“Don’t!”Loomis shouted.
IT ALL HAPPENEDso fast that later none of the agents or detectives could reconstruct it in proper sequence. It was rather like one of those movies directed by someone fresh out of film school, with jump cuts and flash forwards and four or five stories unreeling at the same time.
The first story was Barney Loomis wetting his pants the moment all those guns opened fire. Actually, there was only one gun at first, and it was in the right hand of Detective-Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran and he opened fire the moment the two men got out of what he now could see was a green Montana, and climbed into the black town car waiting at the curb in front of Grace Wagner. The Lincoln’s engine roared into life an instant later, and the car pulled away from the curb just as its rear window slid down and a second gun opened up, a rifle this time spewing automatic fire, which is when Loomis wet his pants because he could actually hear bullets whizzing past his right ear.
The two Mercurys came around the corner at that very moment, Endicott and Lonigan in the lead car, Feingold and Jones in the second. Corcoran had sprinted to the curb by then, and was flagging down the blue Merc. Loomis had thrown himself flat to the ground the way he’d seen them do in better movies than this one, even though there were no bullets flying at the moment.
At the moment, in fact, and even before Corcoran jumped into the blue Merc like somebody about to yell “Follow that car!” the black Lincoln Town car had raced out of sight like theEnterprise zooming off into a star-filled void.
Where it was zooming off to was a spot a mile away, where they had parked the very last of the stolen cars.
THEY HAD LEFT8412 Winston Road in Calm’s Point at seven-thirty, had encountered heavy traffic coming over the bridge, and did not get back to the squadroom till a minute past eight. A minute after that, Carella was calling the number he had for telephone company Special Assistance.
The Joint Task Force’s hi-tech triangulation had ended in something like strangulation, and their Trap-and-Trace routine had proved futile in the face of stolen and disposable cell phones. So it got down to a weary detective sitting behind a cigarette-scarred desk in a grimy squadroom making a good old-fashioned phone call. In many ways the good old telephone company was always reliable if not always courteous. Even dealing with a so-called Special Operator assigned to helping law enforcement agencies working so-called important cases, the civility level was barely acceptable.
“Here’s what we’re looking for,” Carella told a woman named Miss Young. She had no first name. Just Miss Young. “We’ve got an Avery Hanes living at 8412 Winston Road in Calm’s Point, for the year prior to this April first. And we’ve got…”
“Was that Winston as in Winston cigarettes?” Miss Young asked.
“As in Winston Churchill, yes,” Carella said. “And we’ve got a man named Calvin Wilkins, living at 379 Parrish Place in Calm’s Point, from just before Thanksgiving to around the same time, April first. That’s Parrish with a double-R.”
“And what is it you’re seeking, Detective?”
“List of phone calls made from each of those numbers in March. I want phone numbers, names and addresses.”
“You’ll need a court order for that.”
“That’s not my understanding. We’re not looking to put a pen register on those lines. In fact, the numbers are probably no longer in service. All I want is the numbers called and the names and addresses of the parties called. I’m sure you have those. If for billing purposes alone.”
“It’s my understanding that a court order…”
“Miss, we’re dealing with a kidnapping here. Any assistance you can give us…”
“One moment, please,” Miss Young said.
Carella waited.
“Miss Cole,” another voice said. “How may I help you, sir?”
Carella told her how she might help him.
“We’ll need a court order for that,” she said.
“There’s a certain urgency here,” Carella said.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said, and hung up.
It was now five minutes past eight. It would take him forty minutes to get downtown and another forty minutes to shake a judge out of a tree at that hour. By then, Tamar Valparaiso might be dead. He picked up the phone and dialed the number he had for the Joint Task Force downtown.
“Task Force,” a voice said.
“This is Carella,” he said. “Who’s this?”
“Special Agent Jakes.”
“I need some help, Jakes.”
THEY PULLED THELincoln in alongside and slightly to the rear of the Grand Cherokee Laredo they’d parked there earlier today. Cal threw up the hood of the Jeep and jump-started the vehicle. They were on their way again in three minutes flat, leaving the Lincoln with the key in the ignition in a neighborhood where “Your Money or Your Life” was a nursery rhyme. Avery figured if they had a little luck with traffic, they’d be at the beach house in half an hour or so. Then they’d return the girl and that was that.
End of story.
They never once considered the fact that an armed and dangerous person was in that house, and she was only twenty-four years old, and she had never in her life fired an AK-47.
“DETECTIVECarella?”
“Yes?”
“This is Miss Cole again.”
Carella looked at the clock on the squadroom wall. The time was eight-fifteen.
“I just got a call from an FBI agent named Randall Jakes,” Miss Cole said. “He faxed me a copy of a court order that would seem to cover the request you made. Do you have a fax machine there?”
He gave her the fax number.
Five minutes later, he had on his desk two separate lists of the calls Avery Hanes and Calvin Wilkins had made from their respective telephones during the month of March. Not surprisingly, many of the calls had been from Hanes to Wilkins or vice versa. From Wilkins’ number, there were half a dozen calls to Air Jamaica and American Airlines. From Hanes’ number there were a dozen or more calls to American, British Air, Virgin Atlantic, Delta, and Air France. There were calls to Capshaw Boats, the marina from which they’d rented the Rinker presumably used in the kidnapping. There were calls to a person named Benjamin Lu, whoever he might turn out to be. Almost every day in March, Hanes had called a party listed only as “Unpublished.” An asterisk at the top of the page explained: “AT THE CUSTOMER’S REQUEST, THIS NUMBER IS UNPUBLISHED.” In the month of March, Hanes had also made seven calls to a real estate agent in Russell County.
Carella pulled the phone to him and began dialing again.
BY EIGHT-TWENTY-SEVEN, he had dialed the number for Margaret Holmes Realty twice, on the off chance she’d been down the hall the first time. Concluding that she was closed for business at this hour, he dialed Information and told the operator he wanted a residential listing for a Margaret Holmes, as in Sherlock Holmes, in the town of South Beach, which was where the real estate office was located. The operator came back to say she had no listing under that name. He asked her to try all the towns in Russell County, and she said she couldn’t do that, she needed a specific town. He told her he was a police officer investigating a kidnapping, and she asked him to wait while she put a supervisor on the line. The supervisor told him he had to have a specific town, did he know how many towns there were in Russell County? It was eighty-thirty-three when Carella once again dialed the number he had for Special Assistance and asked for Miss Cole.
“I alreadyfaxed you those numbers,” she said. “Didn’t you get them?”