Enigma (FBI Thriller 21)

WEDNESDAY MORNING

Jack climbed into Cam’s Mazda outside the Satterleigh Condominium complex, fastened his seat belt. “I’d call this a bust. The manager told me Ms. Cortina Alvarez is traveling, always traveling. This time, it’s Milan and Florence for the Latin princess, where, he said, she owns houses. She isn’t due back for three weeks.” He asked without much hope, “Did you have any better luck?”

Cam fastened her own seat belt, opened all the windows, slipped on her dark sunglasses, and turned to face him. “Her next-door neighbor told me the same thing. ‘Always on the go, that’s Cortina,’?” she said. “She recognized her passport photo, though, even with the spiked hair and Goth makeup.”

“At least she does live here, sometimes,” Jack said. “I already called Savich. He wants us to meet Ruth and Ollie at that Alexandria warehouse where they captured Manta Ray. The FBI field office has already been all over it looking for the stash he robbed from the bank, but Savich wants us to go in with a fresh eye, turn it over again ourselves. He believes something’s still got to be there. Wherever that Robinson choppered Manta Ray and the woman with him yesterday afternoon can’t be all that far away. And Manta Ray and whoever that helicopter took him to probably wants it back. Otherwise why go to all the trouble of breaking him out? Hey, why aren’t you wearing your sling?”

Cam pressed the start button and the Mazda roared to life. “I’m good to go, Jack, don’t worry. Let’s say Dillon is right; let’s say the reason they broke Manta Ray out was to get whatever he stashed from the bank robbery. If he doesn’t want to give it up, someone might be pulling his tonsils out through his nose right now.”

“Maybe, but Manta Ray is a pretty smart man. I’d put my money on his thinking of a way to come out of this alive. With Jacobson out of the picture, he might. In any case, there’s a chance someone’s going to be headed back there looking to find that stash.”

Cam banged her fist on the steering wheel, and winced. “

With our luck today, he’s probably already come and gone.”

“So how long to get us there, Cam? I see your arm still hurts, you want me to drive?”

Cam had already turned the corner. She stuck her flasher on the roof of her Mazda, gave him a huge grin. “Nah, this is nothing. I wanted to be a race car driver until I was nearly twelve.” She gunned the Miata, swerving around cars that didn’t melt away in front of her. Even traffic on the Francis Scott Key Bridge hugged the sides as she roared past them, screeching into a hard right turn onto Franklin Boulevard.

Jack was grinning like a maniac and he wasn’t even in the driver’s seat. He loved speed, loved the adrenaline rush, could feel the roaring of the blood through his veins and wondered if Cam felt the same way. Her wavy blond hair was whipping about her head, and he saw she was whistling. He felt very good at that moment; he felt energized. He sat back and enjoyed it. Seven minutes later, Cam pulled the Mazda up on a curb half a block from the abandoned warehouse district where they’d first found Manta Ray lying with a dirty torn sheet pressed to his bleeding side.

“That was well done, Wittier; I’m impressed. You want to race with me sometime?”

Cam’s adrenaline level was still soaring upward. “I’ll have you know that was official business. If Savich was right about Manta Ray coming back here, we had to get here fast.”

“Sure, believe what you need to believe.” He gave her a big grin as he climbed out of the Miata and looked around. He saw a desolate hardscrabble landscape with abandoned parking lots fronting a dozen dilapidated warehouses and loading docks, their windows broken out, probably for decades. Nests made of cardboard boxes were huddled around the warehouses, to give shelter from the wind. He saw half a dozen homeless people sitting on warehouse stoops, their backs against building walls, paying them no attention.

“It’s this one,” Cam said, pointing to a warehouse that looked on the edge of collapsing in on itself. Cam pulled off her sunglasses as they made their way into the dim interior of a large empty single-story space. The air smelled like dead rodents and rotted food. They both snapped on nitrile gloves and started going through every corner of the ramshackle space where Manta Ray had picked to hide. They banged on floorboards that hadn’t already been ripped up, checked every crevice behind the busted-up wallboard. They didn’t find Manta Ray’s stash, or any trace he’d ever been there. They stood in the middle of the vast space and tried to look at it with fresh eyes. But their fresh eyes didn’t see anything, either.

As they walked out of the warehouse, none of the homeless people paid them any mind, most kept their heads down, not wanting to draw attention to themselves. But one man was singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He looked at them and smiled. Jack and Cam trotted over to him, both ignoring the other eyes suddenly watching their every move. The man was leaning back against some broken-down cardboard boxes propped against the side of a warehouse. He had an old filthy towel draped over his head, wore a ragged hula shirt open to a dirty T-shirt. They couldn’t tell if he was fifty or eighty. Jack went down on his haunches beside him, got a whiff of something very ripe. He took a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet. “This is yours if you can tell me anything about this man.” He called up Manta Ray’s photo on his cell.

“It’s not enough,” came a phlegmy old voice. “Double or nothing.”

“What? You from Las Vegas? All right.” Jack pulled out a second hundred, his last. “You’ve emptied the bank. Tell me.”

His bloodshot eyes focused on Cam. “You sure are pretty. I had a girl once who was pretty as you. I wonder sometimes what happened to her. I guess she isn’t so young anymore. I sure ain’t.”

“Thank you. Sir, this is really important. Have you seen him? He’s a seriously bad man, a criminal. We believe he might be coming back here.”

“I know who he is, missy. It’s that Manta Ray character. Sally over there”—he flapped a veiny hand toward a head of matted red hair hunkered down in a ragged bundle of blankets inside a cardboard box some twelve feet away—“I call her Dancin’ Sally. She used to be a stripper. She saw him first, told me while we were sharing a nice half bottle of bourbon that this here Manta Ray was about the cutest boy she’d ever seen. She said he was so bad hurt, he’d probably bite the big one.”

He waved a gnarled hand. “Then I saw him. He was dragging himself around, moaning and carrying on.” He looked at the photo again, turned his head and spit. “Don’t see it myself. He looked like another vicious mongrel to me. I haven’t seen him back here since all the cops took him away. I don’t remember when that was, a long time ago, maybe. Last year?”

“A long time ago,” Cam said. “So, you haven’t seen him? Maybe this morning?”

“Nary a glimpse. So he survived. I wondered, so did Sally. He get away from you guys? You’re cops, right?”

“Yes, we’re cops,” Jack said. “You haven’t seen anyone you don’t know drive up here this morning? Or maybe late last night?”

“Nope, just my usual neighbors, and the dealers meetin’ up with their fancy buyers, the putzes. All of ’em belong in jail, you ask me.” He turned his head away and coughed.

Cam felt a hand on her shoulder, looked up to see Agent Ruth Noble. She hadn’t heard Ruth; she’d come up so quietly. “Let me, Cam.” Ruth fell to her knees beside the old man. “Hello, Dougie,” she said, and gave him a Kleenex, waited until he’d wiped his mouth.

40

“Wow, that you, Ruth? You’re looking happy. What? Haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks. Or maybe longer. I can’t remember. How’s Dix and the boys?”

“They’re well, thank you.” She placed her fingers against the pulse in his dirty neck, counted, then nodded. “You told me you were going to stop the booze, Dougie.”