Speaking in Tongues (25 page)

Tate glanced at the phone.

Jimmy shook his head. “No.”

“What do you want?”

“Mr. Sharpe sent me.”

Figured that.

The gun was really very large. The man’s finger wasn’t on the trigger; it was outside of the guard. This didn’t reassure Tate at all.

“I have something for you to look at.”

“Look at?”

“I’m going to give it to you to look at. Then I’m going to take it back. And neither me or Mr. Sharpe’ll ever admit we know what you’re talking about if you ever mention it. You understand?”

Tate didn’t understand a thing. But he said, “Sure. Say, is that loaded?”

Jimmy didn’t respond. From the pocket of his leather jacket he took a videocassette. Set it on the table. Backed up. Nodded toward it. Tate walked over, picked it up. “I should play it?”

Jimmy’s face scrunched up impatiently.

Tate put the cassette in the player and fiddled with the controls until the tape started to play. The scene on the TV showed a building, some bushes. The date and time stamp revealed that it had been made that morning, at nine forty-two. He didn’t recognize where. The tape jumped ahead four minutes; now whoever was making the tape was driving, following another car down a suburban street. Tate recognized the car being followed. It was Megan’s Tempo. Because of the rain he couldn’t make out who was driving.

“Where did you get this?” Tate demanded.

“Watch, don’t talk,” Jimmy muttered. The gun was pointed directly at Tate’s back.

Another jump on the tape. To nine-fifty that morning. Tate recognized the Vienna Metro station. The man taping—of course, one of the private eyes hired by Sharpe, despite his protests to the contrary—must have been afraid of getting too close to his subject. He was about fifty yards away and shooting through the mist and rain. Megan’s car stopped at a row filled with other cars. There was a pause and then motion. After a moment he caught a glimpse of someone. A white man, it seemed, wearing a dark jacket, though he couldn’t be sure. Tate could see no distinguishing features. Then there was more motion. Finally a gray Mercedes pulled out of a space and a moment later Megan’s car eased into where the Merce had been. At 10:01 the Mercedes sped out of the lot.

The tape went fuzzy. Then black.

Tate stared, his heart pounding. Thinking of the vague motion he’d seen—pixels of light on the screen,
distorted to start with, more distorted in the rain and fog. But he believed it might have been the man lifting a heavy object from the trunk of Megan’s car and putting it into the Mercedes. An object about the size of a human body.

“That’s all,” Jimmy said. “Could you eject it?”

Tate did. “Did he see anything else?” he asked.

“Who?” Jimmy asked.

“You know who. The private eye. Can I talk to him? Please?”

Jimmy nodded at the table. “If you could just set the tape there and back up.”

Tate did. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer. This was as far as Sharpe was willing to go. But he asked one more question. “Why did he show this to me? He didn’t have to.”

Jimmy pocketed the cassette, gun still held steadily at Tate. He backed to the door. “Mr. Sharpe asked me just to mention the old adage that one good deed deserves another. He hopes you’ll remember that next Thursday at the argument down in Richmond.”

“Look—”

“He said he didn’t think you’d agree. He just asked me to mention it.”

Jimmy walked to the sliding door, through which he’d apparently entered. He paused. “The answer to your question? I myself would guess it’s because he’s got two daughters of his own. Good night.”

After he’d gone Tate drained his wineglass with a shaking hand and picked up the phone and dialed a number.

When Konnie answered Tate said, “Got a lead.”

“Asking or telling?”

“Telling.”

“Go on.”

“Long story. That case with Sharpe?”

“Right.”

Tate said, “It wasn’t just me he had a PI tailing. It was Megan too.”

“Why? Dig up dirt?”

“That’s my guess. Lawyer’s daughter scores drugs. Sleeps around. Something like that. Anyway, a friend of his just showed me a tape.” Tate described it.

“Hot damn. Get it over here—”

“Forget it. It’s been atomized. But I think it was Megan the perp was moving from one trunk to another. She was probably drugged.” Tate prayed the girl had merely been unconscious.

“Tags?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“Damn, Tate. Why’d you think they put those cute little signs on cars?” After a pause Konnie continued. “Okay. So—you don’t think it’s Sharpe?”

