Catherine Coulter - Backfire

Savich said, “It means this Sue was super-careful. She had to pay the Cahills some upfront money, but you haven’t been able to find any stashed funds, right?”

“Not a dime,” Burt Seng said. “This ‘Sue’ name, though”-he turned to Agent Griffin Hammersmith-“you ever hear of a foreign spy with the name Sue?”

Griffin shook his head. “I’m thinking it’s got to be a code name. Maybe it isn’t even a woman, who knows?”

Eve said, “Cindy didn’t shout it out like it was a code name. It sounded like she knew this Sue person, and well.”

Cheney was tapping his pen on the tabletop. “Savich, you agree with Barbieri?”

Savich said, “Yes.”

Cheney said, “I’ll call the CIA operations officers who worked on the Cahills’ case, see if they recognize it.”

Savich said, “I’m thinking I might throw out Sue’s name to Siles, see his reaction, see if he recognizes the name. I told the guard not to let either Clive or Cindy Cahill have any phone calls until after we visit Siles today.”

Cheney said, “Okay, let’s shift gears for the moment.” He turned to Agent Seng. “Burt has been waiting to give us follow-up on what he and Sherlock found out about that Zodiac Judge Hunt saw.”

Burt Seng wiped his hands on a napkin, then clicked on the overhead to show a Google map of Sea Cliff. He pointed. “Judge Hunt’s house is there on the point of land. You can see there are big boulders scattered all over the beach. Since Judge Hunt told us about the Zodiac, we can forget about whether the shooter drove down Sea Cliff Avenue, parked his car or motorcycle near China Beach Park, and made his way down to the beach.” Burt grinned. “Man or woman, this Sue came in by water.

“If you’ve ever been on an inflatable with an outboard motor, you know it’s capable of speed. He could have motored the Zodiac right up to the beach. He didn’t care if Judge Hunt saw the Zodiac, since he planned to kill him. He walked around the ocean side of the bluff and positioned himself in the mess of thick rocks that stud the beach.” He nodded to Sherlock as he put the photo of the Zodiac on the overhead.

“Now, a female Sue adds a new wrinkle to this,” Sherlock said, “since Mrs. Moe, the owner of Bay Outings in Sausalito, says she rented a Zodiac to a man at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon under the name Bently Ames.”

Burt said, “Mrs. Moe never questioned it was a man. She described him well. Here’s our sketch.” He projected the drawing on the overhead and passed around a sketch of a man described as five-foot-nine or -ten, on the slender side, wearing loose jeans, sneakers, an oversized blue Windbreaker, dark opaque sunglasses, and a Giants baseball cap.

“Bently Ames never took off the sunglasses or the cap. He had a flat voice, Mrs. Moe said, no particular regional accent she could identify. He was polite, paid with an AmEx. He needed the Zodiac only one day, wanted to do an evening run on the bay with his girlfriend, who’d grown up on Zodiacs in Hawaii, he told her. She remembered he was wearing a big honker diamond ring on his pinkie finger, could have been fake, she didn’t know, but why would a man wear a fake diamond? Again, Mrs. Moe didn’t question this was a man. She thought he was middle-aged, maybe even older.

“Now, Bently Ames returned the Zodiac Friday morning right on time. Mrs. Moe said they didn’t even have to wash it down, it was so squeaky clean.”

Sherlock picked it up. “We had our forensic team scour the Zodiac for any sort of evidence anyway, but like Burt said, Bently Ames was thorough in his cleaning, so we don’t have anything.”

Burt said, “We’ll show this photo of the Zodiac he or she rented to Judge Hunt, see if he can positively identify it. That’s unlikely, though, since Zodiacs look similar, for the most part.”

Sherlock said, “We found the real Bently Ames in his Tiburon real estate office. He said his wallet wasn’t missing. We asked him to check. Turns out his wallet was in his pocket, but his AmEx was gone. He said he’d had dinner with his sister at Guymas, a Tiburon restaurant on the water, on Wednesday evening. Then he remembered that after he paid the bill, he’d stopped in the men’s room. He said there were maybe four guys in there using the facilities but for the life of him he couldn’t remember anything unusual. Then he stopped cold, said a guy bumped into him in the small hallway outside the restroom.”

“Bingo,” Virginia Trolley said. “Was he wearing sunglasses and a ball cap?”

Burt nodded. “Yep, a Giants baseball cap. Again, Mr. Ames described him as a man.

“Since Sue had to park someplace, we checked the parking lot closest to Guymas first,” Sherlock said. “No luck. We didn’t think he’d use the parking lot next to the Tiburon Theater and take a chance of being seen, but we checked anyway.”

Sherlock said, “The parking lot attendant in the big lot sits in a booth and takes the money.” She gave a big grin. “Guess what?”

“He did park there,” Harry said. “And the parking attendant noticed a license plate? Please? Please?”

“Nope, but this little freckle-faced kid struts out of the booth in his loose low-rider jeans and tells us sure, he remembered the dude, remembered the sunglasses and the baseball cap. Then Freckle-face told us he knew for sure it wasn’t a rental, since it was a butt-ugly old Dodge Charger, with red paint chipping off. Unfortunately, no license plate, but Freckle-face did say it was a California license.”

Cheney turned to Agent Griffin Hammersmith. “Griffin has been coordinating with the highway patrol and the local police departments to try to locate that vehicle. He’s also got more news for us.”

Sherlock thought Griffin Hammersmith was saved from being too pretty by his nose. It was off-kilter, probably broken when he was a kid. As for his eyes, they were bluer than hers. She wondered if he was used to women trying to chase him down. He said in his slow, melodic voice, “I tried to put myself in the shooter’s shoes. If I came to San Francisco to murder a federal judge, I’d want to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I’d probably want to stay outside the city, unless I had to be there. And I wouldn’t stay anywhere near where I was going to snatch a credit card, like from Bently Ames in Tiburon. So, south of the city, probably near a major highway. A nice enough place but not big or fancy.

“So that’s where we focused. And after a couple of hours of phone calls, we found a small boutique inn off Highway 280 near Atherton, called Pelican Eave. The manager remembered the man, and the car. Yep, the same car the parking attendant described to us. ‘Overdue to be traded in,’ she said. She said he introduced himself as James Connor and he always wore his sunglasses and ball cap-though she remembered it as an Oakland A’s cap-even when he drank tea by himself in the front parlor. Since he paid in cash upfront, for two weeks, she never asked to see any identification. A pity.

“We have agents out there surveilling the inn. She hasn’t seen him since Thursday, the day of the shooting.

“We’ve got an APB out for the car as we speak, and his drawing and description at the local airports and all the cop shops in the Bay Area. I don’t think we’ll find him anywhere close to Atherton.”

Sherlock looked at Agent Griffin Hammersmith. “Why?”

“It’s my opinion he’s not about to take the risk of going back to the Pelican Eave . ” Griffin cleared his throat. “Well, I’ll bet this guy is alarmed. I mean, he knows now Judge Hunt is alive, and if he wants to try again he has to stay in the area. He also knows it’s riskier for him now, and I think he might dump the old Charger and stay closer this time, more in the center of things, where he can blend in with the tourists. If I were this guy or this gal, I might change how I look and stay at one of the dozens of small hotels and motels on Lombard Street or at Fisherman’s Wharf.” Griffin splayed his hands. “This is all a guess, guys, so-”