kill people but seriously, Judge, what in the hell did Stroudt and McCormick stumble onto in Kentucky that I didn’t see?”
“Perhaps whatever is in this backpack,” Shelby answered from the backseat. She sat up, sniffled and wiped away a tear with the back of her right hand and then unzipped the backpack that she and Wire had taken from McCormick’s.
The Judge’s cell phone rang and he looked at the display. “It’s Sally Kennedy.” He looked over to Wire and asked, “Should I answer?”
“Not yet, Judge. I need to think this through. Let’s see what’s in the backpack first.”
Shelby pulled out the laptop, which was still powered up but was at the password screen, something they didn’t have. “I can’t get into the laptop without the password,” she said. “We’ll need some help.”
“What else is there?” the Judge asked.
Shelby held up a cell phone.
“That’s a burner phone,” Wire said. “Cheap one he probably bought at a convenience store with a set number of hours. Is that the only one he had in there?”
Kate rummaged through the backpack and shook her head. “That’s the only phone.” She pulled out an Altoids tin and opened it up. Inside she found a SIM card. “I bet he kept his SIM card, though, for his contacts.”
“So I bet he dumped his cell phone because it had GPS,” Wire said. “So I wonder how they tracked him to St. Paul?” The cell phone had been the first thing she thought of.
“Perhaps they were sitting on Sebastian’s house?” the Judge offered.
“Maybe,” Wire answered skeptically. “I suppose they could have thought that if Stroudt’s intent was to come here and contact Sebastian, maybe Montgomery would try and do the same thing. But …”
“… That’s really betting on the come,” the Judge finished. “Montgomery could appear anywhere and if anything it would have been bucking the odds huge to think he’d follow Stroudt.”
“Perhaps that’s what Montgomery was thinking as well,” Wire added. “No, they tracked him in some other way. What else is in the backpack?”
Shelby pulled out a camera, an Olympus. “Maybe this will tell us what they saw.”
“Let me see,” Wire answered. She took the camera from Shelby, turned it on and started looking through the photos. “These are definitely from Hitch’s cabin in Kentucky,” she reported. “They were in the position I wanted to take pictures from.”
The Judge leaned over, “There’s Connolly walking in,” he said with disgust. “That bastard, I’m going to fry his ass if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Who is this man?” Wire asked, pointing to a rotund balding man in a black suit coat and white dress shirt.
“I don’t recognize him,” the Judge answered and then pointed to another man on the right hand side of the picture. “How about this guy?” Dixon pointed to a younger blondish man, holding something up in his hand while standing by a silver metal briefcase.
“Don’t know who that is, Judge,” Wire answered. “I only know Connolly.”
There was a fourth man in the photos, besides security. “How about the Prince of Darkness here?” The Judge pointed at a man dressed in all black including a black fedora. Wire scrolled through the photos but there was never a good picture of the man. His head was always either tilted down or he was standing in the shadows. “I can only make out part of his face,” the Judge said, pulling the camera close to his eyes. Then he handed it back to Wire. “Advance through the photos, Dara, see if we can get another look at him.”
“I remember the guy,” Wire answered. “If only because I never got a good picture of him myself in all of the chaos when people were running out of the back of the cabin and I rolled video and took pictures. The ones I took of him didn’t show much.”
Wire advanced through all of the photos but there was never a clear picture of the man’s face, only partial profiles or even shots of his back but never a straight on photo. The man was always in the shadows, behind everyone, his hat pulled down over his eyes. It didn’t help that Montgomery never seemed to focus on the man. Instead he was focused on Connolly and the rotund bald man.
Dara got to the last picture in the roll.
“What’s that a picture of?” Dixon asked. It looked like a limousine in the distance with a man opening the door.
Wire glanced at the photo. “I’d kind of forgotten about this. There