13

I called my dad at nine the next morning to check if he was on his way. His first words were: “Why do I have to drive to Long Island?”

“Because we’ll be working together and it’s better if you’re here.” My response came out like a monotone, but it was propelled by a long exhalation of impatience. “Even if I send you the spreadsheet as an attachment, it may have different pagination on your computer.” I was making this up as I went along. “Why should we have to go through: ‘Go to the middle of the page, third column from the right, just below where it says Tulsa’?”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You’re just worried that if you can’t see me, I’ll be muting Bosch and watching it with subtitles.”

He could have more intuition than I gave him credit for. “Actually, I was thinking a six-pack of Bud during a two-hour conference call wouldn’t encourage cognitive clarity.”

My dad arrived an hour later, with the spiraled top of a cop’s small notebook sticking up from his pocket. He was hugging a plastic barrel of pretzels, in a size suitable for a Super Bowl party. The printout of Iris’s spreadsheet on Pete Delaney was in a folder tucked under his arm. When he climbed the stairs to my office, his head and neck seemed a bit more aligned with his spine than they had been lately. He gripped the banister not so much to pull himself up as to steady himself so his dearly beloved snack food wouldn’t tumble to the floor. He even moved at a slightly faster clip than his usual trudge.

I motioned him to my recliner while I took the desk chair. My dad pushed himself three-quarters of the way back. I wheeled my chair over the wood floor so I could share the footrest. The first time Josh took me through the house he had pointed to the floor and told me that it was maple and that Dawn had it installed by a company that specialized in gym floors: “She researched it. Maple is the ideal wood for athletics because it can take a beating.” I wondered how a 110-pound woman doing side lunges could be considered a beating, though I just said oh.

My dad opened the spreadsheet folder and held up a finger—Give me a minute—while he looked over the printout I’d given him the day before. I saw a lot of yellow highlighting and bright blue underlining and slanting red lines going between items in different columns— handwritten, not computer generated. I wheeled my desk chair over to my monitor.

Earlier that morning, before my dad arrived, I had been able to associate a trip Pete took to Boston on March 19 with an unsolved robbery that went down on the following day. An armored truck was in front of the bank in Manchester, New Hampshire, a city about an hour from Boston; the bank was trading old fifty- and hundred-dollar bills for new ones. The guard from the truck passed through the ATM lobby. There were a few people getting cash or depositing checks, including the local cop—or at least a guy dressed like one.

After the new bills were safely in the bank, the guard lugged out the old bills. As he passed the ATMs, the “cop” drew his service weapon and, with the butt of it, hit the guard on the head. It happened so fast that a couple of customers who didn’t see the cop hit the guard in the head ran over to him thinking he’d had a heart attack or stroke, not a concussion.

As the fake cop exited the bank, a Toyota Camry pulled up and he hopped in. The getaway driver floored it, and they and $350,000 in dirty money—with nonsequential serial numbers—were gone for good.

My dad glanced up and I asked, “Do you think we should consider crimes committed by more than one person? I found a bank robbery in Manchester.” I gave him the details. “The Justice Department has that region as a high-intensity drug-trafficking area. Heroin, opioids.”

He shrugged. “Three hundred and fifty thou could buy a shitload of opioids. Or even be seed money for a new drug distribution network. But I don’t know, Corie, we’re flying blind here. Where did you find this?”

“Just tooling around the internet this morning before you got here.”

He seemed pleased by that. The right side of his mouth rose up into a quarter smile, the way it did when I was in high school and brought home an A in physics or took down a two-hundred-pound guy in a krav maga demo. “Okay, let me think,” he said. “Bank robbery would be federal. Can you call somebody at the FBI up there, get the details?”

I wasn’t so sure about that. They’d probably check me out. Impersonating a federal agent could get me three years. And I was no longer a special agent, just a contractor. Not that I couldn’t find a way, but it was a high-risk proposition. Three years in the slammer was not doable in terms of the biological clock. And it probably wouldn’t look great for Josh to have to answer questions about his felon wife during the Senate confirmation hearings for the court of appeals.

