Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,72

matter what Dr. Janus says, I should continue to follow any leads that I deem worth pursuing. He’s also giving us all bonuses for our good work.”

Pully’s head pops up above his cubicle. “You need cheering up?”

I snap out of my funk, remembering what Pully promised—that by day’s end, he’d get a clear visual of that decal on the arm of Darwin’s wheelchair.

“I definitely need cheering up,” I say.

“Then let me e-mail you something.”

I sit down at my desk and wait for the e-mail. “You got a clear image of that sticker for me, Pully?”

“Pretty clear. Not in color, of course,” he says. “But you won’t need color.”

The e-mail pops into my in-box.

The subject line: Pully is a genius (but we already knew that)

I open it. It’s a screenshot from the video after Pully used whatever image-enhancement tools he had at his disposal.

A close-up of the arm of the wheelchair, mostly obscured by Darwin’s forearm, which makes it hard to see too much of the sticker. But the good news is that the sticker wraps around the side of the armrest, clear enough to see.

In the left-hand corner of the sticker are stars. Beneath them, horizontal lines, uniformly spaced.

Stripes.

Unmistakable, even in black-and-white rather than red, white, and blue.

“You are a genius, Pully.”

“But the bigger point is, we already knew that.”

I pop up to my feet. “Team meeting!” I call out, which means we all stand and look at one another over our cubicle dividers. “We have another data point. Let’s review what we know.”

“Number one, he has some kind of a moon-like tattoo or scar on his face,” says Rabbit.

“If we can believe a homeless person’s account of what another homeless person said to him,” I say. Rabbit makes a face, but I shrug. “I’m thinking like an agent. Like a prosecutor who’s going to have to ask a judge for a warrant.”

“Okay, I get it.” Rabbit nods. “We have a wheelchair,” she says, ticking off point number two. “And now, thanks to our resident genius Pully, we have a wheelchair with a sticker of the American flag on the armrest.”

“If,” I reply, “we can believe that the man who put something under Nora Connolley’s car in that parking lot is our killer. Which we don’t know. Or we can’t confirm, anyway.”

Rabbit deflates. “I don’t like it when you think like an agent.”

“But they’ll shut us down if we don’t have more. The key is the wheelchair,” I say. “That’s a huge lead. He has a car, a van, a vehicle of some kind, right? He must.”

“So we start with disability license plates,” Pully chimes in. “What’s our range?”

“We think he’s local to Vienna, Virginia, right?” I say. “A day’s trip away, no more?”

“Right,” says Rabbit.

“So let’s do a multistate search. An eight-, maybe ten-hour radius. That’s gotta be—what—DC, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania…let’s add Tennessee and Kentucky. Start there.”

“Got it.”

“I want DMVs,” I say. “All disability license plates in those states. The driver’s-license photos too. Then cross-reference with CCTV tollway footage in Chicago near the time of the bombing. And in New Orleans around the dates of Nora Connolley’s murder.”

“Men only?” asks Pully. “A certain age?”

“Everyone,” I say. I’m not putting anything past Darwin. He’s almost certainly on the younger side—somewhere between twenty and fifty-something—but who knows? And he’s almost certainly a man, but can we completely dismiss the possibility that Darwin is a woman posing as a man? I’m not dismissing anything with Darwin.

“Okay,” says Rabbit. “It will take some time.”

I know. But this is Rabbit’s specialty. Nobody is better at taking raw data and collating it into a usable format. It’s the backbone of our operation. Books once used a basketball analogy to describe Rabbit: she doesn’t get the score, but she gets the assist.

“Do your magic, Rabbit,” I say. “And do it fast.”

71

CLOSING TIME. Only one customer is lingering in the store along with Books. Books hardly pays any attention to the customer, telling himself that he’s giving the man some space—some customers don’t want to be followed around and hassled; they want to browse in peace—but the truth is that Books is so captivated by his work searching for Citizen David’s accomplice within the Bureau that he hasn’t paid much attention to any of the goings-on in his store today.

He finished looking at the financial records of the field agents assigned to the Citizen David task force earlier this afternoon, flagging a couple of items for follow-up but not seeing anything that set