Kovaks slid in beside him. ‘You’re a slob,’ he observed.
Tommo screwed up his hamburger wrapper and tossed it out of the window. ‘Thought you said you’d only be a coupla minutes?’
‘ Sorry,’ said Kovaks, offering no explanation.
‘ So was she worth it?’
Kovaks stiffened. ‘Tommo, just shut the fuck up and drive. As I told you, it’s my sister. She’s gotta few domestic problems and she’s holed up there to get her head together.’
‘ My ass,’ snorted Tommo with a belch. He reversed the car out of its parking space and hit the road. ‘There was a radio call for ya, by the way.’
‘ What did it say?’
‘ Dunno. I said you’d radio in when you’d finished fucking your little sister. I said you’d be about two minutes.’ He cracked up with laughter.
‘ Don’t push it, Tommo,’ warned Kovaks. He reached for the cassette player and switched off Dwight Yoakam. Then he called in.
The radio operator was a sexy-voiced Texan lady.
‘ Yeah, Joe, urgent call came in for ya, ‘bout ten minutes ago. Caller said he’d call ‘gain exactly on ten-thirty.’
‘ Who was it?’
‘ Don’t rightly know. Refused all details — but he sounded scared. Thought I recognised the voice, but can’t place it.’
‘ Received,’ said Kovaks. ‘I’m on my way in.’
‘ You dickin’ that piece of ass too?’ Tommo asked with a leer. Kovaks gritted his teeth and decided to ask for another partner until Karl Donaldson came back from England.
‘ Why the hell did they go via Galgate anyway?’ Henry asked.
FB, pale, shaken, said, ‘It was the Chief’s suggestion. We had a meeting about it yesterday and we worked out the best route with the driver of the lead car.’
‘ But surely it would have made more sense to get on the motorway north of Lancaster? It’s more direct. No winding, narrow roads. No towns to negotiate…’
‘ The Chief’s argument was that if there was going to be any sort of attempt, they’d expect us to go that way. Going via Galgate was the less likely option, therefore safer.’
‘ It was a fucking stupid decision,’ said Henry.
They were both sitting in the back of a traffic car which was speeding them to the scene.
‘ Not only that,’ persisted Henry, ‘whoever sprung the bastard was expecting the escort to go through Galgate. They were all set up and ready. They weren’t just hanging about on the off-chance. Something’s not right here.’
‘ I know,’ said FB with a heavy sigh.
‘ Who actually knew that the escort would be taking that route?’
‘ Me, ACC Warner — Jack Crosby’s replacement, the driver of the lead car, and the Chief Constable. We were the only ones at the meeting yesterday. The idea was that everyone else involved — the rest of the officers on the escort and the ones manning points — would get about fifteen minutes’ notice just before the escort set off from prison.’
‘ Quarter of an hour,’ mused Henry. ‘Not long enough to put that sort of ambush operation into effect. Which means someone blabbed, someone inside the police…’
He looked at FB who had aged about ten years in the last ten minutes.
‘ I’m going to think out loud now,’ said Henry, ‘and I’m going to say something pretty uncomfortable. It’s unlikely that the driver of the lead car talked to anyone because he’s dead now, so it’s either you, the ACC or the Chief.’
The traffic car reached Galgate.
FB and Henry did not immediately get out. They sat in silence for a few moments.
Eventually FB said, ‘Well, I know one thing for sure.’ He reached for the door-handle.
‘ What’s that?’
‘ It wasn’t me.’
Kovaks was sitting at his desk poring over some surveillance reports on Corelli. There was nothing particularly interesting in them, nothing he didn’t already know about the man, but he looked through them anyway, just in case there was something important he’d missed. It annoyed him that Corelli wasn’t a man of regular habits. He needed to know where and when Corelli was going to be in a specific place and for how long, otherwise how could he plan his execution?
Corelli had many favourite haunts, but he visited none of them at a regular time. He was a butterfly. Flitting here, landing there, then taking off again. This was one of the reasons why the FBI had never caught and prosecuted him successfully.
Obviously he spent a great deal of time at his homes and places of business, but these were times when his protection teams were at their strongest and no one could get through the ring uninvited. For Kovaks’ purpose, he needed to be away from these places, out in public.
Kovaks drew up a list of the places in Miami where Corelli ate and the amount of time he spent at each one. Then he averaged the times out.
In most places he spent less than an hour. But in two restaurants he had a tendency to linger for about three hours at lunchtimes. The problem was that he hardly ever visited them. He’d been to both four times in the last two years.
It did seem, though, that whenever he did, he took his time.
Kovaks raised his eyebrows. ‘Interesting,’ he whispered to himself. ‘If I knew when he was visiting one of them, things could maybe start rolling.’
Suddenly, for no accountable reason, the image of Sue’s badly mutilated body snapped vividly into his mind’s eye. The cops had still failed to track down Damian. Why didn’t he come forward? Could Damian really be a murderer?
Kovaks found that very difficult to believe…
The phone rang, interrupting his musing.
‘ Special Agent Kovaks, can I help you?’
‘ Joe?’ came a quiet, frightened voice.
‘ Yes, who’s that?’
‘ It’s me, Damian.’
‘ Damian!’ Kovaks spluttered. ‘Where the hell are you?’
‘ Joe, I need to talk to someone I can trust. Can I trust you?’
‘ Yeah, sure you can. Where are you? I’ll come and-’
The line went dead; Damian had hung up. Kovaks looked sourly at the phone in his hand. He slammed it down and swore.
‘ This is the saddest tragedy that the Lancashire Constabulary has ever faced and mark my words, we will spare no cost and no effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. We will be relentless in our pursuit and everyone of those responsible will be caught — every single one. Now, if you gentlemen will forgive me…’
An emotional Dave August wiped a tear from his eye, and ignoring the barrage of questions from the assembled press and TV men, he strode towards the scene.
The whole of the centre of Galgate had been cordoned off in a 200 metre radius of the incident on the road. On the railway line, all trains had been cancelled for the foreseeable future. High screens had been erected around the crime scenes so that no prying eyes or lenses could see anything they shouldn’t as the forensic teams, Scenes of Crime officers and search teams began their gruesome tasks. None of the bodies had been moved yet.
August was in full uniform, looking proud and erect. He walked behind one of the screens and saw what lay beyond.
Nothing he had heard prepared him for what he saw.
What have I done? he thought frantically. Oh Christ, what have I done?
Clearly devastated by what he’d seen, he sank down to his haunches, removed his cap and wiped his sweating forehead with his sleeve. He wanted to cry. He wanted to run away. He wanted to bury his head in sand.
‘ Boss?’
August looked up. ‘FB… this is awful. My men, slain in the streets like it’s the fucking Middle East, not the north of England
… Christ!’
‘ Yes, I know,’ said FB. ‘But can I just have a quick word with you about something else?’
‘ By all means,’ August said, rising to his feet, his knees clicking, glad of the change of subject.
‘ I’ll come straight to the point. It’s already been mooted that this is an inside job, that information about the escort route was leaked from either me, you or Mr Warner. I know it’s all bullshit, that it must have got out some other way, but we should be prepared to be investigated, to allow whoever follows this up whatever access they need to our private lives, don’t you think?’