Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(28)

It was over.

He couldn't tell whether anything was passed between them, but with Hammer's death, the woman would have taken back whatever it was she'd been there to give Hammer. Undoubtedly a flash drive.

She opened the door Hammer had unlocked and disappeared into the building, and was lost.

The drone kept making huge circles around the building, but it was a department store. The woman could change clothes. He had no markers. She could be walking out right now in fact.

The department store was connected via a sky bridge to another building of the complex containing menswear. Baker enlarged the radius of the drone's flight. It made a circuit every half hour instead of every ten minutes, but at least he covered more ground. It still had another six hours' flight time left, so he settled farther in the seat and watched the left-hand side of the screen carefully.



       
         
       
        

Damn, a sunny day in Portland brought out the hordes. He carefully watched everyone who exited from the hotel and the conference center and the department store. Hundreds. Mainly men exited from the conference center and mainly women exited from the department store. He didn't see anyone exiting that fit the profile he'd made of the woman.

Though … hello. He sat up straight. The drone gave him a view of garage exits. Two of them. One from the underground hotel garage and one from the underground department store garage.

His video program had an algorithm that caught repetitions, and it caught one now. Three identical SUVs, coming out of the department store garage at … Baker checked. Fifteen minute intervals, exactly.

Hmm. The kind of thing the military did when the commanding officer ordered departures at specific intervals. To the second.

He studied the video. The vehicles were exactly the same. Same color, same make, same model. The chances of three identical vehicles emerging at fifteen minute intervals exactly … hmm.

He switched to a piggyback link to a Keyhole 15 satellite that would be overhead for the next couple of hours and set the algos to follow the vehicles.

In the meantime, he ran the plates. All three were out of state, which was useful if you were hiding something. Local cops could only run in-state plates. But Baker could tap into a national database. It would take a while.

The drone clocked seventy-four vehicles coming out in an hour. Almost two thousand vehicles in a twenty-four-hour period. Baker had a lot of crunching power but this would tax even his systems. He was going to run a plate search on every vehicle exiting the department store for the next six hours. He calculated that it would take something like twenty-four hours to tag each vehicle, run the plates and where possible follow the vehicles to their end destination.

A lot of work. But that was what computers were for and his were the best.

He was in deepest shit if the woman decided to stay in hiding until the department store closed. But that kind of patience was an operator's patience, a sniper's patience. Nothing about the way the woman moved down the alleyway made him think she was an operator. Chances were good she'd leave within the six-hour window.

While his program ran the plate-matching program, his eye was caught by the left-hand side of the screen. The killing, running on a loop. The woman had walked down the alleyway carrying a roller suitcase but he hadn't noticed that she didn't have it when she rushed through the door into the back of the department store.

He froze the video, peered closely. Zoomed in … there! Behind a Dumpster next to the door. It was the same color as the ground, but if he focused, he could see it was a handle. A suitcase handle.

The woman's suitcase had somehow been kicked behind the Dumpster and, in her agitation at Hammer's death, she'd completely forgotten about it. 

Inside that suitcase would be details about the woman's life, maybe a document, an ID. That woman had witnessed Mike Hammer's death.

Baker was pretty certain that he had a fail-safe method of killing, but no one had ever been present at the death before. He had no idea how perceptive she might be. If she was a friend of Mike Hammer's, it was likely she was no dummy. And Hammer was meeting her for a reason.

Chillingly, it was also possible she was from the CDC. In that case, Baker needed to find her as quickly as possible.

Who was she? The answer might lie in that suitcase.

Baker was a mile away. Traffic was light at this time; he could make it in about a quarter of an hour. He knew which cameras to avoid and the alleyway had no cameras. In and out, easy. The area held a conference center. A professional-looking man trailing a rolling suitcase behind him would be a normal sight. In half an hour, he could be back at his safe house, going through the contents of the suitcase. Figure out who she was, go to her house and grab some DNA. Have Frank mix up the cocktail.