“So?” he asked.

I admit I smiled to myself imagining the Honorable Joshua Geller applying for conjugal privileges in a federal correctional institution. Still, having roped my dad into this mission, I could hardly say no to his first request: my making a call.

But then he himself said, “Nah!”

“‘Nah’ what?”

“Nah, unless he hooks up with the same confederate for every job, assuming there’s more than one, doesn’t it feel like he’d be a one-man show? Because listen, kiddo, if he’s such a neat freak or control freak and living a life on Long Island that’s protective coloration, he’s not likely to trust a partner.”

“I agree.” I felt stiff. I stood and linked my fingers together and bent forward till they grazed the floor. Then I did a pull-head-down-to-shoulder stretch for a minute. “He’s not going to trust a confederate. He is such a perfectionist. Unless he has someone who’s not just submissive but close-mouthed. No. He just wouldn’t.”

“Okay,” my dad said. “There’s all that plus we have limited resources. We can’t go chasing after every felony committed in the areas he’s been to. Or not been to, since we don’t know if he actually wound up at the places he said he was visiting.”

“Another thing,” I said. “You know how I told you that an average trip for him takes three days?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, say Pete goes to a client for one day, shows the packaging, lets the client and the staff, if there is a staff, play with the mock-ups, ask questions, make suggestions. That’s one day. Possibly a follow-up the next morning for an hour or two. After that, there’s nothing more to do because he’s all business. So at the very least, he’s got thirty-six hours more.”

Shockingly, my dad stopped cradling his pretzels and lowered the container to the floor beside the recliner. He clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. When I was a kid, I’d always felt as I watched him waiting for an idea, it would not simply pop into his head but actually materialize in some dramatic fashion. Lightning would singe his hair as it zigzagged into his head delivering a theory; a carrier pigeon would hurtle down from the light fixture and land on his lap so he could grab a message from its teeny claw.

But as always, no visible drama. His raised feet simply rotated back and forth, like antennae searching for signal, and after a couple of minutes of being otherwise motionless, he blinked and announced, “You’re saying his way with a client is strictly business. No ‘Let’s have dinner and schmooze.’ No golf. No ‘I hope you’ve got time to show me the sights of Toledo.’”

“Wouldn’t happen. From everything I’ve seen or heard, he’s not discourteous. But not warm, either.”

“So he uses a trip to an actual client as a cover for something else?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said.

He engaged in a few seconds of chin rubbing before he spoke: “Your Pete would say he was going to Minneapolis. He’d stay for a day, day and a half, do his business, and then he’s off to, whatever, some city: Louisville. Okay, say he goes to Louisville.” He glanced up at the ceiling for help. “Maybe he drives, maybe he flies: doesn’t matter. He’d use fake ID. Even if it turns out that all your unemotional lunch guy is doing is picking some random city, like Louisville, to connect with some hottie, he’s not gonna leave a trail with scans of his driver’s license and credit card.”

“He always pays cash for lunch.”

“But you know and I know,” my dad said, “that paying for a plane ticket or a car rental with cash just rings those bells. The protocol is the same whether it’s a get-together for a day of God knows what in a motel or a bank robbery. The idea with both is not to be traceable to the PI your wife hired, or to the Feds. So obviously you don’t use your own credit card. And these days, cash is suspect.”

“Well, I don’t know how sophisticated he is, what kind of fraudulent ID he could get. And with counterfeit credit cards? It’s getting harder, what with the embedded chips, and algorithms for spending patterns.”

“There’s always the just-stolen card, which does mean big risk,” my dad said. “Except big risks aren’t going to stop some people, especially if a guy is going for a major crime. Stealing a card just so he can get to wherever he’s gotta go? That’s not major: there are pros who do it. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

To concentrate, I pressed those points at the top of my nose, right beside my eye sockets. “Okay,” I said. “Our assumption should be that what he’s doing is something criminal. Not cheating on his wife. If he wanted to spend the day in a motel with a dominatrix, he could have his pick on Long Island, pay cash, and get home without having to eat airport food.”

