On a cell surveillance camera you can see the difference immediately. Get the cell assignments and go to the room where a bored overweight uniform watched too many screens. Check out the numbers on the screens, find the cells, watch the enhanced-light picture. The sleepers faced away from the lights, coiled up in their blankets. The ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t—it didn’t matter much which—ignored the lights and you could see their eyes clicking around as they thought all this through.
Next morning, he leaned on the sleeper and released the guy who had stayed up all night. Sometimes the innocent ones could barely walk. But at least they were out in the sun.
The sleepers sometimes took days to break. Some of them had the smarts or the clout lawyers, to lawyer up. But he had them and that was the point.
He had learned all this, more years back than he wanted to think about, and it would still be true when he was long gone from this Earth.
He brought in Pitscomb and Rundorf at sunset. Got them booked, photoed, fingerprinted. They gave him plenty of mouth and he just stayed silent, doing his job.
Into the overnight holding cell they went.
He had a bottle of Zinfandel and slept well that night.
Back in at sunup, Pitscomb and Rundorf were red-eyed and irritated.
His supervisor was irritated, too. “I didn’t tell you to bring them in late.”
“You didn’t? I must have misheard.” McKenna kept his face absolutely still while he said it. He had practiced that in the mirror when he first made detective and it was a valuable skill.
He made the best of interrogating Pitscomb and Rundorf but the simple fact that they had stayed awake most of the night took McKenna’s confidence away. The two gave up nothing. He booked them out and had some uniforms drive them home.
His partner came in that afternoon. LeBouc was a burly man who liked detail, so McKenna handed off some stickup shootings to him. They had been waiting for attention and McKenna knew they would get no leads. The perps were the same black gang that had hit the minimarkets for years and they knew their stuff. The videotapes showed only rangy guys in animal masks. LeBouc didn’t seem to mind. McKenna filled him in on the drowned cases but he couldn’t make an argument for where to go next. The cases were cooling off by the minute now, headed for the storage file.
McKenna had never been as systematic as LeBouc, who was orderly even when he was fishing. So when LeBouc said, “How’d those phone numbers from the illegal turn out?” McKenna felt even worse. He had noticed them in the stack of paper at Castan’s shack, just before he found the Bayside Boats notepaper. Like a hound dog, he chased that lead down and forgot the telephone numbers.
He got right on them. One was the Mexican consulate in New Orleans, probably for use if Jorge got picked up.
One number answered in a stony voice saying only, “Punch in your code.” The rest answered in Spanish and he got nowhere with them. He thought of getting a Spanish speaker but they were in high demand and he would have to wait for days. Nobody in Homicide knew more than restaurant Spanish. He went back to the stony voice, a Mobile number.
Usually, to break a number you use a reverse directory of published numbers. McKenna found nothing there. There were lesser-known electronic directories of unpublished numbers that link phone numbers to people and addresses. He found those in the Mobile Police database. They were built up nationally, working from anyone who used the number to place a phone order. So he considered pretexting. To pretext, you call the phone company repair department, saying there’s a problem on the line and getting them to divulge the address associated with the account. But you needed a warrant to do that and his credit had run out with Judge Preston.
If he couldn’t pretend to be someone else, maybe he could pretend that his phone was someone else’s. That would be caller-ID spoofing—making it seem as if a phone call is coming from another phone, rather than his Homicide number. That made it more likely that the target person would answer the call, even if they had the new software that back-tracked the caller in less than a second. McKenna’s office number was not in the phone book but for sure it was in any sophisticated database software. And the stony voice sounded professional, smart.
Spoofing used to require special equipment, but now with internet phone calling and other Web services it was relatively easy to do. So easy, in fact, that just about anyone can do it. But McKenna hadn’t. It took an hour of asking guys and gals in the office to get it straight. Everybody had a fine time making fun of “the Perfesser” coming to them for help, of course. He developed a fixed grin.
Once you burned an hour to know how, it took less than a minute.
The site even had a code breakdown for the number, too. When stony voice answered, McKenna typed in the last four digits of the number again and in a few more seconds he got a ring. “Hello?”
McKenna said nothing. “Hello?” the voice of Dark Glasses said.
It took a while for his supervisor to go through channels and pin a name on Dark Glasses. The next morning Dark Glasses was in Federal court, the FBI office said. So McKenna found him, waiting to testify.
“May I have a word in the hallway?” McKenna sat down in the chair at the back of the court. Somebody was droning on in front and the judge looked asleep.
“Who are you?” Dark Glasses said, nose up in the air. He wasn’t wearing the glasses now and it was no improvement.
McKenna showed the badge. “Remember me? You were with Mr. Marine.”
“Who?”
“You didn’t say you were a lawyer, too.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your office. The FBI, remember?”
The lawyer inched away but kept his chin out, first line of defense. “I’m waiting to testify on a Federal case.”
“Murder crosses boundaries.”
The bailiff was looking at them. He jerked a thumb toward the doors. In the hallway Dark Glasses had revived his lawyerly presence. “Make it quick.”
“This is about one of your cases, Jorge Castan.”
“I don’t discuss my cases.”
He moved to go past and McKenna casually put a hand on his chest.
“You have no right to touch me. Move away.”
McKenna just shook his head. “You know what’s up. Your case got himself murdered, looks like. The second one like that in a week. And the Bar Association Web site says that before you got hired into the FBI you were an immigration lawyer. And you must know that your case was an illegal or else you’re dumber than you look.”
“I do not take a liking to insult. You touch me—”
“You’re in serious trouble if you know what’s really up. See, murder is a local crime unless you can show it has a proper Federal issue that trumps local. Do you?”
“I do not have to—”
“Yes you do.”
“There is not one scintilla of evidence—”
“Save it for the judge. Wrong attitude, counselor.”
“I don’t know what—”
“What I’m talking about, yeah. I hear it all the time. You guys must all watch the same movies.”
“I am an attorney.” He drew himself up.
“Yeah, and I know the number of the Bar Association. Being FBI won’t protect you.”
“I demand to know—”
Dark Glasses went on but little by little McKenna had been backing him up against the marble walls until the man’s shoulder blades felt it. Then his expression changed. McKenna could see in the lawyer’s face the schoolboy threatened by bullies. So he had gone into the law, which meant good ol’ safe words and paper, to escape the real world where the old primate signals held sway. Dark Glasses held his briefcase in front of his body in defense, but the shield wasn’t thick enough to stop McKenna from poking a finger into the surprisingly soft Dark Glasses bicep. “You’re up at bat now, lawyer.”