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North flicked him an annoyed look, grunted, and went back to work.
“That’s why it wasn’t my best work,” Shaw said as he began to place his final call. “Because you ruined it.”
North did some subvocal muttering that sounded distinctly unflattering.
Maleah Donaldson’s voicemail picked up the call, and Shaw repeated his message for the third time. The idea was simple: people were often reluctant to talk if you asked them questions. But if you let them think they had something to gain, and you made them work a tiny bit for it—well, that was a different story.
“Which one is the mom?” North asked.
“I think Carly might be the grandmother. Any luck?”
North sat back and angled the laptop for Shaw to see the map and the highlighted route.
One of the Borealis investments they’d agreed on—after much handwringing by North, and much, much, much “please, I can’t talk about this anymore” from Shaw—was to begin paying for an online database geared toward private investigators. It was actually a set of databases, and it drew on public records as well as proprietary information. It gave them access to a number of tools that they hadn’t had before, and one of those—which North was currently playing with—was a system that tracked license plates through traffic cameras.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Traffic cameras didn’t always catch a license plate, and not all camera systems uploaded their information, and—well, on and on like that. But it was a tool, and it was often helpful. And it looked like tonight was one of the helpful nights because North had plotted out several appearances of the sheriff’s license plate.
“These are from tonight?” Shaw asked.
“No, I figured I’d map every time his license plate has appeared on camera anytime in the last year.”
“I know you use sarcasm as a shield, but I hope one day you’ll shed your armor and let the healing warmth of human love—oh holy Buddha, my hair!”
When North released him, Shaw rubbed the de-scalped section—he had a fresh understanding of the puppy’s suffering now, and he vowed, once again, to be more forgiving the next time the puppy bit him in the, er, private area. By accident, as North insisted. Then he leaned in for a closer look at the laptop.
The sheriff’s license plate had appeared several times within Wahredua that evening—which made sense, since the city would have the highest concentration of traffic cameras. Then the trail went dark for a while until two hits in Eldon and then another hit in Versailles.
“He’s going west,” Shaw said, still rubbing his scalp. “He’s past the roadblock; there’s no way they’re looking for him that far.”
“Someone’s going west,” North said. “If Welch is smart, he’s already ditched the sheriff’s car. Or at least traded plates.” He was quiet for a moment and then he panned the map to the west and pointed to a city called Auburn, where all this mess had started. “But then there’s that, and what are the odds it’s a coincidence?”
“The Cottonmouth Club,” Shaw said.
“Or some jabroni with a fresh set of plates happens to be driving that way.”
“North, it can’t be a coincidence. Dalton was going to identify the man he met at the Cottonmouth Club. Ambyr was the one who introduced them. And now they’re both dead before the investigation can even get off the ground, and the killer is driving straight toward the club.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. On the street, a Highlander rolled past, tires thrumming against the asphalt. Then stillness descended again. No wind. No night birds. Nothing but the GTO’s rumble, and the air conditioning’s valiant attempt to push back the sticky heat, and the flicker of an Amoco sign.
“The police have access to all this data,” North said in a painfully neutral tone. “They’ll figure out—”
“No,” Shaw said. He made his voice gentler, as best he could, and said, “No. I know you’re trying to—I appreciate it, North. But you know that they’re going to take time to get mobilized, for the investigation to start moving. That’s the nature of a bureaucracy.”
“They also have big guns and bulletproof vests and a hell of a lot more bodies.”
“North, he’s not going to stay with the sheriff’s car forever. He’s going to ditch it, and then this lead goes cold.”
North was silent, but the struggle showed in his face. “John-Henry could use you—”
“No.”
“If I call Emery—”
“No.”
Something snapped, and North burst out, “Well, God fucking damn it, will you let me finish a sentence?”
“Come on,” Shaw said, and he found North’s hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go see which jabroni is driving around with the sheriff’s license plates.”
