Then Richie and I got on a last-minute flight. By 10:45 a.m., we had landed at the Jacksonville airport. We rented a Ford Edge and came down toward 95, the clouds bright white against a pale blue sky.
As we drove, Richie filled me in on the timeline he’d constructed for Freddie Pecos’s final hours. He walked me through his process: how he’d painstakingly documented every pizza delivery receipt in Pecos’s trash and examined every text our old C.I. had received and sent. All of this had helped him narrow down Pecos’s time of death to a slot between 3 and 4 a.m. on Sunday, which confirmed Jo’s initial estimate.
“How far was the ATM from Freddie’s mobile home?” I asked.
“Fourteen miles,” Richie said. “I estimated his ETA that time of night. To cross town and get there—twenty-seven minutes.”
I bit at my lip. The time window between this unknown subject seeing Pecos at the ATM and Freddie’s death was tight. Which made it more likely that hewasFreddie’s killer.
“You showed us pictures of this mystery guy,” I said, “but I presume you looked at Freddie as well? Video of this moment?”
“At the ATM, you mean? Yeah, of course,” Richie said. “I studied his eyes and facial expressions. He showed surprise, Gardner. But also familiarity.”
“So Freddie knew him?”
“I believe so,” Richie said.
“And your theory?”
As the newest member of PAR, this was part of Richie’s training: Come up with a theory of the crime; be specific in details and resolute in his belief system—yet flexible enough to abandon it when new information arrived.
“Well,” Richie said, popping a piece of gum in his mouth, “I figure that this unknown guy—maybe he and Freddie grabbed some beers. Agent Harris said there were two six-packs on the counter in the mobile home when you guys arrived. A bottle missing from each.”
I switched lanes. After four years in Jacksonville, I drove unconsciously toward our old office, noting that the project expanding the freeway only appeared to be 11 percent further along than it had been fifteen months earlier. A giant swath of dirt stretched between the north and south sides of 295, with splotches of mud six feet wide covering the eight unmanned construction vehicles parked there.
“And?”
“They’re drinking back at his trailer,” Richie said. “They have beef, and a fight breaks out. This mystery guy grabs the rifle and shoots Freddie. But he doesn’t know what Freddie was into with the debit cards. So he leaves them there. Takes the cash.”
To my right, loomed the enormous freight loaders at Dames Point. We drove up and across the bridge, the harp-stay arrangement of cables rising 471 feet in the air.
Richie stopped speaking, and I waited to see if there was more.
There was not.
I took the exit off 295 to the Jacksonville office. If two criminals had beef with each other, and that’s all that had happened between the ATM moment and Freddie’s death at his trailer, we wouldn’t be chasing this lead in Jacksonville for long. But it wouldn’t be productive to tell Richie this. He was still learning, and he required encouragement and motivation.
“You’ve been a key part of a seven-figure fraud case,” I said to Richie. “A two-month-long undercover operation.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I appreciate that.”
“And we’re willing to trade away all that intel—three months of work—to a local DA. Why?”
“Because we’re after something bigger,” Richie said, palms up, as if the answer was obvious. “Illegal guns. A militia group stockpiling semiautomatics.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s domestic terror, Richie. That’s more than a crime. It’s a mission.”
“Got it,” he replied. But his face showed something else. Skepticism? Confusion? I could sense he was wondering why we’d come to Jacksonville at all, then.
“We look at patterns, Richie. Analyze what should exist and what shouldn’t.”
He nodded. “And sometimes what wedon’tunderstand is more important than what we do.”
“Precisely,” I said, tightening and loosening my fingers on the steering wheel. “So we look at statistics. Is there some estimable reason why a man who is wanted by the FBI in Jacksonville would be hours away in South Florida at this ATM?”
I passed a row of furniture stores and turned into the lot at our old office.
“I don’t know.” Richie shrugged.
