Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(67)

I read the names aloud.

“Laura Almasi. Sonia Lopez Martinez. Kenneth Riley Napierkowski. Leroy Parker. Thomas Wilson.”

I did a property-tax search. One of the women, Laura Almasi, had paid taxes on a property in Lindon, which was in eastern Colorado, two hours outside Denver. Not much out there. Maybe she was a rancher. She and Wilson still had out-of-state driver’s licenses for Texas and New Mexico, respectively. Leroy carried an outstanding parking ticket. Nothing about the other two seemed even that noteworthy.

Hoping for something more useful, I opened up the Department of Motor Vehicles photos Taft had attached.

Two of the five were white, two black, and Sonia Martinez was Latina. They ranged in age from eighteen—Leroy—to Napierkowski’s sixty-seven.

None of them looked like psychopaths.

Correction. They all looked like psychopaths. These were DMV photos, after all.

Sonia Martinez, age thirty-two, was soft eyed and pretty. Maybe Kane had been doing nothing more in his final moments than letting his gaze rest on an attractive woman.

Pushing away my frustration, I mentally filed away the five candidates and returned to the Dark Web. But while I knew my brief foray into the back alleys only scratched the surface, I didn’t have any better luck searching for Valor there than I’d had on the sun-splashed streets of the regular internet.

Agitated, I closed my laptop. “Let’s get some air, boy.”

The desk was between Clyde and the door, but he still beat me there.

Music and laughter filtered from the bar into the hallway, and the clash of pans in Paul’s tiny kitchen suggested a busy night. Things were rocking and rolling up front. Stallone had given way to the Bee Gees. Tonight’s clientele must have celebrated their youth during the heyday of the disco era. I imagined there were a few gold lamé jumpsuits and metallic halter tops in the narrow space that passed for a dance floor.

Clyde and I pushed through the back door into a balmy night filled with the chirp of crickets. In the distance, headlights flowed like a halogen river on the interstate, the whine of traffic muffled by the kings of disco and the wind breezing through nearby trees.

“Scout,” I said to Clyde. He dutifully trotted in a widening half circle out from the building until he was thirty yards away. Nothing caught his attention. I whistled him back.

“Good boy.” I gave him a treat from my pocket.

While Clyde checked out the local flora and fauna, I stretched and ran through some light calisthenics in the faint light falling from the windows, disregarding complaints from my assaulted ribs. I wanted another cigarette the way a baby wants a bottle, but I ignored the siren call. No one but me was going to clean up my act.

Finished, I leaned against the bricks in the shadows, propped a foot flat against the wall, and folded my arms. Inside, the jukebox took a break, and I soaked in the sounds of a normal neighborhood. Kids shouting, a dog barking, the thump of a basketball, and the rise of cheers from a nearby court—the locals enjoying a pickup game. Clyde nosed through the weeds, tail wagging.

“Just don’t eat anything,” I called.

My phone buzzed. Taft.

“I have those names,” he said. “People who might be a match for the Pushman.”

I dropped my foot and pulled my notebook and pen from my pocket. “Ready.”

“Before I read them to you, you need to know that this is just speculation. You understand that, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“So no going all Kill Bill on these people once I send the list.”

“Going what?”

“Uma Thurman. She kills a bunch of people after they kill—never mind. Just tell me you’ll coordinate with Gorman.”

I had another flash of Gorman holding a business card from Valor. He’d clearly found someone to talk to. I bet he could fill in a few of the blanks on my page.

I crossed my fingers. “Pinkie swear. Just give me the names.”

I jotted the names down as he spoke. None of them looked familiar. Taft gave me addresses for three of the four. The fourth person, a man named Mark Fadden, wasn’t in the Colorado DMV—his most recent address was Atlanta, Georgia. Taft had flagged him because a few years earlier, Fadden had been convicted of a crime by a military court and given an eighteen-month sentence and a bad-conduct discharge.

Bingo.

“This Mark Fadden, how often does he use public transportation?”

“The other three are regular users. But Fadden has ridden an RTD bus exactly four times, twice into Union Station and twice out. Each time, he walked up and down the upper-level platform a couple of times, then went into the station and bought a beer and a newspaper. After that, he sat at a table for an hour.”

“A guy goes to Union Station for a beer and a paper?”

“I’m crushed by your cynicism. The place has ambiance.”

“Sounds to me like he was scoping things out.”

A pause. “That’s how I read it.”

“What about the day of the murder?”

“No sign of him on any buses or trains that day. Which is a strong argument against him being our suspect.”

“Unless someone dropped him off and he put on his Pushman persona.”

“Sydney, be careful with this. Don’t read too much into the biometrics. We’ve crossed a line by matching up Fadden and these other men with a theoretical avatar. We don’t know that any of these guys are the one we’re looking for.”