“I’ll call you back,” she said instead.
It took her under ten minutes, and she delivered the news in person, appearing at my door with a satisfied expression. “I guess I know why you’re still the boss.”
“Oh?”
“That inquiry from the sheriff was about an abandoned rental car near Stratton Mountain, left parked at the filling station just north of the access road. They’re asking if anyone’s reported it missing. So far, no one has.”
She let the significance of her last sentence sink in before raising her eyebrows. “Wanna go for a ride?”
Chapter 4
I waited until J.P. Tyler pulled his head out of the rental car’s trunk before breaking what I thought had been an extraordinarily gracious silence. Locked into a stuffy, windowless garage to ensure the integrity of a potential crime scene, Sammie and I had watched him powder, scratch, vacuum, and snip at almost every surface the car had to offer, receiving very little information for our patience.
As Sammie took another surreptitious glance at her oversized watch, however, I thought a break in the pattern was due.
“So, J.P., what’re we looking at? Good news?”
He was holding a plastic spray bottle in one hand, and a flashlight rigged with a dark red filter in the other. His expression read of slightly veiled irritation. He was not a man who enjoyed an audience.
“It’s got promise.”
He crossed over to a long workbench against the wall and exchanged what he was carrying for some nail scissors and a small evidence envelope. Sammie sighed but kept her peace.
I did not. J.P. had milked this as much as I was going to let him. Besides, I could tell from his barely perceptible smile that he felt he’d already won the game. He could afford to be magnanimous.
“So spit it out.”
He placed the scissors on the car’s bumper. “It’s no home run, but it’s better than what we had. I lifted several fingerprints from the interior, most of which look like they match our John Doe. That would make him the probable renter of the car, in my book. There are others, here and there-kind of in odd places, actually, which make me think they came from someone on the rental company’s cleaning crew. But that’s about it. The rest are smudges, which might’ve come from anyone. The nice thing is that what I got is very clear. Rentals are much better than regular cars that way-almost like clean blackboards, as far as fingerprints are concerned. Once we locate the franchise he got this from, we’ll check their time and personnel files, find out who cleaned it, and see if we can rule out the other prints.”
He then shrugged. “Unfortunately, that’s about it for the interior. I’ll run the dirt I found on the gas pedal by the crime lab, along with what I vacuumed from the seats, but I don’t expect much. And there was basically nothing else-no candy wrappers, no personal items, not even a road map. And,” he held up a finger, “no luggage. It’s almost like he drove the car a hundred feet and then abandoned it.”
“Or someone made it look that way,” Sammie added.
“Or he did himself,” I said, the visitors from the FBI still fresh in my mind.
They both looked at me.
I explained. “Nothing else about him seems normal. The suit, the belt knife, the tattoos, even the way he was killed. They’re all pretty weird. Why not the possibility that he cleaned out his own rental car before dumping it? The one thing we haven’t even bothered with so far is figuring out what someone like this was even doing here.”
Sammie chewed on that for a moment, and then asked J.P., “Was the steering wheel wiped clean?”
He shook his head dismissively. “No, but it didn’t need to be. Steering wheels are lousy for prints. Everything ends up smudged.”
He turned toward the trunk again. “Anyhow, none of that’s the really interesting part. I found bloodstains on the carpeting back here.”
I stood next to him and stared into the dark recesses of the immaculately empty trunk. “A lot?”
“Enough for analysis. I’ll send some clippings to the lab and have them cross-check the DNA with John Doe’s.”
I shook my head. “No. What I meant was the ME said his carotid had been cut, that he’d lost enough blood to affect lividity. If all that blood’s not here, it’s got to be somewhere else.”
J.P. nodded. “So we either have a seriously stained site somewhere, or a blanket or tarp that’s soaked in the stuff.”
We all stared at the car in silence. Finally-hopefully-I muttered, “Well, that’s something,” although none of us were entirely sure what that was.
That night, the bedroom was dark and empty. Gail was in her office at the end of the hall, nestled in an oversized armchair and surrounded by the stacks of paperwork that seemed to follow her like doting pets. Not that I was any better. I’d been doing some late-night homework myself.
I leaned over and kissed her forehead, jostling her reading glasses with my chin.
“Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Did you get hold of Walter?”
I’d told her of Walter Frazier’s visit to Hillstrom’s lab. I found a narrow clearing in the middle of a small couch opposite her and settled down. “Yeah. I thought I’d wait till after hours. I figured if the FBI was being coy, maybe he’d share a few secrets off the record. We’ve worked pretty well together before-he doesn’t play the Bureau’s usual game of excluding local law enforcement.”
She removed her glasses and polished them against her shirtfront. “And did he share?”
“Oh, yeah-no problem. I could’ve spared myself the cloak-and-dagger. He said it was standard practice for the Bureau to ride shotgun when another federal agency needs to fish in home waters without a license.”
She stopped polishing and looked at me closely, suddenly caught by the excitement I’d been stifling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I laughed, still incredulous about my discovery. “Remember Philpot? The guy I told you about? Turns out he’s CIA, dispatched from Boston on orders from Langley.”
Early the following morning, Ron Klesczewski stepped into my office with a single sheet of paper, which he laid on my desk.
“Just came in-the Logan Airport branch of that rental car company. We faxed ’em the John Doe photo, which they definitely matched, and they kicked this back. Interesting reading-mostly for what it doesn’t say.”
I sat forward and peered at the document under the light from my desk lamp. It was a rental application filled out in the name of Boris Malik. “Address: Paris; driver’s license: international, original issue Lebanon; company address: Moscow.”
I stopped reading and sat back. “Let’s follow this up-push whatever buttons you need to gain access to all passenger lists on international flights arriving at Logan in the three hours before he rented that car.”
The intercom buzzed and the dispatcher’s voice floated into the room. “Joe, you have a call on three-the caller wouldn’t leave his name.”
I punched the speakerphone on. “Hello?”
“Lieutenant Gunther?” The man’s tone was soft, almost sleepy.
“Yes.”
“Would you mind taking this call off the loudspeaker?”
I looked at Ron and motioned to him to pick up the phone on the desk just outside my office. I already had a sneaking suspicion who this might be-or at least where he was calling from.
At a nod from me, Ron and I lifted our receivers simultaneously. “This better?” I asked.
“Much-thank you. I assume you either have someone listening in or a tape recorder running. That’s not a problem. I just thought it might be more discreet not to have this conversation broadcast all over the station.”
I put my feet up on the desk. “What’s on your mind?”
“My name is Gil Snowden. I’m calling from Virginia about a John Doe you recently discovered.”