“All right. I’ll go along with you on that for the time being, except Auntie Anne’s pretzels are good. Okay, so he’s going to some city and he tells your lunch group about it. It’s probably legit, in that he either has a real client there or a fictitious client he’s created a story for. He’s not going to commit a crime in that city just on the odd chance there could be some kind of publicity. He doesn’t want to say he’s going to Cleveland and then have someone from your lunch group or his church soup kitchen listening to CNN on a slow news day and hear about a kidnapping in Cleveland, the day he was there. Not that it’s likely any of you would think that, but a guy like Pete wouldn’t give anything away.”

We agreed that instead of me calling the FBI about the bank robbery in Manchester, my dad would track down the local police detective who’d first been assigned to the case and see if he could get any usable information. We were both a little dubious about it because with our single-player theory, someone like Pete would work alone. In Manchester, there’d been a getaway driver. Possibly he’d hire local talent, then kill the guy once he was a safe distance from the bank.

After he left, I spent a couple of hours on the internet and phone just to continue to correlate intriguing felonies—ones worth traveling to commit—with the dates Pete was away. I’d stuck with offenses that appeared to be committed by just one person.

I applied my dad’s standard of a one-hundred-mile radius around a city. Pete had been in Buffalo for three days in late May the previous year. Looking at a map, I saw that part of the circle included Canada. The day after his arrival in Buffalo, there had been a major fire in Toronto—ninety-nine miles from Buffalo—where a carpet warehouse, Mister Rugg, burned almost to the ground. Clearly, arson.

The bottoms of my feet began to tingle, my sign of excitement, as I read the fire inspector’s report. One person could pull this off: it was effective arson, though definitely not sophisticated. Fires tend to move upward, and with arson, the worst burn marks would likely be on the floor of the warehouse, not the ceiling. A local TV report I found on YouTube said that gas chromatography from the crime scene showed gasoline had been poured on the floor. Excellent! I said to myself as the tingle nearly reached my ankles. Gasoline was easy to buy. There was the added plus of not having to worry about taking black powder or ANFO explosives across the border into Canada.

Still, I knew how I often got swept up by the first juicy prospect. Actually, not so juicy, since it had been an inelegant job. Why call in an out-of-town arsonist to pour some ExxonMobil on a cement floor? I only spent one more minute on the internet to discover that sure enough, two and a half months after the fire, the owner had been arrested.

That night, my mom called and said, “A leben ahf dein kepele, dahling!” She sounded as if Queen Elizabeth had just learned Yiddish. The words were an affectionate blessing, a long life on your head. “Your father was on the phone all afternoon, taking notes, using that mahvelous NYPD voice he uses with out-of-towners. So sonorous! You didn’t just give him something to do. You got him out of the house.”

“I just hope this turns out to be something. I mean, that I’m not pulling him into what turns out to be my own delusion.”

“Don’t think like that!” Mothers. With Eliza, I tried not to edit her thoughts unless I thought she was headed off the rails. Clearly, this was a reaction to my mom’s perpetual boosterism with me: Be positive, Corie. Learn to love yourself. When you get into negativity, tell yourself: Stop! “Trust your gut!” she added.

“Okay, I will.” I didn’t give her a chance to clear her throat and ask: Did I just hear a smidgen of sarcasm? Instead, I said: “I’ll text him in a few minutes and ask him to drive over tomorrow, tell him I work so much better with a partner. Oh, and let him know I bought his pretzels so he doesn’t have to bring his own.”

She said, “Splendid!” And for the rest of the conversation we discussed cucumber gazpacho and her friend Lily’s failure to get a callback for a Centrum Silver commercial.

