Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

My surprise over her appearance aside, I couldn’t stop staring and smiling at her. She maintained the professional front, but I could see her eyes holding on me. It wasn’t very often you got to be this close to a former lover of so long ago.

“Who was that you were with?” she asked. “Are you with a photographer on this story?”

I turned and looked back at the doorway.

“No, I’m by myself. And I don’t know who that was. Just some guy who’d been talking to me downstairs in the gambling hall. He went to his room.”

She abruptly walked past me, opened the door and looked both ways in the hall before coming back into the room and closing the door.

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really talking to him.”

“Which room is he in?”

“I don’t know that either. What’s going on? How come you’re in my room?”

I pointed to the bed. My laptop was open and my printouts of notes, the copies of the case files I had gotten from Schifino and Meyer as well as the printouts from Angela Cook’s online search were fanned across it. The only thing missing from the spread was the transcript of the Winslow interrogation, and that was only because it had been too heavy to take with me.

I hadn’t left it all on the bed like that.

“And were you going through my stuff? Rachel, I asked you for help. I didn’t ask you to break into my room and-”

“Look, just sit down, would you?”

The room had only one chair, the one she had been waiting in. I sat on the bed, closing my laptop sullenly and gathering the paperwork into one stack. She remained standing.

“Okay, I showed my creds and asked the manager to let me in. I told him your safety might be in jeopardy.”

I shook my head in confusion.

“What are you talking about? Nobody even knows I’m here.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You told me you were going to the prison up here. Who else did you tell? Who else knows?”

“I don’t know. I told my editor and there’s a lawyer down in Vegas who knows. That’s it.”

She nodded.

“William Schifino. Yes, I talked to him.”

“You talked to him? Why? What is going on here, Rachel?”

She nodded again, but this time not in agreement. She nodded because she knew she had to tell me what was going on, even if it was against the FBI creed. She pulled the chair over to the middle of the room and sat down facing me.

“Okay, when you called me today, you weren’t making the most sense, Jack. I guess you are a better writer than a teller of stories. Anyway, of all that you told me, the part that stuck with me was what you said about your credit cards and bank accounts and your phone and e-mail. I know I told you I couldn’t help you but after I hung up, I started thinking about that and I got concerned.”

“Why?”

“Because you were looking at all of that like it was an inconvenience. Like a big coincidence, that it just happened to be going on while you were on the road working on this unrelated story about this supposed killer.”

“There’s nothing supposed about this guy. But are you saying it could be related? I thought about this but there’s no way. The guy I am trying to chase down would have no idea that I’m even out here and on to him.”

“Don’t be so sure about that, Jack. It is a classic hunting tactic. Separate and isolate your target and then move in for the kill. In today’s society, separating and isolating someone would entail getting them away from their comfort zone-the environment they know-and then eliminating their ability to connect. Cell phone, Internet, credit cards, money.”

She ticked them off on her fingers.

“But how could this guy know about me? I didn’t even know about him until last night. Look, Rachel, it’s great to see you and I hope you stick around tonight. I want you to be here, but I’m not getting this. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the concern-in fact, how did you get here so damn quick?”

“I took an FBI jet to Nellis and had them jump me up here in a chopper.”

“Jesus! Why didn’t you just call me back?”

“Because I couldn’t. When you called me, it was transferred to the off-site location where I work. There’s no caller ID on those transfers. I didn’t have your number and I knew you were probably on a throw-away line.”

“So what’s the bureau brass going to say when they find out you dropped everything and hopped on a plane to save me? Didn’t you learn anything in South Dakota?”

She waved the concern away. Something about the gesture reminded me of our first meeting. It happened to have also been in a hotel room. She had driven my face down hard into the bed and then handcuffed and arrested me. It wasn’t love at first sight.

“There’s an inmate in Ely that has been on my interview list for four months,” she said. “Officially, I came to interview him.”

“You mean like he’s a terrorist? Is that what your unit does?”

“Jack, I can’t talk to you about that side of my work. But I can tell you how easy it was to find you and why I know I wasn’t the only one tracking you.”

She froze me with that word. Tracking . It conjured bad things in my imagination.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”

“When you called me today you told me you were going to Ely and I knew that had to be to interview a prisoner. So when I got concerned and decided to do something about it, I called Ely and asked if you were there and I was told you just left. I spoke to a Captain Henry there and he said your interview was put off until tomorrow morning. He said he recommended you go into town and stay at the Nevada.”

“Yeah, Captain Henry. I was dealing with him.”

“Yeah, well, I asked him why your interview was postponed and he told me that your guy, Brian Oglevy, was in lockdown because there was a threat against him.”

“What threat?”

“Hold on, I’m getting to it. The warden got an e-mail today with a message that said the AB was planning to hit Oglevy today. So as a precaution they put him in lockdown.”

“Oh, come on, they took that seriously? The Aryan Brotherhood? Don’t they threaten everybody who isn’t a member? Isn’t Oglevy a Jewish name, too?”

“They took it seriously because the e-mail came from the warden’s own secretary. Only she didn’t write it. It was written anonymously by someone who had gained access to her state prison systems account. A hacker. It could have been someone inside or someone from the outside. It didn’t matter. They took it as a legitimate warning because of the way it was delivered. They put Oglevy in lockdown, you didn’t get to see him and you were sent to spend the night here. Alone, in unfamiliar surroundings.”

“Okay, what else? This is still a stretch.”

She was beginning to convince me but I was acting skeptical to get her to tell me more.

“I asked Captain Henry if anybody else had called and asked about you. He said the lawyer you were working for, William Schifino, called to check on you and he was told the same thing, that the interview was delayed and you were probably spending the night at the Nevada.”

“Okay.”

“I called William Schifino. He said he never made that call.”

I stared at her for a long moment as a cold finger went down my spine.

“I asked Schifino if anyone besides me had called about you and he told me he had gotten one call earlier. It was from someone who said he was your editor-used the name Prendergast-and that he was worried about you and wanted to know if you had come to see Schifino. Schifino said you had come by and that you were on your way up to the prison in Ely.”

I knew my editor could not have made that call because when I had called Prendergast, he had not gotten my e-mail and had no idea I had gone to Las Vegas. Rachel was right. Someone had been tracking me and doing a good job of it.