Blood List(9)

"Yeah, like days and nights in the desert, Gene. Forty. Know anyone who might have need of forty NetPhone I-590s, paid for with a credit card linked to a fake Social Security number?"

Gene sat up. This killer, this dead-end, this invisible man who followed no patterns and killed without conscience, this monster who taunted his team for fun, had just made a mistake. "Do we know who picked them up and when?"

"The bad news is that the post office won't release that information. Right to Privacy and all that."

He hated it when Sam played with him. Why couldn't she just spit it out? Why hadn't he become a dentist, or a hula dancer—something, anything, other than an FBI agent? On the other end of the phone, Sam said nothing. She always made him ask. "What's the good news?" He stumbled into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it as she replied.

"The good news is that they were picked up by one Bradley Jones. Bradley is a small-time hood with a long rap sheet of minor consequence—possession with intent to distribute, stuff like that. He just got busted on federal weapons charges and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and trying to plea he copped to a whole lot of weird stuff both legal and not, including this delivery. Thought it was a mob thing, phones fell off a truck or something. Anyway, he delivered them to a warehouse in Queens for a hundred bucks.

"I asked the super to check his records. He said the warehouse was rented by some guy who paid in cash, dropped his lease right after the delivery, just ate the security deposit. They're faxing over the lease so we can get the handwriting analysis guys on it. The local office is already fingerprinting everything they could find. If it was him, we'll know by noon or so."

"Great. What's the name on the lease, Sam?" Gene said.

"Um, here it is, Paul Renner," she said. "Guy's a ghost. He's got no record, no known place of employment, no known address. Social security number's fake."

Sacred Mother, Gene thought, not sure if it was sacrilege or prayer, let this be the guy's big screw-up.

"What do we know about these phones?"

Sam replied, "Well, that depends on how much you love me."

"Right," Gene said. "I love you very much. Now spit it out or I'll have you fired, then set on fire for messing with me at four in the morning."

Gene could hear the smile through the phone. "Well, we know that one of them came online last week."

"Great. So how do we find him?" Gene asked.

"Well," Sam said, "we don't. Not really."

"What does 'not really' mean?"

"It means that what we've got is a phone that's currently active, somewhere on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That's all we can get tracing through cell towers. It's not nearly granular enough to be able to find him, but at least we can track his movements."

"All right," Gene said. "Do it."



* * *



October 5th, 2:30 PM PST; Los Angeles Public Library; Los Angeles, California.



Paul Renner sat in the public library disguised as a homeless man, his body tight with anticipation underneath filthy clothes. He looked at the text message again, then at the computer screen. Larry Johnson, Jr., 8473 Eagle Crest Drive, Salt Lake City, Utah. It was downright scary what you could find on the Internet these days.

Mr. Johnson was in his mid-sixties and had found God more than thirty years before when he'd met Mormon missionaries in a NYC park, who saved him from a life of addiction. He went from junky to janitor to union   garbage man to shift supervisor in that time, had a lovely wife and seven children, and had retired two years ago. His rambling blog spelled out his typical day in far too much detail.

He spent most mornings doing the crossword and Sudoku in the paper, afternoons sitting in his front lawn sipping coffee—decaffeinated, of course—and waiting for his first grandchild to be dropped off after daycare. He spent his evenings babysitting until his eldest daughter got home, usually just in time to make him miss Final Jeopardy, then updated his blog from eight to ten.

It amazed Paul that anyone would write such shit and that anyone else would read it. Well, anyone who wasn't studying Larry Johnson, Jr.'s routine to find the best way to kill him, of course. Whistling, Paul committed most of the blog to memory, booked an American Airlines business-class ticket to Salt Lake City for "Scott Gleichauf," hacked through to gain administrative privileges, and formatted the hard drive.

He swore under his breath and pounded the keyboard, earning a look of reproach from the elderly woman next to him. He stood and flagged down a librarian. "Hey, that computer's broke. Just, like, turned off and shit, man."