The next morning fluctuated between drizzle and downpour. From my office, my dad and I could hear the soothing racket of rain on the copper roof of the portico just outside my window. We exchanged printouts, our timelines of felonies committed on the days Pete was out of town. As we read through them, we asked each other for more information every minute or so. Since my dad had the recliner, I gave him a coffee table book to lean on. (I didn’t have a coffee table, so I kept the book Design and Texture: The Magnificent Art of Moroccan Furniture on the floor. (Wynne had given it to me, yet another unspoken nudge to either redecorate my office or move.)

My dad and I combined our two lists, then created a master list from that. It didn’t have a title, though it could have been “Felonies That Could Have Been Committed by Pete Delaney.” We agreed that for the moment we should assume Pete wasn’t the batty sort of criminal, like the one we came across who repeatedly sneaked into stables and cut off horses’ tails (Denver area) or another who specialized in knocking over portable toilets at construction sites (Buffalo).

Instead, we created groups of felony crimes that could be committed in just a few days: burglary, robbery, homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault. After fifteen minutes in the kitchen for elevenses—in our case, coffee, pretzels, and staring out the windows as the hard rain blew sideways—we returned to my office. We worked up a blended list of all crimes ranked (somewhat idiosyncratically, I had to admit) according to my dad’s instinct. I figured it this way: not only did he have seniority, but he was the realer deal in the detection biz.

My specialty was people—figuring out what they needed emotionally, financially, and culturally. How could I—as a special agent—fulfill those needs in order to get the subject to cooperate with an investigation? I knew some veterans in the bureau referred to it as “girl stuff,” but one of my bosses in DC had called me a master manipulator. Obviously I preferred the latter description not only because it was less sexist but also because it was more accurate. Whether being interrogated or conned, the subject should never feel played. Nor should he or she believe the interrogator is clever. That’s not easy. A lot of investigators can’t resist their egos. They have to demonstrate: I’m so fucking clever. That can work on the stupid, the weak, and the fearful. But the savvy and the strong get taken in when they’re comfortable enough to believe they have the upper hand.

My dad and I talked back and forth all morning. He made a few phone calls, tapping old pals to get info while I searched media accounts of incidents where someone like Pete could be the perp. None of the homicides we checked out on the days he was out of town pointed to a serial killer. But just to be sure, I tracked down the names of some mid-level shrinks and scientists at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

I reached a psychologist and told her I was retired from the bureau but wanted to do an article debunking internet reports of ISIS-inspired homicides of individuals—a project that had zero basis in reality. We chatted for a couple of minutes, and I assumed she probed enough to believe that I was authentic because when I gave her three possible time periods, she looked them up while I held on.

Nothing, she reported, though sometimes reports come in months or years later, when a victim’s body is discovered. She’d promised to make a document with the dates and, if anything popped up, she’d get back to me. “Good luck with your article,” she said. “Gosh, it sounds interesting!”

For lunch, I made my dad’s favorite—panini with mozzarella, tomato, and basil. Then he went for a “ten-minute nap” on the couch under the portico, with the rain on the roof as a lullaby. He looked so comfortable there, covered by a light throw blanket, that I figured he was good for at least an hour. As I headed back to my office, I was tempted to go into my bedroom for a nap of my own. But the prospect of an hour alone on the computer with Lulu sharing my chair snapped me out of that.

I’d never learned to work efficiently as long as I had an internet connection. If a paragraph or even a phrase in a manuscript I was considering rang the déjà vu gong, I suspected plagiarism, so I’d search around for a bit. Maybe I’d find something, maybe not, but then I’d meander, unaware I was meandering. When I came back to reality, I’d discover I was watching a Lauryn Hill video or ordering a lilac-scented candle. Once I found myself studying a topographic map of Wyoming with no clue how I got there.

But by myself that early afternoon, I was incredibly focused, as if I were working on some time-sensitive investigation—which, with available minutes ticking away, I guess I was. So along with the bank in New Hampshire, I discovered that on that same day there was a nearly $2 million heist from a jewelry store in Wilmington, Delaware. (One of the items snatched from its vault was a diamond-and-emerald tiara that had belonged to a Romanov. That city had never struck me as a center of grand style, though maybe some dumb-ass Du Pont had wanted to wow the locals.) Wilmington was far beyond the hundred-mile investigatory radius from Boston, where Pete Delaney was supposedly meeting with a client. Still, it was reachable by plane, train, car, and bus in less than half a day.

