Psycho Save Us (24 page)

Agent Mortimer,
the white one, spoke up.  “Who is this O’Connor guy?”

“Not entirely sure,”
Leon said.  That part was true, for the most part.  He knew O’Connor was
somehow connected to Pat’s operation, and knew he’d worked in forgeries a few
years back but didn’t know to what extent.  “My informant has worked in a
certain capacity with O’Connor before, though, and reported suspicious behavior
to me, but nothing serious.”  That was true, too.  Though “report” was a strong
word.  Pat had pretty much told him some street gossip that occasionally had
the name Yeti or Basil attached to it.

“Detective?”
someone called out.  It was Hennessey, stepping out of 448 with his MP-5 slung
at his side and his Glock re-holstered.  He was speaking formally of Leon, not
using his first name, because the G-men were present.  Leon and Hennessey had
unconsciously assumed the stations of a unified front against feds taking over
their case.  “You might wanna see this, Detective Hulsey.”

“What’s up, Lieutenant?”

“I tell you,
it’s a God damn mess in there.  The place is a fucking wreck.  It’s…just come
look at it.”

“Mind if we
sneak a peek with you?” Agent Porter asked.

After hearing
that, Leon wondered if he’d been too hasty in automatically assuming he would
have to fight to keep his clout in this investigation.  It seemed as though
Agent Porter was trying to show a gesture of peace and cooperation.  “Sure,”
Leon said.  “Why not?  Let’s all go take a look.”

The Yeti’s home
was an utter disaster, with random patches of organization that only made the
scene more bizarre.  An odor reached out beyond the open door, so pungent that
the brain and the olfactory nerves never really learned to ignore it.  The big
man himself was sitting on his ass on the floor, his robe spread wide open and
his balls completely hanging out of his stained white briefs.

Leon said
nothing.  He’d never seen so much junk in all his life.  He glanced over to the
G-men.  Agent Porter and his two pals were looking about the apartment with
mild interest.  One of them, Stone, had gone directly over to a pile of
computers, printers and stacked manila envelopes.  A nest of wires clung all
around the nearest wall by a mix of duct and electrical tape.

Sergeant Warwick
was bent down to one knee, asking a few basic questions about the Yeti’s
well-being, just making sure that he was recovering suitably from the effects
of the flash-bang grenades.  So far, he just gazed with tired, indolent eyes at
something on his foot.

“Bunch o’ H,”
someone said beside Leon.  He turned, and found Heinrich offering him a tin
My
Little Pony
lunchbox that was opened and filled with a bag of eight-balls
and hypodermic needles.  “Vaulstid said there’s more in the back.  I’ll bet
there’s a lot more hidden all over this apartment.”

“There’s a lot
over here,” said Agent Mortimer, who had joined Stone by the computer array. 
“Not heroin, but a whole lot of forging going on.”

Leon walked
over.  He pulled his rubber gloves from his back pocket, slipped them on, and
started rummaging through the piles of what looked like garbage, but was one
man’s livelihood.  Agent Mortimer had moved aside a 2009 edition of
The
Merck Manual of Medical Information
, and was lifting a packet filled with
driver’s licenses.  The pictures were mostly of black men and they came from
all over: Houston, Hackerville, Las Vegas, Cumming, Jonesboro, Lafayette,
Tutte, Kansas City, Thomasville, Milwaukee, on and on.

“Laminate over
here,” Agent Stone said, lifting up sheets of plastic, no doubt used to seal a
phony license in place.  “This kind of laminate is good to use for holograms on
a driver’s license.  Various kinds of ink over there.”  He pointed.  There was
an enormous toolbox on the other side of the computer desk, hitherto concealed
by a mound of clothes.  The toolbox was filled with inks and tools necessary to
emboss or add complex designs to a driver’s license.

