Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,104
to the basement to find Tom Miller.
He’s with an elderly patient, working on some kind of squatting exercise. He sees me and nods, gently helps the man into an upright position, and excuses himself. “Everything okay?” he asks me.
“The patients here,” I say. “The people who Lieutenant Wagner preached to about politics.”
“His disciples, sure,” Tom says.
“Right,” I say. “Were any of them named Petty?”
104
“SORRY AGAIN that I kept you waiting,” Books says to the delivery guy as he’s leaving. He watches the man drive the truck out of the alley, then closes the heavy back door and stands in the back room of his bookstore looking at the gigantic crate of new releases.
The thought of unloading them and switching out inventory makes him feel more exhausted than he already is. “Am I fighting an uphill battle?” he whispers to himself. The store’s basically a one-man operation now, his finances squeezed so tight he can scarcely afford even part-time employees.
Well, there’s Petty, whom he doesn’t even have to pay, although he compensates him by letting him stay here. But even Petty doesn’t come every day. Books just doesn’t have enough help.
He checks his phone. He felt a vibration a few minutes ago but he had his hands full. It’s Emmy, as he suspected. He calls her back.
“Oh, good, you’re okay,” she says.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay? What’s wrong?”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah, I am. Where are—”
“Petty’s not there?”
“Sergeant Petty? No, he’s not here. Why?”
“I—I think Petty might be our guy.”
“Petty might be…what guy?”
“Our guy, Books,” she says. “I think Petty might be Darwin.”
“What?” Books chuckles. “Not Wagner?”
“Not Wagner. Listen, they just opened the storage shed,” she says. She tells him about finding Wagner’s van inside, about the U.S. Army seal painted on its roof, and about how that doesn’t match the roof of the van they saw on the Chicago POD cameras.
“Okay, so Wagner had two vans,” he says. “One was registered in his name, the other wasn’t. That’s the one he used for his crimes, and now he’s using it as his getaway vehicle. He probably kept the getaway van in the storage shed. He dumped the one registered to him, because he knew we’d be hunting for it, and drove off in the one we aren’t looking for.”
“That’s what Elizabeth said. That’s exactly what she said.”
“But you don’t think so?”
He hears Emmy heave one of her patented sighs. “He left all his clothes inside,” she says. “What kind of getaway is that?”
“A rushed one, I guess.”
“He leaves behind over a hundred thousand dollars in cash in his apartment. Cash, Books. This guy’s on the run. He’s a fugitive. He can’t use credit cards. Cash is his lifeblood. He took the time to empty out his drawers so he could bring along socks and underwear. He pulled clothes out of his closet and dragged out storage files—but he leaves behind all that cash?”
“He left behind the Taser too. And the Garfield watch.”
“Right, and that’s weird too. He sticks the Taser under his bed. Like we won’t find that? Like we won’t look under his bed?”
“And the watch in his garbage outside…”
“Yeah, it looks like he’s trying to hide it. But didn’t you say trash is one of the first things you search? It’s a treasure trove, you said.”
Right, he did say that. “What’s your point, Emmy?”
“My point is our supposed criminal mastermind, our evil genius, forgot to take a boatload of cash that could have kept him afloat for years on the run. His socks and underwear and shirts and pants were apparently more important than a hundred grand in cash, but then he left the clothes behind in the storage shed too. Oh, and what else does he leave at his apartment? Highly incriminating evidence—the Taser, the watch—that he made only the feeblest of attempts to hide.”
“You’re saying…” Books pushes his hair off his forehead, letting this wash over him.
“Wagner is a patsy,” she says. “He was set up to take the fall.”
“Dead, I assume. Darwin made it look like Wagner escaped. He killed Wagner and took away his clothes, toiletries, whatever, so it would seem like Wagner fled.”
“And he didn’t take the hundred grand in cash…”
“Because he didn’t know it was there, Books. It wasn’t his apartment. It wasn’t his money. He didn’t know Wagner was using the bottom drawer of his stove as a piggy bank. He just grabbed the obvious stuff—clothes, toiletries, some boxes full of personal information—to make it look like