I discovered my favorite gnawable knuckle, the ring finger of the right hand, was ensconced in my mouth. Ergo, something was bothering me. It didn’t take me long to realize that if Wilmington was a possibility, at a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Boston, so was almost any other city in the country. Well, the far West was unlikely because, in addition to actual hours in the air, there would have to be the added trips to airports and flight delays. Still, widening the field gave me all sorts of possibilities. To keep things manageable, I kept with March twentieth, the day after Pete arrived in Boston. See what felonies went down that day across the country.

There was a homicide on Galveston Island in Texas, a resort community on the Gulf. A rich guy from Houston had bought an expensive second home on the water and spent his long weekends and vacations blasting music, days and nights. (One report mentioned neighbors were aghast at songs like “Smack My Bitch Up.”) Cops, court dates, and fines, along with lawsuits by the local community association, ensued for more than a year, but to no avail.

Late on that day in March, when the Houston guy was leaning on the railing of his porch looking out on the canal that led to the Gulf, he was shot twice with a hunting rifle. The autopsy results showed the angle of the bullet was somewhere near 60 degrees, so it came not from his across-the-canal neighbor driven mad by “Smack My Bitch Up” but from a person on the water. Both bullets hit, and that ended the guy’s Spotify Premium subscription for eternity.

There was a kidnapping in Birmingham, Alabama. The owner of a building supply company was kidnapped on the twentieth and found the following day in a neighbor’s driveway, still drugged, his hands and feet bound with duct tape. His eyes and mouth were covered with duct tape also, and he didn’t remember hearing any voices, so he could not be sure whether he’d been taken by one person or more than one. No ransom was demanded, and no one realized he’d been snatched until after he’d been discovered. He lived alone, having just been divorced from his third wife, and he was known to come into work late; no police had been called about his disappearance until he was found, not even at two in the afternoon.

Since the victim vanished and reappeared without anyone but the perpetrator knowing, the FBI hadn’t been called in. The Birmingham PD had handled it, and the kidnap victim was suing the police: In addition to his eyes and mouth being covered, he had a thick paper shopping bag over his head that was tied around his neck with more duct tape. The perp had thoughtfully cut a few airholes in it. The cops who found him as well as the EMS people who came to the scene did cut the binding on his wrists and ankles. However, they were unwilling to take off the bag and the tape around his neck until forensics got there. Unfortunately, their van had a transmission glitch, so that took over an hour, during which the victim became so hysterical he had to be restrained.

I could have stayed online for hours searching for felonies, checking my hunches, reading whatever police reports I could access using the code number for my most recent contract case. There was a magic immediacy (and sporadic incomprehensibility) in reports written by crime fighter types who think prose is a foreign language.

I hadn’t been so engaged since I left the bureau. I’d given up trying to deny that my new life was as exhilarating as my old one—only quietly exhilarating. Instead, I explained to myself that I’d traded the thrill of being part of a team doing something important for a realer life filled with family. I’d quit because I wanted to be committed. To a star-quality husband, to a wonderful child. To—maybe—future children. Understood, commitment was a wee bit boring. Commitment meant a life where I couldn’t just say: Ta-ta! Tired of New York. I’m off to Djibouti for a couple of years. Sometimes, on bad nights, my new life seemed the end of possibility.

Glancing at the bottom of my monitor, I realized my dad had been napping for nearly an hour and a half. He’d been on hold for so long that being back on the chase once again had knocked him out.

