"What? Serving meatballs to Lady and the Tramp?"
"Very funny, Rack. Move it."
Krindon trailed behind them as they headed to the security station. The guard looked up from a roast beef sandwich, a line of mayo fringing his mustache. As Tim explained their purpose, the guard's eyes took in the three displayed badges, then came to rest on Krindon's waiter's apron. His forehead wrinkled. "The fuck is this?"
"He's with us."
The guard tossed a clipboard down on the brief counter. "He's gotta sign in. You all gotta sign in."
"He's a freelance consultant," Tim said. "He doesn't sign."
From the warped radio on the counter, an AM deejay, revved up on caffeine and zealotry, ranted about Syria's weapons of mass destruction. The guard folded his arms and leaned back on his stool. "Can't let him in if he doesn't sign."
Krindon leaned forward and scribbled on the form. As he drew back, Tim read the cursive scrawclass="underline" Herbert Hoover.
"All set?"
The guard's glance lifted from the signature to Tim's face. Then he broke eye contact with an it's-not-worth-it expression of disgust and waved them through.
They found Uncle Pete's Lexus in a dark back corner. Locked.
Tim, Bear, and Guerrera debated who would have to go back to retrieve the keys from the irritable guard, but then they heard the door click open, and Krindon returned a decoding transmitter to his pocket and slid into the driver's seat. The car had been towed, the front seat still way back to accommodate Uncle Pete's girth, so Krindon had plenty of room to maneuver. He tugged up the leg of his formalwear, revealing a slim jim tucked into a garter. He angled the thin metal bar beneath the box of the navigation system, then pulled a corkscrew from his apron and used it for leverage.
The unit was well ensconced. After some directed jiggling, Krindon paused to wipe his brow. "I can usually get you down within a two-block radius. These nav systems are on satellite networks, so they trip sites like mobile phones or wireless modems. Same Orwellian shit."
Guerrera said, "So anyone can find out where a car's been?"
"No, not anyone." Krindon made an angry noise and turned back to the navigation system. "Nothing's ever truly deleted in a computer system. Only the pointers to the data get wiped out. But that data's in there. You just have to know how to find it. And to know how to find it…well, you have to be me." He jiggled the unit, and it finally gave, sliding into his lap. "So you want to trace Uncle Pete's footsteps. What are you looking for? A crash pad?"
"Or a safe house, a hangout, a business front, a meth lab," Tim said. "Anywhere Den Laurey could be laying his head in a back room. He's a little too recognizable right now to check in to a Best Western."
"How far back you want me to go?"
"Give us the last six months."
"Den Laurey's prison break was only six days ago."
"But this is Uncle Pete's car. I doubt he's visited Den since the prison break-I'm just hoping we can put together a list of Sinner-friendly locations and go from there."
Krindon tucked the nav unit under his arm and closed the car door behind him.
Guerrera said, "We'd better lock the door agai-"
Krindon's hand tensed in his pocket, and the Lexus's locks clicked. He turned and walked away, his shadow stretched long in the dim light. Over his shoulder he said, "I'll be in touch."
Chapter 63
Though he doubted that Den would be dumb enough to play Hollywood stalker, Tim entered his house cautiously and safed each room, then double-locked the doors and closed the blinds. He kept the lights off.
He called Smiles and Malane and filled them in, coordinating activities for the morning. He hoped they'd be able to come up with enough leads to construct a new game plan.
The answering machine was maxed out. After the seventh media call, Tim pressed the "erase" button and held it down. When the case settled, he'd change the number. Again.
He opened the refrigerator door, grimacing against the waft of spoiled food. He cleaned it out, throwing away the perishables, and returned to see what he was left with. An onion, a jar of jalapeno mustard, a bottle of Newman's Own, two strawberry Crushes, and one turkey Lunchable.
He arranged the Crush and the turkey crackers on the silver tray as he had for Dray the night before her encounter with Den Laurey, then stood in the dark kitchen, unsure where to take himself. The TV's light would broadcast that he was home, so he ate at the kitchen table in the dark. Though he was accustomed to eating alone when Dray worked P.M. shifts, the new reality of his home life made even this simple activity a painful one. His mood grew heavy; it became evident why he'd spent virtually no time at home since Dray was shot. If he kept moving, he didn't feel as keenly. But now, with the trails gone cold and Pete Krindon working the sole lead on a freelancer's schedule, he had no choice but to be still. A childish longing struck him, but he knew that sleeping beside her at the hospital would be nothing more than an addictive falsehood.
At least half of Tim's child-size meal wound up in the trash. On his walk down the hall, he paused outside the nursery and, without looking over, pulled the door closed. In the bedroom he picked up Dray's sweats, folded them neatly, and set them on a shelf on her side of their shared closet. Each of her outfits, filled out by a hanger and gravity, matched an evening out, a mood, a mental snapshot. Navy blue button-up with a ketchup stain on the right sleeve-Dray pouty after consecutive gutter balls, drinking Bud from a bottle shaped like a bowling pin. Morro Bay sweatshirt-a pre-stirrups grimace before her last OB checkup two weeks ago. Yellow dress with tiny blue flowers-the first night they'd met, at a fireman's charity. She'd worn it again the morning she'd come to meet him at the courthouse to take him home.
An empty house and a full closet were only part of what Den Laurey had left in his wake, but Tim felt it as an utter and profound devastation. Marisol Juarez's grandmother, knocking around her tiny apartment by the dim light of her Advent candles, felt her granddaughter's absence the same way. We'll do our best, Tim had promised her, and Marisol had wound up split open on a warehouse floor. Her death had been a matter of timing and chance, just as countless variables had aligned to land the pellet at the back of Dray's rib cage. He wondered how, if he had to, he'd wrap his mind around the loss of his wife. If he'd learned one thing from Ginny's death, it was that-despite all certainty to the contrary-he'd persist. Like the Northern Alliance fighter he'd seen through the blaze of the midday Kandahar sun, stumbling along a treeless ridge with blood streaming from both ears, carrying his own severed arm. He'd be separated from himself, diminished, but he'd stagger on.
He slid into bed, occupying only his half. His exhaustion was overpowering. He had only a moment to be thankful for that petty mercy before slipping into sleep.
When he woke up six hours later, a stack of computer printouts was waiting on the foot of his bed.
Chapter 64
Tim had entered the squad room carrying the pages triumphantly. His energy proved contagious, and virtually all the other deputies had pulled chairs around his desk to dig back into the case. In the printouts Krindon had broken down the Lexus's headings into five-minute snapshots, yielding a profusion of numbers, but still it took maps, a military GPS computer program, and trial-and-error strategy to evaluate the data. In some places Krindon had pegged the area to within a hundred feet, in others within a few blocks. Not until lunch did they start connecting the dots to figure out travel routes, which they then harmonized with the street maps and traced with red pens. Tim Sharpie-marked as potential destinations anywhere that no movement was recorded between snapshots, but this assumption didn't account for traffic and was further complicated by the fact that satellite towers were not closely spaced in rural areas.