I went first, using a small torch to light our way. It pushed back the shadows to reveal a largely empty property.
There was no art or decoration of any kind. Just plain painted walls and functional furniture. The main living room was full of bunks, which were all unmade, and a couple mattresses had been tossed on the floor.
The kitchen contained a large farmhouse table surrounded by more than a dozen chairs, and I pictured Justine’s abductors in here together, eating, laughing and joking, or perhaps grimly plotting murder, while she was trapped in the small store outside. What pushed men like them to normalize such evil?
We continued through the house, moving upstairs to find more bunks and finally the master bedroom with one king-size bed. I guessed this was where Roman Verde slept, a perk of leadership.
The bed was unmade and the closets were bare, but when we checked the bathroom, we found evidence of a fire that was nothing to do with the burned roof because the ceiling above was still intact.
A small metal trash can stood in the center of the room, its sides blackened. I looked in the can and found the charred remains of papers. Most had burned to ash but a few might be recoverable.
Carefully, I gathered as many fragments as I could, and held them gently in a stack.
“I think this is it,” I said. “The cops must have taken everything else for analysis, or there wasn’t anything here when they were looking. I don’t think we’re going to find anything else.”
Justine nodded.
“We should go.”
“Happy to,” I replied.
She’d masked it well, but I could tell the return to the place where she’d been held prisoner had been hard on her.
“You’re safe,” I assured her, as we left the room.
“I know,” she said, but I didn’t feel the tension leave her until we were in the car, heading down the mountain.
Chapter 74
By the time we returned to the apartment, Monaco was finally asleep. The streets were empty and devoid of crowds. I got a more complete sense of just how much the race altered the city. The diversions, signs, barriers, specially constructed walkways, elevated tunnels, hoardings, stands and temporary buildings stood out as transient additions to the small Mediterranean principality.
Justine took care of the charred documents while I drove us back. When we entered the apartment, we laid them out on the table. I went to Sci’s gear bag and took out one of his traveling crime-scene kits. I found a processing pan and prepared a solution of two parts water, five parts alcohol and three parts glycerin, which I added to the pan. The chemical cocktail was designed to strip away the charring to reveal anything written or printed on the burned paper we’d recovered. The process involved the destruction of the documents, but in the absence of a full lab, it was the best way to retrieve whatever information Roman or his associates might have been trying to destroy.
Justine and I worked methodically, placing each fragment of paper in the solution. We watched them absorb the liquid, sink and then disintegrate, and after each iteration, I would drain the pan, clean it and prepare a new bath for the next document. The first five pieces of paper gave us nothing. They were either blank or contained generic words or numbers that had no special significance, but the sixth and final piece gave up something useful.
First came a logo, Port Hercules Fuel Depot, followed by details of a transaction: 500 liters of marine diesel, invoiced to a boat that had been fueled the previous week. I used my phone to take a photograph of the information.
“They have a boat,” Justine remarked.
“Kendrick Stamp was a scout sniper,” I replied. “They gave me an undetectable pistol for a close kill. It makes sense to have a long-range shooter as backup. Different method in case I was compromised.”
“You think he’d be able to take a shot from a boat?” Justine asked.
“Why not? Why else would they need one? And why try to destroy this invoice if it wasn’t important?”
I watched the fragment of paper sink to the bottom of the pan and begin to disintegrate.
“What now?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do we trust the cops with this? Or if we tell them, do we run the risk of the information leaking, forcing the assassin to switch to a different method?”
“It would be easier if we knew the target,” Justine remarked.
“Until we know otherwise, I’m going to assume it’s Eli Carver,” I told her, aware I had nothing but the fact I was close to the man and Duval’s sharing of intel to support my hunch. “If we can get to the fuel depot, we can use the invoice number to identify the vessel.”
I searched my phone for the details of the filling station at Port Hercules, and discovered it opened at 7 a.m.
“I’m going to make sure I’m there first thing,” I said.
“We should get some rest in the meantime,” Justine suggested. “You look beat.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine. I’m going to stay up a while and review everything. I can’t help feeling there’s something we missed.”
Justine pulled up a chair next to me.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Hey. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose,” she said with a smile. “Mo and Sci are family to me too and I want to do whatever I can to catch the men responsible.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. We kissed tenderly before getting back to work.
Chapter 75
I woke with a start, suddenly aware of noise rising from the street. In the distance I could hear powerful engines roaring like wild animals. I was lying with my head on the dining table and must have fallen asleep where I’d been working. I sat up and checked my watch, dismayed at my failure to stay awake.
It was 8:30 a.m. The fuel depot had been open for ninety minutes.
I looked around and saw Justine asleep on one of the couches.
“Jus,” I said, moving toward her.
She stirred as I leaned down to kiss her.
“Justine, come on,” I said. “We fell asleep.”
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed with a start. “Oh, no. What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty,” I replied. “We need to get moving. It sounds like they’re warming up for qualifying.”
Nothing can prepare a person for the sound of a Formula One car, and the noise of the state-of-the-art machines dominated the city.
Justine nodded and stretched as she stood up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to sleep.”
“Turns out I did too.”
“You find anything?” she asked, gesturing to the mass of paper spread across the table.
“I don’t even know,” I replied. “It all became a blur.”
I returned to the table and looked at the evidence we’d amassed from our investigation into Duval. I picked up the messages we’d pulled off the four phones we’d found in his safe. One device had contained a peculiar set of messages sent by him over the course of a year: a series of numeric codes. I don’t know whether it was the benefit of sleep, or a little distance from the intense focus I’d applied to them, but I finally saw a pattern in them. The first eleven numbers were repeated in each message.
“What is it?” Justine asked, joining me.
“These texts,” I replied. “I think I can crack the code.”
I grabbed a blank piece of paper and wrote out the first eleven numbers.
21716131316
I assumed it was an alphanumeric and that the larger numbers referred to letters further into the alphabet. Through a process of trial and error, I broke the sequence into:
2-17-16-13-13-16
and then tried to fit letters to each one. After a few minutes I realized it was a simple plus one code that read: