AGENT LARKIN made his choice. He was coming with me.
We came up empty on the first two storage facilities. As soon as I saw the third facility, I knew we had a shot.
It was at the end of the street, set back a good hundred yards once you made your way through the gate and down to the main building. I could see the large doors on the units as soon as we got close, and beyond the back fence there was nothing but the desert and the Salt River in the distance.
We walked into the office and had to wait a few minutes, until the manager peeked around the little partition and looked surprised to see us standing there.
“Help you?”
Agent Larkin showed him his badge and told him he was looking for a unit that might have been rented by a man named Livermore. The manager shook his head at the name until Larkin pulled out the photograph and showed it to him. Then the color drained from his face.
“I take it he was here,” Larkin said.
“Yes,” the man said, “but he didn’t call himself Livermore.”
The manager went through a little box of index cards, until he finally found the one he was looking for.
“Gene Lamont,” he said. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What was the name? How did he spell that?”
He showed me the card.
Gene Lamont.
“That mean something to you?” Larkin said.
“He’s a bench coach for the Tigers,” I said. “Managed a couple teams, too.”
Larkin just looked at me and waited for more.
“We were teammates in Toledo,” I said. “Both catchers. My last year there, Gene got the September call-up, and I didn’t.”
“That’s either a hell of a coincidence—”
“Or he was already messing with my head when he rented this place months ago.”
“Any chance we could get into that unit?” Larkin asked the manager.
“If you want to,” he said. “But it’s empty now. I made him pack up and leave.”
“Why is that?”
“Strict rule,” the man said. “You can run power tools, anything you want, but no open flames.”
“Open flames?” I said. “What the hell was he doing?”
“He had this whole grill thing set up, with a huge pot of water. First I thought he was cooking meth or something. I mean, what do I know, right? Wouldn’t be the first time. But turns out he was just boiling water.”
“For what?”
The manager shrugged. “Hell if I know. He’d just moved everything in, all these crates and boxes, and then I notice he’s got this big pot of water going. I told him he can’t do that and he, um . . .”
The man stopped talking and looked away from us.
“What happened?” Larkin said.
“Nothing,” the man said a little too loudly, like he was trying to convince himself. “He just said some things and he left.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about rules being made for men with small minds, then something about the Air Force, how it was obviously the right place for me. Not sure how he even knew I was a veteran, let alone an airman.”
Larkin shot me a quick look. This sounded like the Livermore I had met in that interview room, a man who somehow knew your whole life story.
“Then he said something else . . .”
We both waited for him to take a moment, clear his throat, and continue.
“He said he’d read about a man who got trapped in a storage unit for nine weeks straight. Guy was lucky, he said, because he had some food and water in there. But he was still almost dead when they found him.”
The man paused for a moment, bringing it all back.
“He said, even though he was alive when they got him out of there, he never really came back from it. The heat, the darkness, the isolation . . . The man’s mind just snapped. And of course, he said, this happened in New York, so just imagine if it was Arizona, how hot it would get. That man would have been cooked alive.”
He paused again, swallowing hard.
“I told him to get the hell out of here,” he said, “but he just stood there, right where you’re standing now, and he told me that man was locked in accidentally. Because who would do something like that on purpose? And the way he kept looking at me as he drove off . . . I still think about it. Like I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he came back someday.”
“I’m going to give you this,” Larkin said, taking a card out of his wallet and putting it down on the counter. “Just in case you do ever see him again. You call me right away.”
If you’re alive to make the call, I thought. This may be the last man on this earth you’d ever want to piss off.
“What was the exact date?” Larkin said. “The day this all happened?”
“Let’s see,” he said, looking at the file card again. “It had to be, what, October thirteenth? Fourteenth, maybe?”
“If he couldn’t work here,” Larkin said, looking back at me, “he must have gone somewhere else.”
“Pretty sure most places have the same rules,” the manager said. “But why are you looking for him, anyway? Should I be worried?”
Larkin thought about his answer. “If you watch the news on television,” he finally said, “you may see his face. But he’s probably long gone by now, so don’t worry. You just keep that card by your phone and call me if you need to. There’s a reward for information leading to his capture, too.”
The manager still didn’t look like a man who’d be sleeping well that night. But we thanked him and left. When we were back outside, I saw an old Lincoln Continental parked beside the building, the dark blue paint peeling in the harsh sunlight. I looked it over until I finally spotted the sticker in the corner of the windshield. Faded by the same sunlight, the faint outline of the Air Force symbol, the star with two wings.
I never would have noticed this if I wasn’t looking for it, I thought. But Livermore does this automatically. He looks for information about everyone he meets, then uses it to his advantage. Even if his only goal is to unnerve you.
“I don’t understand,” Larkin said. “What does boiling water have to do with making explosives?”
“Whatever he was doing, he took it somewhere else. Middle of October. We could keep checking other storage units . . .”
“You heard the guy.”
“Or we could look somewhere else,” I said. “What would be his next choice?”
“Something private. Someplace he could do whatever he wanted.”
“If you’re him,” I said, “where do you find that?”
A few minutes later, we were sitting in a coffee shop. Larkin had his laptop open and was using the Internet archives to go through the Craigslist ads for October. He wrote down the contact information for half a dozen people who had advertised space for rent.
“This one looks interesting,” I said. “Five hundred square feet of workspace on a secluded road, metal building with good ventilation . . .”
“It’s miles out of town. Almost in Maricopa.”
“Call the number. See if the space got rented.”
Larkin took out his cell phone and dialed the number. He asked whoever answered the phone if the space had been rented. He looked at me and nodded. He wasn’t even halfway into his next question when the call ended.
“Doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said.
I nodded. “Sounds like somebody we need to go see.”