Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,43

to meet you too. I look at Dwight, our fearless leader, who lifts his eyes from the paper he’s reading.

“Arson?” I ask. “Confirmed? Couldn’t be, not this quickly.”

Dwight removes his reading glasses and rubs his eyes. “Dockery, why are you always asking questions and then answering them yourself? No,” he says, “not confirmed. The scene is still hotter than Venus. They’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble. Our arson guys tell me it’s possible it could be a gas-line break, and then once there was the first explosion, more gas spilled on top of it—a series of explosions, ultimately, fuel on the fire.” He stretches. “It could be an accident. But not likely.”

“I don’t think it was David,” I say. “Not his style.”

“It’s exactly his style,” says Elizabeth Ashland. “One of these short-term loan companies. David hates them. He says they prey on the poor, charge outrageous interest—you’ve seen his rants.” She cocks her head. “So, tell me why this isn’t his style.”

“How about the presence of more than a hundred homeless people above the store? Nothing in our profile indicates he wants to kill anyone, much less people who are poor and sick.”

She shrugs. “He overestimated the power of his blast. He wanted to blow out a couple of windows and rearrange some furniture inside the payday store, but he used too much charge.”

“For the first time ever.”

“Well, he’s blown up only three buildings previously. The track record’s not that long.”

“But why this payday-loan store? There are hundreds in the Chicago area alone. Why one sitting under a hotel for vagrants?”

“You mean, why not one in Manhattan, like you predicted?”

Who the heck is this woman, and is she here for any other reason than to bust my chops? “We don’t know anything yet,” I say to Dwight. “You want me to hit the CCTV cameras, I take it?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll pull up everything we can on that building and the payday store.”

He nods, his eyes bloodshot and sunken.

“Social media too,” I say.

“Yes. We’ll have a command meeting soon, this morning.”

I leave the room, walk down the hallway, and hit the button for the elevator, all the while thinking through all the different possibilities here, what this could mean—

“Dockery,” says Dwight Ross. He’s standing not far away. I didn’t even hear him follow me.

“Yes, boss.”

He steps toward me. “You remember when I told you this was your last chance?”

I don’t say anything.

“The bullshit political statements about corporate America oppressing the poor and downtrodden—you can forget all that. Citizen David is no hero. Now he’s a mass murderer.”

His anger is plain to see, but he is more than mad. He is shaken. Citizen David is his case, in the end, and the stakes just went up considerably. While he was flailing about trying to nab this anonymous crusader, hundreds of people died.

“If it was David,” I say. “I don’t think it was.”

“Because if it was, then you were wrong about Manhattan. And we can’t have that, right, Dockery?”

I start to respond, but Dwight raises a hand. “It was David,” he says. “I don’t need distractions. I don’t need my lead data analyst spending her time trying to prove she wasn’t wrong. I need her full attention focused on catching this asshole.” He drills a finger into my chest. “So catch him, and do it fast.”

He pivots and walks away.

“I’ll catch him, boss,” I say. “But I have one request.”

42

WHEN I return to my team, Pully and Rabbit are reviewing CCTV footage and calling out to each other over the cubicle dividers.

I look at Rabbit. Behind her, on her desk, are framed photographs of her two boys—Mason, in cap and gown, the social worker in Tampa, and Jordan, who now works at a Starbucks by the Yale campus and writes poetry and who had gone to Yale but dropped out in protest because the school didn’t accept enough minority students. Rabbit’s a peace-love-and-harmony hippie who raised her two boys to be much the same way.

“I’m flying to Chicago,” I say. “I’ll stay in touch on the jet.”

“Good.” She sniffs. Her eyes are red; her face is streaked with tears.

“You okay, Rabbit?”

Bonita nods but doesn’t look up. “This feels like Kaczynski all over again,” she says. The Unabomber, she means. She worked on that investigation when she was a young data analyst in the nineties.

“We caught Kaczynski,” I say. “And we’ll catch this guy.”

She shakes her head, wipes at her cheek. “We caught the Unabomber after he published that manifesto in the Times,