Finally, Jamal located a seventy-six-year-old judge who wrote the warrant, not caring if the entry was declared invalid later. The judge told us, “If you find something, this will reach the Supreme Court. I always wanted one of my rulings to do that. Better late than never.”
The dog handler was a small, athletic man, and ex-Army. As the door opened, he ordered Dorothy, in a high, squeaky voice, “Play the game! Go, girl!”
Dorothy ran in. If she found a person she’d bark and corner him. If she found a body she’d bark. The apartment was sunny and immaculate with high ceilings and no sign of life or struggle. Dorothy’s claws made scraping sounds on the bare floor or were muted by throw rugs. I heard her excited breathing as she ran from couch to coffee table to corners.
Nothing.
Dorothy disappeared into the bedroom.
She came out. Nothing.
The bathroom.
Lots of South American folk art hung on the walls. I saw a painting of Brazilian rubber tappers in the forest, reminding me of people I’d seen on the ferry in Rondônia. We’re close. I saw clay vases, crudely made, marked with yellow and black geometric patterns similar to ones I’d seen in the market in Porto Velho. I saw blowguns mounted in glass and a headdress with beads and parrot feathers. The apartment was a mini-gallery. The coffee table offered colorful photography books. From the Amazon.
Dorothy stopped before an interesting oddity in the place, a thick closed door blocking entrance to a built-in room-within-a-room, clearly not part of the original layout. Just a square enclosure in the middle of the loft. Musical practice room, maybe, to shield neighbors from noise. A soundproof cave where a drummer could bang away.
“Or a darkroom,” Izabel speculated.
Dorothy lay down in front of the door and stared at it, ears straight up.
“She’s alerted,” Kovics said.
“It’s locked.”
Eddie said with caution, “Rigged to blow?”
We regarded the room from two feet away. I asked Kovics, “Is Dorothy trained to detect explosives?”
“That was her original job.”
“Which does she smell now? Explosives or chemicals?”
Kovics leaned down and rubbed his knuckles over the dog’s head, roughly. He scratched inside Dorothy’s ears. The dog never shifted her gaze.
“Good girl. Find the boomboom,” Kovics said. “Where’s the boomboom?”
Dorothy immediately stood and, door ignored, began searching again in the rest of the apartment.
“I think we’re okay here,” Kovics said.
“You think? Or we are?” Eddie said, taking a step back.
“Call the bomb squad,” demanded Isabel.
Dorothy was moving along the baseboards, sniffing, a four-footed, living divining rod.
Kovics nodded with a confidence that Eddie did not feel. “If there were explosives in there she wouldn’t have left.”
The locksmith breached the room as Eddie moved back. The inside had been cleaned out. Wire shelves were empty. The block tabletop was shiny bare. There was a corkboard with puncture marks from tacks. I smelled Clorox and Lysol. Someone had gone over these surfaces with double care.
“Nothing here, so why lock it?” I mused.
Dorothy was back again. She’d found no explosives in the apartment. Inside the darkroom she lay down, long nose pointed directly into the shadow beneath a counter. Her ears were straight up. Alert!
“Good girrrrrl,” Kovics said in the high, squeaky voice, rubbing Dorothy’s ears.
“How can she smell anything over Clorox?” Izabel asked, wrinkling her nose, crouching down to see what was under the counter.
Kovics bristled at the slight. “Dorothy has two hundred twenty-five million olfactory receptors in her nose, to your five million. She can smell a body twenty feet below an ice-covered river, and differentiate between human blood and a squirrel’s.”
Izabel Santo’s feet were sticking out from beneath the worktable. She grunted and her sneakers scraped the floor as she pushed back into view. She held up a ripped scrap of paper. On it, blue labeling: PARAFILM M LABORATORY FILM.
My breath caught. This was the “false skin” used in the shipment of mosquitoes, the film laid over their carrying containers, blocking exit, but allowing them to feed through the surface on stored blood.
Eddie rocked back on his heels. These days he unconsciously massaged his arm that had been injured in Brazil when he was thinking.
“You did it, Tom,” he said.
Jamal used the siren and dome light on our way to the art gallery. This time, he easily obtained search warrant permission on the way. The break-in team met us at the grate. Inside, Dorothy made a beeline to the basement and alerted in front of a wooden box stamped RONDÔNIA, inside of which we found a half dozen Indian-made ceramic vases. The pattern on the side was familiar.
“Uno, I think we just found the carrying cases,” Eddie said. “Now where’s the goddamn guy?”
This time when I called Ray Havlicek he came on the line immediately. He was still in Illinois, where the search for contacts of the dead terrorists was under way. FBI agents were questioning other students who had taken classes with the dead men, workers in a Northwestern University lab, and a cousin in prison in Joliet. When I explained what we’d found, Ray’s breathing slowed audibly. He whistled when he heard about the Parafilm.
“So! Two groups at least! Chicago and back East.”
“He’s disappeared. I think we should go public, ID him. Anybody see this guy? Or car? He’s wanted for questioning in relation to the attacks and two murders in New York.”
“I’ll run the idea past the Director.”
“We should announce it now, Ray.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“What’s complicated about it?”
I heard him exhale. “We’re dealing with lots of parts. The East Coast cell doesn’t know you found the thread. So sure, we look for Fargo; talk to the mother. But go public too soon, we risk alerting the whole group.”
“There could be more attacks in the meantime.”
“Yeah, always the question. Balance. Give me a little time. Meanwhile, we’re on Fargo. Good job.”
An hour passed. Two dozen agents arrived at the shop, along with a van filled with lab technicians.
“The Director and the Attorney General are figuring out how to handle this,” Ray said, when I reached him an hour later. “Hold tight. We’re quietly distributing information. He gets stopped for speeding, even noticed on the highway, we have him. His name is available on certain lists.”
“Available isn’t the same thing. And what does ‘certain’ mean?”
“Do you want to panic these people just as we get an idea of who they are, Joe? Send them underground?”
“They are underground.”
“Look at the big picture for a change.”
“Then fill me in on the part I don’t know.”
“I’ll share one thing, Joe,” he said. “The Peace Corps has confirmed that Tom Fargo never joined it.”
“I told you that hours ago!”
“Just sit tight a little longer.”
“We sitting tight?” Eddie asked when I clicked off. I’d had the phone on speaker mode, so we could all hear Ray.
Izabel said, “Well? What now?”
TWENTY-FOUR
“Look at the car door, Ma! Mosquitoes!”
A small boy had spotted them. An eight- or nine-year-old kid wearing glasses, standing at eye level with the gash in the Subaru’s door. The kid was pointing. Onlookers turned to stare. They saw what Tom saw; mosquitoes clustered around the gash where the larger Chevy Tahoe had rammed into the side of Tom’s car.