TWENTY-ONE

I read my notes back to him.

“2002 Ford E-150 commercial van. Registered owner Southeast Fitters Warehouse. No individual listed on the registration.”

I repeated the address, a street I was pretty sure was a bit south of Union Station, but even as I looked at the numbers I knew better than to believe them. Satan would need a Zamboni before a professional killer would offer such an easy trail to follow. I told Brodsky as much.

“I’ve got a bigger problem,” he said. “Your people down here—the agents working the assault on Lisa Sands—they need this, too.”

“It’s not ready for them yet. Not till I check it out myself.”

“Why not use the locals? M.P.D. can handle this without leaving their desks.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I need to see the place myself. Get some handle on where to go with it.”

“You’re asking me to sit on something I can’t sit on.”

“Couple of hours, that’s all. Soon as it gets light outside.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

The address in southeast Washington was half a dozen blocks south of Union Station, not far from the grandeur of Capitol Hill but more distant than that from the congressional lifestyle. The area was one of those trying to come back from generations of poverty and crime, but there was a long way to go. It was a few minutes past seven o’clock when I steered the Caprice around the last corner and started up the street Brodsky had identified. Old houses, medium-size apartment complexes, nothing industrial.

I scanned left and right when I hit the block where Southeast Fitters Warehouse was supposed to be, but there were still nothing but apartment buildings. I slowed down and read every number on both sides of the street, but the one I wanted wasn’t there. Not at all surprised, I grabbed my cell phone to set up my next lead. Probably another waste of time, but if you have a lead you cover it. You want to do the job right, you cover every last one of them.

A quick phone call to the Postal Inspector’s Office gave me a physical location for the post office box listed by DMV records as the address for Southeast Fitters Warehouse. The F Street South Post Office was some distance from the phony address, and the postmaster himself was already waiting for me by the time I got there.

“Southeast Fitters Warehouse?” he said, after I displayed my creds and told him what I needed. “I can show you the index card for that box, but you might not find that name on it.”

“Maybe I’ll see something else that helps me.”

The postmaster was both plump and close to retirement, wearing a white dress shirt but no tie. He led me to a series of dark wood file cabinets, opened one of the drawers and flipped through the contents, stopped to pull out a three-by-five card. He handed it to me.

“I was right,” he said. “No company name. We don’t accept them, you know, not unless we get a person’s name along with them.” He smiled, his lips twisting at the corners. “We have to have somebody to contact for late payment, to kick out if there’s any other trouble.”

I examined the card. The name wasn’t Robert Bennett, of course. Benjamin Allard, the box holder had printed, and provided as his home address the same numbers Brodsky had given me for Southeast Fitters. I scribbled the name in my notebook, gave the card back, and thanked him for the quick service.

“Always glad to help the bureau, Agent Monk. I used to see Mr. Hoover once in a while. With that other fella … that Clyde what’s-his-face.”

“The director was a man with many friends,” I told him, the mandatory bureau response. “Could have been anybody.”

“Don’t make ’em like that anymore, that Hoover.”

“They don’t, sir.” I shook his hand. “They surely don’t.” Our sudden rapport emboldened me. “Can you show me the box itself? What’s in it?”

He squinted at me. “Need a subpoena to see the mail.”

“Just the box then, without the mail.”

His head started to shake again, so I used my trump card. “One time,” I told him. “One more time for Mr. Hoover.”

He stared at me, then turned and walked away. Well, I’ll be damned, I thought, not even for dear old Jedgar. I turned and headed back toward the front door, but two steps later his voice stopped me.

“Where you going, Agent Monk? Didn’t you say you wanted to see it?”

I hustled after him. He led me around a corner to a long row of the open back ends of post office boxes, then along the row itself until he reached the one I wanted. He turned to me and bless his heart didn’t say a word. Didn’t point at it. Didn’t even glance at it. What he did do was walk away.

I struck like a reptile, my hand grabbing and coming back out with seven pieces of mail. I flipped through them. Bills, credit card solicitations, an offering to the box holder from Jiffy Lube to change his oil for next to nothing, finally a real-estate flyer. Each addressed to Southeast Fitters Warehouse, care of this very box. I examined the envelopes more closely, everything in the little windows, looking for another name. Attention somebody or other, something like that, but I saw nothing until I got to the last one.

The real-estate pitch was addressed, I saw, to the attention of Jerry Crown. I copied the name into my notebook, thanked the postmaster one more time before heading out the door.

Out in the Caprice, I called Henry Valenzuela, the computer analyst at WMFO to whom I’d given the telephone data from Telserve on Wednesday, the long list of telephone calls to and from the numbers assigned to Jabalah Abahd and Brenda Thompson. I told Henry what I was looking for, and he promised to call as soon as he had something for me.

Then I called Lisa at the hospital. She was as happy to hear from me as she was sick of staying in bed.

