Майкл Коннелли - Fair Warning

“What about him?” I asked.

“He came in right after me and he’s still nursing his first drink,” she said.

“Well, maybe he’s pacing himself. You’re on your first, too.”

“That’s only because of him. He’s been kind of watching us without watching us. Watching me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he has not looked over here once since he got here. But he’s using the mirrors.”

There was a large mirror that ran behind the bar and another on the ceiling above it. I could see the man in question in both of them so that meant he could see us.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And look at his shoulders.”

I checked: his shoulders were large and the biceps and neck thick. In the days since the Shrike had come to light, the FBI was pursuing a theory that he was an ex-convict who had built up his body in prison and possibly perfected his neck-breaking move there as well. The investigation had zeroed in on the unsolved murder of an inmate at the Florida State Prison in Starke whose body was found stuffed behind an industrial washing machine in the laundry. His neck was broken so severely that the cause of death was listed as internal decapitation.

The case was never solved. Several convicts worked in the prison laundry or had access to it, but the surveillance cameras were fogged over by steam released by the dryers — a problem that had been noted by staff repeatedly but never addressed.

For more than a month the bureau had been looking at video from prison-yard cameras and running down data on every convict who worked in the laundry or could have had access to it on the day of the murder. Agent Metz had told me he was sure that the Shrike had killed the inmate. The murder had occurred four years earlier, well before the Shrike killings began, and it fit the pattern attributed to the Shrike starting in Florida.

“Okay,” I said. “But wait a minute.”

I pulled my phone and went into the photo archive. I still had a photo of the artist composite of the Shrike. I opened it and tilted the screen to Rachel.

“Doesn’t really look like him,” I said.

“I don’t put a lot of trust in composites,” she said.

“What about Gwyneth saying it was a good match?”

“She was emotional. She wanted it to be a match.”

“The Unabomber composite was right on.”

“One in a million. Plus the Shrike’s composite has been on every TV channel in the country. He would have changed his look. That’s a big thing with incels. Plastic surgery. Plus he’s the right age: mid-thirties.”

I nodded.

“So then what do we do?” I asked.

“Well, first, we act like we don’t know he’s there,” Rachel said. “And I’ll see if I can get Metz involved.”

She pulled out her phone and opened the camera app. She held the phone out as though she was taking a selfie. We leaned close and smiled at the screen as she took a photo of the man at the other end of the bar.

She studied the shot for a moment.

“One more,” she said.

We smiled and she snapped another photo, this time zooming the focus in closer on his face. Luckily Elle was leaning into a conversation with the couple in the middle so Rachel got an unobstructed shot.

I leaned over to see what she got and fake-laughed as if she had taken a bad photo.

“Delete it,” I said. “I look like shit.”

“No, I love it,” she said.

Rachel was editing the real shot, expanding it as much as possible without clarity decay and then saving it. When she was finished she texted it to Agent Metz with this message.

This guy is watching us. I think it’s him. How do we handle?

We pretended to chat while we waited for a reply.

“How would he know to follow you here?” I asked.

“That’s easy,” Rachel said. “I’ve been in your stories as well as the podcast. He could have followed me from my office. I came straight here after locking up.”

That seemed plausible.

“But this flies in the face of the profile,” I said. “The bureau’s profilers all said he was not vengeance motivated. The story is already out. Why risk coming back to do something to us? It’s behavior he hasn’t shown before.”

“I don’t know, Jack,” Rachel said. “Maybe it’s something else. You’ve made a lot of generalized statements about him on the podcast. Maybe you got him mad.”

Her phone’s screen lit up with a return text from Metz.

What’s your 20? I’ll send Agent Amin out in a Lyft. See if he follows and we’ll lead him into a horseshoe.

Rachel sent back a text with the address and asked for an ETA on the Lyft car. Metz replied that it would be forty minutes.

“Okay, so we have to order another round and then act like neither one of us can drive,” Rachel said. “We fake a request for a Lyft and then get in the car with Amin.”

“What’s a horseshoe?” I asked.

“They’ll set up a car trap. We drive in, he follows us, they close the horseshoe behind him, and he’s got nowhere to go.”

“Have you ever done a horseshoe trap before?”

“Me? No. But I’m sure they have.”

“Let’s hope it works.”

Forty minutes later we were in the back of the FBI’s Lyft minivan with Agent Amin behind the wheel. He pulled away from Mistral and headed west on Ventura Boulevard.

“What’s the plan?” Rachel asked.

“We have the horseshoe set up,” Amin said. “We just have to see if you have a follower.”

“Did Metz get a bird up?”

“Yes, but he had to wait until it was free from another op. It’s on the way.”

“And how many cars do we have?”

“Four including the Lyft.”

“That’s not enough. He may spot the surveillance and bug out.”

“It’s what we could do on short notice.”

“Where’s the horseshoe?”

“Tyrone Avenue on the north side of the 101. It dead-ends at the river and it’s only five minutes away.”

I saw Rachel nod in the darkness of the car. It did little to balance the anxiety she was exuding.

At Van Nuys Boulevard, we turned north. I could see the 101 overpass just a few blocks ahead.

Rachel pulled her phone and made a call. I only heard her side of it.

“Matt, are you running this op?”

I knew then that she had called Metz.

“Did he leave the restaurant?”

She listened and her next question seemed to confirm that the man at the bar had followed us when we left.

“Where’s the airship?”

She shook her head while listening. She wasn’t happy with his answer.

“Yes, I hope so.”

She disconnected the call but the tone of her last words indicated she thought Metz was handling it wrong.

We crossed under the freeway and then took an immediate turn east on Riverside Drive. Four blocks later, Amin put on his right turn signal as we approached Tyrone.

Amin was monitoring radio traffic on an earpiece. He got an instruction and passed it on to us.

“All right, he’s behind us,” he said. “We are going down to the dead end and stopping. You two stay in the van. No matter what, you stay in the van. That understood?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Understood,” Rachel said.

We made the turn. The street was lined on both sides with parked cars and only dimly lit. There were single-family homes on both sides of the street. A block ahead I could see the twenty-foot wall of the raised freeway. The tops of cars and trucks were crossing up there left to right, heading west and out of the city.

“This is residential and it’s too dark,” Rachel said. “Who picked this street?”

“It was the best we could do on short notice,” Amin said. “It’ll work.”