“Does everything in this town close at nine o’clock?” North asked as they drove past another darkened strip mall. “Where the fuck am I? Mayberry?”
“Pull over,” Shaw said. “We’ll use my hotspot.”
“We get charged for the hotspot. There’s got to be somewhere with Wi-Fi.”
“North, it’s five dollars. Or ten dollars. Or a hundred dollars.”
“We should have free Wi-Fi everywhere. It’s twenty-fucking-twenty.”
“I’ll pay for it. I’ll use my own money. It won’t even be a Borealis expense.”
“A coffeeshop. A grocery store. For fuck’s sake, have they ever heard of McDonald’s?”
“You can charge it,” Shaw said as genius struck. “You can expense it to the Wahredua PD.”
North gave him a sidelong look and then made a hard right into the next parking lot.
They sat, the soft glow of the dash illuminating the car’s interior, as Shaw set up his hot spot and North logged in to his laptop. North made a satisfied noise as his laptop picked up the internet connection, and then he began opening tabs.
“What are you going to do?” he asked as he started typing.
“Daydream,” Shaw said. “I’ve been working on this particular fantasy about a world without boots.”
North bent lower over the laptop, and it sounded like he might have said, “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s a fair and just and equitable world.”
“Why don’t you do something useful? Why don’t you wander into traffic or chew on a high-voltage line or something? Oh, but leave the phone.”
“Nobody gets their toes stepped on.”
“It was one time, mother of God, and I’m never going to hear the end of it.”
“Innocent puppies aren’t viciously de-tailed by hulking, stomping men who are angry because their cartoons got canceled.”
“The puppy still has his tail, thanks very much, and why the fuck would you slap an infomercial into that Saturday morning time slot?”
“Nobody is a secondhand victim of boot foot.”
North’s head came up. “I do not have boot foot. I don’t even know what that is. I mean, it’s not a thing.”
“Oh, it’s definitely a thing. It’s when your socks get all crusty—”
“You know what would be fun? Let’s see if your head fits inside the glove compartment. How’s that sound for a game?”
For about a minute, North tried to grab Shaw—he even went so far as to open the glove box—and Shaw fought him off. North was hampered by the fact that they were still in their seats, as well as by the laptop. Shaw was a victim of a giggling curse an invisible witch put on him—which he tried to tell North about, and which only made North shout louder—so, all in all, they were about even.
Finally, North gave up and said, “Make some fucking phone calls!” And then he went back to work on the laptop.
So, Shaw took out the list of phone records that Deputy Weiss had assembled for them, and he began to work his way through the highlighted numbers. The most recent one, for Liliana Cain, connected him to a recorded message for a law firm. He made a note of the firm’s name in the margin and moved on.
Next, he tried the number for Melvin Welch. The phone rang several times before connecting to a voicemail service. There was no prerecorded message; instead, a robotic voice read off the number Shaw had called. When the tone beeped, Shaw made his voice as stilted as he could and said, “Hello, this is a recorded message from the Missouri Department of the Treasury. We have unclaimed funds for Philip Welch. To learn more, please call us back at your convenience.” Then he recited his phone number and disconnected.
Shaw looked over at North.
“Not your best,” North said.
Shaw couldn’t help the dismay. “Not my best?”
“Your Avon lady is better.”
“But an Avon lady wouldn’t be calling—you’re an asshole! That was really good!”
North shrugged as he clicked the trackpad.
Shaw placed the next call to Carly Welch. This time, a woman answered. Shaw opened his mouth, and then all he could hear was North inside his head saying, Not your best. Out of reflex, he started up with his same spiel. “Hello, this is a recorded message from the Missouri Department of the Treasury. We have unclaimed funds for Philip Welch.”
“Fuck!” North swore.
“Hello?” The woman—presumably Carly Welch—said. There was a tapping noise like she might be checking the phone. “Hello? I thought this message was recorded.”
In a rush, Shaw finished, “To learn more, please call us back at your convenience.” He gave his phone number again and disconnected.
“God damn it,” North said to himself. “Connect, you piece of shit.”
“She heard you!”
