When it was all sorted out Tony drove her back into Portland. Their thirty-minute ride back to Central Precinct started out silently. She sat with her eyes shut aware of his nearness, wanting to touch him, but afraid he’d push her away. When she opened her eyes, she saw he was glancing over at her.
“That must have been a helluva ride.”
“It wasn’t fun. How’d you know to follow Paul’s car?”
“You’re not going to like the answer but … I asked Sam to put a GPS in your shoulder bag while Danny was wiring you up.”
“Shit. You really did bug me this time, didn’t you, Alessandro?”
“Yup. With the tracer on the hard drives going one way and no cell phone signal, we’d have been chasing the wrong thing if it hadn’t been for the one in your bag.”
“Okay, I’m grateful. But how’d you know to stop Paul’s Lexus?”
“Danny. She thought she recognized his voice. Then, when you called him Paul, she was sure. She pulled up the information on his car just as we heard that a county mountie was on his tail for reckless driving. When that came over the radio, we knew exactly what to look for. Got the state police to close the freeway and herd him to a spike strip and that’s that.”
“He didn’t put up much fight.”
“Airbags can knock you silly if they hit you right.”
“Airbag. That’s the sound I heard.”
At the Justice Center, Tony hovered a bit, bringing her coffee and a sandwich, some solvent to get the remains of the tape adhesive off her wrists and ankles. Margo wasn’t sure if the tears she felt close to the surface were because of her car ride or his attention.
Once Sam returned, everyone involved spent the rest of the day beginning to put the pieces together. They started with three Russians: in Portland, Vasily Orlov, aka Viktor. The dead Russian in Newark, a former colleague of Orlov’s and the erstwhile competitor for control of the industrial espionage operation, Dmitri Petrakov. The third Russian, who made it out of Portland International Airport on a plane bound for Frankfurt, Germany just ahead of the police sent to arrest him, was Yuri Volkov. They had alerted the authorities in Frankfurt to pick him up when the plane landed.
All three of them had known each other in Russia before coming to the U.S., involved in shady deals but clever enough to avoid arrest. Somehow, Orlov had found Paul Dreier and, because of Dreier’s contacts with businesses not likely to ask questions about how their attorney had access to information that would help their bottom line, they formed an alliance. It was a nasty, if lucrative, business that had resulted in a half-dozen deaths and millions of dollars of damage to businesses more honest than Dreier’s clients.
• • •
By the time Margo had gotten most of what she knew on the record, it was getting dark. She was beginning to have trouble concentrating. When she asked Sam for the third time when he wanted her to come to Central Precinct the following day, he said, “You’re fried, Margo. Let’s finish this tomorrow. Tony, why don’t you drive her home?”
Margo pushed herself back from the table and stood up, a little shaky but happy at the prospect of going home. All she needed was something to eat and a good night’s sleep. “I can drive myself, Sam.”
“You’ve lost your stuffing and I don’t want to get called out to an accident scene where I get to watch them pry your body out of a car that’s wrapped around a bridge abutment.”