“Okay, let’s assume he’s got this real phone, right? It’s transmitting his location on the day Amber flees. Plus any calls he makes. But when he calls Amber, he uses one of the burners. I mean, he figures she’ll recognize the number and pick up, right?”
I nodded, seeing now where her mind was headed.
“If we know the day and hour where this guy was,” Cassie said, “we could get a warrant for the closest cell tower to Amber’s old apartment. Do a dump.”
“The carrier would release that?” Richie asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I turned to him. “They’d anonymize the data, so we’re blind to who it belongs to until we can give them a reason to release more specific information.”
“That’s when we use the stingray device,” Cassie said. “To collect current incoming and outgoing calls. And study old calls.”
“Repeated calls, you mean?” Richie asked.
“Exactly,” Cassie said, continuing to pace. “These are rule-outs, Richie. We eliminate neighbors and regular traffic from the data pool to get rid of the numbers we know arenotEl Médico. Then we do the same for the second location, Amber’s work. If he made a call from both locations, we overlap the data and voilà—we find one specific device. Hisregularphone.”
No one seemed to know what to make of this. I finished my soup. Glanced up.
All eyes were on me.
“A similar tactic was used in Denver,” I said, thinking of a case in which law enforcement had identified a series of masked adolescents using only a location. “It’s a valid approach.”
“Geez. Love y’all much,” Cassie said, shaking her head at Shooter and Richie, chastising them for looking to me to validate her strategy.
“It’s a long shot,” I said. “But if it works, we’d have El Médico’s number. And if he’s still using that phone—”
“His exact location,” Cassie said.
“We’d have to get a request in to headquarters,” I said. “Get it approved. Then work with a team in Miami or Jacksonville to go through the data. Let’s try.”
Everyone was quiet, and I glanced back at the whiteboard. The bottom name read “Body #9 / ‘Jane Doe.’”
“What are we doing to ID the last body?”
“Slogging,” Richie replied with a shrug. “Quinones’s people have been contacted by nine nearby jurisdictions and logged over two hundred calls.”
“This is the most recent attack?” Cassie asked.
“From how fresh the skeleton looks, yeah,” Richie said.
“So far it’s just been Richie going through all this,” Shooter said. “I’ll jump in tomorrow to help.”
I was still hungry and grabbed a saltine packet, left it beside my laptop. “Good,” I said. “Anything else before Cassie and I go?”
Richie spoke up then. “Yeah, I’ve got something. Straddles both cases. The victims up here—and the gun case down South.” He tracked his gaze from me to Shooter. “Freddie Pecos is having a funeral.”
As his handler, it was Richie’s job to follow any news about Pecos, even after his death.
“You want to attend?” Shooter asked. This was standard protocol, to keep tabs on criminals at their funerals.
“I do,” Richie said. “But if you recall, one of the Sandoval crew saw me a month ago.”
This was another reason why Shooter and I had gone on the bed check the night we’d found Freddie dead. Richie was slightly blown.
“We still have no idea how this El Médico guy and Freddie are connected,” Richie said. “They had a conversation at an ATM, and an hour later Pecos is gunned down.”
“Who’s organizing the funeral?” Shooter asked.
“Sarah Kastner,” Richie said. “That’s his aunt. She owned the property that mobile home was on.”
