Gated Prey (Eve Ronin #3)(33)

“Not as long.”

“I hope you kept the training wheels,” he said and walked out.





CHAPTER TWELVE


Duncan was already at his desk when Eve got back. Biddle and Garvey were telling him about the case they were investigating.

“The surfer was crossing PCH,” Garvey said, “which is like playing Russian roulette, and was hit by a new red Ferrari going southbound at about a hundred miles per hour.”

“Just mowed over him and kept on going,” Biddle said. “Dozens of people saw it.”

“Anybody get a plate?” Duncan asked.

Garvey shook his head. “He was going too fast. He was a red blur, like the Flash.”

Eve asked, “So how do you know it’s a new Ferrari and not an older one, or even an entirely different sports car?”

Biddle looked at her. “A couple of the witnesses are car nuts and identified it as a Ferrari F8 Tributo. It has very distinctive lines.”

“I googled it,” Garvey said. “The car has a 3.9-liter V-8 that gives it 710 horsepower and a top speed of over 200 miles per hour. The base price is $275,000, or about $1,300 per mile of speed.”

“Not many people can afford that,” Duncan said.

“You’d be surprised,” Biddle said. “There are fifty-seven registered owners in Southern California.”

“So, we’re doing this old school,” Garvey said, grabbing his jacket and getting up from his desk. “We’re going to personally visit the owner of every red Ferrari F8 Tributo in the area and see if their cars are damaged.”

“Good plan,” Duncan said.

It sounded to Eve like an excuse for Garvey to suck up to celebrities and studio executives, who were likely to be among the owners of the expensive sports car.

“Don’t forget to take selfies,” Eve said.

Garvey flipped her off and walked out with Biddle.

Eve went over to Duncan’s desk. “How did it go with Mrs. McCaig?”

“She was a mess, but I got the same story from her that we heard from the deputy,” Duncan said. “I ran into your sister as I was leaving the ER. She wanted to have a doctor look at my cut, so I scrammed.”

“Are you afraid of doctors?”

“I’m afraid of deductibles. The captain left us the list of common guests in each community in the hours immediately before and after each home invasion. There’s an overlap of about a dozen guests.” He handed her the paper.

Eve scanned the list and saw a lot of familiar gardeners, utilities, pool cleaners, and delivery services. “I might not mind him looking over my shoulder if he’s also going to do my legwork.”

“He’s just in a hurry to put this case in his rearview mirror. CSU called. They’ve unlocked the laptops belonging to Paul Colter and Greg Nagy and have mirrored the contents for us on encrypted virtual drives in the cloud. I’ve emailed you the links.”

“Okay,” she said.

“We also got access to the tracking data on the phones. But don’t get excited.” He pointed to three open windows on his computer. Each one showed a red pinpoint on a map. “These are the last pings for each of their phones. And they’re right outside each man’s front door, two hours before the invasion went down. My guess is that they turned off their phones when they got in their cars and then stowed them in their glove boxes.”

“These guys are smarter than we thought. They knew we’d track their phones if they got caught. They didn’t want us following the trail back to the staging area where their cars are parked or, more importantly, where the rest of their crew may also be.”

“How selfless of them.”

Eve had a sudden realization. “Maybe more than they thought. They may have unintentionally incriminated themselves in more crimes.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Where were their phones when the other home invasions went down?”

“Read me the dates and times,” Duncan said.

Eve went back to her desk, opened up her notes on her computer, and called out the information to Duncan, who entered the data.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

She swiveled in her seat to face his cubicle. “Let me guess. They turned off their phones at their homes a couple of hours before each of those crimes, too.”

“They did,” he said. “This ties them to all the other robberies.”

“Circumstantially, anyway.”

“It’d convince a jury . . . if these guys were still alive to be tried.”

“Out of curiosity,” she said, “after the other robberies, when and where did they turn their phones back on?”

Duncan typed in some commands and checked the results on his screen. “A few hours later, when they got back home.”

“Smart guys,” she said.

“Not as smart as you,” he said. “They didn’t see how the cover-up would nail them, assuming they’d been caught instead of killed.”

“It doesn’t do us much good now.”

“It tells us they were the bad guys.”

That was true. At least they’d solved something. It helped take the sting off her embarrassing conversation with the guy from the ME’s office.