19
LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE broke into the house through the front door, because that looked like the least used, and so the least likely to have fresh prints. The three of them walked through first, clearing the place, with a variety of Texas cops waiting outside, and as they worked through the house, Lucas realized that Poole was gone.
There was still furniture inside, but it seemed that several pieces were missing, leaving behind leg indentations on the carpets. While there was still some clothing in the closets, it seemed to him that the good stuff was gone: no new men’s shoes, lots of old dusty-looking Nikes, and no women’s shoes at all.
Lucas looked under the sink and found some garbage, topped by a banana peel and moist coffee grounds; he looked in the master bedroom suite, and the bathroom cabinets were mostly empty.
Bob and Rae had gone to check the garage and a backyard shed while Lucas was poking around the kitchen and bedroom. The garage was empty, except for a well-used lawn mower. So was the shed. Rae said, “It looked like he used to have a lot of tools and stuff, but they’re all gone. There’s a homemade workbench in there and a trash bin with a broken guitar neck in it. Gotta be the right guy.”
“Didn’t miss them by much,” Lucas said. “A few hours at the most.”
“How do you know?” Bob asked.
“Banana peel and coffee grounds,” Lucas said.
“Huh?”
“There was a banana peel on top of the garbage. Looked good as new. How long does that last? Not even overnight, I don’t think. I bet it was dropped in there this morning. The coffee grounds were still wet.”
“Well, shit,” Bob said.
“If you were really a genius, you’d have thought of that old telephone thing yesterday,” Rae said to Bob.
One of the crime scene crew people came out and said, “They didn’t wipe anything. There are fingerprints all over the place and hair and everything else, sexual residue on the sheets.”
“Get the prints going,” Rae said. “If you get good ones, we’ll have confirmation in a couple of hours.”
“We can get good ones.”
—
THEY EVENTUALLY went out to the back of the house, to a gas barbeque and a wooden picnic table. They sat at the table and Bob said, “DNA will get us confirmations both on the murders in Biloxi and the armored car job.”
“Take a few days on the DNA,” Lucas said. “I’ll be happy with a good set of prints, right now.”
“So they’re running and we’ve got at least three fake IDs,” Rae said. “Let’s see if Poole has a driver’s license under any of those names, and if he does, see if we can link it up to some license tags.”
Lucas nodded and took out his phone: “Gotta get Forte on the computer shit. And, Rae, grab one of those Rangers and see what they can get out of the Texas DMV.”
Forte was pleased: “Man, you got them on the run. Get me those prints!”
—
ONE OF THE RANGERS ran down the property ownership—it wasn’t Poole—and got in touch with the owner, who showed up two hours after they broke through the front door. He was a heavyset man, red-faced, with a belly that bulged over his turquoise-and-silver belt buckle. He parked his Lincoln on the street, then wandered over to a Ranger, who brought him to Lucas. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked. And, “You busted down my door?”
The Ranger said to Lucas, “This is Mr. Carlton, Davis Carlton—he’s the homeowner.”
“We’re looking for a fugitive named Garvin Poole,” Lucas said.
“This ain’t no Garvin Poole,” Carlton said. “This here is a man name of Will Robb . . .”
Lucas showed him the mug shot and he scratched his head and said, “Damn. That sure looks like Will.”
He’d rented the house to a man he knew as William Robb, he said, and he didn’t know why the phone would be in the name of a Marvin Toone. “I didn’t pay for a phone, or have anything to do with it,” he said.
He collected two thousand dollars a month from the man he called Robb, and said that Robb had told him that he was a disabled veteran who’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was living on a government disability pension from having breathed in poisonous gas.
“Pretty nice house for two thousand,” Rae remarked.
Carlton flushed and said, “He was a war hero, I gave him a break on the rent.”
“That’s real patriotic of you,” Rae said.