I called the Birmingham PD and got the number two guy on the kidnapping case, Sergeant Wiley Wilson; he talked so slowly it gave my mind time to meander. (I wondered if other than Woodrow Wilson and Walter White in Breaking Bad, I could come up with any alliterative W names. Walt Whitman. Wendy Wasserstein.) Anyway, Sergeant WW didn’t question my intro, that I was a former special agent who was now a contractor for the FBI, which admittedly did have the benefit of being true. The victim, LeMayne Atkinson, had been found in a neighbor’s driveway in his own gated community. Sergeant Wilson and I agreed it was a good thing the neighbor’s car had a rearview camera and a bad thing that Atkinson was suing the department. Having established camaraderie, the sergeant said it looked like a one-man job to him “as long as the perpetrator had some strength, because LeMayne had a gut like the old Phillips 76 ball. You know, like from the gas stations.”

“Right.”

“But he had enough Rohypnol in him to knock out an elephant. That’s a big date rape drug.”

“Right.”

“He was awake but was still having tremors when they found him. Bad stuff.”

“What about the shopping bag over his head?” I asked. “If his eyes and mouth were duct-taped, why would anyone use a bag, and a paper one?”

“I’ve been asking myself that,” Sergeant Wilson said. I waited. “Weird is what it was.”

“Right. Was there any marking on the bag, any design or print?”

“No. Just a plain old bag.”

“Brown paper?”

“White. Just plain though.”

“Was it a strong kind of paper? Like if you had a load of heavy groceries, or a couple of twenty-pound barbells, would it hold up?”

“Sure. I mean, unless you were holding it up off the ground and you dropped a barbell from ten feet up. Then? I don’t know.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that before?” I asked.

“No, ma’am. Never.”

“Could it have been some kind of imitation Ku Klux Klan hood? Was the victim African American or some other minority or, on the other hand, someone who might be involved with the Klan or a militia, where a white hood could be a kind of payback?”

“No, Atkinson was white. Owns three building supply places and more the golf club type than thinking about hate crimes, far as we can tell.”

So the shopping bag made no sense to me. Well, other than Pete might have a stack of plain white bags to use for prototypes. Still, for someone so dedicated to maintaining a facade—if that indeed was the case—it seemed unlikely he would add such unattractive packaging to his MO.

When my dad came back upstairs, I was filled with so much information that when I tried to report it, he kept saying, “Slow down, kiddo.”

“This is the problem: I have too much to choose from. Listen, you know I’m more an interrogator than an investigator. Give me a tutorial. Where do I go from here?”

“Stop with the tutorial business. You know what to do.”

I was about to say, No, I have no idea where to go from here, when “Narrow it down” popped out of my mouth. Before he could say anything, I responded by pointing out the flaw of that method. “How the hell do I narrow it down? Go back to a one-hundred-mile radius? Set a floor for profit, like if some crime—robbery, drugs, whatever—doesn’t bring in at least a hundred thou, forget it? Since he’s so much of a loner, don’t go near anything that smacks of an accomplice?”

“Look, anytime you narrow you run a risk of missing what’s just beyond whatever perimeter you set. That’s the minus. The plus is, you can focus. You can talk to a small number of people and you, because you are a good interrogator, can get more out than witnesses and law enforcement think they know.” I nodded. “But listen, Corie, you need something to jog their memory.” He turned and started walking out of the room. “Be back in a sec. I saw you got that expensive vanilla ice cream in the freezer, like what you put out with the brownies Eliza made. How old is it?”

“Dad!”

“I hate when it gets those icy dots all over the top. But a good vanilla ice cream? God’s gift to the world.”

“Fine. Listen, Dad, you said to jog their memory. Are you talking about a photo of him?”

“Yeah, of course. I could probably get someone I know who has an in with motor vehicles. A retired guy, like me. But the pictures on licenses are lousy. When you blow them up, it looks like eyes and a mouth wearing a wig. Unless your guy’s bald. So you need to get a decent picture without calling out, ‘Hey Pete, say cheese.’”

“I know. There’s a teeny picture in a magazine from years ago, but it’s too low resolution to print. Hey, that vanilla ice cream? I got it last week. It’s not even open. Consider it all yours.”