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Letty: “Shut up. Empty the pockets.”
They emptied their pockets, putting the contents on the Tundra’s bed cover: wallets, Lawrence’s purse, two motel keys, car keys, two small multi-tools, penlights, no weapons. Baxter told them to step away from the truck, picked up one of the two sets of car keys and pressed the button on the remote. The lights flashed on the Nissan they were standing next to and the doors clicked open.
Baxter said, “Around the corner in the parking lot, huh?”
Cartwright: “Get back between the trucks, between your truck and ours, right against the wall.”
“Don’t shoot us,” Lawrence said. “We’ll tell you whatever...”
“Yeah, you will,” Cartwright said. She wagged the barrel of her weapon: “Back against the wall.”
Letty said to Baxter, “Clean out their truck. Take everything loose, put it in the back of ours. Wallets, car keys, everything.”
As Baxter did that, Letty and Cartwright questioned the couple: They worked for a research agency, they said, and admitted that they’d located Sovern for the agency, run by a man named Tom Boyadjian. They didn’t know who the clients were, butbelieved they were Russians. As they stood against the wall, Letty used her phone to take close-up photos of their faces.
When Letty and Cartwright ran out of questions, Cartwright ordered the two into the back of the Nissan and told them to sit on the floor of the backseat, facing away from each other. “Don’t shoot us...”
They were clearly terrified, which meant they’d probably witnessed the shooting on the dock. The woman began to cry and Letty asked, “Did you spot all of the people the Russians murdered?”
“We don’t know about any murders...”
“More bullshit,” Baxter said. “The only way you could have followed us here was if you saw us in the marina, and then getting into the truck. You knew what the Russians were there for: they were going to kill Craig Sovern. You were gonna watch them do it.”
Lawrence, “No, no...”
Cartwright said, “You move, you try to get up, you die.”
She pushed the SUV door mostly shut, then said quietly to Letty and Baxter, “We gotta get our stuff out of the room and down to the truck. We’ll leave them here without keys. We’ve got their IDs, their faces, their phones, their license plate, we ought to check their room to see if they left anything there...”
“You watch them, we’ll get the stuff down. See you in ten minutes,” Letty said.
More like fifteen. They jammed everything they had into their bags, quickly checked the couple’s motel room—nothing there except two wrinkled pink bedspreads.
Back in the parking garage, they loaded everything into the truck, left the two researchers sitting on the floor of the Nissan. They drove a half mile to a surface parking lot, and Baxter andCartwright crawled under and through the truck, with a flashlight, looking for a GPS tracker, while Letty kept watch.
They found nothing, but Cartwright wasn’t satisfied. “Lots of cities now have license plate trackers... even tollways have them.”
“We’ve been using one here,” Baxter said. “And about that—Letty stole a plate off a car where we were last night before we picked you up. We put it on the front of the truck. We didn’t want the NSA tracking us, because, you know, one of us might do something technically illegal.”
“Let’s get it off and put your regular plate back on,” Cartwright said. “We’re gonna need to talk to your Delores Nowak. If Nowak tracks us to the meeting, that’s not a problem. We can steal another plate afterward.”
“I hate to do it, but we’ve got to ditch those iPhones from Martin and Lawrence,” Letty said. “They’ve probably got good information on them, but they’re also gonna have a ‘find my phone’ tracker.”
“That’s a thought,” Cartwright said, bobbing her head. “When we leave here, we’ll drop them in the street.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Baxter said. “My car safe... my vault... is a perfect Faraday cage. We keep the phones until we give them to the FBI or the NSA.”
Letty: “Good—if you’re sure the box will shield them.”
“Absolutely: part of the design,” Baxter said.
When they left the parking lot, with Letty driving and Baxter in the backseat, going through what they’d taken from Lawrence and Martin, Baxter said, “Hey: two GPS trackers. Still in the boxes. Good ones. Four hundred bucks each, still got the price tags from the Spy Store, whatever that is. You know, we could make quite a tidy profit from this whole enterprise. We’ve still got five boxes of chips in the back, maybe we could give SlapBack a call, offer to help out...”
Cartwright: “That big set of keys... I think they’re for opening car doors. I could use those.”
“I got dibs on those,” Letty said. “I’ll let you make copies, if you can. But I could use them, too.”
“They’re both licensed private detectives,” Baxter said. “Martin and Lawrence...”