“He didn’t have to show me diddly. He didn’t even bargain—well, not too hard. You know, throw the case and I’ll tell you what the PI saw. He could’ve done that.”

“Would you’ve agreed?”

Tate didn’t hesitate for an instant. “Yes, I would have.”

“Okay, so it’s not Sharpe. Then let’s think. She’s got a stalker after her. He’s checking out her routine. Following her. When she goes to school, when she goes to pom-pom practice.”

Tate tried to picture Megan as a cheerleader. “As if.”

“He knows where she’s going to be this morning. He gets her, drugs her, drives her to Vienna, where he’s left his own car. He’s got to switch wheels. The Mercedes.”

“Right.”

“Leaves her car with the timetable. So it looks like she’s headed off on Amtrak . . . He took off to wherever he was going to stash her. Which means what, Counselor?” Tate couldn’t think.

When he said nothing Konnie gave a harsh laugh. “Damn, I’d forgot how I had to hold your hand when we were putting all those bad guys away. What’s sitting right
under
her car at the moment?”

“Tread marks! The Mercedes’s tread marks.”

“There’s hope for you after all, boy—if you apply yourself and work real hard. Okay, Counselor, this’s gonna take some time. Listen, you sit tight and have some nice hot mashed potatoes. And think of me when you eat ’em.”

•   •   •

Konnie Konstantinatis’s first lesson in police work was to watch his father fool the tax men like ’coons tricking hounds.

The old Greek immigrant was petty, weak, dangerous, a cross between a squirrel and a ferret. He was a born liar and had an instinct for knowing human nature cold. He put stills next to smokehouses, stills next to factories, stills in boats, disguised them like henhouses. Hid his income in a hundred small businesses. Once he smooth-talked a revenuer into arresting Konnie’s father’s own innocent brother-in-law
instead of him and swore an oath at the trial that cost the bewildered man two years of his life.

So from the age of five or six Konnie had observed his father and had learned the art of evasion and deception. And therefore he’d learned the art of seeing through deceit.

This was a skill to be practiced slowly and tediously. And this was how he was going to find the man who’d kidnapped Tate Collier’s daughter.

Konnie arranged for a small crane to lift Megan’s car out of its spot, rather than drive it out and risk obliterating the Merce’s tread marks.

He then spent the next two hours taking electrostatic prints of the twelve tire treads that he could isolate and differentiate—ones he determined weren’t from Megan’s car. He then identified the matching left and right tires and measured wheelbases and lengths of the cars they’d come from. He jotted all this, in lyrical handwriting, into a battered leather notebook.

He then went over the entire parking space with a Dustbuster and—hunched in the front seat of his car—looked over all the trace evidence picked up in the paper filter. Most of it was nothing more than dust and meaningless without laboratory analysis. But Konnie found one obvious clue: a single fiber that came from cheap rope. He recognized it because in one of the three kidnapping cases he’d worked over the past ten years the victim’s hands had been bound with rope that shed fibers just like this.

Speeding back to the office, the detective sat down at his computer and ran the wheel dimensions through the motor vehicle specification database. One set of
numbers perfectly fit the dimensions for a Mercedes sedan.

He examined the electrostatic prints carefully. Flipping through
Burne’s Tire Identifier,
he concluded that they were a rare model of Michelin and because they showed virtually no wear he guessed the tires were no more than three or four months old. Encouraging, on the one hand, because they were unusual tires and it would be easier to track down the purchaser. But troubling too. Because they were expensive, as was the model of the car the man was driving. It was therefore likely that the perp was intelligent, which suggested he was an organized offender—the hardest to find.

And the sort of criminal that presented the most danger.

Konnie then started canvassing. It was Saturday evening and although most of the tire outlets were still open—General Tire, Sears, Merchants, Mercedes dealerships—the managers had gone home. But nothing as trivial as this stopped Konnie. He blustered and bullied until he had the names and home phone numbers of night staff managers of the stores’ recordkeeping and data-processing departments.

He made thirty-eight phone calls and by the time he hung up from speaking with the last parts department manager on his list, faxes of bills of sale were starting to roll into police headquarters.

