Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,63
close in on him?”
He has a point there. If my only goal were catching Darwin, then the last thing I should do is tell him that we know he was responsible for the Chicago bombing. But catching him isn’t my only goal.
I close the document on my computer, satisfied. “Eric, before I wrote this, what do you think Darwin was doing?”
Pully shrugs. “Planning his next crime.”
“Right. Blowing up another building with a bunch of innocent people. Why not? His first bombing worked to perfection. Why not keep going? His confidence is at an all-time high.”
Pully nods toward the computer. “So this was your way of shattering his confidence.”
I pat him on the cheek. “Exactly. Now he’s scared. His methodology didn’t work. He’ll be looking over his shoulder now. He knows we know about Mayday. He’s probably wondering if we got surveillance footage of him at Mayday’s spot across from the payday-loan store.”
“We didn’t. But he doesn’t know that,” Pully concedes.
“Right—he doesn’t know what we know. So what’s his most likely move? What would you do if you were him?”
“Me? Shit, I’d go into hiding.” Pully grabs his bag and hikes it over his shoulder. “I’d stop, at least for a while.”
“And that, my friend, is what I’m shooting for. I want to catch this guy as much as anybody, but more than anything else, I don’t want a repeat of Chicago.”
“So you’re slowing him down. Making him reevaluate.”
“Slowing him down is the best I can do right now,” I say. “And while he’s sweating a little, looking over his shoulder, lying low—I’ll use that time to catch him.”
Pully still seems unsettled, like there’s more he wants to say, more on his mind, something he can’t quite put together.
I walk him to my front door, ready for another long night of analysis. I briefly consider what Pully does in his free time. He’s single and young enough that he should be going out tonight, but my guess is that he’ll be sitting in front of a screen playing some video game or engaging in an online chat about Dungeons and Dragons or whatever the rage is nowadays.
Pully turns to me. “I’d make a terrible agent,” he says. “I can’t think like these people. I’m a numbers-and-algorithms kid.”
“A damn good one,” I say, but I can see that he wasn’t fishing for a compliment. He was warming up to something else.
“What you wrote,” he says. “‘I know’ Chicago wasn’t Citizen David. ‘I found Mayday.’”
“Yeah?”
“You used the first person,” he says. “Not ‘the Bureau knows.’ Not ‘we found Mayday.’ You wrote I.”
Maybe there’s more to Pully than computer code and algorithms after all.
“His problem is you,” he says. “It has been all along. You tracked him all this time by yourself, right here in your apartment. Not the Bureau. Shit, the Bureau doesn’t even approve of what you’re doing. It’s all you, Emmy. Even now. You know he did the Chicago bombing. You found Mayday.”
“Eric, what I wrote will give him pause. He doesn’t know what the Bureau thinks or knows. If he has brains and a sense of self-preservation—which he does—he will suspend his plans for a while and wait for the dust to settle. He’ll check the news and read whatever I write on my computer. He’ll lie low and give me time to catch him.”
Eric’s cherubic face pales, and he grimaces.
“You could have accomplished the same thing without using the first person,” he says. “You’re putting a target on your back, Emmy. You want him to come after you.”
61
HE STARTS at the bottom and moves up.
That’s what makes the most sense to Books. If you’re looking for the mole in the organization, the one leaking information for money, and you have no obvious suspects, you start with the people who make the least money.
So while Petty, his homeless friend who is quickly blossoming into a master salesman, plugs a new novel set during the Revolutionary War to a mother and daughter (“Have you seen the musical Hamilton? Then you’ll love this book!”), Books pores over the documents obtained from multiple subpoenas issued for him by the Justice Department. He starts with the field agents from the various branches of the Bureau—National Security, Intelligence, CID, and Science and Technology—who’ve been assigned to the Citizen David task force.
So far, nothing.
No irregularities in bank accounts. No large deposits. No series of small deposits meant to disguise a large bribe. No evidence of wire transactions. No Swiss bank accounts.