“I don’t think so,” she said. “I believe him about not having therecords, and if he doesn’t have records, why should Poole give him one?”
Bob said, “Yeah.”
Lucas called Forte: “That SOG thing? Never mind.”
“What happened?”
“I decided Rae should cruise the place in a junker car. Turned out to be a mail drop.”
“Damnit. I could taste the guy.”
When Lucas was off the phone, Rae asked, “Now what?”
“We know he’s around here,” Lucas said. “We have to think. Is there any way we could get at a public record that would take us to him? Anything at all?”
—
THEY DROVEback to the hotel and sat around and thought, and called Forte and got him thinking about it: how they could possibly use a telephone, gas company, or power company bill to track down Poole’s house.
“The problem being, he’s not living there as Garvin Poole,” Rae said. “He’s got a lot of money and for a thousand dollars you can get a perfectly good Texas driver’s license under any name you want, if you know the right guy.”
“We know he probably came here about five years ago,” Lucas said. “Wonder if he bought a house? Assuming he lives somewhere around his mail drop... wonder how many houses sold in this area five years ago?”
“Thousands,” Bob said. “People were pouring in here like ratsaround a Pizza Hut dumpster. Besides, I don’t think he bought a house. Ties up too much money and the realtors look at you too close. What I bet is, he found a house to rent and had a quiet talk with the owner. He says, ‘No lease, we’ll pay you three grand a month, and if the tax man asks us, we’ll tell him we pay you fifteen hundred.’ That’s what he did.”
“You may be right,” Lucas said. “But that doesn’t get us any closer to Poole...”
Rae started talking about checking Texas driver’s licenses with a face-recognition computer at the FBI, but Lucas was skeptical: “He’s got a beard and wears eyeglasses, and the pictures are probably pretty shitty. We’ll get twenty thousand false positives.”
Bob eventually was the one who had an idea that worked. He’d been in the bathroom taking a leak, came out and said, “That took some pressure off my brain. Look—we’re thinking too much aboutright now. But if he’s lived there for five years, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a hardwired phone at the beginning. Most people did. We ought to go back five years with everybody we know who knew him and look at their phone records. See who they called in Dallas.”
“Can we do that?” Lucas asked. He really didn’t know.
“Depends on the phone company. AT&T keeps the records for something like seven years. Verizon and Sprint don’t keep them so long, but they keep them for a few years. What I’m thinking is, Box was close to her uncle. She even risked going to his funeral, when a lot of people there knew who she was and the fact that the cops wanted to talk to her. I say, let’s look at the uncle’s phone records...”
They called Washington, and Forte said, “Yeah, we can do that. You got a name for the uncle, address, whatever?”
They had some of it, and Forte said he could get the rest.
Nothing was going to happen for a while, and they eventually drove to a Half-Priced Books and browsed for an hour. Lucas bought a book that told him how to match his personal coloring to the colors of his menswear, Bob bought a book on Leica cameras, and Rae found one on Latin American art. “Now I feel like the dumbshit in the bunch, which definitely isn’t the case,” Lucas said as they checked out.
“You sure about that?” Rae asked.
“Who gets you business class airplane tickets?”
“You’ve got a point,” Bob said. To Rae: “For God’s sakes, don’t piss him off.”
—
ON THE WAY BACKto the hotel, Forte called. “Tell Bob he’s a genius. We got an old number in Dallas, with Time Warner Cable, but it’s still working. It goes back to a month after the Chattanooga armored car shootings. For a Marvin Toone.”
“That’s him,” Lucas said, and, “You’re a genius, Bob.”
“I knew that,” Bob said.
“I’ll crank up the SOG team again,” Forte said.
“Hold on until we cruise it. We’ve still got Rae’s rent-a-wreck,” Lucas said.
