Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(77)

Next Joey pulled up a United Airlines itinerary she had unearthed. “They came in on a flight this morning from Alabama.”

“Where Van Sciver killed Orphan C.” And where Jack had plowed into the dirt from sixteen thousand feet.

“Right. And they rented this at the airport.” Click. “A black Suburban. I know, inventive, right? License plate VBK-5976.”

She paused to check if he was impressed.

He was.

“The same credit card was used to get another matching Suburban, license plate TLY-9443. So I’m thinking four men.”

“Looks like it,” Evan said.

“You know what ALPR is?” she asked.

“Automated license-plate recognition,” Evan said, relieved to be back on familiar turf. “Police cruisers have sensors embedded in the light bars that scan the plates of all surrounding vehicles. They can swallow numbers eight lanes across on cars going in either direction up to eighty miles per hour. They process the plates for outstanding warrants in real time and store them for posterity.”

“Gold star for the old guy,” Joey said. “I already input the licenses into the ALPR system and coded the system to send me and only me an alert when one of the light-bar sensors picks up either Suburban. We’re gonna use Virginia’s Finest to track down these guys for us.” Her grin took on a devious cast. “In more ways than one.”

Evan followed her gaze up the street to the courthouse. It was a beautiful Colonial Revival building—weathered brick, white columns, hipped roof. A trickle of men and women scurried across the front lawn, some black, some white, some in suits, others in overalls, each of them moving with a sense of purpose. A sign in front read CRIMINAL GENERAL DISTRICT COURT.

“Oh,” Evan said. “Oh.”

Already Joey was pulling up the courthouse’s private Wi-Fi network reserved for judges, DAs, and clerks. Hashkiller’s 131-billion-password dictionary required only twenty-seven seconds to get her on. The Records Management System took two and a half minutes. And then there it was before them on the screen, glowing like a holy relic.

A bench warrant.

Evan and Joey smiled at each other.

“First move,” Joey said. “Get the bad guys off the street. Or at least the two we have names for.”

“You’re kind of a genius.”

“I agree with everything but the ‘kind of.’” She wiggled her fingers in glee and then typed in a phony case record.

If the cops brought in the men, red-tape confusion would tangle them up for days.

“What should we have them arrested for?” Joey asked. “Homegrown terrorism is always good, gets the local constabulary all hot and bothered.”

“Terrorism?” Evan said. “Delmonico and Shea?”

“You have a point.”

“Let’s make them pedophiles,” Evan said.

She typed, her smile growing broader as she warmed to the idea. “And prison escapees.”

“Who are also wanted for killing a police officer.”

“That is so the best hat trick,” she said. “It’s like making a list for Santa.”

She finished filling out the arrest warrant, issued a statewide BOLO, and fed the forms into the legal and law-enforcement machinery of greater Richmond.

Then she held up her palm.

He slapped it.





51

Push a Little More

Candy’s back was on fire, but she granted her skin no concessions when on a mission. She refused to scratch it, even resisted tugging at her shirt so the fabric would rub against the ruinous flesh and soothe the burn. Candy had pulled Van Sciver into the hall of the safe house to talk to him privately.

Van Sciver was as unyielding a man as she’d ever encountered, but he was still a man, which meant she had a shot at getting what she wanted from him. He’d pulled his pistol out of his underarm tension holster.

An FNX-45 with a threaded barrel and holographic red-dot sights.

A lot of firepower for the skull of a thirteen-year-old.

“The hard part’s over,” Van Sciver said. “We have him now. X knows it or will soon enough. The kid’s served his purpose.”

Van Sciver’s eyes twitched across the threshold to where David Smith sat on the decline bench, a pillowcase cinched over his head, hands pressed between his knees. He hadn’t made a noise since Delmonico and Shea had delivered him. The two men stood by the rear door, guarding it with M4s in case the skinny thirteen-year-old kid went Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on them. The other pair patrolled the front of the house as if working perimeter duty at a presidential inauguration.

L’s corpse had been removed, the spillage from his body more or less cleaned up, though the smell of vomit lingered.

Over in the kitchen, Thornhill stirred something in a pot, humming to himself. It smelled delicious and spicy, and Candy wondered where Thornhill was from, how he’d learned to cook and who for. It brought back a memory from high-altitude SERE training in her seventeenth year. She’d summited a tree-blanketed rise in the Rockies, nearly stumbling onto a family of four picnicking out of the back of their Range Rover. The mom had laid down a blanket, and there were sliced apples in bowls and cold fried chicken and thermoses of hot cider. The daughter was around Candy’s age. Candy had hidden behind the tree line, staring down at the exotic sight before her, scarcely breathing lest she spook them. She’d remained long after they’d driven off, her boots embedded in a film of snow, trying to loose the tangle of emotions that had knotted up her throat.