Джеймс Паттерсон - Unsolved

Everyone looks at me. I raise my shoulders. “The sample size of his bombings is too small for any discernible pattern,” I say. “He started in the Northeast, with the bank bombing in Connecticut, then he went down to Florida with the chain restaurant, then he headed west to Alabama and blew up the city hall. So that tells us, obviously—”

“That he’s heading west,” says Ross. “We know that.”

I take a breath. Ross didn’t interrupt any of the men even once.

“Given the length of time between the bombings,” I say, “my guess is he’s driving. He drove from Connecticut to Florida, which is about twenty hours if you take the fastest route, but he wouldn’t go the fastest way. He’d want to avoid the toll cameras and the ALPRs—automatic license-plate readers—and the speed traps. He’d go by back roads. So I’d say it took him a good four, five days to get to Florida. And then he spent a day or two planning the bombing, buying the supplies, and plotting out exactly how to do it. That’s a good week, right there, which is exactly the space of time between the Connecticut and Florida bombings. But the city-hall bombing in Alabama was four days later. He traveled about four hundred miles, which you can do in two days even if you’re being careful. And then two days to plan.”

Ross opens his hands. “And now it’s eleven days since the last attack. He could have driven anywhere in the country.”

Sloan, from the Criminal Investigative Division, winces at Ross’s interruption. Ross really should just let me talk.

Ross glances at the map of the United States on the wall. “You think, what, California? Las Vegas? A target-rich environment that would take several days by car heading west. The Grand Canyon, maybe?”

Cobbs nods at that, as does Mayfield.

“I was thinking Manhattan,” I say.

The room goes quiet as everyone calculates.

“Doubling back,” says Carlton.

“Throwing us off,” I say. “Knowing that we’re trying to discern a pattern. And a target in New York City is a tougher nut to crack than some small town in Alabama. He’d need more time to prepare.”

“Interesting,” says Sloan.

Yes, interesting. Everyone’s wondering whether interesting means “accurate.”

And they’re probably also wondering how long it will be before this interesting conversation finds its way into an article by Shaindy Eckstein in the Washington Post .

19

I THREAD my way through the crowd and miraculously find a spot at the bar. This place, Deadline, is only a few years old but it has a throwback, old-school feel, with its dark wood and dim lighting. I’ve been told (I’m not much of a nightlife gal myself) that this has become one of the hangouts for the Washington press corps and the political class.

There is a mix of ages, but it leans to the younger side, congressional staffers and campaign consultants and youthful journalists who publish mostly online. I spot a U.S. senator in a corner booth, an older white man whom I’ve seen on the news shows, holding court for a throng of admiring staffers, disproportionately female and attractive. Everyone here is ambitious, everyone is hungry, and most of them are ruthless.

Shaindy Eckstein is standing with a group of men and women nursing a colorful drink, but I pretend not to notice her. I finally get the attention of the bartender and order a white wine.

I check my watch. I have about twenty minutes, tops, before I have to leave and go to Books’s house for our Friday-night date.

The noise around me is oddly comforting. I spend so much of my time alone with statistics and computers, where I’m safe, so being outside, walking through a grocery store or traveling to work or just running errands, is hard for me sometimes, probably harder than I like to admit, that feeling of being exposed. So you’d think a bar like this would be even worse, but for some reason I feel safer in a crowd of strangers in an enclosed area.

“Hey, you.” I turn at these words and see Shaindy standing there, casually dressed in a black blouse and jeans, her eyeglasses perched on her head holding back her long gray hair.

“Hey yourself.” I get off the barstool and give her a hug. Shaindy is the only reporter I’ve ever liked. When I was taken to the hospital a year ago, she just happened to be there. She was in the right place at the right time to break the story if she chose to do so. It fell right into her lap. “Graham Catcher Rushed to Hospital for Overdose,” or some attention-grabbing headline like that. She could have thrown in some suggestion of a suicide attempt to make it even juicier. The whole thing with Graham was still pretty hot back then. It would have been the easiest story she’d ever written. But she didn’t write it. She let it go when Books and I asked her to leave it alone. She didn’t request anything in return either, like most journalists would, like that reporter in New Orleans just did. She just dropped the whole thing.

“You look good,” she says now, appraising me. I doubt that, but I’ve learned how to deal with the scars, how to wear my hair and clothes to conceal most of them.

“Blowing off some steam?” I ask.

She smirks. “This is work. I get more done here than I do in a full day at the office.”

That’s probably true of the politicians too, all of them cutting deals over glasses of Scotch.

“I’ve enjoyed reading your stuff on Citizen David,” I say.

She has a twinkle in her eye and the hint of a grin that she goes to some lengths to suppress when she asks, “Have you, now?”

“You have an excellent source, it seems.”

“I do. I do.” She takes a sip from her glass. “The source has been very helpful.”

Nice how she put that, not even revealing the gender, no he or she .

“And if I could say one thing to my source,” she says, “I would tell that person this: I will never disclose a source’s identity. I’ll go to prison first.”

I nod.

“My source has nothing to worry about,” she adds. “That’s a promise. And you know I keep my promises.”

“I do know that.” I sip my wine, a nice chardonnay with a hint of pear.

Shaindy leans into me. “On an absolutely, completely different topic, having nothing whatsoever to do with what we just discussed”—her expression deadpan—“do you have anything you’d like to tell me, Emmy?”

I can’t help but smile. “Are you suggesting that I’m your source?”

She puts a hand over her heart. “I don’t know who my source is. I only get text messages from a burner phone. So I have no way of knowing my source’s identity.”

She says this like I already know this information.

“And I won’t try to guess,” she says. “But like I said, even if I knew her—or his—name, I would never tell a soul.”

“Good to know, Shaindy,” I say.

Clearly, Shaindy thinks I’m her source. That’s not surprising. She’s wondering why I would go to the trouble of texting her anonymously instead of just talking to her face to face. After all, she’s already proven that I can trust her.

But she won’t ask, and she won’t tell.

And neither will I.

She winks at me. “Well,” she says, “I’ll just keep checking my phone.”

20

THE MAN who sometimes calls himself Charlie leans back against the seat of his wheelchair in his custom van, his earbuds in, one hand clutching the cell phone, the other arm hanging lazily over the steering wheel.

He is not, in reality, listening to music or talking on the phone. It is a device to throw off suspicion should someone passing by on the sidewalk happen to glance at the curb and see him inside the vehicle or, God forbid, should a police officer approach. He can simply put a cheerful smile on his face and begin speaking and moving his hands expressively, and he will appear to be talking to someone about something innocuous, not staking out a private residence.