“We only recovered two sets of prints at the scene,” he said. “One from the victim. And one from that guy you worked with — Joe Tesla. That’s not been released to the press, but his lawyer knows, so I imagine that you already do, too.”
She lengthened her stride, as if she could run away from that truth. Dirk kept pace easily. “Is that so?”
Dirk ran on without saying anything else.
“What’s the CIA doing?” she asked.
“Why would they be doing anything?”
“I met two of them yesterday at Tesla’s house, and I thought I saw a couple of them up in the concourse, too.”
Dirk slipped on an icy patch, and she caught his arm. “Dirk?”
“I don’t know what the CIA wants with him. We want him for questioning about the murder of the homeless man in the tunnels.”
Ronald Raines, she wanted to say, but didn’t.
“They seem to think he’s got classified information,” Dirk said.
“Doesn’t his company work with them all the time? I imagine he has a security clearance. A pretty high one.”
Dirk nodded. “That’s been bugging me, too. You’d think he’d be in the CIA’s pocket already, and I can’t figure out what contact he’d have with some random homeless guy that would interest them. But they are very interested. Do you know why?”
“I don’t,” she said. “You know I’d tell you if I could.”
“When would that be?” he asked. “We both know he’s a client of yours.”
“If he weren’t, then,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t know. Why don’t you guys ask him?”
“He’s lawyered up. They say he can’t be reached. He can’t even be found.”
That part was probably true.
“Why’d he do something like that?” Dirk asked.
“Go to ground?” She dodged a slow jogger lost in the music of his MP3 player. “He’s terrified that he’d have to go outside, that you guys will make him leave the hotel for questioning. Remember that article I showed you?”
“Jail’s inside,” Dirk said.
She thought of her mother’s name on Joe’s email.
“If he did it,” she said, “then you ought to put him there.”
Chapter 18
Joe couldn’t stay much longer, but he didn’t know where else to go. He paced from one end of the small locker room to the other, closed laptop under his arm. Edison didn’t bother to pace with him this time. He had curled up on a pile of dirty towels to sleep. He’d clearly had a rough night, too.
Joe knew he had to act fast, but he didn’t know why. Rebar had told him that something big was due to happen by the end of the month, and that was the day after tomorrow. Obviously, something more important than Rebar’s life, and Joe’s.
He hadn’t found out anything about Ronald Raines that might indicate why he’d been murdered, much less why the CIA cared.
The information Joe had uncovered about mysterious deaths in Guantanamo Bay might be related. A few days after Rebar had been reported AWOL, one hundred and two soldiers and a doctor were lost at sea when the ship they were on went down halfway between Cuba and Florida. Pretty suspicious, but the Navy had done only a cursory investigation, blaming freak weather conditions. He’d checked weather satellite data for the period in question, confirming the weather had been calm and clear the night the ship was lost. It looked to him as if the boat had been sunk on purpose.
Had Rebar been involved in their deaths? Had he killed them?
Joe leaned against the wall and made a VoIP call on his computer to the number he’d memorized from Rebar’s file. The call might be traceable, but it wouldn’t be easy.
He settled headphones over his ears and listened to it ring once (cyan) and twice (blue).
“Raines,” said a woman’s voice. She sounded so tired and defeated that he almost hung up. He hated to worry her further.
“Good morning, Mrs. Raines.” He introduced himself and lied about being from the Navy. “Have you had any word from your son, Ronald?”
“Have you?” She coughed into the phone, a deep, retching hack. A smoker.
He didn’t dare tell her the truth. “I’d like to go over some facts in his file, ma’am.”
“Why?” she wheezed.
“The file doesn’t seem to support what Specialist Raines’s fellow soldiers had to say about him.” He had no idea if that was true, but it seemed like a good starting point.
“What’d they say?” She didn’t sound worried that anyone would say anything bad about her Ronald, and Joe wondered what he might have been like before the events in Guantanamo Bay.
She was asking more questions than he was.
“What would you like to tell me about him?” he asked.
“Ron’s a good boy,” she said. “Smart. Tough. He always wanted to be a soldier like his father, God bless him.”
“I see.” He kept his voice pitched low.
“He never would have gone AWOL. Never. That’s a mistake.”
“His file says—”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “And I know him better than you do.”
Joe couldn’t argue with that. “What do you think he did?”
“I think he’s on some kind of special mission, undercover, and that once he’s done they’ll clear his name and let him come home.” She coughed as if to underline her point.
He wished, for her sake, that she had been correct about the last part. “I see.”
She laughed bitterly. “I know you can’t tell me even if you do know, which you probably don’t.”
“When did you last hear from him?”
“He called a couple of months ago, like I told the last investigator I talked to.”
Last investigator? “How did he seem when he spoke to you?”
She hesitated. “He said that he wasn’t feeling well and that he had an important mission, but not to worry about him. So, I’m not.”
Why the pause before answering? “Did he say anything specific about the nature of his mission, ma’am?”
“Of course he didn’t.” She sounded offended by the question.
After a few more minutes of trying, he gave up on getting any other information out of her. He thanked her for her time and closed the connection.
The only thing he’d learned was that Rebar thought he was sick, and that didn’t seem relevant. Maybe it was. Joe’s suspicions of an infectious disease could be right. That might explain why the monkey was there — it could have been a long-ago test subject.
If that was the case, the cops weren’t after him to arrest him — they were after him to quarantine him.
He’d have to turn himself in.
Maybe he was wrong. How could a pathogen live seventy years bricked in underground? The longest-living spore that he could think of was anthrax, and that lived only fifty years in the soil. Even if the men in the train car had been infected, they couldn’t have infected Rebar after all that time.
No. Rebar had been sick before he’d broken through the wall.
Still, it might be worth checking to see if the cops were treating the scene as if it were biologically contaminated.
Just because he hadn’t caught anything from the people in the car didn’t mean he hadn’t caught anything from Rebar. If he had, he’d walked, potentially infected, through a giant crowd of people just to get here. He needed to get away from people until he knew more — a self-imposed quarantine. He snorted. That described his current life, more or less, anyway.
The risks were low that he’d caught anything. Joe was basically paranoid about the world, so he knew a lot about disease vectors. There weren’t many strictly airborne diseases — fewer than five (brown) — so it was statistically very unlikely that this one was airborne. He’d had no direct contact with Rebar. He was probably fine and, even if he wasn’t, it was improbable he’d infected anyone else. Everything was fine.