Carlton had no idea what kind of vehicles Robb and his wife owned, except that one was a white pickup. “He’d drop the rent off at my office, that’s the only time I ever saw the man. I came by every six months or so to check on the property and there was never a problem. They seemed like a real nice couple. The kind of renters you hope for.”
—
WHEN CARLTON LEFT, everything slowed down: there was no record of a Marvin Toone or a Chuck/Charles Wiggin with the DMV, although there were several William Robbs. Lucas called Forte to get him working on Dallas-area William Robbs, but told the others, “Won’t be one of them. I can feel it.”
“Fake names are cheap, like burner phones,” Bob said. “They got a different one for everything. Phones and names.”
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “We need to get on these guys. In twelve hours of driving, Texas speeds, they could be a thousand miles from here. By tomorrow night, they could be in California or Florida and we’ll be starting all over.”
“Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Rae said.
Lucas scratched his cheek, looked blankly at the back fence, then said, “Well, first, go change into some marshal clothes. Then, we all knock on doors. Talk to neighbors. We can at least find out what kind of vehicles they’re driving, and what color they are.”
“I got the old guy across the street,” Rae said. “He seems like a curtain-peeker.”
—
THERE WERE five properties that touched Poole’s: one on each side, one directly behind, and two at the back corners; three more houses across the street had a straight look at the driveway going back to the garage. Nobody in any of the houses had useful information, including the old guy across the street.
Robb, they said, had a gray car—or maybe dark blue—his wife had a black convertible, and they also had a white pickup, a Ford. Then a teenager who’d heard the cops were looking for information about Robb’s car came down and told them that it was a metallic gray five-liter Mustang, less than a year old. A beautiful car, he said, and Robb’s pride and joy; and Robb was a cool guy, played a mean guitar.
All of which added up to slightly more than nothing.
Forte called: “You got him. The prints are a direct hit—Garvin Poole and Dora Box.”
“We knew that, but good to know for sure,” Lucas said. “Trouble is, by now they could be two hundred miles from here.”
—
THE CRIME SCENE PEOPLE were still working the house, and Lucas, Bob, and Rae were standing in the driveway, comparing notes, when the old guy from across the street came ambling over. He had a furry white mustache and clear blue eyes. Rae said, “Mr. Case. How’re you doing?”
“You said if I thought of anything, let you know. I thought of something,” Case said.
“Yeah?”
He pointed across the street, to the house next to his: it was an imposing place, faux-Colonial with white pillars hovering over a circular front drive. “That’s the Smith place . . .”
“Talked to them two hours ago,” Bob said.
“They tell you about the wedding last year?”
Bob, Rae, and Lucas exchanged glances: hard to tell where this might be going. Rae asked, “The wedding?”
“Their daughter got married. About time, in my opinion, she was getting long in the tooth and had sort of passed herself around town. But that’s neither here nor there. They got married down at St. John’s and then they had a reception out to the country club and then they had an ‘at home’ pool thing for members of the wedding party.” He pointed again at the Smith house and the circular drive. “The wedding party was all in limos, maybe ten, twelve black limos, and they all came up that circular driveway, one at a time, two or three minutes part. All the people were getting out, kissing each other, going inside. A wedding photographer was out taking movies of them coming up and getting out of the cars.”
Bob said, “Yeah?”
Lucas said, “The cameras were looking across the street to this driveway.”
The old man jabbed a finger at Lucas: “Bingo. They didn’t invite me to the wedding, but they invited me over to the at-home reception because they thought I was lonely, my wife being gone, and also because they planned to play loud rock music all night and they didn’t want me complaining to the police. I was standing there on the porch watching them make the movies and I distinctly remember Will Robb coming and going in his truck.”
Bob said, “I’ll go get the movies,” and headed across the street at a trot.
Rae said, “Mr. Case, you are a sweetheart.”
