The Pain Scale (33 page)

“Yeah. He told her, ‘We have a problem.’”

“Did she answer?”

“Yep. Just said, ‘Fix it.’”

“For all we know,” Ruiz said, “they could be talking about a toilet in the mansion.”

“They could,” I said. “But they’re not.”

“So you’re thinking she’s the shot caller?”

“We have the earlier phone records showing a lot of contact between them. Maybe there’s something else going on. We don’t know. Maybe she’s the one pulling the strings.”

“What do we do with it?”

“We find more evidence.”

“More? You don’t have
any
yet. All you have are illegally obtained phone records.”

“We have more than that.”

“Not that you can use.”

He was right.

And by the time Jen and I got to Patrick’s place, we had a whole bunch more we couldn’t use.

“I’m not sure where I should start,” he said.

“Can we backtrack and find any previous text messages between Kroll and Mrs. Benton?” Jen asked.

“We’ve already got the records. They go back about two years. More than a few, but not a huge number. I’m still working on the contents. The older they are, the harder they are to find.”

Jen nodded.

“My first thought,” I said, “was some kind of relationship.”

Patrick said, “Well, it is
some
kind of a relationship.”

“Just not the kind I was thinking of.”

“Even if they hired Tropov and the stooges, they still could be fucking each other,” Jen said.

“Good point,” Patrick said.

“Maybe the texts will tell us something.” I looked at the stacks of papers on his desk. “What else did you find?”

“I told you last night I have access to S and B’s personnel files? Don’t know what to do with them exactly yet. They have fingerprints on file for all the PMF guys. I’m figuring out a way to run the driver’s prints against what they have without leaving any tracks.”

Jen thought about that for a moment. “Think they’d go in-house for something like that?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But let’s hope so. If they didn’t make any more mistakes, we’re in trouble.”

It wasn’t even noon yet, but we’d already been on the clock for nearly eight hours. Jen looked tired.

“You want to go home, get some sleep?” I asked.

“No, I’m okay.”

“At least take a long lunch. Get a little rest.”

She nodded.

“Come back at three or four.”

“We’re almost there, Danny.”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know where “there” was, but I knew she was right. “Go sleep.”

After she left, I started tossing things around in my head. I was surprised Anton would have gone back to his warehouse. Every experience I’d had with him seemed to indicate he was too smart for a rookie mistake like that. Especially with Yevgeny watching his back. There must have been a reason that he’d taken that kind of chance.

What could it have been?

I was still trying to answer that question when Patrick called. He’d left a few hours earlier to get back to his data.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’ve got something,” he said.

T
HE FACE WAS
not much more than a blur, really, reflected in the rearview mirror of the Tahoe that Shevchuk’s killers had been driving. Patrick gave me a long and complicated explanation of how he had been able to recover the deleted photo from a mirror image of the flash memory of the driver’s iPhone. I got lost somewhere in the second or third sentence.

“How can we be sure this is the Tahoe?”

“Well, we can’t sure it’s
the
Tahoe, but we know it’s
a
Tahoe.” He opened a file and showed me a dozen photos of rearview mirrors. “These are all from the same year and trim level they were driving. If you look close, you can see the shape and proportions are the same.” He moused around the screen for few seconds and pulled three of the pictures into a line under the blurred face. He was right. The mirrors were all identical.

“How did you find all those?”

“Everything’s out there. You just need to know where to look.”

I was impressed. And he knew it.

“And you said you got this from a copy of the phone?”

“Yeah, that’s the best part. The phone itself is still in evidence. I didn’t have to break the chain of custody.”

That meant that, unlike most of the other evidence Patrick had gathered, one of the techs at the department would be able to duplicate his results, and this would be admissible in court and
valid evidence for warrants and other investigative purposes. If we could only match the photo to an actual face.

When I asked him about that, he said, “I used a facial-recognition program to run against the Sternow and Byrne personnel files but didn’t get any hits.” He saw the disappointment in my expression and went on. “Don’t give up yet. The program I have is fairly basic, so I’m upgrading to a much better program. I’ve also got a guy who can enhance the image better than I can. We’ll also have a lot more resources we can use whenever we go on the official record with this and can run it against the state and federal databases.”

“No way to do that sooner?”

“I could access them, but that’s way dicey. We leave a footprint with the feds, and we’re going to be in way deeper than anything we’ve been digging into so far. I don’t think we’re ready to go there, are we?”

That was the first time since we’d started down this path that Patrick had hesitated. He was much more familiar with the territory than I was. I deferred. “You understand the implications of what we’re doing a lot better than I do. You’re in the driver’s seat on this.”

“I like the sound of that,” he said, smiling in the blue light of his computer display.

Jen and I were back at our desks when I described him. “Dark hair, short beard, features on the sharp side. Hard to be much more specific.”

“Could you pick him out of a lineup?” she asked.

“Depends on who else was in it. Maybe.”

“Patrick thinks the techs will come up with the same image?”

“He seemed confident of that.”

“How long did he think they’d take?”

“Couldn’t say. Depends on how they’re prioritizing things.”

“So we’ve got an indefinite window until it goes into the reports.”

I nodded. “I thought about talking to the techs, see if we could slow things down, but I didn’t want to get anyone else involved.”

“Might not be so bad.”

“It would give us access to more data and make coming up with a match a lot more likely.”

“What would we lose?” she asked.

I’d already considered that question and had an answer ready for her. “If he’s still around, and we match him, he’s likely to disappear.”

“How do we know he hasn’t already skipped?”

“Only Anton.” There were a few angles to consider, but I was confident I’d figured them all out. “He might already be gone. If Anton was the contractor, the middleman, then he was probably the last loose end. The shooter and whoever’s calling the shots might figure the mess is completely cleaned. Move on to whatever’s next.”

“That assumes a lot,” Jen said. She was right.

“I know. That our theory is a slam dunk and that we’ve foreseen every possible variable.”

“Think we have?”

“I doubt it.”

“Me too.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“With another needle in another haystack.”

We talked briefly about tipping off the techs to the image on the iPhone, the exact opposite of what I had considered earlier, but decided to wait to see if Patrick could come up with something.

I dug back into the files and started looking for loose ends. A few minutes later, when I extended my hand toward the ceiling and pulled my raised elbow toward my head in an attempt to relieve the pain rising in my shoulder, Jen said, “What?”

“I hate this.”

She waited for me to go on.

“Waiting. Every solid lead we’re getting is coming from the fucking driver’s iPhone and from Patrick’s computer. I want to do something. I need to do something. I can’t just sit here and wait. It’s killing me.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

“And go where?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“
Yogurtland?
”

“You love Yogurtland,” Jen said.

“I know. But it’s not what I thought you had in mind.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe we’d be kicking in a door or something.”

We were sitting in lime-green chairs at the table closest to the window, looking out onto Second Street.

“You know,” I said, “something exciting.”

“Are you kidding?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re sitting there eating vanilla frozen yogurt topped with vanilla wafers and you honestly expect me to believe you want excitement?”

She had a point. So I used the pink plastic spoon to shovel another bite into my mouth and didn’t say anything else.

“How are the schools?” I asked the real-estate lady. She had shoes with heels so high they made my calves hurt, shoulder-length blonde hair that didn’t move when she turned her head, and smelled like a Sephora store. Her name was Shelly.

We’d stopped by a property on Fifth Street in Belmont Heights. They called it a duplex even though it really wasn’t one. I didn’t know what style it was—maybe a little bit Craftsmany mixed in with contemporary suburb? I did know it was a really nice three bedroom/two bath with a guesthouse in back, but it was way out of Jen’s price range. Which was why I was having some fun with Shelly.