“That’s what I saw,” he said finally. He looked straight at Noriko. “The rest’s with you.”
There was no hesitation in her nod.
“We lifted quite a batch of prints off the lighter, ran them through IAFIS courtesy of the access we’re permitted by the Feds,” she said, using the acronym for the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification database. “Every one of them belongs to a man named John Earl Fletcher… or John Earl, as he prefers to be called.”
“What kind of rap sheet’s he got?” Glenn said.
“A long and bad one,” Noriko said. She scanned a sheet in her folder. “It starts almost twenty years ago with a string of misdemeanors and minor felonies in Maine. Possession of illegal substances, drunk driving, public nuisance, that sort of thing. There’re several juvie arrests and probations, a conviction for snatching a wallet at knifepoint. Then he does six months in county jail for assault and battery. A year later, he’s slapped with a charge of third-degree murder… a sheriff’s deputy. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in the Maine state penitentiary.”
“That sounds kind of light for a cop killing,” Glenn said
“I thought so, too,” Noriko said. “Went ahead and cross-referenced the IAFIS information with other clearanced databases, found that it was ruled accidental… the details in the system are sketchy, but it seems they had a personal background of some sort. Knew each other from high school, the way they do in small towns. Earl was driving a truck for a local fuel company. He and the cop are involved in some kind of shouting match over a routine traffic summons, stupid affair. One thing leads to another, and soon they’re in a fistfight. The cop falls, hits his head, doesn’t get up. And Earl goes into the system for a major stretch, where he becomes a man.”
“Gets uglier as they get older.”
“Doesn’t it always,” Noriko said. “When we next catch up with Earl, after his release, he’s changed scenes to Newark, New Jersey, and been arrested in connection with a RICO probe. There’s a charge of interstate travel in aid of racketeering… and worse, multiple charges of murder-for-hire. But a couple of key witnesses change their testimony prior to trial, and the case against him is dropped.”
Glenn snorted. “Oh, what luck,” he said with an ironic smile.
Noriko shrugged, glanced down at her folder.
“There’s nothing else as far as what I’ve dredged out of the computers. John Earl Fletcher — a.k.a. John Earl — seems to exit stage left until he shows up at Kiran with a U-Haul.”
Ricci had sat in his corner of the office without reacting to what she said, or apparently having done anything but lean back and stare into space. Now he moved his eyes to Noriko and kept them on her.
“Your lookouts ever see that van at the plant before?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Last night was a first.”
“And it’s still at the motel.”
She nodded. “The minute Earl leaves his room, I’ll know about it.”
“So we’ve got a guy who gets mobbed-up doing hard time, a pro hitter and dirty carrier, moving stuff for Kiran when the lights are off, then parking a mile away like he’s in no kind of hurry to go anywhere with it. That make sense?”
Glenn scratched behind his ear.
“Not much,” he said. “Unless maybe he’s waiting.”
Ricci turned to him.
“Waiting for what?”
Glenn shrugged.
“Somebody to meet or contact him, something to happen, no way for us to know,” he said.
Silence. Noriko slowly closed the file folder she’d been holding and flipped it onto her desk.
“I’ve seen something this morning besides the law-enforcement material,” she said. “An e-mail from Lenny Reisenberg.”
Both men looked at her.
“The shipping manager who got us mixed up in the Sullivan case?” Glenn said.
Noriko gave him a nod.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “What might be relevant here is that Lenny’s started to dig into some of Kiran’s shipping records, and a standout he’s already figured worth passing on is that a lot of the dual-use laser components Kiran’s been sending abroad in increased quantities — parts I’ve been wondering about for a while — have been freighted to an offshore distribution outfit in Singapore. That same company has major offices in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo.” A pause, a shrug. “None of it necessarily tells us anything’s fishy, since those countries are considered our diplomatic partners, but—”
“Those places are also major route-throughs for lots of neighborhood bad guys,” Glenn said.
She nodded again, and they all sat without speaking for a minute. Then Ricci sat forward in his chair, shifting his eyes from one to the other.
“We damn well better find out what’s in that moving van,” he said.
John Earl got out of the shower in his motel room, dried himself off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stood half naked and still mostly wet in front of the full-length mirror on the door. He touched the tattoo of the fire-engine-red Mack truck on his neck, thinking of the dream he’d had the night before. In that dream — more of a nightmare, truth be known — he was back in Thomaston, back in his prison cell, and working on the much larger version of the truck he’d painted on its wall over several years, after finally convincing the screws to look the other way… though he knew he hadn’t been the only con at Thomaston they’d let amuse himself with arts and crafts, ’long as he was quiet and did as he was told.
It had been quite a scenic picture that developed behind those bars over to the right of his cot, starting with a variation of the fuel delivery truck he’d driven for Hastings Energy before his row with that son-of-a-bitch deputy in Belfast had sent him down, and then growing little by little around the truck — a long black sweep of roadway beneath the heavyweight’s wheels, rolling green hills into forever, and, overhead, the wide blue sky with its bright round sun and cotton-puff clouds. Earl would work on that painting for hours every night till just before lights-out was called. He had always loved trucks. Step-frame trailers, cab-overs, tankers like the Hastings Energy rig. And all those nights he was in that cell working on his painting of the truck, or staring at it in the semidarkness after he’d turned in, Earl would imagine he was riding along in its cab with his windows rolled down, the roar of the wind in his ears blending together with the growl of its monster Detroit diesel engine and the loud chop of rock and roll guitars blaring from the radio.
Yeah, Earl thought, he would imagine himself in that big Mack truck, would dream about it when he fell asleep. All he’d need to do was close his eyes, and he’d be riding fast and free along some unmarked country road, the Mack redder and shinier than a fire engine, taking him anywhere but where he was, taking him nowhere he’d ever be found, carrying him away from that miserable old house of rock and steel as mile after mile of open, empty countryside spooled out behind him.
Earl frowned, once again remembering last night’s dream. Then he went from the mirror to get his clothes from where he’d tossed them on the bedside chair. In that dream, everything had been changed — turned inside out — and he’d been in his prison cell asking one of the guards for paint and getting turned down, begging for paint so he could work on his picture of the truck and getting turned town, getting laughed at, unable to see the screw’s face because it was hidden behind a dark mask like the kind you’d figure might belong on a spacesuit… which Earl now realized was a visored helmet exactly like the one Hasul Benazir had worn over his head while telling him about today’s goddamned job. The insane fucking mission that was supposed to net him a mint, and that he knew would really get him killed if he went ahead with it as planned — the meat eaten clean off his bones, his lungs dripping from his asshole, melted into chunky soup by the same poisoned air that would take out millions upon millions of other unsuspecting dupes.