Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

A jiggle of the screwdriver, and Tim removed the latch bolt from the doorknob assembly. “Anything goes? Including shredding Kindell’s file?”

A chuckle. “Yup. We offered to help you with that motherfucker. We could have found out who was in on it with him and cleaned them both up. You could have been on board with us. But, no, you were too good for us. So it only makes sense you wouldn’t want any part of that case binder now. Hell, you don’t want to dirty your hands with that, Your Honor.”

Mitchell shifted the phone, and Tim strained to make out any background noise but could not. The ensuing silence had the air of a standoff.

“You never answered my question,” Mitchell said.

Tim fitted the last puzzle piece of the altered doorknob in place. “Yes, I’m coming after you. Here’s another answer: Yes, I’m going to find you.”

Tim snapped the phone shut and set it down. He reinserted the knob without its latch bolt back into the front door. Though it looked perfectly ordinary, it was now just a freestanding core of metal, unattached to the jamb. He wedged a wooden doorstop tight beneath the gap, driving the end gently with a hammer so the solid-core door had no give or sway within the frame. Countermeasures against a battering ram.

He’d thought about picking up a motion sensor, but it would have been nearly impossible to hide in the bareness of the hallway. He made a note to look for a small IR unit he could angle beneath the door gap. He’d lay the beam diagonally to the knob side of the door, the side from which Mitchell preferred to pivot on a kick-in.

His window screen popped out easily. His fire escape looked down directly on the wide alley where backup cars would most likely be positioned to catch him in the event of a raid. He climbed silently down one level and stood staring into the apartment below his. Unlike Tim’s unit, it had a distinct bedroom and living room; the latter and a bathroom faced the escape. Putting his face to the living-room window, he noticed that the inside latch had a built-in lock. The bathroom pane was opaque, so he couldn’t see the inside mechanism, but the window didn’t budge under pressure.

The second-floor living room was equally secure, but the bathroom window had been inched open to let the room air. Tim slid it the rest of the way. No screen. He leaped up, grabbing the bars of the fire-escape landing above, and eased himself through the window. The toilet provided a nice step down to the cheap linoleum.

He eased the bathroom door open and stood, regarding the two bodies sleeping side by side in the master bed. His footsteps to the bedroom door were completely silent. He didn’t exhale until he reached the living room. The front doorknob was the same as his had been before he’d altered it-standard Schlage single-cylinder lock. He thumbed the embedded button until it popped out, then opened the door and stepped into the hall. The hall ran north-south-both end windows looked out onto busy streets. The stairwell was located at the north end.

Tim moved to 213, down three doors on the far side of the hall. He picked the lock quickly, not concerned about sound since he knew the apartment wasn’t rented. The empty room, like Dumone’s apartment, smelled of stale carpet. An amoeba stain in the far corner, the size of a garbage-can lid, might have been blood.

Tim walked to the window. The abbreviated fire-escape ladder ended six feet above an alley too narrow to accommodate a car. Ten yards north, another lane between buildings darted west.

Tim left, keeping the front door unlocked, and took the stairs down. He walked to the corner phone booth, flipping a quarter on the way. It came up heads four times in a row. He slotted it and called Mason Hansen. Tim had worked with him closely on several cases when Hansen had been a security specialist in the subpoena group for Sprint Wireless, and he’d kept in touch ever since Hansen had made the move to Nextel last October.

“Hello?” Hansen sounded worried, his voice thin and sleep-cracked.

“Is this line secure?”

“Jesus, Rack, call me at work tomorrow.”

“Is this line secure?”

“Yes. Christ, it’s my home number, I hope so. Are you back on the job already? I thought you took leave after the shooting.” Hansen whispered something to his stirring wife, and then Tim heard him walking into the other room.

“Are you on a cordless?”

“Yes, I-”

“Pick up a landline.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Just do it.”

Various clickings. “All right. Now tell me what’s going on.”

“If I gave you a phone number, could you go back and pinpoint what localized cell sites it’s been tapping in to the network through?”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“Yes, I have a warrant. That’s why I’m calling you at home at three in the morning.”

“Back off the sarcasm. This seems sketchy.”

“Not for now. For now you’re just answering questions.”

“Well, the answer to your question is no. Do you have any idea how much data that would be? We’d have to keep records of the location of every cell phone at every moment in the entire nation.”

“If you can’t get it done retroactively, then how about in the future? If I gave you a number, could you pinpoint the cell-phone location then?”

“Not unless you flash me a paper with a judge’s signature and we do the whole deal. Handheld units, mobile teams in the field-you know the routine.”

“I don’t have access to those kinds of resources. Not on this one.”

“What are you working?”

“I can’t talk about it.” Tim allowed himself a deep exhale. “I’ve been trying two numbers all day: 310-505-4233 and -423 4. I just got through to the first, so I know the phone is on, right now, sending locating bursts to ID itself to the network. You’re saying that does us no good?”

“I’m saying that does us no good unless you deploy a full-force authorized investigation. That’s not a favor I can pull out of a hat, even if I was willing to.”

Tim tried to dissipate his frustration and had a hard time of it. “Can you identify the cell site an incoming call came in through?”

“We don’t have the technology in place for that. Incoming calls are free on Nextel, so the system records on them are less precise. But we can put a tracer on outgoing calls, since those are logged by Billing. See what cell sites they’re pinging. We use it sometimes to track fraud charges. But it’s not actively regulated-we don’t have the manpower. Once we start it up, it spits out an update every six hours, and I can’t throw a wrench into that program without express clearance from above.”

“I can’t keep on top of the guy by myself. Especially on a six-hour delay. That’s why I called him now. Late at night I figure he’s bedded down at his primary location.”

“Well, starting tomorrow, I can give you his first-and-last.”

First call in the morning, last call at night. Usually made from the bedroom or close to it. Guys on the run don’t take the time to install landlines.

“Can you do anything more to-the-minute?”

“Not unless you give me more. Why didn’t you call me earlier? We could have gotten on the outgoing calls.”

“I didn’t get how the technology worked. Plus, I wanted to ascertain that at least one of the cell phones was active.”

“What, before you bothered me?” Hansen laughed. “Call me tomorrow, you bastard. At the office.”

The walk from the corner seemed longer than a block.

Tim rode the elevator up and used a pen through the gap beneath the door to push the stop back. Once inside he took a quick spin through the TV channels. KCOM ran a report regarding the ongoing Lane and Debuffier investigations but made no mention of recent developments.