The elevator doors opened, and we all stepped out.
Richie had indeed done well. The man at the ATM was likely the last person Freddie Pecos had seen alive.
I re-scanned the facial composite. Then the parking lot picture. There were subtle differences in the man’s mouth and nose. But the two images looked similar.
“Who put the composite in the system?” Cassie asked. “Hambis police?”
“Nope.” Richie smiled. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He waited a beat to see our reaction, then surprised us a second time. “The Jacksonville office.”
We turned to each other. That wasourold office, where PAR was started.
“You call them?” Cassie asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I did,” Richie said. “And guess what? An agent told me that they asked for PAR’s help on this case already.” His eyes moved to mine. “You turned them down.”
There is a process by which cases are sent to PAR. To put it simply, I knew every case that we had considered, turned down, or accepted. This one didn’t sound familiar.
“So I guess wealldid good tonight, huh?” Richie smiled.
“Speak for yourself,” Shooter said. “Travis Wells was a bust.”
Richie cocked his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “We put his name in the system so the DA would call us.”
“Yeah,” Cassie said. “That guy won’t be calling.”
“He already did,” Richie replied. “Five minutes before you guys got here.”
I squinted at Richie, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Travis Wells left the bar drunk, and a cop in the parking lot saw him get into his Camaro,” Richie said. “Pulled him over a block away.”
I recalled Travis, up at the bar doing shots, probably trying to forget what was happening to his buddy on his watch.
“So whatever you guys did,” Richie said, “we got our potential C.I.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Travis Wells had been booked at 2:12 a.m. and was currently sweating it out in a holding cell in Farner County.
But according to my early-morning phone conversation with DA Justin Seethers, we had to wait seventy-two hours to approach him. Only then would a reasonable defense attorney take the DA’s claim of a third strike seriously.
“Three days?” I said to Seethers. “You can’t make a deal sooner?”
“It’s not like that,” the DA said by phone, his accent ringing of a youth spent in Georgia or Alabama. “See, this approach to the law is fairly novel, Agent Camden. Far as I know, it’s just me and one other fella prosecuting this way.”
“So you charge these guys under Florida’s 10-20-Life Law and get a big bail assigned. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“On day one in jail, they think you’re bluffing about life in prison,” I said. “But by day three—”
“I make a believer out of them,” he finished my sentence.
After the call with the DA, I jumped in my car to head to theMiami airport. I texted Richie to grab his go bag and do the same. If we had three days before Travis Wells got out of jail, we had time to go to Jacksonville. We could check out the case on this mystery man—and possible killer—who’d interacted with Freddie Pecos at the ATM.
More than that, if we wanted to keep a second C.I. alive, it would help to have clarity on who had murdered our first one.
At the airport, I emailed Craig Poulton, carefully choosing my words to communicate that a new C.I. was on the horizon, but it would take time to lock him down.
