort if you ask me. The polygraph is limited because it depends on peripheral nervous system activity. Deception is a cognition event that is controlled by the central nervous system. The MRI research has shown an increase in prefrontal and parietal activity when someone lies, but I don’t thing a judge is going to admit the results into evidence any time soon.”
“I don’t see people lining up to lay down inside an MRI. It’s claustrophobic and noisy as hell. I’d think that would produce enough stress to skew any results you’d get.”
“Have you ever had an MRI?”
“Not since this morning. Wendy called her mother after she saw me shaking the other night when we didn’t have dinner. Joy set it up and she also got me an appointment with a neurologist on Monday.”
“What about the movement disorder clinic at the KU Hospital?”
“They were happy to see me in two months. I didn’t mind waiting, but Joy did.”
Kate studied me with the bar-code scanning eyes I’d seen her use in the courtroom, her lids three-quarters open, pinched at the corners, her face?at with concentration. It was like she had X-ray vision into my soul. I imagined a torrent of micro expressions?ashing across my face like the ticker at the bottom of the screen on CNN. She leaned forward at the table, her chin in her hand, straightening up when she’d seen what she was looking for.
“You’ve got a lot on your plate, don’t you, Jack?”
“More than I asked for.”
“Well, you don’t have a portable polygraph or a portable MRI, which leaves you with me.”
“I could do worse.”
“Yes, you could. A lot worse.”
We let it hang there, both of us clear what we were talking about, neither willing to push it.
“Two things,” she said, rubbing her palms on her thighs and filling the dead air. “First, the Facial Action Coding System is not a silver bullet and, second, you’re probably better at reading faces than you give yourself credit for.”