Lucas thought it over, then said, “Okay. We’re heading back.”
At the Hilton,the day shift feds had left and the night shift had taken over.
Lucas, Devlin, and Orish lingered, talking, watching the cameras. A half hour passed, and Orish finally said, “I’m going.”
To the senior agent on the night shift, she said, “If anything moves, anything, you get me out of bed. I’ll have my phone on the pillow next to my ear.Anything.”
After she had gone out the door, Devlin and Lucas waited another two minutes, then went down to their own rooms. “This is going to work,” Devlin said. “If we can get the right guy, we’ll have the whole operation pinned, from Lauderdale to New York.”
“Sleep,” Lucas said.
Lucas spent tenminutes talking on the phone with Weather, climbed into bed, and slept—but not well. He was tense, and even though he was asleep, the stress kept him close to the surface. Though he didn’t sleep well, he slept long enough. He’d expected a call in the night, or early in the morning, but his phone alarm went off at seven o’clock, and he rolled out, undisturbed by the FBI watchers. He called Devlin, who was also up, and they agreed to catch a fast breakfast before heading back up to the task force suite.
Devlin hadn’t slept well, either, and they ate the same way they’d slept: in a hurry. Up in the task force suite, Orish and her second, Dick Kerry, were drinking coffee and cruising the various computers. The day shift was back again, along with fresh boxes of pastry and a couple of gallons of coffee. Short stacks of theNew York Timesand theWall Street Journalsat next to the donuts. When Lucas and Devlin arrived, Orish nodded and said, “The going’s slow.”
There’d been no movement overnight. The day shift was back in the truck and the cameras were focused on the car wash.
“What happened to the Hat?” Devlin asked Orish.
“He owns an apartment house over on the east side, six apartments. He went in, and that’s the last we’ve seen of him. He could be in any of the apartments and we haven’t seen anybody arriving who might be carrying off the heroin. Makes a raid tough.”
“He’s probably cutting it,” Devlin said.
“Or he sleeps late,” Kerry said.
One of the computer operators said, “The hearse is moving.”
Orish and Kerry went to the windows and looked out. “Thereit goes,” Orish said, looking down at the hotel driveway. “Probably back to Florida for the second load.”
“We need to keep close track of it,” Lucas said. “I mean, what if the dope is still in the hearse, and they did the whole car wash thing to make sure they were clean?”
Orish and Kerry glanced at each other, and then Kerry said, “Unlikely.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “But I’d sure hate to lose track of the dope...”
Orish said to the computer operator, “If that hearse slows down for more than a traffic light, I want to know about it. I want a car on it until it’s well out of town. Not where it could be seen, but where it could catch up in a minute or so, if the hearse starts to wander.”
“Got it,” the computer operator said.
They stood around, watching the arrowhead that represented the hearse crawling across Staten Island. It was approaching water when the computer operator who was monitoring the surveillance camera called, “We got another one.”
They went tothe surveillance screen and watched a Cadillac SUV disappear into the garage. The plate went to a Cheri Malone; she showed no criminal record at all.
“I’d call that a possibility,” Orish said, looking at the photo on Malone’s driver’s license. She was a hard-faced fifty and held a New York real estate license. “What do you think, Lucas?”
“Don’t know. Like you said, a possibility. If she’s never been inside, the prospect might frighten her. On the other hand, she’s notlikely to draw a lot of time... clean record, she might even claim to be doing a favor for a friend.”
The Cadillac backed out of the garage after a two-minute stay and rolled away.
The hearse had crossed into New Jersey and had turned south on I-95.
Twenty minutes later a pickup truck drove into the garage. “Paul Curry,” Orish said. Wrinkles appeared on her forehead. “I know that name. I think he might be...”
A computer operator said, “He might be the one. He’s been inside four times, twice for dope, once for ag assault, once for criminal sexual assault. He’s fifty-two, one more big bust and he goes away forever.”
“Anything on his family?” Kerry asked.
The operator rattled some keys and then said, “Married, two children in their twenties.”
