“No idea, and I’ve been standing right here.”
“I started thinking more about Bree,” Damien tells me. “About the kidnapper knowing her schedule.” He points to the computer. “Take a look.”
Quincy waves us over, and Jamie and I get closer so we can both see his screen. “Know what this is?”
Jamie and I exchange a shrug. “A guy standing on a sidewalk.”
“Look closer.” He manipulates the mouse and zooms in. It’s Rory, no doubt about it. Then he pulls back, and the Moviehouse behind him comes into focus.
“That’s the theater on Fairfax,” I say. “The one where he was meeting Bree for Casablanca.”
“Oh, yes it is,” Quincy says. “And I’m quite fascinated by the extremely large number of wireless security cameras in that particular area. I believe I caught him from no less than eighteen different setups.”
“Is that bad?” I ask.
“Actually, it’s good. Here’s what’s truly interesting.” He taps more keys, the tape scrolls forward, and Rory’s walking away from the theater.
“Um, so?” Jamie sounds as confused as I feel.
“Check the time stamp. It’s two minutes until the show starts. You’re expecting a date. Worried. And you don’t give her two extra minutes?”
I’m not sure that’s a smoking gun, but I nod, urging him to continue.
“Got this from a traffic cam about three blocks from your daughter’s art class. See? We can make out the license plate. Jerrol and Elsbeth Colgate.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Not surprised as they live in Hawaii,” Ryan says. “But they visit their children in Big Bear, Santa Barbara, and Long Beach three or four times a year. So they keep a car garaged.”
“I made an inquiry based on Damien’s theory,” Quincy says, “and learned that they do significant business with Franklin & Youngman.”
I start to shake my head, then remember the name. “Financial advisors.”
“No way,” Jamie says. “Is that where Rory works?”
“It is,” Damien says.
“Oh, God.” I stumble into the chair next to Quincy, then look up at Damien. “And Bree?”
“I think he targeted her because she was our nanny.”
I remember what Ryan said at the Foundation brunch. That Rory looked like a guy who hadn’t grown up. A guy, I’m assuming, who expected a Stark grant to be his golden ticket. And when he didn’t make it big right off the bat, he decided to take a shortcut.
“That’s the theory,” Damien says, when I spell it all out for him.
“But that’s not proof. If we want to nail this guy, there has to be proof.”
All three men look at each other, and then Ryan speaks. “Yeah, well, that’s where some kickass Stark tech comes into play.”
“The tracker? But I thought the rain messed that up.”
“Just the exterior tracking,” Damien says. “With luck, he’ll have opened the cases.”
“With more luck, he hasn’t already skipped town,” Quincy says.
“He’s here.” Damien’s face is hard as stone. “Right now, I’m feeling very, very lucky.”
27
As soon as Damien finishes running down the Rory theory once again, Bree crosses her arms over her chest, then looks at me and Damien in turn, ignoring everyone else around the conference table. “So is this where you officially fire me or is it where you arrest me?”
“Neither,” he says. “This is where I apologize. And where I ask for your help.”
“Apologize?” Her brow furrows as she looks at me. “Is he serious?”
I nod, but say nothing.
“You passed the polygraph,” I tell her, glancing at Quincy, who administered it less than an hour ago.
“He set me up,” Bree says, her voice hard. “He made it so it looked like I could just as easily be his partner as his victim.”
Damien nods.
I see her throat move as tears form in her eyes. “I didn’t know it was Rory. He made me put that mask on whenever he was in the room. And the only time I saw him was when he grabbed us, and he was wearing that stocking.”
She hiccups, her chest shuddering from her tears. “I didn’t want to leave her. I never would have left Anne alone. I didn’t have a choice. I swear.”
“I know,” I assure her. “And Damien and I are both sorry. We should have had more faith.”
“No.” She takes a deep breath. “I get it. Those two sweet babies. You can’t take chances.” She rubs her eyes. “So what exactly are we doing here? Are you giving me my job back?”
“If you want it,” Damien says. “But right now, there’s another job we want to talk to you about.”
“Um. Okay.”
“Good,” Damien says, then takes the seat next to her. “Are you familiar with nano-technology?”
From the look on her face, she’s even less familiar with it than I was an hour ago. I’d at least heard of it. But Bree’s expression makes it clear that she’s certain that Damien is talking science fiction when he describes the crystalline quantum dots—dust, really—that can be seen only through a certain type of lenses.
“You’re serious,” she says, then adds, “Wow,” when Damien nods.
“It’s tech we’ve been developing for the military and the intelligence community, and it’s had limited, successful field testing.”
“So, what does this have to do with Rory?”
“The particles are suspended in a liquid—that way they can be sprayed on a suspected terrorist, for example, and then certain field glasses can be used to track the suspect back to his base.”
She nods, apparently watching an action movie in her head. “So you sprayed Rory?”
“We didn’t get close to Rory. We sprayed the money. And we sprayed the outside of the case.”
“Oh. Oh. I get it. So when he moves the case, some of the dust is left behind.”
“That was the idea,” Ryan said. “Had the weather been clear, we should have been able to track the particles back to him. And, we hoped, to Anne. But it rained. It diluted the particles, washed some away.”
“In other words, we were screwed,” Damien says.
“So what now?”
“Now we want you to reach out to him. Tell him we’ve finally let you out of your cell. That you miss him and can’t believe we kept you here like a prisoner when you’d been kidnapped, too. That you’re annoyed with us for not trusting you. Tell him you have to get out to clear your head. That you want to see him.”
I watch her face as she processes all of that. “You want me to get into his place. And when I do, I’m going to be looking for the quantum thingies.”
“Exactly,” Damien says. “If he opened the case and handled the money, there should be dust onsite. Even if he didn’t, we might get lucky. There might be some latent dust from when he handled the exterior of the cases. Some minute amount the rain didn’t wash away.”
She nods slowly, processing everything. “I wear glasses sometimes.”
Damien smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “We know.”
I hadn’t really believed he’d still be in town, but when Bree reached out to Rory with the concocted story, he told her how sorry he was that her boss was an asshole and invited her over to his place.
“The money won’t be there,” Damien says from where we sit in a nearby van, the team monitoring the situation with a variety of gadgets. “He’s smart enough not to raise suspicion by leaving town right away. That means he’s smart enough not to have the bulk of the money on his person. But I’m betting he couldn’t resist pocketing a little, and that means we should see the quantum residue.”
“So if Bree doesn’t see the dots, we’re out of luck.”
“Not out of luck,” Riley says. “Just on to plan B.”
Riley had gone back to his house last night, but Ryan called him back for this operation because of his hand-to-hand combat skills. We’re all hoping Riley’s going to be b
ored silly. But better to have him around just in case.
Charles Maynard is also in the van, along with a LAPD detective he’s worked with before.
“How much longer?” I ask, my nerves getting the better of me. “Why the hell didn’t we wire her? We need to know what’s going on in there.”