Chapter 37

CHAPTER 37

D EVINE CABBED OVER TO A rental place and got another car. It was a Subaru crossover that handled nicely. He had freaked out the rental agent by asking if the windows were bulletproof.

On the way back to his hotel he got a call from Campbell.

“Want some good news?” his boss asked.

“It would be different, at least.”

“As you requested, we pulled video from stores along the main road in Ricketts. Everyone uses the cloud now so no more having to go in and extract a hard drive or worry about it being taped over. We didn’t exactly get a warrant, but speed is of the essence. I’ll send you the feed now. We used an AI filter to drill down to the pertinent time in question. Took seconds instead of days.”

“Did they find anything?”

“I’ll let you see for yourself. We also accessed street camera feeds for Seattle when you were at the bookstore and also ran it through the AI filter. There is no one who matches your person’s description on any of them. What you got in the bookstore is all there is.”

“Meaning she knew where the cameras were and worked her way around them. Any progress on finding the real mole in your group?”

“Not yet. But we will find the person, I promise you.”

He clicked off and Devine drove the rest of the way to his hotel, went up to his room, ordered dinner, and sat there eating while he looked over the video feed he’d gotten from Campbell that showed the main road in Ricketts.

He watched as the two men approached him while he sat in his SUV, distracted.

A sitting duck. You better up your game, Devine, or you are dead next time.

He noted that the police cruiser had slid away from its place at the curb two minutes before the hit team approached.

Coincidence? I think not.

Indeed, the whole street had emptied out, so maybe the entire town of Ricketts was on somebody’s payroll.

As his 4Runner rolled off with him and the two men in it, he saw the black SUV appear. He checked for the license plate. Only it didn’t have one. They weren’t going to get tripped up on something that simple.

He was about to turn off the feed when he saw it.

Ostensibly a woman astride what appeared to be an e-motorcycle. She didn’t look anything like a matronly purveyor of books with long stringy hair hanging in her face and bulky clothing that hid any evidence of her actual body. Here, she looked lean and lethal, just like she had on the train. The helmet covered her head, so no ID possible there.

But he closed his eyes and thought back to that train ride on Trenitalia between Geneva and Milan. The girl on the train. The college student, or at least that was the role she was playing. She’d worn shades, even that early in the morning. Should have been a tip-off, and eventually was.

The hair you could change a million different ways. The eye color, too. But the curve of the jaw, no, only he couldn’t see the curve of her jaw because of the helmet and face shield. And in the bookstore the hair had been long and in her face, again by design. So no possible mental match.

But there might be one thing.

In the video she had pulled out a pair of gloves but hadn’t put them on yet. He zoomed in on the five fingers on her right hand exposed in the frame.

Then he closed his eyes and remembered the hand that had held the knife on the train. Her fingers closed around the handle, waiting to plunge it into Devine’s neck or heart or aorta. Only she hadn’t gotten there because he’d seen the knife in the window’s reflection and delivered a punishing blow to her jaw that had knocked the woman out.

Again, one of the seemingly unimportant things that blew up otherwise well-laid plans.

And kept me alive.

Devine opened his eyes and studied the image on the screen with the same intensity he had brought to every task on the battlefield.

The pinky finger visible on the feed had been broken and never reset properly, resulting in the top third skirting off slightly to the right at about a five-degree angle. He froze it there.

He brought up the mental image of the woman on the train. Her hand. That finger. Same injury. Same tilt. The girl on the train was now in the state of Washington. She had told him this already on the easel in the building being renovated. But Devine believed nothing without corroboration, and now he’d just gotten it.

So out there aligned against him he had whoever had tried to kill him in Ricketts. It wasn’t the train girl, because she had saved his life. The police chief, his department, and the mayor of Ricketts seemed to be in the bank with those people, whoever the hell they were.

Which might have been the reason why Ricketts was chosen as the place for the Odoms to meet the two men, with the duffel being another payoff perhaps? Straight cash instead of a gift of a house and car?

Devine worked through this in his head. They had lured the Odoms out with the promise of something. The duffel was given to them, but then they were poisoned somehow. Next, the duffel and what was in it, which Betsy said had gone into the trunk, would have been taken back. The killers had gotten away with murder and it hadn’t cost them a penny.

And Betsy had been left an orphan, and easy pickings for the uncle to step in. So was Glass the other force out there, behind the assassins? Was Ricketts Glass’s town? Had he bought and paid for it? And when you bought and paid for something, you owned it. And maybe you owned everybody who lived there, too. And then gave them military-grade war machines, and a brand-new government building to boot.

A moment later a call from Walker interrupted these thoughts. She said she had been to the bookstore and checked all the areas for prints.

“They were all clean, Travis, sorry.”

He thanked her and clicked off. It seemed the girl on the train also sweated the small details pretty well.

He finished his meal and was thinking about turning in when his phone buzzed again. He didn’t recognize the number but answered it anyway.

“Agent Devine?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Dr. Deborah Coburn. I performed the autopsies on the Odoms.”

Devine forgot all about sleep. He had assumed he would never hear from her. But then he recalled being told that she was a circuit medical examiner. So Ricketts might not be her hometown. And maybe she wasn’t on Danny Glass’s payroll.

“Yes, Dr. Coburn. I do need to speak with you. Where are you now? I’m in downtown Seattle.”

“I’m actually in the Seattle area. There’s a conference here on forensic pathology starting tomorrow. I know it’s late, but can you meet with me now? I’m… well, I’m scared.”

“Where do you want to meet?”

She gave him the address of where she was staying.

“I’m on my way.”