North flicked him an annoyed look, grunted, and went back to work.
“That’s why it wasn’t my best work,” Shaw said as he began to place his final call. “Because you ruined it.”
North did some subvocal muttering that sounded distinctly unflattering.
Maleah Donaldson’s voicemail picked up the call, and Shaw repeated his message for the third time. The idea was simple: people were often reluctant to talk if you asked them questions. But if you let them think they had something to gain, and you made them work a tiny bit for it—well, that was a different story.
“Which one is the mom?” North asked.
“I think Carly might be the grandmother. Any luck?”
North sat back and angled the laptop for Shaw to see the map and the highlighted route.
One of the Borealis investments they’d agreed on—after much handwringing by North, and much, much, much “please, I can’t talk about this anymore” from Shaw—was to begin paying for an online database geared toward private investigators. It was actually a set of databases, and it drew on public records as well as proprietary information. It gave them access to a number of tools that they hadn’t had before, and one of those—which North was currently playing with—was a system that tracked license plates through traffic cameras.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Traffic cameras didn’t always catch a license plate, and not all camera systems uploaded their information, and—well, on and on like that. But it was a tool, and it was often helpful. And it looked like tonight was one of the helpful nights because North had plotted out several appearances of the sheriff’s license plate.
“These are from tonight?” Shaw asked.
“No, I figured I’d map every time his license plate has appeared on camera anytime in the last year.”
“I know you use sarcasm as a shield, but I hope one day you’ll shed your armor and let the healing warmth of human love—oh holy Buddha, my hair!”
When North released him, Shaw rubbed the de-scalped section—he had a fresh understanding of the puppy’s suffering now, and he vowed, once again, to be more forgiving the next time the puppy bit him in the, er, private area. By accident, as North insisted. Then he leaned in for a closer look at the laptop.
The sheriff’s license plate had appeared several times within Wahredua that evening—which made sense, since the city would have the highest concentration of traffic cameras. Then the trail went dark for a while until two hits in Eldon and then another hit in Versailles.
“He’s going west,” Shaw said, still rubbing his scalp. “He’s past the roadblock; there’s no way they’re looking for him that far.”
“Someone’s going west,” North said. “If Welch is smart, he’s already ditched the sheriff’s car. Or at least traded plates.” He was quiet for a moment and then he panned the map to the west and pointed to a city called Auburn, where all this mess had started. “But then there’s that, and what are the odds it’s a coincidence?”
“The Cottonmouth Club,” Shaw said.
“Or some jabroni with a fresh set of plates happens to be driving that way.”
“North, it can’t be a coincidence. Dalton was going to identify the man he met at the Cottonmouth Club. Ambyr was the one who introduced them. And now they’re both dead before the investigation can even get off the ground, and the killer is driving straight toward the club.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. On the street, a Highlander rolled past, tires thrumming against the asphalt. Then stillness descended again. No wind. No night birds. Nothing but the GTO’s rumble, and the air conditioning’s valiant attempt to push back the sticky heat, and the flicker of an Amoco sign.
“The police have access to all this data,” North said in a painfully neutral tone. “They’ll figure out—”
“No,” Shaw said. He made his voice gentler, as best he could, and said, “No. I know you’re trying to—I appreciate it, North. But you know that they’re going to take time to get mobilized, for the investigation to start moving. That’s the nature of a bureaucracy.”
“They also have big guns and bulletproof vests and a hell of a lot more bodies.”
“North, he’s not going to stay with the sheriff’s car forever. He’s going to ditch it, and then this lead goes cold.”
North was silent, but the struggle showed in his face. “John-Henry could use you—”
“No.”
“If I call Emery—”
“No.”
Something snapped, and North burst out, “Well, God fucking damn it, will you let me finish a sentence?”
“Come on,” Shaw said, and he found North’s hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go see which jabroni is driving around with the sheriff’s license plates.”
North’s features twisted, and for a moment, the armor fell away. Behind it was fear, and fresh pain, and a kind of wildly grappling resolve to take control again. And then everything got buckled down again, and his face closed, and he started to drive.