—
BOB DID EVENTUALLY get the movies, but it wasn’t all that simple. At first, the Smiths weren’t at home anymore, but Case told them that Emily Smith was a realtor, and they managed to locate her. She came home and gave them a compact disc with the wedding movies on it, and watching on the Smiths’s high-resolution television, they could see license plates on Poole’s white pickup, but the movies were not quite steady enough to make out the numbers. The plates were white, so almost certainly from Texas.
Bob and Rae wanted to send the movies to the FBI’s digital imaging experts in Washington, but Lucas suggested that they first try the wedding photographer.
The photographer wasn’t working that day, but agreed to meet them at his studio. He turned out to be a short, stout, solemn-looking man who dressed all in black, including a black fedora and a black string tie with an onyx slide. He brought the movies up on a computer screen, grabbed several frames of each instance where the license tags appeared, and began enhancing them in Photoshop.
The numbers never did get particularly clear, but enough numbers were clear enough in the different frames that by putting several frames together, they pieced out a good tag number.
“If the FBI has the capabilities that they’re rumored to have, they should be able to get them a lot clearer,” the photographer told them. “But remember this—I hold the copyright on these photos, not the Smiths. You can use them, but you can’t publish them. I don’t want to see these on TV.”
“You’re being less generous than you might be,” Rae observed.
“I gotta eat. If somebody’s going to put them out to the TV stations, it’s gonna be me and I’m gonna get paid.”
“Don’t do it without talking to us first,” Lucas said. “If you put them out there, and the suspects see them, they’ll ditch the plates and we’ll come bust you for interfering with a federal investigation and maybe accessory after the fact.”
“I’ll talk to my attorney about that . . .”
“Sure, do that,” Lucas said. “If he needs further clarification, tell him to call me.”
—
BACK IN THE CAR, Lucas called the Rangers at the Poole/Robb house, gave them the tag number, and they promised to wallpaper the entire state with it, and all the adjacent states. Lucas warned the Rangers that the people in the truck were armed and willing to kill.
“So are we,” the Ranger said.
“Before you do that—kill them—I’d like to talk to them,” Lucas said.
“We’ll do what we can,” the Ranger said. “I’m making no promises.”
—
WHEN LUCAS was off the phone, Bob asked, “What are the chances?”
“We’re maybe fifty-fifty to get a hit,” Lucas said. “How many white Ford trucks in Texas?”
“About a billion, give or take.”
On their way back to the house, a crime scene cop called from the town houses where Soto had been shot. “We picked up a lot of brass from the .223 used to kill Soto. Most of it had been polished clean, but we found two almost identical thumbprints on two cartridges. We got back a solid hit for a Charlene Marie Kort. The feds have no other record of her, other than a couple of speeding tickets given to a woman with that name in Florida.”
“If there was no other record, where did her prints come from?” Lucas asked.
“The feds had them, but they were submitted as part of a background check by a security guard company in Tallahassee, eight years ago. That’s all we know.”
“And we don’t know whether this Kort actually was the shooter, or whether she just handled the ammo at some point,” Lucas said.
“No, we don’t. But the ammo with the prints is identical to the ammo that had been polished, and the prints look to us to be fresh. They’re very clear, they’re not interrupted by scratches or rubs that you’d expect if the shells had been handled a lot. If the shells are polished, we figure there can only be a bad reason for that—it’s what you expect from a really careful holdup guy, or a professional shooter. Like this Soto guy. Somebody else might not be so careful, pressing a cartridge down into a magazine.”
“Okay, I get that,” Lucas said. “And since the other person is a woman, and Charlene Marie Kort certainly sounds like a woman . . .”
“Yes. We think you should look up Charlene Marie Kort.”
Lucas called Forte and gave him the name.
—
“NOW WE WAIT,” Lucas said. “Hope there’s a lot of football on TV.”
“Could be some intense hoops back at the hotel,” Rae said.
“Could be,” Lucas said.
Bob was shaking his head. “Something’s going to happen,” he said. “We got momentum. Either this Kort is going to turn up or we’ll get a hit on the plates.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Rae said.