There was Teslin
and Artisyn NanoExtreme paper, some butterfly laminate pouches, a thermal pouch
laminator, and an encoder to encode the magnetic strip on each pouch.  There
was a pigmented based inkjet printer, an Epson printer with DuraBrite ink,
pretty much the best for making fake IDs.  There was also plenty of Pearl-Ex
paint and Photo-EZ paper for creating convincing holograms.  There were
numerous books on how to manipulate images on Adobe Photoshop.  There was also
sandpaper.  Only the best forgers went through the trouble of sanding down
holograms to remove the jagged edes on the synthetic paper.

Some of the IDs
Leon saw were EDLs, Enhanced Driver’s Licenses, made with the specifications of
the new Federal Passport Card, which made a document not just good for proving
one could drive, but for proving one’s citizenship of the U.S.

“Quite the
operation for a pig,” said Agent Porter, turning away from it all.  “Now let’s
hear him squeal.”

“We still
haven’t confirmed that it was Spencer Pelletier who was here tonight,” Leon
reminded him.  The G-man stopped and looked at him.  “Until we confirm that, this
is technically still a local matter of nothing more than a possible
kidnapping.  Missing Persons has authority and jurisdiction on it.  I don’t
mind you guys hanging around, but I’ll ask
my
questions, and then we’ll
see what we’ll see.”

To his great
surprise, Agent Porter showed no chagrin.  He smiled humbly and said, “It
sounded bad, didn’t it?  My fault.  It’s your ball, Detective.”

“No harm, no
foul.”

“I need to ask
you, though…”  Porter paused, gave some of the cops and his fellow agents a
glance that indicated a private conference would be appreciated.  They all
obliged and moved away.  Agent Porter turned back to Leon, who prepared himself
for a line of bullshit.  “Detective Hulsey, you
are
aware of why we’re
here.”  It wasn’t a question.

He shrugged his
massive shoulders, which were so thick with muscle they barely moved anymore.  “I
assume you followed the stolen cars faster than we did.”

Porter nodded. 
“It’s been tough, but we’ve been in touch with several insurance companies and
police stations across the South, trying to get a beat on every single stolen
vehicle reported.  The most promising trail led to Mobile.  We knew that
Pelletier had old contacts in Atlanta, so we hopped on a plane and tried to
head him off.  We were just getting into contact with the Atlanta Police Chief
when the report of the Tacoma came in through the system.  We lost track of the
stolen vehicles somewhere near Troup County, which was where the Tacoma was
taken from, so we knew we were getting close.  Me and my guys here,” he glanced
over his shoulder, “we’re all pretty high-strung right now.”

“I understand,
Agent Porter.  I do.  I know how pissed off a man gets when his target gets
away, and I know it’s exciting being on the cusp of catching him—”

“But did you
know we’ve been chasing him for two years, ever since he busted out of
Leavenworth?”

Leon shook his
head.  “All I heard on the wire was that he escaped prison years ago, and was a
suspect in that shit over in Baton Rouge.  Didn’t know from which prison or
exactly how long ago until you just said.”  By “on the wire” Leon meant the
transcripts and news updates that LEOs (law enforcement officers) got way
before the news programs thanks to a New Age network of communications tools
modeled after Interpol’s ECHELON system.  The FBI had hardly gotten it off the
ground yet, and already it was showing promise.  Atlanta was one of the cities
testing the system to see how fast news would travel through law enforcement,
and how long the information could be in their hands before the media got wind
of it.  It could prove vital in getting to the bad guys before they knew they
were being hunted.

“I used to work
SIS,” Porter said.  “You know what they do?”

“Sure.  SIS is
like an FBI inside the prison system.  Investigates prison gangs and plots
inside the joint.”

“Yes.  We were
very upset when Spencer Pelletier escaped us.  He did so in a very humiliating
way for us, I don’t mind telling you.  But it was the U.S. Marshalls’ jobs to
track him down once he was gone, not mine.  Then I got into the FBI and it was
on again.  He’s stayed quiet for these two years, and now we’re closer than
ever to reeling him back in.  We’ve found out a lot about him since he left
Leavenworth.  Detective Hulsey, he’s not what he seems.  Not just a thief or a
bank robber or a con man.  He’s a monster.  A real one, like they keep writing
books about fifty years after they’re dead.  He’s a violent, manipulative
killer.”