But the information wasn’t as helpful as he’d hoped. Most of the sales receipts included the manufacturer of the customer’s car and the tag number. Some had the model number but virtually
none had the color. The list kept growing. After an hour he had copies of 142 records of the sales of that model of Michelin in the past twelve months to people who owned Mercedeses.

He looked over the discouragingly lengthy list of names.

Standard procedure was to run the names through the outstanding warrants/prior arrests database. But a net like that didn’t seem to be the sort that would catch this perp—he wasn’t a chronic ’jacker or a shooter with a long history of crime. Still, Konnie was a cop who dotted his
i
’s and he handed the stack to Genie. “You know what to do, darling.”

“It’s seven forty-two on a Saturday night, boss,” the assistant pointed out.

“You
had dinner at least.”

“Lemme tell you something, Konnie,” the huge woman said, nodding at the KFC bags. “Throw those out. They’re starting to stink.”

Dutifully, he did. As he returned to his desk he grabbed his ringing phone.

“ ’Lo?”

“Detective Konstantinatis, please?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Special Agent McComb with the FBI. Child Exploitation and Kidnapping Unit.”

“Sure, how you doin’?” Konnie’d worked with the unit occasionally. They were tireless and dedicated and top-notch.

“I’m doing a favor for my boss in Quantico. He asked me to take a look at the Megan McCall case. You’re involved in that, right?”

“Yup.”

“It’s not an active case for us but you know Tate Collier’s the girl’s father, right?”

“Know that.”

“Well, he did some pretty good work for us when he was a commonwealth’s attorney so I said I’d look into her disappearance. As a favor.”

“Just what I’m doing, more or less. But I’m gonna present it as an active case to my captain tonight.”

“Are you really?”

“Found some interesting forensics.” Konnie was thinking, Man, if I could turn the tire data over to the feds . . . the FBI has a whole
staff
of people who specialize in tires.

“That’s good to know. We ought to coordinate our approaches. Do some proactive thinking.”

“Sure.” Konnie’s thinking was: They might be the best cops in the world but feebies talk like assholes.

The agent said, “I’m up at Ernie’s, near the parkway. You know it?”

“Sure. It’s a half mile from me.”

“I was about to order dinner and was reading the file when I saw your name. Maybe I could come by in an hour or so. Or maybe—this might appeal to you, Officer—you might want to join me? Let Uncle Sam pick up the dinner tab.”

He paused for a moment. “Why not? Be there in ten minutes.”

“Good. Bring whatever you’ve got.”

“Will do.”

They hung up. Konnie stuck his head in Genie’s office, where she was looking over the warrants
and arrests request results. “Everything’s negative, Konnie.”

“Don’t worry. We got the feds on the case now.”

“My.”

He took the stack of faxed receipts from her desk, shoved them into his briefcase and headed out the door.

Konnie was feeling pretty good. Ernie’s served some great mashed potatoes.

Aaron Matthews sat at a booth in a dark corner of the restaurant, looking out the window at a tableau of heavy equipment, bright yellow in the dusk, squatting on a dirt hillside nearby.

This was an area that five years ago had been fields and was now rampantly overgrown with town houses and apartments and strip malls. Starbucks, Chesapeake Bagels, Linens ’n’ Things. Ernie’s restaurant fit in perfectly, an upscale franchise. Looked nice on the surface but beneath the veneer it was all formula. Matthews stirred as the waddling form of Detective Konstantinatis entered the restaurant and maneuvered through the tables.

Watching the man’s eyes, seeing where they slid—furtively, guiltily.

Always the eyes.
Matthews waved and Konstantinatis nodded and steered toward him. Matthews had no idea what official FBI identification looked like and wouldn’t have known how to fake some if he had but he’d dressed in a suit and white shirt—what he always wore when seeing patients—and had brought several dog-eared file folders, on which he’d printed
FBI PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL
with stencils
he’d made from office materials bought at Staples. These sat prominently in front of him.

He hoped for the best.

But after glancing at the files the detective merely scooted into the seat across from Matthews and shook his hand.

They made small talk for a few moments—Matthews using his best government-speak. Stiff, awkward. If the fake files hadn’t fooled the cop the stilted language surely would have.

The waitress came and they ordered. Matthews wasn’t surprised when the detective ordered milk with dinner. Matthews himself ordered a beer.