Sam stomped on the brakes. A truck trying to exit the parking lot laid on his horn. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“912 area code. That’s Savannah.” I tapped the phone number to place a call to it. The operator’s voice piped through the speaker. It wasn’t legit. Someone had spoofed the number specifically for the purpose of threatening me. Rather, threatening Cassie through me.
Sam had eased the car back into the parking spot. The driver of the truck decided to pull up behind us to block our exit and kept honking. “You think it’s one of those asshole detectives down there?”
I glanced over my shoulder, making sure no one had stepped out of the other vehicle. “Shouldn’t we deal with that?”
Sam held up his hand. “In a minute. Why would one of them send that to you?”
“They’d have to be involved in some way. I don’t get that. I mean, they seem like decent cops. Sure, they’re giving me a ration of shit, but it’s no different from how we’d treat them if they were on our turf.”
“This Novak guy, think he got Cassie to talk?”
The thought sent shivers down my spine, quickly interrupted by the sound of two doors opening then slamming shut. “Shit. Now we gotta deal with that.”
I guess the car hid our frames well enough, because there’s no way in hell the two short guys standing at the rear of the vehicle would ever knowingly pick a fight with Sam and me. We towered over them. One opened his mouth to say something.
“Shut your damn mouth,” Sam said. “I’m half-tempted to not even tell you I’m a cop and just whoop your asses instead.” He pulled his badge from under his shirt. It was attached to a necklace. “See this? That gives me the right to royally screw up your night if the both of you aren’t back in that shitty truck and out of this parking lot in five seconds.”
Sam started counting in a deep, menacing voice. The guys were back in the truck before he hit three.
“The hell is wrong with people?” he said.
I had no answer for him.
We didn’t linger in the parking lot. It was best to not keep Sartini waiting. We could work on the text message on the way.
“Back to what I was saying,” Sam said, once again behind the wheel. “It’s possible he had been stalking you or the detectives. Maybe he had an idea who they were, but you were a mystery. So he broke her down and made her talk.”
“We were in the paper.” I recalled the photo that had been snapped of us outside the crime scene.
“Worthless media.” He accelerated to twenty over the speed limit. “Always getting in the way of our jobs.”
“No kidding. It was like setting up a billboard telling a psycho one of his victims was alive and well and here’s where she’s been hanging out.”
Sam shifted in his seat and pulled his cell out of his pocket. He punched in a number then waited a few seconds. “Hey, Mac. How you doing? Yeah, yeah, it’s Sam. Hey look, I need a favor.” He looked over at me and covered the mouthpiece with his thumb. “What’s that number, Mitch?”
I read off the number the text had been sent from. Sam repeated it into his phone.
“Sure thing, Mac. As soon as you can. If it’s tomorrow, then it’s tomorrow. I’ll be around.”
“Who was that?” I asked after he ended the call.
“You aren’t the only one with contacts, man.”
“Yeah, I get that. Now who was it?”
“Old friend of mine. Works for the NSA.”
“Wait a minute. What old friends do you have that I don’t know?”
“We weren’t always together. I know more people than you think I do.”
“You think he can do something with a fake phone number?”
Sam shrugged. “Hell if I know. But if anyone can, it’s Mac.”
Five minutes later we pulled up to a small house on the outskirts of the city. I tried not to think of Cassie, but that was impossible. If I wasn’t talking about something else, she was on my mind. What was she doing at that moment? Was Novak always there with her, or did she have respite from him? Eventually, my mind always drifted to the place I didn’t want it to go. Images of Novak finishing what he started years ago played on the big screen in my brain.
The porch light flickered on. The front door swung open and a balding man with a pot belly and skinny legs covered partly by jean shorts stepped out. Sartini had retired five years earlier at the age of sixty. They’d forced him out. If it had been up to him, he would’ve stayed on the job forever. He had no wife or kids, no relatives, and only a few friends. Truth be told, I was surprised he hadn’t succumbed to a heart attack or some other fatal ailment by this point. He had nothing to keep him going.
I waved as I started up the walkway to the house. “How’s it going, Sartini?”
He shrugged and shook his hands in front of his distended stomach. “Can’t complain too much.”
We followed him inside. There were stacks of boxes lining both walls of the already too narrow hallway. The boxes scraped the ceiling in some spots and were covered in dust. I glanced into the first room we passed. Had to be a dozen black trash bags in the middle. Newspapers were piled along the back wall.
“You feeling all right, Sartini?” I asked.
“Sure, why not?” he said.
“Just making sure.” I prepared myself for the next room. Who knew what waited for us there. Would we be sitting on trash while watching the tape?
Sartini slid a pocket door back into the wall and flipped a light switch. I was definitely surprised by what I saw. The light-colored carpet was pristine. The walls were white and bare. A long L-shaped desk took over two walls at one end. The surface was empty. A couch wrapped in plastic was positioned at the other end of the room.
“It’s my sanctuary,” he said. “Could care less about the rest of the house. This is where I spend my time.”
“Fair enough. We’re not judging,” Sam said. “I see you still got the gear.”
Next to the desk was Sartini’s setup, an advanced tape player that digitized the feed and connected to his desktop computer.
“I’ve upgraded a few things since I last saw you guys.”
Sartini had lent his experience to us a few times since leaving the department. He was better than anyone they had tried to replace him with. The last case he helped on was about a rich woman killed by her pool boy and the maid. Sartini’s work on the security footage nailed the case shut.
“Probably not much need for this these days, huh?” Sam said.
“More than you might think,” Sartini said. “I get a call every week or two. I’m the lead expert for some of the local robbery detectives. The old school cops, too. A lot of FBI work lately.”
“Anything we might’ve heard about?” Sam asked.
“Probably.” Sartini eased into his Herman Miller chair. At a thousand bucks on a cop’s pension, he must get quite a bit of use out of it to justify the price tag. “So, what do you have for me?”
I handed the tape over to him. “Pretty bad feed of a gas station and convenience store. We got a potential suspect and a license plate. Both are grainy. License plate is worse than the face.”
“Different feeds?” He wheeled over to the tape player. He stopped short of inserting it. “You got a copy of this?”
“That’s the only one,” I said.
He thought for a moment. “I can duplicate it real quick.”
I shrugged. “Can’t you just make a digital copy?”
“Might not stand up if I do. All depends on where it’s going to be tried.”
There would be no trial. I had no intentions of letting Novak live after we caught up to him.
“I think it’ll be all right,” I said. “That feed’s in such bad shape, it won’t hold up. The work you’re going to do is what’ll make the case.”
“I get paid either way,” he said.
“Paid?” Sam laughed. “I got a case of Pabst with your name all over it.”
“That’ll work. Just make sure you have a few with me.” Sartini slid the tape into the machine, pressed a couple buttons, then wheeled back over to his command station. He opened up three different programs, one of which looked like something an audio producer might use to mix tracks. A few moments later the feed took over one of his twenty-seven-inch monitors.
“Shit, Mitch,” Sam said. “This is bad.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said.
“Got a time stamp?” Sartini asked. After I told him the exact moment the van arrived, he forwarded to it. “What’s the first thing I’m looking for?”
I pointed at the store feed. “When he’s in there, right before he leaves.”
He sped the tape up and froze it at a spot where Novak’s face was completely visible. “All right, give me a moment.”
And a moment was all it took for the magic to begin. Keystroke by keystroke, the image became more enhanced. Once Novak’s mug was fully realized, Sartini pushed back from the desk.
“What is it?” I said.
Sartini looked up at me, the last bit of color draining from his pale face. “I know that son of a bitch.”