Alafair Burke - Long Gone

“Can I keep this?” the detective asked.

“Of course.”

“Alice?”

She looked once again in the direction of her name. This time it was Jeff, emerging from the back of a taxi.

“Sorry,” she said to the detective. “I sort of called everyone I could think of after I called you guys.” Including her brother. She still hadn’t heard from Ben.

She watched as the detective-what was his name again?-waved Jeff through the inner sanctum enfolded by the growing array of law enforcement around them. Jeff nodded toward Lily and kissed the top of Alice’s head before joining them on the curb.

The detective continued to ask his questions, and she continued to answer them, but as much as she tried to ground herself in the severity of this moment, she found her mind wandering.

A man was dead. A life was lost. Drew hadn’t been her husband or family or even a friend. This wasn’t about her. Not in any way. So what if she lost a job? Who even cared that she had been through the shock of finding his body? Who cared about her junkie brother falling out of sobriety once again? She knew at a cognitive level that nothing about this situation involved her. Yet the feeling of Lily and Jeff on either side of her shivering body meant the world to her.

How did this happen?

Alice Humphrey had no idea.

She also had no idea the police would soon identify the person who had created ITH Corporation, the company named on her pay stub. She had no idea whose index finger would match a latent print that a crime scene analyst was currently pulling from the gallery’s bathroom door. She had no idea that, two hundred yards away, on the corner of Washington and Bank, as Alice answered a question about Drew Campbell, a police officer working the routine perimeter search for a discarded weapon had just found a pair of black leather gloves with mink lining resting on top of a discarded half bagel in a trash can. He thought about passing them on to his girlfriend, but then placed them in a plastic evidence baggie just in case. She had no idea that this same detective and his partner would be at her door the following day with a photograph that would change everything.

H ank threw an offhand wave toward Charlie Dixon as he passed Dixon’s cubicle on the route to his own. Ever since the shit hit the fan two months ago with the reprimand, Hank felt like he was walking the gauntlet each time he padded through the narrow corridor formed between the makeshift light gray walls erected around the agents’ identical faux-grained desks. It was as if a wave of whispers rippled behind him as he moved through the open-air hallway. He knew it was mostly his imagination, of course, but mostly was not the same thing as entirely.

With Dixon, though, things were different. He’d always been a quiet guy. Came to work, did the job, and left. No group jogs. No lunchtime skins and shirts on the basketball court. No happy hours. But ever since the reprimand-the one that was supposed to be private but which the entire field office obviously knew about the very morning it had been delivered-Dixon had been just a notch more cordial. Intentional eye contact. Meaningful nods. Even hellos in the lunchroom. If the two men didn’t start to slow things down, they might actually share an entire conversation at some point.

At his computer, Hank checked the BMW’s VIN in the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System. Title information used to be maintained only by the states, meaning fifty different databases. Not surprisingly, the bad guys figured out how to use that gap to their advantage. In theory, stolen cars have limited value in a world where a routine traffic stop can turn into a felony bust in a matter of seconds. As a result, stolen cars were usually sold for pennies on the dollar to be exported out of the country or broken down for parts.

But then the bad guys figured out they could steal a car in Florida, install forged VIN tags matching an identical car from a dealer lot, and then register the cloned car in North Carolina. Voilà. Unless the legitimate purchaser of the car that was actually supposed to carry that number just happened to move to North Carolina, no one would ever know that two cars were cruising around with the same regulatory fingerprints.

The federal government had finally pulled its shit together a couple of years earlier to create this new national database. The usual privacy fanatics were apoplectic. About half of the state DMVs also refused to play nice, sensing a system that would rival the one they charged taxpayers to access. Now the system was up and running well enough to be useful in a lot of cases, but was still no guarantee he’d be free from a state-by-state search.

He got lucky. The VIN hit a match.

According to the database, the gray BMW was owned by QuickCar Inc. Hank was familiar with the company. QuickCar members had access to cars maintained in various lots throughout the city and paid only for their actual use. Rentals could be for hours, a full day, or longer. “Quick” out of the lot and dump the car back at any Quick site in the city. He searched for QuickCar on the Internet and dialed the company’s toll-free number. Even if another agent overheard the call, all he’d hear would be an innocuous question about a vehicle identification number. There’d be no need for the name Travis Larson to be spoken on his end of the line. No need for anyone to let slip to the SAC that Hank was once again keeping tabs on the man he was supposed to leave alone. Let it lie, Beckman. As far as you’re concerned, Travis Larson does not exist. Forget the man’s name if you know what’s good for you.

“QuickCar.”

He identified himself as an FBI agent and explained that he needed to track down the identity of the person who’d been driving one of their gray BMWs as recently as this morning. “I have the vehicle identification number.”

“Can you hold for my supervisor?”

Not good.

“This is Mr. Martin. How can I help you?”

Mr. Martin obviously brought an intensity to his job as a rental car company’s phone-bank manager. Hank was tempted to hang up and move on to Plan B, but went ahead and restated his request.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not able to hand out identifying information about our customers on the telephone.”

“This is an urgent matter in a federal criminal investigation.”

“I understand that, Agent, but the company follows certain procedures. If you can fax over a subpoena…”

“You do realize that a fax comes over the telephone line, no different than this phone call. Anyone could doctor a piece of paper.”

Mr. Martin didn’t have a ready response, but he also wasn’t budging.

“Never mind,” he said quickly. “I just got the information I needed from another route.”

He turned his attention back to his computer and pulled up another number, this time for a Quick rental location in midtown. A woman with a heavy Bronx accent answered after six rings. He could almost picture her chomping on the gum in her mouth.

Once again, he said he was an FBI agent with a VIN he needed to track down.

“Um, my manager’s not here right now.” He could hear someone yelling in the background about a car blocking the garage entrance. “ Hey, you! Yeah, girl in the Mazda. Can you back it up just like three feet so this guy can get out and stop yelling at the both of us? Thanks, hon! Sorry, so, yeah, my manager’s out. Can you call back? I think you’re supposed go through corporate or something.”

“This is an urgent matter in a federal criminal investigation.”

The line meant absolutely nothing, of course, but Hank had been amazed over the years at its effectiveness. At heart, people were wired to comply with authority.