“Hey, we don’t know anything yet.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “But we’ve found our guy, so take heart.”
“Can’t you arrest him? Do something? He’s leaving. He’s just driving away!”
Exhaust spilled from the tailpipe of the CRV, and the Vermont officer strolled back to his cruiser. Jack started to turn the key, but she stopped him.
“I can’t arrest him. I have no authority here, and there’s no probable cause of anything. I was stretching it to get him to open the trunk. But it’s okay. Just take a beat. We got this.”
The CRV pulled away, immediately picking up speed—though carefully under the limit this time. In a few moments, it had disappeared from view.
“How? How do we got this?” Jack said frantically.
“Because I put a tracker in the trunk.”
She pulled up the app on her phone that synced with the tracker. “Bingo. He’s pulling into the road, he’s proceeding forwards. We’re good. He’ll think he got away from us and he’ll make a mistake.”
With a whoosh of breath, Jack sank back in his seat. “Did you see anything else in there?”
“I saw a man who’s in such big trouble, he’s about to do something desperate.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“Pupils dilated, eyes darting from side to side, flushed skin, all the classic signs of someone under stress. Also, I saw something on his right hand that struck me as significant.”
“What?”
“Gunpowder residue. That man has been doing a lot of target practice lately. Like he’s preparing for a showdown.”
“Those sounds,” Jack said slowly. “In the background during that call with Celine. Maybe it was a gun range.”
“Is that what it sounded like to you?”
“Not really. I heard some hammering and some squeaking, like the sound a dolly makes. I forwarded the recording to our foley engineer on the show to see what he thought.”
“Has he answered?”
“I don’t know, I’ve been pretty busy,” he said dryly as he pulled out his phone. He scrolled to his emails and clicked on one to open it. “Yup, here it is.” He scanned it. “Josh says to him it sounds like packing crates being loaded onto a…holy shit.” He glanced up at her. “A boat. He says he can hear a foghorn in the background. He isolated it for us. The hammering is the lids of the crates being nailed shut.”
“Our smuggling theory just got a boost.”
“The question is, what exactly is in those crates?”
She snorted. “I’m pretty sure it ain’t lobsters.”
32
They waited by the side of the road until both the Vermont police cruiser and Seth’s vehicle had disappeared. Jack kept his eyes glued to the glowing red dot on Tina’s phone. She was driving now, having given into his anxiety by allowing him to monitor the app.
Somehow that little dot felt like a lifeline, like his one fragile connection to Jessie.
“Do you think it would be possible to identify a specific foghorn?” he wondered out loud. “I know every buoy has specific markings, but what about the foghorns?”
“Good question. Go ahead and google it if you like.”
“No. I don’t want to lose the dot.”
“You won’t lose the dot. My phone can multitask.”
“Not swiping away from the dot,” he said stubbornly. “Shit. It just turned onto the highway. Let’s go.”