Leon nodded. 
“You think he had something to do with my two missing girls?”

“It wouldn’t
surprise me.  His goals…well, they’re amorphous, let’s just say that. 
Constantly changing.  One minute he’s a small scam artist, then he’s a car
thief, then a bank robber, then a car thief again, then aiding in a counterfeit
money ring, then performing dead drops for drug dealers, then stealing cars
again.  He shows a, ah,
proclivity
for switching his game.  Very
unusual.  Most criminals and psychopaths are specialists, not jacks of all
trades.  But at the same time as he’s doing all this, almost as an
afterthought, he kills people.”  The FBI man put his hands in his pockets and
looked around at the other officers in the room, as if to make sure none were
within earshot.  “Lots of them.”

Leon considered
this for a moment, and figured the man for the kind of guy who knew his job
well, and didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was given to wild exaggeration. 
And Leon liked to think he had a perfect bullshit detector.

Then, Porter
shrugged, showing marginal doubt.  “At least, that’s the theory me and my team
have been working on.  We’ve found bodies over the last couple of years that,
once forensics pinned down approximate times of death, started forming a
timeline.  A timeline that coincided with another timeline we’d made for
tracking Pelletier.”

“I never asked
you, Agent Porter.  What department of the FBI are you in?”

“Serial Killer
Task Force.”

Leon said
nothing as a pair of SWAT officers walked in between them, issuing “excuse mes”
as they went past them.  He sighed.  “Well, let me just talk to my captive over
here.  I’ll see what he knows about my missing girls and your Pelletier.  You
can listen in and, when I’m done, he’s your witness and I’ll listen in.  Fair?”

“Sounds great to
me.”  Porter smiled, showing a row of perfectly aligned white teeth.

They walked over
to the Yeti, who was just now blinking and looking around like a man waking up from
a terrible dream, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have to go back there. 
A couple of forensics guys came in with their equipment—luminol, Dictaphones,
lifting tape, ultraviolent flashlights, scalpels, scissors, and of the course
the increasingly essential cyber forensics kit.  They looked at the Yeti, then
at the apartment.  Their dismayed faces showed they understood they were in for
an all-nighter.

“Mr. O’Connor,”
Leon said, kneeling in front of him and wincing as his knees popped.  There
were no chairs that could be easily cleaned off to sit on.  “How are we this evening?”

“B-b-been
better, I guess,” O’Connor said.

“Yeah, I get
that.  Listen, we have some questions for you.”  Leon waved a hand around,
gesturing generally about the apartment.  “So listen, we’ve found a veritable
mountain of evidence here that’ll send you away for a long, long time.  And
we’ve barely even scratched the surface.”

“Wh-who squealed
on me, man?”

“It’s not
important—”

“Who
talked
,
nigger?”  That last word hadn’t been said an invective.  It was more desperate
and pleading than anything, and junkies will say what junkies will say.

“We’re looking
for a certain individual,” Leon went on, trying to keep this from going
anywhere near the name or topic of Patrick Mulley. 
The things we do for
family
.  “We came in search of someone very dangerous, and I believe he
left here within the hour.”

“S-say nothin’
else,” O’Connor said.  “You came for Spencer Pelletier, you got him.”

While Leon
masked his surprise, Agent Porter was unable to conceal his own excitement.  He
knelt down beside Leon quickly, but remained respectfully silent.  That was good
since, technically, this just became a federal investigation.  “Spencer
Pelletier?  He was here, then?  That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, man.  I
gave him some stuff.”

Leon could put
two and two together.  “New identities.”

“Y-yeah, man.”

“What else?”

“I dunno.  A
cell phone and an address.  That’s it.”

“What cell
phone?  What address?”  Leon had his notepad out, his pen poised to jot.  If
they had the cell phone’s number they could trace it, especially if Pelletier
made a phone call anytime soon.  Pinging was the latest rage amongst law
enforcement, and if a call was made by a known number then it was no longer
very difficult at all to find the phone’s exact location.  Warrants were rarely
ever needed, either, thanks to bills like the Patriot Act.