“We have him in solitary. It’s the best we can do.”
Gabriel pulled the tablet closer and watched the video a second time, then a third.
“First, your witness isn’t a good guy—gal, I’m pretty sure this is a woman taking the videos,” Gabriel said.
“We don’t need them to be,” Hinton held his pen in his hand with all eight fingers pressed tightly together on the top and his thumbs underneath. It made Gabriel think of raccoon hands.
“What was second?” Rowan asked Gabriel.
“This isn’t the same man as in the first video.”
“What?” Hinton looked wild-eyed. “Walk me through that.”
“There are very few clues here. I mean, we're talking dust in the air.” Gabriel played the video and stopped on the frame that focused on the window. “I'm looking at pollen in the air through the window—a cloud of yellowish green.” He spread his fingers on the screen so that the others could see it clearly. “That’s tree pollen. I was researching this for a different case just recently. If this took place at the address I found for the first video I was shown, then you can put the date on this video around April twentieth when the pollen was really bad. That is, if it’s from this year. And April Twentieth isafterthe March video that I already analyzed. The first one you have on camera, so you have the date. This one was about six weeks ago.”
“Listening,” Hinton said.
“There was no pollen in the first video. Tree pollen in D.C. is inescapable. There would have been some somewhere in that video—on the cars, in the gutters. We had that late-February snowstorm. As I remember it, the cars in the first video were clean. There was no salt and mud on them. There were no last piles of snow in the shadows. If they happened in the same year, and if it wasthisyear, I’d say that the first video took place in the second week of March.”
“That’s correct,” Hinton said.
“This video happened around April twentieth. You said you had street camera verification of the first video?”
“The camera range stops at the corner,” Hinton said. “That’s why we thought this was a video from earlier on the same day in March.”
“Check April twentieth, around that date, and see if you see this guy crossing the street. If not, at least verify that I’m not right in terms of the pollen. I’ll also remind you that the man in the first video was bald as he crossed the street. And this man started off with hair. If they are videos on different days, these are different victims.” Gabriel’s mouth was dry, and he wished someone had set out water bottles.
“Two different days? Two different men. TwodifferentFBI special agents?” Hinton tossed his pen hard. It bounced off the table and sailed through the air.
Hinton stood and, throwing a “Thanks” over his shoulder, he left.
Gabriel watched the door shut, then turned to the others.
“I hope the witness making these videos is lying low. The Prokhorov Family do not like snitches,” Rowan said, “and they do not like when we discover what they’re up to.”
“What game are they in?” Gabriel asked.
“They’re the usual international crime family,” Rowan said. “They do gambling and shakedowns, trafficking of women, and to a lesser extent some drugs and weaponry. It depends on where they’re working. They find a niche they can call their own and set up shop.”
“So how is it that they grabbed these guys?” Gabriel asked. Normally, Gabriel was strictly need-to-know. But this might well be two special agents, and Gabriel was all in on getting them safe. But three months? Three months for the first guy didn’t seem survivable at the hands of a crime family.
“One of the Prokhorovs’ main rivals—rivals is not the right word, more like frenemies,” Prescott said. “There was a competing family called the Zorics.”
Gabriel interrupted, “There was a Zoric family that was on the news a few months ago where the entire family died in the boating accident. Are they associated with the crime family?”
“That was the boat that took down the family, where the innermost circle—the ones that drove the different schemes—were traveling,” Rowan said.
“So are the schemes done and finished?” Gabriel asked. “Someone cut off the head of the chicken?”
“We actually have some Zoric family members in our federal prison system,” Rowan said. “The Prokhorovs have been looking around to see if they could absorb some of the side players in the Zoric dynasty, the players that didn’t die in that event because they weren’t in the direct family line of Medved Zoric—”
“He was the head of family,” Prescott explained.
“During that time,” Rowan continued, “the Prokhorovs discovered that Zoric partners had infiltrated the Prokhorovs business and had been acting as informants and saboteurs.”
“We have a working theory that as the Prokhorovs routed out the Zoric infiltrators, they discovered the FBI was also in the mix. The trial this coming Tuesday where you’re going to testify against Igor—”
Gabriel interrupted, “I’m not testifying against anyone. I’m testifying about how I’m given a photograph or a video and how I apply my geolocation skills. I’ll walk the jury through the process that led the special agents to that spot.” He looked between them.
