the alley, remember?”
I forgot all about that. “Perfect. Petty came in through the back door today, right?”
“He did.”
We drive to Alexandria and he slows the car as we approach the rear of the store. “The last time we came here,” says Books, “I told you to be careful, that you never knew where Darwin might be. Remember how you pooh-poohed that?”
“I’m not pooh-poohing it now,” I say. “No pooh-poohing. Negative on pooh-poohing.”
We pull into the alley. The security camera looks down on us as we enter the store. Books draws his weapon just in case. It’s dark inside, so Books flicks on the light immediately. Rear inventory room, empty. The remainder of the store, Books quickly confirms, also empty.
“Okay.” He goes to work on the video equipment, pulling up yesterday’s video, stopping where it showed Petty hobbling down the alley, his heavy bag over his shoulder. Books downloads the video onto a DVD and hands it to me.
“Keep it safe,” he says. “With any luck, we’ll know a lot more about Petty tomorrow. We may even find him. And hopefully Tom or Louise at the clinic can identify him and help us start building a case.”
“Great.”
“Now, one more thing,” he says. He walks over to the corner of the inventory room where Petty slept. The bed is still neatly made. Next to it, two crates are stacked, and on top of them, there’s a glass vase of fake flowers.
Books finds a stray plastic bag on one of the bookshelves and throws it over the vase. “Petty put this vase here,” he says. “It used to be up front, but I moved it back into the storage room.”
“I remember it.”
“Petty must have seen it on the shelf and put it here.” Books carefully lifts the vase, now securely in the plastic bag. “Fingerprints,” he says, holding it up.
“Oh, that’s perfect.” We are keeping the fingerprint techies busy these days.
“Glass holds fingerprints pretty well. I’ll run it over to Rich Rudney tomorrow morning,” he says. “And maybe we’ll have an ID on our mysterious Sergeant Petty.”
119
I WALK into the office at seven sharp. Pully isn’t in yet, but Rabbit is in front of her computer, looking different—rested, oddly enough, maybe because she feels unburdened now that I know her secret.
She sees me come in but says nothing. The look she gives me—a mix of scorn and defiance—fills me, more than anything else has, with a palpable sense of loss. We will never look at each other the same way again. We will never, in any way, be the same again.
She must know that I have no choice but to turn her in. She must know that.
She will probably go to prison for the rest of her life.
Pully rolls in not long afterward, his hair sticking out in all directions, looking about fifteen years old. How I envy him not knowing what I know about the third member of our team.
But there’s no time for that now. By eight o’clock, we are humming like the old days, a three-headed crew of data analysts. Pully is looking at registrations on Chevy Impalas in Virginia on the assumption that Books correctly guessed the model of car Petty was driving.
Rabbit, meanwhile, is doing what she does best—compiling. This time, she’s gathering and combining ALPR records extending out from the location where Petty jumped Books in Huntington, the assumption being that some police squad car or some mounted reader on a traffic-control device caught Petty’s license plate.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to cross-reference Virginia-registered Chevy Impalas with plates caught on ALPRs near the scene where Petty and Books tangled.
Books himself has a busy morning. After he gives Agent Rudney the glass vase that hopefully has Petty’s fingerprints on it, he swears out a complaint for an arrest warrant against a man known to him only as Petty for the crime of assault of a federal officer with a dangerous weapon. So now, if and when we find him, we don’t need to immediately stick murder or domestic terrorism charges on him; we can scoop him up for the assault alone.
By noon, Rabbit has compiled data within a five-mile radius of the spot where Petty jumped Books. If Petty sped away in his blue sedan—hopefully an Impala—which he must have done, we have his license plate in here somewhere.
“Run the ALPRs against the vehicle registrations,” I say.
Rabbit does. We get two hits, two matches on the cross-reference. Two Chevy Impalas registered in Virginia crossed the path of some license-plate