“I’m busting out of here,” she told me, and when I didn’t say anything, she hastened to add, “The doctors can’t find any reason to keep me, and they want the bed for someone who really needs it.”

“When? I’ll come get you. How soon can you be ready?”

“How soon can you get here?”

At the hospital, she was packed and eager to leave.

I looked around the room. “Where are all the flowers?”

“They were too nice to throw away, especially your roses, Puller, so I distributed them up and down the hall.”

She stood. I grabbed her suitcase. We started out the door, but a nurse stopped us.

“What do you think you’re doing, Lisa?” she scolded. “Nobody walks out of here on their own two feet.” She grinned. “Give me a second to call an orderly with a wheelchair.”

Lisa shook her head. “I’ve been walking up and down the hall for two hours. I don’t need a ride to get myself to the front door.” She nodded her head toward me. “And I’ve got this hunk to catch me if I fall.”

The nurse checked me out, then stepped closer. “Be quick, then,” she whispered, “and if my supervisor catches you, tell her you slugged me and took off on your own.”

Downstairs, I left Lisa long enough to get the car and bring it back. I got her safely belted in, then pulled away from the curb and jabbed the brakes to avoid a white-coated orderly pushing an empty wheelchair. I reached over and grabbed Lisa’s arm to keep her from jolting back and forth.

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “Just say no if you don’t want to.”

She looked at me, raised her eyebrows.

“Let me take you to my house,” I continued. “Let me take care of you for a couple of days.”

She shook her head. “You’re welcome to take care of me, but not at your house. Don’t ask me to explain, but I need to see my apartment again. A woman thing, most likely, but that’s what I want right now.”

I pulled up to the parking booth, gave the attendant my ticket and a dollar, then edged the Caprice into traffic and looked for Twenty-fifth Street. I could take it south to the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, hook up with the Arlington Bridge, and be at Lisa’s place in Alexandria in twenty minutes.

At her house I carried her suitcase into the bedroom, got her settled into bed.

“Hungry?” I asked her. “Shall I get you something to eat? Or fix something for you maybe?”

But her eyes were already beginning to droop. “Nothing, Puller. Thanks so much, but all I want to do is go to sleep.”

I left her to do just that, careful to make sure her front door had locked behind me before I went to my Caprice and headed home.

Henry Valenzuela called before I could get there.

“Benjamin Allard,” he said, “the first name you gave me? I get nothing by that name.”

“What about the other one? Crown. Jerry Crown.”

“One call. Six days ago.”

The hair on my arms began to vibrate. Before I could ask, Henry continued.

“One call from Crown to the second number you gave me for Brenda Thompson, her work phone, I presume, from the downtown area code. Ninety-seven seconds. Tuesday, the seventh of January.”

“Thirty minutes? That’s all you can give me?” My fingers tightened on the telephone back in the dome. “Jesus, Glen, I’ve got a cell phone number for you, but I can’t do anything with half an hour.”

Rogers snorted. “Count your blessings. There are three Iraqi intelligence officers clearing dead drops in Chicago, a Russian I.O. in Philadelphia, and another one in Los Angeles. I’m risking every last centimeter of my ass to give you even a single second.”

“Russians? We’re still working intelligence officers out of Moscow?”

“You know better than to ask me that.”

I hung up, then punched numbers for Brodsky. I told him what I’d come up with: the new name Jerry Crown and the cell phone number from Telserve.

“Gotta be our guy,” I said. “Or somebody awfully close to him.”

“Still have to find him. It’s not like we can call him up and ask him where he is.”

“Don’t have to ask him.” I told Brodsky about Glen Rogers’s satellite. “The second he answers we’ve got him.”

“Where do I meet you? Where’ll you be?”

“Head for D.C. as fast as you can. Call me when you get close.”

“I’m on my way.”

I’d barely set the phone down when Glen Rogers called me back. His voice was urgent. The counterterrorism squad in Chicago was screaming for the satellite.

“Got to do your thing right now, Puller, or forget about it for today.”

Shit, I thought. I should have stayed downtown, but it was too late for that. “Stand by, Glen. You should get a signal from Crown’s cell phone in a few seconds.”

I hung up, retrieved the phone number from my notebook, picked up the phone again and punched the keypad.

“This is Citibank,” I told the gruff male voice that answered. “I’m calling to make sure you don’t miss our one-time offer of zero percent for the first thirty days. If you act now I can guarantee quick approv—”

The line went dead without a word. Obviously Mr. Crown was already a customer. The phone rang.

“We have signal on your target,” Glen Rogers told me. “In the District … Fourteenth and K … west edge of Franklin Park. I can keep the bird on him for another twenty-seven minutes but you’re on your own after that.”

I tossed the phone back in the cradle, raced for my car. I’d never make it to Franklin Park in twenty-seven minutes, but maybe Crown had put down for the day. Maybe my luck with the video from the truck stop would hold long enough for me to get a fix on him.