By nightfall, they were mostly done with the routine, and Russell Forte called from Washington and said, “We got a quick hit on the fingerprints. His birth name was Marco Obregon, born in Miami, but he changed it to Marco De Soto, maybe to get out from under the other convictions. He’s got a rap sheet about a mile long—convicted on attempted murder and aggravated assault and simple assault, acquitted on one charge of murder, nolo’d on another, convicted on possession of a firearm by a felon, acquitted on a couple of drug charges. He was like a walking monument to the credulityof parole boards. He’s got an address in Coral Gables and an FBI is on the way there.”
“We need the name of the woman he was working with,” Lucas said.
“We’re going for that,” Forte said. “We haven’t seen anything yet—maybe the FBI guys will turn something up.”
—
BACK AT THE HOTEL,Lucas, Bob, and Rae changed clothes and then met in the bar and ate nachos and drank a few margaritas, and Rae said, “This has been an unusual day.”
“Your people giving you a hard time?” Lucas asked.
“Nothing like that—they’re more like excited. Wish-I’d-been-there stuff,” Rae said.
Bob asked Lucas: “This happen to you much?”
“From time to time,” Lucas said. “The weirdest thing about today was, we might have saved Garvin Poole’s life.”
Bob popped a handful of salted peanuts and said, “Didn’t think of that. But you’re right. As long as that woman doesn’t catch up to him. She’s the one I wouldn’t want to meet in the dark.”
17
LUCAS WASnormally up late, but on this night, he’d turned the lights off at midnight, then lay awake in the dark thinking about the shooting, and about Poole. At two, he rolled over and looked at the clock: he needed some sleep, but he also wanted to get going early in the morning. Or get somebody else going. Rae had said she was an early bird. Two o’clock certainly qualified as early.
He turned on the bed light, crawled out of bed, picked up the phone, and called her room. She answered on the fifth or sixth ring and, sounding groggy, asked, “Who is this?”
“Lucas. You got a pen or pencil?”
“Uh, what happened?” she asked.
“I had a thought and I need you to do something tomorrow morning early,” he said.
“Jesus, Lucas, you know what time it is?”
“Yeah. I’m looking at a clock. It’s ten minutes after two. You got a pen?”
“Just a minute.” A minute later she said, “Go ahead.”
“I need you to go back to Arnold’s house. Get an Addison cop to go with you if you need to. Look at his guitar. It’s got a weird checkerboard top to it. I want you to see if there’s a manufacturer’s name on it. Arnold called it by some name... had something to do with parts...”
“Partscaster.”
“Right. Like a Stratocaster. He said Poole built it out of parts. I want to know where he got the parts. When you find that out, I want you to track down the company and find out what Dallas addresses they’ve shipped parts to. Especially addresses that have ordered parts a number of times, to build entire guitars.”
“I can do that, but you think this might have waited until the morning?” she asked.
“Nah. I get up late and wanted to get an early start on this. You get up early, so you can get started without me.”
“Listen, waxworks...”
“I’m tired now, so I’m going to sleep. I’ll call you when I wake up,” Lucas said.
“Listen...”
Lucas hung up, turned out the lights. Grinned in the dark and fell asleep. He slept like a baby until twelve minutes after nine o’clock.
—
RAE STILL FELTgroggy when her alarm went off at five forty-five. She’d usually do a half hour workout before cleaning up, but decided to skip it and get moving. Bob was also an early riser, so she called him, found him awake but not out of bed yet. “That fuckin’ Davenport called me at two a.m. and gave me a job,” she told Bob. “I figure if I have to start early, I might as well make you miserable, too.”
