“Okay,” Lucas said. He wagged his fork at Sherwood. “How would they get it? Another car?”
“They could steal one—they’ll have those skills,” Sherwood said. “If they’re not familiar with the area, with the police culture, that’d be a serious risk. They wouldn’t know when the theft might be discovered, and when the police might start looking for them, how hard they’d look, what resources would be thrown at a stolen car.”
“Which, around here, would be about none,” Lucas said. “I’ve been thinking that they might rent another one, just like they did the first Jeep and the Subaru.”
“If they’re out in the sticks, no car…Lyft? Uber? Taxi?”
“That’s the kind of thing that the feds can work on. Not us, because it takes a bunch of people on phones, and we’re smaller than a bunch.”
Sherwood looked at his watch: “We should go. We can unload this at the meeting.”
• • •
The Minneapolis-area FBIwas housed in a large whitish building with what looked like a black mask around a portion of it, like the Lone Ranger’s mask, if the Lone Ranger had worn his mask on the side of his head.
Sherwood and Lucas drove separately and made the ten o’clock meeting with fifteen minutes to spare. They were shown to a conference room, where Beard, who’d headed the Marshals Service witness protection team, was twitching in a chair at a long conference table. A laptop computer and a projector sat at one end of the table, and a white screen hung on the wall at the other end.
Three FBI suits were in a corner, chatting, cheerful enough at the moment, because they’d been involved in the retrieval of a kidnap victim; or, at least, events could be bent to look that way.
Beard ignored Sherwood but asked Lucas, “Anything new? After the nurse?”
“No.”
“Your locals, the state whatchacallit…”
“Bureau of Criminal Apprehension…”
“Yeah, those guys. They tracked all the calls by all the phones overnight, and there were exactly two, both from me, after the plane had landed. One was while the plane was taxiing, and before we knew that there’d be a delay getting to the house, and the other was to you, to tell you we’d be running late because we lost that suitcase. You didn’t call anyone, and neither did White, before we got there.”
“I knew that,” Lucas said.
“I thought that was the likely case,” Sherwood said. “I’ll see about getting all the phones back, and you can keep the burners.”
“I’m afraid the goddamn FBI might want them,” Beard said. “The ones flying in.”
“We’ll see, I’ve never dealt with them,” Sherwood said.
Shelly White was escorted into the room. She pulled out a chair next to Lucas and said, “You stayed up late.”
“I did, but I didn’t actually do much. Got the doctor back.”
“I heard. I understand we’re gonna get grilled by Washington feds,” she said.
“That appears to be the case,” Lucas said. He filled her in on the interview with the doctor, and the narrowing of the search area around Orono.
• • •
The Washington fedsarrived twenty minutes later, three men and a woman, the men in their forties, the woman a bit younger, all well-dressed, three leather and one aluminum briefcases among them.
They arrived with David St. Vincent, the FBI’s agent in charge, and several more agents, all suited. The youngest one went to the projector and laptop, and after introductions, plugged a thumb drive into the computer and lit it up.
St. Vincent did a brisk PowerPoint presentation, with maps, of all the key moments in the assassination and subsequent investigation, including the interview with Juarez and the washing of phone calls by the BCA.
“We have agents and several marshals accompanying local police in a door-knocking campaign all around the Orono-Minnetonka area, concentrating on farmhouses. No results yet.”
When he was done, there were questions. Sherwood outlined what Lucas and he thought might have happened with cars. There was dissension, but everyone was interested in any possible angle, so the feds would start making phone calls to the ride services and rental agencies.
With the briefing over, Sherwood and Beard were escorted to separate rooms with two of the counterintelligence team members walking with each of them. The other marshals from the Sokolov house were ushered into the conference room, and they all sat around and waited like hopefuls at a temp agency. After a half hour, Sherwood came back with the woman interrogator, and she said, “Marshal Davenport?”
